The Assyrian (63 page)

“The god,” he said at last. “Yes, the god. .
.”

Thus we knew what to expect when we marched
east and entered the devastated region known as Dur Tuqe.

“Dur” means “fortress,” but if the soldiers
of Ashur had ever maintained a garrison there, they had long since
withdrawn to the more comfortable and easily defended cities of the
river basins, for in this place the eye found no mud walls or
watchtowers, no parade grounds, no roads rutted by the wheels of
war chariots. This was land where barley grew, where for centuries
no man had carried any weapon more deadly than a mattock. Now the
Medes had sown slaughter there.

I was a soldier, hardened to cruel sights,
but the bile rose in my throat as I looked about me. It was a
landscape of horrors. The birds, so gorged on carrion that they
could hardly fly, perched beside the banks of irrigation ditches
clogged with the corpses of the farmers who had dug them, and the
plains were pocked with the cold, blackened skeletons of burned
villages. We rode for hours without hearing a sound louder than the
wind. There was no one. They had all fled—or been butchered by the
Medes. All this the Medes had done. The Aryan. The Nobles. I did
not know it then, but as my eyes searched the desecrated earth I
was beholding the glory of their Ahura and the truth of his word.
All I saw was death.

“I will return this devastation whence it
came,” I thought. “I will kill them in their thousands, enslaving
their women and sons, burning their cities and their fields. They
will remember my name to the end of time, for I will close my heart
to pity.”

That night we camped beside a stone cliff
that bore the carved image of Great Sargon, a figure twice the size
of living men, left there to record his glory. Beneath his feet he
had caused to be written a warning and a curse: “Stranger, you
enter the Land of Ashur, Lord of Heaven, Giver of Victory, the Son
of Wisdom and Power. Here the law of kings prevails, who are mighty
in war. Ashur will drown his enemies in their own blood.” From the
king’s hand ran the leads to four Median chieftains who knelt
before him, their arms raised in supplication and their lips
pierced with rings to make them tractable as cattle. Now it was his
grandson’s task to make good this royal boast.

The senior officers of our hastily assembled
army, with some of whom I had fought at the Bohtan River and even
in Babylon, while others were almost strangers, formed a circle
around the table in my tent as I explained my plans for the
campaign. Before us, drawn in charcoal on an oxhide, was a copy of
the map used by the Lord Sargon when he had made war against the
Medes, ten years before my birth. It showed almost nothing beyond a
ragged line of mountains, a river or two, and the names of some ten
or twelve settlements that might have been anything from villages
with fifty families to great cities.

“We shall have to move carefully,” I told
them. “We shall have to send our scouts out two or three days ahead
to feel the way for us—we make war upon strangers in their own
land, and it is best to be cautious.”

“The Medes will think we are frightened,”
said a rab abru from the garrison at Arzuhina, a squat, dark, solid
little figure whose name was Bel Itir and who had the reputation of
a fire eater. “What is the point of fielding this vast force if it
does no more than lumber timidly about like a water buffalo with a
bellyful of nettles?”

As he spoke his eyes blazed in the flickering
lamplight, as if he could already hear the laughter of his enemies
and held me solely responsible for this intolerable
humiliation.

“Let the Medes think what they like. If this
year we cut off only the tip of one finger, next year we will be
back for the whole arm.” I smiled, knowing that a man like Bel Itir
would be hard pressed to understand.

“I mean to reduce these barbarians to
silence,” I went on, speaking now more generally. “When we have
finished here, the Medes will not venture from their mountains for
a generation—perhaps not even then. But this will not be the work
of a single campaign. So let the tribes think we come only to burn
a few villages and then, honor satisfied, hurry back to the comfort
of our great cities. If they imagine that we have grown soft, they
will learn their mistake soon enough.

“Now then—I propose that we follow this line
of mountains into Ellipi, to about here, where we will divide into
three wings and converge upon this point, called Ecbatana. . .”

So we marched east and into the land of the
Medes, an army of near twelve thousand men. And every hour we could
feel upon us the measuring eyes of our enemies—they were no more
than that, a presence that made the air heavy in our lungs. It was
full twelve days before we even saw their faces.

I will never forget my first sight of that
warrior race. It was not more than an hour after sunrise and we had
covered hardly a single beru of our day’s march. All at once I
raised my eyes and saw them. A group of some twenty riders had
appeared on the crest of a low hill—they were simply there, as if
they had sprung straight from the earth. How they had managed to
slip past my scouts I could only guess, for this was their country,
where I was but a stranger.

I raised my arm and brought the line of march
to a halt.

We had at last reached the steppes of the
Zagros Mountains, that great grassland that seemed to roll forward
forever. On our left, at the very limit of the horizon, visible
only as a thin, pale ribbon of melting light, was a vast salt
desert where, it was said, the sun could kill in a single hour,
baking a man’s brains into syrup. On our right were the mountains,
cold, barren, filled with hidden places—little valleys of
astonishing lustiness, or so I had heard, the secret homes of the
Median tribes. And now, it seemed, since so small a party could
entertain no hope of attacking us, they must wish to hear what
unwelcome business had brought us so far.

Finally, when they understood we were waiting
for them, they pricked their horses forward and rode down, eight or
nine abreast, to parley. These would be some local headman or other
and his clan elders, and they did not hurry.

The party drew to a halt some seventy paces
in front of us, on what they probably considered safely neutral
ground. I went forward with my principal officers to meet them.

Some among their number were men full of
years, whose knowledge of life’s hardships seemed etched into their
faces. A few might have been old enough to have fought in the wars
against my grandfather from the very beginning of his eastern
campaigns, and these, after the manner of those who have spent long
lives commanding warriors from the back of a horse, were figures of
immense dignity—I noticed that two of them, their hair as white as
frost, kept glancing at me as they conferred in excited murmurs.
Some were younger. A few, as is always the case, were probably
fools.

One, a handsome man in the middle of his life
and, like most of his race, tall and slender, kept slightly ahead
of the rest and waited in expectant silence, studying me with
almost disdainful calm, as if he regarded this meeting as entirely
a matter between the two of us. His hair, which showed very little
gray, was cut short and tied back with a red fillet, and his beard
was carefully curled. He wore heavy boots, trousers like the
Scythians, and a sheepskin coat lined inside with fleece. There was
nothing except his bearing to indicate that he was lord here.

“I am Uksatar, son of Ianzu, whom the Ahura
loved, and parsua of the Miyaneh,” he announced, the way a man does
when he assumes his name will be recognized.

“And I am Tiglath Ashur, son of the Lord
Sennacherib who is king in the Land of Ashur.”

“I know your name. Lord. I wish to know what
has brought you here.”

“To know one is to know the other, Uksatar,
son of Ianzu, for what except the god’s call for retribution would
bring a prince of the world’s masters to such a place as this?”

I swept my hand over the horizon, as if to
indicate its contemptible emptiness. Uksatar, parsua of the
Miyaneh, seemed oblivious to the insult.

“Then you seek to avenge a few mud huts and a
handful of stolen cattle?” he asked, raising his eyes in apparent
astonishment. “If you wish only to punish a tribe of raiders, you
bring with you too large an army—you will never catch them. If you
have come to conquer the land of the Aryan, it is not nearly large
enough.”

“It is large enough. The man who herds sheep
needs no more than a few good dogs.”

“I see that the son of Sennacherib, king of
Nineveh, still has a bitter tongue,” came a voice from behind
Uksatar’s back. We both looked to see who had spoken, and a horse
nosed its way forward. The man who rode it no longer wore the blue
tunic and black vest of an Uqukadi, but I recognized him
nonetheless. The smile on his thick, fleshy face was still there,
as if nothing had changed since our last meeting, and perhaps, for
him, nothing had. His people were scattered, dead, or in bondage,
but to him, perhaps, it made no difference, for this was a leader
whose final loyalty was to no one except himself.

“Then you survived,” I observed, returning
his salute with a slight nod. “And, it would seem, have
prospered.”

“A wise man, my Lord Tiglath, can always
escape with at least part of his wealth, and a wealthy man is never
without influence.”

His smile broadened, as if he expected me to
congratulate him. He seemed actually to be waiting for it to
happen.

“But we took each other’s measure long ago,”
he went on at last, shrugging his heavy shoulders. “Did we not,
Lord? There seem to be some among these worthies who suspect you of
being a mighty spirit come back to punish them for some ancient
wrong, but I have assured them that you are—”

“That is enough, Upash,” snapped the parsua
of the Miyaneh—it seemed that the Lord Uksatar did not relish
having his counsels opened for my inspection. “You chatter like a
woman. All that is needful is to make the foreigner understand that
we do not fear his might and that, in any case, those who plundered
the lands of his unclean god broke no law which we recognize.”

He turned to me, his eyes narrowing as if he
thought to kill me with a look.

“Go home, Prince Tiglath Ashur, son and
grandson of kings. You will find nothing here but ruin and
death.”

“One of us will, in any case,” I answered,
smiling—this was a game I had played before. “And for now I wish
you a pleasant morning, willing even to believe that you are as
fearless as you claim.”

I raised my hand in salute, but the Lord
Uksatar recoiled at the gesture, as if I had made to strike him.
Nor was he alone—several among his entourage reined back their
horses, and I could hear the murmur of low voices pass among them
like a thrill of panic.

“Dastesh!” one of them shouted, as if
suddenly overtaken by surprise. “Dastesh—setare ye kohn e
Sargon!”

As one man, they wheeled their horses about
and galloped off, not stopping until they had vanished from
sight.

“By the sixty great gods, Rab Shaqe,”
Lushakin scratched his beard in bewilderment as we rode back to our
own columns. “What do you think got them so upset?”

I couldn’t answer him. I could only shake my
head and wonder, the same as he.

“I can tell you.”

It was the rab abru Bel Itir who had spoken.
He rode along beside us, his shoulders hunched grimly, staring out
at nothing. At last he ventured a thin, cruel smile.

“I know their tongue a little,” he said. “A
man learns a few words posted out in this wilderness—enough. It is
the birthmark the rab shaqe carries on the palm of his hand that
frightens them, the blood star, as they called it. It is the mark
of our late king, Mighty Sargon. They fear that he is not quiet in
his grave and returns in his grandson’s person to avenge himself.
They fear it is a ghost who leads us into battle.”

. . . . .

That night I had a dream. The dream was of an
eagle, rising effortlessly into the sky, turning in great circles
as the wind lifted it higher and higher. At last it came to rest on
a barren outcropping of rock. It looked down, and through its eyes
I could see the earth spread beneath me like a wrinkled carpet. The
next morning I gave orders that we were to abandon the steppes and
begin our climb into the Zagros Mountains.

My officers must have thought I had gone mad,
for there was no military reason why we should give up the plains,
where at least we had less to fear from ambushes. There seemed to
be no reason of any kind, none even that I could see. I was
listening to some inner voice, and all I knew for certain was that
I would do its bidding and follow where it led.

We did not see the Medes again for many days.
They were watching our progress—of this I had no doubt; I could
almost feel their eyes upon us—but they kept themselves from sight.
They did not attack, as I would have expected them to. They held
off and waited. We all seemed to be waiting.

The mark of the Lord Sargon. The red star I
have carried since the hour of my birth, since the hour in which he
met his death, somewhere in these very mountains. His sedu
protected my steps—this the blind maxxu had told me, long ago.
Perhaps it was even true. If ever he was with me, if ever he kept
me from harm and led me to see with his own eyes, it was then, in
the land of the Medes, while I wandered the ragged spine of the
Zagros, listening for the words of the god’s voice.

And then, at last, it came to me. Not the
sound of some inner speaking, but an understanding that I been to
this place before, had climbed these mountain passes and felt this
wind upon my face—that none of this was unfamiliar, that I knew
what to expect and would know when I found it, the place where it
would happen. And then, at last, I lost my fear, for I was cradled
in the hand of Ashur.