The Assyrian (31 page)

I killed one, and the other would have taken
my head while I did it if Lushakin had not hacked off the man’s arm
at the elbow. Our soldiers were coming up through the stairway two
at a time now, silent, their eyes blazing. Within seconds we
commanded the lower parapet. There was another pair of stairways
running up through the gate to the upper tower, but this time the
doors were already open. I could hear shouting above—they knew they
were being overrun.

“Ashur is King!” I shouted, letting the words
tear at my lungs—it was the signal that would bring Esarhaddon, and
there was nothing to lose now. Suddenly my cry echoed from a
hundred throats—”Ashur is King! Ashur is King!” I had no thought of
death now. Failure did not exist. I was in a trance of glory.
“Ashur is King!”

They met us on the stairs. The first one cut
at me with his sword, swinging from right to left in that narrow
space—it was his greatest and last mistake. I parried the blow and
thrust up, cutting through his leather breastplate as if it had
been woven straw. I could feel my men pushing behind me. I was
invincible. I could feel the heat of the god’s melammu radiating
about me like a bright cloud of unconquerable power. There were
others ahead, but I stepped over the body of the man I had killed,
cutting through them as if they were no more than cobwebs. “Ashur
is King!” I shouted. “Ashur is King!”

I pushed out into the sunlight, and the man
in front of me actually started back, as if he had seen a devil. I
struck him upon the temple with the flat of my sword and he fell
down like a log—I was no longer killing men; I was clearing them
out, trampling them down like river reeds. I must make a path for
my soldiers. It was a shining moment.

I know not how many we killed—how many I
killed—but it was over in the tenth part of an hour. We were
spattered with blood and our lungs ached from shouting. Soon, very
soon, the Babylonians would counterattack, but that no longer
mattered. The gate was ours. The city was ours—the world was ours!
What difference could it make if I were dead the next minute? We
had won!

From the highest tower of that gate, one of
the world’s great wonders, we looked down to see the soldiers of
Ashur, our brothers, swarming over the broken outer wall. They had
to know—they must know. Here, where we stood, was the way. We had
opened the city’s door to them.

“Ashur is King!” we shouted. We could see
their faces as they heard us, as they raised their weapons in
salute. We could not stop—we would cry the god’s name until our
voices died in our throats. “Ashur is King! Ashur is King! Ashur is
King!”

. . . . .

When the sun set that night, there was not a
single Babylonian soldier still in arms. Most were dead, hacked to
pieces by an enemy mad for vengeance, who hunted them down with
pitiless efficiency. A few, perhaps, managed to hide, to change
into rags and throw aside their weapons, but if they imagined they
would find mercy by concealing themselves among the citizens, they
erred fatally, for there was no mercy.

Death stalked the streets, waiting for any
who dared to show themselves. The lord king kept his word, and the
city of Babylon was made to suffer five days of fire, death, and
pillage while the army of Ashur roamed about, drunk with victory
and the powerlessness of their victims. They were like a pack of
wild dogs, these soldiers of the god. They killed for plunder, for
revenge, for sport. Whole families were massacred within the walls
of their homes. The streets were deep in blood, and there were
corpses everywhere. Women were raped before the eyes of their
husbands and children—not by one man but ten, or twenty—and then,
whether in pity or wanton butchery—had their throats cut. Fires
started everywhere and were left to burn. There was no clean water
except in the camps of the victors and no food, so disease and
starvation raged on, for not a grain of millet could be brought
within the walls and no Babylonian could leave them alive. It was a
mad time.

I did not try to stop the looting and the
slaughter—the king, forgetting in his anger that men who run riot
like this will be hard to bring to order, had commanded that no
officer in his army was to interfere, and I did not. I did not love
these people and felt no pity for them. If they perished and their
city with them, I would not regret it—this is what war does to a
man’s soul. But it did not take long before my heart sickened
within me at what my eyes made me witness.

At first I merely thought, this is bad
discipline. As an officer, I disapproved of what the king had done.
And then, slowly, as I walked the streets and saw what the sack of
a great city meant, I ceased to be merely the professional soldier
who is concerned that the army should he kept within restraint, and
as a man I was appalled by the pointless cruelty of the thing. The
corpses of young girls lay in doorways, where their bowels had been
searched by the sword; their heads were thrown back and their
mouths yawned in voiceless screaming. Children were crumpled in
gutters. War was the business of kings and soldiers—if they lost,
they died, as was only right. But these were the innocents. None of
these had taken part in the murder of the marsarru Ashurnadinshum,
nor had these taken up arms with the Elamites. Yet these, too, fell
victims of the king’s wrath. After a few days I stayed in camp,
where even from my tent I could see pillars of smoke rising to the
sky as Babylon burned. It was not willingly that I ventured again
within her gates.

I saw Esarhaddon but once during those days.
He suffered no qualms, for the taking of the city and its
aftermath, the raw action, had driven away all his doubts and made
him happy again. I saw him at night, after the second day of the
sack, for he stopped at my tent to display his plunder.

“See? Twins!”

And there they were, led along by the ropes
around their necks, two girls, naked, hardly more than children,
frightened but glad to be alive, dark eyed, plump, and pretty—and
alike as two petals picked from the same flower. Esarhaddon grinned
broadly, well pleased with himself.

“I go now to my quarters to try them out.
See, brother, how all good things come to the godly man. Hah, hah,
hah!”

I could still hear his laughter, even as he
disappeared into the darkness.

And perhaps he was right to believe this
blessing was no more than his due for, once again, Esarhaddon had
been cheated of the place that was his by right.

He and his men had fought hard to secure the
gate entrance, and it had only been because of him that we were
able to hold that section of the wall, but it was I whom all had
seen upon the tower, shouting the glory of the god. It was my name
which was on all men’s lips, me whom the king honored for daring,
taking me even deeper into his heart.

Then perhaps it really was the god’s design
to make me king after my father, for he raised me beyond my merits.
He seemed to have chosen me to shine over other men, and the Ishtar
Gate was where he had seen fit to make his choice known to the eyes
of men.

It would seem so. Mine was the glory when an
equal share should have fallen to Esarhaddon, whom none called
great, mighty, brave.

I would not have blamed him if he had come to
think me no better than a thief, though it was not my doing that he
was robbed of his fame. But he did not. Or, if he did, it was only
in the private places of his own heart that he cursed me, for he
never spoke of it. We never spoke of these things, and between us
there was ever a brother’s love.

For five days the murder and plundering went
on, and then even the king, who hated the very ground upon which
Babylon stood, had had enough and gave orders that the sack of the
city was to end. Soldiers, once they have slipped the leash, are
not easily called back to order, and we had to hang a few and whip
raw the backs of many more, but at last the army was brought back
to ranks. They grumbled, these men of Ashur, but they obeyed.

The spoils of this long siege were great.
Babylon was a city of unimaginable riches, and they were now ours.
We looted the holy places, the idol of Great Marduk we carried back
in slavery to Nineveh, and we found, in his temple, idols of Adad
and Shala which had been looted from the temples of Ashur over four
hundred years before. We even captured Mushezib Marduk, who called
himself king; he had tried to escape but was captured and weighted
down with chains.

And when the great buildings had been
stripped and gutted, the system of dikes which held back the
Euphrates was destroyed so that when the season of flooding came
the river would rise and wash away their very foundations. The
vengeance of Sennacherib was to be complete.

The last night before we were to turn our
faces to the north and find our way home, the king held a banquet.
The site he chose was the royal palace, damaged by fire and torn
down by the king’s order, so we were to dine among its ruins. All
of his chief officers were there, and all his sons.

On that desolate patch of rubble, surrounded
by a dead city, it was a crazed revel we enjoyed. Our master, the
Lord of Ashur, was beside himself with triumph—he even ordered that
Mushezib Marduk be brought in that, naked and desperate, chained to
a broken pillar in the house where once he had been master, he
could witness the festivities of his conquerors. This king of
shadow would be taken to Nineveh, there to suffer a death of
exquisite cruelty, a death such as only ruined monarchs die, but
that night he huddled in a corner like a dog.

And we, the conquerors, drank and ate and
laughed, trying not to think or to look too closely about us. And
the king my father praised me above all men.

“Look at him!” he bellowed, his face shining.
“He is not even twenty and already he carries three great wounds
upon his body—and all in the front! What a man, what a warrior he
is already—what a king he would make! Is he not a son any man would
be proud to own? Is he not?”

He made me stand that all might see the glory
of his loins. And they cheered me, these great ones, for they knew
the king’s will. They cheered me, shouting my name.

I was made to stand and listen, my heart
dying within me.

“Do I do wrong, holy father?” I had asked of
the maxxu, and he had raised his blind eyes to my face and smiled,
as if a child questioned him.

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

Chapter 12

After the fall of Babylon the king promoted
me to rab shaqe and Esarhaddon to rab abru—always one step behind.
There was little enough else left to do except receive honors, and
within a few days the army broke camp and began the long march back
to Nineveh. In the Land of Sumer all resistance to the might of
Ashur’s will was at an end. The city we left behind us as we turned
our faces to the north was a ruin in which not even the foxes could
have made a home.

But in the Land of Ashur there was no pity.
The destruction of BabyIon meant only that this long war had at
last found its end. The people remembered their sufferings and
thought of their present safety and rejoiced to be ruled over by a
king who was not afraid to be cruel to his enemies. In the border
towns, where hatred of the Elamites and their puppet allies had
been greatest, the people gathered by the roads to hail their
glorious lord and to hurl curses after Mushezib Marduk as he
trudged along behind the conqueror’s chariot. We were heroes to
those who had not seen the work of our hands in Babylon.

For myself, I tried to close my ears to the
shouting. I tried neither to hear nor see nor think, for I heard
only the cries of the dying and saw but the corpses of the
slain—and I feared they would drive me to madness. My soul was in
torment, and at night I could not bear even to close my eyes.

How was this? I felt myself stained with sin,
and yet I had done no more than follow what I had always
believed—what everyone believed, even the foe—was the path to
virtue and honor. Who is nobler, who is more respected in all
nations than the warrior? What else was I? A murderer? A thief? Why
then this sense of shame?

But I kept such questions locked away in my
own heart. Perhaps they were in the hearts of many in that
victorious army winding its way home, but I shall never know; for
soldiers do not speak of their doubts. Did Esarhaddon doubt? I
think not. Esarhaddon was too busy with his women and the
contemplation of his new wealth—the king had showered us both with
gold and palaces and great estates, for while he favored me above
all others he had come to understand that Esarhaddon was not to be
despised.

“But can you not at least make him rab
shaqe?” I asked. “If I have earned it, so has he. He is the first
of your sons and a brave and resourceful fighter.”

“You are the first of my sons.”

“Yet give him at least a command worthy of
him. Let him prove what is in him.”

“I know well enough what is in him.” The king
shook his head. “He is constantly putting before me some new plan
to conquer Phrygia, or Egypt, or even Arabia—enlighten me, my son,
what is there to conquer in Arabia except sand? And, of course, he
would lead each of these campaigns, which I would hesitate to
entrust even to my most seasoned officers, as sole commander. He is
a boy still, and thinks only of his own glory. He is in love with
war, forgetting that it is merely a tool of power, and such as he
are a danger to have near the throne. No, I will not give him his
own war to fight, not even to please you. Your brother makes my
head ache.

“But never fear—after I am dead you may
reward him as you see fit.”

And, strangely enough, with these views my
brother Esarhaddon did not entirely disagree.

“You had best make up your mind that I shall
be the greatest of your generals,” he said, shrugging his
shoulders. “Our father means you to be king after him. And why not?
You are a wiser choice than I—everyone would agree with that
except, perhaps, my mother—but if I must wait always in your shadow
until our father is safe in his tomb, then you had best resign
yourself to a quarrelsome reign, for I plan to make up for the
slights that are heaped upon me now by conquering all the western
lands. I will set up monuments to my glory in Thebes and Memphis,
in all the great cities of the Nile, that a thousand years hence,
when Tiglath Ashur the king is forgotten, the might of Esarhaddon
the soldier will still make men quake in their sandals. You owe me
this, brother, for I am neglected that you may be made great.”