The Assyrian

by Nicholas Guild

  “I will not beg,” he whispered. “Kill me, and hear my curse as I die.”

  I was almost weeping with rage. I grabbed him by the tunic and pulled him up. I kicked him away from me, striking a blow with the flat of my sword that would have broken another man’s ribs.

  But Esarhaddon merely grunted, as if in surprise. Finally, when he had sat up again, he put his head between his knees and vomited, staining the ground red with sour wine. I went back to the chariot and fetched him my water bag that he could rinse the taste from his mouth.

  “Why did you not kill me?” he asked finally. “Not even I would have blamed you.”

  I was in no temper to answer. I turned away from him, my bowels still trembling with an emotion compounded of wrath and horror. For a long time I could not have spoken.

  “Why did you not kill me?” he repeated at last. Strangely, he sounded quite calm.

  “You are alive—is that not enough for you?”

  He sat there, his elbows resting on his knees, staring at nothing. He looked exhausted, spent.

  “I suppose it must be.”

  I did not reply.

  “I will not ask you to forgive me, Tiglath,” he said, staring at his injured hand as he made and unmade a fist. “I would not deserve it in any case.”

  He did not have to ask, for, although I could not have brought myself to say so, I had already forgiven him in my heart. We both knew, however, that this incident could never be forgotten, that it would stand between us forever. This, as much as anything, was what choked my voice, that he had brought us to this final parting.

  “How is your shoulder?” he asked.

  In truth, I had forgotten all about it. When I looked I could see the cut was clean and not very deep. It hurt a great deal, but that was a good sign.

  “It will not kill me,” I answered. “How is your hand?”

  “Nothing but a scratch, but my ribs pain me.”

  “I am glad to hear it.”

  Our eyes met, and Esarhaddon grinned. He really was sorry. I smiled thinly—it was the best I could do. I sat down beside him and took a swallow from the water bag.

  “But they are plotting against me, aren’t they—Arad Malik and Nabusharusur, I mean.”

  “Of course. They could hardly speak of anything else.”

  “You might at least have warned me.”

  “Would I have been telling you anything you did not already know yourself?”

  He shook his head.

  “The king encourages them—or at least pretends to be blind and deaf. The king favors anyone who he thinks will weaken me. I will kill Arad Malik, the first day I sit on the throne.”

  “Arad Malik is as toothless as a newborn babe. Kill Nabusharusur instead.”

  “What—that eunuch?”

  “Yes, that eunuch. You will not last very long as king, my brother, unless you learn to be afraid of men like Nabusharusur. The fact that his scabbard is empty only means that he is hiding the dagger behind his back.”

  Esarhaddon nodded, as if he understood.

  “We had better bind our wounds,” he said, “and think of some story to explain them when we return. We can say that the chariot overturned. Tiglath?”

  “Yes—what is it?”

  “I will never mistrust you again.”

  I could but laugh. Even in my own ears it was a bitter sound.

  “You think not, do you?”

  We drove back to Amat, and Esarhaddon, to the great consternation of his entourage, issued orders that they would leave for Calah in the morning. We embraced at parting, for we were in company with many others, but I think we both knew that the next time we met it would not be as friends.

  Chapter 23

  It was some five days after Esarhaddon’s departure that word reached me of an incursion on the eastern border. It was not in itself a very important incident—a band of Median raiders had crossed over into our province of Zamua and had attacked a group of villages not far from the headwaters of the Turnat River, the sort of thing which one must expect every so often after years in which men have almost forgotten the sound of fighting. It was, however, the pretext I had been hoping for.

  I wrote to the king in Nineveh, asking permission to assume command of the eastern garrisons for a campaign into the Zagros Mountains. I would carry my battle standards to the very doorposts of the barbarians and remind them, since they seemed to need it, that the Lands of Ashur were not a bazaar stall to be looted whenever it pleased them.

  The king’s reply was not long in coming: “I have learned, my son, that I must indulge your restlessness, and perhaps it is true that we have been too long at peace and the eastern tribes begin to think we have all turned into women. I grant you all power in this matter. Work your will.”

  But I had not waited. I had already issued orders that the northern garrisons were each to send half their strength to join me at a staging area near the border city of Musasir. I set out with the best companies of the Amat fortress and what was left of my old comrades in the quradu—including even Lushakin, who said he had had enough of being a kitchen soldier and would come even if he had to follow behind with the pack mules.

  Thus began my two years of war against the Medes.

  They are a strange people, in some ways unlike any I have encountered in a life filled with strange turnings. And since the days of my youth, when I did battle against them, they have risen to be a great nation. Even then they believed that the future belonged to them, and it is possible they may be right, for they lack neither virtue nor cunning. It may be they will roll over the world like a plague of locusts, but I hope not to live long enough to see that day—they will make bad masters over the lands of my ancestors.

  Even in the reign of Sennacherib we had been fighting the Medes for nearly two hundred years, ever since the days of Raman Ninari, the third king of that name, who led armies into the eastern lands and there encountered a race of horsemen who wore their hair short and fought with spears and called themselves the ‘“Aryan,” the “nobles.”

  The land there is good, although not so well watered as the Tigris plains, and by that time most of the tribes, but by no means all, had ceased their wanderings and settled in towns and villages along the wrinkled slopes of the Zagros Mountains, where they could farm in the valleys and pasture their horses and cattle on the steppes that sloped gently down to the salt deserts of the north. Where they had come from before that I do not know, nor, although the Medes speak of a homeland where the grass is tall, have I ever met anyone who did. I do know, however, that they came as conquerors, each tribe holding its own territory in subjection as masters over the old inhabitants, whom they regarded with the greatest contempt, for they truly believed in themselves as the favored ones of heaven and this made them cruel. Still, their cruelty was limited by their weakness, for although they recognized themselves as one people, they were divided into many tribes, and each warred against the others as fiercely as they did against all other nations. But already this was beginning to change.

  Some ten years before my birth, in the reign of Great Sargon, a raiding party attacked our garrison at Kharkhar, surprising the watch and inflicting great slaughter. Their leader, one Ukshatar, styled himself king, or, in their tongue, “shah” of all the Medes, and indeed he had managed to assemble a confederation of tribes that kept the armies of Ashur busy through several seasons of campaigning. In the end Ukshatar was captured and exiled to the west, where he died, but he left behind him a son, a youth called Daiaukka. It was a name I had heard many times since my arrival in the north.

  Tribes will drift together in loose alliances, or will find some common purpose in the will of a strong leader, but such unity lasts only until victory or defeat. If they triumph, if their combined strength is enough to push aside a weaker foe, then the marauders will inevitably begin to bicker over the spoils. And if their strength bleeds away in battle after costly battle—and this was precisely the fate I had decided upon for the Me
des—then they will lose their faith in leaders and their great lords will end with their throats cut while common men sue the enemy for mercy. It was not Daiaukka whom I feared, nor any other chief with a few thousand spearmen who presumed to call himself shah of the Aryan. It was not a man who had rendered the Medes suddenly dangerous, but an idea. Daiaukka was merely the chosen vehicle of a new force that had entered the imaginations of simple herdsmen and farmers, making them believe they had become something more, for the Medes had found a new worship and a new god.

  The men of the west believe in many gods, and this makes them tolerant of one another. The Egyptians do not care that the Babylonians pay reverence to Marduk, nor the Babylonians that Telepinu is honored among the Hittites. Their precedence is something for the gods to settle among themselves, and it is felt to be only decent that each man pays his homage at the altar of his fathers. The Hebrews in Judah, it is true, worship only one god whom they believe is the lord of the universe, but they are a small, quarrelsome, unimportant people. The Medes were another matter entirely.

  Whence this new religion came I know not. The Medes speak of a great teacher, a prophet of their own race whose name was Zarathustra, but who he was or whether he still lived in those days or if he had ever really existed I was never able to discover. But his was the voice of a worship unlike any the world had yet seen, and it was a voice full of menace for its message was of fire and sword and a world washed in the blood of innocence.

  It begins harmlessly enough—there is one god who shall be honored over all others, and he is called the Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom, or simply the Ahura. The Ahura is all purity—the sky is his body and the sun his eye—and he has created all the other noble gods, the Spenta Mainyu or Bountiful Immortals, of whom there are six. Balanced against these are all the demons of the world, of whom one Ahriman is the greatest.

  The Medes believe that the history of all that is divides itself into three periods, each enduring for three thousand years. The first of these was a golden age in which the Ahura and Ahriman were one and together created the world. Then, since the knowledge of one thing depends upon its opposite, there was no evil. But finally these two separated, the one becoming “He Who Is All Life” and the other “He Who Is All Death,” and this began the second age, the time of trouble and the warfare of good and evil. The third age began with the appearance of the teacher Zarathustra and will end, finally, with the triumph of good and the remaking of the world, which will then last forever.

  There is nothing in this that is so different from the beliefs of other peoples, who revere one god as the lord of all the others and acknowledge, as every prudent man must, the existence of evil spirits. The difference lies in the way these gods and evil spirits are approached because, whereas the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the men of Ashur, even the Greeks—indeed, all the civilized nations of the world—believe that it is right to offer prayers and sacrifice to all the gods, both good and evil, and thus to incline them to mercy, the Medes offer Ahriman and all his followers only curses. All wickedness, even that of the gods themselves, is to be scorned, and it is the object of prayer and sacrifice to strengthen the Ahura in his war against Ahrirnan, to fill his mind with courage and his limbs with death dealing power. Thus men become soldiers in this war of the gods, and it is within their power to hasten the final triumph of light over darkness. Their faith in their prayers, which they call “Mantra,” is so great that they imagine the words themselves to have a force independent of the gods, so that they will ward off evil spirits even if spoken by a foreigner, by one who understands nothing of their meaning. As I have suggested, it is a strange worship.

  Thus everything in life is very clear to the Medes. They live in a world divided between light and darkness, good and evil, perfection and corruption, and the differences between the one and the other are entirely clear. One is either a worshiper of the Ahura or a worshiper of fiends—no middle way is possible. The followers of the true path will be rewarded in this life and the next; all others are consigned to a most terrible damnation.

  The very simplicity of their beliefs has done much to make the Medes a virtuous people, for the whole of their lives is involved with their insistence on purity. They are good farmers because their prophet teaches that to till the soil and redeem wastelands are acts pleasing to the Ahura. They will not lie, not even to an unbeliever, nor violate the smallest particular of any contract because the Ahura disdains all falsehood. They are kind to their animals, particularly the horse, the camel, the dog, the cock, and the cow, which comes first in reverence, because these the Ahura loves. They do not even practice animal sacrifice nor read the future in the entrails of beasts because these too their god has forbidden them.

  In fact, the Medes are so concerned with avoiding any sort of pollution, which they identify with Ahriman and the forces of evil, that death is a great problem for them. Since all of the three elements—earth, fire, and water—are sacred to the Ahura, none may be defiled by contact with a corpse and therefore it may be neither buried nor burned nor cast into the sea. How then to dispose of the dead?

  The Medes have hit upon the solution of exposing them on the roofs of high stone towers, which they call, fittingly enough, “towers of silence,” where their bones are quickly picked clean by carrion eating birds. All who touch a corpse are likewise defiled and must purify themselves by washing in cow urine.

  There is a popular belief among them that the Land of the Dead is presided over by a god named Yama, who sends forth his dogs each day to sniff out those for whom the hour of death has come and herd them like cattle into his presence, there to be judged for all eternity. These dogs are brown, broad snouted, and possessed of four eyes, and for this reason a white dog with yellow ears—thought to be an adequate substitute—is always set to guard a corpse against evil spirits.

  But the teaching attributed to the prophet Zarathustra is somewhat different. At death, so it is written, a man crosses the Bridge of the Gatherer. If he has followed the path of darkness in life, his foot will slip and he will fall down into the House of Lies, but if he has followed the path of the Ahura he will be allowed to enter the House of Praise, the Dwelling of the Pure.

  The purity which leads to eternal bliss is not, they believe, without its rewards in this world as well, and these rewards can be passed on from generation to generation. The Ahura protects his followers, granting them cattle and horses, many sons, and a long life. And the virtuous dead become themselves something only a little short of divine and receive offerings from their descendants, who can invoke their aid against the power of Ahriman and thus procure for themselves all manner of blessings.

  And thus these mountain tribesmen, only lately accustomed to cities and a settled life, had become terrible in the eyes of all civilized men. For it is only doubt and the fear of death which makes it possible for one people to live at peace with another, and from these the Medes had been set free by their new worship. Their pride of race made them believe they were set apart from the rest of mankind, and now their prophet had taught them virtue and a contempt for any who did not follow the way of the Ahura, who promises rewards in this world and the next. To war against evil had become their object in living, and they saw evil everywhere outside the magic circle of their own nation. For such as these death is a blessing, conquest a duty, and mercy the most contemptible of weaknesses. With such as these—molded into a disciplined army—a gifted and ambitious king could sweep across the earth.

  So it was not Daiaukka I feared. I feared the voice of his prophet.

  . . . . .

  It was on the fifth day of the month of Tammuz when I turned my eyes to the rising sun and set out for the land of the Medes. I led a force of six thousand men and would find as many again waiting for me in Musasir. From there we would march south and east, following the line of foothills that eventually rises into the Zagros Mountains, until we reached Zamua and the fortress at Hamban.

  That drowsy little garrison tow
n was suddenly swollen almost to bursting with starving, dust-stained country folk, who, with such of their possessions as they could carry wrapped in bundles, had come streaming in from the wide eastern plains to seek the protection of mud walls and the soldiers of their god and king. They had fled before the fury of the Medes, and the fear of what they had seen and suffered was still in their faces. Now they were starving because the garrison had not grain enough to feed them all.

  “They are like wolves, Lord—they have no pity.” So I was told by an old man as he lay on his sleeping mat beside the town wall, waiting for death. “They come. They steal our oxen and burn our fields and houses. They kill all whom they find. I am old, I do not care, but so many. . .” And his eyes grew wet with tears as they saw once more that which he could not bring himself to speak of. “I will die here. I do not wish to return home.”

  “I will go there for you,” I told him. “And all shall be as it was, for the god’s justice will not be turned aside.”

  He turned to look at me, to look into my face, and it was as if he had not understood.

  “The god,” he said at last. “Yes, the god. . .”

  Thus we knew what to expect when we marched east and entered the devastated region known as Dur Tuqe.

  “Dur” means “fortress,” but if the soldiers of Ashur had ever maintained a garrison there, they had long since withdrawn to the more comfortable and easily defended cities of the river basins, for in this place the eye found no mud walls or watchtowers, no parade grounds, no roads rutted by the wheels of war chariots. This was land where barley grew, where for centuries no man had carried any weapon more deadly than a mattock. Now the Medes had sown slaughter there.

  I was a soldier, hardened to cruel sights, but the bile rose in my throat as I looked about me. It was a landscape of horrors. The birds, so gorged on carrion that they could hardly fly, perched beside the banks of irrigation ditches clogged with the corpses of the farmers who had dug them, and the plains were pocked with the cold, blackened skeletons of burned villages. We rode for hours without hearing a sound louder than the wind. There was no one. They had all fled—or been butchered by the Medes. All this the Medes had done. The Aryan. The Nobles. I did not know it then, but as my eyes searched the desecrated earth I was beholding the glory of their Ahura and the truth of his word. All I saw was death.