The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  The sight of him, his nakedness and his mad, glittering eyes, troubled my mind and I did not know why. He had connived with the Elamites to bring the marsarru to ruin and a shameful death. He had insulted the majesty of Ashur. It was fitting and proper that his own death should be a mocking agony. And yet I could find no satisfaction in the spectacle. I watched for a while, for Tabshar Sin had said it was wholesome for a soldier to witness these public shows of the king’s wrath, telling me that the sufferings of one’s enemy were sweet, but I could not enjoy them as I had expected. Of this softness I was ashamed.

  The walls of Nineveh rose to such a great height that they seemed almost more the work of Great Mother Earth or of the younger gods than of men’s hands. They shut out the city and its noise so that one might almost fancy these had never existed. Beyond them were fields of barley that stretched out endlessly and, always, the great Tigris, queen of rivers. Sometimes, at night, if a solitary man came outside the gates for the refreshment of his soul, the only sound he heard would be her rushing waters.

  But there was no solitude now. The chatter of ten thousand voices stilled the rivers urgent whisper. The confused, swirling movement of ten thousand bodies screened the earth from my eyes. It would be so until the usurper’s cries had ceased to be diverting to the multitudes of Nineveh.

  It was the sixth hour of the morning, when the sun had nearly reached its height. I stood near Nergalushezib’s cage in the uniform of a quradu, a member of the king’s personal bodyguard, holding the javelin I carried everywhere. It would have been the work of an instant to raise my weapon and strike. The distance was no more than twenty paces; it would have been an easy matter to split his heart like a wineskin left out in the sun, and then the crowd would have had nothing left to grin at. I felt a strong impulse to do this—I did not consider that I would be punished for the act, for I was high in the royal favor and disdained to think of punishment—but a quradu is above all else loyal to the king’s will and it was the king’s will that Nergalushezib should live through the extremity of his suffering. So I stayed my hand.

  “Tiglath, is it really you?”

  I felt a hesitant touch upon my shoulder and turned around to see a woman standing behind me. Her face was covered with a marriage veil, but there was something about her eves that stirred my memory. She was richly dressed, after the fashion of court women—the fringes of her shawl were decorated with tiny gold and silver coins, and the red weave of her widow’s tunic was shot through with silver thread. She was a great lady, and behind her, when I had the presence of mind to look, I saw three other women in attendance, also richly dressed, and a tall eunuch carrying the staff of the royal household.

  But this great lady was in stature hardly more than a child. She did not seem old enough to have known a husband, let alone to have lost one, and her eyes, luminous and black, said that she was still waiting for the man who would make the blood quicken in her veins.

  I peered into those eyes, which seemed as familiar to me as the reflection of my own image, but I could not speak her name. At last, and with a glance behind her to make certain none would take note of her boldness, she unfastened the corner of her veil and let me see her face.

  Yes—the truth my heart had known was answered. She was Esharhamat.

  “Don’t you know me, Tiglath?” In her voice was the faint quaver of a sob.

  But she need not have feared I would forget her. In the years since I had departed from the house of women I had tried with all my might to blot her image from my memory. “When you leave this garden you will no longer love me,” she had said, but I had carried my love away and it had never left me. Would for both our sakes it had been otherwise.

  “Yes, I know you, Esharamat,” I answered, my voice nothing but a thick whisper. “I would know you in the dark, with the eyes plucked from my head.”

  “But not, it seems, until I had taken away my veil.”

  She smiled, for her confidence in her power had returned, and with her white hand she returned the veil to its place.

  And then, for a long moment, we were both too overcome with shyness to speak.

  It was still Esharhamat, but the child was almost gone. In her place was the woman she would be, and very soon. She had always been beautiful to look upon—her skin was still wondrously clear, pale almost to transparency, and her features possessed a delicacy hardly known among the river people—but now she was all of that and bewitching as well. Her eyes, so deep a man could lose himself in them, held me with a magic I could neither understand nor resist. I could only stare helplessly. She was so familiar, and yet I felt as if I had never really seen her before.

  Then the damned soul over whose wretchedness we had all come to rejoice screamed through the bars of his iron cage, and the crowd laughed again and surged around us, and the spell was broken. We both turned to look at him, and my heart almost died within me when I heard his incoherent supplication and saw that he was pointing down with his arm at the two of us.

  No, it was only at Esharhamat.

  “He seems to recognize you,” I said. “Why would that be, I wonder.”

  “I was here yesterday and the day before.” Esharhamat lowered her eyes, as if confessing to some terrible frailty. “It is the king’s wish, since Ashurnadinshum was my husband. I must come each day until. . . Perhaps he knows, and somehow blames me for. . .”

  Yes, of course. I had known of her marriage to the marsarru, which had been celebrated here in Nineveh only a few months before the Elamites crossed over into Babylonia. It had been judged, it seemed, that she was still too young to enter into the duties of a wife, and her husband had left her behind when he returned to be lord once more over the black headed people. Otherwise she might have followed him into captivity and death.

  But no—Nergalushezib could not have known the identity of the child woman in her mourning tunic. It was vain to speculate about what might have attracted his attention to her, about what could have been going through that tormented, crippled mind. I turned away and, putting my hand upon Esharhamat’s arm, drew her eyes back to me.

  “He cannot blame you,” I said. “What he suffers is done by the king’s will, who revenges himself upon one whom he numbers among his son’s murderers. That wretch is beyond blaming anyone now.”

  “Thank you, Tiglath,” she murmured as she allowed the tips of her fingers just to brush the back of my hand. “Have you ever felt that. . . shame? To have done nothing, and still. . ?”

  “Yes. But we cannot help what we feel.”

  “No—we cannot.”

  She turned, as if to go. It seemed I had not had time even to catch my breath.

  “Will you return again tomorrow then?” I asked. Surrounded by strangers, I could not speak my heart. I could but hope she still loved me a little and would hear all I left unsaid.

  And did she? Was what I saw in her face no more than my own entreaty being mirrored back to me, or did the way the light changed in her black eyes mean that she too hoped that, having found one another again, we would not now remain forever parted?

  “Yes. Tomorrow.”

  “At this hour?”

  “Yes.”

  Once more her hand reached out to me. For an instant we almost touched, but perhaps we were already too far apart, for she caught back her arm, hiding it beneath her widow’s shawl as if its very existence were some guilty secret. She turned away again.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, but if she heard me she gave no sign. In an instant the crowd swallowed her up and she was gone.

  I hardly knew what I should do. It was as if some part of my soul, long dead, had suddenly returned to life. It flooded back upon me, all the love I had kept dammed up in my heart, and I thought it possible I might drown. Among the Greeks there are many who sing of love’s sweetness, of its mad joy, but they are merely singers. For those who truly love, to whom love comes early in life and lingers through the years like a ghost that will not be driven out, it is an agony tearing at
the liver. Love is a sharp knife in the hands of a child—it cuts to the bone and leaves a scar that time can never rub away.

  Esharhamat was still a maiden—her virginity was something I would prove for myself in time—but she was also a widow, one whose husband had been swallowed by the earth, and therefore free in the law’s eyes. I knew that as soon as her period of mourning was finished the king would give her to Arad Ninlil, his second son by the Lady Tashmetum-sharrat and the new marsarru, but I did not care. As a widow she had her own establishment—she was not shut up in the house of women—and she could come and go as she liked. She was within reach.

  I did not care about Arad Ninlil, whom everybody knew for a languid, cruel brute and half an idiot. The prospect of his being Esharhamat’s husband was repulsive enough—he was not such as any maiden would relish taking to her bed—but he was a future evil, and the future beyond tomorrow did not exist for me. There was only this moment. I felt a longing that seemed to fill me, leaving room for nothing else, as if my skin were merely a thing to contain it. I knew I was about to throw my life away like the rind of an empty melon, and I did not care.

  Suddenly I wanted nothing so much as to be alone. The crowd of strangers was an oppression, and I wanted to breathe cool air and listen to nothing except my own thoughts. I decided I would follow the wall south until I came to the river, for I had a great longing for the sound of its rushing waters that it might wash over my mind and cleanse me of this torment.

  As I walked along I stabbed lightly at the ground with the point of my javelin. It was my favored weapon and I was never without it. I could hit a mark the size of my open hand at seventy paces, and in close combat a skilled fighter can empty a man’s guts from his belly with a single stroke of its copper tip, but I had never used it except in hunting. I would be brave and terrible in war, and I would joy to lay down my life for my king, but this was all in the abstract. At the moment I was plotting how I could cheat him of his heir’s intended bride.

  I loved Esharhamat, and that was not abstract. The shyness that had undone me on the night of Kephalos’s dinner party was far in the past, for it was an easy thing to become a man in the city of Nineveh. Almost as soon as my voice had changed I went to the temple of Ishtar, dropped a silver coin into the lap of one of her sacred harlots, and the thing was done.

  Once in her life, each woman owes this duty to the goddess—she waits beside the temple door until a man comes, and he gives her a silver coin, which thus becomes sacred and is never spent. This she does that the goddess may smile upon her and make her marriage fruitful. For a pretty woman it is the business of a single evening, but some must wait for months, even years. And some decide never to leave and consecrate themselves to the goddess’s service. These become skilled in all the ways of fleshly love and are honored wherever they go. I confined myself to such, although their price was higher, and as a matter of routine and for the sake of my health, like all the young men of the royal barrack, I visited them once every week. They did not touch my liver—that was not their concern—but my visits to the temple allowed me to be quiet in my mind.

  That was all finished now. I loved Esharhamat. If it happened that I never put my hand upon her in the whole of my life I still would not find peace in any other woman’s arms. In an instant, with a smile as guileless as when she was a child, she had ended all of that for me. I could not regret it.

  There is a place where the city wall appears to step to one side to avoid getting its robes wet. The river hurries by, Nineveh seeming to rise from its banks. In the season of floods its waters almost touch the wall, but that time was past now. I seated myself on the bluff, letting my feet hang down almost to the river’s surface, and balanced the javelin across my thighs. I had only to remember the moment Esharhamat had undone her veil that I might see her face, and I was filled with a wretchedness that was itself more profoundly joyous than anything I had ever known. I did not know what I felt. I had become a stranger to myself.

  That I was a condemned man I had not a moment’s doubt. The king’s favor did not extend to tampering with the destiny of his house, so when he knew that I had raised my eyes to her who must be the mother of all the kings to follow, he would strip the skin from my body and nail it to the city gates. This seemed right and just to me—I did not question it. That I must love Esharhamat, this too seemed beyond my power to prevent. Thus I regarded myself as a dead man. Perhaps not this year, or the next, but soon enough. I had found my simtu, my fate, the end the gods had selected for me. How could it be otherwise? Where else could it lead, this love that had begun against the background of a public execution? Somehow I could not bring myself to care.

  But that I should involve Esharhamat in my disgrace, this tormented me. For if I loved her more than my life, how could I wish her to be otherwise than happy and safe? But could she be happy parted from me when I was thus wretched away from her? It seemed a knot that would never be untied. I almost wished that the priest’s knife had not been stayed, that I were now a gelding in the tablet house, my mind untroubled and Esharhamat safe.

  And at the same time I was profoundly happy. I had seen her again—I would see her tomorrow. What was this not worth?

  How long I continued thus I cannot say. All at once I looked up and saw my shadow lengthening across the ground and realized it was nearly night. If I did not return to the royal barrack in the next hour, Tabshar Sin would make me spend tomorrow cleaning out the stable and then Esharhamat would think I had deserted her. I sprang up as if the river had suddenly turned to boiling.

  “Have I startled you, Prince?”

  I saw him and heard his voice in the same instant. He was standing at the edge of the bluff, seven or eight paces distant, and in his right hand he held the staff of a pilgrim. He was an old man—his hair and beard were whiter than a pigeon’s wing and the sun had burned his face to the color of harness leather. He stood with his head uncovered and wore the yellow robes of a priest, although I had never seen a priest wear anything so threadbare—the garment looked as if he could have been born in it, and it and he had grown old together.

  Moreover, I had never seen a priest who was not smooth skinned and fat, for priests are great lovers of luxury, and this man was as gaunt as a corpse dug out of the hot sand. His collarbone was clearly visible under his thin tunic, and the ridges of his brow were so prominent that his eyes seemed buried deep in his face.

  He smiled, but he appeared to be looking through rather than at me. And then, of course, I understood—the old man was blind.

  “No, you have not startled me,” I replied. His hand moved slightly on the staff—a small thing but eloquent in its way, enough to suggest that he knew I was lying. “I simply remembered that I have to be somewhere else. The hour is late.”

  “Is it?” The old man turned his dead eyes to the sky, as if he wished that they might at least feel the dying day’s heat. “Not for you, Prince. “Your day has hardly even begun.”

  We stood on the bluff facing each other, a breeze from the distant mountains beginning to stir around us, and I was overcome with a sense of dreamy unreality. The setting sun at the old man’s back cast an aura about him, like the melammu, which the Greeks call “nimbus,” said to signify the presence of a god.

  “You know me, then?” I asked. I was not at all sure I wished to hear the answer.

  “Yes, I know you. You are Tiglath Ashur, are you not? And you have the mark of the blood star upon the palm of your right hand.”

  “But—you are blind! How. . . ?”

  “Am I?” He shook his head, as if in pity, and he smiled. “Am I blind or are you, whom the sight of this world dazzles so that you cannot see what the god would show you? No, you needn’t be frightened. I am no more than a man, and it is not I whose shoulders the god surrounds with his divine light. Your soul is troubled, Prince? Do not fear. All will unfold by design. All this has been foreseen, and the sin will not be yours.”

  “You speak of sin?” I asked, fo
r I understood now that I was in the presence of a maxxu, a holy man, one who speaks with the god’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  I approached, quietly, as if stalking a deer through the high grass. He knew I came near but made no sign. His blind eyes never left my face—I might have thought he could see except the pupils were misted over like the river on a cold morning. He was blind and a stranger, yet my life seemed open to him.

  “I come from Mount Epih—do you know it?”

  I stopped. I shook my head. “It is sacred to Ashur. Few have ever been there.”

  “Few have, yes. But you will one day. Until then listen to the promptings of your heart, for the god Ashur has entrusted your footsteps to a sedu. All is by the god’s design. The sin will not be yours.”

  “What sin, old man?” I reached out my hand, but I had not the will to touch him. It was not in my power to touch him. “What sin? Speak!”

  “Do you wish to know? Truly, Prince?” The smile said once more that he pitied me my ignorance. He raised his arm and pointed toward the city wall.

  “Look to Nineveh, Tiglath Ashur. Its streets will become the hunting ground of foxes, and owls will make their nests in the palace of the great king. Do not think that happiness and glory await you here, Prince, for the god reserves you to another way. Here all things will be bitter—love, power, friendship. Sweet at first, but, in the end, bitter. The sedu protects your footsteps. Listen to your heart.”

  “My sedu? What. . ?”

  “You bear his mark, Tiglath Ashur. We will meet again.”

  He turned, as if dismissing me from existence, and walked away—away from me and from the city he had cursed with his prophecy. My mind was full of words, but I could not speak them. I could only watch helplessly as his figure contracted in the distance.

  . . . . .

  “Then it is not your simtu to have your hide nailed to the city gate. By the sixty great gods, I imagine it comes as a relief, brother.”