What others are saying about The Assyrian
Publishers Weekly
Guild (The Berlin Warning) masterfully describes court intrigues and the feverish panorama of the battlefield, but the book’s abundant merit lies in its timelessness and universality. This story of a passionately moral man torn among amorous longings, the seductiveness of power, fraternal emotion and cognizance of his nation’s welfare holds many contemporary implications.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review
Guild, previously a crafter of sturdy political thrillers (Chain Reaction, The Berline Warning, The Linz Tattoo) here switches genres to surpass himself in a stunning historical epic—the life and loves of a young Assyrian prince—that teems with violence, sex, and period detail. . . Tiglath makes a splendid centerpiece for Guild’s rich rendering of Assyrian life. All in all, an exciting, full-blooded epic peopled with dozens of memorable characters.
Amazon Customer Reviews
4+ Stars
“I have never read a better book in my life.”
The Assyrian
Nicholas Guild
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011
Dell Paperback Edition
Copyright 1988
Atheneum Hardcover Editon
Copyright 1987
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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About Nicholas Guild
Books by Nicholas Guild
At night outside my sleeping chamber the wind moans in the trees. The great firs, as old as the foundations of the world, high above us their needled branches are pulled about by storms that rise as the day perishes. I turn on my sleeping mat, awake and listening, for an old man finds little rest. Others hear only the wind, but I the speechless words of the Lord Ashur, King of Heaven. The wind is his messenger and in it I hear the voices of the dying.
Even here, at the edge of the world, the smell of corpses is in my nostrils. Among these people who know not the flint-hard sun of my birthplace, no one speaks of omens, and yet I know. In the east the earth in which my fathers lie buried is soft with blood. The gods are carried off into slavery and their cities burn at their backs. The rich fields of barley, the swaying grass, all are waste. I see all this. I have only to close my eyes.
Yet are these phantoms only restless dreams? Are they nothing more? As a man’s life decays, day by day, sometimes his mind fills with shadows.
I believe it is more. Even while I was still a boy the god Ashur thought fit to open the future to my sight. He has not deserted me now. The walls of Nineveh are broken, and her people perish by the swords of foreigners. It was all foretold, a secret I have carried in my breast these many years, a black vision of what must be. That which I see with the soul’s eyes has happened—or will.
And if the end has come, if the throne of empire is cast down and the mighty are dust, then who but I, who have made my home among strangers, whose grandchildren speak with a borrowed tongue, can recall its beginning?
So let me open my tale, for the god, who rules in this life and the next, sets our feet upon strange paths. I am Tiglath Ashur, son of Sennacherib the Glorious, Terror of Nations, and my words ring with truth like silver coins.
My mother was Merope, a woman whom one of the seven kings of Cyprus had given to the King of the Earth’s Four Corners as an article of tribute. The king, being already in the afternoon of life, sent her to his son, whose two lawful wives had yet given him but few male children such as the gods did favor. Thus it was that this foreign woman, this stranger to the king’s city of Dur-Sharrukin, carried me in her womb through the halls of the house of women in the palace of the heir and prince, the Lord Sennacherib. She waited there, big with her burden, while the god perfected his design.
And as my mother approached her time, the great king, Sargon, Lord of the World, my father’s father, was making war in the land of the Kullumite, fighting against a people who lived in tents, wandering from one watering place to the next. In the mountains of the east, Sargon led the armies of Ashur so that these nomads would taste of our might and be sent limping back into the wilderness, never again to trouble the rich lands of Akkad and of Sumer, of the swift-flowing Tigris.
It is a bitter place where the Kullumite dwells. Scarcely a blade of grass can force its way between the sharp stones. There is no comfort, neither for men nor beasts. It is a land of mountains, where the king’s chariot must be carried on the backs of his soldiers and he himself must abandon the saddled war horse for his own legs and climb the hard, rock-strewn trails like any goat. And the Lord Sargon was already old.
On the twentieth day after his armies had last wet their sandals in the great Turnat River, the king ordered that a camp be struck in a plain beneath the nameless cliffs of shale and limestone, near a spring of living water that forced its way up through the ground like blood from a fresh wound. He decreed that all should rest there through two nights to refresh their spirits and find strength. The king pitched his tent and sat down before it, his hands resting on his knees, while the host of Ashur made themselves easy in his mighty shadow. The cooking pots were found and men who had forgotten the faces of their wives and the taste of fresh-killed lamb stripped off their armor and washed the sweat from their faces, dancing in the cold, clear pools like children. A soldier is pleased with little and takes comfort when and where he can, and the king smiled upon them like a father remembering his age.
The Lord Sargon had ruled the wide world for seven years and ten. The kings of Tyre and of Sidon at the edge of the Northern Sea, the rich cities of Carchemish, Aleppo and Damascus, all wore his yoke. He had taken the hands of Marduk and made himself king in Babylonia. As far away as Egypt and Lydia and the wastes of the Arab desert, men sent him rich gifts and trembled at his word, for he was mighty and his anger had a long reach. The Land of Ashur had seen many great kings, restless conquerors who had made the earth quake under the feet of their armies, but Sargon was far the greatest. On his hard old body were the scars of many wounds, for his campaigns reached back to the days of his beardless youth. He was brave as the wild boar and cunning as an adder, and his soldiers loved and worshiped him as though he were the bright god in his own person.
And yet he was old and tired, and the joy of war had left him. Death circled around his head like a black bird.
That night he feasted with his officers, sharing out bread and dark beer, listening to the storytellers and waiting for the time to close his eyes and sleep. The campfires of the army burned while men played at lots and laughed and forgot the hardships of campaign. But in the mountains the Kullumite watched, numbering the hours.
I cannot account for all that followed. The annals, which in any case are always full of lies, are silent here, and memories had grown clouded with the years before I knew to ask. The survivors of that terrible night were few and—who can say?—perhaps reluctant to talk of such things. Who, after all. would speak ill of the Great Sargon, and to the king his son’s own son? But men who have not seen the enemy in many days grow careless—this I have seen myself—and it is easy for the army of a great nation, at war with savages, to imagine itself invincible. Whatever the reasons, there were no scouts sent out to search in the mountains and the sentries of the king’s mighty host were deaf and blind.
And in that dark hour just before the dawn’s first stirring the Kullumite riders came, carrying fire. They had painted their faces black as they rode through the camp, trampling down the tents where our soldiers lay sleeping and setting them to blaze with their torches. Men rushed into the darkness, fresh from their sleeping blankets, blinking like owls, and were killed with their hands empty. They hardly knew what was happening around them before they were struck to the ground, their breasts torn open and their brains scattered. Many a brave soldier of Ashur fell before the long spear with its copper point and the curved sword that knows no pity. The horses screamed as if they were devils and beat the hard earth with their hoofs so that it trembled like a drumhead. There were battle cries and shrieks of panic and the groans of the dying. There was blood for the ground to drink. The cruel goddess Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead, grew sated with carrion.
“And then it was over. As swiftly as they had come, the enemy withdrew, riding back into their mountains, the spoils they had captured slung across their saddles, happy in their riches and glory. We few left alive looked about us, our minds clouded with confusion and fear. We understood nothing except that we had come within a whisper of death. We could think of nothing except that—it was almost like being dead, that panicked helplessness. The brain and the senses throb like a wound. The world in its solid shape seemed almost to vanish, as if we had become ghosts. And then we found that which brought us back to life, for behind them, lying in the dust, his night clothes spattered with gore, they had left the corpse of Great Sargon, hacked like a joint of meat and run through the body with a spear, his death the work of many hands. For one blow, Prince, could never have killed him.”
So the story was told to me, many years later. So it was that there, in the mountains, he died. He fell in battle, cut down by bandits whose highest arts were thievery and the herding of goats. His son, my father, had to buy back his body from his murderers.
I will not trouble myself to recount how the remnants of the king’s grand army found their way home, how they were harried by raiders, how they starved and suffered and died in their hundreds. Theirs is not my story. It was many weeks before those in the Land of Ashur knew of their fate, and of the death of the lord Sargon. They did not know, the subjects of the king, but they guessed, for the gods from whom nothing is hidden had sent them a sign. On the night of Sargon’s death a star was seen in the east, hanging low over the mountains. When men saw it they trembled and hid themselves inside their houses, muttering prayers to turn away evil from the land, for it was a star of ill portent and as red as blood.
On that night, in the house of women in the palace of Sennacherib, the marsarru, the heir, who was king now without knowing it, my mother brought me wailing into the world, and thus my birth cries were the first lamentation for the dead lord.
. . . . .
“See, my little Lathikadas. you can do it. You can do all things. All mysteries are open to you. See how easy, my sweet little prince. . ?”
My mother’s voice, as she taught me to walk on my hands over the cool brick floor of the arcade around our garden—I speak of it as ours and remember it so, but it was common to all who dwelt in the house of women, all the wives and concubines and the king’s children. She had to hold my feet to keep me from toppling over, but I could support my own weight and walk in a straight line until we drew abreast of the great fountain whose falling waters seemed to laugh. She wanted me to have strong arms. I would need them, she said, for the god had set his mark upon me. I was perhaps four or five years old.
“The star is the token of Ishtar, Goddess of Lust, Queen of Battles, and red is the color of mourning. It is a bad omen your little boy carries in that birthmark of his.”
Naq’ia smiled, narrowing her eyes as if to measure me for my grave. She sat at the fountain’s edge, resting her hands on her elbows like a man and watching us. She was one of the king’s two legal wises and his favorite by all accounts, though not yet lady of the palace—the mother of the heir yet lived. It was said that beauty such as Naq’ia’s could melt the bowels within a stone idol, but a child does not see this, so I was merely frightened of her. She was ambitious for her own son and hated me and Merope for bearing me. Little Esarhaddon stared at us from behind his mother’s skirt. I stuck out my tongue at him and he hid his eyes.
“Let the child down, woman. See how the blood rushes to his face?”
My mother released my legs and I tucked in my head under and rolled, just as she had taught me. I sprang to my feet like a trap snapping shut.
“Anyone can see he is an Ionian, woman. A foreigner, like yourself. He will end his days making mud bricks for the city walls “
“A slave, like all of your family, Zakutu?”
Because, of course, everyone knew that Naq’ia was a Babylonian freedwoman whom the great king Sennacherib had purchased from a tavernmaster in Borsippa. In the days of her glory it was not safe to speak of such things, nor to remember that the Akkadian name the king had given her meant “the freed one,” but they were no less true for that.
The smile faded from Naq’ia’s lips like melting frost.
“My son, Zakutu, will be a great man in the land of Ashur,” Merope said, picking me up in her arms and holding me to her. She took my hand, covering the star-shaped birthmark, red as fire, that glowed on the soft white flesh of my palm. “This is prophecy. This was written in the hour of his birth, for the god favors him.”
I always loved my mother, but I knew even then she was not always wise.
And Naq’ia, whose mind was ever turning on dark things, sat quietly by the fountain’s edge, smoothing with her fingertips the hem of her black linen veil. With my mind’s eye I see her there, so many lifetimes ago, not as she was then but as I remember her from my young manhood, still beautiful but with gray in her shining black hair, her mouth lined with years of cunning. She must have been yet almost a girl that morning in the garden at Nineveh, but was she ever young? It is unimaginable. Those who would be the mothers of kings are never young.
“Lathikadas, go and play with the little prince your brother,” my mother said, letting me down so that my sandals scraped against the brick floor.
“And mind how you treat the next king, my great man of Ashur.”
As I drew close, Naq’ia touched my hair, as if she never ceased to marvel at the color of it. I looked up into her eyes, fascinated by the nearness of my danger. Little Esarhaddon came out from behind his mother’s skirt. He was but a few weeks younger than I but smaller, as were most such of the king’s sons who counted as my fellows in the house of women. I held out my hand to him, as I had been bidden, and he took it and smiled. For all that he was his mother’s child, Esarhaddon was even then beginning to think of himself as my friend.
“Yes—it is all right, my son.” Naq’ia leaned forward, taking us each by the shoulder as if she would push us away like boats from their moorings. “Run and play with the god’s little darling, for all that his mother is only a concubine. Learn all the ways of the great men who will be as slaves beneath your feet in a few years’ time.”
Turning my mind back to those times, I can see now what was hidden from me then, that the house of women was a strange, unnatural, unhappy place. It was always crowded—young girls, mothers with their children, old crones who had been the pillow mates of long-dead kings and who had nowhere else to go—but what I remember best is the quiet. We spoke in soft voices, even the little children, as if afraid of breaking some spell. It was the place to which the king my father came to take his pleasure, but no one else found any joy there.
The house of women was a prison, a cage with golden bars, for none might leave or enter without the great king’s order. But a child knows nothing of such things, and our garden, walled around on four sides by the dwellings of wives and concubines, was to me a place of enchantment. The tiled pools were filled with fish that glistened in the water like flashes of lightning, always just out of reach, and the king kept a tame gazelle, raised from a baby and without fear, that would come to lick the salt from our sweating arms.
There was also a linden tree, considered a great rarity. I was forbidden to swing from its low-hanging branches for fear of breaking them, but I did anyway. It was to the linden tree that I took Esarhaddon, that I might astonish him with my daring in this matter of swinging, but all he wanted was to learn the secret of walking upside down.
“Show me, show me, show me,” he chanted, his black eyes glistening, dancing without much agility on his thick legs. Esarhaddon was no more dexterous than the generality of little boys, but to the hour of his death he was solid and unmovablc as a wall. “Show me how—teach me, Laf’kos.”
I was not pleased, so I turned away from him with a shrug.
“I am Tiglath,” I said coldly. A child brought up in the house of women learns learns to stand on his dignity, and it had the desired effect. Esarhaddon stared at me with wonder.
“Your mother called you ‘Laf’kos.’ I heard her.”
“She calls me ‘Lathikadas’—she does, no one else. It is a word in her tongue.”
Esarhaddon, who at that age hardly knew even his own tongue, cocked his head to one side as if trying to shake something loose.
“What does it mean?” he asked finally. In the presence of this mystery he had forgotten all about walking upside down.
“It means my name is Tiglath. You will call me Tiglath, nothing else. Can you remember as much as that?”
And the little boy smiled and said “yes,” apparently unaware that we had been settling a point of honor, and a door in my heart opened to him, one that would never close. Not even death could close it. Even now my eyes fill with tears as I remember when we were children together. Esarhaddon, my brother, my friend, whom I wronged, who wronged me in his turn, but whom I always loved. Whom I love now as he is dust.
“Teach me the trick,” he said, sticking his arms straight in the air. “Show me, Tiglath “
“All right. But I am not to blame if you break your neck.”
. . . . .
“What does it mean?” My brother Esarhaddon might well ask, for the name by which Merope called me was then a riddle, even to me, even as I was a riddle to myself.
We were strangers, she and I, beings set apart. Even as a child I was conscious of this. The ladies of the king’s house would come to look at me, to confirm for themselves the story of “the child whose eyes stayed blue.” The men of Ashur are thickset, black-headed men, and I am tall and slender and in my youth had light-brown hair. Since Shamash, God of Destiny, has made me a wanderer through all the lands of this world, I have learned that there is nothing monstrous in this, that the men beyond the Northern Sea, and even the Nile dwellers in the land of Kem, though they are browner, are not so different. The broad earth holds a great multitude of peoples, but I was not to learn this for many years. All I knew was that my mother had blue eyes and hair the color of bronze, that she spoke a tongue that none save myself could understand, and that I was her son and different from all around me. Children dread the mockery of others, and I felt my strangeness as a curse. And I at least had been born there beside the swift-flowing Tigris—what must my mother have suffered, a foreigner in the house of women?
My mother was what the men of Ashur called an Ionian or, as she would have expressed it, a Greek, since she had been born on the mainland, in a city called Athens. Her father, so she told me, was a shoemaker given to speculating among the merchant ships that went forth over the dark sea. I understood nothing of this—I had never seen a ship nor heard of such a race as “merchants”—but she made it plain to me that he had fallen upon hard times and had been forced to sell his eldest daughter as a slave. He was a sentimental man and had wept as he led her from his house that last day, and she bore him no ill will. Thus, at thirteen, she found herself on a ship bound for Cyprus, where light-haired women fetched a better price. From there, by what accident I know not, she made up part of the tribute the kings of that island sent in their fear to the Lord Sargon. She never saw the land of her birth again.
Lathikadas, “he who banishes grief.” The great king my father chose for me the name Tiglath Ashur, thus to honor at once his grandfather and his god, but my mother, in her life of sorrow, called me “Lathikadas”. I only hope it could have been in some small measure true.
But little brother Esarhaddon, the color and shape of a mud brick, that black-haired boy knew nothing of these things as he asked his harmless question. Naq’ia might intrigue to put him on his father’s throne, but his heart was all innocence. He meant harm to no one save the enemies of Ashur, and in those days little enough even to them.
And while Naq’ia dreamed of his glory, no one, least of all Esarhaddon himself, imagined any destiny for him except that of a soldier. He wanted to be a rab shaqe, a leader of the king’s armies. He would cry if one of the royal pigeons died, but that sweet little boy, like all the rest of us, dreamed of his sword dripping with the blood of Elamites and Medes.
“I hate writing,” he would whisper to me as we hunched over our tablets, copying out the characters of an incantation to the god Nabu we were to learn by rote. “This is for scribes and priests, not for men of valor. It is hopeless. I will never remember the tenth part of all this.”
It was true that the mystery of which Nabu was the patron was no simple business but an art of the highest refinement. We wrote on tablets of wet clay that when baked would last, they told us, until the end of the world, so we must be wonderfully careful to scratch in the long tapering lines that made up a character, the least part of a word, so they would not form unsightly ridges in the smooth surface. And characters there were in their hundreds beyond counting, and a true scribe wrote not in the Akkadian of common men but in an old dialect not spoken in the Land of Ashur since the days of the heroes. And then there was Sumerian to learn, the sacred tongue, written with the same characters but with different meanings and sounds, a tongue to tie one’s brains into knots, such as no men could ever have spoken with comfort, not even in the most ancient times, but such as was pleasing to the gods’ ears.
Esarhaddon held the flat-sided stylus in his thick fingers, copying out the daggerlike strokes of our text, hating each one of them as they passed through his mind like water through a sieve, hating the old scribe who taught us, with his white hair and his beardless face and his mighty fear of the king’s wrath. All this was for Esarhadden the torment of his youth, for his mother, who could not form the symbols even of her own name, was most anxious about his progress. And Naq’ia, it seemed, had eyes everywhere.
“Mother, can you write?”
Merope looked at me as if she expected the gods to turn me to salt for my impertinence, and sighed, and ran her hand through her bronze-colored hair.
“In the city of Athens everyone can write who is not a sucking babe or a fool. It is only the country people with dung stuffed into their ears who cannot write.”
In fact, she could only form some ten or twelve signs, enough to spell her name and the name of her city’s patron goddess and a few other trifles, but she taught me these.
Writing is a strange, unnatural affair. I have heard it said that the god Nabu in pity gave men the daggerlike script that they might remember his preserving prayers, but I do not believe this. The Greeks can spell any word they wish with four and twenty signs, which they call “letters,” so why should Nabu have burdened the people of Akkad and Sumer with hundreds of symbols, as difficult to form as to remember? The writing of the Nile people, which I never learned, is even worse. Only men could produce a thing of such perversity. The gods had no hand in it.
“The gods have blessed you with good ears,” old Bag Teshub would tell me, his voice quavering like a reed flute as he wiped the sweat from his beardless face. “As a scholar you have few rivals among your royal brothers—even Nabusharusur, who is your elder by a quarter of a year, lacks your refinement of understanding. If the lord king your father decides to make a priest of you, you will be a fine omen reader.”
One day our text was the story of Ashur’s victory over Tiamat the Chaos Monster, how he used the winds to keep her mouth open while he shot an arrow into her heart, how he cut her body in half, making the sky with one part and the earth with the other, and thus became lord over all the other gods, who gave him fifty great names. It was an easy text, except for the fifty names.
“Prince Esarhaddon, recite for us the lines from the second tablet in which Ea fails to subdue the monster. Here—take it.”
My brother, poor soul, accepted the delicate little clay rectangle, its edges made smooth and round by the caressing hands of generations of scribes, and he glanced back over his shoulder at me, begging my pity with his eyes.
“‘. . . terror. . . jaws. . . .’” He dug the point of his writing stylus into his cheek, as if to prick himself awake. “‘The terror of her. . .’ something ‘jaws.’”
Nabusharusur, my only rival in our little schoolroom, a bright, lively boy and my closest friend after Esarhaddon, glanced at me and smiled with mischief. Yes, it was only human to feel a certain self-satisfaction in our brother’s misery. I was probably smiling myself.
“What something, Prince?”
And Esarhaddon. who never in his life feared any living thing except his mother, let his face grow dark with anger at the aged scribe.
“I’ll something you, you flabby old gelding—the purse between your legs is as empty as a boatman’s belly!”
The clay tablet flew across the room like a weapon of war, shattering against the wall not a hand’s span from Bag Teshub’s head.
I think Esarhaddon was even glad to receive his thrashing, as if each stroke of the old man’s oxhide lash—which he used only lightly, as these were the king’s sons and might one day grow up to nail his wrinkled old skin to the city wall—were a mark of honor. Almost anything was more to Esarhaddon’s taste than recitation, and when we were released from our labors that day he was as cheerful as a sparrow. In an hour, when by some mysterious but no less inevitable process word of what had happened reached the Lady Naq’ia, then he would know sorrow in all its rich variety, but for the moment, as we sat under the linden tree, unknotting the napkins in which we carried our lunches, he was pleased enough with himself.
“You shouldn’t do such things to Bag Teshub,” I announced grandly, and then my glance met Esarhaddon’s and we grew helpless with little boys’ laughter. “And you shouldn’t say such things.”
“Well—isn’t it true?” Esarhaddon’s mouth was crammed with dried dates, full of sweetness but as difficult to chew as saddle leather. Finally, because he desired to say more, he swallowed so hard that tears started in his eyes. “Have you never seen the old fool make water? His stick is so shriveled up the dead skin sloughs off like the husk of an onion. And the rest of him is just gone! There is nothing there except a shiny scar, as if someone scoured away his pouch with its two little pellets like dried food from the inside of a cooking pot!”
Esarhaddon laughed, as if at a joke he was hearing for the first time, but I was shocked—I could not have said precisely why. Of course, we all knew there was something different about Bag Teshub. For one thing, he was admitted to the house of women, which it was death for another to enter. And, of course, he had no beard. We were of an age, Esarhaddon and I, that on rare occasions we were let out of our golden prison to witness some solemn public ritual or watch the New Year revels from a safe distance. It did not happen often—we were too young—but it was felt that we should begin to understand that there was a life beyond the house of women and that someday we would find our place in it.
So we knew that men grew hair on their faces, great shining black beards, oiled and curling. The nobles of our father’s court looked like gods, an impression no doubt strengthened by the fact that we saw them only from a distance.
Yet Bag Teshub looked nothing like them.
“How did he get that way?” I heard myself asking. I was almost afraid to hear the answer.
“My mother says. . .” Esarhadden leaned toward me, clearly conscious that he was imparting a great secret. “My mother says that it was done to him, that the priests took a knife and cut away his manhood when he was a child. You know, don’t you, that he is one of the lesser brothers of the old king who is dead.”
With my heart pounding inside my breast, I shook my head. It was as if I were looking into a dark future.
“If he is the old king’s brother, who would dare do such a thing? Who would wish it done?”
Esarhaddon, in the innocence of his heart, offered me one of his dates, and I took it, hardly knowing that I did.
“What a silly question, Tiglath. You surprise me. Do you not know why? A king has many sons, and he knows that once he is dead not all of them will live forever on terms of love. He must wish his heir to succeed him without dissension, and a gelding may not aspire to the throne.”
. . . . .
For a few nights the castrator’s knife haunted my dreams—after all, was I not myself one of the lesser sons of the king? The lady of the palace, the Lady Tashmetum-sharrat, had two sons, almost grown men, and then there was Esarhaddon himself. And my mother was a mere concubine, and a foreigner in the bargain. Did I not have reason to be frightened? But a child does not stay frightened long. Only a present danger is real to him, so I soon forgot.
Besides, I had other thoughts with which to occupy my mind, for the gardens of the house of women had received another prisoner. At the age of eight, and already the master of the daggcrlikc writing, which I took to be all the wisdom the world had to offer me, I discovered what it was to fall in love.
What can I write of Esharhamat—Esharhamat, fair to look upon, whose memory softens my liver like damp clay beneath the potter’s hand—what can I put in words that could convey the least particle of her shining beauty? Those who have known this childhood love of another, all tenderness and sweet pain, have no need of my words. And those who have not could never be brought to understand. I have heard it said that time heals every hurt, but it is not so. Some wounds, received early enough, will always ache in cold weather. Such was my love for Esharhamat.
We were cousins, since Esharhamat also claimed the Lord Sargon for an ancestor. Esharhamat’s father was a Babylonian, of noble family, whose grandmother had kept company in the princely bed while the fifth Shalmaneser still ruled. But the great king Sargon had scattered his seed widely in the lands of Akkad and Sumer, so it was not out of respect for her slight connection to the ruling house that she had been brought to Nineveh to be raised among the children ot Sennacherib, Ruler of the Wide World. The gods had elected that my little maid from Nippur should have no insignificant hand in kneading the destiny of nations.
In the place of my birth the god rules. Ashur gave his name to our ancient capital and to the land itself. We are all his slaves, born to serve him, even the king. No one more than the king. On the day he assumes his office, the crowds follow him from the temple shouting “Ashur is King! Ashur is King!” and this is no more than the truth. And Ashur had proclaimed it his will that a maid born in Nippur and of the Lord Sargon’s blood should be the mother of kings in this land until Nineveh and Calah and Ashur itself were merely words in the mouths of strangers.
So Esharhamat was not for the whelp of a Greek slave woman. She would be the wife of Sennacherib’s heir when she was grown to an age for bearing sons. This was written. This was the law and the god’s pleasure, before which all men are helpless.
But a child, who knows neither the passion of the body nor the law’s weight, a child who loves only with his eyes and ears and the touch of his hand takes no account of the god’s pleasure. Esharhamat would one day be queen, the consort, I assumed, of the marsarru Ashurnadinshum, who was many years older and had long been received into the house of succession, where he was as distant from us as the king himself. What was this to me? A child knows no impediment to love. He simply loves. I loved Esharhamat.
And what should I care about Ashumadinshum? Was I not lord of the wide world? Was I not old Bag Teshub’s best student, master of the daggerlike writing and able to speak the tongue of Sumer? Was I not half a head taller than any of my brothers? Could I not walk upon my hands, and now without my mother’s steadying assistance? And was I not all that was beautiful and perfect in Esharhamat’s great black eyes?
“Oouuh. Tiglapf,” she would say in her lisping southern, child’s voice when I would kiss her on the palm of the hand—it was a game of our own invention—”you are su-u-uch a bad boy!”
And then she would hold out the other hand, palm up, and I would kiss that, and she would giggle madly, first hiding her face in the hem of her pink linen shawl and then peeking out at me.
I loved her. She ruled my heart more firmly than any king ever ruled in the Land of Ashur. I wanted nothing more from life than to sit with her beneath the linden tree, sharing out dates and smiling together over this wonderful secret that was somehow ours and no one else’s. We could not imagine a future when this would not be so.
And Naq’ia watched us and smiled her own smile, which was perhaps not so harmless as ours.
“You see? Before he lives through his ninth year, Ishtar has him snared in her net. If it was the gods who gave him that mark upon his palm, they did not intend it for a happy destiny “
But my mother dismissed Naq’ia’s words with a shrug of her shoulders.
They are children.” she said. “What harm can come to them from such as this?”
Oh, Merope, how ill you spoke in that hour. I was but a child, with a child’s eye, but could you not have seen the evil circling above your son’s head?
But she would not see, and I could not. To me the house of women was still paradise, although I was beginning to grow restless in my happiness. I knew that soon I would be leaving that place to enter the world of men, and I was all impatience.
At the end of his ninth year, during the festival days that mark the end of the summer planting, each of the king’s sons comes out of the garden and takes up his work as a servant of the god. After that day, whether he becomes a scribe or a soldier or one of the king’s companions, those few chosen to stand by their lord’s right hand and assist in the direction of the state, he is a child no longer. There is no turning back—the door to the house of women is closed for him. I knew all that, and yet I did not understand why my mother looked upon me with such hungry eyes, why she wept in the darkness of our room at night. I could not fathom that we were about to lose one another, perhaps forever. This she kept from me.
And, of course, on that day I would lose Esharhamat as well, but that too she kept from me.
For Esarhaddon and myself the one reality was that we would soon enter the house of war, there to prepare for the only life fitting for men, that certain path to glory, the life of the soldier. We took this for granted. Such was to be our simtu, our destiny. It was our pleasure and therefore, of course, the god’s. Nothing else was possible.
“However, it may be that such things are no longer to your taste,” Esarhaddon said, smiling with mischief as he sat on the ground and watched me swing by my arms from the forbidden linden tree. “Perhaps that girl has turned your wits and you long to stay here, supporting yourself upon a pillow and dreaming about her eyes.”
I let go the tree limb and. dropping down to the earth, aimed a kick at Esarhaddon’s chest with my bare foot. I missed, of course; he had seen it coming and dodged out of the way. He grabbed my foot and twisted it so that I came crashing down beside him. He was always a splendid wrestler—not quick but strong, and at close quarters that was all that mattered. He had me pinned on my back in a matter of seconds.
“Admit it!” he shouted, laughing straight into my face as he held me down. “Admit it—she’s made you soft as spring mud. Before she came you wouldn’t have been so stupid, even in wrestling, at which you are not gifted. You would have kept your distance and worn me down until you could toss me over on my face with one of your fine Ionian tricks. Girls—paugh!”
It was all a splendid joke, and I laughed with him. I had no objection to admitting to Esarhaddon that, yes, there was something ever so slightly ludicrous about this passion I had conceived for our little cousin, who could not fight with a wooden sword or stand on her hands or even wrestle, who cried when the lightning frightened her, who could only smile and admire and bewitch.
“You are a foreigner, of course—if you were a real man of Ashur you would know better than to melt like beeswax just because she looks at you.”
“I am no more a foreigner than you, you son of a Babylonian!”
This time he was not quick enough to avoid the foot I placed behind his knee to tumble him over backward.
A quarter of an hour later, when we had both washed the dirt from our faces in the fish pond, it was still a splendid joke.
“Well, you will be cured fast enough. When she is the wife of Ashurnadinshum, and that will be sooner than you think, you will have to get over this folly of yours.”
“I don’t see why.” I answered back, perhaps a little too loudly—for part of me knew even then that there was something dangerous about my feelings for Esharhamat. “Just because she is queen, I don’t see why we can’t go on loving each other. What should it matter to Ashurnadinshum?”
“Tiglath, my brother, for all that you are a clever Ionian, by the god’s will there never was born so great a fool.”
. . . . .
As with the approach of a thunderstorm, as the time for parting drew nearer, the air in the house of women seemed to grow heavy and hard to breathe. Bag Teshub became ever more anxious and seemed to whirl with business as he prepared us for our final recitations, and those of the king’s wives and concubines who had sons of leaving age withdrew into the silence of their own hearts. And Naq’ia, as she watched me from the fountain’s edge, smiled as if she knew all the secrets of my future life.
At last, when my mother could no longer restrain her tears in front of me, she gathered me in her arms, covering my head with the heavy bronze curtain of her hair, and wept as if she were to lose me to death. It was the first time I tasted fear.
“You will see, my little prince.” she said in between her sobbing. “You will see how the god of this land protects you from your enemies. The god’s mark upon you will see you through every danger—you will see. You will see.”
“What enemies could I have in my father’s house?” I asked. It seemed suddenly an important question.
“None from whom the greatness of your destiny cannot protect you. You need be afraid of no one.”
And when I looked into her eyes, flooded with tears, I knew at once that she did not credit her own brave words and my heart quailed within me.
“We will not be parted long, Merope. When I am a great general and high in the king’s favor, I will win you out of this place.”
My mother smiled, as if she believed me.
When I left my mother’s arms my one thought was to find Esharhamat, for my mind was troubled. She was sitting beneath the linden tree, as if waiting there, but there was no comfort to be gained from her because the contagion of dread had found its way even to little Esharhamat.
“I will never see you again,” she said in a voice that was no more than a whisper. “I will be walled up in Ashurnadinshum’s house of women and you will forget me. When you leave this garden you will no longer love me.”
They were strange words—I could not imagine what she meant, nor, I suspect, could she. But some foreboding had reached her, child that she was, and she was filled with helpless terror. I was but nine years old, she even less, and we sat there together beneath the great tree’s spreading branches as the future appeared before us like the iron bars of a cage.
The next day, in the presence of the Lord Sinahiusur, the king’s brother who served at his right hand as turtanu, commander of the royal army and the crown’s most trusted and powerful servant, stood four of us: myself, Esarhaddon, Nabusharusur, and a boy named Belushezib, the child of a concubine despised even more than my own mother, since she was the half-wild wife of one of the mountain men of the east, captured by the Lord Sennacherib on the field of battle, where her man lay slaughtered—it was not even certain whose child he was, the king’s or the dead Mede’s. There we all waited before old Bag Teshub to be heard as we each read aloud the daggerlike writing from the clay tablets. It was the last moment we would be schoolboys together. Today, for good or ill, we became men.
Bag Teshub, I suspect to display his prowess as a teacher, gave me a tablet in the tongue of Sumer—it was a simple prayer to Enlil, an ancient god, the guardian of the nether world. I read it haltingly, but the turtanu Sinahiusur, resplendent in his tunic embroidered with blue and green and shot through with silver, nodded his head as he stroked his black beard in approval. Of the others’ recitations I remember nothing, except Esarhaddon’s remark as we were dismissed.
“I read well enough to make sense of a dispatch.” he said. “And what more does a soldier need? It will do.”
We four little boys, our tasks as children behind us, were led away by Bag Teshub and the Lord Sinahiusur, down a corridor we had never walked before, through a door that I had never seen open, and into the hard light of the outside. This was the moment of parting. The turtanu stood with his hands on Esarhaddon’s shoulders, for Esarhaddon was the son of the king’s second lawful wife—not like me, whose mother was merely one more among the royal women—and thus he had already been selected from among us. But as the Lord Sinahiusur held my brother under his hands, his eyes were all the time on my face. He seemed intent upon carrying away in his mind my indelible image. What his thoughts might have been I had no notion. He never spoke.
“Come, my children,” Bag Teshub murmured, looking away from Esarhaddon as if the sight of him troubled his conscience. “Come now—you are all to be scribes. Your lives will be here in the palace of the king. Great things perhaps await you.”
My disappointment in that moment was the sharpest emotion I had yet experienced. So I was not to be a soldier after all. For me there were to be no conquests, no glory. I would pass my days copying tablets. In my heart I cursed the old eunuch for distinguishing me before the king’s turtanu—I was naive enough to imagine that was the cause of my unhappy fate. I had forgotten the half-smiles of the Lady Naq’ia.
“Come this way.” he went on, his voice piping. “The moment has come for your—your initiation.”
While the turtanu led my brother Esarhaddon away, we three were conducted to a vast courtyard far off from the house of women. There four men in the vestments of priests awaited us, their sleeves rolled up to reveal the heavy bulging muscles of their arms and their faces set as if they cherished some special anger against boys of our age. I will remember the expression on their faces all of my life. I have seen it many times since, but that was the first.
We hung back, we three. We were afraid and tried to hide ourselves behind Bag Teshub’s skirts. But even he, in this place, was not our friend.
“Start with this one.” he said, his voice strangely altered. He grabbed Belushezib by the shoulder and thrust him forward. Belushezib did not stand on his dignity as a king’s son—he let out a scream of terror as two of the priests grasped his arms, twisting them cruelly as they marched him to a low stone altar in the center of the courtyard.
In late summer we children wore nothing except thin linen robes and loincloths. These the priests removed from Belushezib’s body as roughly as they might have ripped the skin from a rabbit. The boy kept screaming the whole time, as if he really were being flayed alive.
At first I understood very little of what was taking place. I saw two of the priests holding Belushezib down upon the altar stone by his arms and legs while another, carrying a leather cord in his hands, stepped forward and made a loop with it around Bclushezib’s private parts, choking off the scrotum as he pulled the cord tight. It was all done in the calmest, most workmanlike manner, as if they were cooks in the king’s kitchen dressing a sheep for the night’s banquet. Nabusharusur and I watched in horror as the fourth priest produced a knife with a curved blade and sliced open the scrotum, letting its bloody contents spill out over Belushezib’s legs. I thought the air would shatter with his shriek of terror and pain.
And then, of course, everything was plain to me.
“How dare they?” I thought. “How dare they do such a thing?” But they did dare, and as I felt Bag Teshub’s hand on my shoulder I knew that I was next.
I looked up into his beardless face—he was smiling at me. The skin around his neck was loose and jiggled when he moved. He was fat and strengthless, and he had been the old king’s brother.
Suddenly I understood why my mother had been so afraid, and why Naq’ia had smiled.
Yes, of course. Esarhaddon was not here. He was safe, should the throne come to him. And I was here, about to have my manhood stripped away from me before it had even begun.
And Bag Teshub could smile.
“No—not to me.”
Whether I actually spoke these words I know not, but they filled my mind. My father was the king, and they would not do this to me.
They had finished with Bclushezib. One of them took a torch, dripping with burning pitch, and seared closed his wound. He screamed yet once more, but no one paid any heed. They were already turning their eyes to me.
“Go along, Tiglath,” Bag Teshub whispered. “It is over in a moment. Show them what a brave boy you are.”
He gave me a gentle push forward. The priests were content to wait for me. The one with the curved knife balanced it in the palm of his hand, almost playfully. I took a step, then another, then another. I hardly knew what I was doing.
I would have been a warrior, and a warrior tells himself he is not afraid of suffering and death. I was not afraid of the pain—and I hardly knew what death was. But this shameful dishonor. . . No, it must not be allowed to happen.
I knew what I had to do.
They were far from expecting resistance. I approached them meekly, my eyes upon the ground, like the boy that they thought me to be. The one with the knife was closest to me, his back to the altar stone. He was so sure he had me in his power it was almost like an invitation.
I was only a boy, but my mother had taught me to be agile and quick. I shuffled my feet as I approached him. I kept my eyes down.
Then, at the last moment, when he began to reach out his hand to me. I rushed at him with all the sudden force I could command. It was enough—I hit him just above the knees, striking hard with the palms of my hands, and he rocked back, losing his balance. He fell backward over the altar and, as I had expected, allowed the knife to slip from his grasp.
It fell clattering to the stone floor. While they all recovered from their surprise I had just time to scoop it up as I ran to one of the pillars that supported the arcade around the far end of the courtyard. I ran like a deer, my heart pounding within me. I did not stop until I had that massive granite pillar at my back. The knife in my hand, I turned to face my tormentors.
“I am Tiglath Ashur!” I shouted I was half mad with fear, but it was mingled with a strange exultation such as I had never known. “My father is Sennacherib, Lord of the Earth, King of Kings! Come near me at your peril!”
For an instant there was only silence. I could even hear the faint whispering of the wind overhead. For that instant I thought I might really have won.
But then I was answered with laughter, laughter that boomed like thunder, like the laughter of the god Ashur himself. How dare they? I was so filled with wrath that I wished to shed tears until I saw that it was not the priests who were laughing. They had forgotten my existence. They were on their knees, their races pressed against the dusty stones.
And then I saw them, across the courtyard, in the shadow of the arcade, two men. I strained my eyes to see clearly and, as if to oblige me, they stepped out into the sunlight.
One of them I knew. He was the turtanu Sinahiusur, the king’s brother; he stood silent and majestic as before, wise and heroic.
But I hardly had eyes for him. I was looking at his companion, he who had dared to laugh at me, who laughed still. His tunic was covered with gold. I thought I was in the presence of a god.
He gestured toward me with his arm, his lips still smiling.
“Bag Teshub—Uncle.” he said. “This is but a boy, though he roars like a lion, eh? Take the knife from him.”
Bag Teshub picked himself up from the stones and came toward me, bowing even as he walked.
“Give me the knife, Tiglath. We are not in the schoolroom now. This is the—augh!”
He had come too close. The knife struck out and cut him across the hand so that red blood spattered his arm and rolled to the ground. I waved my little weapon threateningly and he jumped back and out of danger. And the thundering laughter sounded again.
“He is as he styles himself, eh, brother?” the golden man said, turning a little toward Sinahiusur. “This one has the bowels of a prince, eh?—yes? I am convinced, so let it be as you think best. He shall be spared the knife.”
Sinahiusur said nothing. He merely placed his right hand upon his breast and bowed. And then he turned his eyes to me.
“Bow down, Tiglath Ashur,” he said, in a voice like the stroke of an ax. “Bow down before the king thy father.”
My knees became as water and I fell to the stone floor, touching it with my forehead I was in the presence of the god’s chosen one, and my mind was clouded with awe. It was Sennacherib who stood before me, whom I myself had named Lord of the Earth.
“Come to me, boy,” he said, his voice all gentleness. “Come and let me see you.”
In all my life I had never yet seen the king my father, and now I stood before him. He rested his hands upon my shoulders and my eyes clouded with tears.
“Do not be afraid, my son. Have a lion’s heart and I will make you great in the land of Ashur. How is that, eh? Better?”
There was a slight sound. It was Bag Teshub, his bleeding hand wrapped in a scrap of linen, clearing his throat.
Yes—what is it, Uncle?”
“What of the other, Dread Lord?”
Because, of course, we had forgotten all about Nabusharusur. He stood in the shadow of a pillar as if he wished to disappear altogether. I do not know what I felt for him in that moment; perhaps my heart was too glutted to feel anything more.
“Yes, of course.” The king’s face went hard, though his hand still rested lightly enough on my shoulders. “I think one lion is enough for this day, eh? Fulfill your task, Uncle.”
The priests were quick this time. They gave Nabusharusur no chance to resist but lifted him from the ground by his arms and legs. He screamed, he filled the air with his shrill voice, but in an instant he was upon the altar stone and the cruel knife had begun its work.
“No, do not turn away, my son,” the king said, laying his hand upon my check so that I could not. “Learn to be a man and shrink not from pain and blood.”