The Assyrian (25 page)

My men laughed, but our prisoners must not
have found the situation nearly so amusing. Finally, when they
understood that they were as good as dead, the elders among the
Uqukadi rose to their feet. Among them I recognized none but the
seeming idiot who had come to my tent to parley and had never
opened his lips. I pointed to him, calling him forward.

“Where are the other two?” I asked. For a
moment he looked confused, as if he could not understand me, and
then he lowered his eyes again.

“Gone, Mighty Prince,” he said—so it seemed
that at last he had found his voice. “One of them is fled and the
other lies yonder.”

He made a gesture toward the battlefield,
where the crows were already busy. I did not have to ask myself
which was where—I wondered how far into the mountains the heavy one
with the empty smile could have ridden by this time.

“Good. And for that piece of information I
give you back your life. Go join your people.”

His knees nearly buckled under him and he
made a move that might have ended in his kissing my foot had I not
backed my horse away a pace or two. I was not being generous, no
more than when I had allowed the Uqukadi to turn in their own
leaders to me for punishment. This one was probably a coward but
not, I guessed, quite the fool he appeared. Let him lead his tribe,
that they might not pick a stronger man. After the betrayals of
today, no chief among them would ever trust the loyalty of these
people again, and they would know it. A nation stripped of its
illusions about itself will never be strong a second time.

By then the soldiers had returned with a fine
broad two headed ax and a square block of wood someone might have
used as a stool. They looked very pleased with themselves.

“Bring us one of the cook’s helpers,” I told
them. “This is butcher’s work.”

For a quarter of an hour the air stank with
blood. Each man laid his head upon the block, putting his check in
the clotted gore of his predecessors, and the cook’s helper, a
great hairy hulk of a fellow who worked stripped to his loincloth
that he might not bloody his clothes, took off their heads as
neatly as if he had been cutting turnips for a stew and then, even
before its head had rolled to the ground, kicked the twitching
corpse aside to make room for the next. I stayed on my horse,
though the smell of death made him skittish, and the Uqukadi
watched in silent horror—I understood precisely how they must have
felt.

When it was over, the cook’s helper gathered
up the severed heads and put them in a large leather bag. We would
send them to the king, who would rejoice.

“Do not mourn for these,” I told the Uqukadi,
gesturing down toward the headless trunks that lay at my feet, a
few of them still jerking in their limbs like wooden puppets. “They
led you to ruin, and I have done you a kindness to rid you of them.
Now I will tell you of the terms under which the great king of this
land allows you to keep your own wretched lives—no, you will not
die here and now, although you deserve it. Let the women stand
separate from the men, but let them keep their children with them.
Move. Now!”

They did as they were told—they were too
cowed to do anything else. In hardly more than a moment they stood
in two masses, the women to the left and the men to the right. I
called Lushakin to me.

“Take thirty men,” I said. “Go through the
women and sort out any who speak Akkadian—these will be the wives
of farmers hereabouts and must be returned. For the rest, take the
young ones between ten years and twenty, provided they have no
children, up to the number of one in five.”

Lushakin nodded. It was work to his taste. It
was quickly done, and the people did not even weep. They were long
since past weeping.

“I have taken from you the flower of your
young women,” I told them. “Your virgins and young wives—I do not
interfere between mother and child, but I will have the rest. They
will be slaves in the land of Ashur and die there, their hair gray,
in the houses of their masters. They are lost to you forever. I
will also have from you your horses and half your goats and cattle.
Look about you, mighty Uqukadi, and see your dead warriors. Think
of the hardships that await you in the months ahead while you
struggle to live in the barren mountains. Remember the faces of
your women, whom you will never see again, and rejoice in your
misery that the breath is still under your ribs. The mighty king of
Ashur has let you live this once—remember that as well, and tempt
not his wrath a second time.

“Go now, and if the third sunrise finds you
on this sacred soil I will slaughter all of you, down to the
sucking babes. The king deals mercifully with you now, for you are
no more than ignorant savages and do not understand the customs of
great nations, but there will be no mercy should you ever return.
So depart now. Go!”

While the light held, I set the men to
collecting our dead that we might bury them with offerings of food
and wine. That night we could see the light from the Uqukadi
campfires as they gathered up their possessions and prepared for
the long trek back to their mountain home. The best of their men
had died in battle, and they had lost their young women, their
goods, and their belief in themselves. They could not survive as a
nation but would vanish, absorbed by other tribes. They would never
threaten the land of Ashur again.

“You did not put them all to the sword,”
Lushakin said, in a voice that told me he found weakness in what I
had done. “Your father the king will not be pleased.”

“They will not return. Let them spread the
word among the tribes how death and privation wait on the plains of
Ashur. The king will be pleased enough.”

I wrote a letter to Nineveh that very
night.

“To the king my lord, your servant Tiglath
Ashur. May it be well with you the king my lord. May Ashur and
Shamash be gracious to the king my lord. My lord has won a victory
here today—the Uqukadi are as a shadow that sweeps across the land
and is gone forever. I send you the heads of their great men, and
the plain is strewn with the corpses of their warriors. I have
taken women prisoners. I have taken horses and cattle and goats. I
have shown mercy in your name that none may say the soldiers of
Ashur are cruel through fear. . .”

I dispatched the messenger at first light.
Now I would wait for the king’s sentence on me.

For the next several days we waited. I sent
out riders to make sure the barbarians really did depart the land.
The men rested and rejoiced in the ease of their victory, for we
had lost hardly one man in twenty. To keep them busy I ordered a
stockade built where we kept the women captives, roped together by
the neck. They were not molested, for the armies of Ashur do not
rape and pillage—these are not permitted because they corrupt
discipline—but the Akkadian women we had freed from bondage were
not so eager to return to their farmer husbands that my men lacked
for entertainment. Each night the camp was filled with the sounds
of laughter and singing. Each night I slept alone, remembering the
sight of Esharhamat’s naked body.

We were in the north for three weeks. Word of
a great victory over the Uqukadi spread through the countryside and
men came to our camp seeking what the marauders had taken from
them. I divided cattle and goats as seemed just to me—the horses we
would keep against the campaign soon to be waged in the south—and
husbands led their wives and daughters from among us, so that day
by day the noise of the soldiers’ reveling grew quieter. At last
there were only ten or twelve peasant women left, a few whom none
wanted and more whose men had been killed before their eyes when
they were taken captive. To each of these I gave a dowry of
livestock and silver from my own pouch, and some married soldiers
who had taken their fancy—these would follow us to the south; such
women are always of use in an army. The rest simply melted away to
try their fortunes elsewhere. The Uqukadi women would have to await
the king’s pleasure.

At last a rider came, carrying messages and
new orders from Nineveh. I took the tablet he handed me, wrapped in
leather and sealed with the king’s own seal, and retired to my
tent, wondering if I was being summoned home in disgrace. I need
not have worried.

“To the Lord Tiglath Ashur, mighty prince,
beloved son of your father the king, may it be well with you. The
heads of your enemies I have ordered spiked outside the Great Gate
that the people may know of your glory and the strength of your
arms. You have dealt wisely. May the mountain peoples’ eyes swell
with terror when they hear your name, for a noble enemy is feared
more than a cruel one.

“When this reaches you the armies of Ashur
will already be on the road south. Proceed quickly by forced march
that you may join us where we camp on the Lesser Zab. Give your men
no rest, for your father will need your might and your wise counsel
and his old eyes hunger for the sight of you. This year you will
fight as a rab abru, and this no less than your due. Keep the booty
of your victory for your own uses, learning to take pleasure in the
tricks of barbaric women. Come to us quickly.”

I was saved, even promoted two levels, for it
seemed I had skipped over the rank of mu’irru altogether. Now I
would have under my command not a hundred men but a wing of the
king’s army. But what was I to do—and how was I to proceed by
forced march—with more than a hundred female slaves squalling at my
heels?

. . . . .

For every difficulty there is an answer, and
finalIy it hit me that I should write to Kephalos. Let him bring an
escort and let him take the slaves to market in Nineveh. It was a
piece of business he would relish.

I issued orders, and by first light our men
were ready to move. That the women might not slow us down too much,
I bought farm carts at the first village we came to and loaded half
of them aboard that they all could walk and ride in shifts. They
were nomads and therefore good walkers, and for three weeks they
had been locked away in the stockade we had built to contain them.
They seemed to be glad to be on the move and began flirting with
the soldiers assigned to guard them in so outrageous a manner that
I was forced to have a few of them whipped for the sake of good
order.

On the fifth day I met Kephalos on the road
two beru north of Nineveh, and his eyes lit up when I led him
around to examine my booty where they rested in the shade of the
wagons. The women hissed at him like geese, jeering and showing off
their bellies to taunt him, but my brave servant was
undismayed.

“Master, you have done such a stroke of work
here,” he exclaimed, digging his fingers into his heavy brown beard
in an ecstasy of greed. “Look at them—almost children and wild as
animals! Mountain women are notoriously passionate and make fine
whores. I know brothel keepers who will offer—”

“You will not sell them to be harlots, Master
Physician—you will sell them to private persons who wish concubines
or house servants or cheap brides for their sons. After what these
women have known, the meanest dwelling in Nineveh will seem to them
a paradise of luxury, but they will not be sold to the brothels so
that they may be kicked out into the street to starve the minute
their breasts begin to droop. I will not grow rich thus.”

Kephalos raged and tore his garments and said
I would beggar the both of us with my absurd notions—had he not
himself been a prisoner of war, and did he not understand better
than I what was right and proper under such circumstances? Was not
the market for slaves depressed right now because of the conflict
in the south? Where would he find so many fine families willing to
marry off their sons to women who spoke gibberish and did not know
enough to piss in the street, where it would annoy no one?

“Look at them, Lord—ripe as melons. I may
even keep a few of the better ones for my own use. And you would
waste these on pottery makers and carters of fish, men who could
not command the bride price for a thirty year old virgin with bad
teeth? Master, I fear you have defied all my advice for preserving
your health and have been baking your brains in the sun even to
suggest such a crazed idea. But at least the horses, Lord. The king
your father has gifted you with all the booty, so let me see what
can be done—”

“They go to the army, Kephalos—we will need
them in the south.”

This seemed to drive him wild. He stamped his
foot and swore a mighty oath, his white face turning pink as
pomegranate oil.

“By all the gods of Naxos and the Western
Lands, I am cursed,” he shouted. “I am cursed that I must live my
days as the slave of a witless boy—pardon me, Lord, but it is no
more than the truth. I am cursed above all men.”

But in the end, when he saw that I was
inflexible, he contented himself with grumbling all through dinner
and prophesying that I would die in poverty, such were my mad
humors.

“And, of course, my commission will amount to
nothing,” he went on, eyeing me sidewise as he dipped his jeweled
fingers into a bowl of hot water—it was some new elegance he had
adopted. “It was not worth the expense of the journey. . .”

“Two beru, Kephalos. . ?”

“Yes, but one must travel in a certain state,
and then there was the price of the escort. But such are the things
I do for love of my demented, foolish young master.”

He sighed deeply and took a swallow of wine
to console himself, but the wine only seemed to deepen his
gloom.

“I do not know how the nation will thrive,
Lord, if you are to continue in this fashion when you are king. The
rich and mighty are not made of—”

I reached across the table and grabbed him by
the beard, pulling him toward me, for my heart was all at once full
of darkness.