The Assyrian (37 page)

Meanwhile, Tiamat had pondered the fate of
her husband Apsu and her heart was moved to rage. She decided to
attack the gods and destroy them, and even Ea was filled with fear.
At last only Ashur dared to meet Tiamat in open combat and, with
the aid of a great wind which blew into her mouth so that she could
not close it, Ashur fired an arrow down her throat, which found her
heart. When she was dead, Ashur cut her body in two, creating with
one half the sky and with the other the solid earth. For these
great feats of courage and wisdom he was exalted even over his
father as king of the gods.

It is this battle which every year the men of
Ashur recall to life before the god’s eyes. He who plays the god’s
part is called the limmu, and in all the chronicles the year takes
its name from him. In the first year of his reign it is the king
who is limmu, and thereafter his court officers follow in strict
order of precedence. In this year it was Enlilbani, a good hearted,
easy, soldierly sort of man, to whom fell the role of Ashur; he was
master of the king’s table and had also been rab shaqe of the army
which took Babylon—this last coincidence was felt to be a
particularly felicitous omen.

The role of Tiamat was to be filled by none
other than the Lady Ahushina, lately the queen of Babylon and wife
to Mushezib Marduk, who would witness all from his privileged place
in the great bronze jug, for this year the slaughter of the Chaos
Monster was to be no mere pantomime.

The lady was led forth naked, her face and
body painted yellow and black, the colors of salt and mud, chained
by her wrists and ankles. Even under her paint she looked hopeless,
already only half alive. She was tethered between a pair of poles
and, while she stared at the bodies of her slain children, her eyes
blank and uncomprehending, Enlilbani, dressed in the trappings of
the god, came forth from the Akitu house, fitted an arrow in his
bow, and shot her through the heart. She cried out only for an
instant and then was dead.

One of the yellow-robed priests handed
Enlilbani a heavy, copper-headed ax, and with it he set about the
business of cutting the queen’s body in half, hacking it apart from
neck to crotch with several mighty strokes that spattered blood
like rain. The crowd roared—it was a spectacle very much to their
taste.

And what of me and my Greek mother, for whom
these things had all the power of novelty? What of us? My mother
wept. She turned her eyes away, burying her face in my chest, and
wept like a child. I, for my part, had seen many worse things and
was moved only to a faint disgust. I had not expected this—the king
had not told me of his plans. Of course I, as his son and a member
of his inner circle, must be here, but I would have spared my
mother had I known.

At last, when the corpses of his queen and
children lay together on the pyre, when the whole of life beyond
his own poor flesh had been stripped from him, it became Mushezib
Marduk’s turn to meet death. Soldiers came and took the great
bronze urn from the porch of the Akitu house. They put an iron
collar around its neck and pulled it down, dragging it along the
ground so that it bobbed and rolled like a float in the running
river. Then they set the urn in the center of the pyre and poured
water down its neck, pushing Mushezib Marduk’s head to one side to
make room. He was to be boiled alive. While his family burned to
ashes beneath him, he would be cooked like a rabbit in the hunter’s
pot. As this dawned on him he began to scream. At first words—“No!
No! Not this! Mercy! No!”—and then, in the extremity of his fear,
only high-pitched cries, like the screaming of a hawk.

They lit the pyre at several points around
its base, but the wood was green and filled with pitch so that it
burned slowly and with very little smoke. Mushezib Marduk would not
have the blessing of choking to death before the fire reached him.
The only sounds were the crackle of the flames and the wail of
terror that never stopped, never stopped, until one wanted to cover
one’s ears. The Lord of Babylon did not die until the water in his
urn had already begun to boil and spill out over the neck—first
white, and then pink with frothing blood. In time, after the urn
had been heated red-hot, his head, coming loose of its own accord,
tumbled off and fell into the fire. Thus was his end.

When the fire had cooled, its ashes would be
gathered and thrown into the Tigris River. There would be no burial
for Mushezib Marduk and his seed, no offerings of wine and food.
They would have no life in the next world and would be forgotten
utterly.

I took my mother away. We did not speak.
There were no words, no words.

Chapter 14

I remember the taste of her breasts. I
remember the way she moved beneath me, the habit she had of
twitching her hips a little to one side as she neared her climax. I
remember how she liked to bite my ears. I remember the blinding
love I felt for her, and the memory is itself no less than love, as
glowing embers are still fire. Esharhamat—oh, the passion of that
name. Esharhamat.

Once, twice a week, as often as we could, we
made love in the house on the Street of Nergal. I would wait,
wretched, certain she could never come again, until I heard her
little hand tapping lightly at the wooden door that separated one
building from another, and then, when I had her in my arms, I would
carry her to our bed—for we had a real bed, with a mattress filled
with raw wool, for there would be no soldierly scorn of comfort
with my lady Esharhamat. For a long time we could hardly speak. We
could not bear that our lips be parted. How I loved the whole of
her sweet body. How I hungered to learn it all, every morsel, with
eyes, hands, lips.

We did not see each other during the eleven
days of Akitu. The time was filled with rituals and banquets and
great public events, all of which seemed to demand my presence, but
now we were together again, and I covered her mouth with my own. I
wanted to crawl inside her, to be part of her very self, to die and
come alive again. There were no eyes for sight, no breath for
words, only the careless need to be one and feel our limbs, our
very senses dissolving into each other like honey into wine.

At last, as we lay together quietly in our
bed, the urgent passion spent so that we could feel once more the
restful pleasure of love. I heard hailstones beating on the
roof—tat, tat, tat! like birds picking at seeds that have fallen
between the paving bricks. It had thundered all that night, so I
was not surprised. It was somehow an agreeable sound, enclosing us
in safety.

Esharhamat passed her hand over the hair on
my chest, as if to smooth it into place. Her breast just touched my
arm. I felt. . . I cannot put into words what I felt. It seemed
that all happiness must now slip away into nothingness, that all
the rest of my life must be in mourning for the end of this one
moment. I would not grieve, however, since I had this moment.

“Did you miss me?” she asked, letting her
hand come to rest upon my belly and curling her fingers so that I
could feel the faint tracery of her nails.

“When?”

“All these last days—when you were with the
king, and your mother.”

“Are you jealous of my mother?” I turned my
head to look at her, smiling. “Are you?”

“No—not of her. Of the king sometimes.”

“Why? Why would you be jealous of the
king?”

“Because you would lay down your life for
him.”

I laughed, gathering her to me, for it seemed
such a foolish thing for anyone to say. I told her so.

“You only think it is foolish because you are
a man,” she answered. She pretended to be angry but did not turn
her face away when I moved to kiss her.

“Come—why are you jealous of the king? Are
you jealous?”

“Yes.”

“Then why? I would lay down my life for you
just as quickly as for him.”

“Then because you would give me up for his
sake.”

“If he ordered it, how could I not?”

“Not if he ordered it, but if he asked
it.”

“He is the king. How could I refuse? That
would be duty.”

“And love? What is love?”

“Love is what I want—or need, to live. Duty
is life. It is more than life. It is the same with every soldier.
If you were a man you would understand.”

“But I am not a man,” she said, touching my
face with her lips, letting me feel her hungry hot breath, teasing
me with the point of her tongue as I tried once more to kiss her.
“I am not a man—did you know it? Prove to me that you knew all
along I was not a man.”

Even as she laughed, a sound like the
tinkling of little brass bells, she reached under the blanket and
curled her fingers around my manhood, by then once more hard as
iron, guiding it into her. As she melted against me, and as she
shuddered with longing and a tiny sob broke from her throat, I
cared nothing for kings or gods or duty—only for her.

Later, while she slept, I stole out of bed
and went to the window, unhooking the shutters that I might see the
street below, still glittering with fallen hail.

What had she meant to tell me? Had it been a
joke, a mere freak of womanly petulance? What did she want?

As it had from time to time over the past
several days, my memory flooded with the look on my mother’s face
as she watched the butchery before the Akitu house. Had the king
meant to inspire fear? He had only displayed his own—the whole
spectacle had been grotesque and stupid.

If I became king I could prevent such things.
I could have Esharhamat—not in secret but openly, as my wife.

And as my wife she would be forever safe. I
knew she was blind and heedless—what would become of her if I could
not make her my wife? She refused to see that she could ever become
anything else and she imagined, as the rising wind carried her,
that it was her own strength that made her soar so high. She might
destroy herself by her own rashness if the world did not answer to
her wishes. Thus, as I loved her, I was afraid for her.

She was still asleep when I drew the shutter
closed again. I sat down on the bed beside her, and I thought. “You
are all that matters to me—you, this place, this moment.” Was I
wrong to love her like that? Yes. I knew it, and did not care.

And as if she had heard, her eyes fluttered
open and she smiled at me.

“I would be king for your sake,” I said
suddenly, having planned to say nothing. “For your sake, and to
change the world.”

“Would you, my love? But the world will not
allow itself to be changed.”

. . . . .

My walk home took me through some of the
poorer sections of the city, where the streets were slippery with
ice, mud, and garbage and men smelled of weariness and stale beer.
These were the houses of day laborers, who rented space for their
sleeping mats one night at a time, who would never have enough
money to buy themselves wives, and whose bodies, when they were
dead, would lie in unremembered graves, their souls without
offerings to ease the pangs of hunger and thirst. Such men, if they
had the stomach and the strength for either, might become soldiers
or thieves, risking death to better themselves a little, but
otherwise the grim course of their lives had been set for them on
their whelping day.

I passed a wine shop—even here there were
wine shops, for all human creatures must have their little
luxuries—and noticed that, on the other side of the street, there
was a carrying chair of rich design, its sides covered in black
leather. Around it were squatted four discontented looking slaves,
casting their eyes about them as if they wondered how they would
ever avoid the contagion of such a place. They were slaves, yes,
they seemed to imply, but still better than any free man who might
find himself here. It was with a slight shock that I realized they
wore the dress of royal slaves.

All at once a torrent of laughter reached me
from within the wine shop. I was curious—I almost could not help
myself. I went inside.

It was a crowded, fetid little room with
walls of unpainted mud brick. Men in the cheapest dun colored
tunics sat about, at tables and even on the floor, playing at lots
or talking in loud voices or merely watching whatever amusement
might be going forward. There was a slight stir just as I came in,
for these were not people used to rubbing shoulders with ranking
officers of the king’s army, but I was by no means the focus of
interest.

On top of a table at the other end of the
room, a great hairy naked beast of a man was bent over on his
elbows and knees, grunting like a pig as he rutted on a woman whose
white legs stuck out from beneath him like the feelers of some
strange insect. While everyone watched, some cheered the huge beast
on as others, some two or three I saw, made bets, dropping little
packets of coins tied up in pieces of oily rag into the lap of an
elderly crone who sat on a high stool and looked as if she might
own the place.

Of the woman who was the source of all this
entertainment I could tell little, except that she seemed to be
young. I must do something, however—she most probably was here
against her will, for who. . ?

And then, as if to snatch a breath of air
from beneath her loathsome, sweating burden, she happened to turn
her head enough for me to see something of her face. Yes, of
course—I was a great fool—the carrying chair. It was Shaditu!

The king’s own daughter—it was intolerable. A
few quick steps and I had crossed the room. I grasped the lout by
his ankle, yanking him over so that he pulled loose from my sister
and landed on the floor backside first, with a loud smack.

For a moment he was merely stunned. Then he
was angry. But even as he gained his feet the copper tip of my
javelin was balanced delicately against his throat.