The Assyrian (30 page)

“Nevertheless, we would be wise to send
forces in through the riverbed—here and here.”

He reached down and pointed at the spots
where, north and south, the Euphrates entered and left under the
city walls.

“The bed is almost dry now.”

“These, too, will doubtless be defended.”

The men around the table nodded agreement as
the king glanced from one to the next. There were officers who had
served all their lives under that mighty shadow and knew what was
expected of them.

“Yes, but they will not have a wall to
defend, only a dry riverbed—a mud bank some eight or ten cubits
high. And, as you say, Dread Lord, they will be weak.”

“And what would you do, provided you
survived?”

“Spread terror.”

One had only to look at Esarhaddon’s eyes to
know what he meant. And, of course, he was right—such a diversion
was precisely what the attack required.

“And what do you say to this, Tiglath
Ashur?”

I rested my middle finger on a black square
in the center of the map, marking the location of the great
ziggurat.

“With luck, Great King, we might be able to
reach and hold the temple complex, at least for a time. This would
draw many of their soldiers from the inner wall, for they will fear
for their holy places.”

“In other words, you agree with this
absurdity?”

“I think my royal brother has spoken wisely,
yes.”

“So be it.” The king rose from his seat and
all of us, without thinking, stepped back half a pace. “Then you
will lead one prong of this diversionary attack, and Esarhaddon
will lead the other. I wish you joy of it.”

An hour later I found Esarhaddon sitting on
the ground in front of his tent, sulkily drinking a jar of beer.
When he saw me he scowled, as if my face called him to painful
recollections.

“He would not even have listened to me if you
had not agreed. He speaks to me as to an idiot. I am a good
soldier, but he will not listen to me.”

I sat down next to him and took the jar from
his hand, tasted the beer, and gave it back to him.

“He agreed. He gave us the command. If he had
not seen that you were right he would not have yielded.”

“He yielded only because you agreed with me.
You are his darling, his favorite, while I. . .”

“You have never fought with him in a great
battle. It will be different after we have taken Babylon.”

“I might be dead after we have taken
Babylon.”

“Then it will not matter.”

His brow furrowed for a moment and then he
grinned, for he saw the joke. Yet I saw plainly enough how he
suffered, who only wished to prove that it was a soldier’s heart
which beat in his chest.

“We have three days to plan,” he said, after
each of us had raised the jar to our lips. “How many troops do you
think he will give us?”

“A hundred men each would be best—less would
invite disaster, but more would only get in the way.”

“Then you can have the pleasure of asking
him. One company apiece. Swordsmen, with good armor. No archers. It
will be close fighting the whole way.”

“And we will enter the city one hour before
first light.”

“Yes—that would be best.”

And then, although it was a cold day,
Esarhaddon and I went off swimming in one of the canals, playing
like children in the gray water, as if we had forgotten the
war.

Three days later, an hour before Ashur’s sun
would rise behind the eastern mountains, I found myself crouched
among the dead reeds, sunk to my ankles in mud that clung like
pitch, a hundred men waiting at my back. I had only to raise my arm
and Babylon’s final agony would be upon her.

The outer wall ran around only the eastern
half of the city, encompassing a moat, the main canals leading from
the river, and an inner wall. The western half was protected by the
moat and the inner wall, and the river, over which there was only
one bridge, divided it from the eastern half, where Mushezib Marduk
had concentrated his forces against our assault. In normal times
the river would have been as great a barrier as any work of
men—even in that darkness I could see the gap in the inner wall
through which it was accustomed to run—but we had diverted its flow
and now it was almost dry.

We wore tunics over our armor so that we
would make no sound, but I couldn’t see even a single fire—there
was nothing to show that the riverbed was guarded at all. What
would we find beyond the inner wall? Had they simply abandoned
themselves to death? No, they not held out for fifteen months to
meet us with the wide, uncaring eyes of corpses. Somehow it was too
easy.

And then, all at once, the wind changed and I
understood. Yes, that was precisely how they would meet us, for the
air was heavy with the smell of putrefaction. They had been using
the riverbed as their grave pit.

I could hear my soldiers coughing and gagging
behind me—it was more than men could bear, and there was no relief
to be found in covering ones nose and mouth; nothing could hold
back that filthy stench. I gave the order to light the torches. We
would give up surprise to burn the air clean enough to breathe. It
was either that or give up our advance and go home.

Of all the horrors of that grim war, nothing
could rival what awaited us once we had filed through the gap in
the inner wall. There must have been ten thousand corpses that had
been dumped onto the muddy riverbed, a great wall of them extending
for perhaps two hundred paces against the eastern bank, their
rotting limbs tangled together like driftwood left after the season
of flooding. Men, women, children—all ages, all conditions of life,
their bellies swollen and their limbs shriveled to sticks. The ones
nearer the bottom of the pile, crushed and rotting, had long since
ceased to be even recognizably human. Rats, huge, bloated with
carrion, made bold by prosperity, stared at the light from our
torches and then, when they had lost interest, returned to their
gruesome feast. The air was sharp with the smell of death, making
it painful to breathe. Several of my soldiers turned their backs on
the terrible sight, lowered their heads to between their knees, and
retched loudly. I could hear some of them reciting prayers.

But there were no guards. It was a lapse
which I found hard to condemn in them—what power could compel
anyone, even a soldier, to venture near such a place as this? No
one interfered with us, even when we reached the bridge.

The bridge at Babylon is famous, its stone
pillars—in a land where stone is never found—slender and tapering,
reached down into the Euphrates like the legs of storks. The
passageway itself was of wood, and with our grappling ropes we
would have no trouble reaching it. The great ziggurat towered over
us like a mountain.

“What kept you?”

Esarhaddon spoke in a murmur. We stood in the
shadow of the bridge, and he looked back over my shoulder in
astonished horror.

“No—don’t tell me. I can see. But for the
sake of our souls, order your men to put out their torches.”

We climbed up to the bridge and made our way
across to the eastern half of the city. Esarhaddon and I had agreed
in advance that I would take the ziggurat while he assaulted the
shrine of Marduk—in the heat of battle he forgot his dread even of
the gods—but we hadn’t even reached the temple precinct when we
found ourselves climbing over barricades of rubble and fighting for
our lives. The Babylonians had laid a snare for us and we had
walked into it.

We were trapped in the narrow streets, and
archers fired down on us from windows overhead. We could not fight
back. We could not even see our attackers—or, if a man looked up to
see, he might end with an arrow buried in his face. Flights of them
rained down, their points ricocheting off the mud walls of
buildings with a sound like angry wasps.

At every intersection we met attack from both
sides. There were confusion and death everywhere. Sometimes stones
and bricks fell on us, scattering men’s brains. In the darkness and
turmoil many died. We could only push forward.

I do not suppose more than three men in five
were still alive and able to fight by the time we reached the great
plaza of the ziggurat. The first light of the sun was turning the
air to a pale gray—we had space at last and could see to regroup.
The Babylonians were not so eager to take the offensive. At the
base of the ziggurat a group of priests emerged from one of the
smaller side temples—the one who seemed to be their leader raised
his hand, as if he could force us to stop with the bare prestige of
his office. At a signal from Esarhaddon the soldiers fell upon them
and cut them down, leaving them to lie in their own blood. The
ziggurat was ours.

At the second tier of that huge structure we
sat down to rest and look about us. Everywhere there was the
desperation, the confused hopelessness which is the hallmark of a
doomed city’s final hours. The assault had begun—by now everyone
knew it. The citizens of Babylon knew their last day had come.

I could see already fires raging here and
there within the city, and the streets were filled with people,
many of them expensively dressed—probably most of the others had
gold and jewels sewn into their rags, for who else but the rich
survive in a starving city?

I have seen wanton boys catch mice in a
wicker basket and then, for sport, throw it into a pond. The mice
race about, squealing with terror, climbing higher and higher up
the walls of the basket as, slowly, it fills with water and sinks.
The people I watched from the ziggurat were just such. They clogged
every avenue, aimless, confused, trampling one another in their
panic. They must have known they were doomed, but that made no
difference to them. With nowhere to flee, with no hope, they
scurried about, clawing their way through the crowd, driven on by
the blind instinct of fear. If anything, they made their own
destruction the surer by rendering it impossible for troops to move
from one area of the city to another. Only the great processional
way to the north was relatively uncrowded—it was from that
direction that the armies of my father were mounting their attack.
No one wished to flee to the north.

“The king was right. It’s all wasted—look at
them.” Esarhaddon sat beside me, his hands dangling disconsolately
between his knees, glaring down at the mobs in the streets.
“They’re past caring about the defense of their gods. Their gods
have deserted them, and they know it. We’ll sit here like lumps of
dough until the army crashes in through the wall and butchers this
herd of cattle.”

He was in a black mood. I could not blame
him—we had only to look below at the temple courtyard to see the
bodies of our soldiers lying where they had fallen, victims of our
monstrous miscalculation.

The wall! Suddenly it struck me, almost as
though the god had touched my mind. The wall—of course.

“It isn’t wasted if we can capture the wall,”
I said, as if I were speaking to myself. My brother turned his head
to look at me, and his eyes were wide with recognition.

“By the sixty great gods. . .”

We had only to follow our line of sight north
up the great processional way and we could see the famous Gate of
Ishtar. If we could seize that, the city would be ours by noon.

“But how would we do it? They would see us
coming.”

“A ruse, brother.” I grinned at him, showing
my teeth like a crocodile. “All soldiers look alike from above, and
in a time of general panic. . .”

“And if it doesn’t work, we are dead.”

But he stood up, for he had already
decided—that was what soldiers were for, to die.

The plan was simplicity itself. I would lead
a small force of perhaps thirty men and attempt to force my way
onto the wall. If I could surprise the Babylonians and gain a
foothold, and keep it for even a quarter of an hour, then
Esarhaddon would have a chance of both reinforcing me and storming
the gate itself. If we could hold the gate open, the rest of the
wall was almost beside the point.

I set out with men from my old company, many
of whom had been with me since Khalule, and in the cold gray light
of morning we headed up the great processional way at a trot. We
still wore our tunics, hiding the uniforms that would have betrayed
us in an instant. It required less than four minutes to reach the
gate.

There were three soldiers on the parapet
directly above the great arched entrance. They leaned over,
watching us, whether from alarm or mere curiosity it was impossible
to say. Their faces will remain in my memory forever.

I had once seen drawings of the gate’s
plan—every army has such drawings, although no one, I suspect, ever
imagined we would need them—and I tried to remember where the
stairway was located that led up to the towers. A glance was enough
to tell me that it was nowhere on the outside. Where was it?
Where?

I drew my sword and raised it in salute,
looking up at the soldiers, never breaking stride.

“We are the reliefs,” I shouted—in Aramaic.
My heart was pounding like a blacksmith’s hammer. “Open the
trap.”

I kept running, straight through the archway,
just as if I had done it a thousand times. And suddenly, in an
alcove at one of the points where the passageway abruptly widens
out to form a room almost twenty paces across, a square of light
struck the tiled floor with an impact we could almost hear. Yes,
that was where it had been on the drawing. I remembered now. Yes,
they had opened the trap for us—and they had fallen into ours.

I went up the stairway first. There was a
soldier at the entrance, holding the great wooden door up for me.
He smiled. He even extended his free hand. With my sword, which I
still carried, I thrust up and under his breastplate, opening his
belly like a wineskin. He died with hardly more than a groan. I
caught the door as he fell, throwing it back so that its own weight
would hold it open. The other two were already upon me.