The Assyrian Read Online Free PDF Page A

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