The Assyrian (8 page)

My mother had hurt me more deeply than she
could have imagined, for she had made me feel all over again the
sharp pain of losing her. For many days I was thus. While the sun
shone I did my work, the work of learning the soldier’s craft, and
none saw any difference in me, but at night I was overwhelmed with
grief. Only Esarhaddon was my witness, and Esarhaddon said nothing.
I was grateful to him for that.

And then, at last, the torment subsided into
a certain moroseness that was with me always but left me free to
think of other things. I was unhappy, but I had not lost interest
in life. I was thus when Kephalos came to me one day.

I had been speaking no more than the truth
when I told Tabshar Sin I had little enough need of a servant. I
was merely a boy, I had few possessions to trouble about, my needs
for food, clothing, and shelter were met by the royal barrack, and
I spent the greater part of my time in military training. True,
Kephalos did teach me what remained of the Greek alphabet, but that
was quickly done and there was, in any case, nothing to read in
that tongue. For the rest, he seemed to spend most of his day
loafing around the parade ground, idle and useless. He was never an
energetic fellow, but in time even he began to grow restless.

“Master,” he said to me at last, “is it not
the case that in this country slaves are sometimes allowed to go
out and find occupation in the city, to enrich both themselves and
their owners? Is this not the custom?”

I was sitting on my sleeping mat, unstrapping
the greaves from my shins, and I looked up at where he was standing
in the doorway. It was almost evening. I had had a strenuous day
and was tired and hungry, but not unpleasantly so—in a quarter of
an hour I would come out of the steam baths, sweated and clean and
ready for dinner. So I listened to his talk as I might have to the
good natured growling of a camp dog, without much understanding or
interest but willingly enough.

“Yes, of course, Kephalos, that is indeed the
custom.”

“Then, I was wondering. . .”

“Yes, Kephalos?”

He showed his teeth in a nervous smile, an
admission that we both understood he had gotten himself into some
difficulty. I was even then accustomed to this.

“Master, I am of little use here, as you
know. And the atmosphere of a barrack is not much to my taste. I
wonder if I might have your indulgence to follow my old profession.
. .”

“And what profession is that, Kephalos?”

The smile grew a shade more tightly drawn
across his face, for he was aware I was baiting him.

“I would, with your permission, young master,
set up as a physician.”

I kicked off my sandals and he swooped down
to gather them from the floor, hugging them to his breast as if he
had some idea of forcing me to ransom them.

“Master, you must understand I. . .”

“Have you read the law codes, Kephalos? Do
you understand how the king punishes a physician who is negligent
or even merely inept? If you make a man blind in one eye, the king
will send a soldier to your house, where he will gouge out one of
your eyes with the point of a dagger. I was under the impression
that you had not yet completed your apprenticeship at the time of
your capture. Was I mistaken?”

“Master, you are young—let me explain
something to you,” he said, and knelt beside me, placing the
sandals neatly by my sleeping mat. “Master, you must know that one
does not grow rich as a physician by treating the sick. . .”

The program Kephalos outlined to me was
simplicity itself. “You see, my young lord who knows nothing of the
world, I have what is more than learning—I have the prestige that
comes with great patrons. I am the slave of a royal prince and have
served as physician to the wife of the turtanu himself. With such
credentials, wealthy patients will flock to my door, if only that
they may have the pleasure of speaking of it to their friends and
acquaintances—‘Of course our physician is the clever Ionian
Kephalos, who treats the king’s own family!—and from these I will
take as patients only such women as have nothing to occupy them
except their imaginary illnesses, and of such, let me assure you,
no city has ever known the lack. The rest, those who are truly
sick, I will refer to my Assyrian colleagues, that there should be
no jealousy among them. Thus I will undertake to make us both rich
within the space of a year.”

He peered at me speculatively, tilting his
head to one side as if he were considering some weighty matter.

“Because of course, master, I would divide
the profits with you justly. I understand the natural order of
things, and you are entitled to a reasonable return on your
investment. Shall we say, one part in four? My lord is a soldier
and his father is the king, so his needs in days to come will not
be as pressing as mine. One in three, then?”

“Kephalos. a person needs money to start out
as a physician. Boy that I am. I know as much as that. You will
require a house, and instruments, and drugs. I have no money to
give you, for all that you style me as a royal prince. Where will
you get it?”

He held his lower lip between his teeth, and
I understood at once there was more to this sudden inspiration than
he had so far been willing to confide to me. I picked up my sword
and balanced the point against his soft throat

“Kephalos. . .”

“Master, you need not concern yourself with
these sordid details. Leave all to me, and. . .

“Kephalos, you have been dicing with the
soldiers again! How much have you robbed them of this time? Tell me
the truth.”

“Master, I. . . Well, truly I have been lucky
just recently and. . .”

“And therefore someone has offered yet once
more to cut out your entrails and hang you in them?”

“To be honest, master, it would be better if
I could take myself off from here for a term—you understand. Shall
we say, then, equal shares?”

That very night Kephalos removed his
belongings and disappeared into the city.

When I next saw him, ten days later. I hardly
thought he was the same man, so richly was he dressed. His wool
robe was embroidered in blues and yellow and red. It was a
marvelous transformation. And he had a house and a servant of his
own, and he gave me twelve shekels of silver as my share of his
first fees.

“It is beyond anything I could have imagined,
master. The fact that I am a foreigner is a great asset, for it
gives me the advantage of novelty—women love novelty above all
things, as you will no doubt discover in time—and the learning of
distant lands is held in high esteem among the merchant classes. We
will prosper greatly, master! I have had the most astonishing
success with a certain aphrodisiac, the recipe for which I happened
upon quite by chance once in Aleppo. I sell it as fast as I can
compound it, although one ought to feel some compassion for the
poor husbands—if that is who they are—for it has a dreadful odor
and lingers upon the tongue for hours. . .”

I told Kephalos to take back my share of the
profits and invest it for me. I had two reasons for this. One was
that I had no immediate need for money, and the other was a growing
respect for my slave’s cunning. I felt he might indeed make us both
rich, and in the shadowy places in my mind there was some idea of
buying my mother out of the house of women. It was an absurd notion
I knew even then—the king my father did not trade in flesh like a
merchant and, in any case, a handful of silver shekels was unlikely
to impress him—but it gave me hope. It was at least something to do
against my loneliness and dark rage.

And life went on within the royal barrack.
Tabshar Sin was well pleased with me. I was growing taller and
stronger with each day. I was almost a man, as my mother had said,
and almost a soldier. And there was Esarhaddon, to whom I could
confide my feelings, who understood but little yet was my
friend.

“You care too much,” he said, using the point
of his sword to open yet another jar of beer, for he had learned to
love beer almost as much as fighting. He settled back on his
sleeping mat, his eves half closed, a picture of drowsy
contentment. “My mother is in the house of women too, and I hope
she stays there forever. By the sixty great gods, I would rather
face a thousand Medes with nothing to defend me but a copper
pruning knife than live with her under the same roof again.”

He smiled at me, quite pleased with himself.
It was ever my brother’s special gift to see life in terms of
solid, simple, personal reality, as if by his own will a man’s
needs and desires could be raised to a law of nature.

“Mothers—they are worse than all the devils
in all the hated places of the earth,” he went on, waving his beer
jar in the air to indicate the cosmic character of this new wisdom
of his. “You should have had a mother like Naq’ia, Tiglath, and
then you would know how to be happy now.”

. . . . .

It was not long after, in the month of Ah
that hums like a furnace, that I was crouched by the doorway of my
quarters—it was the hottest part of the day, when man and beast
alike sought only shade and quiet—my attention absorbed in an
attempt to repair a sandal strap, when a boy of perhaps seven or
eight presented himself to me, bowed very low, and asked if he had
“the honor of addressing the Lord Tiglath Ashur.” He was as pretty
and delicate as a girl, this child, with large brown eyes and long
lashes. When I nodded, he bowed again and presented me with a
folded piece of leather. The writing inside was Greek, so I did not
have to guess the identity of the sender. The boy had apparently
been instructed to wait for an answer, for he stood at something
like attention while I read.

“His humble slave, the physician Kephalos of
Naxos, begs that the Dread Lord, the Prince Tiglath Ashur, Son of
Sennacherib, King of Kings, King of Assyria, would honor him by
attending his poor table this evening, at his house by the Gate of
Adad. The presence of the Prince Esarhaddon would be an added
felicity.”

“You may tell the physician Kephalos that we
should be happy to accept.” I said, “but that we are soldiers and
must ask for leave.”

The boy bowed a third time, lower still if
such a thing were possible, and withdrew.

I did not trouble myself with consulting
Esarhaddon. since I knew he would fall like a starving jackal upon
any chance to escape the barracks for an evening, so I went
directly to Tabshar Sin, who also had taken refuge from the summer
heat and was lying on his sleeping mat, squeezing water onto his
face and beard from a cloth he dipped now and then into a large
clay jug. Like every good soldier, he had learned long since to
take full advantage of his hours of rest, and he scowled in
irritation when my shadow fell across his doorway.

“What is it you want, Prince?” he asked, in a
tone that said I might go to Arallu, which the Greeks call “Hades,”
for all of him.

“Permission to be absent this evening, Rab
Kisir. I have received an invitation to dinner.”

I showed him the scrap of leather, but he
only glanced at it before letting it drop to the floor. “That
effeminate, dice playing slave of yours, I take it. So he issues
invitations now, does he? He has grown quite prosperous, I am told
.”

“But may I go, Rab Kisir?”

“Is your kit prepared against tomorrow’s
field exercises?”

“Yes. Rab Kisir.”

Then you may go. I expect you will be served
a better meal than the royal mess could offer.”

“And Esarhaddon?”

“Him too?” Tabshar Sin turned his head a few
degrees in my direction, as if to underline his astonishment. “Yes,
very well. But don’t allow him to drink too much beer. And come
straight back when your dinner party is finished. You are royal
princes, but these days Nineveh is full of foreigners.”

The shadows were already lengthening when
Esarhaddon and I set out. It was a glorious adventure. The camp and
the palace, that had been our world, and to us the great city of
Nineveh, where we had lived all our lives, was as unfamiliar as the
wilds of Judah.

“Read it to me again.”

I took the scrap of leather from my pouch yet
once more and for Esarhaddon’s amusement translated its contents
into Akkadian.

“Why does he call our father king of
‘Assyria’? What sort of a place is this “Assyria?”

“The Ionians have no ‘sh’ sound in their
language, so ‘Ashur’ becomes ‘Assur.’ It is simply their word for
the Land of Ashur.”

“This slave of yours is a funny fellow,
Tiglath. ‘Assyria.’ By the gods, he is a funny fellow.”

The palace and all that is attached to it
rests on a great platform of bricks and is thus many cubits higher
than the surrounding city. We had to walk down a long flight of
stairs before we reached the streets, and it was like descending
from a mountain into a forest. Suddenly a crowded, noisy humanity
closed around us, people brushing each other with their shoulders
as they walked past, the cries of vendors, the smells of food and
human sweat and decaying garbage. I have been in many great cities
since then, but none has stayed in my memory like Nineveh.

There were women on the streets, a thing I
had not expected, and they wore the brightly colored costumes of
many lands—green, blue, yellow, even red, which no woman of Ashur
would wear except in mourning—their veils drawn over their faces so
that there was nothing to see except their large black eyes. Some
did not wear veils, which meant they were concubines, and some did
not even cover their hair.

Among the men I heard more Aramaic than
Akkadian, and many times I could not have said what language was
being spoken. Some I could recognize by their dress as Hittites or
Hebrews or, by their pleated linen and their shaved faces,
Egyptians.

We passed a spot where three men were
squatted on the pavement drinking beer from a common pot. They
sucked through hollow straws, for among the common people it is not
the custom first to strain out the husks—something I had not
realized before then. One of the men, I noticed, had had the tip of
his nose cut off, no doubt as a punishment for lying under
oath.