The Assyrian (35 page)

“He wishes me out of the way while he makes
you the marsarru in my place.”

Esarhaddon grinned at me—with ferocity, as if
he hated me.

“In my place. That surprises you, doesn’t
it,” he went on. “For I shall reign when our father is dead. All
the omens speak of it. Flights of birds spell my name. You don’t
believe me? Then ask my mother. She has a retinue of sorcerers, and
she herself possesses the power to raise the spirits of the dead. I
have witnessed this, so I know it to be true. I have seen her in
consort with the ghost of our ancestor Ashurnasirpal, whom you know
to have been a mighty king. He told her that I should be king and
the father of kings. That is what I wished to confide to you,
Tiglath my brother—it is destined to be, and neither you nor I can
alter it.”

I could not tell from his expression whether
he was pleased or not. He showed his teeth in haughty triumph, but
his eyes were frightened.

“I hope there is a rebellion in the south,” I
said suddenly. I took a swallow of wine and made a face, for
Esarhaddon cared not what he drank so long as it fogged his mind.
“I hope the Chaldeans come hopping out of their swamps as
numberless as frogs in summer, and that you and your armies have
not a moment’s rest. It would be the best thing for you, brother.
In peacetime you spend too much time drinking bad wine and
listening to women—especially Naq’ia. You should keep away from
women, because you are a credulous fool and believe everything they
tell you.”

“Probably you are right—yes, most certainly
you are right.” Esarhaddon slapped me on the knee for emphasis,
nearly breaking my leg. “However, a man needs women from time to
time, for the sake of his health.”

“Your health is not improved in that way by
living under the same roof as your mother. And for the rest you
should keep none but foreigners, Elamites and black Ethiopian
women, since you are not gifted in learning strange speech.”

“What of my twins? And the Egyptian
sisters?”

“Have their tongues split with a white hot
knife that they may no longer continue to vex you.”

“This is wisdom—this is good.”

We were both laughing now; leaning against
each other for support, speechless with this delicious jest. One of
us would try to say something, but before he could our eyes would
meet and we would both start to giggle like chattering birds.
Esarhaddon seemed to have forgotten all about being king.

“So you do not believe in my mother’s omens?”
he asked finally, careful not to look at me lest we should begin
laughing again.

“I believe that your mother wishes you to
believe in them—why? Does the prospect of becoming king appeal to
you?”

“No.” He shook his head emphatically, taking
another long swallow from his wine jar. He was already beginning to
act a little drunk, and my brother always saw the world clearer for
being a little drunk. “No—I do not want to be forever shaving my
beard off when the priests say the god demands atonement. I have no
taste for dressing by ritual and fasting like a maxxu on all the
evil days. A king cannot call one minute of his life his own. Who
would be king if he could avoid it? You, perhaps—but I do not put
so high a value on the Lady Esharhamat’s charms.

“Still, what of my mother’s omens?”

“Esarhaddon, your head must have been chipped
out of a block of red granite.”

I got up to stretch my legs and walk about a
bit, for it was growing cold in that bare little garden. My brother
joined me, and we paced off the distance to the far wall, which
faced into the Street of Enlil, where he hoisted up his tunic and
relieved himself noisily before once more taking the wine jar from
my hands that he might continue to drown his thirst.

“So you think I am stupid, do you?” he
asked—not at all offended but merely as if it were a point that
interested him.

“Yes. Have you any idea how many reports
reach me every week that some baby was born in Calah with the first
character of my name etched on his belly? Or that a blood star like
the one on the palm of my right hand was found on the entrails of a
goat sacrificed in holy Ashur? It is the same with every important
man in the land—people wish to curry favor, so they carry tales of
miracles or prodigies or signs sent from the Lady Ishtar. Only a
fool credits such stuff.”

“I am of your opinion.” He made an emphatic
gesture with his right arm, as if dismissing all thought of
disagreement. “But what of the ghost of Ashurnasirpal? Surely,
brother, you cannot doubt the truth of what I saw with my own eyes.
Do not tell me you have become so hardened in your Ionian
godlessness that you do not believe in necromancy!”

Poor Esarhaddon, who was well and truly drunk
now, looked shocked at the monstrousness of his own suggestion, and
I was quick to reassure him that in all questions of religious
faith I was as respectable as any man living.

“But tell me—simply as a matter of
curiosity—what exactly was it that you did see?”

Esarhaddon pondered for a moment, his hands
dangling between his knees as he sat on the lip of a well that was
part of his garden wall and had probably been dug and abandoned a
hundred years ago—one could look down until the curved brick sides
were lost in an impenetrable blackness. At last he glanced up at
me, puckering his face with concentration.

“Saw? I saw very little—merely some white
smoke. One doesn’t see anything. But I heard his voice quite
clearly. My mother asked him, will I be king after the Lord
Sennacherib, and he said ‘yes’.”

“Just ‘yes’? Nothing more? Only ‘yes’?”

“Yes—what do you want from the ghost of a
king, a disputation? Tiglath, there are times. . .”

“Your mother is hoodwinking you,
brother.”

By way of experiment, I took the now empty
jar and dropped it into the well, counting slowly as it disappeared
into shadow. I never did hear it strike bottom.

“A wisp of white smoke, and a voice that
speaks one word—I can find half a hundred magicians in Nineveh
alone who for two silver shekels will summon up the ghost of any
king you like. Kings who are dead, kings who never lived. You have
merely to give them a name—even one you make up; they will not know
the difference—and if you are gull enough to believe in such tricks
you may speak with whomever you choose. Let us go into Nineveh, and
I will show you.”

“Let us go into my Egyptian sisters instead,”
Esarhaddon answered, grinning like a dog. “You may have the older
one—she likes you, and when she likes a man she. . . No? Alas,
brother, you are not as entertaining company since you’ve grown so
besotted with the Lady Esharhamat. But I give you two more months
in the house on the Street of Nergal and you will return to
yourself and be ready for a change in diet, which is after all the
healthiest thing. You will see soon enough that one woman is much
like another once she has shown you her backside.”

When I tried to punish his impudence by
pushing him into the well he laughed and dodged out of the way,
tripping me even as he did so. Even sober I was no match for him in
wrestling, but I can state to my credit that it was a good quarter
of an hour before he had me well and truly pinned, my face in the
dirt, screaming for mercy. Then we went back inside and cleaned
ourselves off in hot water, changing our tunics before we went in
to dinner.

“You have greatly relieved my mind,”
Esarhaddon announced as he washed the back of my neck for me. “I
never had much taste for the idea of being king—I will content
myself with power, wealth, pleasure, and everlasting glory.”

“Yes, but do not be too relieved. For all
that your mother makes up lies about it, you may be king yet. I say
nothing more than what is obvious, that when the god wishes his
will known in this matter, he will speak clearly enough.”

. . . . .

Within the week my brother left Nineveh for
the south, and thus he was not present for the Akitu festival,
which came in the month of Sebat, after the first snows had fallen
on the city.

In all the lands between the rivers there is
no holier time. It lasts for eleven days, marking the renewal of
the pact between Ashur and his people and the beginning of the new
year—which, in fact, really begins in the month of Nisan, with the
first of the spring floods. But why the festival is held at one
time this year and another the next is a riddle best left to the
ingenuity of priests.

During the festival the seventh day is not
unlucky; as it is in other months, and all seems happy and
prosperous. Had I had eyes to see, I would have recognized even
then that luck had deserted me, that all my days were filled with
evil darkness, but I had not. I could see nothing except my own
glory and happiness. I thought the god was sealing his bargain with
me alone, that I above all men would be raised to honor, that such
was the Lord Ashur’s will, but I was mistaken. I should have seen
his warnings, but I did not. Since they were open to the sight of
all, whom may I blame except myself?

On the first day of Akitu the king may take
no food until the new moon appears, and on that day, after we had
witnessed Sin’s pale crescent rising in the eastern sky, the Lord
Sennacherib broke his fast at a banquet in my house, where he dined
among his great lords and I sat at his right hand as if I had been
declared his heir already. I had brought Merope down from Three
Lions that she might be with me and witness this great occasion,
and the king honored us both even further that night by taking his
pleasure in my mother’s bed—at least, he intended it for an honor;
whether my mother took it as such she did not say, and I did not
think to ask her.

During the day, while his belly still
rumbled, my father took me with him when he went to the Shrine of
Shamash, Lord of Decision, to seek the god’s advice on whether
Kabtia, king of the Shubrians, could be trusted in the matter of a
treaty concerning the protection of trade routes to the Northern
Sea. It was a routine enough transaction, but I found it not
without interest because I had never seen the baru at his task and
knew that soon the god would have before him the far more
significant question of who was to follow the Lord Sennacherib on
the Throne of Ashur.

The king brought his question written out on
a clay tablet, which he placed before the image of Shamash, as
glorious with gold as his own sun. We waited in silence while the
kalu performed his office by chanting prayers of supplication and
the ginu, the sacrificial goat, tethered to the altar by a silver
chain, watched us with wide, indifferent eyes. The baru, a man
named Rimani Ashur, a thin, serious seeming man in the middle of
his life—I remember how his beard, still black, gleamed with
oil—watched the ginu, for the animal’s every action, from its
arrival in the temple precincts to its final death agony, was
important in interpreting the god’s will.

At last, when the kalu had ceased his
chanting, we all looked up at the image of the deity, vague and
majestic behind his cloud of incense. Shamash, the eyes of
Ashur—for every well educated person knows that the lesser gods are
merely aspects of the one true god, Ashur, he who gathers all
power, all glory, all existence into his own divinity. Was Shamash
ready to give judgment in this business? The ginu gazed first at
the sacrificial stone on which it was about to die, then at me, and
then at the king. Then the animal snorted loudly, as if a piece of
straw had caught in its nose, and the baru, taking this as a sign
of the god’s intention, took the sacred flint knife from its place
on the altar and, after a pair of novice priests had unhooked the
ginu from its silver chain and. grasping it firmly by the legs,
hoisted it up to the sacrificial stone, he severed its throat with
a single practiced stroke. The animal died without a whimper.

Then all except the baru and one single
assistant left the sacred precinct of the god, for none but they
could be present when the ginu’s entrails were searched. This was
ancient custom, that none might dispute the baru’s judgment. He was
a holy man, everyone believed, whose oath to Shamash could be
corrupted by no earthly thing.

“Dread Lord, the organs are normal,” Rimani
Ashur said, when he had come out from the sacred precinct and bowed
before my father the king. His arms were red with blood up to the
elbows. “The liver is clear of blemishes and the coils of the
entrails follow the usual pattern. There is no disease or
deformity. The god gives you his blessing in this matter.”

Already then the ginu, now nothing more than
the carcass of a dead goat, lay half consumed on the sacred fire
that burned night and day before the image of Shamash. No man would
eat of this flesh, and its ashes would be fed into the Tigris.
Whatever the baru had seen would live only in his own voice and the
record he would inscribe for the temple archives.

“It is well, priest,” the king answered,
following the ritual of acceptance as he raised his hands in
thanksgiving to the god. “It shall be as the Lord of Judgment
decrees.”

The temple complex formed one wing of the
palace, so my royal father and I walked back to his quarters, where
he would wait out the remaining hours of his fast. It was the first
time I had been alone with him in many weeks. He slowed his pace,
as if relishing these few moments of freedom in a day filled with
ceremony.

“It will be just so half a year hence, when I
ask the god’s blessing on my choice of a successor. You will be
king when I am dead, eh? You will do very well.”

The Lord Sennacherib put his hand on my
shoulder, reaching up to do so since I was almost a head taller
than he. He had told me many times that he loved me ahead of all
his other sons, both the living and the dead, and he was my master
and king.