The Assyrian (77 page)

“If Esarhaddon takes us together, what can he
do?” She smiled, drawing me through the open doorway. “I must bear
the son who will rule after him, and that son is yet to find his
way into my womb. What can Esarhaddon do?”

It was a small room and two of Esharhamat’s
servants were there, crouched in a corner, folding and refolding
pieces of white linen—women’s work, intelligible only to them. They
looked up and, seeing me, rose to leave. They did not linger and
their eyes were shining with fear, for they knew their mistress was
committing a mad act. The door closed behind them with hardly a
sound.

With no word, Esharhamat slipped her tunic
off over her head to stand naked before me. She was beautiful—to me
more beautiful even than life—but her body was no longer young. Her
breasts, once so small and tight, were heavy, waiting to burst, and
her belly was puckered

with the wounds of her childbearing. I knelt
before her, pressing my cheek against her poor flesh, my eyes
flooding with tears of pity.

“Am I grown so hideous then, Tiglath?” she
murmured, her fingers smoothing back my hair. “Is love gone
too?”

“Oh no—my love, my love!” Over and over again
I sobbed the words, for I could find no others. “Oh my love, my
love.”

We held each other a long time, alone, with
only the flickering light from a single lamp for company. I do not
know how long. My mind was lost to any thought but of Esharhamat. I
knew no shame nor fear nor duty. I was an empty vessel until she
filled me with the love of her.

We were one flesh again that night. I went
into her, and we became one. It was not the same with Esharhamat as
with other women, for I had no thought of pleasure. My senses ached
with dumb joy, but it was not for pleasure that I loved her. I
could not bear to be parted from her, for my soul was in her body
and without her I wandered in the empty air like a ghost. I knew I
was alive only because I was with her. We were one flesh.

“Come away with me,” I said, when at last
words were possible between us. “Come away, and we will be together
until death.”

“How soon would that be?”

“What does it matter? I cannot leave you
again.”

“You must—you know you must.”

“I know nothing, save that I love you.”

“I will not go with you, Tiglath.” She took
her arms from about me and sat up on her sleeping mat. “The time
for that is past. You speak only of what you wish to be, not of
what can be. You have already made your choice—or perhaps your god
has made it for you.”

“Before you, I care nothing for this god or
any other.”

“So you say now, and believe. But it will not
be the same tomorrow, or the day after. You belong to him, not to
me. I understand that now. I do not even resent it. It is simply
that which must be so.”

“Why?”

“Because it is his will.”

I knew what she said was true, that she was
stronger than I. I could not bear the thought of parting, of days
or years without her. In my heart I cursed the name of god.

“You enter now the time of partings,” the
maxxu had said, “when your tongue will sicken at the sound of
farewell.”

In the darkness, while the world was yet
shrouded by the wings of death, I rose and left her.

. . . . .

“I no longer find favor in my lord’s eyes?”
Zabibe. always cunning, now played the penitent. She knelt before
me, dressed in rags, her shoulders bare. “He does not honor me as
before. I am banished from his presence and can count on my fingers
the nights I have spent on his sleeping mat since our return to
Nineveh. If I have sinned against my lord, then let him punish me,
even onto death. But let him not turn from me, for that is blacker
than any death.”

She touched her head to the floor and
embraced my ankles, bathing my feet with her tears. She was very
convincing, but no woman is so dangerous as when she seems all
weakness and submission. I realized that I had made a mistake in
neglecting her.

“Then bring me my whip,” I said.

But a raw backside and such endearments as
are implied in a little hard rutting would not satisfy her forever.
Zabibe knew she had a rival, and she would not rest content until
she had discovered her. After all, such discoveries were the
purpose that had brought her to me. But in truth I was weary of
living with her deceptions. And I had plans for Zabibe.

In half a month I would return to Amat,
leading the ten companies of soldiers who would man the garrison
there while I took my new army into the Zagros Mountains. By then I
hoped to have wiped the tablet of my life clean.

“We must wait and see,” I told Esharhamat.
“Perhaps I shall die on campaign, or perhaps Esarhaddon will get
drunk and break his neck on a stairway. Or perhaps the god will
tire of this folly and destroy the world. There is nothing for us
except waiting.”

It was true. I saw her only five times all
the months I was in the city, and all the days between were simply
waiting. I lived for those few hours with her, for nothing else.
Even the thought of my war against the Medes filled me with
emptiness—glory and danger were nothing if they carried me so far
from her arms. It was no false delicacy which made me neglect
Zabibe. It was no more than that, sometimes for many days, I simply
forgot she existed.

I heard many voices during these months in
Nineveh, and only half listened to any of them. The king was old
and would soon vanish forever, but what was death for one was life
for many, and the conspiracies hatched out like maggots in the
belly of a dead lion. There were whispers everywhere.

I was constantly meeting people, some of whom
were known to me and some not. These encounters would seem
fortuitous—I would receive an invitation to join a hunt and, in a
party of perhaps a hundred, I might find myself paired with a rab
abru in charge of a garrison in Rasappa, home on leave. The hunt
would be slow. We would talk. Certain hints would be dropped
concerning the present situation. There would be complaints about
Esarhaddon’s policy toward Babylon. I would make some answer and,
suddenly, the man would be pledging me his support should I choose
to contest my brother’s right to the throne. This, or the like,
happened to me three, four, I know not how many times.

Some meetings were not fortuitous. On the
fifth day before the beginning of the festival of Akitu, two hours
before morning, the steward of my house awakened me. He said I had
a visitor who would not be turned away. The man came in a carrying
chair and wore a hooded

tunic that concealed his face—my steward
could not even be sure it was a man. He suspected an assassin. I
took my javelin from where it leaned against the wall and went to
meet this strange visitor. I found him and, when we were alone, he
pushed aside his hood. He was my royal brother, the scribe
Nabusharusur.

“You are surprised to see me,” he said,
smiling with his lips only.

“I am surprised by nothing that befalls me in
Nineveh,” I answered. “If I may ask without rudeness, brother, what
do you want of me at this hour?”

Nabusharusur’s thin, nervous hand played over
the sleeve of his cloak. There were lines around the corners of his
eyes, as if he were always peering into the distance. He was a
man—if he was a man—whose life danced forever on the point of a
knife.

“I come to tell you that you have
enemies.”

“This does not surprise me, since I have not
led a blameless life.”

“You mock me, brother.”

“No, brother.” I shook my head and smiled, no
more pleasantly than did Nabusharusur himself. “It is I who am
mocked. I am not such a fool as you seem to think me.”

“Then know that there are spies in your own
house—the woman Zabibe, for one.”

“So I have been told before this. What of it?
In this city half the inhabitants earn their bread by spying on the
other half. Tell me what I do not know.”

“That this woman, to earn her bread, has
promised the Lady Naq’ia that she will poison you. I would take no
wine from her hands, brother—now, I see, I have told you
something.”

“Yes. And I might ask why you trouble
yourself, brother, and how you know.”

“I trouble because I still have hopes of you,
Tiglath.” He shrugged his narrow, feminine shoulders, as if all his
hopes had long since ended in despair. “You are a fool whom the
past blinds to the future, but it may not always be so. And, as to
my knowledge of this matter—as you have suggested, what secrets are
not for sale in Nineveh?”

He bowed and left me then and, as always, I
was not sorry to see him go. Nabusharusur was an uneasy soul, and
his discomfort was an atmosphere that he carried with him
everywhere. Anyone who breathed the same air was infected with it.
I returned to my chamber, all hope of rest fled, to await the
coming of dawn.

And the next night, at my sleeping mat, I
found Zabibe and her whip and a silver vessel of wine. She smiled
at me, and I knew that Nabusharusur had saved my life.

“I am not thirsty,” I said. “But drink
yourself, if you wish. Drink, before it loses its chill.”

She shook her head.

“No—I do not care for wine.”

I had seen her drink this same wine more
times than I could number.

“Very well then, if you choose to vex
me.”

I picked up the whip, and she smiled again.
Doubtless she thought I would parch my throat with desire for her,
that sometime before morning I would drink the wine and die.

She lifted the hem of my sleeping tunic and
took my manhood between her lips. I cut her back with the whip and
she moaned, and I could feel the pressure of her tongue. All the
while she sucked on me I beat her, until the blood came. I went
into her twice that night. But I did not touch the wine.

The next morning, before the sun rose, I left
her sleeping and carried the silver vessel with me. The cooks were
already awake, so I went into the kitchen and took one of the long,
thin loaves of bread that only servants ate. No one saw anything
strange in this.

The garden behind my house had fallen into
disuse in the last years of the Lord Sinahiusur’s life. It was
overgrown and wild, and there were rats—bold creatures the size of
cats, that feared neither man nor beast nor god. I went outside and
sat upon a stone bench, breaking off pieces of the bread, soaking
them in the wine and casting them down upon the pathway.

In time a rat came. He stood quite still when
he saw me, watching me through tiny, cruel eyes, and then at last,
when he was sure I would not interfere, he came and sniffed at a
morsel of the bread. He ate it, and then another. I waited. He
looked about for more, his long, naked tail dragging behind
him.

And then, in an instant, he came up straight
on his front paws and then collapsed. I walked over and kicked him
with my sandaled foot, just to be sure. He was as lifeless as a
block of wood.

So it was true—there was no doubt. I poured
the rest of the wine onto the ground.

Zabibe, no doubt, was surprised to see me
alive.

Tell a servant to fetch my breakfast.” I told
her. “Be quick, for I have an appetite.”

And, indeed, I did. All things taste good to
the man who is happy to have been spared. This was a debt I owed my
brother Nabusharusur.

And Zabibe would pay. She would pay.

. . . . .

In the morning I would leave for Amat. The
barracks of the house of war were ablaze with torchlight as
soldiers prepared their kits against the long march. They were
fresh conscripts and they knew that some of them were going to war.
They would sleep but little tonight. I knew everything they felt. I
had only to remember the long road to Khalule.

But my brain did not ring with the clash of
weapons and the thunder of horses’ hoofs. These things had lost
their terrifying strangeness and, besides, I was hurrying to the
arms of a beloved woman. Parting from her would be more terrible
than any death.

Esharhamat waited in her sleeping chamber.
Her women, such as she trusted, would guard us against intrusion
until perhaps an hour before first light. Esarhaddon had been the
whole month in Calah, waiting, it was said, for me to return to the
north.

A single oil lamp burned beside her mat.
Esharhamat leaned back on one arm as she turned to me, smiling. As
I knelt beside her she touched my face, letting her fingertips rest
so lightly against the skin, and kissed me upon the mouth. Our
kisses became greedy, almost fierce. We did not speak. There was no
time for words. We made love the way the starving feast, as if it
might all be taken away in the next instant.

“What shall we do all the long time apart?”
she asked at last, when our passion was spent and she huddled in my
embrace.

“We shall suffer,” I told her, since there
was no other answer. “We shall persist in hope, and we shall
wait.”

“For how long?”

“I know not.”

“It is in the god’s hands.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

Outside, in Esharhamat’s garden, the crickets
sang. Mother Tigris was in full flood, and the world was awake for
another year. And I was leaving at dawn to fight the Medes.

“Tiglath. . .”

“Yes?”

“I think it possible I may be with
child.”

I held her in my arms, not moving, perhaps
not even breathing. What did I feel? A kind of cold shock—it was
only the surprise.

“Will it be mine?”

“I hope so, yes. It may be Esarhaddon’s, for
he is nothing if not scrupulous in his royal duties, but I think
not. I believe it is yours, if only because I know already I will
love this child.”

“Then I am glad.”

“So am I.”

In an hour, I thought—perhaps not so much—we
will have to part. How will I bear it? Now, more than ever, how
will I bear it?