The Assyrian (50 page)

“Ah, but if this king does come to drive us
out. . .”

“He will not, I think. I doubt he has the
strength—else why would he have sent his emissary to me? I think
you will die of bedsores before you are troubled from that
direction.”

“And now, where before he had but one, the
lord Sennacherib has two allies, who do not love each other. You
are no less wily than a serpent, my Lord Tiglath Ashur—you would
have done very well as a Scoloti.”

He threw back his head and laughed, enjoying
his own joke as he clasped his hands behind his back, as if to
restrain himself. Barbarian that he was, it suddenly occurred to me
that this was a man who could easily rule an empire—who might yet,
if the great ones of the earth were not careful. I found I liked
him enormously, so I hoped it would never prove necessary to have
him killed.

“And now, come,” he said, taking my arm just
above the elbow. “Let us talk and eat and grow a little drunk
together. I am told your officers are not pleased to have you so
far from the protection of their swords—are they afraid that I
shall poison you? Do they actually imagine I could be such a fool
as that. . ?”

. . . . .

The Scythians do not have very elaborate
ideas of personal comfort. Tabiti and I shared our feast squatting
together beside a campfire, eating chunks of beef mixed up with
wild millet in a pottery bowl. Our drink was fermented horses milk,
called safid atesh—which means something like “white
fire”—evil-tasting but powerful, which I gathered they vastly
prefer to wine, considered an effeminate luxury. The headman of the
Sacan served us both out of a single iron pot, using a copper
ladle. The safid atesh was kept cool in a wet goatskin bag. The one
extravagance was our drinking cups, which were basins of heavy
silver set in the brain pans of a pair of human skulls, the mouths
kept shut with silver wires—Tabiti held his by inserting his thumb
and first finger through the empty eye sockets. He explained that
these were the remains of men he had killed himself in single
combat, and that it was the custom among the Scythians thus to
memorialize a notable adversary.

“This one,” he said, holding his own up that
I could admire the grinning, fleshless face, “was the eldest son of
the headman of one of the lesser tribes among the Aryan. I was just
sixteen at the time, and I stripped his life from him with a dagger
after he had already killed my horse from under me, breaking my
ankle. He got down from his own mount, imagining himself safe and
at leisure to make a slow job of me, but he admired his handiwork
just a moment too long and I opened up his belly; spilling his guts
like fish from a net. The other was a man of no consequence who
once attempted to contest my position as headman —I did thus with
his skull merely to annoy his family, that they might continue to
know their place. There are envious people everywhere.”

All of which made me wonder how, had the
fortunes of battle gone differently at the Bohtan River, I would
have looked with the top of my head sawn off and lined with
silver.

“Why do the women lament so?” I asked,
curious but also hoping to change the subject.

“Ah—does it trouble your conscience?” He
laughed and slapped me upon the shoulder, for he was by then rather
drunk. “But it is no concern of yours. They lament that they must
follow their lords into the next world, that is all.”

“What?”

He said it so matter of factly that I had
trouble believing he was serious, but of course he was.

“You do not have that custom?” he asked, his
narrow eyes expanding with astonishment to almost normal size.
“Yes, I wondered why your men took so little trouble burying their
friends, but there is a strange variety in such practices. We
believe that a man may carry his pleasures with him into the life
after death, so a great warrior is buried with his wagon and his
goods, including horses and women. The horses have their throats
cut, but the women are strangled—I do not know the reason for this
difference, except that such is our ancient usage. The cattle and
sheep are the inheritance of his sons, since it would not be
fitting that they be left impoverished, but his wives will follow
him to the grave as they follow the wagon which bears his
corpse.”

I was able to ride back to my own encampment
that night, but only just—the safid atesh, which after a few cups
had ceased to taste so very repulsive, was stronger than I could
have imagined. Tabiti, seeing my woeful condition, had offered me a
bed by his own fire, but I knew I could not answer for the actions
of my soldiers if I did not return and therefore declined. I think
I was almost sober by the time I found my own tent, but I slept
very soundly that night.

The next morning, even before dawn, the
Scythian caravan was on its way north again, and we were not long
in following it. My head, for the first hour or so, felt as if it
were packed with cinders, but a decent breakfast and the cold fresh
air put me right quickly enough. There is a limit to how bad a man
may feel while he is on campaign, away from the complicated evils
of daily life. On campaign everything is simple, and a man is at
liberty to be happy.

And if that was true for me, it was just as
true for my troops. They had now absorbed the terrible shock of
battle and it had left them changed men—or rather, perhaps, men now
for the first time. They had found confidence in themselves, having
learned to understand the limits of fear, and this showed itself in
their most insignificant actions, in the way they readied their
kits and cared for their weapons, in their commerce with each other
and with their officers. They had come to see that their lives were
now guided by a purpose, and this discovery had released them from
their sloth and self-contempt. They would never be the same again.
We had won more at the Bohtan River than merely a victory.

So I was quite content as we traveled through
this wild landscape, surely one of the most awesomely beautiful
places on earth. I had the leisure, and the peace of mind, to
admire the giant fir trees that shadowed us like the walls of a
prison, to listen with quite childish delight to the tumbling hiss
of the countless fast moving little rivers we crossed, each so cold
that one drew one’s hand out of the water numb, to stare in wonder
when, quite suddenly, the forest would part before a bare granite
mountain that seemed to mock us like an indifferent god. I could
understand why the Scythians were so devoted to their life of
wandering, for that day, while we wandered with them, it was
impossible not to be happy.

Shortly after noon I sent a rider of my own
ahead to seek out the headman Tabiti and invite him to dine with
me. It was more than a simple return of courtesies—I was eager to
renew my conversation with him, for he was a most singular man.

An army on the march carries no luxuries, so
I had sent our cook into the Scythian camp to buy as much mutton as
could be had for twenty silver shekels, thinking to furnish my
little dinner party and provide the troops with perhaps a five-or
six-day supply of fresh meat, but either the Scythians put little
value on minted coins or my man was a bad trader, for he came back
with no more than thirty head of sheep, enough to provide some six
hundred soldiers with no more than a single night’s treat. Still,
we had our banquet that night and Tabiti, sitting on a leather
covered stool, for all the world like a king in his own court,
filled his belly as willingly as I could have hoped.

We drank less that evening, and talked more,
even until the last embers had died in my campfire. I learned many
things about the Scythian tribes, their manner of life and their
relations with the other nomadic peoples. I learned why, except for
the doomed widows, I had never seen any of their women, who seem to
live their whole lives shut up in the wagons of their fathers and
husbands. Tabiti grew expansive as the night wore on and told me
the whole history of his life and of the wanderings of the Sacan,
so far as these were known to him. He described lands far to the
east and mighty cities which even his grandfather had only heard
spoken of, making me realize that his world was wider than mine,
that the Four Corners within which my father Sennacherib claimed in
the name of Ashur to be King of Kings must be only a tiny patch—a
bull alone in a cornfield might as justly imagine himself lord of
creation.

“And you, Lord Tiglath Ashur, why are you
taller than the others of your race? And why is your beard a
different color, like wet sand instead of black? Is this because
you are the son of a king?”

“No. It is because my mother is an Ionian
woman, brought to my father’s harem from the islands beyond the
Upper Sea.”

“Ah, an Ionian! This explains much—some of my
nation have traded with the Ionians for jewelry and weapons, things
such as that. They are a wily people, full of craft and slyness.
Their minds are ever turning on some new scheme, and they have been
everywhere and seen all that the world holds. That is doubtless how
you came to be such a cunning serpent of a man.”

“Does a man inherit his race then?”

“Oh, yes!” He looked at me as if I asked the
questions of a child. “Where we are born is an accident. What we
are inside our skins is all that matters. But perhaps, since it is
only your mother who is Ionian, you have grown up to be quite the
river dweller, happy only with soft mud between your toes. Mothers
count for very little; my own was a peasant girl my father stole
from her village on the banks of the Euxine Sea, but look at me—it
seems to have done me little enough harm.”

Glancing at me sidewise, he appeared worried
lest his words might have given offense, but I only smiled.

“Ah—this wine is from Urartu,” he went on. “I
have tasted it before, once when we raided close to Tushpa. But it
is not the worst and, if he washes his throat with enough of it, a
man may become drunk on anything.”

“You are right—the wine is from Urartu,” I
answered. “It was part of King Argistis’ bribe, one hundred jars in
all.”

“A mere one hundred jars? Such a paltry bribe
is almost an insult.”

“I expect to get more in time.”

Tabiti’s narrow eyes seemed almost to close
as he grinned ferociously at the recollection of my twenty mina. He
reached across and took my arm in his iron fingers, squeezing as if
he thought to break the bone.

“Yes, you do well to take your gold, provided
you can get it. But put no great faith in this king or any of his
nation—a wise man does not build his wagon of rotten wood.”

I must have seemed puzzled, for he released
my arm and took a long swallow of wine, all the time studying my
face.

“You plan to stop at Tushpa on your way home,
Lord Tiglath? Then you will see soon enough.”

. . . . .

The next day—only an hour or two after noon,
as the headman of the Sacan had predicted—we reached the brackish
waters of the Shaking Sea. And there, quite unexpectedly, a
peculiar and touching ceremony took place before the warriors of
two great nations. We had hardly dismounted when Tabiti ordered
that one of his skull-cups be brought. He slipped his thumb and
first finger into the eye sockets and held it in the air for all to
see.

“I declare that from this day the Lord
Tiglalh Ashur, a man of prowess and a prince in his own land, is my
brother,” he shouted. “And in token of this I invite him to partake
of the blood oath of the Scoloti.”

He caused the skull cup to be filled with
wine, and then he took the dagger from his belt, closed his hand
around the blade, and then pulled it through, cutting open the palm
across its whole width. The blood rushed from his wound, but he
made no effort to stanch it—instead, he let it drip freely into the
wine.

Then, with great solemnity, he offered the
knife to me.

It is the sort of thing one must do quickly,
without thinking, before losing one’s nerve, for there is nothing
so terrible as the hurt one must inflict on oneself. I pulled the
knife blade through my fist with a sudden jerk, my heart pounding.
When I opened my hand I was relieved to find that the cut, which
started at the ball of my thumb, had not gone all the way to the
bone. I too let it bleed into the wine before wrapping it in a
cloth. By then I had broken out in a clammy sweat and the pain
throbbed all the way to my elbow, but the thing was done.

Tabiti, son of Argimpasa, raised the skull
cup to his lips and drank deeply. I did the same. When we were both
finished, the Scythians beat the flats of their dagger blades
against their chests and screamed their approval like hawks. My own
soldiers, not to be outdone, raised their weapons to the cry “Ashur
is King!” In the end, we were all very pleased with one
another.

“All true men are brothers, and this world is
a strange place,” said the headman of the Sacan. “Remember this
oath when you have need of a brother.”

He took my hand in his own and, as I looked
into his face, my eyes seemed to cloud. I thought of Esarhaddon,
now the marsarru, one day my king and lord. My brother Esarhaddon,
my friend, who slept in the bed of my beloved.

“All true men are brothers.” This strange and
savage man meant his own words and had made them truth. The world
was indeed a strange place.

. . . . .

How shall I describe the Shaking Sea? Until
that day, I had never seen so enormous a body of water—it seemed to
me that I had reached the farthest limits of the earth, that I must
now be standing at the banks of that great river which surrounds
the world in an endless embrace. After this there could be nothing.
I strained my eyes, but I could make out no farther shore beyond
these vast, blue, blank waters.

“You have tricked me,” I said to Tabiti—only
half joking. “If I take sail from this place I will disappear
forever over the edge.”