The Assyrian Read Online Free

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 daggerlike 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 of 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 Ashurnadinshum?
Was I not lord of the wide world? Was I not old Bag Teshub’s