The Assyrian (28 page)

There had been no further inquiries, of
course. The murder of a prince is the private business of the
king—it is not wise even to admit publicly that such a thing could
happen—so no one would be summoned to justice. If the lord
Sennacherib had his suspicions he would keep them to himself. And
he would strike back at a time and in a manner of his own
choosing.

It seemed odd to me that in all the time we
had been together since my return from the north, my royal father
had never once mentioned the death of his son—not even in passing.
It was as if Arad Ninlil, whom the gods favored not, had never
lived.

I returned to the house of war with a
darkened mind, feeling as if a spider’s web were closing around me,
insubstantial but strong nonetheless.

Whose path was being cleared to the throne,
mine or Esarhaddon’s? In the last few years there had been a great
harvesting of princes, and now, it seemed, someone was doing the
Lady Ereshkigal’s work for her.

. . . . .

For several days I was busy with the work of
the king’s new army. It was well, for it left me no time to think.
Once only I allowed myself the luxury of a day and a night at Three
Lions to visit my mother, who, naturally, had heard nothing and
knew nothing and was therefore as content as a women can be whose
only son fights in a great war. It was a day and a night with the
only woman I knew whose heart was not filled with plotting. When I
mounted my horse to return to Nineveh, I felt as if I were
returning to commit some impurity.

And, of course, I did, one single time, go to
the king’s palace to see Esharhamat, who held my heart in her snare
so firmly that I would never free myself.

But I was not her only visitor that day. When
I entered her garden I found her sitting by the fountain, and with
her was another woman, dressed in a black tunic shot through with
silver threads that made her shine like the night sky. Even the
shawl drawn over her hair was edged in silver. She turned her head
to see who was coming and smiled, as if she had expected me. I
recognized at once the Lady Naq’ia.

It was many years since I had seen her, not
since the days of my childhood, when she had seemed as fearful as a
scorpion. Now she was no longer young, but to my eye younger than
the dread beauty who had ruled the house of women like Semiramis of
old—smaller too, but that was no more than a trick of memory. She
sat there beside Esharhamat, seemingly as close as mother and
daughter. And she could smile and smile, and still I would know she
and I were destined to be enemies until death. I placed my hand
over my heart and bowed to her.

“You have grown, Tiglath—but may I yet call
you by that name, Dread Prince?” Her eyes glittered in mocking
laughter for an instant, not waiting for an answer. “And yet,
though your glory covers the earth now, I think I would still have
known you anywhere. Is your mother well?”

“Well, Lady, and happy. I trust it is so with
you?”

“Yes—it is so with me.”

Time had been kind to the Lady Naq’ia, who
was still admired throughout the city as a handsome woman—indeed,
since she had only just come out of the seclusion of the house of
women, her beauty, newly discovered, struck many with all the force
of revelation.

Yet it was a beauty which carried with it the
thrill of danger; it was impossible not to sense that this woman
was without scruples or affection and understood only the heartless
passion of the body. I had no difficulty grasping why my
father—such was the story—had paid to the tavern master of Borsippa
five whole talents of silver that he might have this wild, dark
eyed slave for his bed. But, had he ever learned to love her, I
could only pity him.

“Could it be, Tiglath, that you have some
word for me of my son?” She smiled again, as if admitting to a
ludicrous weakness. “I wrote to him some weeks ago but, of course,
have heard nothing. Doubtless you understand that a mother always
imagines the worst.”

“He suffers from nothing more terrible than
boredom, Lady. We fight a war of sieges this campaign—which means
that Esarhaddon, as a cavalry officer, leads a dull life. He chafes
at his safety and yearns for opportunities to astonish us all with
his heroism.”

I grinned at her. It cost me nothing, and I
did not hate this woman so much that I would torment her about her
son, my best and closest friend.

“You have given me the best gift anyone may
bestow, and that is a tranquil mind.” She rose from her seat and
held out her hand to me, which I took without thinking. “And my
reward to you will be to leave you alone with this lady, which I
know you desire above all glory and wealth. Goodbye, Tiglath Ashur,
favorite of the great gods.”

And an instant later, when that black shadow
had passed from between us, I turned to Esharhamat, who looked at
me out of eyes that seemed deep as death itself.

“Now that she is lady of the palace she comes
here often—it seems that already she regards me as her daughter in
law.”

Her eyes, I could have gazed into them
forever. I could have become so lost in them that I became empty,
until I had no will to be more than merely some small part of her.
They spoke to me in the private language of my own heart, and yet
they said nothing. Their silence betrayed nothing, except that they
hid secrets I could never guess.

What have you done? I heard in the quiet of
my mind—the question unspoken but not unasked. Esharhamat, whom I
love more than life, in your passion that makes you deaf even to
the god’s whispered voice, what have you done—or perhaps only, to
what have you consented?

“Had I asked you why the Lady Naq’ia was
here, Esharhamat? I don’t recall it.”

An instant later she was in my arms, and our
mouths sought each other with a hungry tenderness which swept away
all doubt. Had some small misgiving stirred in my brain? I had
forgotten it as I felt her body pressing against me. I had
forgotten—or had ceased to care. I knew only that I must accept her
love on any terms on which she chose to offer it.

If there was a sin, then in that moment I
took the guilt for it upon myself, making it and Esharhamat my
own.

“Do you yet love me?” she whispered, pulling
me down to her that I might feel her warm breath against my ear.
“Have I lost you forever, Tiglath Ashur, favorite of the great
gods, or does some small part of you still remember the name of
Esharhamat?”

She did not need to hear my answer—she had it
already. As we sat together by the fountain’s edge, and my hands
wandered over her body, the blood pounded in my head like the war
drums of the Elamites and I was lost to all reason and honor. I
cared for nothing except her—the smell of her hair, the curve of
her breast under my fingers, her little pointed tongue darting
between my lips like a hummingbird at the mouth of a flower. I
cared only for this moment, while the soul and the body had become
one.

And then, abruptly, she pushed me away.

“I have thought,” she said. “I have thought
of almost nothing else.”

“Yes. . . I too. . . At night—your sweet
body. . .

I was almost choked with desire. I tried to
press my kiss against her throat, but suddenly she was mine no
longer. She belonged only to herself.

“I will go the temple of Ishtar. You will be
waiting for me there—you and your sacred silver coin.”

It was several seconds before I even
understood what she could mean. Looking into her face, so hard set,
as if it had been cast in bronze, I did not even know who she was
anymore. Was this really Esharhamat? Who was it I had come to love
with this ungovernable love? I knew not.

“It is a duty each woman owes, from the
lowest to the most high. Why should it not be you who breaks the
seal of my virginity, Tiglath Ashur, whom I love even as do the
gods themselves, as does the king? You, who shall be king after
him, why should it not be you?”

“Because it is forbidden. The Lady Ishtar
commands that it shall be a stranger only who. . .”

“The Lady Ishtar is Queen of Battles too, and
has made you her special favorite—what would she not forgive. . .
?”

“This—this she would not forgive.”

“This, and all else.”

. . . . .

I did not linger in Nineveh. I did not dare.
When the king’s new army had barely wiped from their eyes the dust
of the parade ground, I issued orders that all should be prepared
to march with the new sun. I left behind love and passion and faced
only a dangerous hardship, but I fled from Nineveh as from
death.

Within three days’ march a courier reached me
with orders to join the main army at the walls of Babylon.

Babylon! So it had come to that already. The
greatest city in the world, and our soldiers were camped at her
gates.

“We will stay here and watch her starve to
death!” the king told me. “We will cut off her food and give her
nothing but muddy water to drink. This, Tiglath, this is the city
that sold my son to the Elamites. I do not care how long I have to
wait. This city owes me a great debt and, by the great gods, I
shall make her pay it!”

Babylon, city of Marduk, her walls seventy
cubits high and faced with burned brick, her gates the wonder of
the world. And we would humble her, and tear her life away. Time
would be as nothing. Month would drag into month, the season of
flooding would come and go. The king our lord had settled in his
heart that he would conquer her and thus avenge his first born
son.

Thus it was that the army I had brought from
Nineveh sat down to wait upon the pleasure of the gods.

Chapter 11

For fifteen months the armies of the Lord
Sennacherib kept Babylon sealed shut like a jar of unripe wine. We
camped on the plains around her endless walls; we dug canals that
the mighty Euphrates, which ran in her midst, was slowed to a muddy
trickle; we gathered in her harvests and slaughtered her animals.
It was a boast of that city that even a dog was free in Babylon,
but what when Babylon herself was girded about so tight she could
not breathe? The dogs then were eaten, as was even the grass
between the cobblestones. And while the city died, we waited. Like
vultures, we circled round and waited.

And for fifteen months Esarhaddon and I never
left the field. The king returned to Nineveh for the winter—there
was little enough to occupy the valor even of the common soldiers
except, occasionally, a quick strike against some town or other
that might have risen in aid of Babylon. But for the most part, and
for months together, the Chaldeans kept to their swamps, the
Elamites to their mountains, and the great men of Sumer stayed
quiet in their homes, waiting to see if the Queen of Cities would
really fall. We all waited—the army and the whole world. And
Esarhaddon and I stayed in the south.

Yet we were not idle. The siege of a great
city is a matter requiring patience, yes, but one does not simply
pitch one’s tent and wait. The soldiers of Ashur, who were masters
at this sort of war, stripped off their tunics and, in their
loincloths and their toilsome sweat, dug into the earth like
foxes.

Babylon is a city even greater than Nineveh.
A man would need long legs to walk around her in the time between
noon and sunset, and her wall, which towers over the plains like
the face of a mountain, is surrounded by a moat wide as a river.
The moat was a simple matter—we only had to divert the Euphrates
into a canal and dry it up—but we all learned to hate that wall. I
have stood upon the wall of Babylon, and travelers speak no more
than the truth when they say that two chariots could ride abreast
on the road running along its summit. And its gates were nothing
but traps for the unwary, where attacking soldiers could be boxed
in by the simple raising of a drawbridge and then slaughtered by
archers who stood overhead.

But a wall is not more than one mud brick
placed upon another and is no stronger than the ground upon which
it stands. We dug tunnels through the earth, starting at a point
far enough away that the Babylonians could not reach us with their
arrows, and we undermined the wall—all at once a great section of
it would just crumble away. This, of course, was the labor of many
months.

But long before we brought down her walls,
Babylon had begun to die. By the end of winter even the most severe
rationing could not prevent famine; the dead were carried away by
the Euphrates, and we had only to stand on the shore below the city
and count the corpses to know how many were starving from day to
day. And when we had changed the course of that great river, so
that what flowed under the wall was no more than a brackish
trickle, pestilence broke out in the city. Many more starved or
succumbed to disease than we killed in our final assault.

And all this can be laid to the cowardly
arrogance of one man, for the Lord Sennacherib would have accepted
the city’s surrender. But her king, Mushezib Marduk, who owed his
throne to the Elamites, knew that the full weight of our king’s
wrath would fall on him and therefore held out as long as he could,
unmindful of the suffering of the Babylonians. He saw to it that
his troops were kept in bread and beer while he waited vainly for
the men of Ashur to go away. In the end he could save neither
himself nor his soldiers, nor his people nor even the very walls of
their houses. These all perished under the eyes of the gods.

For that day when it would all end, we the
armies of Ashur waited, working patiently as ants. For fifteen
months we kept our deathwatch.

This time was hardest on Esarhaddon, for the
monotony of the siege threw him back upon himself. Esarhaddon
understood the business of soldiering, but his life was meant to be
a pattern of movement, and inactivity made him fretful. Slowly—so
slowly that only one who had known him from childhood would have
noticed—he lost his belief in himself. Forced to sit and think, he
no longer knew what to think. He preyed upon himself, and his mind,
ever turning upon omens and the mighty forces of the unseen, was
haunted by dark thoughts.