The Assyrian (11 page)

“Yes. But we cannot help what we feel.”

“No—we cannot.”

She turned, as if to go. It seemed I had not
had time even to catch my breath.

“Will you return again tomorrow then?” I
asked. Surrounded by strangers, I could not speak my heart. I could
but hope she still loved me a little and would hear all I left
unsaid.

And did she? Was what I saw in her face no
more than my own entreaty being mirrored back to me, or did the way
the light changed in her black eyes mean that she too hoped that,
having found one another again, we would not now remain forever
parted?

“Yes. Tomorrow.”

“At this hour?”

“Yes.”

Once more her hand reached out to me. For an
instant we almost touched, but perhaps we were already too far
apart, for she caught back her arm, hiding it beneath her widow’s
shawl as if its very existence were some guilty secret. She turned
away again.

“Tomorrow,” I said, but if she heard me she
gave no sign. In an instant the crowd swallowed her up and she was
gone.

I hardly knew what I should do. It was as if
some part of my soul, long dead, had suddenly returned to life. It
flooded back upon me, all the love I had kept dammed up in my
heart, and I thought it possible I might drown. Among the Greeks
there are many who sing of love’s sweetness, of its mad joy, but
they are merely singers. For those who truly love, to whom love
comes early in life and lingers through the years like a ghost that
will not be driven out, it is an agony tearing at the liver. Love
is a sharp knife in the hands of a child—it cuts to the bone and
leaves a scar that time can never rub away.

Esharhamat was still a maiden—her virginity
was something I would prove for myself in time—but she was also a
widow, one whose husband had been swallowed by the earth, and
therefore free in the law’s eyes. I knew that as soon as her period
of mourning was finished the king would give her to Arad Ninlil,
his second son by the Lady Tashmetum-sharrat and the new marsarru,
but I did not care. As a widow she had her own establishment—she
was not shut up in the house of women—and she could come and go as
she liked. She was within reach.

I did not care about Arad Ninlil, whom
everybody knew for a languid, cruel brute and half an idiot. The
prospect of his being Esharhamat’s husband was repulsive enough—he
was not such as any maiden would relish taking to her bed—but he
was a future evil, and the future beyond tomorrow did not exist for
me. There was only this moment. I felt a longing that seemed to
fill me, leaving room for nothing else, as if my skin were merely a
thing to contain it. I knew I was about to throw my life away like
the rind of an empty melon, and I did not care.

Suddenly I wanted nothing so much as to be
alone. The crowd of strangers was an oppression, and I wanted to
breathe cool air and listen to nothing except my own thoughts. I
decided I would follow the wall south until I came to the river,
for I had a great longing for the sound of its rushing waters that
it might wash over my mind and cleanse me of this torment.

As I walked along I stabbed lightly at the
ground with the point of my javelin. It was my favored weapon and I
was never without it. I could hit a mark the size of my open hand
at seventy paces, and in close combat a skilled fighter can empty a
man’s guts from his belly with a single stroke of its copper tip,
but I had never used it except in hunting. I would be brave and
terrible in war, and I would joy to lay down my life for my king,
but this was all in the abstract. At the moment I was plotting how
I could cheat him of his heir’s intended bride.

I loved Esharhamat, and that was not
abstract. The shyness that had undone me on the night of Kephalos’s
dinner party was far in the past, for it was an easy thing to
become a man in the city of Nineveh. Almost as soon as my voice had
changed I went to the temple of Ishtar, dropped a silver coin into
the lap of one of her sacred harlots, and the thing was done.

Once in her life, each woman owes this duty
to the goddess—she waits beside the temple door until a man comes,
and he gives her a silver coin, which thus becomes sacred and is
never spent. This she does that the goddess may smile upon her and
make her marriage fruitful. For a pretty woman it is the business
of a single evening, but some must wait for months, even years. And
some decide never to leave and consecrate themselves to the
goddess’s service. These become skilled in all the ways of fleshly
love and are honored wherever they go. I confined myself to such,
although their price was higher, and as a matter of routine and for
the sake of my health, like all the young men of the royal barrack,
I visited them once every week. They did not touch my liver—that
was not their concern—but my visits to the temple allowed me to be
quiet in my mind.

That was all finished now. I loved
Esharhamat. If it happened that I never put my hand upon her in the
whole of my life I still would not find peace in any other woman’s
arms. In an instant, with a smile as guileless as when she was a
child, she had ended all of that for me. I could not regret it.

There is a place where the city wall appears
to step to one side to avoid getting its robes wet. The river
hurries by, Nineveh seeming to rise from its banks. In the season
of floods its waters almost touch the wall, but that time was past
now. I seated myself on the bluff, letting my feet hang down almost
to the river’s surface, and balanced the javelin across my thighs.
I had only to remember the moment Esharhamat had undone her veil
that I might see her face, and I was filled with a wretchedness
that was itself more profoundly joyous than anything I had ever
known. I did not know what I felt. I had become a stranger to
myself.

That I was a condemned man I had not a
moment’s doubt. The king’s favor did not extend to tampering with
the destiny of his house, so when he knew that I had raised my eyes
to her who must be the mother of all the kings to follow, he would
strip the skin from my body and nail it to the city gates. This
seemed right and just to me—I did not question it. That I must love
Esharhamat, this too seemed beyond my power to prevent. Thus I
regarded myself as a dead man. Perhaps not this year, or the next,
but soon enough. I had found my simtu, my fate, the end the gods
had selected for me. How could it be otherwise? Where else could it
lead, this love that had begun against the background of a public
execution? Somehow I could not bring myself to care.

But that I should involve Esharhamat in my
disgrace, this tormented me. For if I loved her more than my life,
how could I wish her to be otherwise than happy and safe? But could
she be happy parted from me when I was thus wretched away from her?
It seemed a knot that would never be untied. I almost wished that
the priest’s knife had not been stayed, that I were now a gelding
in the tablet house, my mind untroubled and Esharhamat safe.

And at the same time I was profoundly happy.
I had seen her again—I would see her tomorrow. What was this not
worth?

How long I continued thus I cannot say. All
at once I looked up and saw my shadow lengthening across the ground
and realized it was nearly night. If I did not return to the royal
barrack in the next hour, Tabshar Sin would make me spend tomorrow
cleaning out the stable and then Esharhamat would think I had
deserted her. I sprang up as if the river had suddenly turned to
boiling.

“Have I startled you, Prince?”

I saw him and heard his voice in the same
instant. He was standing at the edge of the bluff, seven or eight
paces distant, and in his right hand he held the staff of a
pilgrim. He was an old man—his hair and beard were whiter than a
pigeon’s wing and the sun had burned his face to the color of
harness leather. He stood with his head uncovered and wore the
yellow robes of a priest, although I had never seen a priest wear
anything so threadbare—the garment looked as if he could have been
born in it, and it and he had grown old together.

Moreover, I had never seen a priest who was
not smooth skinned and fat, for priests are great lovers of luxury,
and this man was as gaunt as a corpse dug out of the hot sand. His
collarbone was clearly visible under his thin tunic, and the ridges
of his brow were so prominent that his eyes seemed buried deep in
his face.

He smiled, but he appeared to be looking
through rather than at me. And then, of course, I understood—the
old man was blind.

“No, you have not startled me,” I replied.
His hand moved slightly on the staff—a small thing but eloquent in
its way, enough to suggest that he knew I was lying. “I simply
remembered that I have to be somewhere else. The hour is late.”

“Is it?” The old man turned his dead eyes to
the sky, as if he wished that they might at least feel the dying
day’s heat. “Not for you, Prince. “Your day has hardly even
begun.”

We stood on the bluff facing each other, a
breeze from the distant mountains beginning to stir around us, and
I was overcome with a sense of dreamy unreality. The setting sun at
the old man’s back cast an aura about him, like the melammu, which
the Greeks call “nimbus,” said to signify the presence of a
god.

“You know me, then?” I asked. I was not at
all sure I wished to hear the answer.

“Yes, I know you. You are Tiglath Ashur, are
you not? And you have the mark of the blood star upon the palm of
your right hand.”

“But—you are blind! How. . . ?”

“Am I?” He shook his head, as if in pity, and
he smiled. “Am I blind or are you, whom the sight of this world
dazzles so that you cannot see what the god would show you? No, you
needn’t be frightened. I am no more than a man, and it is not I
whose shoulders the god surrounds with his divine light. Your soul
is troubled, Prince? Do not fear. All will unfold by design. All
this has been foreseen, and the sin will not be yours.”

“You speak of sin?” I asked, for I understood
now that I was in the presence of a maxxu, a holy man, one who
speaks with the god’s voice.

“Yes.”

I approached, quietly, as if stalking a deer
through the high grass. He knew I came near but made no sign. His
blind eyes never left my face—I might have thought he could see
except the pupils were misted over like the river on a cold
morning. He was blind and a stranger, yet my life seemed open to
him.

“I come from Mount Epih—do you know it?”

I stopped. I shook my head. “It is sacred to
Ashur. Few have ever been there.”

“Few have, yes. But you will one day. Until
then listen to the promptings of your heart, for the god Ashur has
entrusted your footsteps to a sedu. All is by the god’s design. The
sin will not be yours.”

“What sin, old man?” I reached out my hand,
but I had not the will to touch him. It was not in my power to
touch him. “What sin? Speak!”

“Do you wish to know? Truly, Prince?” The
smile said once more that he pitied me my ignorance. He raised his
arm and pointed toward the city wall.

“Look to Nineveh, Tiglath Ashur. Its streets
will become the hunting ground of foxes, and owls will make their
nests in the palace of the great king. Do not think that happiness
and glory await you here, Prince, for the god reserves you to
another way. Here all things will be bitter—love, power,
friendship. Sweet at first, but, in the end, bitter. The sedu
protects your footsteps. Listen to your heart.”

“My sedu? What. . ?”

“You bear his mark, Tiglath Ashur. We will
meet again.”

He turned, as if dismissing me from
existence, and walked away—away from me and from the city he had
cursed with his prophecy. My mind was full of words, but I could
not speak them. I could only watch helplessly as his figure
contracted in the distance.

. . . . .

“Then it is not your simtu to have your hide
nailed to the city gate. By the sixty great gods, I imagine it
comes as a relief, brother.”

Esarhaddon sat on his sleeping mat, his head
supported in the palm of his hand. He had been much impressed by
what I told him of my two meetings outside the walls, for
Esarhaddon put great trust in omens of every kind.

“And if the god has granted you a sedu, then
your life will be full of glory.

“He says not.” I shook my head—except for the
prophecy of Nineveh’s fall, which it would have been treason to
repeat, I had told Esarhaddon everything. But I had not told him
that.

“But a sedu, Tiglath. . .”

“Perhaps he was merely a crazy old man.”

“But he knew you, though you say he was
blind—he knew of your birthmark.”

“Perhaps someone pointed me out to him.
Perhaps someone told him about the mark—I do not keep it
hidden.”

I shrugged my shoulders, wishing I had said
nothing. I did not want to believe anymore.

But Esarhaddon was not to be dissuaded. Blind
holy men who journey from sacred mountains, guardian spirits,
birthmarks that foretell a man’s destiny—it was all very much to
his taste. That my visitor had been a maxxu sent from the god was
to him a settled matter.

“A sedu. . .” Esarhaddon lay back on his
sleeping mat, his hands clasped behind his head as he stared
dreamily at the ceiling. “If such a thing were to befall me. .
.”

Perhaps, once again, it was only my mixed
blood that made me doubt, for the Greeks do not place such reliance
on the favor of their gods, who, in any case, seem an indolent lot,
loving most those men who have least need of them. In my mother’s
language there is no word for sedu, for in the western lands the
dead, if they have been properly covered with the ritual three
handfuls of earth, do not return. The gods, from whose sight they
have been cut off, have no commerce with them and thus do not send
them to protect and guide the living. And, in any case, who among
the great—and the god always chooses a sedu from among the souls of
fallen heroes—who would come back into the world for the sake of
one such as me?