The Assyrian (12 page)

Esarhaddon, of course, had an answer.

“The blood star,” he said, nodding gravely.
“You were born in the hour that sent him to Arallu—who could it be
but the king who is dead? The great Sargon is your sedu.”

He was mightily awed at this, was my brother.
For the next hour, until we went to sleep, he treated me with
profound respect. By the time the sun rose, fortunately, he had
forgotten all about it.

In the morning I returned to the Great Gate.
The crowd was much thinned—Nergalushezib was silent and listless,
hanging on to the bars of his cage, clearly not long for this life
and thus a considerably less entertaining spectacle. It was hardly
dawn when I came, and impatience was eating away at my entrails
like ants in the carcass of a dead pig.

She will not come, I thought. She does not
love me and thinks of her own safety, and so she will not come. It
is better thus.

Yet I was not so unselfish that life did not
seem a bitterness to me. In the dim gray light of morning
Nergalushezib and I stared at one another, and I was young enough
and fool enough almost to envy him.

And then she did come, her light little feet
parting the still wet grass, and the blackness lifted from my mind.
We could speak no more than a few words that morning. The crowd was
around us, and Esharhamat had her attendants with her. But the
widow of the marsarru had her own apartments within the king’s new
palace. She lived under the protection of her mother in law the
Lady Tashmetum-sharrat who, as lady of the palace, was not walled
up within the house of women, but that stricken soul, old now,
forgotten by the king, and bereft of her eldest son, had withdrawn
into a seclusion deeper than any there had known.

It was not wholly improper that I should
visit my childhood friend in her own rooms. We were never alone
together, and I did not allow myself to call too often. We were
safe enough, provided it went no further, and we were both happy.
Under the vacant, grieving eyes of the Lady Tashmetum-sharrat, we
sat together beside the fountain in her garden, so like the
fountain of our shared childhood, and we talked and played with her
pet cats—Esharhamat had a great love for overfed cats with long
white fur and sharp claws—and sometimes I would bring her some
pretty trinket I had bought for the purpose among the bazaars.

“What is it?” she would ask, smiling with her
dark eyes and holding it up to the sun’s light.

“It is a brooch for your veil—see how
cleverly the pin is concealed? It comes from Tyre.”

She would laugh and clap her hands as
clumsily I tried to open it. While we were together in the privacy
of her garden she did not wear her veil, which I took as a token of
her trust in me.

“But what are the figures? Cats? Really, are
they cats?”

“Yes. You see? This one looks exactly like
Lamashtu.”

“Oh, Tiglath—you mustn’t call her that.”

“Why not? Is she not the most frightful of
your demons? Did you see what she did to my fingers the last time I
tried to take her from your lap. . ?”

We never spoke of love. It was sufficient for
me if I could but see her from time to time. I believed—I believe
still—that I wanted nothing more. My liver was easy, and I went no
more to the temple of Ishtar.

And while Esharhamat and I followed our
innocent love, the Land of Ashur was at war. I felt strangely
divided—or perhaps not so strangely, since war quickens the hearts
in men. Esharhamat was the breath of life in my nostrils, but I
lived only for the moment when I might do battle against the
Elamites. My training had been greatly accelerated, and I knew that
when the next army marched south, I would be with it. I wanted only
to love Esharhamat, and I wanted only glory. The day I had my final
orders was one of the happiest of my life.

“And I,” lamented Esarhaddon, “I, your
superior in every way—I, Esarhaddon the mighty, the valiant, I am
to be sent off to garrison duty in the west.”

“They know which of us is the true warrior,
brother,” I said, dodging out of the way to avoid the sandal aimed
straight at my head. “You would only disgrace yourself, making
water in your loincloth the first time an Elamite sneezed at
you.”

That was too much for him and he charged at
me from across our room, head first like a bull. When finally he
had pinned me to the floor and we were both laughing too hard to
fight anymore, he relented and we went out into the city to
celebrate my glory over a pot of beer.

“But I see my mother’s hand in this,” he
said—he was deep in drink, but he may have been right. “That bitch
among women. She is ever plotting, spinning webs like a spider. If
I die of the gout at the age of one hundred, it will be her doing.
That Babylonian she cat. By the sixty great gods, why does she
torment me so?”

“That she can make you a great man and rule
the Land of Ashur through you,” I answered him. I was drunk too,
and at the time it sounded like a harmless enough joke.

Esarhaddon nodded, as if the idea were his
own and had just flown into his head.

“I shouldn’t doubt it. The she cat among
women.”

And thus did we both enter into the estate of
manhood.

. . . . .

Let me now say something of the land and
people of Elam, for the story I tell is about more than my own
little life and they were once among the mighty nations of the
earth, though now their memory is dim even where before they were
feared. When I am dead, it may be that only these few words still
remain as their memorial. It is cruel that men’s names should
perish without a trace, so let them live a little longer in this
the chronicle of an old enemy.

Elam, like the Land of Ashur, was nourished
by the waters of the Tigris. It lay many days downstream and to the
east, facing Babylonia across the river. It was a rich nation—as
its inheritors ever will be, since the land abides forever. The
soil is deep and blessed by the Tigris, the Uqnu, and the Idide,
whose floodings keep it fertile.

Beyond the plains there are the mountains,
yielding copper, lead, silver, tin, basalt, stone, timber, iron,
and horses. All that the men of Ashur had had to gain by conquest,
the Elamites were given as a birthright.

It is said that the summers there are like a
furnace, that a dog left out of doors at midday will go mad in an
hour and a lizard cannot cross the road in Susa without being
roasted alive. I have never been closer to their borders than the
Turnat River, and that in the month of Siwan, after the floods have
subsided but before the season when the sun beats down like a
hammer, but even there the people had cellars dug into the earth,
where they could find some relief from the terrible heat.

There are three races of men who call
themselves Elamites: the plains are inhabited by dark haired, white
skinned people who are no different from the Babylonians; the
mountains produce men with brown skin and of great height; and from
the plateaus beyond the mountains come men whose skins are black
but who are nothing like the black skinned men I have seen in
Egypt, who come from the place where the river Nile finds its
source. But all the Elamites, of whatever color, are regarded with
great suspicion by their neighbors, who call them brutal,
humorless, weak, grasping, and untrustworthy. The Sumerians had a
proverb: “An Elamite is unhappy with nothing but a house to live
in.” The Babylonians speak of Elam as a land of witches, magicians,
and all manner of evil spirits. Of my own knowledge I can only say
that they are not weak—I have stood against them in battle, and
they are brave to the point of rashness.

Of their customs I can report little. I never
learned their language, nor have I ever met anyone who has, for it
is of a fearful complexity. Their writing is clearly based on the
daggerlike script, although I was never able to read it, and they
witness documents by impressing their fingernails into the soft
clay of the tablets. The common people worship snakes, which are
plentiful in that country, and a goddess called Pinikir, whose clay
image they wear about their necks—I know nothing of her except that
she is always depicted naked and holding up her great breasts with
her hands. The priests enjoy vast influence among great and humble
alike, and they go naked even when they follow their armies into
battle. Whether this might be to honor their goddess, I know
not.

But of the many remarkable things in the land
of Elam, the most remarkable are the customs of their ruling house.
Like all civilized nations they have a king placed over them, but
the king’s power is divided among himself, his next eldest brother,
who is called the lesser king, and the king’s son, who is governor
of Susa, their capital city. When the king dies he is succeeded not
by his son but by his brother, who does not then appoint his own
son governor of Susa but leaves his brother’s son in that office.
Brother succeeds brother until they are all exhausted, and only
then does the eldest brother’s son come to the throne. This system
has the obvious disadvantage that a younger brother is more
susceptible to jealousy than a son, and the history of the Elamite
royal family has been filled with bitter quarrels. Indeed,
Hallutush-Inshushinak, who began the war with the Lord Sennacherib,
came to power by overthrowing his brother.

Complicating all of this is the king’s
custom, dating from the most ancient times, of marrying his own
sister. At the king’s death his brother marries the widow, who is
of course his sister as well, and it is the order of her male
children and not the identities of their fathers that settles the
succession. This practice of incest raises the women of the royal
house to great prominence, which is a misfortune for any country,
and also, as any cattle breeder could tell you, weakens the
vitality of the line. Sons die young and their loins are not
fruitful, and for as long as men can remember the kings of Elam
have gone mad, one after the other, their minds shaking apart like
a reed fence in the wind. Elam is a rich land and her people were
brave and gifted, but a nation cannot prosper while her kings rage
and stagger and foam at the mouth like a dog with the water hating
sickness. Thus were the Elamites a burden to their neighbors and
hated accordingly.

But for myself I hardly thought of them as
men—they were simply the enemies of Ashur, the proper objects of my
cruel valor. For I had no doubt I would be terrible in war. I spent
the pocket money I had from Kephalos on polished bronze mirrors and
pieces of carved ivory to give to Esharhamat, but I would be a
demon of destruction when I fought the Elamites.

Thus did the year slip by us, and soon the
time approached for the summer campaign. There was the camp and the
final frenzied days of preparation, and there was Esharhamat.
Nothing else stands out in my memory of that time, except a single
chance encounter the significance of which I did not grasp for many
years.

The week before our departure, after the
day’s arms drill was finished and while I waited under the shade of
a reed lean-to for my turn to enter the sweating house and clean my
body before dinner, Tabshar Sin came to me. He squatted on the
ground beside me, and his face was set and grim.

“You will go to war as a member of the
quradu,” he began, shifting his weight uncomfortably, as if the
interview was not pleasing to him. “The quradu always take many
losses, for they fight in the vanguard around the king’s own
person. Further, you are both daring and inexperienced, which is a
dangerous combination. A little fear is a good thing, Prince—I make
no complaint against your courage, for courage is a soldier’s chief
virtue, but I could wish you had more respect for the terrors of
death. Remember that you are soon to lead men into war, and you
will have their lives to think of as well as your own. But that is
not what I wished to speak of.”

I said nothing. I waited in silence, for
Tabshar Sin was a serious man and a brave soldier, deserving of
respect. If I lived through the first rush of battle, I knew it
would be a blessing I owed to him.

“Prince, it is always a prudent soldier who
settles his affairs before the start of a new campaign. That lazy
Ionian I know has made you rich, and you have a mother in the house
of women. Go to the tablet house and write a will.”

He left me, and already I could hear the
sound of wings fluttering over my head, as if the Lady Ereshkigal,
Queen of Arallu, were even then circling above, ready to swoop down
and carry off my life.

So the next day, with Esarhaddon along to act
as my witness, I went to the tablet house. The air there was damp
and smelled like a riverbank after the floods have gone. We were
shown through room after tiny room, the walls crammed with shelf
upon shelf of small clay slabs, and I was reminded how close I had
come to living out my days in this place. The thought made me
shudder. At last we came to a room somewhat larger, like the
schoolroom of my childhood, and there, sitting at a desk, the palms
of his hands stained from years of contact with the damp clay, sat
a scribe in a white linen tunic. He was young, perhaps the same age
as ourselves, and his face was beardless and ever would be. His
eyes were dark and filled with smothered anger, almost as if he had
settled with himself that we were responsible for whatever clouded
his life. Esarhaddon and I took our places on a bench opposite, and
for a moment the three of us regarded each other without
speaking.

“What is it you wish here, Tiglath Ashur?”
the scribe said at last in his reedy eunuch’s voice. I could not
have been more astonished.

“You know me then?” I asked. “We
are—acquainted?”

“You have not changed so very much, either
you or Esarhaddon. Perhaps the difficulty is that I have changed
hardly at all.”