This satisfied them, and we pitched our tents by a spring that gushed from the bare rock like an omen of peace. We set our cooking fires and ate and each man felt safe as he prepared to close his eyes. I did not sleep that night. I was not afraid but I felt a strange excitement, such as a man might feel on his wedding day. Every man’s existence is a riddle to himself—I was not unique in this. But I felt as if I had come to the verge of that discovery for which each of us searches as long as the life is quick within us. I was then still just young enough not to fear that.
The hour before dawn brought a thunderstorm. There was no rain and the sky was clear of lightning, but the angry, rolling boom of the thunder was enough to shatter a man’s skull. We sat around our dead fire, wrapped in our cloaks, terrified, waiting for the light of morning.
“Do not do this thing which is in your heart, Rab Shaqe,” they pleaded. “The god, who sees through our every thought like water, is angry. No sedu, though yours is mighty, can protect you from the wrath of Ashur.”
“I will go,” I said, for all that my courage was shaken like a reed in the wind. “The god merely announces himself. If I am afraid of a little noise I am not worthy to come into his presence.”
But I was afraid. Even after the storm had passed and the sun shone, I could not eat any breakfast. Yet this seemed a thing I must do, although why I could not have said.
After performing the rituals of purification and making offerings of bread and salt and the cuttings from my beard, I said goodbye to my comrades, almost like one going to his death, and put aside all my weapons, save only the sword, which is Ashur’s special symbol.
“The day after tomorrow is an evil day,” the ekalli Sinduri told me, looking like a man about to bury his brother. “Thus you must be down from the mountain by tomorrow night.”
“If I am not back by then, you may assume that the god has taken my life.”
“We will wait, and offer prayers and sacrifice that Ashur may forgive you this folly.”
Thus we parted, while the grass was still wet with dew.
At the foot of the mountain I took off my sandals, knelt, and laid them beside the path that the god might see I wished not to profane his holy place and would not touch it with any flesh but that of my own living body, that I submitted myself to his will. Thus I began the climb that would bring I knew not what.
I was soon out of sight of our camp, for the trail I followed for the first six hours, until well after midday, wound its way about the mountain like a coiled snake. Each step took me only a little higher, and the way was narrow and covered in places with loose rubble, sharp little stones on which I cut my feet many times. It seemed to wander on and on, rising little by little, slowly wearing me down like the wind smoothing a stone. Yet it was still recognizably a trail. I was glad to have it, for it did not last forever.
Eventually I left even that behind and found myself scrambling over crumbled granite, where I held on to cracks in the rock or the odd bush that always threatened to pull loose with the first tug, or faces of smooth stone that had baked in the pale sun until they were as hot as the walls of a potter’s kiln. And always I seemed to be pulling myself straight up, a cubit at a time. There was no end to it. Ashur, it seemed, meant to guard his secrets well.
After the third hour past noon I threw myself down to rest in the shade of an overhang, too weary to go on until I could catch my breath. My legs and arms, even my chest, ached with weariness. I could not remember ever having been so spent. And I was still, it seemed, many hours of climbing from the summit.
I would never make it, I decided. So exhausted, I would surely commit some clumsy blunder and scatter my brains on the rocks below. And besides, it would soon be dark. To climb in the dark is to invite death.
I could have turned back, stopping for the night if the light failed me and climbing down the rest of the way the next morning, but it never occurred to me to do so. There would have been no point, since I had already come so far, for no man may flee the god’s wrath. There was no possible way except up, where I would live or die by Ashur’s will, since I had placed myself in his hands.
After a while I decided it was time to go on again and stood up. There was a narrow ledge of rock that seemed to taper into nothing around the curve of the mountain slope—not a very promising direction but the only one open to me. I pressed my back against the smooth, featureless granite cliff and began making my cautious way forward.
As soon as I was out of sight of my resting place, I could see that the ledge widened into a path rising steeply up the face of the mountain. It seemed to proceed without hindrance, leading straight up. The god, after all, had delivered me from death.
It was an easy path, and one which others had used before me. For a thousand years the holy men of my race had come here to be received into the god’s presence and to search his designs for the men of Ashur.
Here and there I found bits of writing scratched onto the rocks—the first lines of prayers, sometimes only the god’s name. Sometimes the words were almost worn away.
I had been brought here for a purpose—brought here, for I understood now that I had come not through my own will but because it was the pleasure of one whose instrument I had somehow become. He who had made the earth and sky from the corpse of the slain Tiamat, who had made man from the river clay and revealed to him all skill, all knowledge, all wisdom, this same had set my foot upon this journey.
Even as I followed the rising path, the god gave me notice of his presence. I saw two omens, one of evil and one of good. In the dust at my feet I found spilled water tracing the pattern of a snake, a sign that I would know evil in my life. The water was still beaded upon the earth, as if it had just been laid down. Perhaps a hundred paces farther on I startled a covey of quail that flew away to the left. How water could have come to be spilled there, where hardly even the rain visits, I do not know. Why birds should nest in such a place, where there is not a blade of grass to feed them, I do not know. I could understand these things only as the will of Ashur, who meant me to grasp that I would taste of both evil and good, first the one and then the other.
Ashur’s sun was just turning red over the western horizon when the trail ended in a path of level ground, as bare as if it had been smoothed with a trowel. This was the summit—there was nowhere else to go. I sat down, wrapping my cloak around me, and watched the darkness gather.
I cannot account for the light by which it is said the god declares his presence in that place. It is clearly visible from the ground, seeming to bathe the mountain’s peak, hidden by the clouds, in a divine radiance. Yet as I sat there, on the very crown, I was alone in the cold black night. In his sanctuary, Mighty Ashur hides himself. It remains a mystery.
There was a chill wind that blew in fits and starts, like a teasing woman, but I hardly had the strength even to shiver. I was more than weary, since I had eaten nothing that day and felt giddy with weakness, but my cloak was my only protection against the cold, and above a certain level of physical misery sleep becomes impossible. I would keep a vigil through the night, I thought, and perhaps the god would reveal himself to me.
I took my sword from its scabbard and thrust it point first into the soft earth. It would be my altar in his barren place.
I waited. The wind dropped, but the cold hardened like ice. It sank through my cloak, into my flesh, into my very bones. If the stars shone or the moon had risen, they were hidden from my sight. I could hold a hand up in front of my face and not distinguish the fingers. There was nothing to divide one hour from the next. Even my brain seemed to have stopped.
It must have been a dream, although I was never conscious of having slept. I never started awake—the dream merely faded, leaving me blank, empty, and then the first glimmer of dawn brought with it a return to life. But it could only have been a dream, for the things which happen in dreams never come as a shock, and what was shown to me that dead night, had I been awake to see them with the sensible eye, would ha
ve broken my mind like a dry reed. And yet the dream was no less true for having been a dream, and what I saw was no more than what came to pass.
Ashur is the very light of truth. He is the sun that shines everywhere, and he blinds men with his glory. He blinded the maxxu that he might reveal to him the things which would be. He blinds other men that they should pass through the world seeing nothing else. If I saw him that night—and I will die believing none else—then I saw him as light and fire.
I saw many things that night, and understood none of them. I was not the maxxu, blind to the shadows of things, seeing only the truth. I would return from the mountain still blinded by the world, believing that the truth was a dream and the dream truth.
I saw the great Tigris, mother of rivers, her waters burning. I stood on the bank across from Nineveh and watched the city of men disappear behind a curtain of flames. Did the burning waters consume her? I did not know. I only knew that she was lost to me forever and that I could not enter her gates again.
And then, all at once, I was in the city, and the city was a cage of iron, and my brother Esarhaddon was without, dressed in the uniform of a common soldier, his face twisted with rage as he beat against the bars with his sword. And then the door to the cage opened, and Esarhaddon pointed with his sword out to the trackless wastes and said, “Go!” And the cage disappeared from around me and I was alone in the world.
And I saw my father, Sennacherib, the great king, worshiping before the image of the god. His robes were of gold, but he was an old man and his hair had turned white and his strength had left him. His glory was as nothing, and god crushed him beneath his wooden hand.
And the hand of the god became Esarhaddon’s hand, holding my own. I felt his fingers grow slack in my grasp.
And then everything faded away into a clean, white light that filled the world, leaving room for none. That was how the dream ended, in a blinding light.
It ended, and I was alone once more in the darkness. I do not know how long I waited before the dawn came. Time seemed to have stopped forever.
But the dawn did come. Soon I could see the outline of my sword, still stuck in the earth. When I tried, I discovered that I could not pull it free. I pulled until I thought my back would break, but it would not yield. It seemed to have become anchored to the foundations of the world. Finally I left it there.
I hardly remember the journey back down the mountain. I was almost too weary to put one foot in front of another and my mind buzzed like a hornets’ nest—over and over again these strange and troubling dreams returned to me, like the ghosts of slaughtered men haunting their murderer. But the god must have protected my every step, for at last, with the approach of night, I reached level ground. I could already see the soldiers’ campfire.
“Rab Shaqe, you have returned! Indeed the god must have blessed you above all men.”
“I would hardly call it a blessing,” I said in a toneless voice as I sat down before the fire, staring into its flames as the ekalli Sinduri threw a blanket over my shoulders, for I must have left my cloak on the mountaintop and I was shivering with cold. My brain felt numb. When at last I could be brought to understand what he wished for me, I accepted a cup of wine from his hands and drank it greedily.
“You have returned alive from a fearful and holy place, Rab Shaqe. That is blessing enough.”
“Yes, but he has put his curse upon me for my impertinence, Sinduri. He has shown me the future but has kept its meaning from my grasp. I believe I am condemned only to recognize it when at last it comes.”
Chapter 21
In ways I would have found difficult to explain, this one encounter with the inexplicable changed me forever. Or perhaps it might be more honest to say that it changed not me but the terms in which I understood myself. What I had gained on the summit of Mount Epih I could not have said—not then, at any rate—but what I had lost was clear enough. The god had stripped me of my sense of power. He had made me the witness to events over which I was to have no control. He had taught me that I was nothing, that I had no will, that I was merely the instrument of a future the course of which his contrivance alone would settle. Man, for all the arrogance of his pitiful strength, has no power. There is no power under heaven but that of fate, which is no more than Mighty Ashur’s pleasure.
It was enough to learn on one journey. I was weary of the lesson and desired no more to wander into strange adventures. We turned our horses into the rising sun and headed home. The ride back to Amat took us ten more days.
At last we came within sight of the garrison, with the town, on the other side, closer to the river, hidden behind it. I was pleased to see that the fortress walls had risen another two cubits in height since our departure. As we drew near, the soldiers, taken by surprise in their labors, dropped the tools they had been using and rushed to greet us with cheers. “Ashur is King! Ashur is King!” sounded from many throats, and men held out their hands to touch me as I rode past. Even Kephalos, fat as a brood sow, came running up the road, his arms held high in the air, shouting like a caravan driver.
“So!” he panted, slapping my horse’s withers as he walked beside me, “you have not left your bones to dry in the wilderness after all. See how the wall goes up? These mongrel dogs of camp soldiers will work even faster now you are home, Master, for they have made you their heart.”
I looked down into his bloated, shining face and felt a rush of joy and gratitude that the gods had granted me youth and life and the loyal love of this thieving foreigner. I almost said as much, but then, laughing loudly, was just able to stop myself.
“It looks as if you too have been sweating, Worthy Physician—although I do not notice it has made you any the leaner.”
Then we were both able to laugh. I was home—Amat, it seemed, was now my home, and I was glad of it.
“Dine with me tonight, Kephalos, and tell me all the news.”
“No, Lord,” he answered, shaking his head. “You dine with me, for your cook is only a soldier who knows how to cook nothing except goat flesh sauced with its own stale fat. I will, however, allow you to drink such of your own wines as I have condescended to steal from you.
. . . . .
The table before us was spread with plates of fruit, honeyed locusts, spiced lamb’s meat, and strange, sweet-smelling millet. There was wine in golden cups and a pretty slave girl named Sahish to pour it. Life on the frontiers of empire had done nothing to curb my servant’s taste for luxury.
“Did your tour go well, Master?” he inquired, in the polite tone that indicated as clearly as any words that he regarded me as a great fool who had been wasting his time on profitless wandering. “I trust you noticed that while you were gone I raised the garrison wall to twice a man’s height.”
He puffed out his chest, at the same time allowing his hand to wander down the girl’s shoulder until the thumb rested on her breast. As if she understood this as some manner of signal, she refilled his wine cup almost to the rim.
“So high as that, Kephalos?” I said, finding it difficult not to laugh. “And by your own labors, I’ll wager, without a soul to help you!”
He merely shrugged, as if no jest could wound such dignity as his. “It will soon come to that, Master, for, as you know, the impressed workers will shortly be returning to their fields. Building will proceed slowly enough from now until the end of the warm weather.”
“So be it. A great city is not the work of one winter, and we will both be here to push the task on for many years to come.”
Kephalos did not look much encouraged by the prospect. He sat in silence for a long moment.
“You have received letters in your absence,” he told me at last, and in a low voice, leaning back against the cushions that surrounded him on his banqueting chair. “From Nineveh, bearing the king’s seal—and another from Calah. The riders came five days ago, within hours of each other.”
“And I suppose you have no idea what might be in them?” I asked, wondering at his ton
e—what should surprise anyone about my receiving letters from the king?
“Ah, Master. . .” Kephalos twisted uncomfortably in his seat. “When would I presume to let my eyes rest upon your private correspondence? And besides, you know I command no more than some few dozen symbols in the dagger-shaped writing.”
“Kephalos. . .
“Lord?” He smiled painfully, since he would have the truth wrung out of him—we both knew perfectly well that my scribes, whom he bribed, were as much in his employ as my own.
“Speak, Kephalos. What is the news of Calah?”
“Nothing, Lord. Only that the Lord Esarhaddon plans to inspect the garrison this summer. . .”
“‘Inspect?’” I repeated—I could hardly believe it. “‘Inspect?’ He uses this word to me?”
“Yes, Lord. He uses the word.”
“And what else?”
“And he wishes to announce the impending birth of a son. He says that the diviners are quite certain the Lady Esharhamat will be brought to the labor of a son, no later than the last ten days of the month of Iyyar.”
The same thought, I imagine, was in both our minds. I had last seen Esharhamat on the sixteenth day of Ab, and Kephalos could count to nine as well as anyone.
With an irritation born of that consciousness, he peered into his now empty wine cup and frowned.
“Sahish, you lazy slut,” he shouted, in Akkadian, “shall your master and his guest be left to perish of thirst? Be about your duties, girl, or you’ll find yourself sweeping out the sleeping chambers in a brothel!”
. . . . .
The king’s letter contained no word of Esharhamat. If his son and successor was about to be blessed with an heir my father did not see fit to mention it to me—perhaps the prospect was not very much to his taste, since his message consisted principally of abuse of Esarhaddon.
“The Donkey has been in the south, worshiping at the shrines of the old Sumerian gods and collecting sorcerers—one supposes that even the great are entitled to their diversions. I am constantly pestered with warnings that I must rebuild Babylon before the patience of heaven is exhausted, and perhaps some gesture in that direction is necessary before this division between us becomes a focus for dissent. The Donkey is not popular, so I am forced to clear his way to the throne all the more carefully.
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