The Assyrian by Nicholas Guild Read Free Book Online Page A

excuse me from my exercises. I
was not sorry to leave, being tired and dirty and having had my
backside scraped raw from waist to neck by falling off a horse. My
foot had caught in the stirrup and the broken winded old mare, who
knew all about little boys who fancied themselves masters of the
king’s cavalry and had evidently decided she would teach me to
respect my elders, dragged me perhaps as many as twenty paces
before Tabshar Sin could overcome his paralysis of laughter enough
to disentangle me. It had not been one of my better days, and I
welcomed any excuse to quit the scene of such a humiliation. I
didn’t care who wanted me, or for what.
    “Go to the dwelling of the camp commander,” I
was told. The thought entered my mind that perhaps I had disgraced
myself enough to warrant dismissal, but it was all one to me.
    But it was not the camp commander whom I
found sitting on a stool beneath the vine arbor in his garden,
drinking beer from a brightly glazed jar, but the Lord
Sinahiusur.
    The king’s turtanu had lost none of his
majesty of bearing since the last time I had seen him, nearly seven
months before, when he had saved me from the gelding knife. His
tunic, the color of the hot summer sun, blazed with silver threads,
and his beard was as black as pitch. He sat calmly, impassive as a
monument, seeming to notice nothing, the jar held delicately in his
right hand, as if he were considering if he should let it drop to
the ground. I approached him to kneel and place my hands upon his
knee in token of respect. There was no servant to attend him, so we
were quite alone. At last the Lord Sinahiusur touched my head and
bid me rise.
    “What happened to you?” he asked, bidding me
turn around that he might examine the scratches on the backs of my
arms.
    “I fell from a horse, my lord.”
    It was not a subject for which I had much
enthusiasm, and I was just as happy when I was allowed to hide my
injuries from his sight. They were painful enough, for the winter
sun had dried them until they were as cracked as mud, but I felt
the injury most deeply in my pride.
    “And dragged, from the looks of things.”
    “Yes, my lord.”
    “So you are not yet ready to lead a charge?”
He searched my face and smiled, though there was that in his smile
to suggest it was more to put me at my ease than because his liver
was quiet. “Nevertheless. I hear good reports of your progress,
Tiglath Ashur. So you get on well here? The life pleases you?”
    “Yes. my lord.”
    “And do you fancy you will make a good
soldier for our master the king?”
    “I hope so, my lord.”
    “Well, and there is more to the soldier’s
craft than can be taught in the house of war—or learned from the
back of a horse. You would be wise to remember that, Tiglath
Ashur.”
    I did not know what answer to make, so I made
none. Instead, I let his wise old eyes hold me and I waited, for
the turtanu had not come to this garden merely to exchange
pleasantries with a boy—I did not need Tabshar Sin to tell me
that.
    And he, it seemed, waited too. I do not know
what sign he expected, but perhaps, finally, he saw it because he
smiled once more, this time with something like real pleasure, and
his hand settled upon my shoulder.
    “You will live in a troubled world, Tiglath
Ashur. You will need many friends. I wonder if you will count me
among them. What do you think? Shall we be friends, boy?”
    He tilted his head to one side, still holding
my shoulder in his strong brown fingers.
    “What do I not owe you, lord?” I asked—I
hardly know where I found the courage to speak, for my heart was in
great confusion and I understood nothing. “All that I am is yours
to command, and if you wish the friendship of one so insignificant.
. .”
    “Good, then, we are agreed,” he barked,
shaking me as his grip tightened and then relaxed. “You speak well
for a boy, but sometimes it is best to say nothing. You will learn
that. I think you may have learned it already.