The Assyrian (62 page)

I wrote to the king in Nineveh, asking
permission to assume command of the eastern garrisons for a
campaign into the Zagros Mountains. I would carry my battle
standards to the very doorposts of the barbarians and remind them,
since they seemed to need it, that the Lands of Ashur were not a
bazaar stall to be looted whenever it pleased them.

The king’s reply was not long in coming: “I
have learned, my son, that I must indulge your restlessness, and
perhaps it is true that we have been too long at peace and the
eastern tribes begin to think we have all turned into women. I
grant you all power in this matter. Work your will.”

But I had not waited. I had already issued
orders that the northern garrisons were each to send half their
strength to join me at a staging area near the border city of
Musasir. I set out with the best companies of the Amat fortress and
what was left of my old comrades in the quradu—including even
Lushakin, who said he had had enough of being a kitchen soldier and
would come even if he had to follow behind with the pack mules.

Thus began my two years of war against the
Medes.

They are a strange people, in some ways
unlike any I have encountered in a life filled with strange
turnings. And since the days of my youth, when I did battle against
them, they have risen to be a great nation. Even then they believed
that the future belonged to them, and it is possible they may be
right, for they lack neither virtue nor cunning. It may be they
will roll over the world like a plague of locusts, but I hope not
to live long enough to see that day—they will make bad masters over
the lands of my ancestors.

Even in the reign of Sennacherib we had been
fighting the Medes for nearly two hundred years, ever since the
days of Raman Ninari, the third king of that name, who led armies
into the eastern lands and there encountered a race of horsemen who
wore their hair short and fought with spears and called themselves
the ‘“Aryan,” the “nobles.”

The land there is good, although not so well
watered as the Tigris plains, and by that time most of the tribes,
but by no means all, had ceased their wanderings and settled in
towns and villages along the wrinkled slopes of the Zagros
Mountains, where they could farm in the valleys and pasture their
horses and cattle on the steppes that sloped gently down to the
salt deserts of the north. Where they had come from before that I
do not know, nor, although the Medes speak of a homeland where the
grass is tall, have I ever met anyone who did. I do know, however,
that they came as conquerors, each tribe holding its own territory
in subjection as masters over the old inhabitants, whom they
regarded with the greatest contempt, for they truly believed in
themselves as the favored ones of heaven and this made them cruel.
Still, their cruelty was limited by their weakness, for although
they recognized themselves as one people, they were divided into
many tribes, and each warred against the others as fiercely as they
did against all other nations. But already this was beginning to
change.

Some ten years before my birth, in the reign
of Great Sargon, a raiding party attacked our garrison at Kharkhar,
surprising the watch and inflicting great slaughter. Their leader,
one Ukshatar, styled himself king, or, in their tongue, “shah” of
all the Medes, and indeed he had managed to assemble a
confederation of tribes that kept the armies of Ashur busy through
several seasons of campaigning. In the end Ukshatar was captured
and exiled to the west, where he died, but he left behind him a
son, a youth called Daiaukka. It was a name I had heard many times
since my arrival in the north.

Tribes will drift together in loose
alliances, or will find some common purpose in the will of a strong
leader, but such unity lasts only until victory or defeat. If they
triumph, if their combined strength is enough to push aside a
weaker foe, then the marauders will inevitably begin to bicker over
the spoils. And if their strength bleeds away in battle after
costly battle—and this was precisely the fate I had decided upon
for the Medes—then they will lose their faith in leaders and their
great lords will end with their throats cut while common men sue
the enemy for mercy. It was not Daiaukka whom I feared, nor any
other chief with a few thousand spearmen who presumed to call
himself shah of the Aryan. It was not a man who had rendered the
Medes suddenly dangerous, but an idea. Daiaukka was merely the
chosen vehicle of a new force that had entered the imaginations of
simple herdsmen and farmers, making them believe they had become
something more, for the Medes had found a new worship and a new
god.

The men of the west believe in many gods, and
this makes them tolerant of one another. The Egyptians do not care
that the Babylonians pay reverence to Marduk, nor the Babylonians
that Telepinu is honored among the Hittites. Their precedence is
something for the gods to settle among themselves, and it is felt
to be only decent that each man pays his homage at the altar of his
fathers. The Hebrews in Judah, it is true, worship only one god
whom they believe is the lord of the universe, but they are a
small, quarrelsome, unimportant people. The Medes were another
matter entirely.

Whence this new religion came I know not. The
Medes speak of a great teacher, a prophet of their own race whose
name was Zarathustra, but who he was or whether he still lived in
those days or if he had ever really existed I was never able to
discover. But his was the voice of a worship unlike any the world
had yet seen, and it was a voice full of menace for its message was
of fire and sword and a world washed in the blood of innocence.

It begins harmlessly enough—there is one god
who shall be honored over all others, and he is called the Ahura
Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom, or simply the Ahura. The Ahura is all
purity—the sky is his body and the sun his eye—and he has created
all the other noble gods, the Spenta Mainyu or Bountiful Immortals,
of whom there are six. Balanced against these are all the demons of
the world, of whom one Ahriman is the greatest.

The Medes believe that the history of all
that is divides itself into three periods, each enduring for three
thousand years. The first of these was a golden age in which the
Ahura and Ahriman were one and together created the world. Then,
since the knowledge of one thing depends upon its opposite, there
was no evil. But finally these two separated, the one becoming “He
Who Is All Life” and the other “He Who Is All Death,” and this
began the second age, the time of trouble and the warfare of good
and evil. The third age began with the appearance of the teacher
Zarathustra and will end, finally, with the triumph of good and the
remaking of the world, which will then last forever.

There is nothing in this that is so different
from the beliefs of other peoples, who revere one god as the lord
of all the others and acknowledge, as every prudent man must, the
existence of evil spirits. The difference lies in the way these
gods and evil spirits are approached because, whereas the
Babylonians, the Egyptians, the men of Ashur, even the
Greeks—indeed, all the civilized nations of the world—believe that
it is right to offer prayers and sacrifice to all the gods, both
good and evil, and thus to incline them to mercy, the Medes offer
Ahriman and all his followers only curses. All wickedness, even
that of the gods themselves, is to be scorned, and it is the object
of prayer and sacrifice to strengthen the Ahura in his war against
Ahrirnan, to fill his mind with courage and his limbs with death
dealing power. Thus men become soldiers in this war of the gods,
and it is within their power to hasten the final triumph of light
over darkness. Their faith in their prayers, which they call
“Mantra,” is so great that they imagine the words themselves to
have a force independent of the gods, so that they will ward off
evil spirits even if spoken by a foreigner, by one who understands
nothing of their meaning. As I have suggested, it is a strange
worship.

Thus everything in life is very clear to the
Medes. They live in a world divided between light and darkness,
good and evil, perfection and corruption, and the differences
between the one and the other are entirely clear. One is either a
worshiper of the Ahura or a worshiper of fiends—no middle way is
possible. The followers of the true path will be rewarded in this
life and the next; all others are consigned to a most terrible
damnation.

The very simplicity of their beliefs has done
much to make the Medes a virtuous people, for the whole of their
lives is involved with their insistence on purity. They are good
farmers because their prophet teaches that to till the soil and
redeem wastelands are acts pleasing to the Ahura. They will not
lie, not even to an unbeliever, nor violate the smallest particular
of any contract because the Ahura disdains all falsehood. They are
kind to their animals, particularly the horse, the camel, the dog,
the cock, and the cow, which comes first in reverence, because
these the Ahura loves. They do not even practice animal sacrifice
nor read the future in the entrails of beasts because these too
their god has forbidden them.

In fact, the Medes are so concerned with
avoiding any sort of pollution, which they identify with Ahriman
and the forces of evil, that death is a great problem for them.
Since all of the three elements—earth, fire, and water—are sacred
to the Ahura, none may be defiled by contact with a corpse and
therefore it may be neither buried nor burned nor cast into the
sea. How then to dispose of the dead?

The Medes have hit upon the solution of
exposing them on the roofs of high stone towers, which they call,
fittingly enough, “towers of silence,” where their bones are
quickly picked clean by carrion eating birds. All who touch a
corpse are likewise defiled and must purify themselves by washing
in cow urine.

There is a popular belief among them that the
Land of the Dead is presided over by a god named Yama, who sends
forth his dogs each day to sniff out those for whom the hour of
death has come and herd them like cattle into his presence, there
to be judged for all eternity. These dogs are brown, broad snouted,
and possessed of four eyes, and for this reason a white dog with
yellow ears—thought to be an adequate substitute—is always set to
guard a corpse against evil spirits.

But the teaching attributed to the prophet
Zarathustra is somewhat different. At death, so it is written, a
man crosses the Bridge of the Gatherer. If he has followed the path
of darkness in life, his foot will slip and he will fall down into
the House of Lies, but if he has followed the path of the Ahura he
will be allowed to enter the House of Praise, the Dwelling of the
Pure.

The purity which leads to eternal bliss is
not, they believe, without its rewards in this world as well, and
these rewards can be passed on from generation to generation. The
Ahura protects his followers, granting them cattle and horses, many
sons, and a long life. And the virtuous dead become themselves
something only a little short of divine and receive offerings from
their descendants, who can invoke their aid against the power of
Ahriman and thus procure for themselves all manner of
blessings.

And thus these mountain tribesmen, only
lately accustomed to cities and a settled life, had become terrible
in the eyes of all civilized men. For it is only doubt and the fear
of death which makes it possible for one people to live at peace
with another, and from these the Medes had been set free by their
new worship. Their pride of race made them believe they were set
apart from the rest of mankind, and now their prophet had taught
them virtue and a contempt for any who did not follow the way of
the Ahura, who promises rewards in this world and the next. To war
against evil had become their object in living, and they saw evil
everywhere outside the magic circle of their own nation. For such
as these death is a blessing, conquest a duty, and mercy the most
contemptible of weaknesses. With such as these—molded into a
disciplined army—a gifted and ambitious king could sweep across the
earth.

So it was not Daiaukka I feared. I feared the
voice of his prophet.

. . . . .

It was on the fifth day of the month of
Tammuz when I turned my eyes to the rising sun and set out for the
land of the Medes. I led a force of six thousand men and would find
as many again waiting for me in Musasir. From there we would march
south and east, following the line of foothills that eventually
rises into the Zagros Mountains, until we reached Zamua and the
fortress at Hamban.

That drowsy little garrison town was suddenly
swollen almost to bursting with starving, dust-stained country
folk, who, with such of their possessions as they could carry
wrapped in bundles, had come streaming in from the wide eastern
plains to seek the protection of mud walls and the soldiers of
their god and king. They had fled before the fury of the Medes, and
the fear of what they had seen and suffered was still in their
faces. Now they were starving because the garrison had not grain
enough to feed them all.

“They are like wolves, Lord—they have no
pity.” So I was told by an old man as he lay on his sleeping mat
beside the town wall, waiting for death. “They come. They steal our
oxen and burn our fields and houses. They kill all whom they find.
I am old, I do not care, but so many. . .” And his eyes grew wet
with tears as they saw once more that which he could not bring
himself to speak of. “I will die here. I do not wish to return
home.”

“I will go there for you,” I told him. “And
all shall be as it was, for the god’s justice will not be turned
aside.”

He turned to look at me, to look into my
face, and it was as if he had not understood.