The Assyrian (49 page)

“You have collected many scars for one so
young. It is troublesome to be so unlucky.”

He smiled, looking even more like a cat. It
appeared that now I had my answer.

“I have fought in many battles,” I said.
“Thus I have many scars. A man is not counted unlucky in battle
unless he is killed—or loses. Neither of these fates has been mine,
so it is not I who has been unlucky.”

There was no reaction, but of course there
would not have been. Doubtless this man had traded insults
before.

“I have two choices,” I went on, smiling
thinly, hoping this proud man would not think I either mocked or
insulted him. “I can kill you, and then pursue a leaderless people
across the Bohtan River until I have exterminated them all—this,
surely you realize, is now well within my power—or you and I can
come to an understanding which will save much bloodshed.”

“I am not afraid of any death you may visit
upon me.”

“How have I suggested that you are?”

The answer seemed not what he had expected.
He sat quietly for a moment, hardly even seeming to breathe, as if
turning something over in his soul.

“Of course, there is always the question of
whether you can speak for your people—and whether any of your
nation can be trusted.”

“My word is law among the Sacan,” he said,
with a kind of cold fury, seeming almost to spit the words at me.
“And the word of a Sacan is his blood oath.”

“I am delighted to have that point
settled.”

We sat facing each other, separated, it
seemed, by more than a mere few cubits of air. We were on opposite
sides of an unbridgeable hostility; each as alien to the other as
if we were not both men. Thus it must be—or must it? I found I was
unable to suppress a conviction that this was someone whom I could
both understand and, within reasonable limits, trust.

“You do grasp, I hope, that if we follow your
people as enemies they cannot escape. This has nothing to do with
courage—after today no warrior of the Sacan tribe needs to prove to
me that he is a man. I am speaking of facts, of war and the way it
is waged against a people in flight, of how their animals will be
destroyed and their women and children will starve after the
husbands and fathers are dead. You are their leader and must be
their eyes into the future. Have I made myself plain?”

He said nothing. For a long moment he did not
even move, and then, at last, he consented to nod his head.

“Now—will Tabiti, son of Argimpasa, headman
of the Sacan tribe of the Scoloti, give his blood oath that he
acknowledges the lordship of King Sennacherib, King of the World’s
Four Corners, King of Kings? Will he pledge himself to aid the Lord
Sennacherib against his enemies? Will he forswear war against the
Land of Ashur and honor such boundaries as the king chooses to have
respected? Will he give his word on this?”

He sat quiet again, listening to that voice
which only he could hear, and then his narrow eyes turned to my
face.

“Sennacherib is nothing to us,” he said. “We
have not seen his might or his prowess in war, and the Sacan will
not bow to an empty name. How are you called?”

“I am Tiglath Ashur, son of the Lord
Sennacherib, a prince in this land.”

“Then I will give such a pledge to Tiglath
Ashur, who is the son of a king and who has bested the Sacan in
honorable combat—to him and to no other. Will this content
you?”

“It seems it must.”

Chapter 18

The next day, by agreement, both sides
collected their dead. I gave orders that there was to be no further
looting, and no hands or heads were to be collected as trophies.
Our losses numbered less than a hundred, but among the Scythians
Ereshkigal had reaped a rich harvest—their corpses covered the
plain like mown barley. Strangely, they seemed to nurse no
bitterness toward us for this. Their defeat seemed to have for them
the character of a natural disaster, impersonal, a thing to be
endured but no man’s fault.

It had been settled between the headman
Tabiti and myself that our forces would follow his as they
retreated back to the western shores of the Shaking Sea. This
journey would take some three days, and it was my intention then to
march east to Tushpa before racing the snows back to Amat. The lord
Lutipri did not know it, but I had every intention of collecting my
twenty mina of gold. Although I had forbidden them to plunder the
enemy, either the living or the dead, my men were not to be denied
their booty, and the king’s portion would provide against the
maintenance of his garrison for perhaps as long as two or three
years. This, I decided, would be a good trick to play upon the
Urartians and would teach them, in a way they would be likely to
remember, not to trifle with the shaknu of the north.

But first there was the work of burial to be
done. We dug a long trench by the banks of the Bohtan River, that
our fallen comrades might have the satisfaction of lying in the
ground they had won with their blood, and interred with them
offerings of food and wine to quiet their souls. It was a simple
business, the work of an afternoon, for the peoples who live beside
the swift-flowing Tigris do not entertain very lively hopes
concerning the next world. The duties to the dead ensure nothing
more than that they will lie quietly and not trouble the
living.

Such did not, however, seem to be the
prevailing opinion among the Scythians.

The first thing that struck me, as I watched
them gathering up the corpses of their dead warriors, was that they
had dug no graves, either on this side of the river or the other.
Instead, the bodies were sewn into long leather bags, which they
seemed to have already at hand—perhaps each man carried one with
him on all his journeys, against the day of his death—and then they
were loaded aboard their wagons.

That night the survivors conducted a wild
ceremony of grief, in which they danced around bonfires which were
visible from a great distance, breaching the cold, still air with
shrieks that sent shudders down the backs of men hardened to fear.
I dispatched spies to watch in secret, and they reported to me that
many of the Scythian men, in what seemed a drunken ecstasy of
mourning, had been seen driving arrows through their own left
hands—indeed, over the next few days I saw several of them bearing
precisely such a wound. These sad revels were kept up for several
hours, dying off only as the night sky began to lighten with
dawn.

And at sunrise the Scythian caravan started
on its journey north to the waters of the Shaking Sea.

As soon as the last of their wagons had
departed camp, we crossed the Bohtan in force. Let them feel us at
their heels, I thought—let them be reminded that they return to the
mountains a conquered people. I wished to be quite sure Tabiti
understood that he had not entirely escaped our hands.

It was a few minutes after noon when one of
their riders came back toward us, bearing an invitation from
Tabiti, son of Argimpasa, to Tiglath Ashur, son of Sennacherib, to
share a meal with him that evening in the midst of his people. He
proposed to make camp that evening at the foot of a high place
which he called by the name of Surti. I accepted, over the
strenuous objections of my officers, who feared I might be going to
have my throat cut. The Scythian rider grinned at my answer, quite
as if it represented some purely personal victory, and tore away at
a wild gallop.

My officers could easily have been
correct—these people seemed capable of anything—but I could not
have refused without offering an insult which would have been the
ruin of all my plans. Besides, I did not want to refuse. I was,
quite frankly, much too curious about what I would find to allow me
to do that.

In the late afternoon I goaded my horse into
a trot and began making my careful way through the Sacan caravan in
search of Tabiti, who, of course, would be traveling with the
vanguard. That ride itself revealed many sights to me, and those
few hours were among the most interesting of my life.

For the first time I saw some of the Scythian
women, following on foot behind the wagons, dressed in heavy, wide
skirts that reached to the ground and were dyed in the most violent
colors, linen blouses with full sleeves which they wore rolled back
almost to the elbow, and vests decorated with embroidery and little
gold and silver disks sewn onto the fabric. They covered their hair
with their shawls but did not go veiled after the fashion of
married women in my own land, so I had no trouble seeing their
faces.

I could only conclude that the Scythians took
their wives from many lands, either by barter or conquest, for
along with the reddish skin, black hair, and catlike eyes that were
everywhere in evidence among the men —and, indeed, among the
preponderance of the women—I saw light-haired girls with skin like
butter, Urartians with their heavy noses and inward sloping chins,
one or two blacks, and several who would have looked at home in
Sumer.

But the one thing which was common to them
all, and which struck me most forcibly, was the bitterness of their
lamentation. All, without exception, wailed as if their livers
would burst, the tears running down their cheeks, their hair
streaming over their faces. Doubtless these were the new widows—why
were none of the survivors’ wives in evidence?—and at first I
thought that the Scythian men must be fine husbands to inspire such
grief. Then it occurred to me that these tears, these sobbing moans
were not the expressions of grief but of fear—deadly, hopeless
fear. What could they imagine was to become of them? It was a
puzzle to me.

The wagons I noticed were all driven by boys.
Most looked between the ages of eight and ten, and many gave
evidence of their mixed blood. I saw no other children of either
sex and no women but the weeping widows. The men either walked
beside their wagons, holding one of the horses by the bridle, or
rode.

The Sacan showed signs of being a wealthy
tribe. Their horses, although a trifle smaller than ours, were
handsome and plentiful—taking the proportion of horses to wagons as
a guide, I would guess that every family had six or seven, and many
had more. The men as well as the women demonstrated a great love of
ornament. Many decorated their tunics with the gold and silver
disks I had noted before, and even the poorest among them wore
bracelets of copper. I saw a number of men—the men, by the way,
were generally more splendid than the women—with shirts and tunics
of a cloth that caught the light like polished metal, dyed intense
reds and blues and greens. I learned later that the cloth was
called “seric,” after the people who made it, and that it came from
a land many months to the east. I was also told that the thread was
woven by worms that nested in trees, but I was not so credulous as
to believe such a thing.

People stared at me as I rode by, but only as
a strange sight in their midst. None tried to molest me or to offer
me any impertinence, nor was there the least sign of hostility
toward the commander of the army which only two days earlier had
scattered death among them like rain. At the same time I had no
impression that they feared me or had been cowed by their defeat.
Truly, they were a remarkable people.

“Ah, the Lord Tiglath Ashur, son of
Sennacherib. Give the word—we will make camp here for the
night.”

Tabiti turned his horse to face me and reined
it in to a stop. His casual order, uttered in a flat,
expressionless voice, sent riders galloping back into the caravan
as if they carried warnings of an immediate attack.

He smiled at me, showing white, even teeth.
It was impossible to guess what that smile might mean.

“We have made good time,” he said cheerfully.
From his tone the two of us might have been intimate friends,
traveling together for months. Still, he did not offer me his hand.
“The day after next we shall rest by the Shaking Sea, by early
afternoon I would guess. The grass and water there are very fine,
although the sea itself is dead. It is a fine place—would that we
had never left it.”

“Why did you?”

The headman of the Sacan shrugged his
shoulders and smiled once more his unreadable, catlike smile.

“It is not good for us to settle in one place
too long—only look at the Urartians. Tushpa is a fine city, many
centuries old. I have seen it from a distance. Yet the men who rule
there must depend upon the king in Nineveh to make war for
them.”

“I came to the Bohtan River to defend the
Land of Ashur, not that of the Urartians.”

“Is this so?” Tabiti, son of Argimpasa,
raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “I wonder, then, what other
business could have sent their ambassador to Amat?”

“Then you knew of that?”

“Yes—little though I was able to profit from
it. I would never have guessed that. . . You moved your army with
great speed, Lord Tiglath. One can only hope they paid you well for
so much trouble.”

“Twenty mina of gold.”

“Such a sum?”

As if driven to it by his surprise, the
headman of the Sacan dismounted from his horse and handed the reins
to the boy who had been driving his wagon and who I assumed was
probably one of his sons. I did the same, and together we strolled
back along the road made by the wheels of his caravan. For a long
time he said nothing. He seemed lost in thought, hardly conscious
of not being alone.

“I wonder then,” he began again at last, “I
wonder that you have consented to this return of ours. They will
not be pleased in Tushpa. They may even withhold your twenty mina
of gold if you were not wise enough to collect it in advance.”

“They would not have paid so much in advance,
but they will pay it now—I do not propose to give them a choice.
Besides, it is nothing to me if they are displeased. If they wish
to drive you out, let them do so themselves. I think my lord in
Nineveh will be just as contented if you tarry forever by the
Shaking Sea, keeping King Argistis’ head muddled with anxious
thoughts.”