The Assyrian (17 page)

And at Nineveh, which we saw in the distance
just as the first few drops of winter rain were falling, at Nineveh
there was joy close to madness that the Servant of Ashur had once
more returned to his capital. Women clutching bread and jars of
beer in their arms danced in ecstasy at the return of their long
absent husbands and men threw coins in the king’s way that they
might be blessed by the touch of his chariot wheels. For three
nights no one slept within the city walls, for it was a time of
festival. The wine shops and brothels were busy places, and women
flocked to the temple of Ishtar to couple their duty to the goddess
with the excitement of the army’s return. We were a great nation,
trampling our enemies underfoot. We were loved by our god, feared
by all besides, powerful and rich—all believed this and rejoiced in
it. A man in a soldier’s tunic wanted for nothing, had he money or
not, and even the meanest soldier’s share of booty was no small
thing. Nineveh was far from the plains of Khalule, and here we
could believe in our victory.

As soon as the quradu had marched back to the
house of war, I stripped off my armor and joined the lines of men
waiting to steam themselves clean in the baths. Then I put on a
clean uniform and made my way to Esharhamat’s apartments in the
king’s palace. One of her ladies led me into the enclosed garden,
where Esharhamat was sitting beside her fountain, looking down into
the water.

She glanced up and when she recognized me her
face seemed to come alive. She danced across the tiled floor—this
is the only way to describe how her light little feet flew—and
threw herself into my arms. In an instant I found her lips pressing
against mine with an urgency that nearly took my breath away.

“I knew you would come back,” she whispered.
“I knew you would not die, I knew, I knew. . .

I kissed her hungrily. I didn’t care who saw
us—it didn’t seem to matter. I was back in this garden and
Esharhamat still loved me. It wasn’t until we had sat down
together, and I held her tiny hands in my own, that I noticed she
no longer wore the red tunic of mourning.

“Then you are soon to marry Arad Ninlil,” I
said, my heart turning to stone in my breast.

“Never! I will never marry him!” The words
seemed to choke her.

“He comes here sometimes,” she went on at
last, her voice lower, colder, as if the memory froze her heart.
“He stays for dinner with his mother and looks at me with wide,
hungry eyes. Once he. . . I hate him. I will never marry him. I
will never marry anyone but you, my Tiglath Ashur, whom the god
loves as I do. Never.”

I had only to look into her eyes to know that
she meant it. She would bring down the king’s wrath upon us. We
both might perish, but for myself I could not be otherwise than
full of joy. This moment seemed worth a thousand deaths.

“But you are out of mourning. . .

“Yes. It had gone on long enough. I never
cared for him—he was never truly my husband.”

“Then nothing has been said of Arad
Ninlil?”

“Nothing.”

We both smiled, absurdly happy. We were only
reprieved, like prisoners given another day before they must face
the executioner’s knife, but what did that matter? We had this
little space of time still left to us. Nothing else seemed
important.

I tried to tell her of the campaign, but
strangely she seemed to know everything already. Of the slaughter
at Khalule, of the march through the cities of the south,
everything. She even knew that I was now high in the king’s favor.
Word of all these things had reached Nineveh long before.

When I spoke of the king, Esharhamat only
smiled, watching me out of the corner of her eye. For her all
things seemed easy and obvious. It was only after I had gone from
her that I realized I had understood nothing, that Esharhamat had
grown to be the sort of woman before whom all men are merely
children.

. . . . .

It was nearly dark when I left her garden,
and at that hour I had no heart for the royal barrack, so I went
instead to the house near the Gate of Adad.

“Young master!” Kephalos bellowed as he saw
me. He had grown even stouter in the space of half a year and his
green and yellow tunic billowed like a sail as he waddled to meet
me at the doorway and throw himself on his knees to embrace my
feet. “Am I yet the slave of my reckless young lord? The gods of
all nations be praised for it!”

He sent Philinna scurrying off to the kitchen
to prepare our dinner and the boy Ernos was given three shekels of
silver and told to buy the finest wine he could find. Before the
stars were out, Kephalos and I, sitting under the vine arbor in his
garden, were both most of the way toward being very drunk as he
regaled me with stories of how things had stood in Nineveh during
my months of absence.

“The gossip among the physicians, Lord, is of
course all about the marsarru Arad Ninlil’s stomach troubles—he has
been sorely plagued ever since the army’s departure, and many say
it is out of jealousy over your exploits. These, Lord, I have paid
storytellers to recount throughout the city and they have rebounded
to the profit of us both. My women patients come to hear me speak
of you, and of course everyone has confidence in a physician whose
master is both a hero and lucky enough to be still alive. By the
way, did the ointments prove of benefit?”

“Yes, er. . .” I was not unhappy to find
myself choking on one of Philinna’s honeyed locusts, for the red
jar was still in my kit, its seal unbroken, and I did not relish
another lecture from Kephalos on the depravity and dirtiness of
southern women. “My wounds, er. . . Would you like to see how
nicely the scars have healed?”

I stood up and lifted my tunic to show him
the sword thrust that had danced along my rib cage at Khalule—it
was nothing more than a thin white line now, and Kephalos, holding
up an oil lamp that he might see the better, inspected it with
great interest.

“Were you a vainer man, Lord, you might even
wish my art had not done its work so well,” he said as I sat down
again. “Scars are not unbecoming to a warrior, when they have been
honorably sustained, and in a year or two it will require a trained
eye to know how close that one came to killing you.”

“But, as you say, Kephalos, I am unencumbered
with that sort of vanity. Now—tell me. What is said here of the
campaign? Do the people have any notion of the real losses at
Khalule?”

My slave shrugged his shoulders. “They do not
care. Lord. It is to be remembered that Nineveh has the king’s
charter, and since none here may be conscripted into the army, one
must go to the houses of the poor to hear the voices of mourning.
It was reported as a glorious campaign, and the merchants have
grown even richer by buying up the spoils. People are disposed to
believe whatever they are told.”

When I described to him what the great battle
had been like, and how the king had wept in my arms and had kept
his tent for three days, Kephalos merely nodded, as if it were a
story he had heard many times before.

“You will recall, master, I warned you before
you left, so full of the glory of war. It is an enterprise that
profits none but the crows—and, of course, the shopkeepers and the
harlots when once the army has returned. By the end of the week
none of those soldiers who are this night roaming the streets in
search of wine and amusement will have so much as a copper
shekel.”

It was no less than the truth. As I walked
home through the crowds of merrymakers, I knew Kephalos was wise.
So it was not in any very happy frame of mind that, upon returning
to the royal barrack, I kicked off my sandals and lay down for my
first night’s rest on a real bed in six months. A hundred times I
had slept better on the bare ground.

The next morning I awoke at first light, and
my head felt as if it would split open like a roasted apple. I got
up and managed to wash my face, but I dared not venture out of
doors for fear the light of Holy Ashur’s sun would strike me dead.
As I buried my face in my hands I cursed Kephalos and his wisdom
and the abundance of his wine, the taste of which still lingered in
my mouth as if it had died there. I was beginning to learn that the
god had not intended me for a reveler.

“Here—take this.”

It was Tabshar Sin. He held a jar of beer to
my lips, making me drink. There must have been something in the
beer, for it smelled like the charcoal ovens outside the city
gates, but in a few minutes my head had contracted back to its
usual dimensions.

“What are you doing here?” he asked finally.
“I have been looking for you all over the house of war.”

“Why? Where else should I be? This is my
room.”

I glanced about me, blinking like an owl in
the dusty light from the sole window. Yes, of course there hadn’t
been any mistake. Esarhaddon and I had lived in this room for five
years.

“This is a boy’s room,” Tabshar Sin said
quietly, as if he were explaining something to a sick child.
“Tomorrow I will have another student sleeping in here. You have
quarters in the officers’ barrack—or has it slipped your mind that
you are now a rab kisir of the quradu? Get up and go to the steam
house to sweat your brains supple again. You are to attend the king
this evening.”

I looked up into his face and saw that he was
grinning at me. And then the grin collapsed in an instant.

“You did well. Prince,” he said. “Your name
is covered in glory, and you have made me proud. Now scour yourself
out and then come and tell me of the death of Nargi Adad.”

. . . . .

It has always been my observation that the
crueler the war and the more ambiguous its outcome, the costlier
and more elaborate the victory celebration. We had shed much blood
in the south and achieved little beyond inflicting comparable
sufferings on our enemy. True, the Elamites had withdrawn back
within their own borders and we had accepted the submission of all
the great cities of Akkad and Sumer except Babylon—the only one
that mattered—but nothing had been settled and next year both
armies would take the field again. Our ordeal, it seemed, was only
to be the more protracted. Hence the grandeur of the banquet with
which the king my father celebrated his triumph.

There was much music that night and much
wine, but I was not in the company of men I trusted as well as
Kephalos, so I drank but little. The smells of incense and roasted
lamb weighed down the heavy air. The wax torches burned in the wall
sconces and the women danced—except this year they were naked but
for their jewels, and their sweat mingled with the oil on their
brown ripe bodies to make them glisten like the stars as they
twisted cunningly in what seemed a frenzy of lustful passion.

Yet it was the king who held our eyes,
resplendent in a tunic of purple and gold. The turban that covered
his graying hair was encrusted with green jewels. When the king
laughed, all men laughed with him, and when he told a story, we all
listened. The king was glory, power, the divinity of the god
himself. The king held us all cradled in his hand like dice ready
for the throw.

This evening I was not one of the pages who
waited in a doorway. I was one of the king’s favorites, gathered
around him at the long table. All of his great men were there: the
commanders of his army, the Lord Sinahiusur, and the marsarru Arad
Ninlil—seated not at his father’s right hand, as one might have
expected, but farther down the table, only a little above my own
place. The governor of the city was there, and the shaknu of
Hindani, glancing about nervously as if he expected that he had
been summoned away from his province to an uncertain destiny. There
was even a woman, though hardly more than a girl, sitting beside
the king at his left hand, pressing her shoulder against his
arm.

I thought perhaps she was one of his new
concubines, part of the tribute from our campaign, until, as her
eyes wandered about the room, they happened to come to rest on my
face and she smiled—none of the king’s women would have dared to
smile at another man like that.

I did not learn until later that this was
Shaditu, his favorite daughter, the delight of his liver as he
called her, for she was beautiful to look upon and played upon his
weakness and fear. Her mother had been an Egyptian woman who died
giving her life and, it was said, had cursed the child with her
last breath. Still, the king was blind to her wickedness, and she
worked much evil before her life was stopped. She was my own
sister, and yet no woman but a harlot has ever smiled at me as she
did that night.

“. . .but it was not like the wars of our
youth, brother, eh? Do you remember, in the campaign against the
Hittite lands, how the king of Sidon fled from us into the sea and
drowned before the eyes of the whole city? When Sidka, king of
Ashkelon, would not submit, we took his gods, his women, his
daughters and sons. We burned their bodies in a great fire—do you
remember that, eh? He learned to kiss the earth at our feet! And
the Egyptians—by Adad, the Egyptians! How we fought them! How their
corpses covered the battlefield under the walls of Altaku! Would
you have liked to see that, my little honeyed apple, yes? Your old
father when he was not so old . . .”

Shaditu stared up into his face and stroked
his hands as they held her slender young body, and whispered things
into his ear which made him roar with laughter. And the king, who
like all kings had learned to trust no one, trusted in her
love.

But the king was drunk with more than his
daughter’s caresses that night, and finally the lady was sent away
that he might enjoy the dancers’ performance all the more. The
table rocked with laughter and soldiers’ jokes, and the beating of
the drums became like a fist that struck one between the eyes. The
dancers came closer—a man had only to put out his hand to touch
their gleaming bodies, and more than one man did. At last the king
staggered up from the table and two of the women caught him under
his arms lest he fall—they moved to his aid with a quickness that
must have come from long practice. He laughed, twisting his head
from one to the other, and allowed them to help him, and then the
rest of us began to rise.