The Concubine's Son

by H A CULLEY

  Tutub was larger than Akshak and had been an independent city state for several hundred years before it became part of the kingdom of Eshnunna. It had sprung up originally to house the farmers and workers who looked after the date, fig and olive groves in that part of the Diyala Valley, but it had soon grown in size as a staging post between Elam and the Tigris long before Eshnunna had become the more important city. It was unusual in that the temple complex, instead of being built on a ziggurat, was enclosed by two oval walls. The main temple stood in the middle of the inner wall on top of a raised rectangle. It was here that the Elamites had based themselves.

  With only a thousand men to defend Tutub and a hostile population, there was no possibility that the Elamites could defend the city walls. Their commander was baffled by Zuuthusu’s decision to give him the same number of men as the garrison for the much smaller Akshak, but he had been told that the latter was more vulnerable to attack, whereas Tutub was only a dozen miles from Eshnunna and the main Elamite army.

  When Hammurabi arrived at the city he found the gates wide open and the population streaming out to greet him as their saviour. This was not what he had anticipated. He had planned to lay siege to the city so that his army was in position outside the walls when Zuuthusu raced to the garrison’s rescue. If he was caught inside the city besieging the temple complex he would be trapped. So he explained to the council of Tutub what he wanted.

  The Chief Elder approached the temple complex nervously and asked to speak to the enemy commander.

  ‘Lord, we are fearful of the Babylonian host encamped outside our gates,’ he told him when the commander appeared above the sacred gate. ‘They have sacked the town of Akshak, killing the men and raping the women. Won’t you help us defend the city?’

  The Elamite commander was a well-connected officer from the city watch in Susa who his captain had more than been happy to send on the expedition into Eshnunna. The man was loyal but lacked judgement; his captain hoped that the experience he gained would improve him. If it had, he was not destined to return to Susa to demonstrate this.

  He was delighted by this turn of events and imagined that Zuuthusu might promote him if he managed to hold the city until relief came. He led his men out of the temple complex and walked with the chief elder toward the main gate. Suddenly a group of armed men darted out of an alley and hustled the chief elder into a house. Archers and slingers then appeared on the rooftops and started to slaughter the hapless Elamites below them. Their gullible commander was one of the first to fall, together with his officers.

  Now leaderless, the Zagros tribesmen, who made up the rest of the garrison, panicked and tried to flee back to the temple complex, only to find the street blocked by Babylonian infantry. More Babylonians appeared at the other end of the street. They were trapped. Now the Babylonians’ training came into play.

  In the crush of the narrow street spears were useless and the Babylonians used their swords and shields. Pushing the hapless tribesmen with their shields they stabbed and stabbed at the enemy, stepping over the fallen as they advanced inexorably down the street from both ends. Meanwhile the archers and slingers continued to wreak havoc on the middle of the enemy column. Some tried to climb up the walls of the houses to attack the archers on the rooftops but they proved easy targets for those on the opposite roof.

  Within ten minutes it was all over. The Elamites threw down their weapons and pleaded for mercy. The Babylonians were slow to realise that the enemy had surrendered and many more died before Tarhunda, who was directing operations from one of the roofs, managed to get his men to stop the killing. All in all over half the Elamites had died. There were no wounded; they had all been killed by a quick sword thrust as the Babylonians stepped over them during their advance.

  Tarhunda brought two prisoners before Hammurabi. He had been puzzled by the king’s order but quickly understood why he had wanted him to find two brothers once the king started to question them.

  ‘I’m told that you are brothers?’ Hammurabi asked them in Akkadian, the common language of Mesopotamia. The two nodded dumbly.

  ‘Do you love each other as brothers should?’ Again they nodded.

  ‘So you would be upset if I killed one of you here in front of the other?’

  ‘If you’re going to do such a terrible deed, then kill me and spare my brother,’ the elder beseeched him. ‘But you are known as Hammurabi the Lawgiver and said to be just and fair. We expect to be sold into slavery, but not killed without a reason.’

  The King of Babylon smiled, slightly flattered that even this man from the Zagros Mountains had heard of the code of laws which he was busy introducing. In fact, the man only knew of the code because Zuuthusu had mentioned it in a disparaging speech about Hammurabi when he dispatched the garrison to Tutub.

  ‘I will spare your brother if you do as I tell you. Betray me and I promise you that he will die slowly and in agony. This is war, not a civilian dispute.’

  ‘I will do as you ask, noble king, but spare my brother; he is only sixteen.’

  Hammurabi looked at the man’s hirsute and extremely ugly brother and doubted that he was as young as sixteen. Not that it mattered how old he was.

  ‘You are to run from here to your army encamped before Eshnunna with a message from your commander.’ Hammurabi stopped. ‘Do you know his name?’ When the man nodded eagerly, he continued. ‘The message is that the city is besieged by ten thousand Babylonians and he begs Lord Zuuthusu to come to his aid as soon as possible. Now repeat the message back to me.’

  Once he was satisfied that the man had the message off pat he let him go. He was escorted through the Babylonian lines and onto the road to Eshnunna. The man’s brother was kept imprisoned separately from the rest of the Elamites. Hammurabi re-joined his army encamped before Tutub, as if they were laying siege to the city.

  ‘Now we just pray to Marduk and all the gods that our courier really does love his ugly brother and that he manages to deliver the message to Zuuthusu.

  ~#~

  For the first two days Arishaka had made good time since leaving Upi, but now he had encountered a problem. The low, barren brown hills through which the column was making its way were intersected by a few dry water courses called wadis. These were steep sided and between ten and twenty feet deep. They varied in width from fifteen to thirty feet. The main rivers were fed from their sources in the Taurus Mountains but there were other, intermittent streams and rivers that only flowed for a short while after rain fell on the lower hills of Eshnunna. The previous night there had been a sudden thunderstorm and heavy rain had fallen for several hours. Now the wadi in front of them was filled with a raging torrent of water which was quite impassable.

  Hammurabi had been quite clear, Arishaka had seven days to get his small army into position. If he failed to do that, then his brother’s plan would fail. He was joined at the point that the path descended into the wadi when it was dry by his second-in-command, an Eshnunnan officer who knew the country through which they were travelling from his years on patrol.

  ‘Is there any way around this torrent?’ he asked the man, who shook his head.

  ‘No, the water comes from high in the hills above Eshnunna. It would take us longer to go around it than it will do to wait here for the water to subside.’

  ‘And how long will that take?’

  The officer gave an expressive shrug. ‘It might die down in ten or twelve hours, or it might take a couple of days. It depends on how much water fell in the hills during the thunderstorm.’

  ‘We don’t have ten hours spare, let alone a couple of days, if we are to reach the rendezvous on time.’

  ‘We might if we march through the night.’

  ‘Will your men do that.’

  ‘To save their homeland, they will try their best; but whether they will be in any condition to fight when they arrive at wherever it is we are going is quite another matter.’

  Arishaka looked around him is despair, then he spotted the
tops of some trees in a depression about a mile away.

  ‘I thought you said that there wasn’t any water in this area?’

  ‘There isn’t’

  ‘Well, how are those trees growing over there? There must be an oasis.’

  The two men looked at each other and said the same thing at the same time: ‘build a bridge’.

  Whilst most of the men cut down the trees and used the camels to haul them towards the edge of the wadi, others scouted for the narrowest crossing point. Then they set about binding the palm tree trunks together to form a rough platform twice the length of the gap to be bridged. They made it three tree trunks deep, staggered to make it as rigid as possible, and six wide. Luckily the far side of the wadi was slightly lower. Slowly the bridge was eased out over the raging water using other trees as rollers. As the end neared the far side, the centre of gravity reached the middle of the gap and the structure started to dip. This was made worse by the natural give in the tree trunks.

  Arishaka got men to sit on the near end to keep it from tipping downwards, which made the task of the camels hauling the bridge into place even harder. Eventually the far end hovered just clear of the ground on the far side with a good three feet of it protruding beyond the gap. The men jumped off the near end one by one and slowly the bridge dropped into place. It proved to be a somewhat springy construction but it held together as the army filed across. Six hours after they had first arrived at the wadi everyone was across, except for the camels. They would have to follow on once the water stopped flowing, but, as they could move much faster than men on foot, they should be able to catch up within a day or so. In the meantime, the men would have to survive on what they could carry.

  Up until then, the Eshnunnans had only moved during daylight, setting off just after dawn. Now they were on the move before the first rays of the sun touched the tops of the surrounding hills and didn’t stop until the last vestiges of twilight had vanished. His men soon learned to be disciplined in how they camped. Any equipment they couldn’t find by touch and pack away in the dark got left behind.

  On the sixth night Arishaka gathered his commanders together.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you our mission before now just in case one of you got captured and tortured. We are not headed for Eshnunna, but Tutub.’

  He waited patiently for the hubbub of protest to die down.

  ‘Hammurabi will draw the Elamites away from your city to go to the relief of Tutub, which he will be pretending to besiege. Our job is to take up a position on the south side of the Diyala Valley and, once the enemy have passed us, to seal the trap to make sure they can’t escape back to Eshnunna.

  ‘What if they defeat your brother, we will be left at their mercy?’

  ‘They won’t defeat Hammurabi. He has more tricks up his sleeve than just us.’

  ~#~

  The scout almost threw himself off his horse to make his obeisance to the king.

  ‘Get up, man.’ Hammurabi said impatiently. ‘It’s your news I want not expressions of devotion.’

  ‘Yes, lord king.’ The man hauled himself to his feet but couldn’t resist bowing to show the awe he felt in addressing his king. ‘Zuuthusu is on the march. The whole army have abandoned the siege and are marching this way.’

  ‘How long ago did they leave and what’s their order of march?’

  ‘They left at daybreak, lord king. Chariots in the lead – about thirty or so I would think, not that many at any rate – with the infantry marching in two groups; one group before the archers and one after them. Then the baggage train in the rear with a guard of perhaps a thousand spearmen.’

  ‘Good. You’ve done well. Report back to your captain.’

  After the messenger had left, the king turned to Tarhunda.

  ‘Our Elamite has obviously got through to Zuuthusu all right, thanks be to Marduk. I just didn’t expect him to succeed so quickly. It looks as if my timing is a little out. I just hope that Arishaka hasn’t been held up. No word of him arriving yet, I suppose?’

  Tarhunda shook his head. ‘I’ve got a few scouts looking out for him a mile or so into the hills, so we get advance warning of his arrival.’ If he had doubts about the wisdom of a complex plan that could so easily go wrong, he kept them to himself.

  ‘Well, we had better start deploying the army in any case. The enemy vanguard should be here within the next two hours.’

  In fact the Babylonians had deployed into position over half an hour before the Elamite chariots appeared. What they saw arrayed before them convinced them that they would have an easy victory. It was true that Hammurabi had three times the number of chariots than they did, but behind them stood less than a thousand archers and perhaps six thousand spearmen. The chariots spread out into line and the Elamite infantry started to fan out as they emerged from the valley onto the plain in front of Tutub.

  Hammurabi was watching with Tarhunda and a small escort from a nearby hill top. As soon as the enemy infantry started to deploy, he turned to a man holding a hollowed out ram’s horn and nodded. The man puffed out his cheeks and blew into the horn as hard as he was able to. He was known for the power of his lungs and a piercing high pitched sound emerged from the horn which easily carried across the plain and echoed off the hills of the Diyala Valley. The result looked very much like a disturbed ants’ nest.

  The light chariots sped across the plain towards the slow onager drawn chariots of the Elamite army. The archers fired several arrows as they closed and then several more as they turned and returned whence they had come. As the light chariots turned, their spearmen cast two javelins at the opposing heavy chariots. Within five minutes half of the enemy charioteers were dead or seriously wounded for the loss of a mere three of the light chariots. More importantly, many of the onagers were dead or badly wounded.

  Meanwhile the heavy Babylonian chariots had split into two, each group charging the flanks of the infantry who were still deploying. The Elamites were thrown into confusion as some tried to get away from the chariots whilst others were still attempting to get into position. The heavy chariots wheeled away and charged the infantry again, creating further chaos. With no archers to support them, there was nothing they could do against the pinprick attacks of the archers in the chariots.

  As the chariots returned to the main Babylonian army, the archers came forward and fired into the air. Whilst the range was too great for the arrows to do too much damage, they added to the confusion amongst the disorganised Elamites.

  Further back along the Diyala Valley the main part of the Elamite army were still in a marching column. The road ran along the south bank of the river, which lay a few hundred yards from the beginnings of the hills which lined the valley. At one point the road passed within a hundred yards or so of a steep scree slope surmounted by a line of rocks. As the Elamite archers came level with this slope men suddenly appeared amongst the rocks and started shooting arrows and stones from slings at the men below. Further along the valley four thousand spearmen ran down from where they had concealed themselves and charged into the unprepared enemy infantry. At the same time a force of camels appeared from nowhere and their archers started to attack the baggage train and its guards.

  All along the enemy column there was chaos. Although the Elamites actually outnumbered their attackers, they had been taken by surprise and they were demoralised. The force of a hundred camels couldn’t hope to defeat a thousand infantry in a straight fight but the spearmen on foot couldn’t get to grips with the hit and run tactics of the camel troop. Without archers they had no way of hitting back, other than to throw their spears. Those that did so rarely hit their fast moving target and then found themselves unarmed as, unlike most of the Babylonian infantry, they didn’t carry bronze swords. Their shields helped to protect them from the arrows but, as the camels attacked from all directions, many were hit in the back as they held their shields in front of them.

  Eventually, they had had enough and the six hundred survivors fled back the wa
y they had come. This was where Arishaka and his men should have come into play. Their job had been to seal the trap, but there was no sign of them.

  Hammurabi judged that the moment had now arrived for the next move. The battle in the valley had come to the point where surprise had given way to weight of numbers and the Babylonians were beginning to take significant casualties. He gave the signal and another loud blast on the ram’s horn sent the Babylonian infantry on the plain in front of Tutub forward. After one last attack by the chariots and a flight of arrows, the infantry advanced in line towards the Elamites. Only seven thousand of the enemy had managed to deploy out of the valley and over a thousand of these had been killed or wounded, so the odds were almost even.

  However, the Babylonians were well trained and morale was high. They hit the Elamites as a solid shield wall and the latter crumbled against their well-disciplined assault. With their shields locked together and their heads protected by copper or bronze helmets, the Babylonians presented an almost impenetrable wall to their enemy. The tribesmen, on the other hand, were more used to fighting as individuals. In less than half-an-hour they had lost another thousand men; their line was broken and they were routed.

  They fled back into the valley and ran straight into their comrades, who were just about managing to hold their own. Panic is infectious and, as soon as the fleeing infantry got in amongst them, the rout became a rolling tide and the whole army turned tail and headed back towards Eshnunna.

  It was at this moment that Arishaka’s tired men arrived at the rendezvous. As their front ranks crested the last ridge before the Diyala Valley, they saw the Elamites break further down the valley. The remnants of the baggage train was about a mile away and the camel troop, having seen what was coming along the valley, wisely headed away from them at speed. It was now a race for Arishaka to get his men into position before the routed Elamites arrived.