The Assyrian (67 page)

We were in the stable, where Tahu Ishtar had
been showing me a fine silver-colored colt born only four days
earlier. It stood beside its mother on thin, ungainly legs while my
overseer caressed its neck with his broad, knowing hands. He was a
proud man, who would never violate the trust I placed in him, and
this animal, born for the service of another, was precious in his
sight.

“He is fine,” I said. “As fine as the horses
of the Zagros, of which the Medes are so proud—as fine as the great
black brute that bears their king. I will not part with him. I will
have him trained up to war and ride him myself.”

“What shall we call him, Lord?”

“Ghost,” I answered. The name was as much a
surprise to me as to anyone, for it had just that instant come into
my head. “The Medes are greatly afraid of ghosts.”

“So it shall be, Lord.”

He closed the stall behind us and we went
back outside into the sunshine. It was a fine cold day and the
blood washed through my veins like wine. It was good to be alive
and in possession of so many of the earth’s good things. In that
moment I envied no man.

“You have done well, Tahu Ishtar,” I said. “I
grow rich by your labor and care. I feel privileged that I can
entrust my property to one such as you.”

He said nothing, but frowned, and cast a
furtive, sidewise glance at his son. He, too, it seemed, had read
rightly the message in a pair of dark eyes.

That night, when the lamp beside our sleeping
mat had been extinguished, I let my hand slide up over Naibas hips,
carrying her night tunic with me. She settled closer to me, opening
her legs that my fingers might caress the downlike hair of her
cleft, and her lips searched for mine as I guided my manhood into
her. Was there less passion or more in her embrace? Who was I to
her in that moment when her body arched and her breath escaped in
tortured, whimpering gasps? A woman’s pleasure blinds her eyes, and
thus her lover becomes whom she pleases.

She fell asleep in my arms, as she had
countless times before. She sighed in her sleep and dreamed.

“I have lost her,” I thought. “I own her
body, but she is no longer mine.”

And what of it? I had never been hers. I was
not wounded, not even in my pride—I did not even care. It was
simply a kind of joke that the gods had played on me.

I would wait. Naiba was my property and thus
far my property had not been interfered with—her soul was not my
concern. It might all come to nothing, leaving us all the way we
were, and if it did not. . . But I had time until then. I would
wait.

I was at Three Lions for five more days and
that, it seemed, was time enough for something—perhaps only an
understanding, the knowledge of another’s heart that fills a
glance—for something to have developed between my concubine and the
son of my overseer. Naiba was still half savage and, more than
that, a woman grown. What had she not learned of men in the house
of my servant Kephalos? What would she not risk to gain some object
close to her heart? What could she not conceal? She served my bed
each night, as if nothing had changed. But Qurdi—poor Qurdi, once
that firm limbed little boy who had straddled the back of the lion
skin his father had brought me, peering curiously into its open
mouth—he had not yet so completely left his childhood behind him
that anyone with eyes could not read this trouble in his face. He
was not born to hide anything in his soul.

Thus I knew all.

And yet there was this mystery—that I should
be so little touched by the matter. I did not love Naiba, but love
is only one small part of the bond between a man and woman. She was
mine, no less so than if I had covered her with the veil and called
her “wife.” A year ago I would have felt—what? Anger? Yes, at least
anger. And my wrath, against this my chattel and her lover both,
would have been terrible to behold. Now I only hoped that they
would be discreet, that things did not reach such an extreme that I
would be forced to act. Above all else, I wished to avoid punishing
the injury I did not feel.

But if my heart did not swell with anger, was
I empty? No. Then what was there? I searched and found. . .what?
Relief. I was secretly pleased, because here at least was one woman
who would weep no salt tears when I turned from her. Here was no
Esharhamat.

Esharhamat. I had only to speak her name, to
whisper it in the privacy of my unquiet mind, and all was made
plain to me. I had returned to her, by the simple device of
consenting to return to that city of dead hopes, where perhaps, had
the god willed it, she might have sat at my side as consort and
queen. Each marker stone on the road to Nineveh brought me nearer
to her. She filled my breast and left no room for little Naiba, who
had held me in the protective circle of her embrace, as if only
waiting for this moment.

Such were the thoughts in my mind as I kissed
Merope goodbye and prepared to depart for the city where I would
once more be the son of a mighty father, covered with favor and
glory, the darling of empires, the master of all save my own
voiceless passions.

Chapter 25

Once again, he seemed to be waiting for me.
He sat in the dust before the last marker stone on the road to
Nineveh. I knew who he was as soon as I could distinguish that the
shape in the distance was a man and not simply one of those tricks
the sun plays with distant objects. I was not even surprised.

He looked unchanged from the first time I had
seen him, some seven years before. I stopped my horse before him
and my shadow fell across the spot where he crouched on the ground.
He glanced up with his blind eyes that focused on nothing, and he
smiled.

“The Lord Tiglath Ashur comes home at last,”
he said. “He is welcome.”

I instructed the ekalli in charge of my
escort to proceed down the road, telling him that I would catch up
in a moment. He stared at the maxxu with an expression of something
almost like horror and obeyed without uttering a sound.

“Who welcomes him, old man?” I asked. “Do you
speak for yourself, or for another?”

“Are you not summoned, Prince?”

A blind man may seem to look beyond what he
does not see, as if through the obscuring veil of this world. So it
was now. His eyes were fixed on mine, but what was revealed to him
was the insensible truth behind the mask. His brown, withered lips
parted, as if to laugh, but he made no sound. He seemed to mock me
in silence.

“I know now you are from the god,” I cried,
my heart clenched with apprehension. “Speak—what do you want of
me?”

“I, Lord? Nothing.” The thin shoulders moved
in dismissal beneath the faded yellow robes. “Have you seen so much
and learned so little? You, who have climbed Mouth Epih to pray
there and receive dreams? Did not the god cradle you in his hand at
the Place of Bones? And yet you ask what I want of you.”

“Then what have you come to tell me? Speak!
Have mercy on me, for I am full of darkness!”

“This is better, Lord. Learn to submit, for
the god’s will is each man fate. But I have come with his message
only—that you must harden your heart, for you enter now the time of
partings. In the years to come you will speak ‘farewell’ until your
tongue sickens of the sound.”

“This is every man’s fate.”

“Yes—at the end of life. But you are still
young.”

“Is this why I am brought to Nineveh? To say
‘farewell?”

“No, but to do the god’s will.” He raised a
thin arm, and seemed to dismiss me even from his thoughts. “Go now,
Prince, for your eyes still blind you. Go.”

I would have spoken again, for there was much
I wished to know, but saw it would have been in vain and said
nothing. An old man sat in the dust by the roadside, sightless and
poor before a mighty prince, but the prince had become an object
unworthy of notice. I was nothing. He seemed to have forgotten my
existence.

I spurred my horse and rode away, not looking
back. I would not have dared.

. . . . .

How long may a thing trouble the mind after
it has been forgotten, the shadow that darkens all and is thus
itself invisible?

The king’s riders met us before we were
within two beru of the city gates and raced away to announce our
coming. Nineveh’s walls were draped in banners, and we were met
with bread, flowers, and wine. I rode up the Street of Ishtar, my
head ringing with the people’s cheers, and my father met me on the
palace steps and embraced me in the sight of all. I had forgotten
the blind maxxu with his talk of partings. I had driven him from my
thoughts.

The king was beside himself with joy.

“My son!” he shouted, his voice cracking with
emotion. “My son, the conqueror of nations! No man is more glorious
than my son, the pride of Ashur!”

And the people cheered, as if I had come back
with a hundred foreign princes yoked to my chariot. A mob will
cheer any man if he is raised up before them; the king might have
done as much for the slave who cleaned his sandals. Yet I did not
think of that either, for it was I whom the king loved.

Gathered about him on the steps were all the
great men of the court—or, rather, nearly all. Esarhaddon, I
noticed, was absent. And the Lord Sinahiusur as well.

The king had grown into an old man.

“We shall feast tonight, eh?” he said,
leading me inside the great bronze doors, taller than four men. “We
shall grow drunk and merry, chasing away each dark thought. Yes?
Shall it not be so?”

“Yes—it shall be so.”

Where was my mind while I spoke? The king,
his hand on my shoulder, clutching at me as if afraid he might
fall, followed my steps. I had almost forgotten him, because for an
instant. . .

She might have been no more than a shade in
that vast hall with its painted walls and its columns of cedar,
each so huge that two men could not touch hands around it. I caught
sight of her but for a moment, before she retired quickly back into
the shadow and was gone. Yet not so quickly that I did not know
her.

Esharhamat, whose face I saw in every night’s
darkness. I knew her. I knew her behind her veil, as I would have
known her had my eyes been torn from their sockets. Just a
glance—that was all she gave me. What was I to read in that look?
Perhaps nothing. Perhaps only dead hatred. I did not know.

She was great with child. So that much, at
least, had been true.

“Yes. Tomorrow will be time enough to speak
of the business of state. Yes? Tomorrow I will be the king
again.”

He squeezed my arm and I awoke from my waking
dream. “Look at me,” he seemed to be telling me. “I am your father,
and I love you. And I am the king this moment.”

Yet I could not help but notice how the
jeweled turban no longer hid the gray in his hair, and that he
seemed always short of breath. His face was full of lines and his
cheeks sunken. He was not what he had been.

We did grow drunk and merry that night, but
it was not the wine that clouded his mind. He would tell a story,
breaking off in the middle because he had forgotten what he had
wanted to say, wrathful if anyone attempted to remind him. And
always, in his wrath, he returned to Esarhaddon.

“That cursed boy! For he will never be
anything more than a boy, a puling baby clinging to his mother’s
skirts. He will never be a man, and may it be the god’s will that
he never reign as king.”

“It is already the god’s will that he shall
reign,” I said, laying my hand upon the Lord Sennacherib’s arm—for
so small a thing as this touch, which ten years ago he would have
scorned as an intolerable impertinence, now had the effect of
distracting him into a calmer state of mind.

“And he was always a good soldier. You should
give him command of an army that he might fight some great war. He
would not make you ashamed.”

“I am ashamed of him now.”

The king, sullen and resentful, clenched his
fist and lowered it lightly to the table.

“Where is the Lady Shaditu?” he cried
suddenly. “Where is she? Why is she not here to honor her
brother?”

His eyes cast about, searching for someone he
might punish for this offense. At last they came to rest on a
chamberlain, an elderly eunuch whose name was Shupa and who had
served him for thirty years.

“Well? Go and fetch her!”

The chamberlain, who knew his master’s
temper, bowed himself out of the royal presence as quickly as he
could, his head ducking all the while like a bird picking up
seeds.

I looked about me, at the other faces round
the table, at the king’s princely brothers and their sons, at my
own brothers, whom birth had placed higher or lower than myself, at
the men of humble birth whom fortune or virtue had raised to power
at the king’s side, men who had been great in the Land of Ashur,
some of them since before I was born. Some of them could not—or
would not—meet my eye. All were afraid. Did they know what had
happened between Shaditu and myself that last night? Nabusharusur
had known, or guessed. Perhaps in all Nineveh only the king did not
know.

But did they need that knowledge to make them
afraid? Was it not enough to be the king’s servant in the deep
twilight of his life, when the heir was filled with hatred? They
listened to my father as he mocked his successor, and they said
nothing—what could they say? How many of these men would find their
heads between their feet the day Esarhaddon took the king’s mace in
his hand? No—they had enough to fear without my little sin weighing
on their minds.

And the king? He had already forgotten about
Shaditu. An Arab girl with skin as pale as wood smoke was dancing,
clicking little cymbals between her fingers and thumbs in time to
the music of a flute player in the pleated linen tunic of an
Egyptian. The king laughed, clapping his hands, and the Arab girl
smiled with her eyes. The king had drunk too much and could not
count time to the music, but that did not matter. And his wrath was
lost in a moment of idle pleasure.