The Assyrian (10 page)

But I must confess that I watched that
Amorite and his dancer with something like awe. I could not have
looked away if I had wanted to, and I did not want to. All I could
see of her from behind the screen of his green and white tunic was
one leg, the foot of which rested on her stool, but it took no
great labor of the imagination to understand what was taking place.
His tunic, the only curtain he allowed his modesty, trembled and
shook like a fishing boat’s sail in a squall. When it was over—for
the whole act occupied no more than a minute or two—and he
shuddered and was at last quiet, he sagged away from her as if
somehow she had squeezed him dry. The woman, when she stepped out
from in front of him, was of course unchanged. It might never have
happened. She went back to her musicians and sat down and sipped a
cup of water. Nothing had touched her.

“I have a room upstairs—perhaps you would
prefer that, Lord?”

The serving girl returned. She was leaning
over us, closer to Esarhaddon than to myself, and it was difficult
to know which of us she addressed.

“Yes, I would. . .” The words died in
Esarhaddon’s throat. I do not think I could have spoken at all.

She turned her eyes to me, but I could only
look down and shake my head. All desire, if such it was, had
deserted me. She put her arm across Esarhaddon’s shoulder,
dismissing me with a tight smile.

“Then come, Lord, and share my sleeping mat
for a time. You will see that we know the difference between a
greasy caravan merchant and a cadet of the royal barrack. Come now.
Lord. . .”

Esarhaddon glanced at me, and I could see he
was almost as frightened as I had been, but he rose and went away
with her. I was left behind to consider my failure in solitude.

She made short work of him, for not a quarter
of an hour later he was down again and we were back out on the
street. We had had enough of reveling and it was time to turn our
steps back to the palace and our quiet beds.

“Well—did you?”

I felt myself entitled to as much curiosity
as that.

“I’m not sure—I think so.” Esarhaddon shook
his head in perplexity. “She lay down and told me I could do as I
liked and wanted to know if I preferred her on her back or her
belly. At last she grabbed me—you know—and it was over in a second.
I couldn’t tell whether I was actually inside her or not.”

“How did it feel?”

“It is difficult to put into words. At any
rate, for two pieces of silver, I think I made a bad bargain.”

He threw back his head and laughed and, arm
in arm, we went home.

As soon as we were within the barrack
compound we could sense the change—lights were on everywhere, and
the only sound was the hum of voices. We had not been in our room
long enough to remove our sandals when the doorway darkened and we
heard Tabshar Sin’s voice.

“Where have you been?” he asked. He did not
sound pleased.

“We went to the Ionian’s house for dinner.
Tiglath asked permission—don’t you recall?”

Tabshar Sin stared at us in the gray
darkness, almost as if he couldn’t understand what the words
meant.

“Be ready for arms inspection in five
minutes,” he answered. There will be no sleep for anyone tonight.
We are on alert until the palace sends word to the contrary.”

“Why? What has happened?” I do not know which
of us spoke.

“You mean you have not heard?”

Tabshar Sin turned back toward us from the
threshold, and his astonishment seemed genuine.

“Nothing—what is it?”

“The rider came an hour ago. The Elamites
have crossed the Tigris with a great army. Babylon has fallen, it
would seem without much resistance, and the marsarru Ashurnadinshum
was captured. Whether he is alive or dead. . .”

“Then it is war,” I said. It was a conclusion
at once obvious and stunningly important. The Elamites had ridden
in and taken the king’s heir. Ashurnadinshum might even be dead
already, and I would not envy him the manner of his dying.

The Land of Ashur was to fight, and not for a
day or a month or even a year. There would be many campaigns, for
it was no small thing to snatch the king’s son from the throne of
Babylon and the Elamites were not old women. If it went on long
enough, even Esarhaddon and I might see battle. With a shock I
realized that this night was probably the last moment of my
boyhood.

“Yes, Prince—it is war.”

Chapter 4

Nergalushezib, for a few months at least, had
felt the throne of Babylon under his haunches. Now his kingdom was
an iron cage hanging by a chain from the Great Gate of Nineveh.
Naked and filthy, the crown he had usurped from Ashurnadinshum
fixed to his head with copper nails, on his hands and knees he
roamed back and forth, back and forth, while the citizens pelted
him with mud, excrement and curses. I saw him on the third day of
his exposure, and already then hunger, the merciless sun, the
anguish of his own heart, and perhaps the copper nails driven
through the skull and into his brain had deprived him of reason. He
howled like an animal, praying for death through his cracked and
bloody lips. The gods must truly have scorned him, for he lived to
the sixth day.

Thus did the Lord Sennacherib, the Servant of
Ashur, avenge himself for the butchering of his eldest son.

That day and all the days while Nergalushezib
lived were like a time of festival in the city. Fortune tellers and
prostitutes, sellers of beer, fruit, honey cakes, and roasted meat
all followed their trades under his eyes. All the delights of this
life, all just beyond his reach, all were there for him to witness
as, a finger’s width at a time, his life ebbed away through the
mire coated bars of his iron cage. As he raved and howled and
begged for the pity of men and gods, the people of Nineveh laughed
at him with many voices. Most of them were foreigners—this wasn’t
their quarrel. They were merely there to watch, and the war was
good for trade.

And the war, it seemed, would never end but
would go on and on, for Nergalushezib had not been taken in some
decisive battle but sold by a traitor, to whom Sennacherib gave as
his reward the man’s measured weight in silver. The Elamites and
their Chaldean allies could always find a new wax doll to reign for
them in Babylon, and it was at Susa, in the dungeons of the Elamite
king Hallutush-Inshushinak, that Ashurnadinshum, strangled with a
bowstring, had met his death. Then that king in his turn had
perished, slain by his own people after Sennacherib’s victory at
Nippur. But now his son reigned, and Kudur-Nahhunte, as all men
knew, was as poisonous as a coiled serpent.

It had been almost two years since the night
the royal barrack had stood at alert. The beginnings of a beard
grew on my chin, and to my intense embarrassment the hairs were
straight rather than curly, declaring once again my mixed blood. I
was almost a man and my military training, greatly accelerated
since the war’s beginning, was nearly over. All these things
weighed on my mind as I stood in the crowd that had collected
outside the city walls to witness the usurper’s agony.

The sight of him, his nakedness and his mad,
glittering eyes, troubled my mind and I did not know why. He had
connived with the Elamites to bring the marsarru to ruin and a
shameful death. He had insulted the majesty of Ashur. It was
fitting and proper that his own death should be a mocking agony.
And yet I could find no satisfaction in the spectacle. I watched
for a while, for Tabshar Sin had said it was wholesome for a
soldier to witness these public shows of the king’s wrath, telling
me that the sufferings of one’s enemy were sweet, but I could not
enjoy them as I had expected. Of this softness I was ashamed.

The walls of Nineveh rose to such a great
height that they seemed almost more the work of Great Mother Earth
or of the younger gods than of men’s hands. They shut out the city
and its noise so that one might almost fancy these had never
existed. Beyond them were fields of barley that stretched out
endlessly and, always, the great Tigris, queen of rivers.
Sometimes, at night, if a solitary man came outside the gates for
the refreshment of his soul, the only sound he heard would be her
rushing waters.

But there was no solitude now. The chatter of
ten thousand voices stilled the rivers urgent whisper. The
confused, swirling movement of ten thousand bodies screened the
earth from my eyes. It would be so until the usurper’s cries had
ceased to be diverting to the multitudes of Nineveh.

It was the sixth hour of the morning, when
the sun had nearly reached its height. I stood near Nergalushezib’s
cage in the uniform of a quradu, a member of the king’s personal
bodyguard, holding the javelin I carried everywhere. It would have
been the work of an instant to raise my weapon and strike. The
distance was no more than twenty paces; it would have been an easy
matter to split his heart like a wineskin left out in the sun, and
then the crowd would have had nothing left to grin at. I felt a
strong impulse to do this—I did not consider that I would be
punished for the act, for I was high in the royal favor and
disdained to think of punishment—but a quradu is above all else
loyal to the king’s will and it was the king’s will that
Nergalushezib should live through the extremity of his suffering.
So I stayed my hand.

“Tiglath, is it really you?”

I felt a hesitant touch upon my shoulder and
turned around to see a woman standing behind me. Her face was
covered with a marriage veil, but there was something about her
eves that stirred my memory. She was richly dressed, after the
fashion of court women—the fringes of her shawl were decorated with
tiny gold and silver coins, and the red weave of her widow’s tunic
was shot through with silver thread. She was a great lady, and
behind her, when I had the presence of mind to look, I saw three
other women in attendance, also richly dressed, and a tall eunuch
carrying the staff of the royal household.

But this great lady was in stature hardly
more than a child. She did not seem old enough to have known a
husband, let alone to have lost one, and her eyes, luminous and
black, said that she was still waiting for the man who would make
the blood quicken in her veins.

I peered into those eyes, which seemed as
familiar to me as the reflection of my own image, but I could not
speak her name. At last, and with a glance behind her to make
certain none would take note of her boldness, she unfastened the
corner of her veil and let me see her face.

Yes—the truth my heart had known was
answered. She was Esharhamat.

“Don’t you know me, Tiglath?” In her voice
was the faint quaver of a sob.

But she need not have feared I would forget
her. In the years since I had departed from the house of women I
had tried with all my might to blot her image from my memory. “When
you leave this garden you will no longer love me,” she had said,
but I had carried my love away and it had never left me. Would for
both our sakes it had been otherwise.

“Yes, I know you, Esharamat,” I answered, my
voice nothing but a thick whisper. “I would know you in the dark,
with the eyes plucked from my head.”

“But not, it seems, until I had taken away my
veil.”

She smiled, for her confidence in her power
had returned, and with her white hand she returned the veil to its
place.

And then, for a long moment, we were both too
overcome with shyness to speak.

It was still Esharhamat, but the child was
almost gone. In her place was the woman she would be, and very
soon. She had always been beautiful to look upon—her skin was still
wondrously clear, pale almost to transparency, and her features
possessed a delicacy hardly known among the river people—but now
she was all of that and bewitching as well. Her eyes, so deep a man
could lose himself in them, held me with a magic I could neither
understand nor resist. I could only stare helplessly. She was so
familiar, and yet I felt as if I had never really seen her
before.

Then the damned soul over whose wretchedness
we had all come to rejoice screamed through the bars of his iron
cage, and the crowd laughed again and surged around us, and the
spell was broken. We both turned to look at him, and my heart
almost died within me when I heard his incoherent supplication and
saw that he was pointing down with his arm at the two of us.

No, it was only at Esharhamat.

“He seems to recognize you,” I said. “Why
would that be, I wonder.”

“I was here yesterday and the day before.”
Esharhamat lowered her eyes, as if confessing to some terrible
frailty. “It is the king’s wish, since Ashurnadinshum was my
husband. I must come each day until. . . Perhaps he knows, and
somehow blames me for. . .”

Yes, of course. I had known of her marriage
to the marsarru, which had been celebrated here in Nineveh only a
few months before the Elamites crossed over into Babylonia. It had
been judged, it seemed, that she was still too young to enter into
the duties of a wife, and her husband had left her behind when he
returned to be lord once more over the black headed people.
Otherwise she might have followed him into captivity and death.

But no—Nergalushezib could not have known the
identity of the child woman in her mourning tunic. It was vain to
speculate about what might have attracted his attention to her,
about what could have been going through that tormented, crippled
mind. I turned away and, putting my hand upon Esharhamat’s arm,
drew her eyes back to me.

“He cannot blame you,” I said. “What he
suffers is done by the king’s will, who revenges himself upon one
whom he numbers among his son’s murderers. That wretch is beyond
blaming anyone now.”

“Thank you, Tiglath,” she murmured as she
allowed the tips of her fingers just to brush the back of my hand.
“Have you ever felt that. . . shame? To have done nothing, and
still. . ?”