The Assyrian (3 page)

Esarhaddon laughed, as if at a joke he was
hearing for the first time, but I was shocked—I could not have said
precisely why. Of course, we all knew there was something different
about Bag Teshub. For one thing, he was admitted to the house of
women, which it was death for another to enter. And, of course, he
had no beard. We were of an age, Esarhaddon and I, that on rare
occasions we were let out of our golden prison to witness some
solemn public ritual or watch the New Year revels from a safe
distance. It did not happen often—we were too young—but it was felt
that we should begin to understand that there was a life beyond the
house of women and that someday we would find our place in it.

So we knew that men grew hair on their faces,
great shining black beards, oiled and curling. The nobles of our
father’s court looked like gods, an impression no doubt
strengthened by the fact that we saw them only from a distance.

Yet Bag Teshub looked nothing like them.

“How did he get that way?” I heard myself
asking. I was almost afraid to hear the answer.

“My mother says. . .” Esarhaddon leaned
toward me, clearly conscious that he was imparting a great secret.
“My mother says that it was done to him, that the priests took a
knife and cut away his manhood when he was a child. You know, don’t
you, that he is one of the lesser brothers of the old king who is
dead.”

With my heart pounding inside my breast, I
shook my head. It was as if I were looking into a dark future.

“If he is the old king’s brother, who would
dare do such a thing? Who would wish it done?”

Esarhaddon, in the innocence of his heart,
offered me one of his dates, and I took it, hardly knowing that I
did.

“What a silly question, Tiglath. You surprise
me. Do you not know why? A king has many sons, and he knows that
once he is dead not all of them will live forever on terms of love.
He must wish his heir to succeed him without dissension, and a
gelding may not aspire to the throne.”

. . . . .

For a few nights the castrator’s knife
haunted my dreams—after all, was I not myself one of the lesser
sons of the king? The lady of the palace, the Lady
Tashmetum-sharrat, had two sons, almost grown men, and then there
was Esarhaddon himself. And my mother was a mere concubine, and a
foreigner in the bargain. Did I not have reason to be frightened?
But a child does not stay frightened long. Only a present danger is
real to him, so I soon forgot.

Besides, I had other thoughts with which to
occupy my mind, for the gardens of the house of women had received
another prisoner. At the age of eight, and already the master of
the daggerlike writing, which I took to be all the wisdom the world
had to offer me, I discovered what it was to fall in love.

What can I write of Esharhamat—Esharhamat,
fair to look upon, whose memory softens my liver like damp clay
beneath the potter’s hand—what can I put in words that could convey
the least particle of her shining beauty? Those who have known this
childhood love of another, all tenderness and sweet pain, have no
need of my words. And those who have not could never be brought to
understand. I have heard it said that time heals every hurt, but it
is not so. Some wounds, received early enough, will always ache in
cold weather. Such was my love for Esharhamat.

We were cousins, since Esharhamat also
claimed the Lord Sargon for an ancestor. Esharhamat’s father was a
Babylonian, of noble family, whose grandmother had kept company in
the princely bed while the fifth Shalmaneser still ruled. But the
great king Sargon had scattered his seed widely in the lands of
Akkad and Sumer, so it was not out of respect for her slight
connection to the ruling house that she had been brought to Nineveh
to be raised among the children of Sennacherib, Ruler of the Wide
World. The gods had elected that my little maid from Nippur should
have no insignificant hand in kneading the destiny of nations.

In the place of my birth the god rules. Ashur
gave his name to our ancient capital and to the land itself. We are
all his slaves, born to serve him, even the king. No one more than
the king. On the day he assumes his office, the crowds follow him
from the temple shouting “Ashur is King! Ashur is King!” and this
is no more than the truth. And Ashur had proclaimed it his will
that a maid born in Nippur and of the Lord Sargon’s blood should be
the mother of kings in this land until Nineveh and Calah and Ashur
itself were merely words in the mouths of strangers.

So Esharhamat was not for the whelp of a
Greek slave woman. She would be the wife of Sennacherib’s heir when
she was grown to an age for bearing sons. This was written. This
was the law and the god’s pleasure, before which all men are
helpless.

But a child, who knows neither the passion of
the body nor the law’s weight, a child who loves only with his eyes
and ears and the touch of his hand takes no account of the god’s
pleasure. Esharhamat would one day be queen, the consort, I
assumed, of the marsarru Ashurnadinshum, who was many years older
and had long been received into the house of succession, where he
was as distant from us as the king himself. What was this to me? A
child knows no impediment to love. He simply loves. I loved
Esharhamat.

And what should I care about Ashurnadinshum?
Was I not lord of the wide world? Was I not old Bag Teshub’s best
student, master of the daggerlike writing and able to speak the
tongue of Sumer? Was I not half a head taller than any of my
brothers? Could I not walk upon my hands, and now without my
mother’s steadying assistance? And was I not all that was beautiful
and perfect in Esharhamat’s great black eyes?

“Oouuh. Tiglapf,” she would say in her
lisping southern, child’s voice when I would kiss her on the palm
of the hand—it was a game of our own invention—“you are su-u-uch a
bad boy!”

And then she would hold out the other hand,
palm up, and I would kiss that, and she would giggle madly, first
hiding her face in the hem of her pink linen shawl and then peeking
out at me.

I loved her. She ruled my heart more firmly
than any king ever ruled in the Land of Ashur. I wanted nothing
more from life than to sit with her beneath the linden tree,
sharing out dates and smiling together over this wonderful secret
that was somehow ours and no one else’s. We could not imagine a
future when this would not be so.

And Naq’ia watched us and smiled her own
smile, which was perhaps not so harmless as ours.

“You see? Before he lives through his ninth
year, Ishtar has him snared in her net. If it was the gods who gave
him that mark upon his palm, they did not intend it for a happy
destiny.”

But my mother dismissed Naq’ia’s words with a
shrug of her shoulders.

“They are children.” she said. “What harm can
come to them from such as this?”

Oh, Merope, how ill you spoke in that hour. I
was but a child, with a child’s eye, but could you not have seen
the evil circling above your son’s head?

But she would not see, and I could not. To me
the house of women was still paradise, although I was beginning to
grow restless in my happiness. I knew that soon I would be leaving
that place to enter the world of men, and I was all impatience.

At the end of his ninth year, during the
festival days that mark the end of the summer planting, each of the
king’s sons comes out of the garden and takes up his work as a
servant of the god. After that day, whether he becomes a scribe or
a soldier or one of the king’s companions, those few chosen to
stand by their lord’s right hand and assist in the direction of the
state, he is a child no longer. There is no turning back—the door
to the house of women is closed for him. I knew all that, and yet I
did not understand why my mother looked upon me with such hungry
eyes, why she wept in the darkness of our room at night. I could
not fathom that we were about to lose one another, perhaps forever.
This she kept from me.

And, of course, on that day I would lose
Esharhamat as well, but that too she kept from me.

For Esarhaddon and myself the one reality was
that we would soon enter the house of war, there to prepare for the
only life fitting for men, that certain path to glory, the life of
the soldier. We took this for granted. Such was to be our simtu,
our destiny. It was our pleasure and therefore, of course, the
god’s. Nothing else was possible.

“However, it may be that such things are no
longer to your taste,” Esarhaddon said, smiling with mischief as he
sat on the ground and watched me swing by my arms from the
forbidden linden tree. “Perhaps that girl has turned your wits and
you long to stay here, supporting yourself upon a pillow and
dreaming about her eyes.”

I let go the tree limb and. dropping down to
the earth, aimed a kick at Esarhaddon’s chest with my bare foot. I
missed, of course; he had seen it coming and dodged out of the way.
He grabbed my foot and twisted it so that I came crashing down
beside him. He was always a splendid wrestler—not quick but strong,
and at close quarters that was all that mattered. He had me pinned
on my back in a matter of seconds.

“Admit it!” he shouted, laughing straight
into my face as he held me down. “Admit it—she’s made you soft as
spring mud. Before she came you wouldn’t have been so stupid, even
in wrestling, at which you are not gifted. You would have kept your
distance and worn me down until you could toss me over on my face
with one of your fine Ionian tricks. Girls—paugh!”

It was all a splendid joke, and I laughed
with him. I had no objection to admitting to Esarhaddon that, yes,
there was something ever so slightly ludicrous about this passion I
had conceived for our little cousin, who could not fight with a
wooden sword or stand on her hands or even wrestle, who cried when
the lightning frightened her, who could only smile and admire and
bewitch.

“You are a foreigner, of course—if you were a
real man of Ashur you would know better than to melt like beeswax
just because she looks at you.”

“I am no more a foreigner than you, you son
of a Babylonian!”

This time he was not quick enough to avoid
the foot I placed behind his knee to tumble him over backward.

A quarter of an hour later, when we had both
washed the dirt from our faces in the fish pond, it was still a
splendid joke.

“Well, you will be cured fast enough. When
she is the wife of Ashurnadinshum, and that will be sooner than you
think, you will have to get over this folly of yours.”

“I don’t see why.” I answered back, perhaps a
little too loudly—for part of me knew even then that there was
something dangerous about my feelings for Esharhamat. “Just because
she is queen, I don’t see why we can’t go on loving each other.
What should it matter to Ashurnadinshum?”

“Tiglath, my brother, for all that you are a
clever Ionian, by the god’s will there never was born so great a
fool.”

. . . . .

As with the approach of a thunderstorm, as
the time for parting drew nearer, the air in the house of women
seemed to grow heavy and hard to breathe. Bag Teshub became ever
more anxious and seemed to whirl with business as he prepared us
for our final recitations, and those of the king’s wives and
concubines who had sons of leaving age withdrew into the silence of
their own hearts. And Naq’ia, as she watched me from the fountain’s
edge, smiled as if she knew all the secrets of my future life.

At last, when my mother could no longer
restrain her tears in front of me, she gathered me in her arms,
covering my head with the heavy bronze curtain of her hair, and
wept as if she were to lose me to death. It was the first time I
tasted fear.

“You will see, my little prince.” she said in
between her sobbing. “You will see how the god of this land
protects you from your enemies. The god’s mark upon you will see
you through every danger—you will see. You will see.”

“What enemies could I have in my father’s
house?” I asked. It seemed suddenly an important question.

“None from whom the greatness of your destiny
cannot protect you. You need be afraid of no one.”

And when I looked into her eyes, flooded with
tears, I knew at once that she did not credit her own brave words
and my heart quailed within me.

“We will not be parted long, Merope. When I
am a great general and high in the king’s favor, I will win you out
of this place.”

My mother smiled, as if she believed me.

When I left my mother’s arms my one thought
was to find Esharhamat, for my mind was troubled. She was sitting
beneath the linden tree, as if waiting there, but there was no
comfort to be gained from her because the contagion of dread had
found its way even to little Esharhamat.

“I will never see you again,” she said in a
voice that was no more than a whisper. “I will be walled up in
Ashurnadinshum’s house of women and you will forget me. When you
leave this garden you will no longer love me.”

They were strange words—I could not imagine
what she meant, nor, I suspect, could she. But some foreboding had
reached her, child that she was, and she was filled with helpless
terror. I was but nine years old, she even less, and we sat there
together beneath the great tree’s spreading branches as the future
appeared before us like the iron bars of a cage.

The next day, in the presence of the Lord
Sinahiusur, the king’s brother who served at his right hand as
turtanu, commander of the royal army and the crown’s most trusted
and powerful servant, stood four of us: myself, Esarhaddon,
Nabusharusur, and a boy named Belushezib, the child of a concubine
despised even more than my own mother, since she was the half wild
wife of one of the mountain men of the east, captured by the Lord
Sennacherib on the field of battle, where her man lay slaughtered —
it was not even certain whose child he was, the king’s or the dead
Mede’s. There we all waited before old Bag Teshub to be heard as we
each read aloud the daggerlike writing from the clay tablets. It
was the last moment we would be schoolboys together. Today, for
good or ill, we became men.