The Assyrian (19 page)

“I am not the king’s lady, my son—only one of
his women. And he has not come near my bed in many years.”

I did not know what to say, so I said
nothing. And as our shadows began to lengthen along the road, we
came to the boundary stone marked with the winged disk of Ashur to
show that we had crossed onto the king’s land.

No, the king my father had not gifted me with
a dog hole. As we rode along, the fields, bare now and covered with
yellow stubble, stretched to the right hand and to the left as far
as the eye would carry. And the farmhouse was not of brick but of
mountain stone and built after the Hittite pattern that the rooms
might have sunlight during all the hours of the day. My heart rose
within me, for I was bringing my mother to a palace.

By the time I had brought the cart to a stop,
the farmhands and household slaves had already gathered before the
great wooden doors to greet us. As I stepped down they all bowed as
one.

“I am Tiglath Ashur,” I said, in the voice I
used to address soldiers—I was unused to the ways of country people
and conscious of my youth, and thus afraid of seeming either raw or
weak. “And this is the Lady Merope, my mother.”

“Yes, Lord—a rider was here yesterday to
bring us word of your coming.” A tall man with a black beard and
the weathered face of one who has lived out his life within sight
of the northern mountains stepped a little apart from the others
and bowed once more. There was that in his manner to suggest he was
not used to bowing. “I am Tahu Ishtar, overseer on this estate
these ten years, in that time the king’s servant as he is the
god’s, as I am now yours. We have prepared the house to receive
you, and a woman will see to your lady mother’s comfort. If you
will follow me, Lord.”

We dined that night on roast kid and barley
bread washed down with beer—these were not people who had ever
tasted wine—and when the meal was finished and my mother and I
warmed ourselves against a brazier placed in the center of the
room, I enjoyed a sense of comfort and safety such as I had almost
forgotten was possible. The smell of wood smoke was like myrrh.

“Will you be happy here, Merope?” I asked. “I
can only stay through the second half of the month, but I will come
as often as I can. This will be our home from now on. Will you be
happy here?”

“Yes—it is like a dream.”

There were tears wetting her checks. They
glistened in the red light of the fire. I sat down beside her and
put my arm across her shoulders, thinking to myself what an empty
life she must have led in the house of women that she could think
it a dream to find herself here, on an isolated farm, with nothing
to sustain her but the occasional visits of her son.

“You must marry, Lathikadas,” she said
suddenly, letting her hand close on the front of my tunic. “You
must bring a wife here, a girl to share your sleeping mat, to bear
you children and bring happiness to your life.”

“I am young yet, Merope. There is a world of
time to think of taking a wife, and for now I am content that you
should be mistress here.”

I had thought my mother was expressing more a
foreboding than a hope, but I was mistaken. I could feel the
tension growing as her fingers tightened on my collar—this with her
was no womanish fit of baseless possessiveness. Something, some
idea or recollection, had frightened her.

“I fear I cannot order your house as you
would wish it,” she went on—with a hint of panic in her voice. “My
son, I have been a slave since childhood, and one does not learn
the domestic arts in the king’s harem—and I would never be jealous.
I would wish you to find love with her, that she might. . .”

“That she might what, Mother?”

She looked up into my face, and I saw
something almost like terror in her eyes.

“That she might drive the memory of
Esharhamat from your heart, my Lathikadas.”

I will not attempt to describe what I felt in
that moment. I was too astonished to sort it all out—that word of
my harmless meetings with Esharhamat should have reached Merope’s
ears. Was this business the common gossip of the palace? Could it
have reached as high as the king?

No, that it could not have. I was alive and
in high favor. But the favor of the mighty is a fragile thing, and
all at once I felt that the very ground beneath my feet was no
stronger than the crust of stale bread, that it could collapse
under my weight from one instant to the next and I would fall to a
shameful death. It would take no more than a word.

“But, Mother, how could you have. . .”

“How? You can ask me how?” She made some
pretense of laughter, but it was a bitter sound. “How would I,
walled up as I was in the house of women, have heard anything of
Esharhamat and my son? You forget whom I have there as a companion,
and is there a mud turtle from here to the Bitter River who can
make a splash that Naq’ia will not hear?”

Naq’ia—yes, of course. And would not Naq’ia
delight to torment my mother with such news? I could understand
Merope’s fear. I could feel it myself.

But I took her face in my hands and kissed
her brow, just as I had done as a child.

“It is quite innocent, Mother. I see her from
time to time—that is all. Nothing evil can come of it.

“And now I think it would be well if we both
found our beds,” I continued, as if I had answered all her doubts
and could turn her thoughts as easily as I might wheel a chariot
about over the broad plain. “Your women wait for you beyond the
door. And tomorrow I would rise early to see my property. I would
have these people know that their new master is a soldier and does
not sleep till noon like some tavern harlot.”

Merope showed me her smile, which was a smile
I had seen on the lips of other women. A smile that said she knew
what all women know, that men are no more than children.

“It would be well, my son, if you were as
wise in all things as in this.”

. . . . .

The next morning the sun had not risen above
the eastern mountains when I opened the door of my new house and
stepped outside into the cold light, but Tahu Ishtar, my overseer,
was already waiting for me. One hand clutching the shoulder cloth
of his rough brown tunic and the other a staff—the mark of his
station as the javelin I carried was of mine—he bowed stiffly when
he saw me. Standing beside him was a thin little boy who could not
have been more than twelve. At a glance from the overseer he too
bowed, so low that I could almost see the back of his neck.

“My son Qurdi,” Tahu Ishtar said, “who by my
lord’s grace will succeed to his father’s office when I am summoned
by the Lady Ereshkigal.”

The boy smiled shyly and then dropped his
eyes to the ground.

“Will my lord be pleased to inspect his
property now?”

I wore the uniform of a rab kisir in the
quradu and my father was the king, but this man, without any show
of insolence, had made it plain that he had seen nothing yet to
make him tremble with awe. Outside the cities, where they have not
learned to be corrupted by foreign manners and the power of wealth,
the men of Ashur are just that way—they are not slaves.

“I will be very pleased.” I said, smiling at
the boy Qurdi. The overseer merely bowed once more.

We spent the first half of the morning
looking over the buildings—the threshing floors, the granaries, the
barns and stables and cellars—and I was pleased to discover that I
seemed to be a most prosperous farmer. I was possessed of sheep,
cattle, and horses. I had barley and millet. Flocks of geese
patrolled the grounds, looking for the grain that lay scattered for
them. In great clay jars kept in the cool earth I had beer and
cider enough to drown whole companies of thirsty soldiers. The land
had been bountiful to me. And all these things Tahu Ishtar showed
me, explaining everything in a calm, detached voice, as if he
concerned himself with none of it. He was a proud man and had no
wish to appear to boast.

I said little, asking a question now and
then, listening to the answers in silence. My overseer would not
curry my favor and neither would I his, for I was not a boy now and
men must respect each other. The boy Qurdi followed us everywhere,
standing close to his father but watching my face.

“There will be snow on the ground soon, Lord.
There is little enough to do now, so the people keep to their
houses and make ready for winter. You will see their village when
you inspect the fields, but for that we must take horses.”

We returned to the stables, and I picked
myself a great black brute of a horse, bridled him, and threw a
blanket over his back. When both Tahu Ishtar and I were mounted,
and Qurdi had climbed up behind his father, we set out.

The circuit of my estate occupied more than
three hours, through orchards and vineyards and across fields of
bare, turned earth and well cared for irrigation canals wide enough
for barge traffic and brimming with silt laden water that glistened
like polished iron in the cold winter sunshine. Tahu Ishtar
explained how each field would be planted against the spring
harvest, how the canal locks were managed, and where my tenants
worked during each season of the year.

“Will you live among us, Lord?” he asked
finally, careful not to look at me as he did so.

“When I can—yes.” I could not know whether or
not it was the answer he wanted. “I am a soldier and we are at war,
but I am leaving my mother here and will come as often as I am
able.”

He nodded, still without looking at me.

“That is good. It is better for the land when
the lord lives on it, and the king, of course, was seldom here. I
have not seen the king’s face these ten years, although I wrote to
his scribes in Nineveh when there was need of advice. I suppose now
that will no longer be required.”

We pulled up our horses in front of one of
the dozens of narrow wooden bridges thrown across the canals, and
at last Tahu Ishtar turned his face to me. It seemed that, since I
did not intend to hide myself in some great house in Nineveh,
living off the revenues of lands I never visited, he had decided I
was someone he could bear the sight of.

“No, that will not be required. I prefer to
make my mistakes in person.”

With the suddenness of spring thunder, Tahu
Ishtar opened his mouth and laughed. It was like a soldier’s
laughter, unforced and fearless. We were not the same men now; we
had shared a joke.

He raised his arm and pointed to a wisp of
smoke against the mountains.

“Come, then. Yonder is the village where your
people wait. You will find yourself an object of curiosity, since
there are many among them who have never yet seen the face of their
lord.”

To enter a village along the flood plains of
the Tigris is to venture back into the world of the ancients, for
thus the fathers of our race lived before the times of kings and
cities, when there was only the land and the god. I had seen many
such, circles of mud brick huts, places too small to have names,
but always before I had been the soldier who passed by on the road
to somewhere else. I knew nothing of the lives lived before these
cooking fires and had never tasted the water drawn from their
wells. All who live in the king’s mighty shadow are just the same
and are thus strangers in their own country, for it was in the
villages that we began and it is to them that we return to find the
roots of our greatness. We are a race of farmers, for our land is
rich, and it is a proverb in every barrack that the best soldiers
are born with mud between their toes. The lords in Nineveh liked to
forget this, but it was true all the same.

As we rode toward the village I could see
that, just as my overseer had promised, a crowd was gathered
against our arrival. Already, even at a distance, there was that
shouting which comes from many throats, except that these were not
for us. These were the cries of lamentation, and this assembly had
come together not to welcome their new lord but to bewail some
catastrophe unique to themselves. Tahu Ishtar was mistaken—my
tenants had forgotten my very existence.

The women in their white wool tunics and
their colored shawls over their heads—and they were mostly women,
their children clustered around them, and a few old men—threw up
their arms and sobbed like the ghosts of the unburied. A few sank
to the ground, picking up handfuls of dirt to cast upon their
shoulders and heads. The cooking fires had been left to burn
themselves out and water jars were scattered about, their contents
draining into the earth.

“What is it?” I asked. “What has happened?
What distresses them?”

Tahu Ishtar came down from his horse and they
gathered about him, all shouting at once. I could understand
nothing. At last he stepped over to take my bridle as I dismounted,
and his face was hard as ice.

“The lions have come back.” His voice was
without the least hint of expression, as if he had in that instant
lost the power to feel the meanings of words. “When the cold
weather comes, hunger drives them down from the mountains. Before
this they have stolen only a few goats, but now they have carried
off a child.”

“My son, my son! My little son!” One of the
women fell on her knees before us, seemingly unable to stand under
her affliction. “Great Lord, Noble Lord, find my baby for me!”

As she buried her face in the dirt, her hands
clutched my ankles in supplication. She could not even speak now,
and hardly weep, so great was the torment of this sorrow.

“That is where the men have gone,” Tahu
Ishtar said in a low voice. “They have no horses, but it is already
too late.”

“Still, we must do something.”

I knelt and took the woman’s hands in my own,
and she looked up into my face. I could not tell even whether she
was young or old, such was her grief, and the words that had half
formed in my mind seemed suddenly paltry things—what could I tell
her? That I would bring back her child?