The Assyrian (26 page)

“What do you mean, when I am king? Speak,
slave!”

“Master, did you not know?” He blinked at me
in astonishment as his fingers settled gently over the hand that
seemed about to tear the whiskers from his chin. “I had thought the
king your father would have. . . You mean you have heard
nothing?”

“Not one word—speak.”

“Gentle master, please. . .” When I released
him he took water from his bowl and rubbed it into the hairs of his
face. I was in an agony of suspense, but he hardly seemed to
notice.

“There is now no one in your way—except, of
course, the Lord Esarhaddon, who all say is a fine soldier but no
more,” Kephalos went on at last, studying my face as if he had
never seen it before. “And even he. . . he was in my house not two
days hence and spoke of your elevation to marsarru as a settled
matter. He has hopes that now you can arrange a command of cavalry
for him.”

“But what of the marsarru who is? What of
Arad Ninlil? What of him?”

My canny slave shrugged his thick shoulders
like one in the presence of a sad but unavoidable fate.

“Dead, my Lord—dead of an apoplexy, where all
thought it would be his stomach troubles that must take him off.
Dead this whole week.”

Chapter 10

By nightfall every man in camp had heard the
news of Arad Ninlil’s death, and the next morning, while I bid
good-bye to Kephalos and his consignment of women for the slave
markets, I found myself hailed as if I had already been proclaimed
and the throne stood vacant. All soldiers of Ashur hold the king in
great reverence, and these had fought with me in two campaigns—in
their eyes I was the marsarru, no matter that no baru had probed
the entrails of a consecrated goat to understand the god’s
will.

I wore a red tunic that day, in token of
mourning for my royal brother, but this did not stop the
infantrymen of my old company from setting up a cheer almost the
moment I first stepped into the sun’s light. “Ashur is King, Ashur
is King,” they cried, as if they followed me from the temple with
the crown newly fixed upon my head. It was not a thing which could
be permitted. As I mounted my horse I raised my hand with the fist
clenched for silence.

“There is but one king in this land,” I
bellowed, feigning an anger I did not feel, for their display of
loyalty had softened my liver. “His name is Sennacherib and he
waits for us by the banks of the Lesser Zab. Why are you not ready
to march to his aid? Do you imagine the Elamites are asleep and the
Lord of Ashur has no use for his army? I go now to stand at his
side—whether I have you behind me or not!”

I turned my face to the south and rode away.
I did not hurry, however, since three hundred men cannot strike
camp and prepare to march in an instant. Once out of sight, I let
the horse proceed at his own pace—horses, it has been my
experience, will always idle if they do not feel the prod—and it
was no later than the first hour past noon, and I had not traveled
more than a single beru, when I heard my soldiers shouting after me
to wait for them. At last I turned about and let the reins
drop.

I could not help but laugh when, after
perhaps a quarter of an hour, I saw their sweating faces. Lushakin
came forward and, in the men’s name, begged my pardon, saying that,
nonetheless, it had been a putrid foreigner’s trick of mine to
leave them with their kits unpacked and twelve great jars of
perfectly good beer open and undrunk, which now they had had to
leave behind to cheer no one but the sand fleas. I laughed still
more and pardoned him for his impertinence as well. We lost hardly
any marching time at all that day, and I did not have to hear
myself shouted up as the god’s chosen one anymore that
campaign.

Yet, though a man may silence others, he may
not silence the voice of his own heart. To be the marsarru—it would
answer every ambition I had kept hidden these many years. If it was
truly the king’s will, then he would give me Esharhamat for my
wife. I would live in glory and happiness. It would be no mean
thing to dwell in the house of succession.

It was five days before we reached the king’s
encampment on the Lesser Zab, for the spring floods were only just
beginning to subside and every little trickle of water was over its
banks, leaving the ground thick with mud. I could only hope the
Elamites would be sensible enough to stay comfortably at home until
Ashur’s sun had dried the land enough for gentlemen to fight
upon.

On the day of our arrival I found the king
preparing himself for the punishment of a local noble who had tried
to bring his city out against its rightful lord.

“Ah, is it you, Tiglath—Rab Abru, Conqueror
of the North? Yes? Come kiss me, my son. I am delighted you have
not missed the day’s entertainment. Come, have a cup of this
appalling date wine and tell me all your adventures, eh?”

We sat together in front of his tent,
surrounded by soldiers who stood about watching us from a discreet
distance, rather as if we were dangerous animals, and my royal
father poured out with his own hand some of the contents of the jar
that rested on a small round table at his elbow. He was not
precisely drunk, but the wine—which really did taste like boatman’s
pitch—had glazed over his eyes so that they looked as if they were
made of polished marble. I described to him everything that had
happened in the north, and he smiled and grunted and nodded his
head from time to time but without really seeming to listen. I did
not understand this until he pointed to my almost untouched cup and
frowned.

“You do not care for the wine, boy? Not to
your taste, eh? Drink it anyway, for it is strong and dulls the
mind. Have you never seen a man flayed before?”

“No, Lord—never.”

“You will today, and that will not be to your
taste either. But it is better for a little strong wine. Drink,
boy.”

We drank in silence until an officer in the
uniform of the quradu approached and, placing his right hand over
his heart, bowed before the king his master.

“It seems the hour has come for me to
dispense justice, eh?” The Lord Sennacherib looked at me and
grinned uncertainly. “Come, Tiglath, my son—we must not neglect so
important a part of your royal education. Hah, hah, hah!”

We rose and, with his arm across my shoulder,
my royal father, Lord of the Earth’s Four Corners, well and truly
drunk now, stumbled toward his chariot.

“You drive, boy,” he said. “They say you have
a great skill in the direction of horses, and I do not trust myself
today—it would not be consonant with my kingly dignity if I were to
turn us over into a ditch, eh? Hah!”

The city of Ushnur, or what survived of it,
was not ten ashlu from the king’s encampment—we could have walked
the distance in as many minutes, except that kings do not walk when
they wish to be seen in their majesty. I had wondered why the
army’s chief officers were not billeted within its walls until I
saw that its walls had been demolished and the city itself almost
totally destroyed, its streets clogged with dead bodies.

Three days had passed since the elders had
come to Sennacherib on their knees, entreating that they might be
allowed to surrender, and still one could see columns of smoke from
fires that, by the king’s order, had been allowed to continue
burning. Even the granaries had been burned, so these people would
be without food until the summer harvest—provided they lived until
then. I had seen the women begging at the camp gates, some of them,
from their clothes and jewelry, the wives of rich men, reduced now
to selling their bodies for a handful of millet.

In a siege lasting less than a single day,
the armies of Ashur had reduced this place to ashes and barren
rubble, swatting it down like a fly, and with almost as little
effort. I could not imagine what madness had possessed the citizens
to resist.

“I have had some of the survivors driven away
with whips that they may wander the land and recount in other
cities what has happened here,” my father said, smiling at me
pleasantly as we drew up before what had once been the city gates.
“I mean this campaign to be the last I shall have to fight in the
south, so I will leave this land a waste. The black headed peoples
will know that their masters live in Nineveh, not in Susa. See how
they cringe before us, my son? They will not soon forget the name
of Sennacherib.”

We stepped down from the chariot, and stools
were brought that we might sit in the midst of a wretched crowd
whom the soldiers had collected to witness the death of their
former lord. Men and women alike, they stared at us with a mixture
of fear and that weariness and abject misery which conquers all
fear, even of death. I do not think they had will enough left even
to hate us.

“Bring him!” the king shouted, his voice loud
and vigorous, as befitted a conqueror. There was even that hint of
impatience, as if this were a small matter, almost beneath his
notice, which is so necessary to royal bearing. Bring him—let his
people see what this oath breaker’s witless folly has brought him
to.”

A line of soldiers opened and the man was
brought forward. He was naked and gaunt, less from hunger than from
suffering; men who have endured prolonged torture always have that
worn look. His wrists and ankles were chained and he seemed hardly
able to stand. I wondered at this until I saw that his footprints
in the dust were caked with blood—the soles of his feet had been
beaten raw with a knotted lash. He could not speak, it seemed; he
could not even look the king my father in the face. Plainly this
was a broken man.

“Where is Kudur-Nahhunte now, O Marduknasir?”
the king asked him, and then waited for the answer he knew would
not come. “In Susa, that is where—hiding his head beneath his
mother’s skirts. Where are your Elamite masters, whose knees you
embraced? Not here. Lord. Not here. Only you are here—you and I.
And in half an hour you will be a skinless corpse and your hide
will be nailed to the wall of that hovel you call a palace—what
there is left of it. Yes, let the thing be done!”

The executioners were waiting, their arms
crossed over their massive chests. In every army there are always
men set aside for such work, and they are always shunned by their
fellow soldiers, and they are always just alike—great mute lumps of
muscle with tiny eyes, and wearing the smile of an idiot. There
were two of them today, and they came forward and one of them took
Marduknasir by the chain that ran between his manacles, pulling him
to his knees, while the other hammered iron pegs into the ground at
the corners of a square perhaps three paces at a side. When he was
finished, their victim was dragged to the center and chained by his
arms and legs to the four iron pegs, the chains pulled tight so he
could hardly move at all. It was time to go to work.

They began with Marduknasir’s left hand. One
of the executioners took a copper knife from his belt. Its blade
was hacked in places, but it looked sharp enough. As he began
cutting from the tip of the middle finger and down across the palm,
the other poured a trickle of water into

the ever lengthening wound—this, in part, to
clear away the blood but principally to intensify the suffering. He
then made a second careful incision from the tip of the thumb to
the wrist and, this finished, started stripping back the skin so
that finally they had peeled it from the whole hand in a single
piece, fingernails and all. Then, after removing the manacle for a
moment, they started up the arm.

I had never heard anyone scream as did
Marduknasir. Perhaps all along he had not believed he would be made
to suffer this, for there was in the animal shrieks that rent the
air a certain note of panicky incredulity, as if, in addition to
everything else, he was experiencing the full terror of the
unforeseen, the mortal blow that comes out of the darkness.

But very soon even this was gone, as with his
skin they stripped away all that had been human about Marduknasir.
It was not long before he was not a man at all, merely a thing that
can feel pain and nothing else.

The crowd watched in sullen silence. If any
of the man’s family were there to witness his ordeal they did not
make themselves known, but perhaps they were afraid—that was the
purpose of this exercise, to make people afraid. The king and I sat
close enough that we could smell the blood that poured down over
the exposed, quivering muscles, but our faces revealed nothing.
That is what conquerors do. They close their hearts.

It was a slow business, this death—the
executioners were in no hurry. Marduknasir, if one could still call
that mass of raw, bloody flesh by a name, lived at least until the
skin was peeled from his breast and thighs. At least, he still
cried out in a soft, mindless whimper. How long he lived after that
only the god knows; there was only the twitching of his limbs. At
last the executioners stood up. One of them, covered in blood and
smiling—I remember how he smiled—held in his hands, like a garment
he was presenting for sale, the whole skin, even the face with hair
and beard.

“Nail it to the wall of his house,” the king
said, rising from his seat. He was sober now, and he did not smile.
“Post a guard that none may take it down for burial. Feed the
corpse to the dogs.”

Once more he put his arm across my shoulder,
but this time I think it was to steady me.

“Come, my son. It was just so with me the
first time—I do not envy you the hard lessons of your youth.”

. . . . .

The execution of Marduknasir was like a
portent of the whole of that year’s campaign, for the king was to
show no mercy to any who resisted him. We burned villages and
sacked cities, sending the survivors into exile after we had
impaled their great men on pointed stakes. The Elamites crossed to
the west bank of the Tigris only once in defense of their allies.
They tried their strength against us at a place called Lagas—I
remember there was a lake nearby where Esarhaddon and I went
swimming the day before the battle, which was terrible but not so
terrible as Khalule had been. After this one foray, which the
annals do not lie in calling a victory for Great Sennacherib,
Kudur-Nahhunte retreated into the mountains of his own land and
died soon after at the hands of his subjects. It would be many
years before Elam, weak and demoralized, ventured once more to stir
up trouble among her neighbors.