The Assyrian by Nicholas Guild Page A

part of my soul, long dead, had suddenly returned to life. It
flooded back upon me, all the love I had kept dammed up in my
heart, and I thought it possible I might drown. Among the Greeks
there are many who sing of love’s sweetness, of its mad joy, but
they are merely singers. For those who truly love, to whom love
comes early in life and lingers through the years like a ghost that
will not be driven out, it is an agony tearing at the liver. Love
is a sharp knife in the hands of a child—it cuts to the bone and
leaves a scar that time can never rub away.
    Esharhamat was still a maiden—her virginity
was something I would prove for myself in time—but she was also a
widow, one whose husband had been swallowed by the earth, and
therefore free in the law’s eyes. I knew that as soon as her period
of mourning was finished the king would give her to Arad Ninlil,
his second son by the Lady Tashmetum-sharrat and the new marsarru,
but I did not care. As a widow she had her own establishment—she
was not shut up in the house of women—and she could come and go as
she liked. She was within reach.
    I did not care about Arad Ninlil, whom
everybody knew for a languid, cruel brute and half an idiot. The
prospect of his being Esharhamat’s husband was repulsive enough—he
was not such as any maiden would relish taking to her bed—but he
was a future evil, and the future beyond tomorrow did not exist for
me. There was only this moment. I felt a longing that seemed to
fill me, leaving room for nothing else, as if my skin were merely a
thing to contain it. I knew I was about to throw my life away like
the rind of an empty melon, and I did not care.
    Suddenly I wanted nothing so much as to be
alone. The crowd of strangers was an oppression, and I wanted to
breathe cool air and listen to nothing except my own thoughts. I
decided I would follow the wall south until I came to the river,
for I had a great longing for the sound of its rushing waters that
it might wash over my mind and cleanse me of this torment.
    As I walked along I stabbed lightly at the
ground with the point of my javelin. It was my favored weapon and I
was never without it. I could hit a mark the size of my open hand
at seventy paces, and in close combat a skilled fighter can empty a
man’s guts from his belly with a single stroke of its copper tip,
but I had never used it except in hunting. I would be brave and
terrible in war, and I would joy to lay down my life for my king,
but this was all in the abstract. At the moment I was plotting how
I could cheat him of his heir’s intended bride.
    I loved Esharhamat, and that was not
abstract. The shyness that had undone me on the night of Kephalos’s
dinner party was far in the past, for it was an easy thing to
become a man in the city of Nineveh. Almost as soon as my voice had
changed I went to the temple of Ishtar, dropped a silver coin into
the lap of one of her sacred harlots, and the thing was done.
    Once in her life, each woman owes this duty
to the goddess—she waits beside the temple door until a man comes,
and he gives her a silver coin, which thus becomes sacred and is
never spent. This she does that the goddess may smile upon her and
make her marriage fruitful. For a pretty woman it is the business
of a single evening, but some must wait for months, even years. And
some decide never to leave and consecrate themselves to the
goddess’s service. These become skilled in all the ways of fleshly
love and are honored wherever they go. I confined myself to such,
although their price was higher, and as a matter of routine and for
the sake of my health, like all the young men of the royal barrack,
I visited them once every week. They did not touch my liver—that
was not their concern—but my visits to the temple allowed me to be
quiet in my mind.
    That was all finished now. I loved
Esharhamat. If it happened that I never put my hand upon her in the
whole of my life I still would not find peace in any other