The Assyrian (70 page)

We were all trapped—Esharhamat in a marriage
founded upon bitterness and contempt, Esarhaddon in an eminence as
little suited to his wishes as to his talents, and I. . . I wanted
a woman I could not have, which was a common enough fate, and I
could live without the glory of kingship. Why then did I feel so
estranged from myself? I did not know. That was my burden, not to
know.

And each night I sat among the village men,
and we discussed war and farming—the only two fit subjects. We
drank beer until sleep came, and then my dreams did not torment me.
Thus I lived for five days.

On the third day the king sent another of his
heralds and I dismissed him too, although with greater courtesy
than the first. And on the night of the fifth day, long after the
inmates of the village had found their beds, yet another came, and
this one I told I would return to Nineveh. He said his orders were
to accompany me back, but I told him that this I would not permit.
I was not a truant schoolboy to be hauled back by the ear. I would
return as I had left, alone.

The next morning, as I mounted my horse, a
village woman gave me a pottery water flask and a small reed bag
filled with bread and dried meat.

I rode away without looking back. I heard no
sound except the beating of my horse’s hoofs.

The Gate of Nergal, which opens onto the road
to Tarbisu, was still unlocked when I arrived, so I did not have to
shout up to the watchman and identify myself in order to be let in.
I simply rode through, one more man on horseback, among so many on
foot, hardly noticed at all. A prince who leaves his escort behind
him becomes like other men—he has no special majesty and no one
recognizes him. Of this it is wise sometimes to be reminded.

I had hardly arrived in my rooms to take off
my cloak and wash the dust of travel from my eyes before a page
burst in upon me and, directly behind him, the king himself.

“I ought to have your feet chopped off for
wandering away in such a manner,” he said, embracing me
nevertheless. “And it is a crime punishable by death to refuse a
royal summons. My son, much as I love you, I would have your life
for this insolence were it not for your brother Esarhaddon. Your
absence has obliged the Donkey to remain waiting here in Nineveh
longer than pleases him, and I have been kept vastly amused by his
impatience and anger. It is always a pleasure to see him annoyed,
but he has been almost beside himself—he talks of nothing but your
‘unconscionable impudence’ and how he would have you flayed if he
were king. You are fortunate finally to have accepted him as an
enemy. Come—I have kept the banqueters waiting in your honor.”

Our entry together into the great hall caused
something of a sensation, for no one knew why I had left the city
or how I would stand in the king’s favor when I returned—palaces do
a lively custom in rumors, and possibly half the men who dined with
us that night had expected some great change, like a movement of
the earth itself, that would sweep them in or out of favor.

And then there was the matter of Esarhaddon’s
all too obvious reaction at the sight of the king leaning on my
arm. His face went black with rage.

So my father’s banquet was an occasion for
great disquiet and, as happened so often in the last years of his
reign, it declined rather quickly into a drunken orgy. It took
hardly more than an hour before courtiers of otherwise blameless
dignity, their faces flushed from wine, were pelting each other
with pieces of roast meat. I saw at least three of the dancing
girls lifted up to the table, placed on their backs, and rutted on
by men who waited their turns in strict order of precedence. It was
a scene worthy of a provincial army barrack after two months’
campaign.

But the king enjoyed it all. He laughed and
made rude jokes, encouraging those who held back to join in the
general merriment. Baiting Esarhaddon and watching the depravity of
his nobles—his pleasures in life seemed to have dwindled down to
these. Finally he got up from his chair, walked to a corner,
vomited loudly, and allowed himself to be led off to bed.

And all the while my brother and I, as if by
compact, drank little, spoke hardly at all to those around us, and
zealously avoided one another’s eye. For either of us, one might
have imagined, so much as to acknowledge the other’s existence
would have been insupportable.

But when the king had finally left I went to
find my own rest, abandoning the field to Esarhaddon. I was weary
of Nineveh. I wanted only to return to the safe forgetfulness of my
garrison at Amat, where the only enemy was found in battle. I would
most happily abandon all this glittering corruption to my brother,
who doubtless had no more taste for it than I did. Let this be his
punishment, I thought, to reign in this dog kennel until disgust
gnaws straight through his vitals and he dies of it. As soon as the
king would release me, I would fly like a bird from his golden net.
The Medes would pay me back a thousand fold as I piled up their
corpses as monuments to my immortal glory.

Thus simple does the tangled web of life seem
to a young man, for I was young then, although I felt myself to be
old and full of cynical wisdom.

In my rooms the Arab girl Zabibe helped me
off with my robes and rubbed my limbs with hot scented oil. I
almost fell asleep under her cunning hands. Almost, but not
quite.

“My lord has been absent many days,” she
murmured as she bathed my face in water mixed with flower petals.
“I thought my lord had forgotten his servant.”

I had forgotten her—the thought of her had
never once entered my head—but it seemed impolite to say so, and I
merely smiled.

“Zabibe lives only to find favor with my
lord,” she went on, her voice as gentle as the flutter of a bird’s
wings. The tips of her fingers brushed against my manhood, which by
then was as stiff as bronze. Her pale skin caught the light from
the oil lamp beside my bed, making her seem the only real object in
the room. “My lord must learn to put all care behind him, to let it
fall away like a soiled garment. My lord must permit Zabibe to ease
his heart.”

I listened to her voice, feeling like a child
whose ear is captured by a cradle song, knowing and not caring that
I heard only the skillful chatter of a harlot. What did it matter
what was real and what not? Why should I care? I had only now—this
moment was all I could call my own. Happiness was a shadow, but
pleasure at least was real.

. . . . .

I awoke the next morning with a headache. The
brazier, cold for hours, had left a faint taste of smoke in the
air, and Zabibe was snoring like a water buffalo. This was the end
of passion—a winter morning, a pounding head, and a woman who, as
soon as she opened her eyes, would expect to hear that she was the
god’s first blessing. I put on my tunic and slipped quietly out of
the room. Tonight I might desire this woman’s consolation again,
but I could not face her now. I escaped to the house of war, where
I could steam my soul clean again in the sweating house and enjoy a
soldier’s breakfast of beer and boiled millet.

“The Dread Lord Sennacherib, King of the
Earth’s Four Corners, salutes the Royal Prince Tiglath Ashur!”

Within the narrow confines of the officers’
mess, his voice boomed like a warm drum. I was sitting at a table
with my back to the door, and I could not have been more startled
if someone had jabbed me between the shoulder blades with a sword
point. I turned and saw the herald with the silver ribbons hanging
from his staff, and my heart sank.

“The Dread Lord Sennacherib requests. . .

“Yes—yes, yes. Just tell me where,” I
snapped. I was growing weary of this little ritual.

“If you will follow me, Lord—now.”

He made a grand, sweeping gesture with his
hand to indicate the way out, and I rose meekly to go after
him.

There was a litter waiting for me—in all my
life I had never ridden in one, since I held my own legs to be as
sound as another man’s, and this did not seem the moment to start
behaving like a pampered concubine, so I dismissed it and followed
the herald on foot. We passed back through the palace grounds and
out the Gate of Igisigsig and into the royal gardens, which
occupied the corner between the river and the city’s northern wall,
a place my father loved and where I found him sitting under a vine
arbor with a cup of wine in his hand. Esarhaddon was with him,
looking no more cheerful than he had last night.

“The hero has at last found a moment for us,”
my brother cried, glaring at me as he rose from his seat. “I am
astonished he can be bothered.”

The king laughed and pitched the contents of
his wine cup onto the ground beneath a flowering bush.

“The marsarru here has been telling me that
your campaign against the Medes is a profitless waste. He says our
only real safety lies in avoiding the anger of the gods.”

He laughed again, stamping his sandaled foot
to emphasize the delicious nature of the joke, and Esarhaddon
scowled and snorted like a bull beset by flies. It was obvious that
this quarrel was of long standing.

“My Lord Marsarru is, as always, correct,” I
answered. “Only a fool risks the wrath of Great Ashur, but I think
he will not be displeased if we remind the Medes that he and not
their Ahura is lord in the Western Lands.”

“I was speaking with reference to the temple
of Marduk in Babylon.”

Esarhaddon sat down again as I came near him.
I think he was afraid I might have offered him my hand.

“That place is in ruins—do you not recall,
brother, how you and I labored at its destruction?—and Marduk has
abandoned his city and now does honor to Ashur in our temple here
in Nineveh. Were you by chance suggesting it should be
otherwise?”

I smiled at him. I hated him, at that moment,
more utterly than ever I had anyone in my life. And it was not the
Medes I was thinking of—or the ruined temples of Babylon, or the
honor of the deathless gods—but Esharhamat.

“Yes, my Lord Marsarru,” the king interposed.
“Were you by chance suggesting it should be otherwise?”

He sat with his hands on his knees, turning
his head from one of us to the other. His eyes glittered with
malicious pleasure, but the sun shining down on his gray old head
pitilessly revealed his weary age.

Esarhaddon picked up a pebble and threw it at
a bird which had perched on a tree limb some twenty paces away. It
was a near miss, and the bird fluttered into the air.

“The Medes are no more danger than that,” he
said. I could read in his eyes a consciousness of having evaded a
direct answer.

“Than what, my beloved son—that bird, or the
unerring accuracy of your arm?”

“The god of Babylon must be restored,”
Esarhaddon replied, seeming to close his mind to the king’s
mockery. “Marduk, who leaves no insult unanswered, has conceived a
great wrath against the Land of Ashur. We cannot prosper until the
city is rebuilt. If we neglect this duty, our royal house is
doomed.”

“I was not born in the Land of Sumer,” I
said. “I am a man of the north and put my trust in the mercy of
Ashur.”

“No one needs to remind us that you are half
a foreigner, my Lord Tiglath.”

“Just as all men remember, my Lord Marsarru,
that your mother used to sell her backside in the wineshops of
Borsippa.”

Esarhaddon rose in terrible anger, his hand
already on the hilt of his sword. I believe, save for the presence
of the king, we might have ended our quarrel there and then, but my
father also rose and pushed us apart.

“How dare you!” he shouted. “How dare either
of you! Am I a plowman, born with mud between his toes, to watch my
sons goad each other to deadly fight? I forbid this! Sit down,
Esarhaddon, since you are most to blame. We were speaking of the
Medes.”

And, as quickly as it had arisen, the crisis
passed. Esarhaddon resumed his seat, but from that moment on he
might as well have been struck deaf for all the impact my words had
on him.

“Then may I now speak of the Medes?” I
asked—it seemed we had done justice to every other topic.

“Yes, my son. Speak of the Medes.”

“They are a little people. They are not
important.” My brother did not even look at me as he spoke.

“The Sagarians, the Miyaneh, and the
Iranzu—these are only tribes. Yes, they are little people, each in
turn, and not important. But if they combine, and think of
themselves as one nation, then they are important And this they are
beginning to do, under a man called Daiaukka, who calls himself
their king. I have met this king, and he is all that one would most
fear in an enemy. Added to this, the Medes have found a new god. .
.”

I spoke for some time, telling all I had
learned in the eastern mountains, and the king listened with great
attention. He would stop me now and then to ask a question—a name,
perhaps, or the meaning of some strange foreign word—but for the
rest he preserved an impenetrable silence.

“And it is your belief they will march west?”
he asked at last, folding his hands in his lap.

“Yes, Dread Lord. Unless we stop them, and
soon, they will come down from their mountains like wolves. We must
teach them the cost of their ambitions, and if the lesson is
terrible enough perhaps then they will leave us in peace for a
generation.”

“And for this, I have no doubt, you will need
a great army,” Esarhaddon said suddenly. “Greater by far than that
which is presently under your command.”

“I will need more men, yes. Perhaps sixty
companies more.”

My brother nodded, as if this was the answer
he had expected. The tight smile on his lips was that of a man
whose worst suspicions had been confirmed.

“My Lord King,” he asked, “have you
considered to what end my brother raises such a force? Surely not
to fight the Medes. It cannot be that a few mountain barbarians,
who are a threat only in the eastern provinces, justify so massive
a response. I think the Lord Tiglath Ashur wishes to strengthen his
northern army for reasons which have precious little to do with the
Medes.”