The Assyrian (2 page)

And Naq’ia, whose mind was ever turning on
dark things, sat quietly by the fountain’s edge, smoothing with her
fingertips the hem of her black linen veil. With my mind’s eye I
see her there, so many lifetimes ago, not as she was then hut as I
remember her from my young manhood, still beautiful but with gray
in her shining black hair, her mouth lined with years of cunning.
She must have been yet almost a girl that morning in the garden at
Nineveh, but was she ever young? It is unimaginable. Those who
would be the mothers of kings are never young.

“Lathikadas, go and play with the little
prince your brother,” my mother said, letting me down so that my
sandals scraped against the brick floor.

“And mind how you treat the next king, my
great man of Ashur.”

As I drew close, Naq’ia touched my hair, as
if she never ceased to marvel at the color of it. I looked up into
her eyes, fascinated by the nearness of my danger. Little
Esarhaddon came out from behind his mother’s skirt. He was but a
few weeks younger than I but smaller, as were most such of the
king’s sons who counted as my fellows in the house of women. I held
out my hand to him, as I had been bidden, and he took it and
smiled. For all that he was his mother’s child, Esarhaddon was even
then beginning to think of himself as my friend.

“Yes—it is all right, my son.” Naq’ia leaned
forward, taking us each by the shoulder as if she would push us
away like boats from their moorings. “Run and play with the god’s
little darling, for all that his mother is only a concubine. Learn
all the ways of the great men who will be as slaves beneath your
feet in a few years’ time.”

Turning my mind back to those times, I can
see now what was hidden from me then, that the house of women was a
strange, unnatural, unhappy place. It was always crowded—young
girls, mothers with their children, old crones who had been the
pillow mates of long dead kings and who had nowhere else to go—but
what I remember best is the quiet. We spoke in soft voices, even
the little children, as if afraid of breaking some spell. It was
the place to which the king my father came to take his pleasure,
but no one else found any joy there.

The house of women was a prison, a cage with
golden bars, for none might leave or enter without the great king’s
order. But a child knows nothing of such things, and our garden,
walled around on four sides by the dwellings of wives and
concubines, was to me a place of enchantment. The tiled pools were
filled with fish that glistened in the water like flashes of
lightning, always just out of reach, and the king kept a tame
gazelle, raised from a baby and without fear, that would come to
lick the salt from our sweating arms.

There was also a linden tree, considered a
great rarity. I was forbidden to swing from its low hanging
branches for fear of breaking them, but I did anyway. It was to the
linden tree that I took Esarhaddon, that I might astonish him with
my daring in this matter of swinging, but all he wanted was to
learn the secret of walking upside down.

“Show me, show me, show me,” he chanted, his
black eyes glistening, dancing without much agility on his thick
legs. Esarhaddon was no more dexterous than the generality of
little boys, but to the hour of his death he was solid and
unmovable as a wall. “Show me how—teach me, Laf’kos.”

I was not pleased, so I turned away from him
with a shrug.

“I am Tiglath,” I said coldly. A child
brought up in the house of women learns to stand on his dignity,
and it had the desired effect. Esarhaddon stared at me with
wonder.

“Your mother called you ‘Laf’kos.’ I heard
her.”

“She calls me ‘Lathikadas’—she does, no one
else. It is a word in her tongue.”

Esarhaddon, who at that age hardly knew even
his own tongue, cocked his head to one side as if trying to shake
something loose.

“What does it mean?” he asked finally. In the
presence of this mystery he had forgotten all about walking upside
down.

“It means my name is Tiglath. You will call
me Tiglath, nothing else. Can you remember as much as that?”

And the little boy smiled and said “yes,”
apparently unaware that we had been settling a point of honor, and
a door in my heart opened to him, one that would never close. Not
even death could close it. Even now my eyes fill with tears as I
remember when we were children together. Esarhaddon, my brother, my
friend, whom I wronged, who wronged me in his turn, but whom I
always loved. Whom I love now as he is dust.

“Teach me the trick,” he said, sticking his
arms straight in the air. “Show me, Tiglath.”

“All right. But I am not to blame if you
break your neck.”

. . . . .

“What does it mean?” My brother Esarhaddon
might well ask, for the name by which Merope called me was then a
riddle, even to me, even as I was a riddle to myself.

We were strangers, she and I, beings set
apart. Even as a child I was conscious of this. The ladies of the
king’s house would come to look at me, to confirm for themselves
the story of “the child whose eyes stayed blue.” The men of Ashur
are thickset, black headed men, and I am tall and slender and in my
youth had light brown hair. Since Shamash, God of Destiny, has made
me a wanderer through all the lands of this world, I have learned
that there is nothing monstrous in this, that the men beyond the
Northern Sea, and even the Nile dwellers in the land of Kem, though
they are browner, are not so different. The broad earth holds a
great multitude of peoples, but I was not to learn this for many
years. All I knew was that my mother had blue eyes and hair the
color of bronze, that she spoke a tongue that none save myself
could understand, and that I was her son and different from all
around me. Children dread the mockery of others, and I felt my
strangeness as a curse. And I at least had been born there beside
the swift flowing Tigris—what must my mother have suffered, a
foreigner in the house of women?

My mother was what the men of Ashur called an
Ionian or, as she would have expressed it, a Greek, since she had
been born on the mainland, in a city called Athens. Her father, so
she told me, was a shoemaker given to speculating among the
merchant ships that went forth over the dark sea. I understood
nothing of this—I had never seen a ship nor heard of such a race as
“merchants”—but she made it plain to me that he had fallen upon
hard times and had been forced to sell his eldest daughter as a
slave. He was a sentimental man and had wept as he led her from his
house that last day, and she bore him no ill will. Thus, at
thirteen, she found herself on a ship bound for Cyprus, where light
haired women fetched a better price. From there, by what accident I
know not, she made up part of the tribute the kings of that island
sent in their fear to the Lord Sargon. She never saw the land of
her birth again.

Lathikadas, “he who banishes grief.” The
great king my father chose for me the name Tiglath Ashur, thus to
honor at once his grandfather and his god, but my mother, in her
life of sorrow, called me Lathikadas. I only hope it could have
been in some small measure true.

But little brother Esarhaddon, the color and
shape of a mud brick, that black haired boy knew nothing of these
things as he asked his harmless question. Naq’ia might intrigue to
put him on his father’s throne, but his heart was all innocence. He
meant harm to no one save the enemies of Ashur, and in those days
little enough even to them.

And while Naq’ia dreamed of his glory, no
one, least of all Esarhaddon himself, imagined any destiny for him
except that of a soldier. He wanted to be a rab shaqe, a leader of
the king’s armies. He would cry if one of the royal pigeons died,
but that sweet little boy, like all the rest of us, dreamed of his
sword dripping with the blood of Elamites and Medes.

“I hate writing,” he would whisper to me as
we hunched over our tablets, copying out the characters of an
incantation to the god Nabu we were to learn by rote. “This is for
scribes and priests, not for men of valor. It is hopeless. I will
never remember the tenth part of all this.”

It was true that the mystery of which Nabu
was the patron was no simple business but an art of the highest
refinement. We wrote on tablets of wet clay that when baked would
last, they told us, until the end of the world, so we must be
wonderfully careful to scratch in the long tapering lines that made
up a character, the least part of a word, so they would not form
unsightly ridges in the smooth surface. And characters there were
in their hundreds beyond counting, and a true scribe wrote not in
the Akkadian of common men but in an old dialect not spoken in the
Land of Ashur since the days of the heroes. And then there was
Sumerian to learn, the sacred tongue, written with the same
characters but with different meanings and sounds, a tongue to tie
one’s brains into knots, such as no men could ever have spoken with
comfort, not even in the most ancient times, but such as was
pleasing to the gods’ ears.

Esarhaddon held the flat sided stylus in his
thick fingers, copying out the daggerlike strokes of our text,
hating each one of them as they passed through his mind like water
through a sieve, hating the old scribe who taught us, with his
white hair and his beardless face and his mighty fear of the king’s
wrath. All this was for Esarhaddon the torment of his youth, for
his mother, who could not form the symbols even of her own name,
was most anxious about his progress. And Naq’ia, it seemed, had
eyes everywhere.

“Mother, can you write?”

Merope looked at me as if she expected the
gods to turn me to salt for my impertinence, and sighed, and ran
her hand through her bronze-colored hair.

“In the city of Athens everyone can write who
is not a sucking babe or a fool. It is only the country people with
dung stuffed into their ears who cannot write.”

In fact, she could only form some ten or
twelve signs, enough to spell her name and the name of her city’s
patron goddess and a few other trifles, but she taught me
these.

Writing is a strange, unnatural affair. I
have heard it said that the god Nabu in pity gave men the
daggerlike script that they might remember his preserving prayers,
but I do not believe this. The Greeks can spell any word they wish
with four and twenty signs, which they call “letters,” so why
should Nabu have burdened the people of Akkad and Sumer with
hundreds of symbols, as difficult to form as to remember? The
writing of the Nile people, which I never learned, is even worse.
Only men could produce a thing of such perversity. The gods had no
hand in it.

“The gods have blessed you with good ears,”
old Bag Teshub would tell me, his voice quavering like a reed flute
as he wiped the sweat from his beardless face. “As a scholar you
have few rivals among your royal brothers—even Nabusharusur, who is
your elder by a quarter of a year, lacks your refinement of
understanding. If the lord king your father decides to make a
priest of you, you will be a fine omen reader.”

One day our text was the story of Ashur’s
victory over Tiamat the Chaos Monster, how he used the winds to
keep her mouth open while he shot an arrow into her heart, how he
cut her body in half, making the sky with one part and the earth
with the other, and thus became lord over all the other gods, who
gave him fifty great names. It was an easy text, except for the
fifty names.

“Prince Esarhaddon, recite for us the lines
from the second tablet in which Ea fails to subdue the monster.
Here—take it.”

My brother, poor soul, accepted the delicate
little clay rectangle, its edges made smooth and round by the
caressing hands of generations of scribes, and he glanced back over
his shoulder at me, begging my pity with his eyes.

“‘. . . terror. . . jaws. . . .’” He dug the
point of his writing stylus into his cheek, as if to prick himself
awake. “‘The terror of her. . .’ something ‘jaws.’”

Nabusharusur, my only rival in our little
schoolroom, a bright, lively boy and my closest friend after
Esarhaddon, glanced at me and smiled with mischief. Yes, it was
only human to feel a certain self-satisfaction in our brother’s
misery. I was probably smiling myself.

“What something, Prince?”

And Esarhaddon. who never in his life feared
any living thing except his mother, let his face grow dark with
anger at the aged scribe.

“I’ll something you, you flabby old
gelding—the purse between your legs is as empty as a boatman’s
belly!”

The clay tablet flew across the room like a
weapon of war, shattering against the wall not a hand’s span from
Bag Teshub’s head.

I think Esarhaddon was even glad to receive
his thrashing, as if each stroke of the old man’s oxhide lash—which
he used only lightly, as these were the king’s sons and might one
day grow up to nail his wrinkled old skin to the city wall—were a
mark of honor. Almost anything was more to Esarhaddon’s taste than
recitation, and when we were released from our labors that day he
was as cheerful as a sparrow. In an hour, when by some mysterious
but no less inevitable process word of what had happened reached
the Lady Naq’ia, then he would know sorrow in all its rich variety,
but for the moment, as we sat under the linden tree, unknotting the
napkins in which we carried our lunches, he was pleased enough with
himself.

“You shouldn’t do such things to Bag Teshub,”
I announced grandly, and then my glance met Esarhaddon’s and we
grew helpless with little boys’ laughter. “And you shouldn’t say
such things.”

“Well—isn’t it true?” Esarhaddon’s mouth was
crammed with dried dates, full of sweetness but as difficult to
chew as saddle leather. Finally, because he desired to say more, he
swallowed so hard that tears started in his eyes. “Have you never
seen the old fool make water? His stick is so shriveled up the dead
skin sloughs off like the husk of an onion. And the rest of him is
just gone! There is nothing there except a shiny scar, as if
someone scoured away his pouch with its two little pellets like
dried food from the inside of a cooking pot!”