The Assyrian (29 page)

Marduk is a powerful god,” he would
mutter—usually only when he was drunk, but he was drunk a good deal
in those days. “He will avenge himself upon us if we destroy his
city.”

“Perhaps he has deserted his city, for all
things happen through the god’s will.”

“No—Babylon is a holy place. Mark me,
brother. This will be visited upon us one day.”

“We do Ashur’s will. We are his people; we
have nothing to fear from Marduk, who is honored only in
Babylon.”

He would look at me from beneath his heavy,
anxious evebrows, almost as if I had insulted him.

“Marduk is king of the gods—all men say
so.”

“Only here, brother.”

“All men know the stories of Marduk’s power
and greatness. Did you not hear them as a child? But, of course—I
forget. Your mother is an Ionian woman.”

His mother, of course, was Naq’ia, a southern
woman, bought by the king her husband in Borsippa but born the gods
alone guessed where. What rubbish had she stuffed into her son’s
head? It was possible not even he knew.

There would be whole days when he kept to his
tent, speaking to no one but his two Egyptian concubines. Taking
advantage of his weakness, they had managed to convince him that
they could call up the dead, dispel evil spirits, read a man’s
future in his excrement, and I know not what other foolishness.
Esarhaddon held them in such respect that he beat them only rarely
and would not permit any of his friends to bed with them. Many
times I had thoughts of cutting their throats, for they did great
mischief in muddling my brother’s head so.

But I believed that Esarhaddon’s
superstitious melancholies were due as much as anything to lack of
exercise, so when the fit was on him I would go to the tent of the
rab shaqe and arrange that he be sent out to lead a raiding party
against some town where they had forgotten the weight of Ashur’s
hand, and he would return four or five days later carrying a sack
crammed with bleeding heads, leading donkeys laden with treasure
and enough oxen to feed the army for a month, smiling and laughing
and telling tales of his glory not even he believed. Yet afterward
he would be his old self again—for a while at least.

My own mind was hardly less dark. I did not
live in fear of shadows, but the waiting preyed on my nerves. All
we could see over the walls of Babylon was the top of the great
ziggurat, which at night—every night—was ablaze with torches as the
priests made sacrifice to the divine patron of their city. The
people were starving, as much Mushezib Marduk’s prisoners as ours,
and their piety had taken on the desperation of those who can see
no escape save through the power of their great god.

I received Kephalos’ letters from Nineveh, in
which, because they were written in a language not many in the
lands between the rivers could read, he felt emboldened to speak of
the dissatisfaction at home. There was division over the king’s war
against Babylon; many felt with Esarhaddon that the city should be
respected. Their reasons were various: fear of Marduk’s revenge, a
sentimental attachment to Babylon as the mother of our culture and
learning. Some even said that Sennarcherib’s wits had been turned
by grief over his son’s death, that he wasted blood and treasure in
a blind, senseless rage. It was a dangerous sign that such things
could be spoken of Ashur’s king. Kephalos, who was not a fool,
wrote his letters on sheets of leather which I found neatly folded
at the bottom of the boxes of medicines and supplies he sent me.
These I always burned.

He wrote me also of my mother, whom at my
entreaty he visited regularly, and he would pass on her little
messages. He did not write to me of Esharhamat.

Esharhamat—how that name had burned itself
into my brain! I saw her in my dreams at night, and, though at
times I was half mad with desire of the flesh, I kept my oath to
her and took no pleasure in other women.

Perhaps I will yet become the marsarru, I
thought. I had no yearning to follow my father on the throne, but
as his heir I could marry Esharhamat. And if I did not, Esarhaddon
would, who did not care for her and would take her like a tavern
harlot simply because he could imagine no other way. He would do
his duty and father sons by her, and I would grow to hate him for
it. I did not wish this—I wished only to possess Esharhamat as my
wife in peace. So perhaps it would be best if by Ashur’s will I
became the next king. These were the ideas with which I entertained
myself as an army of five and eighty thousand men waited for the
walls of Babylon to crumble.

And when I was not dreaming of the kingship
or of Esharhamat and her fair body, I was practicing the arts of
provisioner, for my father in his wisdom had settled that we should
pay the local peasants for their grain and livestock and not simply
take it from them.

“Why should we turn the whole land of Sumer
against us?” he reasoned. “The farmers have lost the greater share
of their market because Babylon is starving under our blockade. An
army eats less than a whole city, and the gold which will pay for
our bread is in Mushczib Marduk’s treasury—as good as if it were in
my own. The city shall pay and we shall eat, and the common people
who work the land shall bless us.”

This was good policy. And to see that all was
honestly done the king appointed his son Tiglath Ashur to treat
with the heads of villages concerning the prices for barley, goats,
beer, bread, cheese, honey, butter, eggs—the list was endless. I
was less than pleased with this work, for the men of Ashur do not
admire merchants.

Moreover, the task was one that I and many
others did not feel was becoming to an officer of my rank and
station, and in the mess I was the object of some mockery.

“The king was wise to choose him,” said Arad
Malik, my royal brother, now quite a man and fresh from a tour of
duty in Lebanon. “The Ionians are well suited to commerce—I know
all about the Ionians, who think only of money.”

“Pay no attention to him,” said Sinqui Adad,
a rab kisir of my own age who was sitting next to him and did not
seem to relish the company. “He is a fool when his skin is full of
wine.”

I smiled, wishing this ludicrous scene would
end.

“Thank you, my friend—I can see that.”

But Arad Malik merely shook his head and
laughed.

“No,” he went on, dismissing all objection
with a languid wave. “No, I tell you, the king chose well. Tiglath
can sit on his haunches like his ancestors, a bag of copper shekels
between his knees as he barters over the price of millet.”

“As your mother bargained over the price of
her backside?”

It was not I who spoke, but Esarhaddon, who
loved nothing so much as an ancient quarrel.

“Is it not true that the king of Hamath found
her beside a tavern door, soliciting business for her nether hole?
I know not what other part of her men could fancy, a woman with
green breasts that hang down to her waist. What a family! At least
Tiglath’s grandfather never sold anything except sandals.”

I have never known anyone bait so easily as
Arad Malik, who actually was fool enough to stand up and draw his
dagger—I think he would have climbed over the table after
Esarhaddon had not Sinqi Adad and a few others pulled him back down
to his scat. Esarhaddon, who had been so looking forward to putting
a sword through his belly, was understandably disappointed.

All three of us were ejected from the mess to
settle this matter among ourselves—the others had no thought except
finishing their meal in peace—but Arad Malik by then had considered
more carefully and, declining my very civil invitation to mortal
combat, went off with a shrug and curse to find his own tent.

“You shouldn’t have asked permission. You
should simply have taken that rabbit sticker of yours and killed
him,” Esarhaddon told me as we walked back to his quarters, where
there was at least bread and wine. “No one would have blamed
you—the whole world knows that Arad Malik would be vastly improved
for having his heart cut out. And duels involve too many
risks.”

“Perhaps then we should send Leah over to
keep him company—she might oblige us by eating him alive.”

“Hah, hah, hah! Yes, she would, wouldn’t
she.” Esarhaddon slapped me on the back almost hard enough to break
a rib. “By the sixty great gods, she’d leave him shriveled as an
Egyptian mummy. Hah, hah, hah! Nevertheless, after you are king I
think you would do well to have the impudent dog’s throat cut—a
reasonable man takes his precautions.”

“Perhaps, after I am king, I will give you
his mother for your collection, and Arad Malik will oblige us by
dying of mortification.”

“Hah, hah, hah!”

But for all this I was still left sitting
with a bag of copper shekels between my knees. Nor did I murmur
against it, for I understood what they, as yet, did not, that the
Lord Sennacherib had already decided that I should follow him and
was preparing me against that day. A king must know everything
about the conduct of war, not merely the leadership of men but even
down to the price of barley and the best weight for horse blankets
in winter.

Thus every few days I would take a dozen
wagons and an escort of twelve men and head off toward yet another
nameless little village to trade in the king’s name with farming
folk who had probably never heard of Sennacherib, Lord of Ashur. It
was on one of these journeys that I renewed the acquaintance of one
who seemed to know me better than I did myself.

I was riding out over the vast, trackless
plain, flat and almost featureless, which in centuries of flooding
the Euphrates has spread out as her bounty, following the great
river. There was a grove of palm trees perhaps two beru distant—I
could see it quite clearly, although my company would not reach it
for more than an hour, such is the character of the southern
lands—and a grove generally meant a village nearby. At any rate it
was a direction, one which I thought I had chosen for myself,
although now I am no longer sure.

He was sitting on the trunk of one of the
trees, which must have been uprooted during the last inundation,
his body covered by yellow priest’s robes, faded and almost in
rags, his bony, ascetic face tilted up toward the sun, a faint
smile upon his lips, although he could have seen nothing to please
him—indeed, he could not have seen anything at all through his
clouded eyes.

I waved to my men to stay off a little and
rode up alone, stopping my horse in front of him, waiting, saying
nothing.

“The god still mantles you in his holy light,
Prince,” he said at last. “You have traveled far.”

“No farther than yourself, Maxxu.” I smiled
and shrugged, hardly knowing whether he could see, or would trouble
to notice. That he had known me I found not at all surprising.

“Yes, farther than I. I stay ever in the same
place and the world moves. And now you prepare to humble the great
city of Marduk.”

“Do I do wrong, holy father?”

“You? You do nothing at all, Tiglath
Ashur.”

“Is it my sedu, then?”

I had not meant to mock him, but there must
have been some note of disbelief in my voice, for the maxxu
fastened his blind eyes upon me and his face assumed an expression
of contemptuous pity.

“You are alive when many are dead—did you
imagine yourself to have survived solely through your own
resources? But no, it is not the sedu which will bring down mighty
Babylon. All is by the god’s design.”

I leaned forward, and the horse stirred
nervously beneath me. Suddenly I was full of fear.

“And is it the god’s design that I shall be
king, Maxxu? Am I to be blessed?”

But he shook his head. “These are different
questions, Prince. And I have answered them both already.” He
looked back up into the sun, blinding and white at that hour of the
morning, and the smile returned to his lips. “Go now, Prince. You
have the world’s business to do—and the god’s.”

“Will we meet again?”

“Go now, Prince.”

When I returned to my men, my ekalli Lushakin
looked at me with strange eyes.

“Who was that old beggar, Rab Abru? Some
friend of yours?”

“I hardly know,”

A few minutes later, when I glanced back to
the palm grove, the maxxu was nowhere to be seen.

. . . . .

The month of Tisri was nearly finished, and
the nights were already turning cold, when once more the king came
down from Nineveh to be with his army. We all knew this meant the
final assault on Babvlon was about to begin.

“They have brought this upon themselves,” he
told us. “They have made it plain there can be no peace in Sumer as
long as this city clings to its dreams of greatness, so we will
wake it from its dreams. We will sack the city. We will carry fire
and sword to its holy places—its temples we shall destroy and its
gods we shall lead away into slavery. And there shall be such a
slaughter here that men will speak of it with horror to the end of
the world. When we leave this place, not one house shall stand
among the rubble. We shall divert the course of her great river
that even the foundations shall be washed away. Babylon shall be
erased from the minds of men.”

We stood around him as he sat in his tent,
with a map of the city spread out before him, drawn in charcoal on
the hide of a sheep.

“We have collapsed the wall in three
points—here, here, and here. It will be at those three points that
our soldiers will enter for the assault.”

“There is an inner wall. Dread Lord, which
has not been breached. Doubtless it will be defended.”

The Lord Sennacherib regarded his son
Esarhaddon with an expression of astonished contempt.

“What of that, eh? The defenders are so weak
from starvation that they can hardly hold their weapons. What we
are planning here today, Royal Prince, is not a battle but a
massacre.”