The Assyrian (6 page)

But it was not the camp commander whom I
found sitting on a stool beneath the vine arbor in his garden,
drinking beer from a brightly glazed jar, but the Lord
Sinahiusur.

The king’s turtanu had lost none of his
majesty of bearing since the last time I had seen him, nearly seven
months before, when he had saved me from the gelding knife. His
tunic, the color of the hot summer sun, blazed with silver threads,
and his beard was as black as pitch. He sat calmly, impassive as a
monument, seeming to notice nothing, the jar held delicately in his
right hand, as if he were considering if he should let it drop to
the ground. I approached him to kneel and place my hands upon his
knee in token of respect. There was no servant to attend him, so we
were quite alone. At last the Lord Sinahiusur touched my head and
bid me rise.

“What happened to you?” he asked, bidding me
turn around that he might examine the scratches on the backs of my
arms.

“I fell from a horse, my lord.”

It was not a subject for which I had much
enthusiasm, and I was just as happy when I was allowed to hide my
injuries from his sight. They were painful enough, for the winter
sun had dried them until they were as cracked as mud, but I felt
the injury most deeply in my pride.

“And dragged, from the looks of things.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“So you are not yet ready to lead a charge?”
He searched my face and smiled, though there was that in his smile
to suggest it was more to put me at my ease than because his liver
was quiet. “Nevertheless. I hear good reports of your progress,
Tiglath Ashur. So you get on well here? The life pleases you?”

“Yes. my lord.”

“And do you fancy you will make a good
soldier for our master the king?”

“I hope so, my lord.”

“Well, and there is more to the soldier’s
craft than can be taught in the house of war—or learned from the
back of a horse. You would be wise to remember that, Tiglath
Ashur.”

I did not know what answer to make, so I made
none. Instead, I let his wise old eyes hold me and I waited, for
the turtanu had not come to this garden merely to exchange
pleasantries with a boy—I did not need Tabshar Sin to tell me
that.

And he, it seemed, waited too. I do not know
what sign he expected, but perhaps, finally, he saw it because he
smiled once more, this time with something like real pleasure, and
his hand settled upon my shoulder.

“You will live in a troubled world, Tiglath
Ashur. You will need many friends. I wonder if you will count me
among them. What do you think? Shall we be friends, boy?”

He tilted his head to one side, still holding
my shoulder in his strong brown fingers.

“What do I not owe you, lord?” I asked—I
hardly know where I found the courage to speak, for my heart was in
great confusion and I understood nothing. “All that I am is yours
to command, and if you wish the friendship of one so insignificant.
. .”

“Good, then, we are agreed,” he barked,
shaking me as his grip tightened and then relaxed. “You speak well
for a boy, but sometimes it is best to say nothing. You will learn
that. I think you may have learned it already. Come.”

He rose from his seat and we walked out to
the front of the camp commander’s house, where the Lord
Sinahiusur’s chair was waiting for him. His bearers, their naked
bodies blackened by the sun, crouched on the ground like dogs,
staring up at us with eyes that seemed to measure us only as
weight.

“I think it possible, my friend Tiglath
Ashur, you may grow up to be of some small use to your king, whose
servants we both are. And thus I wish to be of use to you—is that
not the truest meaning of friendship? Yes, of course it is. So I
have brought you a gift. Where is he?”

I looked about me as if the question had been
addressed to myself, but the turtanu’s eyes were fixed on his head
bearer, a huge fellow with a captive’s ring through his nose, who
used his thumb to point back toward the curtained chair.

“Get out of there, you cursed rascal!”

The Lord Sinahiusur’s face went suddenly
black with rage. A few quick steps took him to the chair, and he
pushed back the curtain with an impatient gesture to reveal the
cursed rascal, only just awakened from his comfortable nap. Never
had I seen such a ridiculous mixture of surprise and slinking guilt
as when the turtanu grasped him by the collar of his slave’s tunic
and pulled him out with a yank that sent him sprawling in the dust
some four or five paces distant. The bearers roared with approving
laughter at the sight, and I laughed with them. Even the fellow
himself smiled foolishly as he knelt in the dust, his hands raised
in supplication as if to ward off the beating he must have
expected.

But the turtanu did not strike. His whip
stayed in his belt as he studied the slave with obvious
distaste.

“You must think it a poor gift I bring you,”
he said at last. “But perhaps, Tiglath Ashur, you will find him of
more use than I ever did. He has certain talents and he is
cunning—make of him what you can.

“And, you there, see to the boy’s back lest
you shame me utterly.”

The slave ducked his head in eager
compliance, his hands still raised to shield his face though he
would have known he was safe enough now. The Lord Sinahiusur glared
at him, as the cat glares after the rat that has escaped his
jaws.

He spoke no more, but held out his hand that
I might touch my forehead against it, stepped into his chair, so
recently vacated, and pulled the curtain shut. As he was carried
away, I turned to the slave who was still kneeling in the dust,
wondering what I was to do with this curious new possession.

I regarded him with puzzlement. Finally the
slave stood up and looked about him. He was perhaps twenty-five
years of age, though he did not exhibit the bearing of a young man.
He had a fair complexion which, in our part of the world, suggested
he had spent most of his life within doors, and there was something
almost of insolence in his manner, as if he did not greatly fancy
the idea of being slave to a boy not yet ten. This in itself
irritated me greatly, for I had had enough reminders already that
day that I was still less than a man grown.

He was waiting, it seemed, as uncertain of
his position as I was of mine.

“I am a soldier.” I said finally. “I have no
need of a body servant and, in any case, such a thing would not be
permitted in the royal barrack. Perhaps the rab kisir can find a
use for you somewhere.”

He registered no reaction at first, and then
the words seemed to take hold in his mind.

“My lord, you must not judge me too harshly
from that. . .” He made a gesture toward the spot where the
turtanu’s chair had stood and let his pale, mobile face widen into
a rather doltish grin. “You will find I am an excellent servant,
and. . .”

He had rehearsed the speech and now, it
seemed, had run out of words. The words did not come easily, for
this was a foreigner whose Akkadian rasped on the ear as coarsely
as a grinding stone on an ax blade—a stranger in the Land of Ashur.
And he had been made to look a fool. Well, I knew exactly how he
felt on both of these accounts and could feel sorry for him.

“I will do what I can for you,” I answered,
in Aramaic. It was the language used by many of the soldiers and
probably half the city of Nineveh, and one always assumed any
foreigner would speak it. “What would you have of me?”

My back was bothering me as we stood there in
the cold wind. I would have liked to finish this business so I
could go indoors to bathe and change, but the slave merely stared
at me with a look of what had become helpless appeal. It was not
very long before I grasped that he had understood not a single
word.

I peered into his face, with its light eyes
and its sharp, almost delicate features, so different from the
faces I saw around me each day, and suddenly I understood.

“What would you have of me?” I repeated, but
this time in my mother’s language. The change in him was immediate
and unmistakable.

“Gentle master!” Before I could stop him he
had thrown himself to the ground and was embracing my feet. “Little
did I expect, in this place. . .”

And thus it was that Kephalos attached
himself to my destiny.

. . . . .

“I was not born a slave, master,” he said as,
in the dim coolness of my barrack room, using a basin of water and
a soft cloth, he washed the dirt out of the scratches in my back.
His touch was as gentle as a woman’s. “I am a prisoner of war.”

He said it with great pride, but I had
already gathered as much from the notch which had been cut in his
left ear—a runaway slave who is recaptured and found to bear that
mark is put to death at once. This is the law.

Most prisoners of war, however, are forced to
labor digging in the canals or carrying stone for one of the king’s
building projects. They are worked without mercy and quickly die,
and this slave did not have the hands of one who had endured hard
toil or even the rigors of parade drill. It was difficult to credit
that my new possession had ever been a soldier.

“What war?” I asked him. I was frankly
curious and I wanted to hear what lies he would concoct to make
himself a hero. “How did you happen to be taken?”

But the Greek merely shrugged his shoulders,
as it in regret over some lost opportunity. It was perhaps a
quarter of a minute before he could bring himself to answer.

“Five years, ago I was on my way home from
Aleppo and had the misfortune to be in Tyre when the Assyrians
came. Only two days before I had been set upon and robbed outside a
tavern and thus, unfortunately, in the ensuing panic was without
means of purchasing my escape by sea. The Tyrians impressed me into
their army, so I spent the siege on top of the walls playing dice
while we waited for the city elders to negotiate a surrender. I won
a great deal of money and perhaps this caused some resentment—a
foreigner in a city under attack, master, is always in an awkward
position. In any case, when the moment came to deliver up
prisoners, I found myself in chains, prodded along with the point
of a spear toward the Assyrian encampment. And that is the whole
history of my military career.”

He sighed and opened a small wooden box that
rested beside him on my pallet, taking out a tiny clay pot filled
with a gray ointment which, as soon as it touched the raw skin,
took the sting from my back and made me feel much better.

I discovered that my bad temper had left me,
that I was disarmed of my amused contempt for this man, and that I
would have liked to do him some service before parting, since it
seemed unlikely I would be allowed to keep him.

“What are you trained to do?” I asked him,
glancing down at the wooden box as he helped me back on with my
tunic. “How have you thus far avoided the labor gangs?”

A sly smile flickered for just an instant at
the corners of the slave’s mouth, disappearing almost at once.

“Ah, master,” he exclaimed, casting his eyes
toward the ceiling, “always beware to waste your youth in
profitless follies. Had I drunk less that night I was robbed in
Tyre I would not be a slave today. Had I been less indolent I would
instead be home in Naxos, growing rich as a physician—such, indeed,
has been the calling in my family for uncountable generations.

“Nevertheless, I am the son of a physician,
and I did not walk through my father’s house with my eyes quite
closed. I have learned a few things, and the turtanu’s principal
wife, as perhaps you did not know, suffers from complaints
connected with her monthly bleeding, the precise nature of which
you are too young to understand but which have been a source of
great inconvenience to her husband. I have managed, with the aid of
a few little tricks I picked up in my travels. . .”

He stood back as if to consider what more
could be done in the arrangement of my tunic, and the subject of
the turtanu’s lady seemed to pass from his mind like a wandering
shadow.

“And now the turtanu gives you to me?” I
asked, unwilling to lose this highly interesting narrative.

He smiled, as one awakened from a trance.

“Who am I, master, to unravel the secrets of
the marriage bed? The lady is past her first youth, so perhaps the
difficulties have ceased of their own. Perhaps the turtanu has
grown impatient with her and has hit upon this means of—no, no,
young master, do not seem so shocked. When the gods see fit to
afflict you with a wife you will understand how trying they can be.
I myself have never taken a woman to wed, but every man has a
mother and I could tell you stories of mine. . . But enough of
this. It is time. Lord, for you to go to dinner, where you must
plead my case before the rab kisir, for if I must be a slave among
the Assyrians the gods grant at least that my master be a
Greek.”

I opened my mouth to remind him that I was no
foreigner here like himself but the king’s own son, but the
expression on his face made me think better of it. The Land of
Ashur might be my home, but I knew how it felt to be a stranger in
it and thus understood what was in Kephalos’ heart. I was no more
than a boy but not so young as I might otherwise have been.

. . . . .

“This slave, Prince, he is a gift from the
turtanu?” Tabshar Sin rubbed his check with the fingers of his one
hand as he leaned toward me, his elbow nearly knocking over his
beer pot.

He picked up his knife and began tapping the
blade against the edge of the table, a sure sign that his mind was
troubled. He had drunk deeply that evening and, at any time, a
matter such as this would have filled him with misgivings. He was
responsible for good discipline in the royal barrack, but the
turtanu was second only to the king as commander of the army.