The Assyrian (46 page)

Moreover, I had other matters to occupy my
mind, and for a while, a week perhaps, I would be away from the
garrison, surrounded by soldiers whom at least I could depend upon
not to cut my throat as I slept. The regular patterns of military
life were themselves a kind of refuge.

So it was that, one day after the assassins
corpse had been displayed to the troops at morning assembly, I
climbed on my horse—no mean feat, since my hands were still covered
with salve and wrapped in linen bandages—and led the third, fourth,
and sixth companies into the mountains for field maneuvers.

All the years I was a soldier, I always loved
these sorts of exercises. Everything is so straightforward—there is
work, there is food, there is sleep. A task may be performed one
way and not another; there is no ambiguity, no room for
interpretation. There is the skill of the warrior, which has the
grace of simplicity, and there is the company of other men who see
the world no differently than one does oneself. I am excellent with
the javelin and bow, a fine charioteer, a fair horseman,
indifferent with a sword. As a soldier, this was everything I was.
My men were willing to take upon faith my talents as a commander,
and moreover, my rank aside, they had decided that I was one like
themselves. There is no greater happiness than that sort of
acceptance—at least, none that was open to me.

The maneuvers went well. As the god would
have it, their old commander had been posted to Amat only the year
before and thus had had only that much time to foster sloth and
indiscipline. The men remembered quickly enough how to fight, but
we were yet an army without an enemy. This would not last
forever—almost every night, after we had passed beyond our own
boundary stones and into the gray, barren mountains where no man’s
word was law, I could feel upon us, upon our cooking fires and our
sentry lines, the eyes of strangers, the eyes of savage men who
lived in leather tents and called no one “king,” who knew that one
day they would meet us in battle and were measuring us against that
knowledge. I could but wonder what they made of what they saw.

When we returned to Amat, I found an emissary
from the king of Urartu waiting for me, eager for parley. His
subject was war.

Urartu had been a glorious and powerful
nation, brought low by the might of the Lord Sargon. Within living
memory she had ruled over a league of the northern states that
stretched all the way to the Upper Sea, but the great king, in the
fifth year of his reign, conquered Carchemish, blocking passage
over the Euphrates and thus dividing the league in two. Then, the
following year, after bringing the western lands under his yoke,
the Lord Sargon marched into the homeland of King Rusas, who
escaped death by hiding himself inside the walls of Tushpa, his
impregnable capital, bounded on three sides by steep cliffs and on
the fourth by the Shaking Sea. But the Lord of Ashur laid the
country waste, capturing the royal treasury and slaughtering Rusas’
subjects in their thousands. Rusas, overcome by grief, died by his
own hand, and in the reign of his son the land of Urartu became a
humble vassal state, sending tribute to Nineveh and setting up
images of Ashur in all her chief temples, beside that of Khaldi,
her own chief god.

But time had turned this great victory into
something very much like a defeat, for Urartu had served as a wall
to the northern nomads, whom now she was too weak to resist without
help. Thus, save for the garrisons now under my command, the
Cimmerians, the Scythians, and the other great tribal
confederations would have come swooping down from their mountains
to delight themselves in the green valleys of the Tigris. Great
Sargon, by freeing us from one enemy, had cleared the path for
another.

The emissary was a thin man, perhaps five and
thirty years of age, and shorter than I by perhaps the width of
three fingers, which still made him seem tall among the men of
Ashur. He was as dark as a Sumerian, with the glittering black
eyes, the heavy, fleshy nose, and the short chin which is typical
of all his race. Except for the fur lining of his cloak—a very
practical addition in these altitudes—he dressed after the fashion
of Nineveh, as did all the men of Urartu I ever met, for, although
their language was different, their debt to us for their manners
and culture was as heavy as ours to the Babylonians.

I invited my guest to dinner—let him eat my
simple soldier’s fare, I thought, that he may know there has been a
change at Amat—and asked him to wait until I had sweated off the
dust of twenty days and no longer smelled like a pack horse. While
he waited, and while I sponged myself with hot water, my officers
gathered round me in the sweating house to mop their brows and tell
me all they had heard or could guess about why King Argistis had
thought it well to send an ambassador all the way from Tushpa to
share lamb’s meat and bread with the new shaknu of the north.

“Perhaps he is not from Argistis, but seeks
our help to topple him from his throne—they say that king has
inherited his father’s strain of madness.”

“Perhaps the Urartians have hopes of reducing
the terms of tribute imposed on them.”

“I do not care what he wants. I only pray he
comes prepared to bribe us all liberally.”

But, to the great disappointment of all such
hopes, the only bribes the emissary brought were a hundred jars of
Nairian wine, from vines grown on the edge of the Shaking Sea and
surprisingly sweet and heady. He and I—his name was Lutipri—broke
the seal on several that evening and became tolerably drunk
together and, as a natural consequence, the best of friends.

But the friendship of diplomats, like their
candor in drunkenness, has its limits. Lutipri’s mind was never so
fuddled as it seemed, and he never forgot the reason for his visit.
As we sat together on a bench on my porch, roasting our knees
before a brazier while we sucked the cool, star streaked, sobering
night air into our lungs that we might drink at least a little more
before our servants had to carry us to our respective rests, what I
heard at last was the voice of Argistis’ servant.

“The lord king my master,” he told me,
leaning his shoulder against my arm, as if about to whisper a great
secret, “the mighty one, who is like a god in Tushpa, whose every
word is law above the Bohtan River, he wishes his royal brother
Sennacherib, whom he loves, to know that the Scythians are growing
insolent in the land of Shubria. They have established settlements.
They have even presumed to tether their horses by the western banks
of the Shaking Sea.”

“They must have little enough joy of it,
however, for I have heard that the waters there are brackish and
undrinkable.”

“Nevertheless, they have come. And the king
my master lays claim to all lands touched by those waters. He
cannot have mountain tribes less than two days’ sailing from his
capital.”

I considered this for a moment, staring at
the glowing coals in the brazier—I had taken a great liking to this
brazier, since it had saved my life—wishing my head would stop
buzzing like a nest of wasps that I might hear myself think.
Suddenly I had a great longing for my bed.

“I assume, therefore, that the mighty
Argistis, whom all the world knows to be valiant, has sent an
expedition against these impudent barbarians, and that even now
they are scattered again like chaff.”

In silence we sat, and I filled my guest’s
cup from one of the jars he had brought me, congratulating myself
on still having wits enough left to make such a noncommittal reply;
since the Lord Lutipri, who squirmed in his seat and seemed to
regard with distaste the wine I had poured for him, was so
obviously displeased with it.

“This has not proved convenient,” he said at
last. “As you doubtless know, we have the Cimmerians, the Medes,
and even the Mannaeans pressing in on us from the east. Of course
all of these together present no challenge for the glory of our
arms, but they are persistent. They threaten us—and you—more
directly than do the Scythians. These few savages would require no
more than a small punitive raid.”

“Still, I do not see how this matter concerns
us. Doubtless your king will deal with them in his own good time,
and as long as they have not crossed south of the Bohtan River. .
.”

“Ah—but, you see, this they have done.”

Trapped. Yes, I had trapped myself. It would
serve as a lesson to me. I was yet neither wise nor old enough to
whisper with adders.

“The month of Elul is now nearly half gone,”
I said, perhaps a trifle too quickly. “In a month the snows will
begin to fall over the mountains. There is no time for a
campaign—even a small punitive raid.”

“The land lies lower on the western shore.
Skirting the mountains, an army could march so far in, say, ten
days. One lightning strike, and then south again, following the
river home. Everyone knows of your daring, Lord Tiglath, of your
defeat of the Uqukadi, of how you opened the walls of Babylon by
stealth and overthrew the city. For you, this would be such a small
thing.”

“Lord Lutipri, your mother nursed you on the
venom of a scorpion.”

. . . . .

The next day we spoke again, and at length,
and this time we were both sober. I complained much of the hazard
of such a mission, and in the end I extracted a promise that the
king in Tushpa would pay to the Lord Sennacherib twenty mina of
gold toward the cost of driving the Scythians back over the Bohtan
River—to more than that I could not commit myself, seeing that the
season for campaigning was almost gone. To this the Lord Lutipri
agreed quickly enough, since I was content to let the means of
payment remain vague. A day later he began his journey home, and I
did all I could to create the impression that I thought myself
tricked and ill used.

In fact, I was well pleased. The whole plan
appealed to my imagination, and it was precisely what the garrison
at Amat needed to shake it from its lethargy—precisely, in fact,
what I had promised them. Even the morning after that drunken
conversation with King Argistis’ wily emissary, I issued orders for
a general mobilization.

The march into the land of Shupria would be
no easy business. We would avoid the mountains where we could,
following the course of the upper Tigris until we had reached the
end of the Judi Dagh range, when we would strike north, but that
was all rough country. The maps I had showed little detail, so I
would have to rely on such of my men as had come from those areas.
Two things I knew for certain, however: one was that such chariots
as I meant to take would have to be disassembled and packed by
horse, which would slow us down; and the other was that speed would
be everything. Lutipri had said I could reach my destination in ten
days, which probably meant he thought I would be lucky to reach it
in twelve. I had every intention of sighting the southern shore of
the Bohtan River in eight.

“Will you take the third, fourth, and sixth
companies, Rab Shaqe?”

“Yes, of course. They are, for the time, my
only seasoned troops.”

“But they need rest after their maneuvers,
Rab Shaqe—you need rest yourself.”

“We were in the mountains for half a month.
What campaign lasts so short a time as half a month? We will not
leave until we have seen the back of this Urartian swindler, so
there will be time enough for rest. Make your preparations.”

My officers stopped raising objections when
they saw that I would not listen to objections, that I had set my
heart upon a war before the snows fell. I knew what I was about—a
garrison in the grip of winter is a dismal place for men who have
forgotten there can be anything except peace. Soldiers must see
that all is done for a reason, that if they train for war it is
because war is their purpose for living. This these pillow warriors
of mine would only believe when they had beheld the enemy’s swords
flashing in the sun. I had not the slightest intention of letting
the fortress at Amat fester like a bedsore.

I would leave one third of the garrison
behind, for a large army, like a wounded snake, does not cover
ground quickly. My quradu I would take, and seven companies. If I
could not conquer with them, more soldiers would only mean more
corpses to glut the crows. I departed from Amat on the morning of
the sixteenth day of Elul, leading men whom, for the most part, I
had commanded not even a month.

A soldier on campaign lives a life harder
than any slave’s, and that march, across nearly forty beru of
rough, rock strewn wasteland, was an ordeal as terrible as any
battle. On the first day, while the men were still fresh, we
covered seven beru, and that night, as I toured the camp, the
soldiers I saw huddled about their cooking fires had not even
strength left to curse me. The second day we came within sight of
the Tigris River, a ribbon of light glistening sluggishly in the
distance, and that day we had marched six beru. On the third and
fourth days we maintained a pace of five beru, but I heard much
muttering, especially on the fourth day, which was an evil day when
decent men would have kept to their tents.

In truth, I felt some uneasiness on this
point, but I was more afraid of the onset of winter, which, if it
found us still in the field, was certain death, than I was of evil
spirits, which are a vague and insubstantial menace. So I told the
men we were all under the protection of the god Ashur, who could
forgive any sin, and of my sedu, which was of great power. When we
were not attacked by marauders or struck down by plague, many came
to believe me—they did not cease to complain, which is no more than
a soldier’s right, but I heard no more of evil days.

Each day they had to rise from their bed in
the dark because I had given orders that the marches would commence
at dawn, whether the men had been breakfasted or not. At the height
of noon I allowed one hour of rest, and then the march would
continue until almost night. That there might be no ill feeling, I
walked myself, using my horse as a pack animal, and ordered all
officers to do the same.