The Assyrian (55 page)

. . . . .

Kephalos, even before my return, had
purchased for himself the largest house Amat had to offer—a cramped
little warren by the standards of the palace he had inhabited in
Nineveh, but large enough for reasonable comfort. The difficulty,
of course, was that my servant’s notions of comfort were anything
except reasonable.

“I pray you, Lord, to excuse the poverty of
my table,” he announced the first time I came to dinner there, “but
the kitchen in this place is a smoky box. My cook can hardly see
for wiping the soot from her eyes and, as no doubt you understand,
luxury is not to be expected under such conditions.”

I looked at the silver dishes in front of me
and beheld as great a variety of foods as even the king in Tushpa
had regarded as sufficient against the gluttony of foreign
visitors. Duck prepared after the Hittite manner, lamb roasted in
spices, honeyed locusts, dried fish, barley, pumpkin, lentils,
several varieties of cheese, and an abundance of fruit almost past
imagining. The wine, of course, had been looted from my own
cellar.

“In such a wilderness, one must accustom
oneself to privation,” he went on, sighing loudly before washing
his fingers in a small bronze bowl and accepting a towel to dry
them from one of the four or five serving girls, each more
beautiful than the last, who floated in and out of the room as
silently as ghosts.

“Perhaps, with effort and a little good
fortune, we can make of the place something worthy of you,” I said
dryly, for his self-pity was comic enough.

“Yes, Lord—riches relentlessly follow at the
heels of power, and I have always known that in your service I
would contrive to die a wealthy man.” He glanced up, his eyes
twinkling with what might have been either greed or irony. “Allow
me, after we have eaten, to put before you certain plans I have
drawn up in accordance with your instructions. I fancy you will not
be displeased.”

My purposes were nothing if not grandiose. I
would extend the fortress’s outer wall to encompass an area nearly
five times the size of the present compound, and this extension
would be carried out in stone, which luckily was to be found in
considerable abundance in the mountains only a day’s march distant.
It threatened to be no small task, but I would need the space
because it was also part of my design to raise the strength of the
Amat garrison from thirty companies to a hundred, and that within
five years.

And from this need for haste proceeded,
paradoxical as it might seem, the intention to use stone.
Brickmaking required the heat of the summer sun, but stone could be
quarried and cut even in winter. Besides, I had three thousand
soldiers to keep occupied until the next campaign season.

Other work must necessarily follow. There
would be barracks to build, and the kitchens, offices, workshops,
and stables would have to be extended. An army such as the one I
envisioned would require parade grounds to train on and hords of
craftsmen in leather and metal to keep them outfitted. And since
soldiers and craftsmen and scribes must all be paid, and must have
somewhere to spend their money, the amusements of the town itself
would have to be enhanced—but this, I suspected, was a matter which
could be trusted to take care of itself.

There was work enough to last several years,
but thanks to Kephalos we made a good start that winter. The
quarries were surveyed and within a month the first great blocks of
stone had begun to make their way toward Amat on log rollers.

The men of Ashur are great builders. This is
the real secret of their success as conquerors—they understand so
completely the arts of fortification that almost any city against
which they lay siege is doomed, for those who would undermine a
wall must first know how it was constructed. Thus, in the armies of
the god no man is a soldier only; he will also have abilities as a
carpenter, a mason, a joiner, or perhaps even an architect. And
thus I had at my command all the skilled workmen I required.

But skill can only do so much. The earth
cannot be dug by magic, and stone blocks, no matter how perfectly
their corners have been squared, will not move of their own will.
To do these things required a vast force of men with no talents
beyond strong muscles and a willing pair of hands.

This difficulty, however, did admit of a
solution, since my appointment as shaknu carried with it the
customary powers of impressment. Besides, we found the local
farmers, idle enough during the winter months, more than willing to
work at the rate of half a copper shekel a day—such a sum, small as
it was, could buy a bushel of dates, and among these folk a bushel
of dates was wealth almost beyond imagining.

By the month of Tebet, when there was already
a finger’s depth of snow upon the ground and the quarry workers
split away their blocks of stone by pouring water into the cracks
they had made with iron axes and letting the water freeze
overnight, the great new wall of our fortress had risen already to
the height of a man’s waist, and I was able to hope that it would
be finished within two years’ time. My own palace, which would also
be the military headquarters and seat of government for the
northern provinces, was proceeding even faster. I had hopes it
would be ready for occupation by the season of flooding.

The men of Ashur live by farming and war, and
these are occupations which belong to the long hot months of
summer, after the cold has unclenched its fist and the floods have
come and gone. In winter we sharpen our swords and repair our
granaries and wait. It is the season when, for want of anything
better to do, a man turns in upon himself. It is the season of
memory and tormenting dreams. It is the season of the bitter
heart.

Hence I was more than eager to keep myself
busy. Had I been posted to the south, where there was no stone, I
would have enjoyed a wretched enough time, but in Amat there was
hardly any interval to indulge a taste for misery. In the mornings
I worked at my desk; I saw my officers, read reports, and attended
to the hundreds of little tasks by which a garrison of three
thousand men is kept warm, fed, and orderly. And in the afternoons
I mounted my horse and rode out to see how the work was
progressing. It was only in the evenings that my brain was tempted
by dark shadows, and even then I tried to keep myself busy—and if I
could not find some piece of business I feasted my officers or went
to Kephalos’ house to talk nonsense. And there was Naiba.

And it is no small pleasure to watch walls
and buildings slowly rising at one’s command. By the time we began
to feel the first hint of warmer weather, the great fortress walls
had risen to the height of a man’s head, three of the new barracks
were ready to receive their occupants, and my own palace, except
for the roof and the interiors of the rooms, was nearly finished
and I had hopes of being able to move in within a few months. I
took great delight in all this, and that delight compensated for
much.

For I was then still a very young man, and a
young man, whatever his disappointments, cannot remain afflicted
forever. I had a task in life, something to make every day seem
important, and my flesh was not deprived of its comforts. If I had
my black moments to live through—particularly when the oil lamp had
been snuffed out and I had spent my seed and must wait for sleep to
close my eyes—they were only moments, to be measured against long
hours of forgetfulness and an easy mind. I was, if not happy, at
least content.

But by the time the snow had started to
vanish from the ground and the floodwaters were rising again, I was
beginning to feel restless. The work proceeded well and did not
depend on my day to day supervision, and the reinforcements from
Nineveh could not arrive before the end of Iyyar, and that gave me
over two months. Amat could not hold me. I was like an animal in a
cage, rubbing its sides against the bars to make its place of
confinement as large as possible. I decided on a tour of the
provinces.

The villages of the north are small and
widely separated, for the land is not as fertile as it is in the
south. My new subjects would be too poor to entertain their shaknu
and a large force of his solders without considerable hardship, and
I would not be seen as a mere plunderer. Besides, it was part of my
object to make these people understand that the garrison at Amat,
to which they paid their taxes and sent their menfolk impressed as
laborers, was there to protect them. What would they think if it
appeared that not even I felt safe to travel within my own
territories without an army at my back? How secure in his life and
his property was then any man? Thus I set off with a bodyguard of
only ten men.

It was a cold morning on which we began our
journey, the coldest in many days. The frozen breath of our horses
made great plumes in the air, and the fields of stubble left over
from the autumn harvest were shining with ice. Naiba stood on the
porch of my house, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, watching
with that look of doubt that women have when the men go off on
their incomprehensible errands. I smiled at her and swung up onto
my mount. It seemed a fine time to be alive.

We followed the Upper Zab south until just
after noon and then struck out for the east, entering a line of
fertile valleys nourished by a river which appeared as no more than
a thread on any map I had ever seen and was bounded on either side
by ranges of mountains the names of which none among us could even
guess. The river, swollen by the melting snow, was already a
torrent, and we could hear quite plainly along its bottom the
sounds of huge stones being rolled downstream by its violence. The
land on the opposite bank was much more level and open, but it was
not until almost evening of the second day that we found a spot at
which we could risk a crossing. I could not remember when I had
ever felt water as cold as that.

On the morning of the third day, only a
little more than an hour after breaking camp, we rode into the
first village we had seen since leaving Amat. Perhaps sixty or
seventy families, living in the collection of mudbrick buildings,
made up this one community, which might have existed on the same
spot for easily a thousand years.

Following the etiquette which governs such
matters—for even the king’s shaknu must not imagine the men of
Ashur will consent to be treated like a conquered race—I stopped my
horse some twenty paces from the village perimeter and waited. In
his good time, the village elder, a white haired, leathery old man
with a face like a lion, came out to meet me, his staff of office
in his right hand. He bowed, just low enough to be polite without
implying servility, and stood in silence.

“You have the look of one in authority,” I
said. “I bring you greetings from our dread lord, the King in
Nineveh, the Servant of the God, the Lord of the World. I am his
shaknu, and my name is Tiglath Ashur.”

“It is a name known even here, my Lord
Prince. And I welcome you, the mighty son of a mighty father, as if
you were the king himself.”

That night the village feasted us on fresh
killed lamb. And I was the guest in the elder’s house, where I
drank beer with him and his sons and his son’s sons. Outside I
could hear the laughter of my soldiers, most of whom had probably
been born in such a place as this and thus doubtless felt very much
at home. I too, though raised in the Lord Sennacherib’s court, felt
the comfortable familiarity of these whitewashed walls, within
which, in a sense, all the men of Ashur have been born, for the
village is the root of our lives.

All of us, the elder and his progeny and
their guest the shaknu, sat on reed mats upon the floor, drinking
from pottery jars and enjoying the brazier’s fire. And the old man
told me of the days when he had been a soldier in the army of the
great king Tiglath Pileser, who had made war in the western
lands.

“I was but a boy then, and had never been
more than half a day’s journey from my father’s threshold. I was
privileged to serve under the Lord Sargon, who became king himself
in the next reign but one. He was a mighty man—but for your leather
colored hair and your blue eyes, you, Lord, might almost be his
ghost.”

“I am not fit even to be his shadow, Old
Father, but I am flattered if you think my grandfather lives in me
a little. I was born in the hour of his death and this, I fear, is
the only legacy I have from him.”

I opened my hand to show them the birthmark
on the palm.

“I remember the blood star which ushered you
into the world—and the Lord Sargon out,” the old man said gravely
shaking his head. “It is a fearful thing to be thus marked by the
god. It makes me thank the might of Ashur that I was born to a
humble destiny.”

“To be a prince and live in a golden house
must not be so punishing a fate.”

It was one of the grandsons who spoke, a man
of about my own age but very far gone in drink.

“I would not spurn to be a king’s son—ask the
Lord Tiglath Ashur if he would trade places.”

In the silence that followed, he swallowed
hard and lowered his eyes to the ground.

“This fool sprung from my own loins meant no
disrespect, Prince,” the elder said at last. I could only grin, as
if at a joke, and touch his beer jar with my own.

“And none was taken, Old Father. You both
speak the truth, for a man’s life is what he makes it. If he is
wretched in a golden house he has no one to blame but himself.”

“No, Prince—a man’s life is what the god
makes it.”

. . . . .

In every village we were received with warm
hospitality, for the men of Ashur respect their king and his
servants and do not disdain the stranger in their midst. I found
that my name had preceded me even to these remote places, which
gratified my pride but did not make me once again so willing to
speak of my father’s fathers, nor did I again show anyone the mark
on my palm. I had been boasting, after a fashion—for I was proud to
be descended of great kings—and I had been punished for it. I did
not delight to be reminded that I was nought but the god’s
plaything.