The Assyrian (44 page)

“I suspect you know precisely where the rab
abru might be found,” I said, fixing my eyes on the bright yellow
pennant that hung with the army wing standard over the fortress
gate and proclaimed the rank of its senior officer. My own was in
my luggage and would be run up before nightfall. I never went
anywhere without it, nor would any other commander.

I smiled, not very pleasantly, at this
adjutant who, after all, was merely doing what honor required in
protecting his superior.

“Find him. Bring him to me within the half
hour, or I will send out an arrest party for the two of you. Is
that clear?”

“Yes, Rab Shaqe—very clear!”

In saluting, the fellow struck his chest so
hard that he would probably carry a mark there for half the month.
He went scurrying off toward the town as fast as he could work his
legs.

The northern frontier was not a desirable
posting. Men were sent to places like this because they had made
powerful enemies, or because they had somehow disgraced themselves,
or perhaps most often because no good commander wanted them and
thus they settled here the way a stone will settle in the mud at
the bottom of a horse pond. Doubtless the soldiers here, who
probably had heard no news from the capital in many months, were
already busy wondering what the rab shaqe Tiglath Ashur had done to
get himself banished to Amat. I would let them think anything they
liked, but they would learn soon enough, and to their sorrow, that
my crimes had not included laxness of discipline.

I went inside the headquarters building—there
was nothing to be gained from standing about outside, and my
interview with the garrison commander, when it finally did take
place, would be better conducted in private.

The public rooms presented a sorry enough
sight. The floors were dirty, dust and not quite empty wine cups
seemed to be everywhere, and much of the furniture looked as if it
would fall to pieces at a hard glance. What the living quarters
might be like I did not even care to imagine.

Without much difficulty I had concluded that
it would be necessary to make a few examples among the officers—one
cannot expect soldiers to be better than the men who lead them—and
I had even less trouble deciding where to start. The garrison
commander was in for a trying day. I found myself hoping that he
would be deserving of the fate I had in mind for him.

And when at last he arrived—half led, half
supported by his adjutant, like a blind man or a cripple—I was not
disappointed. Even from halfway across the room I could smell him.
His uniform tunic was wrinkled and covered with what looked like
food stains, and his beard was a greasy tangle. And already, hardly
two hours past noon, he was drunk—so drunk that when he tried to
speak he was no more intelligible than a grunting sow. There was
nothing to be gained from berating such a man. He would probably
not have understood one word in five.

“Clean this vagabond up,” I told his
adjutant, keeping my voice level, almost indifferent. “Lock him in
a sweating house until he remembers how to think, but have him
presentable and sober within two hours. Further, you may issue
orders for a general assembly.”

“And when shall the garrison present itself,
Rab Shaqe?”

“In two hours. Everything will happen in two
hours, Rab Kisir.”

The man looked at me as if I had just
pronounced a death sentence on him.

I waited inside the headquarters building. I
would not show myself again until the entire garrison had assembled
for inspection; it would do them no harm to make their new
commander’s acquaintance under the rigors of parade discipline.
None of the officers thought fit to disturb me—doubtless they were
engaged elsewhere. My only visitor was Lushakin.

“By the great gods, Prince, this place is
more like a brothel than a fortress,” he said, sitting down and
breaking the seal of a jar he had brought with him. He offered me
the first swallow—we had been together a long time, and such, in
his view, were all the courtesies to which my rank entitled me—and
then tilted back his head to wash his throat in beer. “The place
seems to have as many harlots as lice. So far at least five
different women have offered me their backsides, and we have been
in barracks not yet an hour together. However, if they are as dirty
as everything else around here, I would be afraid to touch them.
The food, by the way—at least such as the common soldiers eat—isn’t
fit for anything except mending walls with.”

“The beer is no pleasure either,” I said,
making a face as he offered me another pull from his jar.

“Ah, Prince, we have all been spoiled by the
beer in Sumer. The water of the Euphrates makes the best beer in
the world—you cannot expect to find anything like it this far
north.”

And Lushakin, to whom all beer was merely
beer, finished his off with a single long swallow.

“I will tell you something else, though,” he
said, lowering his voice. “You mustn’t expect to go into battle
with troops like these and come away alive. They have gone to seed.
They hate the very idea of war, almost as much as they hate their
officers. Mark my words, Prince, the first flash of a tribesman’s
sword and they will run like rabbits, every one of them.”

“Then we shall have to teach them that there
are things far more frightful than any enemy.”

“Oh, I think they are learning that already,”
Lushakin answered, showing his teeth in a wide grin. “Like all
soldiers, they have a great curiosity about the new commander, and
our boys have been telling them stories.”

“Good—let them think I eat babies for
breakfast.” I could not help but laugh. “Lushakin, I am glad you
are my friend and not my enemy, for you have no more scruples than
an adder.”

My ekalli merely shrugged his shoulders, as
if I had said no more than what would be obvious to a child.

“And what, Prince, have scruples to do with
soldiering?”

An hour later I stepped out into the cold
white sunlight to inspect my new army. Their commander, looking as
if he would have preferred to be dead, but sober and in a clean
uniform, stood in front of their ranks, watching me with an
expression of sullen hatred on his face.

Even from a distance these men of Ashur made
a sorry sight. I saw rusted weapons and bowstrings grown frayed
enough to be mistaken for shocks of wheat. I saw dirt and boredom.
They were soldiers, but they stood about like prisoners in a labor
gang, and indeed for most of them the army probably was a kind of
servitude. They had lost their pride—or perhaps, more accurately,
they had never had any to begin with.

“I have come here to assume command,” I
shouted, still standing on the porch of the garrison headquarters.
“Let me show you how that is done.”

At a nod from me, Lushakin and five of my
quradu came forward from the ranks and seized the rab abru,
grabbing him by the arms and legs and carrying him to the front of
the parade ground. He was so astonished that at first he did not
even protest, but he was loud enough when they put his feet through
rope nooses and hung him upside down from the log railing in front
of a horse trough.

He screamed and shouted curses in a high
pitched, cracking voice, but one could hardly hear him over the
laughter of his own troops—it was a measure of how low their morale
had sunk that they would take such delight in seeing their
commander thus humiliated. Indeed, he made a comical sight, lying
on his back in the mud, his legs sticking straight up so that his
tunic had slipped to his waist, but soldiers must hate their
officers before they will laugh at their disgrace—and an officer
who is hated by his men is invariably a bad lot.

When the rab abru was well secured and his
sandals had been removed, Lushakin turned to me, saluted smartly,
and stood waiting for his orders. He knew well enough what they
would be. We had discussed the whole performance, and the form of
punishment had been his own suggestion—a thing he had once seen in
Naharina, done to an Arab caught cheating at lots. But before
soldiers the appearance was everything, and so Lushakin waited.

“Ten apiece, Ekalli. And don’t spare your
arm.”

Lushakin had found a whip, perhaps the length
of a man’s arm, made of hippopotamus hide. While another of our
troop gripped the rab abru’s feet by the toes, forcing him to hold
them as level as the top of a table, he laid his whip gently across
the soles, as if to measure his stroke.

I will not soon forget how the rab abru
screamed, like a woman in hard labor. The neat little whip whistled
through the air and bit into the soles of his feet, and each time
he screamed with what seemed a mingling of terror, pain, and
something almost like indignation. Lushakin obeyed his orders—each
stroke raised a fine spray of blood, stripping away the skin as
efficiently as a knife. Ten strokes on each foot, carefully paced
that the performance should not end too quickly—the whistling whip,
the dull, sickening thud as it found its mark, the rab abru’s feral
scream. And the whole time, his soldiers laughed at his agony. It
was a spectacle they found very much to their taste. They had seen
nothing so amusing in months.

When Lushakin was finished, he poured cold
water over the man’s by then raw soles and cut him down. The rab
abru was driven out of the fortress where, until that day, his word
had been law. He was driven forth with a lash, his every step
leaving a bloody footprint on the muddy ground. If he had friends
in the town to succor him, then he might be saved from privation
and death, but to this garrison he was less than a shadow. The
sentence, should he ever return, was death. Beyond that, his fate
was to be a matter of indifference.

I waited until the soldiers had finished with
their joke. I stood in silence, watching them disdainfully, until
they grew quiet once more.

“In one month, we shall take the field
against the mountain nomads. It will be our last chance while the
weather holds, and I have no intention of awaiting your
convenience. You have but that one month to make yourselves into an
army—otherwise your only hope of life is that the barbarians will
take pity upon the armies of Ashur and send only their women and
young children into battle against you, for I do not know how a
rabble such as I see before me could ever hope to prevail against
men.”

They did not laugh now. Some of them, no
doubt, had fought with the Lord Sennacherib against these same
mountain tribes, and they felt the truth of my words, realizing,
perhaps for the first time, to what a depth they had allowed
themselves to sink, and had the decency to feel ashamed. It was a
beginning.

“With your commander—with your late
commander, whose name shall not be spoken here—I have dealt lightly
because I would not stain the day of my arrival with the taking of
life. Doubtless he was not alone in his corruption, for no officer
fails in his duty if he believes his men will not suffer it, but he
shall take the blame for you all. I will make no inquiries into
past sins. I will not ask who among you has dealt falsely or been a
coward or robbed another of his food and drink—all of this will be
allowed to pass into oblivion. But if it happens again, then the
next time you are called to witness punishment you will see death.
You will see the fortress walls covered with the hides of traitors.
Remember this, and tempt not my wrath.

“Tonight, no man will see his bed—not I, and
certainly none of you. This den of vermin shall be put in order, if
it must be done by torchlight.

“And tomorrow, at one hour after dawn, we
will assemble here again, and we will see if you have forgotten
utterly what separates men from beasts. If you have, then I can
promise you a day such as you will not soon forget. Your officers
shall give you your assignments. I dismiss you to them.”

I spent the rest of the day going over the
account tablets, and fortune smiled on my predecessor that I had
not done so earlier, otherwise he might have lost the skin from
more than just the soles of his feet. The man had been a thief as
well as a drunkard, and the great gods knew what else besides.

Already, when I sat down to dinner, I could
see the blaze of torches and smell the burning pitch. The meal was
quite good—lamb dressed with okra, bread and cheese, with only the
deplorable local beer to let me know I was not eating at my own
table at Three Lions. Before such a meal it was easy to forget that
common soldiers might have only such food as was fit to mend a wall
with, but no one can fight with his belly full of straw. I decided
that in the morning I would issue orders that officers and men
would be fed the same rations.

Having ordered the entire garrison to work
through the night, I could hardly seek my own bed, but there was no
difficulty in keeping awake—the noise of the work crews, the orders
and curses shouted back and forth, the unearthly play of torchlight
outside my windows would have kept a corpse from sleeping. And
added to all that was the cold, for which, at this season of the
year, nothing could have prepared me. In Nineveh, doubtless, half
the populace were sleeping on their rooftops, hoping vainly for the
tiniest breath of wind, but in Amat I sat in front of a brazier,
wrapped in an old cloak, my teeth chattering uncontrollably. I
could almost envy the soldiers outside, who had at least each other
and their work to keep them occupied and warm. I had nothing except
solitude and discomfort, and an idleness that left my mind a prey
to painful recollections—for even here, I found, I could not drive
Esharhamat from my thoughts.

“Remember, all your life, each night, that I
will be in Esarhaddon’s bed. . .” They would be married by now, and
she would be asleep beside my brother, her belly filled with his
seed. She would bear his sons—and forget, in time, that there had
ever been such a man as Tiglath Ashur.