“Leave me in peace, damn you!”
I was instantly sorry, for it was not Esarhaddon’s fault that his wife was dead. Nothing, really, had ever been his fault.
“I will find my own way,” I said, no longer shouting. “Good night to you.”
“Good night.”
I left, taking a half-empty jar of wine with me. I did not go to bed but sat in my garden, beneath the faint, flickering light that shone through the shutters of my son’s nursery—an oil lamp burned on a table there all through the night because Selana thought little Theseus Ashur might be frightened if he awakened in the darkness.
It was the month of Nisan and the air was cold, yet I felt nothing. I merely sat there, watching the light in the window, wishing all of this world’s shadows could be so easily dispelled.
“He cried, and I saw you out here. . .”
It was Selana. She put her arms around my shoulders and touched her cheek to mine.
“So My Lord has heard about the Lady Esharhamat.”
Only then did the tears well in my eyes.
“I have loved her since we were children,” I said, my voice no more than a thick whisper. “All these years I have loved her, and now she is dead and I feel. . . Really, I have no idea what I feel.”
“I know.”
“The gods play with us, Selana.” I reached up to touch her arm—strangely, in all our time together I had never felt as close to my wife as in that moment, grieving for another woman. “They mock us.”
“I know. I know.”
. . . . .
By ancient custom the king can take no part in any ceremony of mourning, not even for members of his own family. The marsarru was still hardly more than a boy, and thus it fell to me, as Esharhamat’s eldest living relative, to accompany Ashurbanipal to the holy city of Ashur, there to receive his mother’s corpse for burial in the royal vault.
We traveled by barge and the journey occupied us for one full day, from sunrise to sunset. It was the first time I had ever spent more than a few minutes together in Ashurbanipal’s presence, yet when we reached the wharf at Ashur I found I understood this young man, who would one day rule the Earth’s Four Corners and who was probably my own son, no better than when we had first stepped on board.
He was proud and silent, as I knew already, and he kept his own counsel—these were perhaps admirable qualities for a king, but they did not make him an agreeable companion. If he grieved for his mother’s death, if he knew or guessed that I was anything more to him than merely his father’s half-brother, he gave no sign of it. During the two days we were obliged to wait before the funeral cortege arrived from Uruk he amused himself with hunting.
And then, on a wagon drawn by six black oxen, Esharhamat’s iron casket passed under the city gates. On pain of mutilation, the people of Ashur were commanded to remain in their houses while the procession made its slow way over streets that had been covered with straw to muffle the sound of the wheels. No one spoke, not even in whispers, as Ashurbanipal and I followed the casket through the doors of the god’s great shrine and down into the royal vault where my father, my uncle the Lord Sinahiusur, and the dust of a hundred generations of kings and princes slept in the darkness. We laid Esharhamat in her crypt, where one day the king her husband would rest beside her. The stone lid settled into place and was sealed with bronze. Thus did we consign her forever to the shadowed past.
Not only the flesh is mortal. There is a sense in which that day some part of me died and was buried with Esharhamat, and something else found at last a means of struggling into life.
XLI
It is time now for my pen to speak of other things, of war and the ringing of weapons in battle, of slaughter and unimaginable suffering and the heroism of ordinary soldiers, of defeat that is victory and victory which becomes defeat. I have now to tell of Esarhaddon’s campaign into Egypt.
Just as I had refused to be his turtanu, I refused my brother’s offer to be sole commander of his army—that honor therefore fell to Sha Nabushu, who I am sure spent many days puzzling his brain to discover what sort of trap I must be laying for his unwary feet. Instead I went as rab shaqe of the left wing, with some forty thousand men, many of them from Amat, under my orders. Lushakin, my onetime ekalli and my comrade in a score of great battles, all the way back to Khalule, when we were both green boys, had marched two hundred and fifty companies down from the northern garrisons and put aside the chance of an independent command in this great undertaking that he might serve as my lieutenant. It was quite like the old days.
On the third day of the month of Iyyar, almost a week before Esarhaddon, his principal officers and most of the royal garrison enjoyed their triumphal departure from Calah, I bade farewell to my wife and son and rode off to the city of Nisibis, which was to be the assembly point for the entire army. I would meet the northern forces there and ensure that all was in order and the whole expedition would be properly provisioned. The king wished to be certain there were no lapses, for he was in a hurry to feel the sands of Egypt under his feet.
At Selana’s insistence I took Enkidu with me. “I will not send you off again into that nest of scorpions without his great shadow to cover your back,” she said. “Little Theseus and I will be safe enough alone, for the Lady Naq’ia knows well the value of all her hostages.”
Nisibis was only a provincial capital, with no resources to feed and shelter the host that was about to descend on it, so I called out the local garrison and set them to work building a camp that would soon hold an army over a hundred thousand strong. I chose a spot some half a beru from the city walls—discipline is not improved when soldiers who are soon to face the enemy have too easy access to the comforts of town life—and set men to digging earthworks and laying out defensive perimeters, just as if the Egyptians were about to attack us rather than the other way about. From the local merchants I requisitioned all their available stocks of grain, oil, beer and livestock, and I sent out foraging patrols to see what could be purchased from the local farmers. These measures caused very little grumbling because everyone was paid for his goods in silver. It is the custom of all nations to plunder their enemies, but a good soldier does not steal bread from the mouths of his own people.
Thus within ten days, when the first companies began to arrive from the northern garrisons, we were prepared to receive them. By the middle of the month, when I welcomed the king, there was a city of white tents where before there had been nothing but an empty plain.
“Hah! They begin to look like an army!” Esarhaddon exclaimed, climbing down from his horse—being a practical soldier, he had abandoned his royal chariot as soon as he was out of sight of Calah’s walls. “By the Sixty Great Gods, we will throw a fright into the Egyptian king when he sees us.”
“Perhaps, but Taharqa does not have the look of a man whose knees are much given to buckling.”
“You have seen him then? How I envy you your travels, brother! What is he like? I have heard he is as black as a monkey.”
Esarhaddon accepted a cup of beer from one of his orderlies and put his hand on my shoulder.
“He is from the Land of Kush,” I said. “He is not an Egyptian, which in my experience is not to his discredit. I saw him only once, but he has a reputation as a man of vigor.”
“When we capture his women, we will see what they have to say of the matter—hah, hah, hah!”
And so it went, straight through supper. My brother was a born warrior and, like this, in the midst of his armies, far from the intrigues of the court, he was always in fine spirits. It was only the burden of kingship which oppressed him.
Esarhaddon was sufficiently pleased with all that I had done in preparation for his arrival that he began referring all matters of supply and disposition to me.
“You see what a useful thing it is to be possessed of a brother who is half an Ionian?” he would say. “Perhaps, when we get to Egypt, instead of fighting for it we will simply send Tiglath out with a bag of copper
shekels and let him buy the place for us.”
But when one of his officers ventured to laugh, Esarhaddon struck him in the face so hard that the man almost lost his right eye.
“Do not mock my brother, cur.” He picked the poor unfortunate up by the front of his tunic and shook him like a dog would a water rat. He had been drinking, which always made him quick to anger. “I jest with him because I love him, but he carries the scars of many battles and I will not have him mocked by one such as you.”
“Doubtless he intended no insult,” I said, stepping between them and helping the man to his feet—I preferred to make my own enemies. I got him out of Esarhaddon’s sight as quickly as I could and took him to my own tent to close the gash in his face with a salve of mud and wood pitch, a recipe I had learned from Kephalos. A few cups of wine numbed the pain. His name was Samnu Apsu. He was very young, and he sat with his head in his hands as if he had forfeited the right to live.
“Do not be distressed,” I told him. “By tomorrow the king will have forgotten the whole incident. He will probably ask you how you came to cut your face.”
“I meant no disrespect, Lord,” he said. He looked as if any moment he might begin to weep.
“I know it—probably the king knew it. It is probable that display was for my benefit. As you doubtless know, we have not always been on the best of terms.”
He nodded. Almost at once he seemed to feel better, as young men will when they feel they have been admitted into a confidence.
The next day we broke camp and set out for the west.
. . . . .
“May the gods curse him!” shouted Esarhaddon. “May his seed be cursed to the tenth generation! May his loins wither and his heart rise in his throat and swell until it chokes him! The cowardly, deceitful, effeminate, double-dealing swindler—I treat him as a friend, giving him all of Sidon’s trade routes, and my thanks is to be betrayed to the Egyptians. I will have his life for this!”
The king was understandably upset, for Ba’alu, prince of Tyre, had hearkened to the words of Pharaoh and joined the revolt of vassel states that seemed to be spreading across the coast of the Northern Sea like rainwater on a flat roof. Now he had closed the gates of his island city in our faces, and the soldiers of Ashur were digging siege trenches all around the walls. It was Sidon all over again.
“I will starve him out. I will undermine the walls and sack the city. The Tyrians will follow Abdimilkutte’s subjects into exile while their houses burn at their backs. These Phoenicians—you would think they might learn.”
“You cannot starve them out because you cannot cut them off from the sea,” I said. “This time you have no allies.”
“I am entering into negotiations with the seven kings of Cyprus,” Esarhaddon grumbled. I could only shake my head.
“Then you will negotiate until we are all old men,” I told him. “The Cypriots are cautious men. . .”
“You mean, they are Ionians—hah!”
“Yes, they are Ionians. They will not take sides until they see who prevails, you or Taharqa. You cannot take Tyre in less than five months, and if you wait around here much longer you will find yourself trying to cross the Egyptian desert in the middle of summer. This is madness.”
“It is not madness to punish traitors,” he replied stiffly. Yet he knew I was right.
“If you conquer Egypt, Ba’alu will come crawling to lick the dust from your sandals. If you do not, it will not matter. We can ill afford this, brother.”
Still, we waited on the Tyrian plain for the better part of a month. Every morning the king and I would ride out to watch the progress of the earthworks being dug to undermine the city walls, and every morning I told him the same thing.
“This is folly. Do you want Pharaoh’s double crown, or do you want to chase after every copper shekel that rolls away into the gutter?”
And above us the watchtowers of Tyre glittered against the bright blue sky.
“They will laugh,” Esarhaddon would say. “They will rejoice when we slink away like beaten dogs. Ba’alu will mock at the glory of Ashur.”
“Let him laugh. He will stop when we return from Egypt—if we return.”
But at last my brother allowed himself to be persuaded. We struck camp and turned our faces to the south, to the land of the Samaritans, to Israel and Judah. Always we stayed within sight of the sea. We did not venture near Jerusalem, although her king Manasseh was in revolt against the Lord Ashur and had even given one of his sons the name of Amon, after the greatest of the Nile gods. Esarhaddon listened to reason and did not allow himself to be distracted by quarrels with petty rulers who would abandon their impudent rebellion as soon as Pharaoh was crushed.
The garrison at Ashkelon was another matter. We did not relish the prospect of crossing the Egyptian desert with thirty thousand of Taharqa’s Libyan soldiers at our backs.
We stopped our march and made camp about two beru from the garrison walls. We had seen their patrols, but thus far the Egyptians had not seen fit to challenge us. As soon as a defensive perimeter had been thrown up, the king and his principal officers—myself among them, with Enkidu as my constant shadow—rode out to have a look.
Ashkelon was a stone fortress with its back to the sea. It had stout walls, and the ground around it had been cleared for an hour’s walk in every direction. It would not be easy.
“We shall have to take it,” Sha Nabushu announced, with the air of stating the obvious. “Tyre was one thing, and this is another. We have no choice.”
Ghost started at something, and I climbed down to see what it was. I touched a flat stone with the point of my javelin and a scorpion the size of a man’s hand scurried off to find itself another bit of shade. The sand under my feet was so blistering that I could have cooked an egg simply by burying it under a few handfuls.
“Feel the heat?” I asked, looking up at Esarhaddon—the sun was almost directly behind his head, so I had to shade my eyes. I could not see his expression. “We are already near the end of Siwan, and next month the desert will be like the inside of a pottery kiln. We can reduce this fortress or we can invade Egypt, but we cannot do both. Perhaps the garrison commander will be convinced of the wisdom of staying within his walls.”
“Why should he do that?” Sha Nabushu asked contemptuously. “He will say anything, but once we are in the desert, he will be on us.”
There was a buzz of agreement from the other officers, but the king, I noticed, kept silent.
“Yes, brother,” he said at last, “why should he do that?”
“Because we have five men to his one, and because the Lord of Ashur is not noted for his forgiving temper.”
Esarhaddon laughed. Then he nodded in agreement.
“Go talk to them,” he said. “You know these Egyptian rogues—if they let you out alive, and if it smells right to you, we will make a truce with them. If they kill you, brother, I give my oath to avenge your death.”
He laughed again and yanked the reins around to return to camp. In a moment, as the sound of hoofbeats died away, only Enkidu and I were left. Enkidu glared at the garrison walls as if he would have liked to pull them down with his bare hands.
“You think all of this is mad,” I said, but my mute companion did not even glance at me. “Doubtless you are right.”
I climbed back on my horse and we started toward the fortress. I found myself wondering if the Egyptians would favor me with a cup of wine before they cut my throat.
The watch patrol offered no challenge until we were some five or six hundred paces from the main gate. Four cavalrymen rode out to meet us. All four had that sullen, sun-hardened look one associates with Libyan mercenaries, and none carried an officer’s whip. They stopped their horses about thirty paces in front of us. No one drew his sword.
“I would speak with your commander,” I said in my villainous Egyptian.
At first there was no reaction. The Libyans kept their eyes on Enkidu whom, doubtless with perfect justice, the
y must have thought the more serious danger.
“Who wishes it?” one of them asked finally. I remember he bore three parallel scars on each cheek—the Libyans are a primitive, brutish people, and these wounds had probably been intended as enhancements to his manly beauty.
“An officer in the service of the king of Ashur, Lord of the Earth’s Four Corners, Master of the World.” I grinned contemptuously, showing my teeth, on the theory that nothing would make a stronger impression on this lout than a display of impudence. “His camp is not two hours’ ride from here, as doubtless you know. I have come because the king has seen fit to grant you a chance for your lives.”
Whether this speech had produced the desired effect I was left to guess, since the four Libyans turned their horses and rode back to the protection of their walls. There was no choice but to wait outside in the sun.
Within a quarter of an hour another rider came out through the main gate, an Egyptian this time. By the time he was close enough for me to see it, his face was registering an expression of the most profound astonishment.
“The Lord Tiglath Ashur, is it not?” he said, sounding a little awed by his discovery. “Nefu, son of Hardadaf, prince of Siut—I was once a guest at one of your famous dinner parties. I had heard you were dead.”
“As you see, I am not.”
Did I remember this smooth-faced youth? No, I thought not, but people had come and gone in my house in Memphis, making themselves at home as if they were in a brothel. He could have visited a score of times without my ever noticing him.
“I might never have recognized you with that beard, but your servant is another matter. Come within, Lord, and let us drink such wine as this doghole can offer and talk of happier times. . .”
Nefu’s father, it seemed, had somehow run afoul of Pharaoh.
“And, as you see,” he told me, gesturing around with a hand that held one of the dried apricots that had been served with dinner—I cannot fault his efforts at hospitality in that forsaken place. “As you see, the disgrace extended to the whole family. I have been out here a year, and it shouldn’t surprise me if I die as commander of this garrison. Such is the wrath of the Living God.”
The Blood Star Page 66
