Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [124]
I had leave, thanks to my bargain, to peruse the royal library at will. In the days that followed, I used it to full advantage, little though it gained me. Of history, there was plenty. I learned that Drujan was a small province nestled alongside the Sea of Khaspar, warded by mountains to the east, north and south. Because it was easily defensible, it had a long history of fierce independence, although its satraps had paid homage to the Great Kings of Persis. I learned that it was a seat of worship for the ancient Persians, who called it also Jahanadar, Land of Fire, due to a phenomenon on the peninsula which jutted into the sea. There, at certain crevices in the rock, fire-spouts were wont to occur.
The Hellene philosopher Stratophanes saw these with his own eyes and gauged them to be a natural phenomenon, born of volatile gases trapped beneath the earth's crust. It was, he owned, nonetheless impressive. The Persians, who worshipped Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Light, built temples around them and tended the Sacred Fires.
Even the Akkadians, who destroyed so much Persian culture when they conquered, did not extinguish the Sacred Fires of Drujan, hailing it instead as evidence that the solar fire of Shamash had descended to earth to put the seal on their victory. The Persian priests—magi, theywere called—were allowed to continue to tend their fires . . . only now they must do so in the name of Shamash.
So much did I learn, and then little more for a span of centuries, when Drujan, quiet for hundred of years, rose up in rebellion. At a guess, I would hazard that isolated Drujan, poor in natural resources, ignored by its overlords in favor of lusher lands, gradually returned to its old ways over the course of centuries.
Hoshdar Ahzad was the name of the leader who emerged, a prince of ancient bloodlines, and it was in his name that the Drujani took up their swords, slaying the Akkadian vizier and his garrison. All along the border, they rose up against the fortresses and on the peninsula, they took the fortified palace of Daršanga, where Hoshdar Ahzad installed himself as sovereign lord, and decreed the worship of Ahura Mazda restored.
Better for him, I thought, if he had kept quiet and seen to his borders first, for no sooner had the name of Ahura Mazda rung freely across the Land of Fires than the wave of Akkadian vengeance broke, drowning it in blood.
It was an Akkadian chronicle I was reading, and the author did not spare in his gleeful descriptions of the revenge they exacted, documenting atrocities that made my blood run cold. In Daršanga it was the worst. Hoshdar Ahzad and his family were taken alive. The self-styled sovereign was made to watch the rape of his wife and young daughters. When his cries of grief grew too loud, they cut out his tongue. His infant son was speared and spitted, his roasted flesh fed to the dogs. After that, they decided he had seen enough and put out his eyes. And while he wandered, blind and stumbling, mewling, the Akkadian general ordered a bloodbath. It was as Pharaoh had said. Lowborn or high, every man, woman and child of Hoshdar Ahzad's lineage was put to the sword. The stone floors of Daršanga were awash in blood and the corpses stacked like cordwood.
As a final touch, the Akkadian general gave his archers leave to use Hoshdar Ahzad for target practice, commencing with his limbs. It took him, the chronicler reported with pleasure, a long time to die.
I had seen enough, too. I shoved the manuscript away and sat in the cool, vaulted library, sickened by what I'd read. On the painted walls, Thoth, the Menekhetan god of scribes and scholars, strode serenely, ibis-headed, carrying a balance in one human hand. I had known the Akkadians could be brutal. I'd not known the extent of it. The diffident clerk who had aided me in my research approached with abow and addressed me in Hellene. If the gods of Hellas had not penetrated the royal library, their language had.
"Do you desire aught else,