The Assyrian (80 page)

“The poor fool,” I thought. “He understands
nothing.”

The soldiers cheered as I rode through camp
to my own tent. They cheered out of relief that I was not dead in
some rocky gorge but had returned to lead them safely home again
when we had killed the last Mede—this is how every soldier thinks,
and the commander who does not know it is a lost man. They shouted
my name and bellowed themselves hoarse, pounding their shields with
the flats of their swords when I raised my hand to show the blood
star on the palm. They were like children frightened of the dark
and I, and the sedu of Great Sargon, had become their only
light.

“Tabshar Sin,” I said, when the old man met
me with a cup of wine, “there shall be such slaughter as has not
been known since Khalule. It shall be worse, perhaps, for the Medes
will fight until we have broken them under the wheels of our
chariots.”

“Have we come on a fool’s errand then,
Prince?” he asked—I could see by the look in his eye he was merely
testing my nerve, for no man feared death less than my old rab
kisir. I could only laugh.

“No. We have no choice,” I said, when my
laughter died. “We must fight them here, or a year from now under
the walls of Nineveh. That is not a choice.”

“Then we shall defeat them,” he said, as if
stating the obvious. “The god shall not desert us.”

“Yes, we shall defeat them.”

I went to my bed that night remembering the
smile on Daiaukka’s lips when he parted from me. He too believed in
the favor of his god.

. . . . .

Over the next ten days our progress was slow
and cautious. I had no intention of being surprised by the sudden
appearance of Daiaukka’s army, so our scouts fanned out to all
points of the compass, even into the mountains, to bring back
reports of everything that moved within twenty beru of our columns.
We never saw them—they were as invisible as the wind—yet I had no
doubt the Medes were close by and massing for battle.

It was on the afternoon of the tenth day, in
the middle of a dust storm that blew in from the northern desert to
choke men and horses and bring the sky down around us until it
seemed like a vault of earth, that a lone rider came into our camp.
He wore the costume of a Mede and his mouth and nose were swathed
in a long scarf with small silver coins sewn around the fringe, so
that only his eyes were visible. When the sentries challenged him
he requested to be brought to me.

“Well, what is it?” I asked impatiently,
little pleased to be standing in the raw, gritty wind—no man who
could help himself ventured out of his tent on such a day. “What
would you have of me?”

It was only when he took a step nearer me,
and I could see his eyes, that I understood. Wary and intelligent,
they reminded one of a cat.

This man was no Mede. I dismissed the
guard.

“Come inside,” I said, as soon as we were
alone. “You bring word from the Lord Tabiti?”

“Brother, I am the Lord Tabiti.”

With a single deft movement he removed the
scarf, and all at once it was the headman of the Sacan who stood
before me. He laughed at my surprise, and we fell into each other’s
arms.

“I hope the Lord Tiglath carried wine with
him when he came into this forbidding place,” he said, wiping the
dust from his arms and shoulders. “My throat is parched, and even
that filthy stuff you had from the Urartians would be welcome. By
the gods, are those the rich grasslands where you promised the
Scoloti would win an empire fit for princes of the earth?”

“It makes a better impression when the wind
is still and, yes, there is wine.”

I gave orders for a goat to be roasted, and
while we waited for it Tabiti and I broke open a jar and grew drunk
together. He was very weary, having departed his own encampment
twenty days before to see how the ground lay and to find the army
of Ashur.

“We have left the wagons and the women and
children behind on the shore of Lake Urmia,” he told me. “I have
ten thousand good men, and we were traveling fast. They are perhaps
no more than eight days behind me and are staying close to the
foothills of the Elburz Mountains. I had to cross the desert which
lies between here and there—it is a wretched place where only
scorpions can live in comfort. I have seen where the Medes are
gathering. They have chosen well for themselves if they mean to
fight there, for they occupy rising ground some eight days from
here. Daiaukka must have five and fifty thousand men with him.”

“He says sixty.”

“Sixty then. I believe him. You have what,
thirty thousand?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty against sixty—so be it.” Tabiti
shrugged his shoulders, as if dismissing a trifle. “You defeated my
Sacan at the Bohtan River, where our advantage in numbers was even
greater.”

“Do the Medes know of your coming yet?”

“No, I think not. The people of the northern
mountains are all Cimmerians and hate the Medes. As soon as we draw
near, they cut the throats of the headmen Daiaukka has put over
them and invite us to a feast of celebration. I doubt if any word
of us has found its way south. It is a pleasant thing to invade
lands where one is welcomed as a liberator.”

I said nothing, since my experience had been
different. But neither did I, like Tabiti, have any thought of
settling in this place.

“Is it important?” Tabiti asked suddenly. “Do
your plans depend upon surprise?”

I almost laughed.

“No, my lord. I entertain a doubt that
anything will ever be likely to surprise Daiaukka—even his own
defeat.”

“Then he must have powerful necromancers in
his service.” The headman of the Sacan frowned, shaking his head.
“Magic is a great advantage in war. Perhaps we should. . .”

“No—it is not that.” I did laugh now, unable
to help myself, but Tabiti was by then too drunk to take offense.
“It is simply that the shah-ye-shah has a habit of looking far into
the future. His plans do not depend on success in this battle, or
the next, or even on his own survival. He prepares the foundations
of a house in which he will never dwell, but the design is clear in
his mind. One day, long after he is dead, the Medes will be a great
nation, rulers of the wide world. He works for this. He knows it
will all come to pass, and this knowledge, it seems, is enough for
him.”

“Then he is mad — but a madman of the most
dangerous sort, for he infects others with his own madness.”

“Yes, my friend.” I filled our cups again and
took a long swallow of the wine, which seemed to clear my mind even
as I felt the fumes rising in my brain. “Yes, he is very
dangerous.”

Tabiti remained with us through the next day
and night, and in that time he told me of all he had seen since
entering the lands where the Medes are called “master.” He was a
clever man and had kept his eyes open. With more ambition he might
have been as great a threat as Daiaukka, but his dreams did not
encompass empires and neither did he long to serve the avarice of
strange gods. He merely wanted a little well watered grassland for
his people and, of course, some share of a soldier’s glory. Perhaps
in this he was wise enough to be envied. And, for the moment at
least, he was my friend and he opened his mind to me.

“The Cimmerians have not the will to fight,”
he told me. “I tried to draw them into alliance, but they are too
afraid and would not be of much use anyway—they have hearts like
dogs and might run off to lick the ground at Daiaukka’s feet the
first time he whistles for them. If we do not triumph in this great
battle of yours, they will turn on us quickly enough.”

“Tell me of what you saw of Daiaukka’s
army.”

“What is there to tell?” He spat on the
ground to show that he held his enemies in contempt, but we both
knew the truth. “They are many, and they have many horses—I lay on
a bluff an hour’s ride from their camp, and I have not the eyes of
a sparrow hawk to count the feathers on their arrows. Besides,
there were patrols. I did not dare stay long.”

“I know that. Prudence is the first virtue of
a commander. I only ask what you did see.”

Satisfied with this, Tabiti, son of
Argimpasa, gazed through narrowed eyes at the hazy, shadowed line
of mountains that lay to the south. We were outside the earthworks
that served as a defense against surprise attack, and the sun was
far to our backs.

“I was struck by one thing,” he said at last.
“They had built enclosures for their horses, one at each end of the
camp. It was not what I would have expected—perhaps Daiaukka
studies to make war like the men of Ashur.”

He smiled, thinking he had made a joke. I felt my
bowels turning to ice. If the Medes were dividing their cavalry
into wings, with their infantry in the center, it could only mean
that they had made a start at organizing themselves by fighting
units instead of by tribes, as had always been their custom. It
meant that indeed Daiaukka had learned something from the campaign
of two years ago. It meant that he would no longer send his men
down on us in shapeless waves, to fight as barbarians, each with no
thought in his head but glory and perhaps the chance of a little
plunder, relying on nothing beyond his horse, his own courage, and
the favor of his gods, but would now engage us, however clumsily,
as a disciplined force. It meant that Daiaukka had discovered
tactics.

Chapter 30

It was three days after Tabiti left us to
rejoin his own men that my outriders first made contact with
Daiaukka’s forces. I received reports of sightings and even
skirmishes, and I ordered that henceforth patrols would be
conducted in force.

The Medes began a series of raids—trivial
annoyances rather than battles, intended merely to test our
defenses. In response, I sent out two companies of cavalry on a
night attack and they overran one of the enemy’s forward positions
and returned with forty fresh cut heads. After this the raids
ceased.

Two days later I rode out with one of the
patrols and had my first look at Daiaukka’s camp. We stopped at the
top of a bluff, perhaps the same one on which Tabiti had hidden
himself for his first view of our common enemy. But I did not
hide—there was nothing courageous in this, since I was neither
alone nor more than three hours’ hard gallop from my own sentry
lines. Besides, I wanted to be seen. By now the Medes knew the
great silver stallion and his rider, and I wanted them to
understand that I had come and that the hour of reckoning was at
hand.

A party of cavalry crossed the valley to
within perhaps half a beru of us, but there were only five of them
and it was clear they had no intention of engaging us. Finally they
stopped. They made no further move; they simply waited to see what
we would do while they had their own look at the intruders. One of
them was mounted on a fine black horse—the distance was too great
to be sure, but I believe this was Daiaukka himself.

Tabiti had been right. The shah-ye-shah had
chosen his site well. His camp occupied the highest point on slowly
rising ground that would give his horsemen a wide area in which to
maneuver, while the thick, dry grass might conceal all manner of
obstacles for my chariots. To be near water, we would have to
establish ourselves at the valley floor, a narrow place to which,
if it came to that, we would be forced to retreat in some
confusion. And then there was the wind, which blew as hot as a
demon’s breath all day and changed direction abruptly as soon as
the sun approached its highest point. From noon on, when we would
engage the Medes most closely, when our arrows and javelins would
need it the most, we would have the wind against us.

“The time and the place will be of my
choosing,” he had told me. “We will measure our virtue against
yours and see whom the Ahura favors.”

He had chosen this place—he had chosen well.
But I swore that it would be mine to choose the time of battle, for
all the little good it would do me.

“I have seen enough,” I said. “Let us return
and break camp. It seems we have an appointment.”

On the way back, wishing to avoid all
inquiries while I tried to sort out what must be done, I rode at
the rear of the column. But at last, having grown weary of my own
thoughts, I began listening to the conversation between the two
soldiers directly in front of me, a pair of farm lads still fresh
enough from home to think the rest of the world but a poor place
compared to their own village. Yet I found them beguiling enough,
since they did not speak of war and strategy and the folly of their
commander—my mind was already too full of these things.

“Look at this patch of waste,” one of them
said, gesturing contemptuously at the valley where, in a few days,
he would perhaps lie dead. “I wonder the Medes bother to fight for
such land—full of stones and dried to powder. A man could break a
hundred copper plowshares just plowing a field big enough to feed
his wife.”

“Only if she is a dainty eater.” The other
soldier laughed, poking his fellow in the ribs. “And a prodigious
pisser—I know not how else anyone would water this land. By the
sixty great gods, look at that grass! In this wind, the first
lightning storm will burn the ground black as far as you can see. .
.”

I stopped listening—I had heard enough. The
heart in my breast pounded like an ironsmith’s hammer.

By the next evening we had dug our earthworks
on the valley floor and were as safe there as we could hope to be.
Daiaukka made no attempt to interfere. Why should he, while we were
closing the trap on ourselves?

When the officers of the northern army met in
my tent that night, they were in no very pleasant frame of
mind.

“This is madness,” they said. “We should
withdraw and force a battle on more favorable ground.”

“We cannot withdraw,” I told them. “We have
issued this challenge and Daiaukka has accepted it. If we withdraw
he has won his point—he has proved that we are afraid of him. These
are the best terms for battle we can hope for, since to decline a
fight now will allow him to return to his mountains claiming a kind
of victory. There he can only grow stronger while we grow weaker.
No, we must fight now.”