The mob, I think, was disappointed in me. They had expected that the Prince Tiglath Ashur would be their liberator, their champion. They had hoped for a miracle. As always, I was praised and honored because I was not my brother. And now I had declared myself his servant.
But what it had cost Esarhaddon to be seen receiving this public pledge of my loyalty! One cannot command what is freely given, and how it must have galled him to see me with my face to the ground, honoring him as king because it was my will. The victory had been mine—not his, but mine. I had paid him back for everything in that moment. His pride would never recover. He would remember all his life how I had shamed him. A man may triumph, even on his knees.
And now, again, I waited for his sentence, although now it hardly seemed to matter.
I was alone. Slaves brought me food and tended to my other requirements with silent efficiency but never spoke. For three days my solitude was unbroken.
But on the third night I received a visitor. As I sat before a brazier in what would have been my audience chamber, a door opened, a shadow fell across the floor, and I saw my sister, the Lady Shaditu—at least, I remember thinking, she wasn’t an assassin.
Suddenly the slaves were gone. They had simply disappeared.
“I had thought by now you would have chosen your alliances,” I said, grateful, in spite of myself, for even such of human warmth as she could provide.
“I have. But our brother does not take his women seriously enough to care where they go or whom they see.”
“You are his woman now then?”
“Yes—you were expecting Esarhaddon to be as dainty as yourself?”
She smiled at me and sat down beside me on the couch. It was only a smile, nothing more. “A crow steals scraps where it can. Esarhaddon knows my bed, as do other men. I wonder sometimes if he would still recognize me out of it. What happened to the slave girl?”
“The Arab? Zabibe? I gave her to a metalsmith with one eye. If his arm is strong enough—and his stomach—perhaps she is even happy with him.”
This made Shaditu laugh. She threw back her head and laughed like a jackal. And then she put her arms about my neck and covered my mouth with her own. I could feel her tongue sliding between my lips. My hands covered her breasts.
“Go ahead,” she whispered. “There is nothing to stop you.”
Nor was there. Shaditu sighed with passion the moment I went into her.
When it was over, it might never have happened. She smoothed her hair back with her hands and smiled again.
“You perhaps wonder why I came? No—not for that. At least, not only.”
“Then what else?”
“To tell you of your danger.”
Now it was my turn to laugh.
“My danger. . ?” I was still almost choking with laughter. “My. . . Shaditu—my sister—do you imagine I do not understand my danger?”
“Esarhaddon is filled with wrath,” she said, ignoring this unseemly display of mirth. “When he entered the city, his captives chained to his chariot, an army at his back with which he had won a great victory, the people stood silent. There was no sound but the drums. And then you. . .”
She made a gesture with her hand, as if letting it float in the air.
“That is what you made of his triumph—nothing. Less than nothing. ‘He thinks I am king through his grace?’ he asks, and men are ashamed to answer him. He will kill you if he dares.”
“And does he?”
“You know him. It lies with his dreams and his soothsayers—and his mother.”
“If it lies with her, I am already dead.”
She did not answer but rose, walking back through the shadowed room to the door, which still stood open.
“Goodbye, Tiglath Ashur,” she said. “It is a weakness in me to love you, yet I do. I wonder if we shall ever see one another again.”
And she was gone.
I stayed up until dawn and then went to my sleeping mat. A sword lay beside me for company.
The next morning, when a slave brought me my breakfast, there was a bowl of dates on the tray. I had not eaten more than two or three when I found a piece of leather, no larger than the palm of my hand, rolled up and lying among them. The writing on the inside was Greek.
“I, who have been one, understand the art of corrupting slaves. If you have need of me, whisper my name into the ear of the dog who brought this.”
Yes, who else but Kephalos could have found his way to me through the walls of my brother’s palace? Who else would have tried? But I would have no need of him now.
I had already received my summons to attend upon the king in the third hour after midday.
Esarhaddon was lying down, surrounded by his concubines, his feet dangling over the end of the couch while a black woman, with heavy gold wire woven into her hair but otherwise naked, washed them in a silver basin. I put my right hand over my heart and started to bow.
“Do not dare to do that to me again, Tiglath!” he shouted, kicking the black woman aside and jumping up. “I will not be made mock of twice.”
“My Lord. . .”
“Stop it!”
He raised his arm, pointing it at me, and then glared savagely about him. “Get out of here—all of you. Can’t you see I have business? Get out!”
For a moment the only sound was the quick patter of bare feet against the floor. It was only when we were alone that Esarhaddon seemed able to relax.
“They can be a nuisance,” he said, almost as if to apologize, and then looked at me in a curious, pleading way. Suddenly it was as if nothing had ever changed between us.
“Who is the black one? Is she new?”
“Yes.” He smiled, half to himself. “A present from. . . Tiglath, that was a foul trick you played on me.”
“If I have offended. . .”
“I said to stop it! Damn you, when you take that tone I know you only mock me.”
“You are the king, brother,” I said, finding myself almost capable of pitying him.
“Am I? Yes. What of it?” With the petulant discontent of a child, he threw himself back down upon the couch. “I wish by the sixty great gods I wasn’t.”
“Nevertheless, you are. And there is nothing either of us can do about it.”
Suddenly he grinned at me. “No—there isn’t, is there.”
“No.”
For a long moment he said nothing, but merely lay there on his back staring at the ceiling. I waited, since there was little else I could do.
“You came to Khanirabbat,” he said finally, still staring at the ceiling, as if addressing it rather than me. “You could have joined the rebels—perhaps even been king in my place. Yet you came. And when I sent that idiot Sha Nabushu. . .”
“You are the king. If you recall, we have already agreed to that. I am a soldier and the king’s servant.”
“And if the king demands your life?”
“Then I suppose I will die.”
“And when I die, you are thinking, the Lady Esharhamat’s little bastard Ashurbanipal will rule in my place. You note I call my son a bastard, Tiglath—he whom the world in its ignorance calls my son. Or perhaps you imagined I would not guess?”
He looked at me now. Had he been a god instead of a man, I would have been burned to ashes under that look. Yet I said nothing.
“My son will rule, Tiglath—brother. My son, and no other. I bear you no ill will over this—over this, in particular—for I hate her as much as she does me. But my son will have a crown.”
“That is for the god to judge. He will choose your successor no less than he chose you. It is vain to imagine otherwise.”
The lord king sprang to his feet, trembling with rage as his face grew dark as a thundercloud.
“May the god damn your black soul, Tiglath.”
“And may the god grant you all that we both know you deserve—Dread Lord.”
There was a moment—only a moment—when I imagined Esarhaddon might be about to sp
eak the words that would have made him my brother again. There was something in his eyes which suggested that pain of recognition a man feels when at last he has seen what he is about to lose. We stood facing each other. Anything might have happened. And then how different might have been the histories of our two lives.
“Guard!”
In an instant I found myself flanked by soldiers. And as I looked once more into Esarhaddon’s face I knew that the moment had passed—or that what I had seen there was nothing more than my own last vain hope. Now his eyes showed me implacable hatred, and the despot’s freedom from remorse.
“You will conduct the Lord Tiglath Ashur out,” he said, his voice half choked with anger. “I believe somewhere we must still have the iron cage in which we accommodated the king of Babylon, the Lord Nergalushezib, during his stay with us. Find it—and place it at my brother’s disposal.”
One of the soldiers attempted to take me by the arm, but I shook him off and laid my hand across his face hard enough to knock him to the floor.
“Don’t you dare!” I whispered through clenched teeth. “I will go because it is the king’s will, but for no reason else. Never dare to put your hands on me again!”
Both soldiers were armed and I had no weapon, not even a dagger, yet the one who was still standing retreated a pace. He looked to the king, his eyes pleading, as if afraid I had the power to strike him dead.
And Esarhaddon too was afraid.
“Yes, of course,” he said, forcing out a syllable of feigned laughter. “Remember your manners and behave yourselves—he is, after all, the Lord Tiglath Ashur. A hero, and a prince!”
I could hear his laughter echoing behind me, even as the soldiers conducted me away.
. . . . .
In our family, it seemed, nothing was ever discarded. The cage was in a corner of the palace dungeon, its bars coated with more than ten years’ accumulated dust.
The jailer, who was a kindly old man, a former soldier with half his left foot gone, cleaned it up for me as best he could and even gave me a cushion to sit on—the cage was not large enough to allow anyone to stand up inside it. He brought me my meals of bread and water and lightened my spirits with such conversation as was in his power. He remembered Nergalushezib very well and had helped to nail the crown to his head. He told me the cage had not been used since that time.
He had a wife and lived in the city. By his comings and goings I was able to keep some track of time and thus knew the days of my captivity. It was on the twentieth, in what I took to be the middle of the night—although, in that windowless cellar I could not be certain—that I received a visitor.
I certainly had not expected one. I assumed that, the jailer aside, the next person I would be likely to meet down there was the man sent to cut my throat. But it was not he. It was the king’s mother, the Lady Naq’ia.
She was at that time between forty and fifty, yet, aside from the gray in her hair, she seemed little changed from the woman I remembered from my childhood. Her tunic and veil of black linen, shot through with silver, were the same. Her beauty was untouched and her smile was still unreadable.
The jailer—not my friend, but the one who relieved him, who never spoke—brought her a stool and she sat down, dismissing him with a wave of her hand. For a long moment she said nothing. She merely peered in through the bars at me, as if the sight gave her immense pleasure.
“How is your mother, Tiglath?” she asked finally.
“Well, Lady, when last I saw her. That was a month and some days ago.”
“My son has sent a new shaknu to Amat, so I assume she will now go to your estate called Three Lions?”
“Where I hope. Lady, she will be allowed to live in quiet.”
“Of course, Tiglath.” She smiled. “Your mother is a sweet soul and I mean her no harm.”
She lapsed into silence again. And then, suddenly, as if something had reminded her of a joke, she laughed. It was a brittle, silvery laugh, of a kind experience has taught me to mistrust in women.
“Perhaps you do not remember,” she said. “It happened when you were only a child—I told your mother once that you would end your days making bricks for the city walls.”
“Yes, I remember. Is that to be my fate?”
“That is the difficulty, Tiglath—your fate. As much as it would please me to see you sweating in a loincloth, in mud up to your elbows and knees, I think it is not to be.” She shook her head, looking as if she would have liked to reach through the bars and comfort me.
“There is the city mob to think of,” she went on. “A man who commands their affection as you do is not to be publicly humiliated—they would not stand for it. And then there is my son. He wants to kill you but I am not sure he quite dares. And even if he finds the courage, would it be wise to kill you? How can we kill you when the mob and the army both hold you in honor, when you have made so public a submission to our power? Yet how can we not, when Esarhaddon will never be true king as long as he stands in your shadow? It is, as I have said, a difficulty. I have yet to make up my son’s mind for him.”
The smile, which had never left her face, changed slightly.
“Or perhaps you have been imagining yourself in Esarhaddon’s hands? No—in mine, Tiglath. Did you think I would trust my son with such a decision?”
“He is king, Lady, not you.”
“Yes, he is king. Yet I made him so, and without me he will not last as king for very long. He knows this—or soon shall.”
“The god made him king, Lady.”
“No, Tiglath.” She shook her head, gently, like a mother instructing her child. “The god had nothing to do with it. I made him king, and no other.”
So it was true. The rumors I had heard from the lips of Nabusharusur—they were true. The omens had been tampered with. It was not simply a wishful fancy of those whom the sudden and unexpected elevation of my brother had disappointed, but the truth. Perhaps—and I shuddered at the thought—perhaps Shaditu had not lied when she called me “true king.”
For the first time since my father’s murder, I felt the cold grip of fear in my heart—not fear of death, but of what is worse than death. It had all been for nothing, I told myself. Everything, my whole long surrender, for nothing. It was not the god’s will I had served, but Naq’ia’s.
All this time—Naq’ia’s.
“And the death of Arad Ninlil. . ?”
“Not I, Tiglath—at least not directly.” She placed her fingers together before her lips, in what seemed no more than amused pity. “Dare I speak the name of Esharhamat to you, or do you still imagine her so fair, so innocent? Men are just such credulous fools. Yes, Tiglath, she did what I could not, although through means of my contriving. In this, if nothing else, we were allies.
“She poisoned him at dinner, and under the very eyes of his mother. The deed took courage, and a heart as hardened as my own. And her punishment now, as my son’s wife, believe me when I tell you it is just.”
I had no desire to hear more. I covered my face with my hands.
“Do what you will with me, Lady,” I said. “For you have made me the most accursed of men.”
“Yes, Tiglath—I know as much.”
She rose, for she had achieved her purpose, and was thus willing enough to leave me to my thoughts.
“Esharhamat will not suffer alone,” I said at last, my heart full of anguish. “The god will not permit these things to stand unavenged.”
She paused for a moment, her hand already on the door, and smiled yet again.
“Perhaps not, Tiglath, although I care little enough for your crude northern god. Yet it seems it is not upon me that he visits his wrath. Look about you. It is I who may leave this dungeon, and you who must stay. Will you ever leave it, I wonder?”
. . . . .
I did leave it, for the god’s voice was not stilled. Had I remembered his promise, all that he had revealed to me, I would have understood his design.
But I did not. My heart
, in the days which followed, was closed to hope. I lay in darkness, waiting only for death.
And one day I really thought it had come.
But it was not death which came, only Esarhaddon, wearing a soldier’s tunic. He came with his bodyguard of quradu. He came with a sword in his hand.
“Let him out,” he told the jailer. And then, as if his wrath would not be contained, he struck the cage with his sword, making the bars ring. “Let him out, I say!”
It was the dream. Had not the god foretold this? The city a cage, Esarhaddon beating his sword against the bars. . ?
I could see it in his face. He wanted to kill me, but I did not need Naq’ia to tell me he would not dare. I grinned at him. I knew no fear of him, for I had the god’s promise.
The jailer undid the lock and opened the narrow little door. It was the first time in almost a month that I had stood upright, and my knees trembled beneath me.
“Get out of your kennel, dog,” my brother growled, his face black with rage.
In the end, two soldiers had to help me. I stood, leaning against the cage that had held me like a fox in a trap, and I mocked Esarhaddon. I had no need to speak. To look him in the face was mockery enough, for it was he who was afraid, not I.
“Go ahead,” I murmured. “The sword is in your hand. Nothing stops you. Kill me and be king forever—if you have it in your bowels even to be a man.”
“Tiglath, do not. . .”
“Strike!” I shouted, not even caring. “Now or not at all.”
We both knew that was the choice.
He was a long time deciding. In his heart, in his face, reigned a conflict plain to all who saw him. Yes, he wanted to kill me. Yes, that was why he had come.
Still, to this hour, I do not know what except the god’s will stayed his hand, but at last he threw his sword down to the brick floor.
“Clean him up! The Lord Tiglath Ashur, my royal brother, looks like a dung carter.”
He looked about him, smiling, demanding applause for his wit. There was only silence.
“He shall not hear my judgment like a slave,” he said, his voice level now, his eyes on me, as if he spoke to myself alone. “Bring him to me in three hours’ time.
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