The Assyrian (33 page)

I had only to hold out my hand to her and she
touched the palm with the tips of her fingers. We had been born for
this moment, she and I. This night, this place, they belonged to
us. I had not even to speak her name. She took my arm and we passed
through the temple doors.

It was a tiny room where Esharhamat and I
became one flesh. The attendant, an eunuch, to whom I gave a gold
coin that would feed him until the winter burned to death in the
summer sun, provided us with a brazier to keep us warm and with his
own hand closed the oxhide curtain across the threshold. I spread
my cloak out over the floor—we needed no other sleeping mat—and
Esharhamat unfastened her veil and let it fall away from her face.
We knelt together there, our bodies touching, my hands on her
shoulders as I lowered my mouth to kiss her. It seemed a moment
beyond passion, as if we had entered into the presence of a
mystery. Our lips brushed—so gently it almost could have been an
accident—and then, when I could feel her little pointed tongue
searching for mine, I sought her with the hunger of all these empty
months of waiting we had known. All my longing for her was in that
first kiss. I would gladly have died for this one instant with
her.

But I did not die. I had never been so alive
as I was then—perhaps I never would be again. Nothing mattered to
me, nothing except the taste of her lips and the warm scent of her
hair and the feel of her hands on my arms. I lived only in my
senses and in my love.

Esharhamat undid the fastenings of her tunic
and let it slip to her feet. The dim red light of the brazier
played over her legs and belly, but she was hidden in shadow above
the waist. I placed my hands upon her shoulders and she covered
them with her own and guided them down until they were cupped over
her breasts. I could feel the pressure of her quick, shallow
breathing against my palms as I kissed her throat, the soft little
hollow beneath her ear, the point of her chin.

“Come into me,” she whispered, her breath
moist and warm against my cheek. “Come into me—hurt me. I do not
care how much you hurt me.”

“No, not yet. Not quite yet.”

I was hard as new forged iron, but I wanted
to give her some pleasure before I broke her maidenhead. I forced
her down with my weight so that her back was against the cloak I
had spread over the brick floor, and the tip of my manhood just
brushed against her little feathered cleft—I could feel her thighs
around me as she tried to encircle me and draw me to her. The
tension itself heightened her desire, and soon I was sliding easily
back and forth over her tight cleft and she began to moan, softly
at first, and then as if she wished to sob with despairing agony.
Only it was not agony, but her passionate longing.

Finally, as I thrust forward, I could feel
her maidenhead resist and then give way. Esharhamat cried out—but
only once, for almost in that instant her pain was swallowed up in
a greedy ecstasy as I drove into her, her virgin blood easing my
way. I thought I could not bear my own pleasure as suddenly, and in
a great rush. . . There were no words, no words.

Afterward, and for a long time, we lay
together, locked in silent embrace. I entered her again, and this
time there was an even greater feast for the senses but not the
same almost unearthly rapture, which perhaps two people may only
have once in all their life together. I do not know—my time with
Esharhamat was all too brief, and I never knew such joy in the arms
of another woman.

“We may not come to this place again,” I said
at last, when I could bear to break the silence of our perfect
concord. “We must never return to this place. But I shall find
another—I shall find—”

She stilled me with her kisses. She did not
need to hear what, after all, were only words. She knew that now I
could never bear to be without her, that she had won, that I would
love her always, even at the cost on my life. Yes, of course she
knew.

“I will find a house, some quiet place
where—”

“You have a house,” she murmured, like a
mother whispering to her child in the night. “Or, at least, your
slave has a house.”

“Yes, but the risk—not only to ourselves but
to. . .”

“Kephalos? I do not care about Kephalos! It
is the same for us as for him, and he is a slave.”

I did not say to her what was in my heart,
that Kephalos was less my slave than my friend, that it would be
cowardly in me to involve him in my own ruin, that she was without
pity. I did not say these things. I was silent, for I knew that it
was her love for me that made her thus, and I knew that I would do
whatever I must, that I cared for no tie on earth, no debt of honor
or friendship, so much as I did for the sweet touch of Esharhamat’s
flesh. Yes, I knew already what I must do.

. . . . .

For the next several days my time was not at
my own disposal. The king, ever since our return from the south,
had been restless with new energy, as if his conquest of Babylon
had awakened him from a trance, and I was now, in fact if not in
title, one of the royal companions and was expected to attend him
as he followed his rounds of pleasure and duty. I was there at his
council meetings and his banquets. I stood behind him when, as
Chief Priest of Ashur, he prayed to his god. I listened when he
told his stories and laughed when it pleased him to jest. And when
he hunted—he hunted now nearly even day, as if he could not bear to
part utterly with the pleasures of war—I was at his side. I drove
his chariot when we pursued the lions in his private preserve and
when we wheeled out onto the great plains around Nineveh to track
down the herds of wild asses. When his beaters and his packs of
dogs ran deer into his snares so that he could kill them at his
leisure with a long spear as, their antlers tangled and their eyes
rolling with terror, they struggled in the nets. I carried his
weapons and wiped the blood from his hands and face. I was his son
and his favorite and these things fell to me as a matter of duty.
And even as I came to see that he was after all only a man and not
the shining idol of kingship the world took him to be, I grew to
love the Lord Sennacherib, whose seed I was, who had taken me to
his heart.

The Ruler of the Earth’s Four Corners was now
old. He had many weaknesses and his mind had grown maggoty with a
thousand anxious fears. And, although he still clung to all the
symbols of his days of glorious and triumphant youth, his hunting
and his revelry, to all the splendor of his power, I suspect he was
not blind to the changes in himself. There were but few whom he
trusted, but he came to lean on them more and more. The turtanu
Sinahiusur—his brother and perhaps his only real friend—the Lady
Naq’ia, myself, and his daughter, the Lady Shaditu.

I saw much of Shaditu in those days. If I sat
at the king’s left hand, she sat at his right. When he returned
from his almost daily round of slaughter, she was there to meet us
at the royal gate, bearing a bowl of water in which he could wash
the dust from his face. More than once, as we sat opposite from
each other at the banqueting table, her naked foot slipped under
the hem of my tunic and she would run her toes over my skin,
smiling at me the whole time like the most wanton tavern whore.

And if I did not become her lover, many did.
Many a young man cooled his lust on her sleeping pallet, and
everyone—except, it seemed, the king—knew. Or perhaps he refused to
know. Or perhaps he did know and was past caring.

And, of course, there was always the Lady
Naq’ia. She shared his bed almost every night, for if the king went
into his other women it was merely for the sake of appearances.
Sennacherib had fathered many children, but in the winter of his
life he had only passion enough left for her, whom he seemed to
need as another man needs air to fill his lungs. The lady Naq’ia
was silent and seldom seen, but all knew that in the palace of the
king her word had the force of law. I tried, as best I could, not
even to remember her existence, but she was part of the atmosphere
of those times, like the scent of death on the wind.

And thus, hemmed in by my life as a courtier,
with its duties of attendance and the constant pressure of its pale
intrigues and nagging, unspoken rivalries, by that world of faint
menace which had become the king’s inner circle, I had many excuses
for putting off my visit to Kephalos’ house near the Gate of Adad.
I made the most of them, for I did not relish the business.

But at last the thing must be done.

I did not send word to Kephalos that I wanted
to see him, for I was afraid that he might guess my errand.
Kephalos would know what the whole city knew, and many must have
recognized the face of the man who had met a great lady at the
steps to the temple of Ishtar—and I would not give him time to
frame an excuse for refusing me. It was cowardly of me, for he
would need no excuse beyond the claims of simple prudence, but even
taken by surprise my slave would be agile enough in his own
interest and I had no confidence of being within my rights in this
matter.

So I simply appeared before his door one
morning, at an hour when I could assume he would be unencumbered
with affairs.

The boy Ernos—no longer quite a boy—met me
and took my cloak, bowing low and glowering the whole time, as if
he suspected some mischief, and when I let it be understood that I
wished to see his master without delay he led me to the upper story
of the house where, behind a curtained doorway, I found Kephalos
lying comfortably in a huge bronze tub, big enough to serve as the
sarcophagus of a king, up to his beard in hot, heavily perfumed
water. Philinna, naked as dawn, was squatting on the floor behind
him, rubbing his fat back with a cloth. They both looked up with
surprised annoyance, as if I had caught them at something they
would have been as happy to keep to themselves.

“Do not attempt to rise, Worthy Physician, or
you will slip and break your head. You see how polite I am? I have
not even asked you what you are doing in that thing—what is it, by
the way?

“I am surprised at my young master’s
ignorance,” he announced grandly, taking the cloth from Philinna to
wet it and wring it out over his head. “For was it not the king
your father’s own army which brought this back with them among the
spoils from Babylon? It is a most civilized refinement, such as one
would expect from the Babylonians—one washes one’s body, thus, more
effectively and far more agreeably than in a sweating house, where
one is also annoyed by the presence of all such common riffraff as
care to enter so public a place.”

As if to illustrate his point, he raised his
foot out of the water and allowed Philinna to polish it with great
vigor, as if she imagined it to be a copper cooking pot. While she
did so, her great breasts rolled around like water skins on the
deck of a pitching boat.

“Yes,” I answered, in Akkadian. “Esarhaddon
too thinks it entertaining to take his women to the baths with him.
I am surprised you do not have her in there with you, Kephalos.
Would you not find that more convenient?”

“The Lord Tiglath Ashur has a waspish tongue
for such an early hour. Can it be that he imagines he has cause to
be displeased with his servant?”

He watched me for a moment through narrowed
eyes, as if I were a patient to be treated with salves or hot
mustard water, and then his expression cleared.

“No,” he went on finally. “I see it is not
with Kephalos that he is at odds, but with himself. Philinna, hand
me a drying cloth and then be about preparing the prince something
to eat. In any case, leave us.”

When the door curtain swung shut, Kephalos,
who had already wrapped himself in a sheet of linen the size of a
sail, waited for a few moments, his head cocked to one side as if
he were listening for something, and then padded over to the
entranceway and peeked outside. He left huge wet footprints on the
tile floor. I stared down at them with uncomprehending wonder—I
could hardly understand what I was doing here.

“She is gone. There is no one without,” he
said, smiling and nodding. Then, after he had adjusted his linen
covering, by now grown damp straight through and clinging to him
like a skin he was in the process of sloughing off, he raised his
hands in a gesture of cynical resignation. “The man is a fool whose
trust resides with his household servants, Lord.”

“Am I not to trust you then, Kephalos?”

His hands slowly sank through the air, and as
they did my slave’s face seemed to melt like wax, the ends of his
mouth collapsing into a frown as his forehead creased and buckled
under the weight of his sorrow.

“Oh, do not speak the thing, master,” he
said, even as he sank down onto the rim of his great bronze tub.
“Pray, tell me quickly you have not come about the Lady Esharhamat,
for though all men whisper you will be king one day, you are not
yet safe in the house of succession, and to take that one to your
sleeping mat is to flirt with the executioner’s knife.”

I did not trouble to ask myself how he could
have known what I wished of him. I did not need to ask, for when I
met the veiled lady at the temple of Ishtar I had announced my
intentions to the world. And, though I felt defeat and ruin
crowding about me, like a farmer who watches a summer flood washing
away his barley harvest, I merely shrugged my shoulders, as if we
discussed a matter of indifference. Doubtless I fooled no one.

“She is a widow, Kephalos, and quite at her
own discretion until she is given again in marriage. Besides, I
have been led to understand by the turtanu Sinahiusur that a blind
eye. . .”

“The blind eyes will be yours, master, cut
out of your head with a dagger should the Lord Esarhaddon become
king and discover that you have been rutting on his bride.”