Page 434 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[1090-1020 B.C.] The Celtic Dawn 371

pileser the importance of seeing things for himself, and when the
king determined to send a pack train south to the mountains to
bring bronze, he had taken the opportunity to see with his own
eyes the source of the metal. Bronze was essential to the equip­
ment and armament of his troops, and he needed to know whence
it came, how much could be produced, and how vulnerable was
the route along which it came. All the same, he was dissatisfied
with bronze, as anyone must be who had once been accustomed
to the bite of iron weapons. Bronze was at most a second best, and
no commander likes to equip his troops with second-best mate­
rials. That was another matter that he could discuss with the
foundry masters on the morrow.
But the subject came up that evening, at dinner at the high
table in the house of the royal superintendent of mines. It was the
son of the Master of the Horse, provoked by a chance reference
from his father to his service with the Assyrians—irritatingly
frequent, those chance references were—who ventured to pro­
test. Tiglathpileser had been dead these thirty years, he said, and
half Europe and half Asia lay between Assur and the Salzgebirge.
What did the Tigris have anyway, or come to that the Nile, which
the Danube did not have?
He was a very young man, scarcely out of his teens, and very
sure of himself. He was of a new generation, brought up in the
cavalry camps of central Europe, and, like all his generation,
completely divorced from his tribal origins on the steppes. He
affected to despise everything Cimmerian; having been bom in
Nyrax in the territory of the Danubian king, he preferred to
consider himself by birth a Celt. Like the native Celts he culti­
vated a flowing mustache and swept his fair hair back in a care­
fully pomaded mane. Though as a concession to utility he went
so far as to wear the trousers of the steppe people rather than the
European tunic, he professed to regard felt armor and horse
cloths as positively Scythian, and himself affected the local
woolen homespuns. The massive gold torque around his neck and
the horned bronze helmet hanging from its peg on the wall be­
hind him both proclaimed his assumption of the fashions of the
Celtic court.
But for all his youthful extremism, he was known to his