The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  But by then, of course, I had grasped something which even a few hours earlier, while I was kept blind by borrowed radiance, had eluded me. This spectacle had been arranged.

  The skilled workmanship of kings. The report would soon reach Nineveh that I had been received in triumph. That I was popular with the army was well known, but now all would credit me with the favor of the city mob, which is not so negligible a thing that great men might ignore it. The priests would be silenced.

  And had I not myself begun to believe? And was that no an object too? The cunning old fox my father would gull me with everyone else. And all this the Lord Sinaiusur had understood from the beginning.

  So the next day, keeping to the role assigned me, I abased myself at the shrines of Ashur, Ishtar, Adad, Ea, Nergal, Shamash, Sin, Nabu, and—simply as a precaution—Marduk. I offered wine and fruit, I burned cuttings from my beard to atone for past sins, and I donated gold, silver, copper and precious stone to the gods’ adornment. I listened, humble and silent, to priestly admonitions. I saw my simtu read in oil streaked water. I consulted the barus. I would prosper, they told me. I would be great in the Land of Ashur.

  In the evening I went to dine at the barrack, where most were veterans of the southern wars and I was greeted as an old comrade. Among the common soldiers there were many who wished merely to touch my hands—such is the power of myth, for had not many of them suffered more and put their lives at greater hazard than I? Men create their heroes and their kings to reflect what is most noble in themselves, for what was I but their image of all they had done themselves? I felt myself humbled as I sat in the officers’ mess, drinking wine with braver men than I who for the rest of their lives would speak of how once they had breached a jar with Tiglath Ashur.

  In the morning we set out again for Nineveh. Once more the soldiers and common people lined the road, and once more they called my name as if invoking the power of the great gods, but this time the wine did not set my head spinning and I was able to wave and smile and know that it was merely emptiness, an illusion like the blue water one sees beyond the baking desert.

  And the Lord Sinahiusur, who rode beside me, was once more the king’s turtanu, to whom all in the land save one must bow.

  “You did well,” he said, his eyes idly searching the horizon—it is a habit which is common enough in old commanders. “There will be other journeys, and these, I think, the king can trust you to make on your own. The nation is like a bride and must accustom herself to the sight of the husband her father has chosen for her.”

  “But Ashur has not chosen, has he? Not yet?”

  “No, but the king has chosen.”

  “I thought you favored Esarhaddon and the orderly succession.”

  “I favor the king’s will, Tiglath.” He turned to me and showed his teeth in a weary smile—the lines about his eyes and mouth were like scars. “And, on reflection, I agree with him that you will sit easier on the throne than your brother. But the god will have his way in this, for all that the king or I may ponder it, and, as you say, the god has not chosen. Not yet.”

  He glanced back over his shoulder, but the soldiers of our escort were riding some twenty paces behind us, so we might as well have been alone.

  “The king listens to women,” he went on at last. “Women, when they wish a thing, sometimes cause a man to imagine he has the power to make all happen according to his will.”

  “But the woman in this case—and I assume you refer to the Lady Naq’ia—wishes by all means that I not succeed my father.”

  “Yes, what you say is true. But the effect is nonetheless the same, for she fosters in him the belief that this will be resolved, one way or the other, by some choice of his. That is the danger. And, of course, there are other voices besides that of the Lady Naq’ia. The Lady Shaditu, you have no doubt observed, strives with all her considerable power to ingratiate herself with those of the blood.”

  From the tone of his voice, and the rather pointed way in which he seemed to look at nothing, I was left in no doubt about his meaning. What had he heard? What rumor could have reached him? The turtanu saw into everything, so what chance had Shaditu of hiding her conduct from his eyes? Still, of my own involvement. . .

  “Lord, I have had no such commerce with my sister.”

  He turned to face me, twisting about on his mount, and his expression registered genuine surprise.

  “No, Tiglath,” he said, “it was not of you I. . . It is perhaps best if you forget I spoke at all.”

  “As you will, Lord.”

  We rode in silence for several minutes. There was no sound save that of stone hardened hoofs against the bare ground. And then, all at once, as if to announce the conclusion of some inner dialogue, the Lord Sinahiusur cleared his throat.

  “Nevertheless,” he said, reaching across to put his hand upon my arm—his eyes were dark and serious, like those of a man who has discarded his illusions one by one. “Nevertheless, it would be well, I think, if in the next reign the Lady Shaditu were put to death.”

  . . . . .

  The Lord Sinahiusur was right when he said there would be other journeys. I went to Calah, to Arbela, to Arrapha, and Balawat. I worshiped at their shrines and ate at the tables of their great men. I visited the garrisons at Zakho and Aqra and Hajiya. I listened to soldiers’ stories and told lies of my own. And everywhere I was treated as the king’s heir and favorite and men loved me because they saw it was my father’s will that they should.

  And the envoys of foreign kings came to me and I spoke to them such words as they desired most to hear, how I would protect them from their enemies, how I held their masters to my heart as I might my own brother. These, of course, they did not believe, so I bribed them with gold and silver, and they sent letters home speaking of me as one who must be accorded honor.

  Nor did I neglect the Lord Sennacherib’s great capital of Nineveh, my home since boyhood, though it had become little more than a place where I stopped, now and then, to wash my face in cold water. In Nineveh there was wealth, which was a power I had learned not to despise, so I courted the great merchants, who lived like lords, and the traders and the lenders of money—though not directly, for that would have been unseemly in a prince of the blood.

  Thus I sent for my slave Kephalos, saying, “The men of substance in all the Lands of Ashur, the men of other lands who dwell here in the city and deal in metal and wood and all precious things, to these you are no stranger. Speak to them for me. Say I wish them well, for they make the land flourish. Tell them I mean to bring peace and order with me when I come to the throne.”

  But Kephalos pulled at his beard and frowned.

  “Master, what if you do not come to the throne after all? Will not then your brother the Lord Esarhaddon remember that my voice spoke for you in the bazaars? He loves you, as you say, but he does not love me!”

  “Then would it not be safer to help me to be king?”

  At last he agreed, and he did not stop at a few words in the ears of rich foreigners but sent out storytellers, hired with his own money, to make the common people marvel at the glory of my deeds. For Kephalos understood his own interests and was ever my friend.

  Thus I worked, and dreamed of becoming marsarru—not from the desire to be king but because I loved Esharhamat, who must be the next king’s wife. And because I had convinced myself that I followed the god’s will.

  I hardly saw Esharhamat in those days, but she registered no complaint for she understood what I was about. We loved each other and tried to wait in patience, believing that patience was all that was required to make us happy. Many times it entered my mind that if I were to ask the king for her hand he would very probably not have refused—he would no doubt think it a wise stroke of policy, to make my selection seem all the more inevitable. The king was no obstacle now. Yet I did not ask. I kept remembering the Lord Sinahiusur’s words: “But the god will have his way in this, for all the king and I may ponder it.” Like a pious man, or a cow
ard, I hesitated to tempt the hand of heaven. I did not ask. And Esharhamat and I met furtively when we could at the house on the Street of Nergal, as if in shame, as if already she were another man’s wife and we guilty lovers who feared to be taken in adultery.

  And all this time the god kept his own counsel—or spoke in riddles. This I learned from the priest Kalbi, an honest fool who had never learned to let his tongue be guided by the times and could thus be trusted. Of course it was his fate that none listened who had a hand to turn aside his unhappy prophecies. This is how the gods jest with us, by dressing truth as folly.

  Kalbi visited me only once. I never saw him again, but the impression he left with me has endured from that day to this. He was a strange little man—short, sudden in his movements, with unkempt appearance and eyes that bulged out of their sockets as if they were being pushed from behind. His father had been Nergaletir, chief baru in Great Sargon’s time, and he was descended from the true line of prophets and seers.

  It was in the month of Siwan, when the floods were subsiding and the land was coming to life again under the hot sun. He came to me at my palace in Nineveh, where my servants brought me word of him upon my return from a day of hunting with the king. I was tired and not in patience to listen to the chatter of priests, but it would not have done to send away one to whose family the gods had entrusted their confidences for a thousand years. So I sent him word that I would see him as soon as I had washed myself, and my servants showed him into my presence at the evening meal.

  “My apologies for making you wait, Honored Priest. Please—come, sit. Do me the kindness of dining with me.”

  But Kalbi stood his ground in the center of the floor, bent slightly forward at the waist, his right hand plucking violently at his tunic while his protruding eyes blinked with painful intensity, as if he were warding off a blow.

  “I—have not come to dine, Lord. I thank you, no.”

  “Then at least sit. Take a cup of wine, at least. No? Nothing?”

  But he would not move. He seemed rooted to the spot—or perhaps merely determined to be rude. I could not tell.

  “I am not accustomed to the usages of princes, Lord.”

  He waited in silence, expectant, almost tranquil, as if this should be answer enough. But my servants too were waiting, and the meal my house steward had put before me was doubtless growing cold, so I decided I would not starve to death merely on a point of etiquette and began eating.

  “Then I wonder what could have enforced this visit upon you,” I said at last, smiling none too kindly—the man was beginning to make me feel uneasy.

  “I come bearing messages,” he said, apparently relieved that the subject should at last have been mentioned. “Strange and contradictory messages—riddles, in fact. I am at a loss to untangle them. Lord, and wondered if you might know. . .”

  “I?” I allowed myself to laugh, although I felt very little in a humor for jests. “I have no skill in these things. Why would you have come to me?”

  “Perhaps because you are most closely concerned, Lord. It is said by many that you will be the next king.”

  “By many, but not, I take it, by the god?”

  “No, Lord.” He shook his head. The blinking had by now achieved a mechanical regularity and seemed to jolt his head, as if his eyelids were boxes being slammed shut and the sound startled him. “I have asked the god many times. I have prayed to him to know; but he keeps your simtu hidden.”

  “But he speaks to you of other matters?”

  “Yes—two. The reign of darkness that is to come, and the black bird which circles over the Lord Esarhaddon.”

  I pushed the plate from me, for suddenly I had lost all hunger.

  “Take care, Priest. The Lord Esarhaddon is a fine soldier who is not to be insulted. He is also my brother, whom I love, so take care what you say of him.”

  “It is not what I say which matters, Lord, but the god. The god does not favor him but puts him under a bad sign. The Lord Esarhaddon will never reign with the god’s blessing.”

  “Then he will never reign.” I took a sip of wine, feigning a calm I did not feel.

  “Then why, Lord, does the god show me a valley of shadow which is to come? There will be evil times ahead for the Land of Ashur—this I know.”

  And Kalbi spoke of omens, of children who had been born with the organs of both men and women, of tremors of the earth, of black clouds hiding the peaks of sacred mountains, of the deaths of stars, of sightings, in the west, of the moon dripping blood.

  “There is a woman, Lord, in the temple of Ishtar, who falls into a trance that the Sacred Lady may use her tongue. She is an old woman who has lived within those precincts since girlhood, and the goddess has borrowed her voice only four times before. Last night was the fifth.

  “But the goddess hides the truth—did I not speak of riddles. Lord? She puts a question: ‘Why must the blood star go down beyond the western waters, to rise again, and then to eclipse forever that the land may wither under the sun?’ It occurred to me that you might know the answer, Tiglath Ashur, since the god has marked your body with the sign of a blood star.”

  “I know no answers. Leave me now, Priest—leave me, for you trouble my mind.”

  “One question more, Lord, and then I will leave you. Is there one known to you who is blind and yet sees?”

  “What do you. . . ?” I stood up so quickly that the table before me jumped away, sending my wine cup clattering to the floor. “What do you know of him? I. . .”

  “Nothing, Lord. I, nothing. It is said that there is a blind maxxu who comes to you. What does he tell you, Lord? Does he speak of a dark time?”

  “I know nothing of such a person. He has never spoken to me.”

  We stared at each other across the empty air. The wine was spattered over the floor like blood—I could not seem to take my eyes from it.

  “Then good night to you. Lord.”

  He was gone. I glanced up to speak to him but he was already gone.

  . . . . .

  Thus I had many things to occupy my mind while I traveled in the king’s name and waited with the whole nation for the god to make known his will. It was in the month of Ab that the oracles were to be read, and as the season approached I received a letter from Esarhaddon announcing that he planned to return to the city for the occasion, bringing his mother with him—I fancy it was rather the other way about, since nothing could have kept Naq’ia from Nineveh at such a time.

  The day he arrived was the hottest of that summer—the very bricks of the city wall bubbled in the sun like roasted fat. I did not envy my brother his journey, for in Sumer the heat could only have been worse, but when I visited him at his palace it was not the discomforts of travel which occupied his mind.

  I found him sitting in his garden, under such shade as a sickly olive tree might offer, afraid to go inside and, already then, at hardly an hour past noon, too drunk even to remember to cover his head.

  “Come into your own rooms,” I said, standing over him—he looked up at me with wide, anxious eyes, as if he couldn’t remember who I was. “Come, brother. In this heat, and with such a quantity of wine in your belly, you are likely to have a stroke.”

  He shook his head and then dropped his gaze to his feet.

  “By the great gods, Tiglath, I might count it as a blessing if I were to die quietly in my own garden. It is terrible, terrible. The worst of misfortunes. I fear I am doomed to live a blighted life if this alu cannot somehow be turned aside.

  I took the wine jar from between his hands and sat down beside him.

  “What misfortune?”

  “Misfortune? Oh—you mean the alu. It happened on the journey, almost before the city gates. A mongoose ran under my chariot and was crushed by the wheels.”

  “Yes? Is that all?”

  “Is that all?” He grasped me by the shoulder of my tunic as if he would shake me into my senses. “Do you not know that to have a mongoose run between your legs is the wors
t magic? Even now my mother’s ashipus are studying to see if perhaps the alu comes only if a man is standing on the ground—I was above the ground, in my chariot. Or, if not, then perhaps some ritual. . .”

  “You do not have to worry about this day’s sun, brother, for your brains have already been baked hard. I never heard any such nonsense about a mongoose.”

  Esarhaddon drew himself up straight, as if to assert his dignity.

  “You have not read as widely as I in the texts, brother. If you had . . .”

  “Since when have you become such a scholar?” I asked, in some astonishment. “As far as I am aware, you can hardly read at all.”

  “I have them read to me.”

  “Where? In Sumer?”

  “Yes, of course.” Esarhaddon blinked at me in astonishment. “It is in Sumer that such learning has been brought to its perfection.”

  “Then perhaps the alu comes only if the mongoose is Sumerian.”

  “You think such might. . ?”

  “By the great gods, brother! Come inside—this instant! Or your alu will have little enough work left to do.”

  With my arm across his shoulder, he went into his own rooms, where his women bathed his head in cool water. At last he slept and was able to forget about the evil magic of a dead mongoose—at least, for a while.