The Assyrian by Nicholas Guild

our sakes it had been otherwise.
    “Yes, I know you, Esharamat,” I answered, my
voice nothing but a thick whisper. “I would know you in the dark,
with the eyes plucked from my head.”
    “But not, it seems, until I had taken away my
veil.”
    She smiled, for her confidence in her power
had returned, and with her white hand she returned the veil to its
place.
    And then, for a long moment, we were both too
overcome with shyness to speak.
    It was still Esharhamat, but the child was
almost gone. In her place was the woman she would be, and very
soon. She had always been beautiful to look upon—her skin was still
wondrously clear, pale almost to transparency, and her features
possessed a delicacy hardly known among the river people—but now
she was all of that and bewitching as well. Her eyes, so deep a man
could lose himself in them, held me with a magic I could neither
understand nor resist. I could only stare helplessly. She was so
familiar, and yet I felt as if I had never really seen her
before.
    Then the damned soul over whose wretchedness
we had all come to rejoice screamed through the bars of his iron
cage, and the crowd laughed again and surged around us, and the
spell was broken. We both turned to look at him, and my heart
almost died within me when I heard his incoherent supplication and
saw that he was pointing down with his arm at the two of us.
    No, it was only at Esharhamat.
    “He seems to recognize you,” I said. “Why
would that be, I wonder.”
    “I was here yesterday and the day before.”
Esharhamat lowered her eyes, as if confessing to some terrible
frailty. “It is the king’s wish, since Ashurnadinshum was my
husband. I must come each day until. . . Perhaps he knows, and
somehow blames me for. . .”
    Yes, of course. I had known of her marriage
to the marsarru, which had been celebrated here in Nineveh only a
few months before the Elamites crossed over into Babylonia. It had
been judged, it seemed, that she was still too young to enter into
the duties of a wife, and her husband had left her behind when he
returned to be lord once more over the black headed people.
Otherwise she might have followed him into captivity and death.
    But no—Nergalushezib could not have known the
identity of the child woman in her mourning tunic. It was vain to
speculate about what might have attracted his attention to her,
about what could have been going through that tormented, crippled
mind. I turned away and, putting my hand upon Esharhamat’s arm,
drew her eyes back to me.
    “He cannot blame you,” I said. “What he
suffers is done by the king’s will, who revenges himself upon one
whom he numbers among his son’s murderers. That wretch is beyond
blaming anyone now.”
    “Thank you, Tiglath,” she murmured as she
allowed the tips of her fingers just to brush the back of my hand.
“Have you ever felt that. . . shame? To have done nothing, and
still. . ?”
    “Yes. But we cannot help what we feel.”
    “No—we cannot.”
    She turned, as if to go. It seemed I had not
had time even to catch my breath.
    “Will you return again tomorrow then?” I
asked. Surrounded by strangers, I could not speak my heart. I could
but hope she still loved me a little and would hear all I left
unsaid.
    And did she? Was what I saw in her face no
more than my own entreaty being mirrored back to me, or did the way
the light changed in her black eyes mean that she too hoped that,
having found one another again, we would not now remain forever
parted?
    “Yes. Tomorrow.”
    “At this hour?”
    “Yes.”
    Once more her hand reached out to me. For an
instant we almost touched, but perhaps we were already too far
apart, for she caught back her arm, hiding it beneath her widow’s
shawl as if its very existence were some guilty secret. She turned
away again.
    “Tomorrow,” I said, but if she heard me she
gave no sign. In an instant the crowd swallowed her up and she was
gone.
    I hardly knew what I should do. It was as if
some