The Assyrian (90 page)

At last he was still. It seemed to take
hours, but the spectacle of his agony lasted probably only a few
minutes. A man will not die so quickly as that of burns alone, so
perhaps he smothered in the thin, white smoke. He dangled there,
perhaps the height of a man above the glowing coals, lifeless,
burning like a joint of meat left unattended. When the flesh from
one foot simply sloughed off, allowing the bone to slip through the
manacle, I heard a choking sound beside me. I turned and saw
Kephalos, his head between his knees, unburdening himself of
breakfast.

Esarhaddon did not stir. He watched, never
letting his eyes look away from this horror he had commanded, his
face a blank mask. It seemed he had learned that much about being a
king—that he was not allowed to feel anything.

When he was satisfied, he rose from his chair
and dismissed us. No one was eager to stay. I took Kephalos back to
my tent and gave him small sips of wine until he could stop
sobbing. It had not been what he had expected.

“By the gods,” he said at last, “you are a
brutal race, you Assyrians.”

I could only smile, although my heart was far
from merry.

“I suspect it is the same everywhere,” I
said. “Esarhaddon is no worse than many. It is the justice of
kings.”

. . . . .

Yet the justice of kings did not check the
nightly pilgrimage of deserters from the rebel army. Each morning
found them camped outside the earthworks in still greater numbers,
and if Esarhaddon’s craving for revenge snatched off some few of
these, others lived, and all were willing to try their luck.

The executions continued. The iron tripod was
in daily use, and there were times when the smell of roasted flesh
hung over the camp like a pall. I do not fault Esarhaddon for this,
since it was wise policy to offer examples of what the law demands
from traitors. Hedged about by rebellion, he could not afford to
seem weak. Yet I believe the deaths of many could have been traced
not to wisdom but to fear. My brother was trying to kill his own
doubts.

On the last day of Sebat I received a
message. A friend, one Sinqi Adad, who had recanted his allegiance
to Arad Malik but had been denied clemency, was to swing over the
coals the following morning—he had asked to see me.

“We were boys together,” I told Kephalos. “He
fought at Babylon with us—he was as much Esarhaddon’s friend as
mine. It is a cruel thing that he should die like this.”

“It is a cruel thing that anyone should die
like this,” my servant replied, with admirable clarity of mind.

“Yet I would prevent it if I could.”

I looked at him questioningly, and Kephalos
puckered his face with misgivings. At last he nodded.

“It will be a bad thing should it be
discovered,” he said, taking a small clay vial from his medicine
bag. “Indeed, I had meant this for you, should you come to grief,
but do as you think best, my foolish master.”

I thanked him and left to pay my call.

Sinqi Adad was sitting in the mud, chained to
an iron peg. His hair and beard were matted with filth, and on his
arms and back were long bruises from where the guards had beaten
him with their spears. He looked exhausted and weak. It is not the
custom to waste food on condemned men, but I had brought bread and
wine with me and no one attempted to prevent me from carrying them
into the stockade.

I knelt beside him, holding out the loaf and
the wine jar. With shaking hands he tore off a corner of the round,
flat loaf, stuffed it into his mouth and washed it down with the
wine. It was several minutes before he was very much disposed to
conversation, but at last, when the urgency of his hunger had
abated a little, he looked up at me with a sigh and nodded.

“My thanks,” he said. “It doesn’t atone for
your throwing in your lot with Esarhaddon, but I thank you just the
same.”

“I had always made it clear that I would
honor the lawful succession. No man has a right to say I misled
him.”

“Perhaps not, but men will always believe
what they wish.”

He grinned. Under the circumstances, it was a
remarkable act of courage.

“Arad Malik, that gutter dog, you should have
seen him when he received word that you had carried your army over
to Esarhaddon’s side. If the gods honored such a man’s curses, what
a death you would have died in that moment.”

“Is it bad over there?’“ I asked, hardly
knowing why.

“Bad?” He raised his eyebrows as if wondering
what I could mean. “It is as bad as this place, only bigger.”

With a gesture of his chained arm, he took in
the perimeter of the stockade.

“When will Esarhaddon force the battle, do
you think? Tomorrow? The next day? Everyone over there knows that
there will be no escape if they are caught under that millstone.
Already when I left, soldiers were cutting the throats of their
officers. Yes, it is very bad.”

“Then perhaps there will be no battle.
Perhaps, when the moment comes, Esarhaddon will find his enemies on
their knees.”

“You were not always such a fool, Tiglath.”
He tore off another corner of the bread and ate it with savage
ferocity, all the while looking at me as if he would have liked to
tear out my heart as well. There are some who would prefer an
honorable death in battle to a lifetime of serving your brother and
his Babylonian gods. I was weak, and stupid enough to believe I
could buy my life with submission—you see what an error that was.
And now I will die because once I told Esarhaddon to his face that
he was not fit to be keeper of the king’s pigeons, let alone king.
Others, braver than I, will not risk the same fate.”

Suddenly he let the bread fall into the mud
and covered his face with his hands. He was sobbing.

“Oh, that it should all have come to this!”
he said finally, brushing the tears away with his fingers—he
smiled, for he was embarrassed. “And for the sake of Arad Malik. .
. That is what rankles. Who would wish such a man king? He is no
better than Esarhaddon, perhaps not even as good. But
Nabusharusur—oh, how I curse the day I first listened to that
gelded serpent.”

“Why? What of him?” I shrugged my shoulders,
understanding nothing. “What has Nabusharusur. . ?”

Sinqi Adad, clasping my arm with both hands,
shook it as if to rouse me from my slumbers.

“He told everyone that Arad Malik was only
holding your place, Tiglath. He made everyone believe that this
rebellion was in your name!”

At last he released my arm and let his hands
fall into his lap. All the strength seemed to leave him as he
acknowledged the enormity of his mistake.

“Have I not said men will always believe what
they wish?”

I reached into my pocket of my tunic and took
out the vial Kephalos had given to me, keeping it hidden so that
only Sinqi Adad could see.

“What is it?” he asked. I think at first he
was only surprised.

“Take this before they come for you
tomorrow.”

“What is it? Poison?”

“No—I am not so brave as that. If I gave you
poison to cheat the king of his spectacle, I would end by taking
your place in the fire. No, it is not poison.”

“Then what. .. ?”

“It kills pain and fear. It makes death easy.
You will die, but you will not suffer. Take it just before they
come to fetch you, or its effects may not last long enough. And
bury the empty vial in the mud when you have finished, or someone
may guess.”

He hid the vial under his ragged clothes and
took my arm again.

“You take a dreadful risk, Tiglath—may the
gods bless you for it.”

“Let it stand as my rebellion against
Esarhaddon. I am sorry to have failed you, my friend.”

“We have all failed each other, you no worse
than the rest of us.”

And thus we parted. I went back to my tent
and hid my face from men. I did not go the next morning to see
Sinqi Adad’s end, but I was told he died bravely.

That night a messenger arrived from Arad
Malik, asking terms for surrender. He came under a standard of
truce, and Esarhaddon sent him back in a leather sack, cut by sword
thrusts in a hundred places so that his corpse held hardly a drop
of blood. Thus the rebels knew what they could expect.

It was clear that the battle, if there was to
be one, must be soon—Esarhaddon would have felt himself cheated if
there were to be no battle, so plans were rushed ahead. I was not
asked to the staff meetings, but even a prince in disgrace is not
without his informants, so I knew that orders had been issued to
take the field the next morning, which was to be the second day of
the month of Adar. And, beyond this, I was given instructions by
Sha Nabushu.

“You will take no part,” he told me, yet
again. “You may not fight, even as a common soldier. The glory of
this day shall be entirely the king’s.”

“So you keep saying. Yet do not fear—I will
not make a shadow in the Lord Esarhaddon’s sunlight. I shall be
present as an observer only, since that is a penance I feel I owe
to those who will die tomorrow, but I am just as happy to stay
clear of this fight. You see, I have little taste for the butcher’s
trade.”

It was not an answer which pleased, but there
was no doubt that Sha Nabushu took my meaning. All the day long one
could hear the sound of grindstones. Everyone knew of the wagonload
of axes my brother had brought with him from Nineveh. Everyone
could guess what they were for.

That night I was invited to Lushakin’s tent,
where the senior officers of the northern army, who tomorrow would
fight under Sha Nabushu, were busy drinking themselves into a
stupor. No one was afraid of losing—and, under such circumstances,
it hardly occurs to a man that he might be killed, even by
accident—but the mood was one of defeat.

“My wife’s nephew was in the Nineveh
garrison,” one of them said. “He has not turned up among the
deserters—what am I to say to her when I return to Amat?”

“We shall all have to wash our weapons and
make purifying sacrifice. This kind of fighting stinks in the
nostrils of the gods.”

“They say that the Lord Esarhaddon plans to.
. .”

I raised my hand to indicate I would hear no
insult offered to the king, and everyone fell silent. I think they,
too, in their hearts, blamed me for bringing them to evil days. I
stayed only a little longer and then left.

And the next morning, in the gray light
before dawn, my head was near split open by the blare of war
trumpets.

“Why was I not awakened?” I asked, stumbling
out of my tent with my corselet of copper armor plates still only
half buckled. “And where in the Lady Ishtar’s name is my
horse?”

The orderly shook his head, as if ashamed to
own it was all his doing.

“Taken away last night, Rab Shaqe” he said.
They left you a brown mare in his place, but you won’t find much to
praise about her. She’s the next thing to crow bait.”

“My horse?” I squinted at him, hardly able to
credit it. They took my horse?”

“Yes, Rab Shaqe—you see, it is known by
sight. . .”

Yes, of course. Esarhaddon would have to
assure himself that, even if I should decide to follow the battle
from a distance, I would be as one invisible.

“Then put a bridle on the mare.”

She almost was the next thing to crow bait.
There was nothing covering her shoulder bones but hide and I
suspected she would probably drop dead if somehow I forced her to a
gallop. Yet, since I had no intention of making such demands on
her, she would do well enough. She was a match for her rider, for
it seemed that neither of us was fit for war.

I kept to a line of low hills, where I would
be in no one’s way, staying somewhere between the main body of foot
soldiers and the cavalry companies who rode ahead to seek the
initial contacts with Arad Malik’s army. And as the god has made me
his witness, I will describe the terrible truth of that day, which
saw so monstrous and pointless a bloodletting. For the battle at
Khanirabbat was far less a battle than a simple massacre.

It was just an hour after sunrise when the
first skirmishes took place. The rebel horsemen were waiting in
ambush and staged a mass attack in Esarhaddon’s cavalry. The rebels
charged in a body. Even half a beru away I could hear their war
cries, and for a moment they seemed to have plunged deep enough
into their enemy’s battle groups perhaps to scatter them and carry
their point. Yet what can three hundred men do—and I wonder if they
had so many—against three or four thousand? And how do bees
overcome the solitary ferret that tries to raid their hive? The
king’s horsemen swarmed over the rebels, engulfing them, leaving
them no escape. Within half an hour the fight was over and the
ground was strewn with horses and men, dead and dying, from both
sides. Yet there could be no doubt about the winner. That was the
last cavalry engagement of the day. The rebels had left their last
rider a corpse upon the withered grass.

Two hours later it was the infantry’s turn.
The rebels had four or five and twenty battle squares, and these
assembled in haste from companies whose strength had been bled away
by the desertions of the last several days—not even three thousand
men, not a fifth part of their original numbers, proposing to do
battle against Esarhaddon’s army; perhaps by now seventy or eighty
thousand strong.

I will not speak of tactics, for what are
tactics when one man stands against twenty or thirty? The rebels
were simply crushed—there is no other word. They fought bravely, as
men will who know they have no choice except in the manner of their
deaths, but they fought without hope.

By midday it was over, except for the
killing. Esarhaddon’s chosen men went over the field with their
axes, hacking to death any of the wounded they could find and
taking trophies from the fallen—a wagon rode around to collect the
heads. Those few who were unlucky or foolish enough to be taken
alive were treated with even less respect. The officers were flayed
on the spot; they were pegged down on the first convenient piece of
cleared earth and had their skins ripped off like rabbits. I
counted at least forty who met this fate, and there were doubtless
many I did not see. The common soldiers were spared for the moment.
They were rounded up and taken away, but they had not escaped. I
heard later that they were marched straight from the battlefield to
Calah, a distance of some fifty or sixty beru, a distance which
fresh and provisioned men could not cross in less than ten days,
and these were without food and water. There the few survivors of
this ordeal were set to work as slave labor making the mud bricks
for Esarhaddon’s new temple to the god Marduk. I wonder if one of
them lived into the summer.