The Assyrian (85 page)

I saw Daiaukka take the sword from his belt.
The blade flashed in the sun as he waved it over his head, for he
wished me to know what was coming.

No—I would not merely stand and wait for the
stroke to fall. I was a king’s son. I would not shame my father,
the Lord Ashur, and the soldiers who had followed me to this place,
not by allowing myself to be cut down like a shock of barley.
Twenty paces was not too far if they measured the distance to an
honorable and manly death.

My guts felt as if they were stuffed with
burning coals, and my knees shook. Yet I could move. I took a step,
then another, then another. Daiaukka waited—it seemed to amuse
him.

And then he slapped the great black stallion
on the haunch with the flat of his sword blade, and man and beast
jolted forward. No more than a trot at first, but slowly gathering
speed—they bore down on me. This was the moment.

I took another step, and another. I had no
chance. I was already dead. What good . . ?

And then Ghost sprang into life, his great
hoofs striking out, tearing at the ground. His battle was not over.
He was not so easily defeated.

I cannot describe the sound he made—never
have I heard a horse make such a sound, like the snarling of a
great cat. His war cry made the air tremble as he closed on the
black stallion.

With a mighty leap that almost carried him
onto the horses back, he struck out with his hoofs. His neck was
stretched straight and his great square teeth exposed, as if he
meant to tear his enemy to pieces. Once more both horses went down,
and Daiaukka crashed to the ground, rolling over and over.

I did not waste my opportunity. I would die,
but not alone. I paced off the remaining distance at a painful,
jerky trot, as fast as I could bear. I picked up the javelin. It
was in my hand—I was a man once more.

Could I throw it? I did not know. The whole
left side of my body throbbed with pain, and I felt ready to
collapse. But I would try to throw. I had to try.

Daiaukka started to climb to his feet. He was
stunned—I think he had forgotten all about me. He looked about, as
if trying to remember what had happened. He turned to look at
me.

It was the last chance I would ever have.
Willing myself to forget my pain, I coiled and threw. Daiaukka
could see, but seemed not to understand. Together we watched the
javelin as it arched through the air.

He might as well have been struck by
lightning. He could not have avoided it, and it fell upon him with
seemingly as great a shock. The point entered his chest, just under
the collarbone, and shot straight through until half its length was
buried in his body. I would have known the moment of impact with my
eyes shut, by the great cry that went up from the Medes. Daiaukka
never made a sound.

He collapsed. He did not stagger and fall
like another man—he simply went limp and crumpled.

I had all the time I wanted now. I walked
toward him, slowly, for it was not in my power to do better. I drew
my sword.

But there was no reason. He was lying on the
ground, seemingly unable to move. I knelt beside him.

The horses, not twenty paces away, were
kicking dust into the air and neighing savagely, oblivious to us.
If someone did not part them soon, one would kill the other.

But the quiet of mortality had already come
to Daiaukka. He was alive, but only by a little, and lying on his
side. He looked into my face and his mouth shaped a word, but there
was no sound. His tongue came out to moisten his lips and he tried
again.

“Do you think. . ?” His eyes closed. For a
moment I thought he was dead, but at last they opened again. “Do
you think it will end now?”

Already I could hear the slap, slap, slap of
sandaled feet as the crowds who had come as witnesses surged
forward, eager to be present for even the last moments of a man’s
life. It was the end of privacy. In an instant, living and dead, we
would belong to our eager nations.

“It will never end,” I said.

He smiled, and then became still. Now, at
last, he was dead.

. . . . .

Of what remained of that day, of the next,
and of many which were to follow, I remember very little, I hovered
close to death and the black bird shadowed my soul with her
wings.

“By the sixty great gods, what a gash! You
can look straight through and see his liver!”

I recall hearing someone say that as they
carried me from the field on a blanket, but nothing more.
Daiaukka’s face in death, a few sentences—everything else is
missing, even the pain.

So what I know of that time, while my life
seemed as fragile as a spiders web in the wind, I know it only as
it was told me after: of the rumors which swept the camp, even as
they carried me back to my tent; of the loud voices among my
soldiers, demanding vengeance against the Medes; of the terrible
wind, howling like a madwoman, which blew all that night and into
the next until the ground was scoured clean where Daiaukka and I
had squandered each other’s blood—this was taken by both sides as a
terrible omen—of these things I knew nothing. For I was not there
but in some other place entirely.

As a check on the Medes during this troubled
season—for who can tell what desperate and defeated men will think
to do if they suspect confusion among their enemies?—the officers I
had left in command decided to take the boy Khshathrita as a
hostage. It was a reasonable precaution, for after his father’s
death the heir was the one remaining focus of power among the
tribes of the Zagros. Without him they were not a nation, and they
knew it. So they would sit quietly and wait, while their
shah-ye-shah’s son rested by the campfires of his enemies.

My soldiers treated the boy kindly, for the
men of Ashur have a great fondness for the young, yet it must have
been a fearful ordeal for him. He was, after all, only a child and
surrounded by those whom he had been taught to believe monsters of
cruelty, and he could not know what fate would befall him were I to
die—an event which must have seemed as certain and imminent as the
next sunset. But for all this he behaved with the calm dignity of a
man, and one who is of the seed of kings. It would not have shamed
his father to see him, for Daiaukka lived again in his son.

Once, when for a few minutes the mist cleared
from my brain. I opened my eyes to find the boy sitting on the
floor beside my cot, his head resting on his hands as if his vigil
had been a long one. It seemed odd that he should be there, the son
of my slain enemy, but this curious turn did not trouble me. I
merely assumed that I must be dreaming. I had had many and far
odder dreams in my troubled, deathlike sleep, so what was the
presence of an inoffensive boy sitting at my bedside? Perhaps, if
this was a dream, he was a messenger from the gods and would reveal
if at last I had met my simtu—a matter concerning which, in my
weakened condition, I had only the mildest curiosity. So I took
this visit calmly enough.

“Will you live or die, my Lord Tiglath?” he
asked, his voice low, as if it were a private business between only
the two of us.

“I know not,” I answered. “Have I been a long
time deciding?”

He held up three fingers.

“This many days, my lord. When will you
know?”

“No sooner than you yourself, boy.”

I closed my eyes and drifted back to that
twilight sleep that seemed to enclose me like the waters of a
bottomless sea.

Later—how much later I could not even have
guessed—I woke again and managed to swallow a few sips of beer. The
boy was nowhere about.

That was all I remembered until at last,
after what my dreams had made into a long and difficult journey
through a land filled with monsters, the Lady Ereshkigal was
pleased to open her hand and release me.

“Ah, so it seems you will yet live!”

It was Tabiti, squatting like a laundrywoman
at the head of my cot. I had to twist my eyes around to see him,
and the effort made them throb in their sockets. The wound in my
side felt like a nest of scorpions and I seemed to be bathed in
sweat.

“Something to drink,” I whispered thickly.
“Something. . .”

The cup was at my lips before I could finish.
It was not beer this time but wine mixed with water. Nothing will
ever taste so good again as did those first few sips. Their
coolness ran straight through my veins, as if they had been empty
until that moment.

“What is this. . ?”

I reached down to feel what made my side pain
me so. I had forgotten all about Daiaukka and his lance until the
sharp sting of a fresh wound reminded me. Yes—then I remembered
everything.

“He cut a hole in you wide enough to reach
inside and pull your bowels out by the coil, brother. They have
sewn you closed now, but it was a messy business and there was much
blood poured onto the earth. The wound turned putrid, and you have
been many days delirious with fever, but it is broken now.”

“How many days?”

“Daiaukka has been feeding the crows now for
ten days. Until this morning, we thought you would be another
course in the banquet. It was a close thing.”

“My horse—what of Ghost?”

“A bit torn, but alive and well.” Tabiti
laughed softly. “Did you know that he killed the big black? He got
him down and kicked in his ribs like the walls of a chicken house.
He is a fine animal, that horse of yours. Let me have first chance
if you decide to sell him.”

“I will never sell him. He saved my
life.”

“I know he did—he and that sedu of yours. I
do not think you are meant to die for a long time, brother.”

He leaned a little closer, like a man with a
secret.

“For some days now their sorcerers have been
telling the Medes that you would recover. They say that Daiaukka
was a fool to do battle with one who cannot die, and no one
contradicts them. It is a marvelous thing.”

He said no more, for he saw that his words
pressed in on me. Instead, he gave me the wine to taste
again—perhaps there was something more mixed in with it than water,
for soon I fell asleep again, a true sleep this time. It lasted for
three or four hours and at its end I felt stronger.

It seemed that, yet again, and for some
purpose of their own, the gods had spared me.

In the days which followed I had no visitors
except Tabiti, the boy Khshathrita, and, once or twice, Lushakin.
Command of the northern army was in his hands, and he did not
trouble me with its concerns. A month passed before I was called
upon to remember that I was rab shaqe. I had first to remember that
I was alive.

The end of that month saw the arrival of
perhaps the last person I might have expected to find in the
wilderness of Media, for one morning, as a spoonful at a time I was
fed the breakfast of barley gruel that was deemed to be the only
food my poor punctured guts could tolerate, I heard someone outside
my tent talking to the guard, begging to be admitted.

Suddenly the voice was a bellow, swearing
ferociously—and in Greek! There was the sound of a scuffle, and the
flap came springing open, letting in the bright sun and my friend
and servant Kephalos.

“Master, may the gods of the west, the lords
of all true magic, be praised that I find you alive!” he said as,
with great difficulty, for he was as fat as ever, he knelt by the
cot and kissed my arm, weeping like a woman. His clothes and beard
were dusty, and he smelled of the sweat of many days, yet there was
no one the sight of whom could have been more welcome to my
eyes.

“They told me five days ago, in a Cimmerian
village near Heshir, that you still breathed, but I hardly dared to
believe it could be true. I came as soon as the message rider
reached Amat, Dread Lord—I packed my medicine box and came. May
Apollo the Mouse God receive homage forever that he has spared
you!”

He could speak no more, for his feelings got
the better of him and tears choked his voice. I wept too, touched
by this display of love and loyalty. We wept together. It was a
most affecting scene and did us both good.

An hour later, quite calm, a cup of wine in
his hand, my slave narrated to me the history of his journey.

“As doubtless you can imagine, the news of
your victory in battle and the defeat and death of the Median king
was occasion for much joy throughout the whole city of Amat. Some
dreamed of glory, some of the end of war and danger and the
campaign tax, and the harlots and shopkeepers dreamed of soldiers’
booty—it went almost as a thing unnoticed that you, Dread Lord, had
suffered a grievous wound and even were reported in many quarters
to be dead already, but thus unsteady are the affections of
men.

“I went to the rab abru, that son of a
brothel keeper Marduk Pashir—you did a foolish thing to leave him
in command of the garrison, master, for the wicked little man hates
you and plots with your brother the marsarru behind your back—and I
asked, with that humility of bearing which is only proper in a
slave, if I might be allowed an escort for the journey hither, and
I found—you will hardly credit it—that I was refused!

“‘I cannot spare the men,’ he told me, with
scant courtesy. ‘I have been left shorthanded as things are and
cannot spare ten or even five able bodied soldiers to go chasing
off into the Zagros on some errand for a fat Ionian slave.’

“‘I am physician to the rab shaqe,’ was my
answer. ‘He lies gravely wounded and in peril of his life. I must
have an escort that I may attend upon him.’

“‘From what I hear, he is as good as dead
even now. How long will it take you to reach his camp, do you
think? Twenty days—provided your throat is not cut along the way.
Save yourself the trouble, Physician. He will be bait for crows
long before you ever see the outside of his tent.’”