The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  “He proposes to make a tour of the north and no doubt thinks to overawe you with his new splendor. As you love him better than I do, I wish you pleasure in his visit. Certainly it will do him no harm to be separated from his mother for the space of a few months. Since I have grown old and lost my pleasure in her fair flesh, I can see clearly the error I committed by covering her with a veil and calling her ‘wife,’ but the gods punish old men by opening their eyes to follies which cannot be undone.

  “Ghosts flutter about my head and I am oppressed in spirit. My son, has it all been wasted. . ?”

  But if my father could hear only the beating wings of death, all the world around him was awakening to the new year. Each day the sun shone a little longer as it melted the last of the winter snows. The Upper Zab, its waters heavy with their burden of silt, was near its crest. Life had ceased to feel such a vexation.

  Since the new barracks were almost finished, I sent some ten of my officers south to collect the reinforcements which would begin their march to Amat as soon as the flooding ended. They had orders to stop at Three Lions on their return and to bring my mother and some of her women with them. The first phase of my life in this place had ended, and I now longed for so much of a settled existence as a soldier can expect. I looked forward to her coming, and to the season of campaigning which would begin with the hot weather.

  The night of my return was the last I spent in my rooms at the old garrison headquarters, for the next morning saw the beginning of our move to the new palace. The offices and public rooms were still unfinished, but my own wing, where I could live not as shaknu but as a private man, was ready to receive me.

  My mother’s chamber still smelled of wet plaster, but I ordered that the wooden floor be sanded and polished with wax so that all would be ready against her arrival. Naiba worked from dawn to dark in the arrangement of our new household, tiring herself with anxiety that all should be ready to receive the Great Lady Merope, as she called her. Naiba was, after all, still little more than a child and I could not convince her that she had nothing to fear, that the Great Lady was a mild, harmless creature who had herself been a slave in a lord’s house.

  Naiba was a stranger here—like my mother, like myself. We were an odd enough match, she and I. I could not help but wonder what my mother would make of it all when she arrived.

  But the spring would bring the answer—to that and many other questions. There was nothing to do except to wait as the river, having bestowed its gift, went back once more into its own banks and the farmers began again to yoke their oxen to the plow. My soldiers, grown cranky with boredom, talked of campaigns and loot, and once more the battle squares of Ashur’s army formed upon the parade grounds at Amat. It was the time for new undertakings, when once more anything seemed possible.

  It was on the first day of Iyyar that outriders brought back word that wagons, cavalry, and columns of infantry had been seen less than three days’ march from the city. I gave orders to make ready to receive the twelve companies of reinforcements the king had promised. But even before they arrived, when I rode out to count their lines in the distance, I discovered there were only eight, five of foot and three of horse. The dispatches they carried contained no explanation, so it was simply necessary that I content myself with less.

  Still, they made a noble show when they marched up to the fortress gates to present their standards. We could hear the throb of their war drums an hour before the first sentry shouted down from the wall that he had seen their dust on the wind.

  The citizens lined the roads to cheer and I, mounted on my horse with nearly the whole garrison assembled for parade, waited to receive them at the gate. The drums grew louder and I had to keep the reins tight on my horse, made skittish by the gathering noise. I felt my heart beating within me as if in answer as it swelled with a soldier’s pride, for the armies of the god made a fine sight.

  At a few minutes after noon, the force commander, a rab abru from his uniform, broke away from the lead column and at a half gallop came toward me up the road to fulfill the protocol of presenting his compliments and reporting the numbers and dispositions of the companies. He was mounted on a fine black charger and rode as if he was perfectly aware of the glorious spectacle they made together. He was almost upon me before I recognized him for Arad Malik, my royal brother, whom I had not seen since our encounter under the walls of Babylon.

  He reined his horse in to an abrupt halt, saluted, and handed over to me his commander’s baton. I could not have missed the sly smile on his lips as I accepted it and our eyes met.

  “I bring the king’s greetings to the Lord Shaknu, the Royal Prince, the Mighty Tiglath Ashur, the Scourge of Ashur,” he said, saluting once again. “And may I be allowed to include my own?”

  “I thank you, Royal Prince,” I replied, wondering who could have taught him such a speech. “And you are welcome, for I have learned to see the past with a blind eye.”

  He showed his teeth in a grin — he had grasped my meaning—and we rode back together to greet the troops.

  “The Lady Merope and her women are in a wagon just behind the first column of infantry, where the dirt of travel is less of an inconvenience.”

  I nodded — perhaps less of an expression of gratitude than he expected, but I did not know why Arad Malik had come and I wished not to commit myself.

  The troops filed past, and I received and returned their salute. For just a moment I saw my mother’s face behind the curtains of her wagon; she smiled and waved, perhaps a little tentatively, as if unsure of her welcome. I could not wave, but I could smile and that seemed to be enough.

  “Most of them are still raw,” Arad Malik said suddenly. It was half moment before I decided that he must be talking about the reinforcements. “But there is a good leavening of veterans. Do you plan to take them on campaign this season?”

  “Yes—unless the Medes send an envoy to kiss my feet.”

  He laughed at this, just a shade louder than the joke had warranted and we lapsed back into silence as the columns of soldiers passed by in review. I was conscious the whole time that he was watching me in his sidewise fashion, but I was careful not to meet his eye. Why, when we had detested each other from childhood, was he suddenly so ingratiating? And where had he, cloddish even by the standards of a soldier’s mess, learned these new arts of pleasing? I could only assume that time and circumstances would enlighten me.

  When the last of the formalities were over and the eight new companies had been dismissed to find their barracks, I helped my mother down from her wagon and, with her women trailing silently behind us, led her to my new palace.

  It had been three seasons of the year since I had last seen her and she seemed worn; that, however, might only have been the fatigue of the journey. As we walked she kept her hands clamped tight on my elbow, as if afraid of stumbling.

  “I do not think you will find this place too unpleasant,” I said, trying to smile as she looked up at me with moist, anxious eyes—she had often looked at me just that way, even when I was a child; it was the look of one who does not trust in the permanence of any happiness. “It is colder in the winter but less oppressive in the summer. I have found that the climate agrees with me.”

  She did not answer, but smiled and glanced away, clutching my arm all the tighter.

  “Have you eaten, Merope?”

  She shook her head. “Not since yesterday morning, my son—I could not. I know it was foolish of me, but I. . .”

  “Then you will eat now. We will feast together now, for tonight I must attend a banquet for my officers and those affairs tend to last until long after decent people have found their beds. Still, we have some few hours yet.

  “Are you content, Lathikadas? And at peace?”

  “Who in this wide world is at peace?” I answered, laughing uncomfortably. “I have learned to live with myself, which is no trifling thing, and I am occupied with work. I am not unhappy. It will be better now that you are here.”
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br />   “And do you still think of her?”

  It was not a question I cared to answer directly I shrugged my shoulders and smiled again.

  “I have a woman—a present from Kephalos, who understands the way of these things. You will meet her when we dine. I hope you will like her.”

  “If she pleases my son, I will like her.”

  We walked up the steps and across the stone veranda, and the guards opened the doors for us. For a moment, looking around her, my mother was lost in wonder.

  “It is truly a palace,” she said at last. “As if for a king.”

  “I am a king here, Merope—or, at least, I stand in the king’s place and must keep up his dignity. But I promise not to lock you away in my house of women.”

  She laughed softly, and for the first time seemed able to be really happy. It was a beginning.

  . . . . .

  The walls of the banqueting hall were innocent of carved panels to immortalize my victories in war and my prowess in the hunt. This deficiency was much lamented by Kephalos, who thought it reflected badly on the shaknu’s majesty, but otherwise when my officers, new and old, appeared for the welcoming feast, they found nothing lacking that contributed to their comfort and pleasure. My good servant, ever mindful of the importance of appearances, had made that evening’s food and entertainment his special concern. For three days his cook and a vast army of helpers had been busy preparing delicacies enough to sate many times the number of my guests and, looking about me as I entered, I had not realized that Amat could boast so many pretty harlots. There were even musicians. Since my arrival I had not heard the warble of so much as a single reed flute, but somewhere Kephalos had found musicians for the harlots to dance to.

  “I have had to buy up every drop of decent wine to be found in this dog hole,” he told me nervously; catching at my sleeve as I prepared to sit down. “I only pray, Lord, that it may be enough, but after an hour or two when everyone is sufficiently drunk, I shall begin substituting lesser vintages.”

  “I beg you not to be anxious, my friend—a soldier drinks only to be riotous and happy. That a wine be potent is the only requirement he knows how to make of it.”

  Indeed, judging from the din of the cheering that greeted me when I took my place at table, these men of Ashur were already quite drunk enough for present purposes.

  I was in a fair way of being drunk myself before I noticed that there was one among my guests who was not a soldier—nor ever could be. Sitting near a corner of the hollow square made by the banqueting tables, sober, largely disregarded by the men around him, sat my royal brother the scribe Nabusharusur, looking much the same as he had the last time we had met, on the eve of my first campaign, when we were both really still boys.

  Sitting where he was, he might never have attracted my attention at all if one of the harlots, with a woman’s spite against one whom she could not charm, had not begun to tease him, calling on her friends to notice his smooth eunuch’s face and attempting to sit on his lap. Nabusharusur, as if accustomed to this sort of raillery, merely pushed her away and, for the rest, sat staring glumly at nothing.

  I raised a hand to summon one of the guards.

  “Chase that naked bitch out,” I told him. “And give her a good hard spanking with the flat of your sword before you let her go, since she thinks it proper to annoy my guests. See to it that her backside is too tender to put on any man’s lap for the next half month.”

  “It shall be as you would have it, Rab Shaqe” he said, grinning. The order seemed very much to his taste.

  “And ask the prince my brother the learned scribe if he would consent to join me.”

  When Nabusharusur came to my table I rose and took his hand, and the officers around me made room for him.

  “I did not see you among the passing troops this afternoon,” I said, simply to be saying something—this silent, unhappy figure was not an easy man to talk to.

  “I do not sit a horse well,” he answered. “I traveled in a wagon with your mother’s women.”

  He smiled thinly, as if admitting to an obvious infirmity. It was his way of indicating that he was not grateful to me for my interference, that he had accepted his lot, if not with perfect grace, and would thank me to keep my generous impulses for the benefit of others. Somehow—I could not say how—his attitude inspired a certain respect.

  “You wonder at my presence here?” he asked, smiling the same thin, unhappy smile. “At why I would undertake such a journey? I am employed as a scribe by our brother Arad Malik.”

  “I would imagine he has need of one,” I said, remembering the pretty speeches of this afternoon.

  “Yes.” The smile grew just a shade broader, as if to acknowledge the justice of my remark. “He is a dolt, but he has just wit enough to know it and to depend on me. I find him useful.”

  “As what? As someone to carry a sword for you?”

  “As a counter against Esarhaddon.” He shrugged his narrow, feminine shoulders, conscious that he was taking a risk and seemingly indifferent to it. “He is a soldier, a prince, and still a man. People respect him for these things, and when I put words into his mouth they listen.”

  “Playing at treason is a dangerous game, brother. Esarhaddon has a memory for slights, and he will be king one day.”

  “Does he? Will he? Who can know? In these matters the will of the god is all.”

  “The god has made his will plain already.”

  Nabusharusur said nothing, answering only with another shrug. I did not have the impression he was as concerned with the god’s will as he suggested.

  It was not a topic I had any strong interest in pursuing, so I joined his silence with my own and turned my eyes toward the performance taking place within the hollow square of tables, where one of the harlots, stripped naked and gleaming with oil, danced like a madwoman, shaking her breasts in time to the frantic drumbeat and moaning in what seemed an ecstasy of lust. My officers cheered her on and kept time by clapping their hands—one might imagine that none of them had ever seen such a dance, although it was like a hundred others I had witnessed on such occasions. I began to suspect that perhaps I was not drunk enough.

  “I wonder that even a man untouched by the gelding knife can find these entertainments amusing,” Nabusharusur murmured, as if confiding the thought to himself alone. “This woman, who would delight to sell herself to anyone for half a silver shekel, for a moment now she holds the attention of all. It is a strange thing, this power of the flesh. It is beyond the comprehension of a poor eunuch like myself.”

  “But I think, brother, that you understand other kinds of power well enough, and they, too, live more in the mind than in the loins.”

  I had said perhaps more than I meant to. Our eyes met, and Nabusharusur smiled.

  “It is well to know that not all the Lord Sennacherib’s sons were born fools. We must speak again, Tiglath Ashur.”

  And we did, more than once in the ten days that my royal brothers stayed in Amat as guests of the garrison. Nabusharusur, with his thin arms and smooth face, was still as quick in his wits as when we were all boys together in Bag Teshub’s schoolroom, and to this the years had added the cold cynicism of one for whom life holds no promises. A lump of earth like Arad Malik could be sufficiently brave in battle—judged simply as a soldier he was well enough—but courage in such men is largely lack of imagination. Nabusharusur was a different case entirely. He saw the truth with nerveless clarity; he feared nothing because he cared for nothing. For the working of mischief one Nabusharusur would always be worth a hundred Arad Maliks. The marsarru did not know it, but he had made a formidable enemy.

  But it was Arad Malik who spent his time stirring up resentment against Esarhaddon among my officers. When whispers of it began to reach me, I sent not for the rab abru but for his scribe.

  It was a warm day. We drank wine under the vine arbor in my garden. This was not a conversation I cared to have in the presence of any third person.

 
; “It must stop,” I told him. “I expect his visit within the next three months, and Esarhaddon knows how to make himself popular with soldiers. Arad Malik is putting himself under the shadow of the executioner’s ax.”

  “Is he? He is safe enough while the king lives, who cares not what evil is whispered of his successor, and I think you overestimate the marsarru’s powers of pleasing. Besides, in the next reign, if Esarhaddon chances to be king, Arad Malik knows that his life will not be worth an hour’s purchase.”

  “How does he know that?”

  “From me—I have told him so. And he is on familiar enough terms with the hastiness of our good brother’s temper to believe it.”

  “And what of you?” I asked, suspecting I already knew the answer. “Why have you made this alliance for yourself? It can mean nothing to you who is the next king.”

  “That is true—provided it is not Esarhaddon. Tell me, brother, can you credit simple spitefulness as a motive?”

  Nabusharusur looked at me with an inquiring, faintly contemptuous expression on his face, as if he pitied me my lack of intellectual refinement.

  “Do you not know, Tiglath Ashur, what is the common gossip of Nineveh?” he went on finally. “Have you somehow escaped the rumor that the baru Rimani Ashur hanged himself in remorse for having broken faith with Shamash, Lord of Decision, in the matter of Esarhaddon’s selection? Do you honestly believe that the god somehow preferred that thickheaded ox, who is fit for nothing except to sacrifice himself in battle, over yourself?”

  There was a tree at the end of the garden in which several blackbirds were contending among themselves for roosting rights—for days the sky had been crisscrossed with their returning numbers. I could see their wings flapping heavily among the still bare branches, and their threatening, unmusical cries were probably audible even within the palace walls. I did not think of omens, but the sight of them made me wish for a stone with which to send them all flying.