The heat raised dust storms that blotted out the distinction between earth and sky so that we seemed sometimes to wander aimlessly in a gritty, burning cloud. We covered our faces and marched on, hardly believing that one direction could be better than another, and sometimes even the camels simply sat down and refused to take another step. When one of them could not be raised, we cut its throat, drained the water from its belly—water that smelled and tasted like a rotting corpse but which no man was by then too proud to drink—and left the carcass for the vultures that had been circling above us almost since we crossed the Brook of Egypt.
Yet we went on, not because we believed there was anything ahead of us except the emptiness of the desert but because it was impossible to go back and the only alternative was to fall down and wait for death. Esarhaddon offered prayers to the gods—and most particularly to Marduk, whom he regarded as his special patron—and the rest of us cursed into the darkness which seemed to swirl with evil. I thought to myself that if we reached Egypt we must conquer, for men who can endure this will never perish by the sword.
And at last, when our water jars were nearly empty and we had abandoned ourselves to death, on the sixteenth day after entering this terrible wilderness, we raised our eyes and beheld the settlement at Magan. It seemed, after all, that the gods had shown some pity.
Although perhaps fifty or sixty Egyptian soldiers were posted at Magan, it could not with any accuracy be described as a garrison. The soldiers were no more than wardens to the poor wretches who had been condemned by Pharaoh’s justice to work the silver mine there, and they fled almost as soon as they saw our dust on the horizon. What we found were an oasis, a score of deserted buildings, and some hundred or so gaunt, earless, sun-dazzled prisoners in copper chains who could not understand why they had suddenly been left unguarded.
“By Adad’s thunder, these fellows must be villians,” Esarhaddon commented. “What crimes they must have committed to be sent to wear out their lives in such a place.”
I made a few inquiries and discovered that most were farmers who had suffered during bad harvests and not been able to pay their taxes. Even my brother, who had sentenced many a traitor and rebel to cruel death, could not understand such harshness.
“This Taharqa must be the most savage of rulers. I believe I do the Egyptians a great service to liberate them from such a monster.”
“Yet I doubt they will thank you for it,” I told him.
There was water at Magan, which made it seem a paradise to our exhausted soldiers. We were now less than twenty hours from the Nile Valley and the sand dunes had given way to ground as hard as stone, which was hardly wet grass under a man’s feet but which made marching easier. The king decided we would try to reach Ishhupri in one final dash, before Pharaoh’s army, which doubtless knew something of what our progress had been like, would be expecting us.
“We will allow one day of rest, and then it will be forced march. I will give orders to slaughter the camels, since we no longer need them and the men will appreciate the fresh meat.”
Esarhaddon was a harsh commander, but war is a harsh business. I could not bring myself to make any objection to his plans.
“It would be well to find out if there are any recent arrivals among the Egyptian prisoners,” I told him. “They might be able to tell us something worth the trouble of finding out.”
“As you wish.” Esarhaddon made a gesture with his hand as if waving away a fly. “As you understand their chatter, I leave it to you.”
I had the prisoners’ chains struck off and ordered them fed and given beer from the stores their jailers had left behind—gratitude loosens a man’s tongue, and beer keeps it from swelling with lies.
Most of these men had been in the labor gangs for years and therefore knew nothing of interest, but I did find one who still had scabs where his ears had been cropped. He had been brought through Ishhupri only the month before. The city, he said, was almost unfortified, but the streets were full of Libyan soldiers. Pharaoh had not yet arrived from Memphis, whither he had shifted his capital after Esarhaddon’s attacks on the Delta cities two years before, but he had been expected any moment. I went immediately and told all of this to my brother.
“Then you were right—he means to stop us now, before we have had a chance to recover from the desert.” Esarhaddon grinned, as if the idea pleased him. “We will have to show him that the men of Ashur do not faint like women at the first touch of the sun.”
We rested through the next day, but the morning of the eighteenth day since we had entered the Sinai we were all up three hours before sunrise and had already marched seven beru before noon. By nightfall our outriders were reporting back that they had seen the lights of Ishhupri.
“Five more hours tomorrow, and then we will see what this fellow Taharqa is made of,” said Esarhaddon.
The next day, an hour before noon, we reached cultivated land and had once more the pleasure of feeling the mud from irrigation ditches between our toes. That afternoon we made camp within sight of the city walls.
I had half expected Taharqa to have his soldiers already drawn up in battle array and ready to engage us at once—this is what I would have done in his place, refuse us even an hour in which to rest from our forced march from Magan—yet, aside from a few mounted patrols that watched us for a while and then rode away, we never saw an enemy soldier.
Perhaps we really had caught them by surprise. Perhaps they really had thought they would have at least another day or two before we were upon them. I must own I began to entertain a new respect for Esarhaddon’s talents as a strategist.
We camped half a beru from Ishhupri’s main gate. As the sun set the wind rose, raising clouds of dust over the empty no man’s land between our trenches and the city walls. The ground which tomorrow would be so crowded and full of death was that night naked and silent, like a bride who fears the unknown violence of her husband’s lust.
Soldiers everywhere are the same on the eve of battle. Those who had work, reassembling the chariots that had had to be carried across the desert sands or deepening the trenches that would be useless in a few hours, were lucky because they had no liberty for helpless dread. Otherwise, men kept to themselves or collected in little groups and spoke in hushed voices. The tension is almost unendurable, yet everyone is kind and patient. There were no quarrels, for personal grievances seem unimportant in the face of the vast slaughter that waits behind only a few more hours of darkness. I went to visit Esarhaddon in his tent.
“How is the army?” he asked me. When I told him he nodded in approval. “Good. If tonight they are not too weary to be frightened, tomorrow they will not be too weary to fight. Come—I will share my last jar of wine with you. I have been hoarding it against this very hour.”
. . . . .
We had marched almost ten hours a day for two days, but no one slept that night. We were all tired, but if we won tomorrow we would sleep the next night in Ishhupri, and if we lost we would probably sleep forever, so it did not matter that we were tired. I spent the hours before dawn with my staff officers, planning in detail how our wing of the army would face an enemy we had not seen and could not even number. We only knew we had not come all this way to find death on our knees.
In the last few minutes before sunrise Ghost was brought to me with the bit already in his mouth. I took my own good time renewing the acquaintance, stroking his nose and talking to him in the low voice that horses find so calming—this was to be his first battle, but his sire’s heart beat under his ribs and I wished I could be as confident of victory as I was of him. A warrior projects much of himself onto the animal he trusts with his life. Perhaps I only wanted, for a moment or two at least, to escape from the thought of all that was coming.
I would fight with my cavalry that day. I was not the king and therefore could be spared, and, regardless of the lies I had told Selana, the men of Ashur have no respect for a field officer who cowers behind his own lines.
At
first light, with a wild beating of war drums, the gates of Ishhupri were thrown open and Pharaoh’s army began pouring out onto the plain. I lost count after a hundred chariots, and the footsoldiers, who moved at a brisk trot, seemed to take hours to fill out their lines. I think it possible there might have been something like two hundred thousand men facing us.
Lushakin was in command of the infantry. I rode up and exchanged a few final words with him, then we watched in silence as the enemy marshaled his forces. We did not speak of it—one simply does not at such a moment—but we exchanged a glance. No, neither of us had expected anything like this.
Yet somehow I found it impossible to be afraid. I beheld the long lines of Pharaoh’s soldiers and with the eye of memory I saw the streets of Memphis as they had looked after troops like these, perhaps some of these same men, had surfeited themselves on pillage, rape and murder. I remembered Nodjmanefer, left to rot in her own house. My heart, I found, had turned to iron and was as insensible to fear as to pity. My brother, I knew, wanted glory, and the soldiers of Ashur dreamed of their share of plunder. I wanted only revenge.
Finally the war drums were quiet. It was that terrible moment before the order comes down to engage. It was like watching the door to death swing open.
The red flag rose by the king’s chariot. “Advance!”
In a battle of this kind it is always the horsemen who make the first contact. I drew a javelin from my quiver and let Ghost feel the touch of my heels—he needed no urging; he was as eager as I.
As I galloped out onto the empty plain between the two armies, I had no anxieties about being left in peace. There were Libyan cavalry everywhere, it seemed, swarming out through the lines of infantry like ants out of a burrow. The Libyans are skilled riders, and suddenly I saw one of them bearing down on me, his curved sword flashing in the morning sunlight. This was what I had been hoping for. I locked my javelin under my arm, leveled the point, and charged. I caught him just below the rib cage, just as his sword slashed at me—it split the javelin in two but too late to save him, for as I rode past he was already falling backwards over his horse’s rump.
He was lying on the ground, vainly trying to turn over on his side, one hand strengthlessly holding the broken shaft that had pierced his belly. I cantered back, reached down, and yanked the javelin loose. He screamed as I did this, and then was silent. I rode back to our lines, carrying the javelin with me as a trophy.
“You see how easily they die?” I shouted, waving the bloody point in the air as I rode back and forth before the ranks of our infantry. “You, whom heat and thirst cannot kill, whom the terrors of the desert have hardened into men of stone, you will trample them down like the very grass!”
“Ashur is king!” they shouted back. “Ashur is king! Ashur is king! Ashur is king!”
I turned back to the fight, and for a time the cavalry skirmishes raged like a fire. The ground was quickly covered with dead and dying men, but neither side seemed able to break through to attack the opposing ranks of foot soldiers, and time was running out as our armies swelled towards one another—this, it appeared, was a battle that the infantry of the two sides would have to settle between themselves.
Yet cavalry soldiers are much too vain ever to admit they will not turn the tide of the fighting with their own valor, and on neither side were horsemen threatened with indolence. We engaged the Libyans in several pitched and bloody skirmishes, and I felled two more of the enemy before my own carelessness and one of Pharaoh’s charioteers almost ended my life.
The Egyptians sometimes use fowlers’ nets to entangle men and drag them from their horses. I knew this and had therefore kept a respectful distance from their light, agile war chariots, but in the heat of battle one sometimes grows heedless. It took no more than the instant I stopped to catch my breath.
I hardly even knew what had happened except that I heard Ghost neighing in panic and then, in the next instant, found myself trapped in the coils of the net. That was my first sensation, of trying to fight my way clear of this snare, which at first seemed as insubstantial as smoke. Then I felt the tug of the rope, and the blind terror that comes with being yanked helpless from a horse’s back. One of the lead throwing weights had caught me above the ear, so I was too stunned even to try freeing myself. I remember the sensation of falling—very slowly it seemed, for the ground took forever to reach me—and then the sickening shock of pain when it did.
And then. . . Nothing. I was in too much pain to be afraid. As I lay there in the dirt, I became the disinterested observer of my own extremity. There was dust everywhere and I couldn’t see much beyond the chariot that had brought me down turning to finish the work.
I’m as good as dead, I thought. I’ll be under his wheels in half a minute. Strangely, this didn’t make much of an impression on me. It simply didn’t seem to matter.
Certainly I would have been killed if not for Ghost. Like his sire, he refused to acknowledge defeat and, when the Egyptian chariot started to roll down on me, charged the horses, lashing out with his hooves and knocking one of them down so that the whole team became ensnared in its own lines. The driver was thrown and had to run for his life, so for the moment I was safe.
All I recollect is feeling a certain smug satisfaction in the ownership of such an animal. He is fine, I thought. He is braver than any ten men.
I must have fainted. I have no idea how long it was, whether five minutes or an hour, before someone noticed that the commander of the left wing was down. Finally a team of stretcher bearers carried me from the field, and by then my wounds were painful enough that I almost hoped I would die.
“This campaign’s fighting is over for you,” the physician told me as he washed out the gash along my rib cage with wine. An assistant was already heating the blade of a knife with which to sear the edges.
“It can’t be that bad,” I said, feeling sick with dread—I had had this done to me often enough before to know what to expect. “Just be quick, and I will be quite fit again in a few days.”
“A few months perhaps. Your arm is broken in two places. I shall have to reset the bone, and you will like that far less than the touch of a hot knife.”
The physician was right. When he had finished, and was stitching a wound in my leg closed with a silver fishing hook and a piece of catgut, I no longer felt so warlike. I could not even move the fingers of my right hand.
“Prince, you are a capon,” I whispered to myself. “You are as worthless as a woman.”
A few minutes later Esarhaddon rode over to see whether it was true, as he had heard reported, that I was dead.
“I knew they were lying,” he said. “No Egyptian will ever kill my brother, who has been favored with the sedu of Great Sargon—you will have nothing more than a few scars about which you can tell outrageous stories.”
He laughed loudly at this, for the Lord of the Earth’s Four Corners was in a fine, excited temper. It seemed the battle was already turning against Taharqa.
And perhaps it really was true that some change had happened to us on our journey here, for the soldiers of Ashur fought as if the desert’s own relentlessness had entered their souls. We were outnumbered, but that somehow did not seem to matter. Wave upon wave of the enemy pushed against our lines and then broke into pieces. Slowly we advanced on the walls of Ishhupri. This army which had crossed the Wilderness of Sin was like a grindstone crushing all beneath its weight.
It was shortly after noon that Pharaoh’s men, first in one place and then another, made the collective decision that they were beaten and turned to run for their lives. The slaughter that followed was terrible to witness. Those who fled back through the city gates were hunted down and butchered. The rest, the bulk of them, retreated west toward the Nile valley. Our cavalry pursued them, but most made good their escape. By twilight, the field was ours.
“We have vanquished them!” Esarhaddon boasted. He mounted his chariot, for in a few moments, to the cheers of his army, he would ride in trium
ph through the gates of Ishhupri. “We have vanquished Egypt.”
From the wagon on which they had stretched me out, I raised my head and looked around at the field where, although I did not know it then, I had seen my last day as a warrior. It was covered with the dead and made my heart sick.
“We have vanquished an Ethiopian Pharaoh and his army of Libyan mercenaries,” I told him. “Egypt still lies ahead.”
XLIII
The men of Ashur entertain no great hopes for the life after death, yet it is a fearful thing for a man’s soul to become lost in the darkness, to wander forever in the night winds. Thus before the sun set we buried our fallen comrades on the battlefield they had won with their blood, appeasing each man’s ghost with offerings of bread and wine that he might not know want in the Land of Spirits. The enemy we left to the feasting of dogs and carrion birds.
We had lost some nine or ten thousand men, which was not many in a host of perhaps a hundred and forty thousand after so terrible a battle. We counted nearly seventy thousand enemy corpses strewn over the plain, and our soldiers killed numberless others who had thrown aside their weapons and taken refuge within the city walls—the people of Ishhupri, who wished to ingratiate themselves with the victor and, in any case, had no love for Taharqa’s Libyan mercenaries, were quick to betray them to us. In this single morning, Pharaoh had been bled almost white.
Ishhupri was no great city, but after the desert it seemed to hold every luxury. Esarhaddon wisely forbade looting but ordered the citizens to turn over all their stocks of beer as the price of being allowed to submit. Egyptian beer is not the like beer of Sumer, yet provided a man is thirsty enough he will not disdain to wash out his mouth with it and the soldiers of Ashur blessed their king for permitting them the indulgence of a single night’s drunkenness. The next day we set out in pursuit of Taharqa’s army, on the road that led to Memphis.
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