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Thick pauls of smoke rose upward from the burning buildings.

Towering flames blackened the stones and mud brick of the walls and consumed the roof timbers completely.

The gates to the wall complex seemingly so sturdy hung loosely from their hinges, the first flames licking at the thick wood.

They hadn't been enough to stop the Assyrians.

Norhead the defenders, most of whom now late dead, flies buzzing over corpses, pincushion but arrows, or late open by an axe, a spear, or a sword.

A lone head stood in front of the gateway, carefully positioned atop a spearhead so that its sightless eyes stared back at the destruction.

The Assyrian soldiers heard of the survivors into a stone walled animal pen outside the walls where they had once kept their livestock.

Now they were the commodities, items being counted and recorded on a tablet of wet clay by the scribe accompanying the soldiers, each individual life enumerated with a stylus.

The sum of the survivors wailed at the side of the fire and carnage behind them.

Others sat on the ground numb to it all or driven into shock by what had just happened.

When the sun had risen that morning, they had been servants of Hosea, the King of Israel, administrators, and estate managers, and charioteers, and scribes.

Many had been powerful people, learned and literate, writing down the ancient stories of their people and their special relationship with their god Yahweh.

As the sun began to set behind the line of ridges to the west, the sky to the east, darkening behind the smoke, they were the property of the King of Assyria.

He could do with them as he pleased. Perhaps Yahweh really had abandoned them, as some said.

The last rays of sunlight glinted off the bronze scales of the Assyrians armor and the polished metal of their helmets.

None of this seemed to affect them in the slightest, not the palpable sadness and horror emanating from their captives, nor the dozens of deaths they had just caused.

They laughed and joked with one another, barely concerned with the survivors.

The fight had gone out of the soldier's new.

It wasn't the first time they had done this, nor would it be the last.

Most of them were barely aware of precisely where they were nor did they much care.

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