The Assyrian Read Free

It is a word in her tongue.”
    Esarhaddon, who at that age hardly knew even
his own tongue, cocked his head to one side as if trying to shake
something loose.
    “What does it mean?” he asked finally. In the
presence of this mystery he had forgotten all about walking upside
down.
    “It means my name is Tiglath. You will call
me Tiglath, nothing else. Can you remember as much as that?”
    And the little boy smiled and said “yes,”
apparently unaware that we had been settling a point of honor, and
a door in my heart opened to him, one that would never close. Not
even death could close it. Even now my eyes fill with tears as I
remember when we were children together. Esarhaddon, my brother, my
friend, whom I wronged, who wronged me in his turn, but whom I
always loved. Whom I love now as he is dust.
    “Teach me the trick,” he said, sticking his
arms straight in the air. “Show me, Tiglath.”
    “All right. But I am not to blame if you
break your neck.”
    . . . . .
    “What does it mean?” My brother Esarhaddon
might well ask, for the name by which Merope called me was then a
riddle, even to me, even as I was a riddle to myself.
    We were strangers, she and I, beings set
apart. Even as a child I was conscious of this. The ladies of the
king’s house would come to look at me, to confirm for themselves
the story of “the child whose eyes stayed blue.” The men of Ashur
are thickset, black headed men, and I am tall and slender and in my
youth had light brown hair. Since Shamash, God of Destiny, has made
me a wanderer through all the lands of this world, I have learned
that there is nothing monstrous in this, that the men beyond the
Northern Sea, and even the Nile dwellers in the land of Kem, though
they are browner, are not so different. The broad earth holds a
great multitude of peoples, but I was not to learn this for many
years. All I knew was that my mother had blue eyes and hair the
color of bronze, that she spoke a tongue that none save myself
could understand, and that I was her son and different from all
around me. Children dread the mockery of others, and I felt my
strangeness as a curse. And I at least had been born there beside
the swift flowing Tigris—what must my mother have suffered, a
foreigner in the house of women?
    My mother was what the men of Ashur called an
Ionian or, as she would have expressed it, a Greek, since she had
been born on the mainland, in a city called Athens. Her father, so
she told me, was a shoemaker given to speculating among the
merchant ships that went forth over the dark sea. I understood
nothing of this—I had never seen a ship nor heard of such a race as
“merchants”—but she made it plain to me that he had fallen upon
hard times and had been forced to sell his eldest daughter as a
slave. He was a sentimental man and had wept as he led her from his
house that last day, and she bore him no ill will. Thus, at
thirteen, she found herself on a ship bound for Cyprus, where light
haired women fetched a better price. From there, by what accident I
know not, she made up part of the tribute the kings of that island
sent in their fear to the Lord Sargon. She never saw the land of
her birth again.
    Lathikadas, “he who banishes grief.” The
great king my father chose for me the name Tiglath Ashur, thus to
honor at once his grandfather and his god, but my mother, in her
life of sorrow, called me Lathikadas. I only hope it could have
been in some small measure true.
    But little brother Esarhaddon, the color and
shape of a mud brick, that black haired boy knew nothing of these
things as he asked his harmless question. Naq’ia might intrigue to
put him on his father’s throne, but his heart was all innocence. He
meant harm to no one save the enemies of Ashur, and in those days
little enough even to them.
    And while Naq’ia dreamed of his glory, no
one, least of all Esarhaddon himself, imagined any destiny for him
except that of a soldier. He wanted to be a rab shaqe, a leader