by H A CULLEY
‘Of course, but if I doubled the standing army we could still afford it?’
Abilkisu looked as if he was about to have a heart attack. ‘Doubled the… that would cost us another six or seven hundred talents each year. We would start to make a loss each year, lord king. We would soon exhaust the reserves.’
‘Hmmm, arithmetic isn’t my strong point but, even if we didn’t increase the amount of annual income from the present level, we would have enough to keep going for a decade or more, wouldn’t we?’
‘Perhaps,’ the man admitted grudgingly.
‘Good. You had better plan on paying for another two thousand men in the standing army, plus a hundred more chariots, five hundred more archers and another hundred horsemen.’
‘What about the force to go to the relief of Hiritum?’ Arishaka asked.
‘You had better take the standing army. Adiar is right about not calling up the militia for this. Mari and Yamhad should provide the bulk of the force. We only need to demonstrate our support.’
~#~
Two days later Arishaka led his small army out of Babylon, Mutu-Namaha riding proudly at his side. He was followed by a hundred horsemen who would act as scouts once they neared the border with Mari, five hundred camel archers commanded by Dadanum, fifty lightweight chariots, five hundred archers, a thousand boy slingers and two thousand infantry armed with spears, swords and shields. All the spearmen now had bronze helmets and wore leather armour. The baggage train brought up the rear.
Hammurabi watched them go. Only the archers and the charioteers were not part of the present standing army. Now he needed to start recruiting and training his new full-time recruits. If he could get most of them from the present militia, it would make the training a lot quicker.
He already had a treaty of mutual support with Mari and Yamhad. Assuming that their combined forces proved sufficient to raise the siege, the question of Hiritum’s future would have to be decided. The city would have to accept that it was too small and weak to continue to stand alone as an independent state. He would have liked to bring them within the Babylonian confederation but he couldn’t see Zimri-Lim standing for that. He would want them to become part of Mari. Much as he resented this solution, he couldn’t see a realistic alternative.
After three days Arishaka sent a messenger to Mari to tell Zimri-Lim that he was on his way with nearly four thousand men and asking about a rendezvous. He also asked about the contingents coming from his allies.
They were two thirds of the way to Hiritum before his messenger returned. He was eating his evening meal with Mutu-Namaha, Dadanum and Narem-Suen when the man arrived. Dadanum was the senior captain of a thousand in the force and so was effectively Arishaka’s deputy.
The messenger handed a written note to his commander, who undid it and read it with growing disbelief. His face fell but he didn’t say anything. He passed the message to Dadanum without comment.
‘What are they playing at? By the time they are ready the city will certainly have fallen. Doesn’t Zimri-Lim realise the urgency? Does he want to give the Elamites a foothold on his doorstep?’
The two boys were full of curiosity about the message and the unwelcome news that it obviously contained but they knew better than to ask.
‘Well, it looks as if it’s down to us, doesn’t it?’
Dadanum looked even more worried at this. ‘You’re not thinking of tackling an Elamite army with the few thousand that we have here?’
‘There’s the garrison of Hiritum as well, that must number some four or five thousand.’
‘We don’t know what the Elamite strength is, but they wouldn’t besiege a city of that size without at least fifteen thousand men.’
‘I’m sure you are right, but we need to find that out for certain, and the exact situation on the ground. Then we need a plan to even up the odds a bit.’
Chapter Four – The Siege of Hiritum – 1769 BCE
Arishaka and Mutu-Namaha had ridden forward with ten scouts and had found a vantage point from where they could observe the siege in progress. By the size of the Elamite camp there more like twenty thousand troops present, but there appeared to be two separate camps, each with a banner flying beside the commander’s tent. The man turned to the boy.
‘There are both Elamite and Eshnunnan contingents over there.’
‘Does that help us?’
‘It will do if we can sow dissension between them.’
Then Arishaka grabbed his aide’s arm. ‘They’re constructing a ramp to breach the walls.’
This was a laborious way of getting into a city, but ultimately it was the most successful. The ramp was being built at a thirty degree angle and had started 20 yards from the wall. So far the ramp had reached the edge of the ten foot deep ditch that ran around the city. This was fifteen feet wide so it would take some time for the Elamites to fill it in before they could continue with the ramp. There was no activity around the ramp at the moment, so presumably they worked on it at night.
Uncle and nephew cautiously backed away from their vantage point then made for the river, where Uktannu met them with a boat he had hired from a merchant. Taking several archers and slingers with them, they set off upriver. They reached the point level with the south east corner of the city wall when they spotted two boats packed with troops making towards them. Arishaka correctly assumed that they were part of the flotilla that the enemy had used to cross the Tigris and so he beat a hasty retreat. Thinking that they were just trying to run the blockade and bring supplies into the city, the two enemy craft gave up the chase after a while, having succeeded in preventing them from achieving their supposed aim.
‘Did you notice anything important before turned back?’ Arishaka asked Mutu-Namaha.
‘I saw about fifty craft moored along the river bank perhaps a mile north of the city, uncle.’
‘Did you?’ Arishaka was surprised. He was concentrating on the walls and the ram and hadn’t seen the boats himself. ‘Well done,’ he added distractedly as an idea occurred to him. Then he remembered what he had wanted to tell the boy.
‘No, it wasn’t that. It was the ditch that runs around the wall. It must have been full of water when they arrived but the enemy have built a dam. It’s only a couple of yards wide and it wouldn’t take much work to breach it.’
‘Wouldn’t they just re-build the dam again?’ he started to say. ‘Ah, I see! If we wait until the ramp is nearly completed, it will wash the foundations away and it will collapse, taking them back to where they are now.’
‘Precisely. We aren’t anywhere near strong enough for a straight-forward fight, but if we can delay them for a month or so, the city might be able to hold out until the armies of Mari and Yamhad can get here.’
Naram-Suen felt extremely proud, but nervous. He had been given a force of a hundred boy slingers to command, supported by a hundred archers. The boys had been chosen for their stealth and initiative. Fifty of them carried tinder, flint and an unlit torch and all of them carried a bundle of kindling tied to their backs. Their task was to set the Elamite and Eshnunnan boats alight. If they were successful this would strand the enemy on this side of Tigris, cutting their supply lines from Eshnunna and also enabling Babylon to resupply the city by water.
Arishaka was dubious about entrusting such an important mission to the former Elamite princeling, but Dadanum had spoken highly of his ability and pointed out that it was only his quick thinking and bravery that had saved the life of Samsu-Iluna. In the end he was grudgingly convinced. The boys would probably react well to being led by someone nearer their own age too.
They crawled forward until they could see the sailors’ camp along the bank of the river. About forty boats were tied up four abreast and stretched along the bank for three hundred yards. Another ten boats were moored over the other side of the Tigris. Naram-Suen cursed. His orders were to destroy all the boats. His studied the camp on this bank. It appeared that all the sailors were sleeping in leather tents ashore
, rather than on board the boats. There were three fires dotted amongst the tents, around which sat a number of guards. There didn’t appear to be any other sentries. Narem –Suen slithered back to where his boys waited and quietly briefed them.
Thirty minutes later he imitated the croaking crow-like call of a night heron. The call was repeated back to him by another four boys. One of the guards looked up, perhaps wondering at the sudden activity amongst the river birds, but then he went back to chatting quietly to his fellow sentries sitting around the camp fire. Naram-Suen nodded to the ten slingers in his group and stood up. The off-white robes that they normally wore, even grubby as they were, would have stood out in the moonlight so they had stripped off and covered their bodies in black river mud. They started to whirl their slings above their heads. The low whistling noise alerted the sentries but by then it was too late. Two stones had been aimed at every man’s head and at least one hit home, crushing the skull and killing instantly. The sentries dropped to the ground. One fell across a fire and the smell of roasting flesh started to waft through the air until three boys had the presence of mind to rush forward and drag the body clear.
Naram-Suen waited for five minutes but the only sound was snoring coming from the tents. Then a man came out to relieve himself. He took a puzzled look at the sentries lying in odd postures around the nearest camp fire and went over to investigate. Several stones hit him at the same instant and he joined his dead compatriots. Fifty boys started to strike their flints and blew to get a flame before lighting the oil soaked torches. When most of them were lit, a hundred boys crept forward silently through the rows of tents towards the moored boats. They climbed into the first boat in each row and made their way across it into the second one. There they piled up the kindling and anything else they could find that would burn, including tarred hemp cordage and the heavy linen sails, before setting fire to the pile.
Once the fire was going well they retreated to the first boat and did the same. By now several boats were burning well and the boys retreated to the bank. The crackling noise of the fires and the light they gave off had woken some of the sailors but, as they appeared from their tents, the archers sent to support the boys started to pick them off.
Naram-Suen gave the signal for the boys to retreat back through the ranks of the archers, who then covered their withdrawal. But he and twenty boys didn’t go with them. Instead they clambered across to the northernmost boat in the outer row, which was as yet untouched by the conflagration, and cast off.
~#~
Dadanum was overjoyed when he saw the sky light up, indicating the success of the mission to burn the enemy’s boats. An hour later the exhausted but exultant slingers and the archers returned to camp to a welcome fit for heroes. The boys had stopped to wash and recover their dirty robes and had brought those belonging to the other boys back with them. When Dadanum asked where Naram-Suen and the others were, all they could tell him was that they had cast off in one of the boats before it had caught alight.
When he questioned them further, he was slightly relieved to find out that one of the boys with his aide had some experience of boat handling. Those that knew him said that he had sailed with his father trading on the Euphrates since he was ten. When his mother died three years later, his father had taken to drinking and gambling with the inevitable result that he lost his boat. The boy had found himself destitute and had lived on his wits, stealing food when he could, for three months until he had been caught. The choice between losing his right hand for theft and joining the army as a slinger was not a difficult one.
He went to see Arishaka, who was ensconced with Abi-Maras discussing how best to open the breach in the dyke separating the Tigris and the ditch around Hiritum. Both Mutu-Namaha and Uktannu were present, listening to the discussion with interest. Dadanum didn’t want to let him know that Uktannu’s brother was missing in front of the boy. He guessed that Mutu-Namaha would also be upset as the three of them had grown quite close in recent months. He waited for the two to finish then, as Abi-Maras was leaving, Dadanum had a quiet word in his ear. He nodded and beckoned for the two boys to follow him out. They left reluctantly, wondering what had necessitated a private conversation.
There was nothing that Arishaka could do except send out patrols towards the city to see if there was any sign of the missing boys. He had chosen the reverse slope of an escarpment for his camp. This gave a good view of the approaches from the north and west and was hidden from sight. However, it was five miles from the city and so there was a great deal of ground for the patrols to search. They came back at the end of the day with nothing to report, except that they had seen several craft crossing the Tigris between the Elamite camp on the west bank and the wharf near the city’s water gate.
Neither Arishaka nor Dadanum could make head or tail of this. The wharf couldn’t be in Elamite hands as it was directly below the walls where it could be covered by archers. Then, late in the afternoon, one of the lookouts reported an enemy boat heading downstream close to the west bank. It had disappeared from view behind a small hill but hadn’t reappeared on the river further south. The inescapable conclusion was that it had come in to moor on the west bank.
Dadanum volunteered to take some of his camel archers to investigate but Arishaka insisted on accompanying them. Twenty minutes later then encountered a troop of muddy boys whose smiling eyes and toothy grins conveyed better than words ever could how pleased they were with themselves.
Once washed and decently clothed again, Narem-Suen explained what had happened to them after he sent the rest of the slingers back.
‘One of the boys knew how to sail so, after we had cast off, he showed me how to steer with the tiller whilst we drifted downstream in the middle of the river. He and the other boys got the big triangular sail up and we started to sail back up stream against the current. It was quite slow going but we eventually came level with the ten boats moored on the east bank. There were a group of about a hundred men clustered between the river and a large cluster of buildings. We had intended to set fire to the boats moored just a little further north but instead I decided to attack the men first’.
He paused to take a drink of water before continuing. ‘Well, the first salvo struck nine or ten down. I don’t think that they were paying much attention to us, perhaps they thought we were Elamites who had managed to get the boat free before it caught fire, or perhaps they were too busy watching what was happening on the far bank; anyway, they were slow to react and the slingers are quite quick. A second volley hit them whist they were still stunned by the first one and another eight or so were hit. Then they began to panic. Some ran off whilst others started to string their bows. We managed to get another load of stones away before the first arrow came back at us.’
‘Of course, all they could really see was the boat. We were shadowy black figures, even back lit as we were at times by the burning boats six hundred yards away across the river. A few arrows struck the boat and one boy as unlucky enough to be hit in the neck. He fell into the bottom of the boat, gurgling and moaning. Some of the others went to see if they could help, but of course they couldn’t do anything; so I told them to leave him and keep up the bombardment of the men on the bank. We were drawing away from them upstream by now so we only managed to hit a few more before we were out of range.’
‘I glanced back and thought that there were probably no more than thirty men left standing. We had probably downed the same sort of number so the other forty must have run away to hide. Perhaps they were clerks or slaves. Anyway, we moored further upstream and crept back towards the boats. I sent a dozen boys to set up a protective screen whilst the rest of us got our torches lit. We had just managed to set two boats alight when about thirty men charged towards us. The boys I had sent to protect us managed to get two volleys off before they had to turn and run.’
‘They had managed to hit another seven so I decided to stand and fight. We formed a line and our attackers stopped to use their bows. There
were only about eight archers left so we concentrated on them. Five went down before they could draw their bowstrings and the other three must have panicked. At any rate, their arrows missed us. The remaining men were now outnumbered and they fled into the darkness.’
The boy’s throat was dry with talking, so he took another gulp of water before continuing. ‘We started to fire the other boats and then it struck me. The building probably contained supplies; supplies that might be desperately needed in Hiritum. So we cast off the burning boats and went to check the store sheds. They were full of food and weapons, including barrels of arrows. When we came outside again we found that the Elamites had returned and the first boy out fell back inside with two arrows in his chest. I thought we were trapped.’
‘Luckily one of the boys found a hatchway into the next store room and so we escaped and ran like mad for our boat. We cast off and managed to tow two of the other boats behind us as we got the sail up and clawed our way back upstream and across to the wharf by the water gates of Hiritum. That’s about it really. Some of the sailors and the soldiers from the city manned the other boats and we crossed back again. By this time it was dawn and we could see that there were only about twenty Elamites facing us. The soldiers from the city soon killed them and then we helped to fill all six boats that were left with stores and ferried them across to the wharf on the opposite bank.’
‘Of course, the Elamites outside the city could see what was happening and tried to storm the wharf but they took a great number of casualties from the archers on the walls and eventually gave up. We kept ferrying supplies across most of the day until the stores were empty then we sailed downriver. Once we got clear, reaction set in for some of the boys and they collapsed. I suppose it was the first time that some of them had killed a man and the continual excitement got to others once it was over. Nonetheless, there were enough of us left to cope with crewing the boat.’