The house of war also included the royal barrack, where those of the king’s own blood were trained up to be soldiers. My brother and I had both spent our youth on the parade grounds at Nineveh, where our father had had his capital. Esarhaddon’s sons were here in Calah, but it would be just the same for them as it had been for us. And little Theseus—provided that I did not fall victim to some palace intrigue—would in his turn join his royal cousins to learn the soldier’s trade.
My son cried lustily when he was born, and the midwife declared that he would be tall like his father and have powerful limbs when he grew to be a man. Perhaps she said this of every male child she helped to bring into the world, but just the same it filled me with pleasure to hear it. For the first several days of his young life I spent as much time as I could in the nursery, being generally in the way. I had had no notion of how much I would love this child. I would watch his mother nurse him, and afterwards I would be allowed to hold him in my arms and feel his tiny fingers clutched around my thumb. I dreaded every moment that required me to be absent, for in his smallness he seemed so fragile that I was tormented by a thousand fears for his life. Yet he did live. Selana assured me that he was healthy and strong. Gradually I learned to believe her.
The birth of a son turns a man’s mind back to his own childhood. Memories of my mother filled me with sorrow that she had died while I was in exile, that at the end I had not been there to close her eyes. I remembered Esarhaddon when our friendship was still unshadowed. I remembered the house of war.
I was a rab shaqe in the king’s army and my campaigns against the northern tribes were the stuff of fable. No one questioned my right to enter the garrison of the quradu. No one, perhaps, except myself.
As my eyes swept across the parade grounds, I was struck at once by their strangeness and their utter familiarily. As a boy I had never driven my teams of horses across this dark-packed earth, endlessly practicing the sharp turns at full gallop that are the charioteer’s highest art. That had all been in Nineveh. Yet the youth who held the reins that morning, who made the ground shake and sent up plumes of dust from under his wheels, might have been myself at his age. He was in fact Ashurbanipal, who would be marsarru one day and then, when Esarhaddon died, king in his place. He was as well, if I could give credit to Esharhamat’s word, the son of my own loins.
I watched him for a long time. He was still only a boy, for the tufts of beard that were visible here and there on his face were hardly more than baby hair, but he handled the horses with a man’s skill. His mother said he had little taste for a soldier’s life—it might even be true. Others said that he was clever, that he collected clay tablets for the sake of the old learning on them, that he was arrogant, that he was too much under the sway of his grandmother, the Lady Naq’ia. Many stories, most of them vicious, collect around the boy who will one day hold the world in his hands.
“Your pardon, My Lord, but are you not the Lord Tiglath Ashur?”
I glanced around and saw a youth of about thirteen standing behind me. He wore the uniform of a royal cadet.
“I am he,” I said.
“Then you are he who crushed the Medes, who killed the mighty Daiaukka with your own hands and in single combat?”
“I am that one also.”
“Then I am your nephew, Lord, for I am Shamash Shumukin.”
Yes, I could believe this was Esarhaddon’s son, for he looked just as his father had at that age, with the same open face and the same wide, solid stance, making him appear as impenetrable as a mud brick wall.
I offered him my hand and he took it, pumping my arm as if he wanted to tear it loose and take it home with him for a trophy.
“And it is your ambition to be a soldier?” I asked, merely out of politeness, since the answer was obvious enough.
“Yes, Lord. To be rab shaqe of the king’s armies and lead conquered nations under the yoke of Ashur.”
He spoke with such ardor that I was touched, remembering the glamour that war had held for me at that age—when I had never seen it.
“And is it the same for all the royal cadets? Is the next reign to be the scene of so much carnage?”
We both looked toward the figure in the chariot, who at last was bringing his team to a walk.
“It is not the same for Ashurbanipal,” Shamash Shumukin announced, watching his brother with unselfconscious pride. “He will be the king. He is too clever to care much for soldiering.”
I found myself wondering whose words these were, his own or Ashurbanipal’s. And if he was aware that there was a difference.
“We have worked it out between us,” he went on. “He will be the king and I will be his sword.”
“Then you are friends?”
“Yes, Lord—friends and brothers.”
The words sent a shiver down my back.
All this time Ashurbanipal’s horses had been marking out a wide circle in the dust, which they now left to pull up beside us. The boy whom the god had chosen as the next king of Ashur did not step down from his chariot, and thus he retained the advantage of forcing us to look up to him.
“You are the Lord Tiglath Ashur,” he said coldly, as if he thought I might like to know. “I am Ashurbanipal, son of the Lord Esarhaddon, Ruler of the Wide World.”
For a moment I actually had the impression he expected me to bow.
Then his gaze turned to his brother and he smiled.
“Come, Shumukin. There are still at least four hours of daylight left—we can go hunting.”
I watched the two drive off together and then, as I turned to leave, saw that another pair of eyes had been watching me. Esarhaddon stepped out of the shadow of a doorway, grinning. I bowed to him.
“Stop that, Tiglath,” he said, punctuating the command with an irritated wave of his hand. “There is no one about to be impressed, and you know you only do it to annoy me. What are you doing here, anyway? Come to get away from the smell of milk and excrement?”
He grinned, as if he had said something enormously clever.
“No. I have been looking into the future.”
“Ah, the boys.” The Ruler of the Wide World shrugged his shoulders, as if to indicate that his concern for the future did not stretch so far as into the next generation. “Ashurbanipal would make a better scribe than a king. He despises me for a dull hunk of brown clay, so that sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t suspect. . . But Shamash Shumukin will make a very proper soldier—I have plans for him. They are great friends, you know. They are like we were at their age.”
“Like us, you say? Then one can only wonder which of them, in the end, will first betray the other.”
I still remember how the light changed in Esarhaddon’s eyes.
. . . . .
Egypt. All that summer, I hardly heard of anything else. Was there a soul in Calah, or in the world beyond it, who escaped knowing that the king of Ashur was planning a second attack on Egypt?
“The tribes are crawling around the northern borders like flies over a dead horse, and you want to take an army to Egypt?” I asked him, for I thought the whole idea mad. “You will need at least a hundred and fifty thousand men, and if you succeed you will need to leave half that number behind to garrison the country. What is there in Egypt that is worth stripping our defenses naked in order to get?”
“You have settled with the northern tribes, Tiglath—or had you forgotten? As long as you are alive, there will be no war with the Medes, and none of the others count.”
“I could be thrown from a horse tomorrow, or your mother might finally find a way to have me poisoned. You hang a great deal on the life of one man.”
“My soothsayers tell me you will live into extreme old age. So we are all safe enough.”
Esarhaddon grinned, as if the last possible doubt had been answered.
“What is your real objection to this venture?” he asked me, quite as if he thought he was being excluded from some secret. “I will not make the same mistake as before—thi
s time we shall attack from the east, where they are not so well guarded.”
“What do you know of Egypt?” I asked him in turn.
“That it is rich.” He shrugged his shoulders in disdain. “You seem to forget that I have already seen one season of campaigning in the Delta—the place is not unknown to me.”
“But that was the Delta, as you say. You saw garrison duty in the west during our father’s reign. How close did you ever come to her eastern borders?”
“I was stationed in the Land of Bashan.” Esarhaddon laughed. “You remember Leah, the woman I brought home from there, who had a ring put through her nose because there was no other way to keep her in order? It was there I. . .”
“Egypt, brother!”
“Yes, Egypt—after Sidon was destroyed, we went as far south as the Great Salt Sea in which nothing lives, into the lands of the Hebrews.”
“But did you know that between there and Egypt there is a great desert?”
“What of it?” he asked, as if he had seen something of the sort on a map and was not impressed.
“To take an army across that desert will be a fearful thing.”
“Why should it be? A desert is merely a patch of waste ground—we are not women, you know.”
What could I do but shake my head at such ignorant folly?
“I have crossed that desert, brother. It is a place more terrible than anything you can imagine. I am lucky that my bones are not still there.”
“You have been to the western desert?” Esarhaddon’s face shone like a lamp, and he reached across the table where we were having breakfast to put his arm about my neck and pull me to him. “You have truly been there? Tiglath my brother, I knew I was right to bring you home!”
“By the merciful gods. . !”
For I had sealed my own fate—now he would insist that I come with him on this mad adventure.
Yet mine was probably the only voice Esarhaddon heard that did not encourage him in his Egyptian enterprise. It is always the same when a new campaign is proposed; everyone sees in it some road to personal advancement. The soldiers, who were weary of garrison life and excited by the prospect of plunder, spoke to him of the conqueror’s glory; and the courtiers, who dreamed of power and place and a chance to undo their rivals, worked hard to smooth away every doubt and at the same time whispered into the king’s ear how Pharaoh was stirring rebellion among the western vassal states—which was true, but had been just as true every day since the reign of our great-grandfather.
The whole of Calah seemed united in conspiracy, and even Naq’ia, although she said nothing directly to her son, let it be known that this Egyptian scheme had her approval—why should she not approve, when every day that Esarhaddon was away from his capital strengthened her own hold, both on the present government and on the heirs to the next?
“Suppose then that you succeed,” I told him. “You have driven Pharaoh’s armies into the desert, where they will have nothing to eat except the grave offerings left for their ancestors. The Nile Valley is yours, from the Delta to the gates of Karnak. What will you do then?”
“I will sack Memphis, which you claim is such a prize. I will strip the temples of their gold. I will rape the women and carry away the best. I will put an iron ring around Pharaoh’s neck and drag him back to Calah behind my chariot.”
“And then what?”
Esarhaddon stared at me as if he did not understand the question, so I repeated it.
“And then what will you do?”
“Do? What else is there to do?”
“A conquered nation must be governed, and Egypt is like an anthill. If you kick it to pieces you will have a hard time putting it back together again.”
But the King of the Earth’s Four Corners dismissed that difficulty with a contemptuous lifting of his eyebrows.
“What does it matter then? I will put the double crown on the brow of some local idiot, and my garrison commanders will rule in his name.”
He grinned with mischief.
“Or perhaps I will make you Pharaoh, and you can shave your face and put on a little false beard made of lacquered wood. Think of how surprised all your old friends would be.”
At last I gave up and let Esarhaddon have his way, reconciling myself to it with the thought that, by accompanying him, I might be able to open his eyes before it was too late. I should have known then that it was already too late.
“When will you go?” Selana asked. We sat together on the floor of our bedroom, which was now covered with a thick reed mat, watching our son, who was five months old, display his latest accomplishment— sitting up with no other support than his mother’s steadying hand on his backside. He seemed almost as pleased as his parents at this new ability and smiled broadly, showing two glistening slivers of front tooth that had recently broken through the gum.
“Not until after the end of next year’s floods,” I answered, as young Theseus stealthily guided my finger into his mouth and then bit down hard enough to make me wonder if he would relish the taste of blood. “Nothing on such a scale can be done in haste.”
“And how long will you be gone?”
“Six months, or perhaps eight.” The finger, as I was glad to discover when I got it back again, was deeply indented but intact. “It depends most on what we will find in Egypt. Esarhaddon expects a quick campaign, but I fear he will be disappointed.”
Whether weary of the effort involved in holding himself straight or annoyed at a conversation not directed at him, my son made a loud, inarticulate sound and raised his arms to indicate that he wanted to be picked up. I obliged him, and he expressed his appreciation by reaching across my face and putting his thumb in my eye. Selana remained silent, looking down at her hands in her lap.
“I will be perfectly safe,” I said. “This will be nothing like Sicily—I will go as a rab shaqe in an army numbering at least a hundred thousand men. Soldiers die in battle, but commanders generally perish in their beds.”
This seemed to ease her mind a little, yet I continued to suspect that she regarded the whole venture as a fool’s errand. I refrained from telling her how closely I agreed with her assessment.
“Little Theseus must be fed,” she announced tonelessly, reaching out to take him from me. She opened her tunic to expose a breast, rubbing the nipple with her thumb.
“Soon you will have to give that up,” I told her. “He is not yet old enough to eat meat.”
She smiled a tight, brief smile and dropped her head to kiss the child that milked her—things had not been well between us of late, although she had said nothing.
I got up to leave.
“Will you be sorry to be gone so long?”
I had almost reached the doorway. I turned around to answer, and the sight of her there, with our boy in her arms, made my voice catch in my throat. I left without speaking.
. . . . .
Shamash Shumukin was much to be pitied. His mother had never cared for him, giving him up to the care of nurses from the hour of his birth, and his father was that remote and awful being the king of Ashur. He had the companionship of his brother, but at that age a boy needs something more. I had had my uncle the Lord Sinahiusur, who had treated me with kindness when I was a youth and had made me his heir, and Tabshar Sin, the old soldier who had taught me to be a man. They had given me the guidance I needed, along with the sense of being approved. And thus, when in his loneliness Esarhaddon’s forsaken son attached himself to me, I remembered the debt I owed to others and tried to be his friend.
And, more than anything in this life, Shamash Shumukin wanted to take part in the Egyptian campaign. Thinking this might not be the worst thing, I promised him I would raise the matter with the king.
“Ashurbanipal, of course, cannot go,” I said to Esarhaddon. “He will be the marsarru in a year or two and, in any case, he is too young; but Shamash Shumukin is a different matter. Eight months on campaign would be worth three years in the royal barrack. Only think, brother, wh
at you or I at his age would have given for such a chance.”
But the king of Ashur was hardly listening. His face was flushed and he glared at me with exhausted rage. There were broken clay tablets all over the floor of his study and his scribes were nowhere about. Apparently I had only just missed a scene.
“I am the victim of my servants,” Esarhaddon declared, stamping his sandaled foot against the floor. “The Land of Ashur is not ruled by her king but by eunuchs who scratch lies into mud as soft as their own flabby bellies. They know nothing of war—all they ever think of is money.”
He sat down behind a table half covered with the contents of a spilled wine cup, looked at another tablet, and then abruptly threw it too to the floor. Then he refilled the wine cup and looked up at me as if he were trying to remember why I was in the room.
“Now—what is this about Shamash Shumukin?”
“He wants to join the expedition to Egypt. I think it would be a good thing.”
“That is impossible. He will be in Babylon by then.”
“And why by the god’s mercy would you send him to Babylon?”
“To be viceroy. And the Babylonians had better grow accustomed to him, because after I die he will be their king.”
The announcement was made in a flat, passionless voice, but I must own I would not have been more amazed if I had found it written across the sky in letters of fire. It took my breath away. Esarhaddon, I knew, was not the wisest head ever to wear the crown of Ashur, but I never would have credited even him with such a monstrous piece of folly.
“Whom else have you told of this?” I asked.
“No one else.” He grinned at me savagely. “You are the first whom I have honored with my confidence.”
“Then all is well. Just forget all about it, and we will take Shamash Shumukin with us to Egypt.”
The Blood Star Page 64
