Free The Assyrian by Nicholas Guild Page B

am told
.”
    “But may I go, Rab Kisir?”
    “Is your kit prepared against tomorrow’s
field exercises?”
    “Yes. Rab Kisir.”
    Then you may go. I expect you will be served
a better meal than the royal mess could offer.”
    “And Esarhaddon?”
    “Him too?” Tabshar Sin turned his head a few
degrees in my direction, as if to underline his astonishment. “Yes,
very well. But don’t allow him to drink too much beer. And come
straight back when your dinner party is finished. You are royal
princes, but these days Nineveh is full of foreigners.”
    The shadows were already lengthening when
Esarhaddon and I set out. It was a glorious adventure. The camp and
the palace, that had been our world, and to us the great city of
Nineveh, where we had lived all our lives, was as unfamiliar as the
wilds of Judah.
    “Read it to me again.”
    I took the scrap of leather from my pouch yet
once more and for Esarhaddon’s amusement translated its contents
into Akkadian.
    “Why does he call our father king of
‘Assyria’? What sort of a place is this “Assyria?”
    “The Ionians have no ‘sh’ sound in their
language, so ‘Ashur’ becomes ‘Assur.’ It is simply their word for
the Land of Ashur.”
    “This slave of yours is a funny fellow,
Tiglath. ‘Assyria.’ By the gods, he is a funny fellow.”
    The palace and all that is attached to it
rests on a great platform of bricks and is thus many cubits higher
than the surrounding city. We had to walk down a long flight of
stairs before we reached the streets, and it was like descending
from a mountain into a forest. Suddenly a crowded, noisy humanity
closed around us, people brushing each other with their shoulders
as they walked past, the cries of vendors, the smells of food and
human sweat and decaying garbage. I have been in many great cities
since then, but none has stayed in my memory like Nineveh.
    There were women on the streets, a thing I
had not expected, and they wore the brightly colored costumes of
many lands—green, blue, yellow, even red, which no woman of Ashur
would wear except in mourning—their veils drawn over their faces so
that there was nothing to see except their large black eyes. Some
did not wear veils, which meant they were concubines, and some did
not even cover their hair.
    Among the men I heard more Aramaic than
Akkadian, and many times I could not have said what language was
being spoken. Some I could recognize by their dress as Hittites or
Hebrews or, by their pleated linen and their shaved faces,
Egyptians.
    We passed a spot where three men were
squatted on the pavement drinking beer from a common pot. They
sucked through hollow straws, for among the common people it is not
the custom first to strain out the husks—something I had not
realized before then. One of the men, I noticed, had had the tip of
his nose cut off, no doubt as a punishment for lying under
oath.
    Esarhaddon insisted we stop at a stall where
an old woman with no veil and a series of waving lines tattooed
over her nose and left cheek was selling fruits preserved in sugar.
There were flies swarming over the fruit, but Ksarhaddon would not
be pleased until we bought some. We paid for it with a couple of
copper half shekel pieces, most of the money we had, and it turned
out to be a bad purchase. As soon as we bit into the fruit and
pierced the sugar that coated it, the smell was dreadful and there
was black rot at the core. We threw the rest into the gutter.
    Here and there we heard the sounds of music
and sometimes of women’s high pitched laughter. Open doorways
invited one inside buildings made of yellow mud brick.
    The people in the streets, citizens and
foreigners alike, stared at us and stood out of our way, for we
were dressed in the uniform of the royal barrack. Boys that we
were, no man would have dared to raise his hand against us.
    There were no beggars on the streets, as I
have seen in other places, for the king punishes begging. Nineveh
is a rich city and there