The Assyrian (16 page)

“And is it you, Tiglath, my son? You are
still alive in all this, eh? It must he the gods have granted you a
sedu.”

I started at the word, but he did not notice.
He was lost to anything so insignificant as my small shudder of
despair.

“Yes, Lord, it is I.”

“And are they gone? Eh? Yes?”

“They are gone back over the river, Lord. I
do not think they will soon return.”

The king my father put his hands upon my
shoulders, this time not to save me from the gelding knife but to
support his weary heart. He was old and frightened and so he rested
in his son’s arms, for all men must trust someone. Thus it was that
we found each other on the blood soaked plains of Khalule.

Chapter 6

The next day, and the next, we gathered our
dead from the plain at Khalule and buried them with offerings of
food and wine. The corpses of the enemy we looted and left to the
crows; their wounded, those who had survived the night, we put to
the sword. We took their hands and heads for trophies, for there
was no mercy in our bowels. When we had finished, we nursed our own
wounded and rested, waiting for the king to issue commands. The
Elamites had withdrawn—not even our outriders could find them — so
we were free to call the battle ours if we wished, but I remember
no talk of victory.

So we waited for the king my father to tell
us what he wished of us, praying in our hearts that he would not
order us across the Turnat and into the Land of Elam, for we had no
more heart for war. The ground on which we had fought was covered
with the stinking carcasses of men and animals and the fresh turned
earth of graves. Our losses were close on to two men in five, and
the enemy must have suffered even worse. If we pursued them into
their own kingdom, they would be driven to the limits of
desperation, and no foe is so deadly as he who has abandoned the
hope of life.

But for three days the king kept to his tent,
refusing all food, seeing no one. None were admitted into his
presence, not even the turtanu. And thus we waited, measuring the
bitterness of our suffering against what was left of our manly
courage. None thought of rebellion against the Servant of Ashur,
the Lord of the Earth’s Four Corners, for the king was sacred and
the soldiers of the god were pious men, but the mood in the camp
was dark. We waited, for there was nothing else.

The death of Nargi Adad had made me rab kisir
in fact as well as name, for there was no one else to lead. The men
in my company were only common soldiers, lost without someone to
give them their orders—it was then I first understood that for a
warrior orders are the breath of life, all that stands between him
and what he fears more even than the enemy, that terrible chaos of
his own ungoverned will.

And thus it was my place to argue with the
supply officers for bread and beer, to see that the physicians
attended to my soldiers’ wounds, and, more than all else, to keep
them occupied with work. I was not quiet in my own mind—the wound
along my rib cage pained me constantly, and I had used up all of
the ointment in Kephalos’s green jar to help those among the men
who might have died without it. Besides, from one day to the next,
my memory had grown clogged with unspeakable recollections, so I
was glad to be busy in the management of others. Authority and the
endless business that follows in its wake are the best vehicles of
escape from oneself. Each day, as my soldiers grew to depend on me
more and more, my command over their loyalty became ever more firm,
and each night as I lay down upon my bedroll, too tired even for
dreams, I put yet a little more healing time between myself and the
horror of that one long day.

On the third evening after the battle, as I
sat with my men around a campfire, waiting for the cooking pot to
boil so that we could be done with eating and find our rest, I
glanced up and saw standing at the edge of the firelight a man
carrying the white javelin of a royal messenger. Fluttering from
the shaft of the javelin was a silver ribbon, a sign that he
carried words to a prince of the blood. I did not at once grasp the
implications of this.

“Rab Kisir—direct me to the Lord Tiglath
Ashur,” he said. Like all such court officials in all nations, he
was a fine looking young fellow and obviously very taken with
himself. His beard glistened with oil and his hands, showing white
as ivory against his beautifully embroidered blue

uniform, were well tended and as expressive
as a woman’s. I would have wagered much that to this one his weapon
was no more than a badge of office, a thing to be carried about
like a walking stick, but I was dirty and tired and out of temper
with the world. Also, I did not care for his manner of addressing
me.

“Your search is over,” I answered, hardly
looking at him while I used the point of my sword to stir the fire.
My men, I was aware, found the exchange rather comical—they were
already nudging one another and exchanging sly little winks. It
would seem the royal messenger was not greatly to their taste
either. “What do you want?”

“You. . ?”

“I. State your business—or am I required to
guess?”

He might actually have said something, but if
he did I could not hear it in the ensuing laughter. The messenger,
when he had recovered from his confusion—clearly a royal prince
lying around a campfire with a pack of dirty sweat streaked
soldiers was not something he saw every day—he bowed from the
waist, touching his right hand to his brow in token of respect. It
was a gesture to which no true warrior would have condescended
before any man not the king, and I despised him for it.

“I have been sent by the Lord Sennacherib,
Prince. He sends you his prayers for a long life and bids you
attend him.”

“Now?”

“Now, Prince.”

It was not a summons that could be ignored,
so I rose to go, cursing only in the privacy of my heart. Someone
handed me a jar of beer, and I rinsed my mouth out with a swallow
and spat the rest into the fire, making it hiss like a witch.

“Never fear, My Lord Prince,” said Lushakin,
my new ekalli. “I will keep something from the pot for you should
the king your father not invite you to stay for dinner.”

The remark was greeted with renewed laughter,
for Lushakin was regarded as a great joker, natural enough in the
son of a boatman, quick tongued rogues and fine storytellers in all
the nations.

“Do not trouble yourself, My Lord Ekalli.
Remember that the king has prayed that I might live until
breakfast.”

As I followed the royal messenger away I
could hear them laughing still, even until the sound was swallowed
up by the general buzz of camp noise.

And as we walked I had only to look around me
to see that the stricken weariness of my own soldiers, the fear
that had sunk bone deep in each of them, was common to all those in
the king’s army. The cooking fires lit up their faces as men sat
with their arms slumped over their knees, staring out into the
darkness as if they could see their own deaths there. Their voices
were muffled and hollow; their movements slow. They had the look of
men only just recovering from sickness, except that their sickness
was not of the body but of the will and spirit. All of this I could
see in the firelight that flickered against the black night.

I did not ask myself why the king should send
for me. My mind was not clear enough even to frame the question—I
could only look out at the things about me and see what was plain
to everyone. I had not even the wit to be surprised.

The king’s tent was in the camp’s very
center, surrounded by those of his principal officers. It was of
heavy purple linen and almost as large as the house of my slave
Kephalos in Nineveh. It was even divided into an inner and an outer
room so that the Servant of Ashur might preserve his majesty.
Except at the entrance, there were no guards posted, for in the
midst of his army what had my father to fear from any man?

That he was my father was impressed upon my
mind yet again when the royal messenger drove the point of his
javelin into the earth and left it there beside the entrance to the
king’s tent that all might know the Lord Sennacherib, the sacred
king, wished to be alone with the son of his loins.

The outer room contained only a camp table,
behind which perched a beardless scribe who could hardly bring
himself to glance up from his tablet. The flap to the inner room
was held aside with a cord and the scribe motioned with his stylus
that I was to go through.

“And is it you, lad? Eh?”

The king sat on the edge of his cot, dressed
in nothing but a plain linen tunic, quite as if he had just risen
from sleep, although his eyes said he had not slept in many days.
His head was bare and I could see plainly enough the heavy streak
of gray that crept through his hair. I knelt before him and placed
my hands upon his knees and he took them both in his own, squeezing
tightly. I looked into his face and he tried to smile but then
looked away, dropping my hands.

“Fetch us some wine, eh? You see it? Yes?
It’s over there on the table. Bring a cup for each of us, and we’ll
drink to the Elamite king, eh? Hah, hah, hah!”

I said nothing but did as he bid. As he took
the cup from my hands I could see that his own were shaking.

“Sit, lad—sit. Come sit beside me.”

He was better after the second cup, and his
hands were still.

“They are gone, eh?” His glance drifted
nervously around the tent, as if he feared that Kudur-Nahhunte
might be lurking behind a chair. “‘They went back across the river,
yes?”

“Yes, Lord. They will not return, not for a
long time. They have left too many of their best soldiers to lie
rotting outside our stockade.”

“Did they?” The king clutched my arm with
both his hands. “Did they, lad? Eh? You’ve seen them?”

“Yes, Lord. You have only to step out onto
the plain to see the great harvest of corpses.”

“Then let’s do that, lad. We’ll be safe
enough, just you and I, yes?”

He rose from his cot, and I helped him into
his great silver tunic and with my own hands placed the turban of
royalty upon his head. He was like a child being dressed by his
mother. When he left the tent one of his courtiers approached, but
the king waved him away with an impatient gesture.

“No!” He glared around at the knot of his
officers who surrounded us. “None but my son here. A torch!”

One of the guards handed me a torch, and
together the king and I walked to the gates of the stockade, men
staring at us as we passed as if at the visitation of a god, and
then out onto the killing ground at Khalule. The stink of mortality
was heavy in the air. There was no light save from the summer moon
and the torch I carried, but that grisly landscape needed no other
to reveal its horrors. Blood stained the ground, leaving great
black patches where it had dried, and the bodies of dead men lay
about in grotesque profusion. One could almost hear the anguished
cries of their souls as they floated about aimlessly on the night
wind.

“It is true then, eh?”

The king held my arm as we picked our way
over the litter of corpses—he limped like an old man.

“It is true, Lord.”

“And what of our own army?”

“Badly mauled, but intact.”

“Then we will not march south into Elam,” he
said—for the first time that evening his truly was the king’s
voice. “We cannot stay here or there will be sickness—phew, what a
smell! We will go west, to the Euphrates. With the Elamites gone,
that black headed rabble will remember soon enough who is Lord of
Akkad and Sumer. We will give my brave men a few months of easy
victories, let them grow rich on booty and gain back their
confidence. The Babylonians will pay for this campaign, that they
may learn the price of their treachery to my son and heir.

“Come, Tiglath—you will stand at my side
while I issue the order. They say you fought like a cornered boar
and were twice wounded, and in your first battle, too. Let the
lords of Ashur see how I raise you to glory, eh? Do your wounds
hurt you, lad? I remember how in my first battle I. . .”

And thus did the king my father, in his time
of fear, gather me to him. He made me great, as he had promised
when I was but a smooth limbed boy, and through him I came to know
the ways and uses of power. I never knew what made him send for me,
but all that I grew to be in the Land of Ashur I owe to that
night.

. . . . .

We did march west, and the great men of
Sippar threw themselves at the feet of our king, begging that he
might spare the city, for by then all knew that the Elamites would
come no more that year into the lands of Akkad and Sumer. The king
in his wisdom saw the virtues of an easy victory and accepted their
tribute, worshiped at the shrines of their gods, and headed south,
keeping always to the shore of the river Euphrates, its waters
muddy and its currents slow as a crippled snake. The cities of
Cuthah, Kish, and Borsippa all made their submission, for the
armies of Ashur were not to be resisted—and would return home soon
enough.

We did not move against Babylon, for
Mushezib-Marduk, who the previous year had taken the hands of the
god Bel and was king in that city, had with him a strong army. He
had been at Khalule but like a prudent monarch had suffered his
ally to do most of the fighting and was thus still powerful enough
to hold his citadel. Babylon, as all men know, is a great city, and
to take it against a determined opposition was, for that year,
beyond our strength. We fought no more pitched battles that
campaign.

And with the end of summer we turned our
faces north toward Nineveh.

Along our route of march his loyal subjects
came out to do honor to their king: Opia, Samarra, Talent, holy
Ashur, Calah, all the great cities of the land. We traveled the
road home with garlands of flowers about our necks, and old women
greeted us with wine and fruit. We had suffered much, and for the
god’s sake and theirs, that all might sleep safe in their beds and
dream no dreams of the Elamite. At Takrit they clothed the walls in
banners of green and yellow, and at Calah the people knelt by the
roadside to accept the blessings of the mighty king.