Land of Marvels

by Unsworth, Barry

  “A captured god,” Somerville said. “Yes, there are precedents for it in Assyrian practice. It would make sense if you had your back to the wall, if the Babylonians were at the gates and your own gods had failed, to use the enemy’s god for protection.”

  “A very ancient and potent god,” Palmer said. “He doesn’t look so impressive at the moment, does he, doing a knees-up like that? I suppose we can put him upright now.”

  The statuette, though no more than a foot tall, was surprisingly heavy. A considerable effort was needed to raise it, very carefully, and set it upright against the wall. At once, in this restored position, it reasserted its elemental power, head thrust forward, hands on knees, transformed into an object of terror and devotion.

  “Yes,” Palmer said. “You can see it, can’t you? He wasn’t one to cross. The sculptor, whoever it was, must have been in fear and trembling when he made him.” He got up and took some steps farther into the chamber, toward the entrance to the larger chamber beyond, which was blocked off by double stone doors and a fall of masonry across the entrance. “If he was there, where he is now, against the wall, anyone making for the tomb would have had to cross the path of his gaze and so incur his curse. Like a kind of psychic burglar alarm.”

  “His eyes are made of pitch,” Somerville said. “Like the lion’s. But they have not been touched by fire. If it was so, if Marduk was installed here as a last-ditch defense against any who would come to violate the tomb, it must have been close to the end, it must have been in the last—”

  He was interrupted by a sudden exclamation. “Come and look at this,” Palmer said. He was standing close to the blocked doorway, gazing upward. Part of the wall on one side had fallen across the entrance, but the stone lintel above it was still in place, and the beam of Palmer’s torch was resting steadily on this.

  “What is it?” Somerville moved to Palmer’s side and looked up at the lintel. After a moment he made out the marks of incisions on the stone. It was cuneiform script, Assyrian.

  “They chiseled the signs into the stone. Pretty deep, aren’t they? They wanted the message to last.”

  “Can you make it out?”

  “I don’t think it’s a text, it looks like just a single name. Hang on a minute . . .” When he spoke again the pitch of his voice was higher, charged with a tone of protest. “Can’t be,” he said. “Must be a fake of some kind, a theft of identity. If they can borrow the power of a god, I suppose they can borrow the power of a king too.”

  “What king?”

  Palmer lowered the torch. “The name up there is Sin-shar-ishkun,” he said. “There can’t be any mistake. The first syllable refers to the god Sin, who appointed him shar, or king.”

  “There was only one king of that name,” Somerville said. “He died in the flames when the Babylonians and Medes took Nineveh in 612 and put the city to the fire.” He made a gesture toward the doorway and the chamber beyond. “It’s in the Chaldean chronicles. Whoever is in there must be an impostor. Look, it’s getting late now, I don’t think it would be advisable to go any further today. We’ll get them to make a barrier to block off the entrance to this anteroom, keep out the light, keep people out too. Planks lashed together will do. We’ll set a guard of four men to stay at the top of the shaft. I’ll stay with them if you will send someone with provisions for me. Tomorrow morning we’ll clear the doorway and try to shift the doors. With any luck, they will still turn on their pivots. It won’t take more than two or three hours. Then we’ll see who is inside there.”

  “No reason why you should do the whole night. You need sleep just like the rest of us. I’ll come to relieve you around two A.M.”

  In the heightened state of his nerves—and with the knowledge that his assistant disliked any disturbance of his sleep—this offer brought a prickle of tears to Somerville’s eyes. He was reluctant to accept, however, reluctant to leave the scene even for the space of an hour. But Palmer insisted and in the end prevailed.

  ______

  Manning had not told Edith the whole truth, by any means: He had limited himself to the American’s duplicity, he had naturally said nothing about his own designs once the report was secured, and he had said nothing that might cause her to suspect that Spahl was on the same quest. Such knowledge was useless to her, he had reasoned, and might even be dangerous, causing her to do or say the wrong thing. He was not a man with a great play of mind, but he had seen from the way she took the news—first the rage, then the tears—that there had been something going on between her and Elliott, that the swine had been taking advantage of her. Hell hath no fury, he had said to himself sagely, and he took care not to fan the flames.

  Consequently, Edith, in deciding what to do with the papers that had been so falsely entrusted to her, had no idea that Alex was in any real danger. She wanted to show her contempt for his behavior and to make sure he understood that all was over between them. After some thought she decided to return the papers to him publicly, with as many spectators present as possible to add to his discomfiture. On the morning following the major’s revelations she rose somewhat earlier than usual and took more trouble with her toilette, arranging her hair carefully and putting some color on her cheeks. She chose a dress that she knew to be becoming, one that fitted close but not so much as to be vulgarly flaunting. When she felt sufficiently ceremonious and prepared for the scene she made her way to the courtyard, Elliott’s folder under her arm.

  She found everyone but Palmer seated at the breakfast table; he was still at the site, and Patricia was proposing shortly to take him a thermos flask of tea and stay there with him until Somerville returned to relieve him. It was a good occasion, with everyone present like this; in fact during these days there had been what seemed an increased sociability among them; Elliott in particular was never seen alone but always in the company not only of the major but of the Swiss journalist.

  She was put off her stride a little by the sight of her husband at the table; he was rarely at meals now, and she had somehow not envisaged him as a witness. Might he not think it strange, seeing her dressed and made up like this, seeing this rejection of Elliott’s papers along with Elliott himself? But it was too late now to hold back. Holding herself very straight, as she had been taught to do as a child when reciting poetry or acting the queen in pageants—she had always had the queen’s part—Edith walked to the place where the American was sitting and dropped the file with deliberate carelessness on the table beside him. “I have no further use for these,” she said—or for you either, her tone and looks implied.

  But she had forgotten, in the hurt to her feelings, quite a number of things. She had forgotten that Elliott was still officially an archaeologist, that the major would be obliged, in company, to pretend to believe this, that the Swiss would believe it anyway, that it was important for her husband’s credit and his relations with the Turkish authorities that it should be generally believed. These things came to her, all in a rush, in the silence that followed. Elliott had not moved. She felt the color rise to her face. She looked across at her husband with a sort of entreaty, conscious suddenly of how much she cared that his name and his ambitions should be protected. But he did not meet her gaze; he seemed abstracted, hardly aware of what was happening.

  It was Manning who saved the situation, for which she was always to be grateful to him. “Your notes about the Hittites, Elliott, I suppose,” he said. “Have you found any evidence of those bronze-sheathed war chariots you were talking about the other evening?”

  Elliott rose from the table, keeping a loose and careless hold of the file. He did not glance at Edith but looked steadily at the major. After a moment he nodded. “There are indications,” he said. “Certainly there are indications. I am compiling a report.” A sudden smile came to his face, exuberant, full of confidence. He looked with his usual unwavering frankness at the major and Spahl, who were both now standing. “In fact,” he said, “I have already compiled it. It is on my person at present. I am propos
ing to carry it on me at all times—to avoid losing it, you know. When I return home, I am hoping to publish it in the American Journal of Oriental Research.” He turned toward Edith then, but still without looking directly at her. “These notes are no good to anyone,” he said. “They never were.” And as he spoke he dropped the file back on the table with a gesture very similar to hers.

  He was moving toward the door, closely followed by Manning and Spahl, when Somerville, seeming to emerge from some species of daydream, addressed the whole company: “I’d like to invite you all to come over to the excavation site at midday today. We will have cleared the entrance to the burial chamber by then. There is every sign that the tomb has not been disturbed. We expect to find a sarcophagus inside, perhaps more than one. I want you to be witnesses of what promises to be a momentous discovery. I am sure that you as a colleague”—and here he looked at Elliott—“will want to be present.”

  “Certainly,” Elliott said.

  “I too,” Major Manning said. “Sounds dashed interesting.”

  “This in my article will find a place,” Spahl said.

  Somerville looked at his wife, noticing that she looked particularly attractive this morning. “I know I can count on you to be there.”

  “Of course.”

  The invitation issued, Somerville remained where he was, watching the others leave the table, Edith too. She had eaten nothing; she had not so much as sat down at the table, unusual with her, she always enjoyed breakfast. He himself had eaten very little. He had been punctually relieved by his assistant, but he had not succeeded in sleeping much afterward. He was overwrought, and the talk he had had with Palmer before leaving for the house had added to the tension of expectation he was living under. Palmer had not been able to sleep either, and lying awake, waiting to return to the site, he had remembered something. The series of Chaldean chronicles that began in 616 B.C. were an invaluable record of the last days of the Assyrian kingdom and provided a detailed account of the destruction of Nineveh by the Chaldeans and Medes in alliance in 612. There were omissions in them, of course, and defacements of the text, and one of these last had come to his mind and assumed particular significance as he lay there. He had tried to bring the passage to mind but had not been able to remember much but the date. A strong attack they made against the city and in the month of Ab . . . Then he had remembered, with sudden excitement, that the words referring to the king’s death had been bracketed off in the translation and queried as uncertain. On that day Sin-shar-ishkun, the Assyrian king [was killed?] . . . Some accidental damage to the face of the text, just at this point, a chance in a thousand? Or some uncertainty on the part of the scribe? Was there some alternative version, some knowledge possessed by only a few? In any case, in the absence of more evidence, that he had died there was an assumption, no more than that. He was thought to have perished in the flames because nothing more was heard of him after the destruction of the city. But no proof had ever been offered; the body had never been identified.

  This fact—the uncertainty that lay over the king’s death—he had mentioned to Somerville, and they had talked about it for a little while. It was in Somerville’s mind now, to the exclusion of all else, as he watched the others leave the breakfast table, saw the houseboys enter to clear away the dishes. And it was still there a little later as he walked back to the mound, an essential element in what was becoming to his mind a marvelous story.

  On the way he went over the official version of events as far as he knew them. The father of Sin-shar-ishkun was Ashurbanipal, the learned and ruthless, the last great king of Assyria, hunter of lions, creator of the vast library of cuneiform texts at Nineveh. He died in 627, and Kandalanu, the puppet king he installed at Babylon, died in the same year, which had led some to believe, and Somerville among them, that this monarch never existed, that Kandalanu was a throne name and it was Ashurbanipal himself who was worshiped at Babylon in a form of a statue named Kandalanu.

  A not uncommon practice for the Assyrian kings to create alternative selves—it was what he now believed Sin-shar-ishkun to have done. In 623, on the death of his brother, he had become king of Assyria, the last of the line. Eleven years of desperate fighting against the growing power of the Medes, the destruction of Ashur, the home of their gods, the meeting of Nabopolassar the Chaldean and Cyaxares the Mede below the walls of the devastated city, the agreement they made there to divide the dying empire of the Assyrians between them. From that point on they were to fight side by side, and Assyria was doomed. Then the final battle, the final siege, and the defective text that Palmer had remembered.

  His excitement increased as he drew nearer the mound. Today might see the answer to the enigma contained in the chronicles. A totally new light on the last years of the Assyrian kingdom. If so, he would go down in the annals of archaeology, and Palmer with him; he would join company with the great ones of the past, so much revered, Layard, Rassam, George Smith. He would be famous; he would be in demand; he would never again lack for financial backing.

  He found Palmer sitting hand in hand with Patricia at the entrance to the vertical shaft. Hardly a hundred yards beyond them, the tin roofs of the German sheds gleamed in the early sunshine. The workpeople were arriving, and the two foremen stood talking together at some distance from the shaft, obviously wanting not to intrude on the young couple. Fortified by the tea Patricia had brought him and by her company, Palmer declared that he would stay on and see the progress of the work. Patricia too wanted to stay. Only one group of six, composed of the workmen Somerville trusted most, under the pickman who had found the stone carving of the Guardian, was set to work on clearing the rubble that lay over the entrance to the tomb and opening the stone doors. The rest of the people, directed by the foremen, were set to work higher up on the side of the mound, one party continuing to trace the course of the wall, the other taking up the flooring of the ash-covered platform they had found.

  By midmorning the rubble had been cleared. The six men were enough to make the stone doors swing open on their iron pivots. Somerville sent them up to the surface and stationed Elias at the mouth of the shaft with instructions to wait there for the people of the house and allow no one else to come down. Then—and only then—he and Palmer, armed with lamps from the anteroom, stepped over the broken brick that still lay strewn over the threshold and entered the chamber.

  Set longways against the wall that faced them as they entered, and occupying most of the wall—there was scarcely room for a man to stand at either end—was a terra-cotta sarcophagus three or four feet in height, closed with a slightly beveled lid, also of terra-cotta. In the walls on either side were shallow alcoves containing carved alabaster vases of closely similar design. Otherwise the room was bare.

  Somerville halted in the middle of the room, held back in these first moments by a sort of superstition from proceeding farther, as if haste might seem disrespectful to the presences here. He held his lamp up toward the ceiling. “It’s a perfect barrel vault,” he said. “These bricks were set by people who knew what they were doing. Shaft, steps, anteroom, burial chamber—he must have had it built long before, maybe years before. He wanted to be ready for the end, when it came.”

  “There’s an inscription.” Palmer had not been so reluctant to approach the sarcophagus. He was crouching forward now, looking closely at the foot.

  “Can you read it?”

  “I think so, yes. Take me a bit of time. The terra-cotta is in good condition, good as new, almost.”

  “Is there a name?”

  “Hang on a minute. There’s an invocation to the gods at the beginning and the usual curse on anyone who comes to disturb the tomb. The name of the occupant should be somewhere between. Yes, here it is, two names.” He paused here for further scrutiny, a pause that seemed long to Somerville. “One of them is Sin-shar-ishkun,” he said at last. “I can’t make out the other just yet. It’s a woman’s name.”

  The rush of relief these words released in Somerv
ille made him unsure he could control his voice if he tried to speak. He fell to studying the lid of the sarcophagus. It was sealed with bitumen, he saw now. “We’ll need a sharp, thin-bladed knife,” he said, restored to self-control by this practical consideration. “Preferably with a serrated edge. Would you go up and ask Elias to find one for us?”

  He made no further attempt to examine the sarcophagus while he waited but stood without moving in the center of the room, feeling the silence of the place settle over him. Two names. It was unusual; in fact he had never heard before of an Assyrian king and his consort laid in the same coffin or even in the same tomb. The royal women were buried at home below the domestic wing of the palace; the kings were customarily taken to Ashur, dwelling place of the father-god, for burial. But the city had gone up in flames, and the god Ashur made captive and led away on a cart in 614; it had been the first of the Assyrian power centers to fall. The tomb must have been built well after that. He could not recall the name of Sin-shar-ishkun’s queen; perhaps he had never known it.

  When Palmer returned with Patricia, they were accompanied by Edith. A few minutes later Elliott, Manning, and Spahl arrived; it seemed that these three had walked over together. Somerville waited until everyone was assembled and the lamps were set around the wall. Then he set to work with the knife Palmer had brought. It was easier than he had thought, there was hardly need for sawing; the bitumen was brittle, the seals parted one after the other as Elliott and Spahl, standing on either side of him, eased up the lid very slightly at the points where the knife was inserted.

  “We are ready to take the lid off now,” Somerville said. “It will probably need four of us at least. I’d just like to say a few words first. I wanted you to be present so that if questioned about the authenticity of these proceedings you will be able to give eyewitness accounts. Mr. Spahl, in particular, as a journalist of considerable standing, might be willing to bring the discovery before a wide readership, might even be glad to be the first to do so.”