The Assyrian (23 page)

“Oh, damn you!” she screamed, and the hot
tears started in her eyes. “Damn you, Tiglath, you coward—how dare
you speak to me of your love!”

Her little sandled feet kicked at my shins as
if they were a door she meant to break down, and when that did not
satisfy her fury she went for my face with her nails and would have
raked her claws across my eyes had I not held her hack. I took her
in my arms and held her to me, pinning her arms so that she could
not move—she even tried to bite me, such was her rage.

But at last she was quiet once more. When I
was sure I touched her cheek with my lips, but she did not
struggle. But if she was overmatched in strength, that was all—and
she understood enough to use only weapons of her own choice.

“I would have risked all for you,” she
whispered tensely, her mouth almost against my ear. “Everything,
for just one moment of your love. And you have not even courage
enough to push your way in between my legs. Let me go, Tiglath, for
I will not hurt you.”

Nothing, not the sharpest sword, has the
cutting edge of a woman’s scorn. I released her, feeling as if my
bowels had been torn away. I would have preferred anything, even to
the meanest death, to the cold contempt I saw in her eyes.

“Think what you like,” I said, my voice
thick, “except that I do not love you.”

“Oh, I know you love me, Tiglath—after your
fashion.”

There seemed no word I could speak that would
not make me look a bigger fool, so I turned to go. Esharhamat’s
garden was no more than twenty paces across, but on that morning it
seemed a limitless desert.

“Tiglath!”

I looked back in time to see her push the
tunic from her shoulders so that it slid caressingly down her body
to leave her naked, the red linen gathered about her feet like a
pool of blood. Yes—she had not lied. She had grown to a woman and I
found her fair.

“You have eyes at least—use them! And come
back to me when your love is strong enough to allow you to take
what you want.”

For a long moment we stood there like idols
of stone. I know not what was in her heart, but for myself I did
not understand how I could bear ever to lose the sight of her. But
at last, when I could bring myself to look away, I turned once more
to go, for there was still no word upon my lips. Surely now, I
thought, surely we will now be parted forever.

“Tiglath!”

Even with my back to her, I could hear the
quick sound of her sandals against the flagstones. As I turned, she
threw herself into my arms and as I lifted her up she wrapped her
bare legs around my waist, burying her face in my neck as if she
clung to me out of love for her life. And then her hungry mouth
covered my face with kisses.

“Only come back to me, Tiglath—my love, my
god! I would die if you stayed away.”

I was half mad with that mixture of
tenderness and lust that can make a man believe the world begins
and ends in one beloved body. I knelt there in Esharhamat’s garden,
her legs still tight about me, as she arched her back and let my
lips wander over her breasts. Her little mat of black hair was
pressed tight against my belly—I could hear her breath catch each
time she moved and the sweet smell of her flesh filled my nostrils.
Yes, she had spoken no more than the truth. There could be no price
too high for this one moment of passion.

“No—you are right. This is not how it should
be.”

She pushed herself away, as if struggling
against us both, but even as we kneeled together there under
Ashur’s bright sun I could not keep my arms from her.

“Let me get my tunic,” she said in a level
voice—all the violence of rapture seemed drained from her. “I begin
to feel foolish this way.”

When she had covered herself she came back to
me and took my hand. Nothing in her look or manner betrayed what
had happened between us.

“Come to me again in a few days. By then
perhaps I will have thought of something.”

She smiled at me, her smile filled with a
sense of foreboding. Yes, let the god help all men, for they are
but lots held in a woman’s hand.

“What is there to think of, Esharhamat? We
love each other, but this thing cannot be.”

“Can’t it?” Her eyes flashed in something
like anger. “It can—it must! The god has given us to each other. I
feel this in the marrow of my bones. If he has let us find love he
will find us a way to happiness. I will not allow myself to be so
helpless. I. . . Trust me, Tiglath. You have not a woman’s
cunning.”

A woman’s cunning—that was what she called
it. Yes, the cunning that is blind to all which it does not wish to
look upon. This bright little bird, consumed by the sightless
passion of springtime, her heart hammers her breast as she sails on
the storm dark wind, hurrying to build her nest in the brittle,
naked branches, stealing straw from everywhere, and she cannot see
that the tree is already dead.

And this she called a woman’s cunning.

Chapter 9

As the Fates would have it, I did not see
Esharhamat again for many months. The next morning, even before the
sun rose, I found a messenger standing in the doorway of my
quarters; he handed me a tablet bearing the king’s own seal which
commanded me into the royal presence without delay. I had time only
to splash a little water in my face and put on my uniform before
the messenger and I set out for the palace at a dead run. But we
needn’t have hurried so—I was left to wait in an outer room,
pondering how much the king might know of my offenses and how he
would choose to avenge himself.

When the door to the king’s sleeping chamber
did open, it was not my father or even one of his pages who came
out to meet me but the Lady Shaditu, wearing only a thin linen robe
that caught the light from behind to show the outline of her body
as clearly as if she had been naked. The look on my face only made
her smile.

“I have been about my duty. He is pleased
that I should help him bathe,” she said, not even bothering to hold
the robe closed in front as she shrugged her thin shoulders. “He is
old—what can he do except look?

“Now, if it were you, Tiglath, brother. .
.

She came near me, put her arms about my neck,
and kissed me most wantonly on the mouth.

“Now in Elam,” she whispered hoarsely, “in
Elam it is a mark of high favor when a royal prince beds with his
sister. It means he will—”

But of late I had had quite enough of women
who threw themselves at me and I pushed her roughly away, so
roughly that she stumbled and fell to the brick floor.

“We are not in Elam, Lady.”

But she merely leaned back on her white arms
and giggled like a drunken harlot.

“I could have you impaled upon a stake for
that,” she said, quite as if it were a matter of no importance—she
made no attempt to rise. “You must enjoy putting your life at risk,
brother. Either that, or you are wiser than you seem and know that
women find a little brutality exciting. Come and help me up, then
you may kiss me yet once more.”

When I did not move, she found her feet
alone.

“Another time will serve as well.”

“Come in, Tiglath, my boy—been getting
acquainted, eh?”

It was the king. His head was covered with a
cloth as he stuck it out the door. He motioned to me with his
arm.

“Come in, come in, my son—now run along, pet,
for we two have men’s affairs to speak of.”

He smiled at Shaditu quite as if she had been
a child, and with a glance at me that mocked all men she left the
room on her bare feet. The instant she was gone the king seemed to
forget her existence. He put his arm over my shoulder and I walked
with him into his private apartments.

“I have news that will make you very happy,
Tiglath Ashur, Son of Sennacherib, King of Kings. You see, we have
this little difficulty in the north. . .”

I was to lead a punitive expedition against a
tribe of barbarians who had come down from the eastern mountains
and had the effrontery to raise their tent poles within sight of
the northern reaches of the Tigris River. The farmers in that area
had sent a messenger to Nineveh complaining that their villages
were being raided and their women and livestock carried off, and so
the king, so he told me, felt that this would be a good chance for
me to test my new infantry tactic. I was to leave at once. On three
hours’ notice my men were to be ready to march. There was no time
even to send a message.

And though it tore at my liver to be away
from Esharhamat, I could not disguise to myself the fact that mixed
with my sorrow was a certain measure of relief, as if I had
escaped, at least for the moment, more than one dangerous
entanglement.

Besides, I was an officer with his first
independent command—I had three companies of foot soldiers under me
and a detachment of cavalry. I did not relish the prospect of
another encounter with my all too loving sister, and Esharhamat’s
love was a trap that always stood waiting for me. I could ruin both
our lives just as easily one time as another.

After the first days march we camped almost
within sight of Three Lions, but I did not ride over to see my
mother. It would not have made a favorable impression on my men had
I done so, but I cannot claim duty as my principal reason for
staying away. I was quite honestly afraid to look Merope in the
face, for she would be certain to ask about Esharhamat and I had no
confidence in my talents as a liar.

We were six days reaching the place where the
river bent in toward the Taurus Mountains like a drawn bowstring.
There was still almost a finger’s depth of snow on the ground, but
I had no difficulty in finding the traces of my nomad adversaries—I
had only to look about me at the burned villages, and to smell the
rotting corpses of men and animals, to know they were close at
hand.

“Such pointless butchery,” I thought to
myself, “as if they were boys pulling the wings from flies because
they can find no other sport. These are not a people who will stand
and fight like soldiers—one glimpse of an army in the field and
they will run back to their mountains like deer. I have made this
journey for nothing.” My heart was black with anger.

But I needn’t have worried, for the Uqukadi,
although they were savages, were not cowards. The Uqukadi—that was
what they called themselves, though doubtless now they have
disappeared from the earth or been swallowed up by other peoples;
in those times nothing was more ephemeral than the tribal groupings
of the mountain nations.

I had no sooner made camp than their
delegation was at my tent, come to parley on such insulting terms
that it was almost an open challenge to battle.

There were three of them, all of middle years
with shocks of gray in their beards, although they seemed to rank
themselves by age, and all dressed in the blue tunics and black
vests that appeared to be the costume for men of substance among
them. But the resemblance went no further. The varieties of human
nature are the same among all races, and their leader, a heavy,
slow moving man given to smiling at nothing, I could have met in
Babylon or in Ethiopia, where the tribal elders tie bones into
their hair and live in huts made of grass.

The next in precedence was clearly the fire
eater among them, a tall man with a strong face—I noticed that he
carried a scar that ran on the left side from his hairline almost
to his chin—and fierce black eyes that seemed to pop slightly out
of their sockets. I decided then and there that if I should ever
take this one in battle I would have his head on a stake before
sunset, for he was the sort who by instinct seeks power and, when
he has it, causes no end of vexation to his own people and all
their neighbors.

The last—and I have often wondered what quirk
of social ordering could have raised this one to the eminence of
treating of war and peace even for a tribe of mountain bandits—was
small and narrow shouldered and, I gathered, almost an idiot. He
never spoke, but nodded vigorously whenever either of the others
did—sometimes even when I did. Or perhaps he was not so weak in the
head after all, since he was the only one of the three who had
sense enough to be frightened. Throughout our brief interview he
seemed on the verge of running away like a deer that has seen a
snake.

I met them sitting behind a small table in my
tent. I did not rise when they entered, nor did I open my lips. I
thought it well for them to understand that an officer in command
of the soldiers of Ashur does not stand upon forms of courtesy with
ragged nomadic raiders who count their wealth in goats. For perhaps
as long as two minutes, therefore, the four of us waited in tense
silence.

“I wonder what the great king in Nineveh is
thinking of that he sets a boy to lead his troops,” said the eldest
at last, in reasonably fluent Aramaic—the idiot’s head bobbed up
and down several times in agreement, all the time staring at me
with eyes that pleaded like a whipped dogs.

“Perhaps he felt that a boy, as you choose to
style me, was all that was required.”

I forced myself to grin at him, as
unpleasantly as I could manage. Already then I realized we were
only probing for weakness—if I did not take their heads back with
me to the king, they would probably find some slave to cut my
throat as I slept. There was no way this would end except in
blood.

“The king in Nineveh is merciful,” I went on,
still showing them my teeth. “If you go now, leaving behind your
swords, your women, and your livestock, he will allow you to crawl
back to your mountains, there to starve to death in your own good
time. If you do not, I will take these things from you and you will
die here.”

“You, boy?”

The one with the fierce eyes took half a step
forward, as if prepared to run me through for my insolence. But he
would not and we both knew it, so I did not trouble to move.