The Assyrian Read Online Free Page A

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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