Free The Assyrian by Nicholas Guild Page A

of
buying my mother out of the house of women. It was an absurd notion
I knew even then—the king my father did not trade in flesh like a
merchant and, in any case, a handful of silver shekels was unlikely
to impress him—but it gave me hope. It was at least something to do
against my loneliness and dark rage.
    And life went on within the royal barrack.
Tabshar Sin was well pleased with me. I was growing taller and
stronger with each day. I was almost a man, as my mother had said,
and almost a soldier. And there was Esarhaddon, to whom I could
confide my feelings, who understood but little yet was my
friend.
    “You care too much,” he said, using the point
of his sword to open yet another jar of beer, for he had learned to
love beer almost as much as fighting. He settled back on his
sleeping mat, his eves half closed, a picture of drowsy
contentment. “My mother is in the house of women too, and I hope
she stays there forever. By the sixty great gods, I would rather
face a thousand Medes with nothing to defend me but a copper
pruning knife than live with her under the same roof again.”
    He smiled at me, quite pleased with himself.
It was ever my brother’s special gift to see life in terms of
solid, simple, personal reality, as if by his own will a man’s
needs and desires could be raised to a law of nature.
    “Mothers—they are worse than all the devils
in all the hated places of the earth,” he went on, waving his beer
jar in the air to indicate the cosmic character of this new wisdom
of his. “You should have had a mother like Naq’ia, Tiglath, and
then you would know how to be happy now.”
    . . . . .
    It was not long after, in the month of Ah
that hums like a furnace, that I was crouched by the doorway of my
quarters—it was the hottest part of the day, when man and beast
alike sought only shade and quiet—my attention absorbed in an
attempt to repair a sandal strap, when a boy of perhaps seven or
eight presented himself to me, bowed very low, and asked if he had
“the honor of addressing the Lord Tiglath Ashur.” He was as pretty
and delicate as a girl, this child, with large brown eyes and long
lashes. When I nodded, he bowed again and presented me with a
folded piece of leather. The writing inside was Greek, so I did not
have to guess the identity of the sender. The boy had apparently
been instructed to wait for an answer, for he stood at something
like attention while I read.
    “His humble slave, the physician Kephalos of
Naxos, begs that the Dread Lord, the Prince Tiglath Ashur, Son of
Sennacherib, King of Kings, King of Assyria, would honor him by
attending his poor table this evening, at his house by the Gate of
Adad. The presence of the Prince Esarhaddon would be an added
felicity.”
    “You may tell the physician Kephalos that we
should be happy to accept.” I said, “but that we are soldiers and
must ask for leave.”
    The boy bowed a third time, lower still if
such a thing were possible, and withdrew.
    I did not trouble myself with consulting
Esarhaddon. since I knew he would fall like a starving jackal upon
any chance to escape the barracks for an evening, so I went
directly to Tabshar Sin, who also had taken refuge from the summer
heat and was lying on his sleeping mat, squeezing water onto his
face and beard from a cloth he dipped now and then into a large
clay jug. Like every good soldier, he had learned long since to
take full advantage of his hours of rest, and he scowled in
irritation when my shadow fell across his doorway.
    “What is it you want, Prince?” he asked, in a
tone that said I might go to Arallu, which the Greeks call “Hades,”
for all of him.
    “Permission to be absent this evening, Rab
Kisir. I have received an invitation to dinner.”
    I showed him the scrap of leather, but he
only glanced at it before letting it drop to the floor. “That
effeminate, dice playing slave of yours, I take it. So he issues
invitations now, does he? He has grown quite prosperous, I