The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  For the first time I saw some of the Scythian women, following on foot behind the wagons, dressed in heavy, wide skirts that reached to the ground and were dyed in the most violent colors, linen blouses with full sleeves which they wore rolled back almost to the elbow, and vests decorated with embroidery and little gold and silver disks sewn onto the fabric. They covered their hair with their shawls but did not go veiled after the fashion of married women in my own land, so I had no trouble seeing their faces.

  I could only conclude that the Scythians took their wives from many lands, either by barter or conquest, for along with the reddish skin, black hair, and catlike eyes that were everywhere in evidence among the men —and, indeed, among the preponderance of the women—I saw light-haired girls with skin like butter, Urartians with their heavy noses and inward sloping chins, one or two blacks, and several who would have looked at home in Sumer.

  But the one thing which was common to them all, and which struck me most forcibly, was the bitterness of their lamentation. All, without exception, wailed as if their livers would burst, the tears running down their cheeks, their hair streaming over their faces. Doubtless these were the new widows—why were none of the survivors’ wives in evidence?—and at first I thought that the Scythian men must be fine husbands to inspire such grief. Then it occurred to me that these tears, these sobbing moans were not the expressions of grief but of fear—deadly, hopeless fear. What could they imagine was to become of them? It was a puzzle to me.

  The wagons I noticed were all driven by boys. Most looked between the ages of eight and ten, and many gave evidence of their mixed blood. I saw no other children of either sex and no women but the weeping widows. The men either walked beside their wagons, holding one of the horses by the bridle, or rode.

  The Sacan showed signs of being a wealthy tribe. Their horses, although a trifle smaller than ours, were handsome and plentiful—taking the proportion of horses to wagons as a guide, I would guess that every family had six or seven, and many had more. The men as well as the women demonstrated a great love of ornament. Many decorated their tunics with the gold and silver disks I had noted before, and even the poorest among them wore bracelets of copper. I saw a number of men—the men, by the way, were generally more splendid than the women—with shirts and tunics of a cloth that caught the light like polished metal, dyed intense reds and blues and greens. I learned later that the cloth was called “seric,” after the people who made it, and that it came from a land many months to the east. I was also told that the thread was woven by worms that nested in trees, but I was not so credulous as to believe such a thing.

  People stared at me as I rode by, but only as a strange sight in their midst. None tried to molest me or to offer me any impertinence, nor was there the least sign of hostility toward the commander of the army which only two days earlier had scattered death among them like rain. At the same time I had no impression that they feared me or had been cowed by their defeat. Truly, they were a remarkable people.

  “Ah, the Lord Tiglath Ashur, son of Sennacherib. Give the word—we will make camp here for the night.”

  Tabiti turned his horse to face me and reined it in to a stop. His casual order, uttered in a flat, expressionless voice, sent riders galloping back into the caravan as if they carried warnings of an immediate attack.

  He smiled at me, showing white, even teeth. It was impossible to guess what that smile might mean.

  “We have made good time,” he said cheerfully. From his tone the two of us might have been intimate friends, traveling together for months. Still, he did not offer me his hand. “The day after next we shall rest by the Shaking Sea, by early afternoon I would guess. The grass and water there are very fine, although the sea itself is dead. It is a fine place—would that we had never left it.”

  “Why did you?”

  The headman of the Sacan shrugged his shoulders and smiled once more his unreadable, catlike smile.

  “It is not good for us to settle in one place too long—only look at the Urartians. Tushpa is a fine city, many centuries old. I have seen it from a distance. Yet the men who rule there must depend upon the king in Nineveh to make war for them.”

  “I came to the Bohtan River to defend the Land of Ashur, not that of the Urartians.”

  “Is this so?” Tabiti, son of Argimpasa, raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “I wonder, then, what other business could have sent their ambassador to Amat?”

  “Then you knew of that?”

  “Yes—little though I was able to profit from it. I would never have guessed that. . . You moved your army with great speed, Lord Tiglath. One can only hope they paid you well for so much trouble.”

  “Twenty mina of gold.”

  “Such a sum?”

  As if driven to it by his surprise, the headman of the Sacan dismounted from his horse and handed the reins to the boy who had been driving his wagon and who I assumed was probably one of his sons. I did the same, and together we strolled back along the road made by the wheels of his caravan. For a long time he said nothing. He seemed lost in thought, hardly conscious of not being alone.

  “I wonder then,” he began again at last, “I wonder that you have consented to this return of ours. They will not be pleased in Tushpa. They may even withhold your twenty mina of gold if you were not wise enough to collect it in advance.”

  “They would not have paid so much in advance, but they will pay it now—I do not propose to give them a choice. Besides, it is nothing to me if they are displeased. If they wish to drive you out, let them do so themselves. I think my lord in Nineveh will be just as contented if you tarry forever by the Shaking Sea, keeping King Argistis’ head muddled with anxious thoughts.”

  “Ah, but if this king does come to drive us out. . .”

  “He will not, I think. I doubt he has the strength—else why would he have sent his emissary to me? I think you will die of bedsores before you are troubled from that direction.”

  “And now, where before he had but one, the lord Sennacherib has two allies, who do not love each other. You are no less wily than a serpent, my Lord Tiglath Ashur—you would have done very well as a Scoloti.”

  He threw back his head and laughed, enjoying his own joke as he clasped his hands behind his back, as if to restrain himself. Barbarian that he was, it suddenly occurred to me that this was a man who could easily rule an empire—who might yet, if the great ones of the earth were not careful. I found I liked him enormously, so I hoped it would never prove necessary to have him killed.

  “And now, come,” he said, taking my arm just above the elbow. “Let us talk and eat and grow a little drunk together. I am told your officers are not pleased to have you so far from the protection of their swords—are they afraid that I shall poison you? Do they actually imagine I could be such a fool as that. . ?”

  . . . . .

  The Scythians do not have very elaborate ideas of personal comfort. Tabiti and I shared our feast squatting together beside a campfire, eating chunks of beef mixed up with wild millet in a pottery bowl. Our drink was fermented horses milk, called safid atesh—which means something like “white fire”—evil-tasting but powerful, which I gathered they vastly prefer to wine, considered an effeminate luxury. The headman of the Sacan served us both out of a single iron pot, using a copper ladle. The safid atesh was kept cool in a wet goatskin bag. The one extravagance was our drinking cups, which were basins of heavy silver set in the brain pans of a pair of human skulls, the mouths kept shut with silver wires—Tabiti held his by inserting his thumb and first finger through the empty eye sockets. He explained that these were the remains of men he had killed himself in single combat, and that it was the custom among the Scythians thus to memorialize a notable adversary.

  “This one,” he said, holding his own up that I could admire the grinning, fleshless face, “was the eldest son of the headman of one of the lesser tribes among the Aryan. I was just sixteen at the time, and I stripped his life from him with a dagger after
he had already killed my horse from under me, breaking my ankle. He got down from his own mount, imagining himself safe and at leisure to make a slow job of me, but he admired his handiwork just a moment too long and I opened up his belly; spilling his guts like fish from a net. The other was a man of no consequence who once attempted to contest my position as headman —I did thus with his skull merely to annoy his family, that they might continue to know their place. There are envious people everywhere.”

  All of which made me wonder how, had the fortunes of battle gone differently at the Bohtan River, I would have looked with the top of my head sawn off and lined with silver.

  “Why do the women lament so?” I asked, curious but also hoping to change the subject.

  “Ah—does it trouble your conscience?” He laughed and slapped me upon the shoulder, for he was by then rather drunk. “But it is no concern of yours. They lament that they must follow their lords into the next world, that is all.”

  “What?”

  He said it so matter of factly that I had trouble believing he was serious, but of course he was.

  “You do not have that custom?” he asked, his narrow eyes expanding with astonishment to almost normal size. “Yes, I wondered why your men took so little trouble burying their friends, but there is a strange variety in such practices. We believe that a man may carry his pleasures with him into the life after death, so a great warrior is buried with his wagon and his goods, including horses and women. The horses have their throats cut, but the women are strangled—I do not know the reason for this difference, except that such is our ancient usage. The cattle and sheep are the inheritance of his sons, since it would not be fitting that they be left impoverished, but his wives will follow him to the grave as they follow the wagon which bears his corpse.”

  I was able to ride back to my own encampment that night, but only just—the safid atesh, which after a few cups had ceased to taste so very repulsive, was stronger than I could have imagined. Tabiti, seeing my woeful condition, had offered me a bed by his own fire, but I knew I could not answer for the actions of my soldiers if I did not return and therefore declined. I think I was almost sober by the time I found my own tent, but I slept very soundly that night.

  The next morning, even before dawn, the Scythian caravan was on its way north again, and we were not long in following it. My head, for the first hour or so, felt as if it were packed with cinders, but a decent breakfast and the cold fresh air put me right quickly enough. There is a limit to how bad a man may feel while he is on campaign, away from the complicated evils of daily life. On campaign everything is simple, and a man is at liberty to be happy.

  And if that was true for me, it was just as true for my troops. They had now absorbed the terrible shock of battle and it had left them changed men—or rather, perhaps, men now for the first time. They had found confidence in themselves, having learned to understand the limits of fear, and this showed itself in their most insignificant actions, in the way they readied their kits and cared for their weapons, in their commerce with each other and with their officers. They had come to see that their lives were now guided by a purpose, and this discovery had released them from their sloth and self-contempt. They would never be the same again. We had won more at the Bohtan River than merely a victory.

  So I was quite content as we traveled through this wild landscape, surely one of the most awesomely beautiful places on earth. I had the leisure, and the peace of mind, to admire the giant fir trees that shadowed us like the walls of a prison, to listen with quite childish delight to the tumbling hiss of the countless fast moving little rivers we crossed, each so cold that one drew one’s hand out of the water numb, to stare in wonder when, quite suddenly, the forest would part before a bare granite mountain that seemed to mock us like an indifferent god. I could understand why the Scythians were so devoted to their life of wandering, for that day, while we wandered with them, it was impossible not to be happy.

  Shortly after noon I sent a rider of my own ahead to seek out the headman Tabiti and invite him to dine with me. It was more than a simple return of courtesies—I was eager to renew my conversation with him, for he was a most singular man.

  An army on the march carries no luxuries, so I had sent our cook into the Scythian camp to buy as much mutton as could be had for twenty silver shekels, thinking to furnish my little dinner party and provide the troops with perhaps a five-or six-day supply of fresh meat, but either the Scythians put little value on minted coins or my man was a bad trader, for he came back with no more than thirty head of sheep, enough to provide some six hundred soldiers with no more than a single night’s treat. Still, we had our banquet that night and Tabiti, sitting on a leather covered stool, for all the world like a king in his own court, filled his belly as willingly as I could have hoped.

  We drank less that evening, and talked more, even until the last embers had died in my campfire. I learned many things about the Scythian tribes, their manner of life and their relations with the other nomadic peoples. I learned why, except for the doomed widows, I had never seen any of their women, who seem to live their whole lives shut up in the wagons of their fathers and husbands. Tabiti grew expansive as the night wore on and told me the whole history of his life and of the wanderings of the Sacan, so far as these were known to him. He described lands far to the east and mighty cities which even his grandfather had only heard spoken of, making me realize that his world was wider than mine, that the Four Corners within which my father Sennacherib claimed in the name of Ashur to be King of Kings must be only a tiny patch—a bull alone in a cornfield might as justly imagine himself lord of creation.

  “And you, Lord Tiglath Ashur, why are you taller than the others of your race? And why is your beard a different color, like wet sand instead of black? Is this because you are the son of a king?”

  “No. It is because my mother is an Ionian woman, brought to my father’s harem from the islands beyond the Upper Sea.”

  “Ah, an Ionian! This explains much—some of my nation have traded with the Ionians for jewelry and weapons, things such as that. They are a wily people, full of craft and slyness. Their minds are ever turning on some new scheme, and they have been everywhere and seen all that the world holds. That is doubtless how you came to be such a cunning serpent of a man.”

  “Does a man inherit his race then?”

  “Oh, yes!” He looked at me as if I asked the questions of a child. “Where we are born is an accident. What we are inside our skins is all that matters. But perhaps, since it is only your mother who is Ionian, you have grown up to be quite the river dweller, happy only with soft mud between your toes. Mothers count for very little; my own was a peasant girl my father stole from her village on the banks of the Euxine Sea, but look at me—it seems to have done me little enough harm.”

  Glancing at me sidewise, he appeared worried lest his words might have given offense, but I only smiled.

  “Ah—this wine is from Urartu,” he went on. “I have tasted it before, once when we raided close to Tushpa. But it is not the worst and, if he washes his throat with enough of it, a man may become drunk on anything.”

  “You are right—the wine is from Urartu,” I answered. “It was part of King Argistis’ bribe, one hundred jars in all.”

  “A mere one hundred jars? Such a paltry bribe is almost an insult.”

  “I expect to get more in time.”

  Tabiti’s narrow eyes seemed almost to close as he grinned ferociously at the recollection of my twenty mina. He reached across and took my arm in his iron fingers, squeezing as if he thought to break the bone.

  “Yes, you do well to take your gold, provided you can get it. But put no great faith in this king or any of his nation—a wise man does not build his wagon of rotten wood.”

  I must have seemed puzzled, for he released my arm and took a long swallow of wine, all the time studying my face.

  “You plan to stop at Tushpa on your way home, Lord Tiglath? Then you will see soon
enough.”

  . . . . .

  The next day—only an hour or two after noon, as the headman of the Sacan had predicted—we reached the brackish waters of the Shaking Sea. And there, quite unexpectedly, a peculiar and touching ceremony took place before the warriors of two great nations. We had hardly dismounted when Tabiti ordered that one of his skull-cups be brought. He slipped his thumb and first finger into the eye sockets and held it in the air for all to see.

  “I declare that from this day the Lord Tiglalh Ashur, a man of prowess and a prince in his own land, is my brother,” he shouted. “And in token of this I invite him to partake of the blood oath of the Scoloti.”

  He caused the skull cup to be filled with wine, and then he took the dagger from his belt, closed his hand around the blade, and then pulled it through, cutting open the palm across its whole width. The blood rushed from his wound, but he made no effort to stanch it—instead, he let it drip freely into the wine.

  Then, with great solemnity, he offered the knife to me.

  It is the sort of thing one must do quickly, without thinking, before losing one’s nerve, for there is nothing so terrible as the hurt one must inflict on oneself. I pulled the knife blade through my fist with a sudden jerk, my heart pounding. When I opened my hand I was relieved to find that the cut, which started at the ball of my thumb, had not gone all the way to the bone. I too let it bleed into the wine before wrapping it in a cloth. By then I had broken out in a clammy sweat and the pain throbbed all the way to my elbow, but the thing was done.

  Tabiti, son of Argimpasa, raised the skull cup to his lips and drank deeply. I did the same. When we were both finished, the Scythians beat the flats of their dagger blades against their chests and screamed their approval like hawks. My own soldiers, not to be outdone, raised their weapons to the cry “Ashur is King!” In the end, we were all very pleased with one another.

  “All true men are brothers, and this world is a strange place,” said the headman of the Sacan. “Remember this oath when you have need of a brother.”