How long I walked aimlessly over that vast killing ground I do not know. Darkness had long since closed over the earth; there was only the light of torches from the camp. I must have been drawn to them. It was at the edge of the camp that I found the king. He was alone, sitting on the back of his chariot, his head in his hands. He looked as if he had been weeping.
Many years later I read of this battle in the annals, of the king’s glorious anger and his victory over the Elamitcs, whose knees trembled like reeds in the wind. It was all lies. The histories of nations are usually lies, their own or their enemies’. The king was not glorious that night when I found him weeping in his chariot. I touched his arm and knelt beside him, for it was easy to forget that he was Lord of the Earth’s Four Corners. He looked up at me, and at first his eyes shone with fear before he recognized me.
“And is it you, Tiglath, my son? You are still alive in all this, eh? It must he the gods have granted you a sedu.”
I started at the word, but he did not notice. He was lost to anything so insignificant as my small shudder of despair.
“Yes, Lord, it is I.”
“And are they gone? Eh? Yes?”
“They are gone back over the river, Lord. I do not think they will soon return.”
The king my father put his hands upon my shoulders, this time not to save me from the gelding knife but to support his weary heart. He was old and frightened and so he rested in his son’s arms, for all men must trust someone. Thus it was that we found each other on the blood soaked plains of Khalule.
Chapter 6
The next day, and the next, we gathered our dead from the plain at Khalule and buried them with offerings of food and wine. The corpses of the enemy we looted and left to the crows; their wounded, those who had survived the night, we put to the sword. We took their hands and heads for trophies, for there was no mercy in our bowels. When we had finished, we nursed our own wounded and rested, waiting for the king to issue commands. The Elamites had withdrawn—not even our outriders could find them — so we were free to call the battle ours if we wished, but I remember no talk of victory.
So we waited for the king my father to tell us what he wished of us, praying in our hearts that he would not order us across the Turnat and into the Land of Elam, for we had no more heart for war. The ground on which we had fought was covered with the stinking carcasses of men and animals and the fresh turned earth of graves. Our losses were close on to two men in five, and the enemy must have suffered even worse. If we pursued them into their own kingdom, they would be driven to the limits of desperation, and no foe is so deadly as he who has abandoned the hope of life.
But for three days the king kept to his tent, refusing all food, seeing no one. None were admitted into his presence, not even the turtanu. And thus we waited, measuring the bitterness of our suffering against what was left of our manly courage. None thought of rebellion against the Servant of Ashur, the Lord of the Earth’s Four Corners, for the king was sacred and the soldiers of the god were pious men, but the mood in the camp was dark. We waited, for there was nothing else.
The death of Nargi Adad had made me rab kisir in fact as well as name, for there was no one else to lead. The men in my company were only common soldiers, lost without someone to give them their orders—it was then I first understood that for a warrior orders are the breath of life, all that stands between him and what he fears more even than the enemy, that terrible chaos of his own ungoverned will.
And thus it was my place to argue with the supply officers for bread and beer, to see that the physicians attended to my soldiers’ wounds, and, more than all else, to keep them occupied with work. I was not quiet in my own mind—the wound along my rib cage pained me constantly, and I had used up all of the ointment in Kephalos’s green jar to help those among the men who might have died without it. Besides, from one day to the next, my memory had grown clogged with unspeakable recollections, so I was glad to be busy in the management of others. Authority and the endless business that follows in its wake are the best vehicles of escape from oneself. Each day, as my soldiers grew to depend on me more and more, my command over their loyalty became ever more firm, and each night as I lay down upon my bedroll, too tired even for dreams, I put yet a little more healing time between myself and the horror of that one long day.
On the third evening after the battle, as I sat with my men around a campfire, waiting for the cooking pot to boil so that we could be done with eating and find our rest, I glanced up and saw standing at the edge of the firelight a man carrying the white javelin of a royal messenger. Fluttering from the shaft of the javelin was a silver ribbon, a sign that he carried words to a prince of the blood. I did not at once grasp the implications of this.
“Rab Kisir—direct me to the Lord Tiglath Ashur,” he said. Like all such court officials in all nations, he was a fine looking young fellow and obviously very taken with himself. His beard glistened with oil and his hands, showing white as ivory against his beautifully embroidered blue
uniform, were well tended and as expressive as a woman’s. I would have wagered much that to this one his weapon was no more than a badge of office, a thing to be carried about like a walking stick, but I was dirty and tired and out of temper with the world. Also, I did not care for his manner of addressing me.
“Your search is over,” I answered, hardly looking at him while I used the point of my sword to stir the fire. My men, I was aware, found the exchange rather comical—they were already nudging one another and exchanging sly little winks. It would seem the royal messenger was not greatly to their taste either. “What do you want?”
“You. . ?”
“I. State your business—or am I required to guess?”
He might actually have said something, but if he did I could not hear it in the ensuing laughter. The messenger, when he had recovered from his confusion—clearly a royal prince lying around a campfire with a pack of dirty sweat streaked soldiers was not something he saw every day—he bowed from the waist, touching his right hand to his brow in token of respect. It was a gesture to which no true warrior would have condescended before any man not the king, and I despised him for it.
“I have been sent by the Lord Sennacherib, Prince. He sends you his prayers for a long life and bids you attend him.”
“Now?”
“Now, Prince.”
It was not a summons that could be ignored, so I rose to go, cursing only in the privacy of my heart. Someone handed me a jar of beer, and I rinsed my mouth out with a swallow and spat the rest into the fire, making it hiss like a witch.
“Never fear, My Lord Prince,” said Lushakin, my new ekalli. “I will keep something from the pot for you should the king your father not invite you to stay for dinner.”
The remark was greeted with renewed laughter, for Lushakin was regarded as a great joker, natural enough in the son of a boatman, quick tongued rogues and fine storytellers in all the nations.
“Do not trouble yourself, My Lord Ekalli. Remember that the king has prayed that I might live until breakfast.”
As I followed the royal messenger away I could hear them laughing still, even until the sound was swallowed up by the general buzz of camp noise.
And as we walked I had only to look around me to see that the stricken weariness of my own soldiers, the fear that had sunk bone deep in each of them, was common to all those in the king’s army. The cooking fires lit up their faces as men sat with their arms slumped over their knees, staring out into the darkness as if they could see their own deaths there. Their voices were muffled and hollow; their movements slow. They had the look of men only just recovering from sickness, except that their sickness was not of the body but of the will and spirit. All of this I could see in the firelight that flickered against the black night.
I did not ask myself why the king should send for me. My mind was not clear enough even to frame the question—I could only look out at the things about me and see what was plain to everyone. I h
ad not even the wit to be surprised.
The king’s tent was in the camp’s very center, surrounded by those of his principal officers. It was of heavy purple linen and almost as large as the house of my slave Kephalos in Nineveh. It was even divided into an inner and an outer room so that the Servant of Ashur might preserve his majesty. Except at the entrance, there were no guards posted, for in the midst of his army what had my father to fear from any man?
That he was my father was impressed upon my mind yet again when the royal messenger drove the point of his javelin into the earth and left it there beside the entrance to the king’s tent that all might know the Lord Sennacherib, the sacred king, wished to be alone with the son of his loins.
The outer room contained only a camp table, behind which perched a beardless scribe who could hardly bring himself to glance up from his tablet. The flap to the inner room was held aside with a cord and the scribe motioned with his stylus that I was to go through.
“And is it you, lad? Eh?”
The king sat on the edge of his cot, dressed in nothing but a plain linen tunic, quite as if he had just risen from sleep, although his eyes said he had not slept in many days. His head was bare and I could see plainly enough the heavy streak of gray that crept through his hair. I knelt before him and placed my hands upon his knees and he took them both in his own, squeezing tightly. I looked into his face and he tried to smile but then looked away, dropping my hands.
“Fetch us some wine, eh? You see it? Yes? It’s over there on the table. Bring a cup for each of us, and we’ll drink to the Elamite king, eh? Hah, hah, hah!”
I said nothing but did as he bid. As he took the cup from my hands I could see that his own were shaking.
“Sit, lad—sit. Come sit beside me.”
He was better after the second cup, and his hands were still.
“They are gone, eh?” His glance drifted nervously around the tent, as if he feared that Kudur-Nahhunte might be lurking behind a chair. “‘They went back across the river, yes?”
“Yes, Lord. They will not return, not for a long time. They have left too many of their best soldiers to lie rotting outside our stockade.”
“Did they?” The king clutched my arm with both his hands. “Did they, lad? Eh? You’ve seen them?”
“Yes, Lord. You have only to step out onto the plain to see the great harvest of corpses.”
“Then let’s do that, lad. We’ll be safe enough, just you and I, yes?”
He rose from his cot, and I helped him into his great silver tunic and with my own hands placed the turban of royalty upon his head. He was like a child being dressed by his mother. When he left the tent one of his courtiers approached, but the king waved him away with an impatient gesture.
“No!” He glared around at the knot of his officers who surrounded us. “None but my son here. A torch!”
One of the guards handed me a torch, and together the king and I walked to the gates of the stockade, men staring at us as we passed as if at the visitation of a god, and then out onto the killing ground at Khalule. The stink of mortality was heavy in the air. There was no light save from the summer moon and the torch I carried, but that grisly landscape needed no other to reveal its horrors. Blood stained the ground, leaving great black patches where it had dried, and the bodies of dead men lay about in grotesque profusion. One could almost hear the anguished cries of their souls as they floated about aimlessly on the night wind.
“It is true then, eh?”
The king held my arm as we picked our way over the litter of corpses—he limped like an old man.
“It is true, Lord.”
“And what of our own army?”
“Badly mauled, but intact.”
“Then we will not march south into Elam,” he said—for the first time that evening his truly was the king’s voice. “We cannot stay here or there will be sickness—phew, what a smell! We will go west, to the Euphrates. With the Elamites gone, that black headed rabble will remember soon enough who is Lord of Akkad and Sumer. We will give my brave men a few months of easy victories, let them grow rich on booty and gain back their confidence. The Babylonians will pay for this campaign, that they may learn the price of their treachery to my son and heir.
“Come, Tiglath—you will stand at my side while I issue the order. They say you fought like a cornered boar and were twice wounded, and in your first battle, too. Let the lords of Ashur see how I raise you to glory, eh? Do your wounds hurt you, lad? I remember how in my first battle I. . .”
And thus did the king my father, in his time of fear, gather me to him. He made me great, as he had promised when I was but a smooth limbed boy, and through him I came to know the ways and uses of power. I never knew what made him send for me, but all that I grew to be in the Land of Ashur I owe to that night.
. . . . .
We did march west, and the great men of Sippar threw themselves at the feet of our king, begging that he might spare the city, for by then all knew that the Elamites would come no more that year into the lands of Akkad and Sumer. The king in his wisdom saw the virtues of an easy victory and accepted their tribute, worshiped at the shrines of their gods, and headed south, keeping always to the shore of the river Euphrates, its waters muddy and its currents slow as a crippled snake. The cities of Cuthah, Kish, and Borsippa all made their submission, for the armies of Ashur were not to be resisted—and would return home soon enough.
We did not move against Babylon, for Mushezib-Marduk, who the previous year had taken the hands of the god Bel and was king in that city, had with him a strong army. He had been at Khalule but like a prudent monarch had suffered his ally to do most of the fighting and was thus still powerful enough to hold his citadel. Babylon, as all men know, is a great city, and to take it against a determined opposition was, for that year, beyond our strength. We fought no more pitched battles that campaign.
And with the end of summer we turned our faces north toward Nineveh.
Along our route of march his loyal subjects came out to do honor to their king: Opia, Samarra, Talent, holy Ashur, Calah, all the great cities of the land. We traveled the road home with garlands of flowers about our necks, and old women greeted us with wine and fruit. We had suffered much, and for the god’s sake and theirs, that all might sleep safe in their beds and dream no dreams of the Elamite. At Takrit they clothed the walls in banners of green and yellow, and at Calah the people knelt by the roadside to accept the blessings of the mighty king.
And at Nineveh, which we saw in the distance just as the first few drops of winter rain were falling, at Nineveh there was joy close to madness that the Servant of Ashur had once more returned to his capital. Women clutching bread and jars of beer in their arms danced in ecstasy at the return of their long absent husbands and men threw coins in the king’s way that they might be blessed by the touch of his chariot wheels. For three nights no one slept within the city walls, for it was a time of festival. The wine shops and brothels were busy places, and women flocked to the temple of Ishtar to couple their duty to the goddess with the excitement of the army’s return. We were a great nation, trampling our enemies underfoot. We were loved by our god, feared by all besides, powerful and rich—all believed this and rejoiced in it. A man in a soldier’s tunic wanted for nothing, had he money or not, and even the meanest soldier’s share of booty was no small thing. Nineveh was far from the plains of Khalule, and here we could believe in our victory.
As soon as the quradu had marched back to the house of war, I stripped off my armor and joined the lines of men waiting to steam themselves clean in the baths. Then I put on a clean uniform and made my way to Esharhamat’s apartments in the king’s palace. One of her ladies led me into the enclosed garden, where Esharhamat was sitting beside her fountain, looking down into the water.
She glanced up and when she recognized me her face seemed to come alive. She danced across the tiled floor—this is the only way to describe how her light little feet flew—and threw herself into
my arms. In an instant I found her lips pressing against mine with an urgency that nearly took my breath away.
“I knew you would come back,” she whispered. “I knew you would not die, I knew, I knew. . .
I kissed her hungrily. I didn’t care who saw us—it didn’t seem to matter. I was back in this garden and Esharhamat still loved me. It wasn’t until we had sat down together, and I held her tiny hands in my own, that I noticed she no longer wore the red tunic of mourning.
“Then you are soon to marry Arad Ninlil,” I said, my heart turning to stone in my breast.
“Never! I will never marry him!” The words seemed to choke her.
“He comes here sometimes,” she went on at last, her voice lower, colder, as if the memory froze her heart. “He stays for dinner with his mother and looks at me with wide, hungry eyes. Once he. . . I hate him. I will never marry him. I will never marry anyone but you, my Tiglath Ashur, whom the god loves as I do. Never.”
I had only to look into her eyes to know that she meant it. She would bring down the king’s wrath upon us. We both might perish, but for myself I could not be otherwise than full of joy. This moment seemed worth a thousand deaths.
“But you are out of mourning. . .
“Yes. It had gone on long enough. I never cared for him—he was never truly my husband.”
“Then nothing has been said of Arad Ninlil?”
“Nothing.”
We both smiled, absurdly happy. We were only reprieved, like prisoners given another day before they must face the executioner’s knife, but what did that matter? We had this little space of time still left to us. Nothing else seemed important.
I tried to tell her of the campaign, but strangely she seemed to know everything already. Of the slaughter at Khalule, of the march through the cities of the south, everything. She even knew that I was now high in the king’s favor. Word of all these things had reached Nineveh long before.
When I spoke of the king, Esharhamat only smiled, watching me out of the corner of her eye. For her all things seemed easy and obvious. It was only after I had gone from her that I realized I had understood nothing, that Esharhamat had grown to be the sort of woman before whom all men are merely children.
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