The Assyrian (34 page)

“All women are alike to Esarhaddon—he is not
fastidious on this point. Besides, my brother loves me.”

“Yes, my young fool of a lord, but he does
not love me!”

Kephalos threw himself to his feet with such
violence that the water in his bath nearly cascaded onto the floor.
He stamped about like a man distracted, his eyes the whole time
fixed imploringly on my face.

“Lord, do not imagine that your brother’s
forgiving temper can be relied upon to that degree—if he finds that
you have been using my house as a . . . Oh, by the blessed gods of
the west, I cannot bear even to think upon it!”

“Does this mean that in this I am not to
trust you, Kephalos?”

“No, master, since it seems I have no hope of
dissuading you from this folly—it means nothing of the sort.”

My slave, the clever and prosperous physician
Kephalos, regarded me with something which in another man might
have been mistaken for aggrieved sorrow, as if I were the son who
had disappointed a father’s fondest hopes, but I knew that look
merely meant he was thinking.

“Everyone saw you on the temple stairway,
master. It was most unwise to meet the lady there.”

“But perhaps not everyone is clever enough to
guess the lady’s name.”

“Everyone is that clever, master.” He laughed
with sudden brevity, as if the joke had only then occurred to him.
“This is the price of glory, that all men know your face and are
interested in your concerns. If the Lady Esharhamat is spoken of
outside your father’s palace, it is only because she is loved by
the mighty prince, the Lord Tiglath Ashur, whose name is feared to
the ends of the earth.”

“Do not mock me, Kephalos. It is not wise to
mock me in this.”

“I do not mock you, Lord—though you have
behaved like a great fool and deserve to be mocked. I simply point
out what is plain to all men except yourself.”

He put his hand upon my shoulder and peered
earnestly into my face that I might see he was not in jest. And
then he smiled.

“Come, my foolish young master. Let me dress
myself that we may both preserve our dignity, and then we will
drink more wine than is good for us and discuss how best you may
enjoy the Lady Esharhamat’s embraces in safety.”

Chapter 13

The year which followed, while I basked in
love, glory and hope, was the happiest of my youth.

Kephalos, who in all practical matters was
much wiser than I, saw at once that there was no hope of hiding my
intrigue with Esharhamat from the eyes of the palace. At the same
time, however, he judged that it was from there we had least to
fear, since Esharhamat must marry whoever would be the next king
and therefore enjoyed a certain immunity. No one would dare to move
against her as long as her conduct escaped becoming a public
scandal, and it was on this object that my slave lavished all his
cunning.

“At all costs, master.” he said, shaking his
head vigorously—he had by then become more than a little drunk,
which made all his movements more emphatic but seemed somehow to
have no effect whatever on his agility of mind—“at all costs we
must prevent this affair from descending to the common gossip of
the city. The Lady Esharhamat is the prize for which all contend,
for with her comes the throne of Assyria, and thus, should some
other besides yourself become king, he cannot strike you down for
enjoying her bed—at least, he may not do this in public—except if
he does not fear to call the legitimacy of his offspring into
question. This he will shrink from as long as the common people
believe her to be virtuous, and this they will believe as long as
you are discreet. She is a widow and commits no offense against
decency by pleasing herself with you, but your brother the Lord
Esarhaddon, should he rule, will want no hint of suspicion that his
sons are not his own. As you say, he is not fastidious in his
dealings with women and for himself will not care, but it is best
that these matters be kept hidden from view.

“And thus, master, under no circumstances
must you bring her here, for all men know whose slave is the
physician Kephalos and even the good people of Nineveh are not so
blind as not to see what takes place under their very eyes.
Besides, there is the small matter of my own safety—Esarhaddon will
not scruple to let his wrath fall on me if I too openly assist you
to enjoy his future lady of the palace. No, I must make other
arrangements.”

There are in every city certain quarters
where people know it is wisest to pay heed only to their own
affairs and leave their neighbors in peace. One’s comings and
goings are not noted, and if the street is awakened in the middle
of the night with sounds of violence, the residents will wait until
there is quiet again, then perhaps someone will check to be sure
whoever has been left lying in the gutter is actually dead, and
then everyone will return to his own blameless rest. In such
quarters it is well understood that all men have secrets and that
the less these are noised about the better. It was in such a
quarter that Kephalos purchased two houses, on different streets,
which happened to share a common back wall.

“This is called the Street of Nergal,
master.” He gestured with his arm as if dismissing a tavern keeper.
“Here a young man in a hurry for his inheritance could for about
five silver shekels hire a man to cut his father’s throat—unless,
of course, that young man’s name happened to be Tiglath Ashur; the
murder of a king is rather too ambitious a crime for such as call
this place home. But everything else, from stolen copper cooking
pots to the favors of little beardless boys, is for sale here
somewhere. One has only to know where to look.”

I glanced about me and had no difficulty
understanding how the place had come by its name, for that god of
plagues, the great patron of the underworld, would have felt quite
at home among these leprous looking walls, these buildings whose
upper stories seemed to teeter out toward the street, as if
balanced on the edge of collapse. Unlike most of Nineveh, where
people in all their noisy, busy self-preoccupation crowded the
streets so that one could hardly pass, here there was quiet, and
but a few furtive, silent figures—veiled women and men who turned
their backs when they felt one’s eyes on them—stood about,
shuffling their feet, as if waiting for someone they rather wished
would never come. Indeed, the place seemed under a kind of
curse.

Kephalos peered at me with apparent amusement
as we paced over the center of the empty street—anyone might have
supposed we were measuring its length.

“I can imagine what you are thinking, master,
but I can assure you that no one here will come to you with his
hand open. You will be under no threat of exposure, for these
people are not much interested in matters of state and have
probably never even heard of Tiglath Ashur. Besides, their greed is
too cautious for them to think of practicing extortion against a
royal prince. You and the lady will be safe enough. Come—let us
look at the house.”

The place had little enough to recommend it;
there was not so much as a three-legged stool on the ground floor,
merely an empty cooking grate and a few clay jars with cobwebs
stretched over their mouths. Above, in the larger of two rooms, I
found a blanket, a sleeping mat rolled up against a wall, and a
copper pan for washing oneself in.

“Come in here, Lord, and see my
contrivance.”

There was a doorway cut in the back wall,
covered with a bullhide curtain. Kephalos pushed it aside and then
opened a heavy wooden door that had been barred from our side. We
walked through to a larger room which took up the entire upper
story of a different house. The shuttered windows looked down upon
a street I had never seen before.

“The Lady Esharhamat will come to this
entrance in a closed chair,” he said as we gazed down at the heads
of passersby. “You will wait for her in the other house—why should
anyone guess there is any connection between your visits and hers?
The man from whom I bought these two buildings claims that they
have been the scene of many intrigues, none of which have ever been
discovered. You will notice there is a wine shop across the way—it
seems a humble-enough place, the retreat of men who have nothing to
sell but their sweat, but it does a brisk business in rooms taken
by the hour and is not unknown to great ladies whose tastes run to
muscular porters and boatmen smelling of pitch. The sight of a
closed chair is not so uncommon in this street that anyone would
pay it special attention.”

“It is nothing if not sordid,” I answered
quietly. “I wonder how she will see these ‘arrangements’ of
ours.”

Kephalos shrugged his shoulders, as if at a
thing indifferent.

“Probably with far less delicacy than you do,
my foolish young master. Women, even those like the Lady
Esharhamat, who are hardly more than children, go through the world
with their eyes open and have fewer illusions than men. Intrigue is
their natural element—you will see, Lord. All will be well.”

. . . . .

“All will be well.” Kephalos, who could
imagine no obstacles but of time and place, did not understand. Or
perhaps it was I who did not understand—I do not pretend to know.
It was all a confusion and has remained so.

But my slave was right that I would be able
to hide nothing from the eyes of my father’s court. Within a month,
when I went to bid farewell to my brother Esarhaddon before his
removal to Borsippsa—the king had appointed him shaknu of the whole
of Sumer, with full martial powers—I had that lesson driven
forcibly home.

“I hear you have purchased a house on the
Street of Nergal,” he told me, as almost his first words. “This, I
assume, is for the fair Esharhamat? Come into the garden and tell
me all about it that I may know how to chide her when she becomes
my lady of the palace. It is always well for a husband to know some
little secret which will reduce his wife to silence when she begins
scolding about his other women. Come, for I have secrets to
unburden as well as you.”

His arm was across my shoulder as he spoke,
leading me along through the sparsely furnished rooms of his new
palace—Esarhaddon had a soldier’s dislike of clutter, and his ideas
of luxury encompassed none of that grandeur one meets with in the
homes of rich merchants.

But for all the intimacy and trust which had
become a habit between us, something had altered in his manner
toward me. It was difficult to define and I am not even sure if, at
the time, I recognized any change had taken place, but somehow my
brother had learned to be jealous. He could tease about marrying
Esharhamat in my place—why should he care that the lady and I were
meeting secretly, since to him women were merely an appetite to be
satisfied?—but for all his joking tone there was something almost
like a threat in his voice, as if he meant to issue a warning that,
in the end, he would make his way in spite of me.

“And just how,” I asked, “did you come to
hear of these things?”

He turned his head to look into my face,
raising his eyebrows in surprise.

“Why? Are they supposed to be so great a
secret? My mother told me—how else did you imagine?”

Yes, of course. I should have guessed. For
Naq’ia was now living with her son again, and was even to accompany
him into Sumer—how she had ever persuaded the king to agree to that
I could not imagine, but she had. Yes, what would Naq’ia not know
about my doings in the Street of Nergal?

Esarhaddon’s garden was merely a bare tiled
square beneath the blank sky. It was a place where, after a night
spent in the taverns, he could sit alone, huddled in a lion-skin
cloak, and breathe in the cold night air until he was sober once
more and could stand the sound of women’s voices.

His mother, I knew, was driving him to ever
more dangerous and mind numbing debauches as slowly she took over
the management of his house and his life, as with the subtle
cunning of a spider she tangled him ever more hopelessly in her
web. And Esarhaddon, in war as terrible and reckless in his courage
as the blind, storming wind, had grown—or perhaps had only grown
more—afraid of her. It was almost as if his childhood had never
ended.

We sat on a bench of cedar and, once a
servant girl, one of the Babylonian twins—which one I had no
inkling, for truly they were as alike as two halves of the same
apple—had brought us wine and a plate of honeyed dates, he waved
her away, waiting until she had withdrawn back into the palace, and
then turned to me with worried eyes.

“We must be careful, of course,” he said, his
voice hardly more than a murmur in my ear. “She will wait there by
the door and listen, and then run to my mother and tell her
everything she has heard. It isn’t her fault, poor little weasel;
she won’t be able to help herself. You see, all of them, all my
servants, even my women, they all live in mortal terror of Naq’ia.
One can’t blame them, but one learns to exercise discretion—not
that it matters. In the end, my mother always finds everything out
anyway.”

He looked at the wine jar in his hand as if
he suspected it of containing poison and then took a long
swallow.

“Of course, she uses magic—didn’t you know
that? Her power is greater even than the king’s, for all that he
sends me off to amuse myself in the mud of Sumer. Sumer! I ask him
for the garrison at Amat, that I may make war against the hill
tribes, and he gives me Sumer.”

“The king means to honor you, brother.” I put
my hand on his shoulder and shook it, as if to wake him from a
stupor. “You will have rule over the richest province. . .”

“Rule, but not kingship—I will be shaknu of
Babylon, but did he not make Ashurnadinshum king?”

“He sees your worth now, brother. He wishes
to make you great. And Ashurnadinshum met his death as king of
Babylon.”