I, the Sun Page 2

  I must have spun wildly; I remember their faces blurring together. I retreated as far from my uncle as I could, until a hand pushed roughly against my back. I wore no cloak – a vanity, a boy’s desire to hurry the hair of manhood. I had a light dirk at my hip, all a boy is allowed. Reaching down, I unbuckled my belt and let the dirk drop.

  Kantuzilis took a measured step. Leather cracked sharply in the dim

  It was myself I fought there. Not before the lords would he shame me! And yet, I dared not strike him.

  No help would be forthcoming from behind – not from Tuttu, expressionless, huge as a hill; nor from my uncle Muwatalli the Elder, whose restraining hand was again laid against my spine.

  “Tasmisarri,” said my uncle Kantuzilis, taking a step that brought us chest to chest, “you are going to learn respect for the Great Ones and the Laws of the Land, and you are going to obey them, henceforth! No one is going to have to chase you, anymore.” Muwatalli still had his hand on me. “Take your kilt off boy, and kneel down’

  I shoved back hard and tried to bolt through the opening the off-balance Muwatalli had left. They were all warriors. I got two steps.

  Someone knocked my legs out from under me and I went down. All thought of what boys do and do not do left me. I bit hard into an arm seeking my throat. A kick connected with my kidneys. I swung wildly with feet and fists, my face pushed into the dirt, but the men on me were princes, not street brawlers, and I became witness to the effectiveness of Meshedi training. They held me spread-eagled and one stripped me. Then, amid much jocularity and taunting jibes, Kantuzilis strapped my back and buttocks until I gnawed the ground.

  When at last the restraining hands were gone and the snap of the strap ceased, I lay very still.

  Muwatalli picked my head up by the hair, shook it, and when he loosened, his hold I let my head fall back.

  “His father’s son, by that,” said Kantuzilis, close to my ear. His sandaled foot turned me, a wad of spit fell on my face, and the men, amid conjectures as to whether the whipping would in truth improve me, drifted away.

  It was Zida, my brother, who came around to see if I was dead.

  By then I had wound my torn kilt about me and reclaimed the dirk from the ground. I had ceased tasting blood in my mouth, had found a way to lie on my side.

  “Tasmi –”

  I did not look up. “Go lie with Kantuzilis.”

  “– Asmunikal –”

  “Go lie with her.”

  Zida sat, remonstrating softly that I would speak so of the Great Queen. “She has her troubles. She’s just trying to protect us –” He was squinting surreptitiously in the moonlight, trying to see if I was badly hurt without being obvious, gathering his report.

  ‘She can marry Tuthaliyas, for all I care.”

  “If she did that –”

  “Fool! He will demote her, not marry her. Once he has done it, he can take just about everything – not including the stone-house, of course. Would you like to live there, with father’s ashes?”

  “Tasmi, be easy on her. She worries about you.”

  “I assumed that was why you were here.”

  “Did they say anything to you?”

  “About what?” I asked, cautious.

  “Asmunikal will tell you.” He rose.

  I grabbed his ankle and pulled it from under him.

  He swore. I slammed my fist into his ribs, rolled over on him and, while I had him pinned, did a little damage that would not show.

  “Tasmi – By the Lady! Stop!”

  I beat an apology out of him, for not coming to my aid.

  Before I let him up, I told him what I would do to him if again he turned away from me when I battled heavy odds.

  “I could not. She would not let me. Tasmi –”

  “You are a man. Recognized, oath-bound. Are you not?”

  I pounded his head against the ground until he said that he was. Then, I made him swear by the Oath Gods to come of his own initiative to my aid, always. He was the first I ever put under my overlordship, but neither the method nor the wording has changed much over the years.

  Before I released him, I related certain intimate details about his concubine that I could not have known if I had not seen her unclothed. He almost struck me then. But he was a man, and sworn to me. He snarled wordlessly, stood swaying for a time. At last, he said: “Please come, for our mother’s sake.”

  “What do they want with me? No one was too interested when the moon was high.”

  “Kuwatna-ziti is here from Arinna. I do not know what they want…”

  “Kuwatna-ziti!” So that was who the strange lord was. I had seen only two strangers that evening: one had left the circle of relatives before it closed in on me; the other… “Is he wearing a blue cloak?”

  Zida said, “What? No, but Kantuzilis’ men saw the Storm God leaving the stone-house with Arnuwandas’ spirit, to take him up to kingship in heaven, and the Storm God was!” His eye-whites flashed, peering around.

  “By the droppings of the Great Bulls! You are beyond redemption,” I spat, and started down the hillside.

  Kuwatna-ziti, then, was the stranger who had left the circle just before it closed in on me. His reputation was growing. Most in the Upper Country had heard about him: they called him the Shepherd. He and his lords had been holding their own against Gasga this whole fighting season. Now, in gimant, the season of snow and impregnation, all the Great Ones rested; and the armies lay snoring. Soon, with the thaw, they would form up, and naught would be left in Hattusas, or any other city, but a skeleton garrison and a few Meshedi to keep the people right with the law. This spring, I, Tasmi, would not stay behind with the children.

  That thought, the cheeriest I could find, steadied me through the crowd.

  The shelves of the stone-house’s grounds were richly planted, terraced, thick with folk. I saw Tuttu, one of the chiefs of 1,000. He caught my eye and guffawed loudly. My neck burning, I turned away, hoping that on my dark skin the bruises and weals would not be too noticeable in the torchlight.

  The pavilion before the stone-house was well dressed up; Asmunikal had had five years to prepare her husband’s burial. The slaves belonging to the place were sparkling, dressed in white, passing beer to the mourners.

  She sat in her carven chair, the one with the copper standards of twelve-point stags rising from its arms, and the strange lord sat beside her.

  Cloak thrown aside, he sat on a stool at her feet, listening raptly. His hair was clubbed into black locks curling down his broad back. Pressed against short sleeves, his muscles stressed his woolen tunic. His curtate shirt was cinched with a chariot belt. Below that he bore a curling sheath of tooled leather. His legs, from knees to sandals, were bare. They were legs that had braced against many a half-wild team, knotted, rolling with sinew, bulging at the calves.

  As he turned his head to me, slanted eyes peered out above a close-cut black beard, measured my frame, returned to meet mine. Rising, he touched his hand to his heart casually, as Asmunikal flew from her chair and hurled herself against me, blithering her distress and demanding an account of my condition.

  The big man suppressed a grin, looked at his sandals. I stared over her head at him steadily.

  “Tasmi, please, please…”

  I pushed her away. Her hands running over my back made the welts burn. “Great Queen,” I said sternly, trying to find my mother behind those glittering, half-mad eyes. But on she babbled, making no sense. “Tawananna! What need have you for my presence here?” The formal title brought her to herself.

  “Tasmi, this is Kuwatna-ziti.”

  “My lord,” Kuwatna-ziti said, and inclined his head to me, slowly. In the torchlight’s dance, it seemed that he fought his face.

  I acknowledged him, since he had chosen to acknowledge me, and turned my attention back to her. “What is it you want, mother?” I shook her.

  “My arms,” she whimpered. “Tasmi, this – thing that happened, I –”


  “I know,” I said gently. “When the moon turns full again, all this will be behind us.” She knew what I meant. I was a boy only until then. Then I would be a man. I could challenge whom chose; I could bear man’s weapons; I could settle up some debts long owing.

  “No, no, no –” And she caught herself in mid-moan and bit her bottom lip between her teeth. Even then, she was beautiful. Still the most beautiful woman in Hattusas. She looked up at me in horror.

  “Tasmi, that is not what I want. It is not what any of us wants.”

  “It is what I want!”

  “You are hurting me! There are more important things for you to want. Look you, child of my heart, you know what must come to pass –” Her voice lowered suggestively, “You must live that long. Get your hands from me!”

  I let her go. This, surely the latest of her endless schemings to put me in the seat of kingship, was not worth the trip down from the ledge. “Mother –”

  “We have arranged for you to go to Arinna, to join the lords fighting there.”

  Despite all that seethed in me, my heart leapt. “Under whose direction, and who is ‘we’?” Behind her, the lord from Arinna leaned his weight on one hip and his palm on his sword’s hilt and tried to look unconcerned.

  “Tasmi, they will kill you if you stay here.”

  “Tell me something I do not know.”

  “I cannot protect you –”

  “Answer my question!”

  “‘We’ is… everyone. Your uncles, the commanders, the Great Ones –”

  “Are you saying that everybody held a meeting to decide what to do with me?”

  Tears streamed from Asmunikal’s eyes. She sniffed, “not everybody. There will be other changes. I am to marry…”

  I whirled around and strode off through the crowd. If they were sending me to Arinna, it would be under armed guard and the famed Kuwatna-ziti was marked for my jailer.

  I wanted none of it. For the thousandth time, I considered turning my back on the whole nest of scorpions and becoming a mercenary: a Sutu. Sutu ask no questions of lineage; a good sword arm is their bloodbond. And the arm, even then, I had, though the swords boys get are wooden and clumsy. I had not done it before, because I was not a man, and not hard enough pressed. When Arnuwandas first died, I ran as far as the Red River; but I came back. I had waited all my life to become what the next full moon would make me: a man. But it was no use being a dead man.

  When a hand came down on my shoulder, I acted instinctively: I slid the dirk from its sheath and whirled in one motion, reaching out for the assailant behind me, hugging him close – they never expect you to do that. So I paused, my dirk at the jugular of the man I embraced, to see whose throat I was going to slit: the whole maneuver took only a moment. A wary breath slid down through the long aristocratic nose of Kuwatna-ziti, who was still as stone in my grasp, his eyes almost crossed looking down at my blade-hand.

  He cleared his throat. I felt the muscles bunch in his back, and knew that in a moment I would have no advantage: he was too big, too filled with war. He said: “If you will put that knife down, and promise not to tell my men, that I languished in your arms like a lover, I will buy you some wine in town and we will discuss this.”

  Two men had stopped; one touched the other’s arm. I either had to kill him and run, or let him go. I let him go.

  “You are fast as the Storm God’s lightning,” said the shepherd wonderingly. “None have had me that close to a crematory urn this whole season.”

  I sheathed the dirk.

  “Let us go into the town, and you can collect your wine,” he grinned.

  I found that I did not want to like him, but that I did. “No,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. The beating Kantuzilis had given me throbbed. “Tell me here.”

  “And then, if my words have worth to you –”

  Three Meshedi came running up, pushing through, the crowd.

  “Trouble, Great Shepherd?” queried one Meshedi, blade drawn, the light running along its curve. His two companions made no secret of their intent, flanking me on either side.

  “Trouble? Not unless you would like to start some.”

  The Meshedi blinked and looked pointedly at me.

  “Tasmisarri,” said Kuwatna-ziti, “let us find that wine.”

  He took my arm and we walked away from them. I heard the snick of their blades as they sheathed them.

  “Do not call me that. Just Tasmi.” I shook my arm free.

  “This way, then, Tasmi,” and he struck for the chariot road that winds down into the city.

  “There is a quicker way, for walking.” I saw, as we passed through the gate that led to the mausoleum’s stables, the next king of Hatti – the moongleam on my father’s crown drew my eyes to him. Tuthaliyas sprawled against the stable wall, an offering vessel overturned beside him, snoring softly.

  “Are you not cold?” said Kuwatna-ziti. I changed sides with him, blocking his view of the king. Kuwatna-ziti made a movement, as if to offer his cloak.

  “The cold keeps me numb. I would not feel Kantuzilis’ little gift.”

  “You are a strange one, my lord prince,” he chuckled, and we turned the corner, leaving tuhkanti-Tuthaliyas to sleep in peace.

  Kuwatna-ziti was then taken up with a man of his, and the harnessing of his team. They were fine, long-bodied greys, fit for such a chariot: an open-backed fighting machine, lean and unornamented.

  I sat on a low stone wall, and watched the men of Kuwatna-ziti and the slaves and two somewhat anxious Meshedi watch me. The moon took refuge behind the rock sanctuary’s jutting crown. I wondered why I was doing this, playing into their hands.

  Then Kuwatna-ziti strolled over to me and said, “If you will drive for me, it will be just us two.”

  Did he think I was a baby, to be lured by a sweet-cake? I made a noncommittal noise, careful to conceal my anticipation.

  The greys were savage as the Gasgaean enemy. I ground my teeth together and braced my legs and concentrated on keeping both wheels on the narrow, elevated road. Kuwatna-ziti leaned against the chariot’s side as if the racing steeds were walking in review, a hand casually upon the leather braces that line its sloping rail.

  “Pull up,” he said, after a time, though he had only bared his teeth when I let the greys tear through the stable yard, scattering Meshedi and troops and slaves like dust. But it was not my driving which concerned him, I found, as I rubbed the back of my forearms each in turn.

  We were at that flat clear place where the road swings wide and the city lies like a woman exposed. The light she threw hovered over her like a red veil. The palace, a city within a city, was nearly whole again. Down the slope from her, evidence of the burning still scarred the streets. But things were almost right, once more. Right, and ready for our enemies to loot and pillage.

  Kuwatna-ziti turned full about, inspecting the empty view. “Let them crop.” I loosened my hold on the greys. “Good. Now, let us sniff out what we may, with none to overhear us.”

  I looked at him. “A nice team, this.”

  “For the right man. Will you drive for me when the weather breaks?”

  My heart leapt, then quieted. Bribe. I folded my arms over my chest.

  He scowled at me in the dark. “We fight, in Arinna. We tolerate no sinecures. There is no safe place among the Shepherd’s flock. We number three score, and there is not one of us unbloodied. Or is the frontier too wild…?”

  “My lord,” I said, vaulting over the chariot’s side to the ground, “drive yourself.”

  “My lord prince,” he roared, so that the horses shied and he grabbed for their reins. He wheeled them about and put them between me and the city. They snorted and danced. I went left. He took them off the road to follow me. It occurred to me, as he jerked them hard around, that I deserved this, for being fool enough to trust my mother. I fingered the dirk, trying to judge his heart in the dark, as the wheels creaked and the greys lunged in place and Kuwatna-ziti roared, “A curs
e upon every oath I ever took to your demented family! You get in this car, or by the Sun Goddess of Arinna I will grind you to mud under my wheels!” And he sawed on the reins and the horses lunged toward me, wild-eyed.’’

  At the last moment I stepped aside. As he rushed past, Kuwatna-ziti leaned down out of the chariot and grabbed me by the arm and heaved. For a moment I dangled, half over its side, then he pulled me by the belt and I tumbled inward, cracking my head against the blunt side of a war ax fastened to the chariot’s curving leather-padded innards.

  The chariot lurched to a stop. I felt myself shoved out onto the ground, heard a loud squeal from the greys. Then Kuwatna-ziti was on me: “My lord prince, I am going to talk to you in the only language you understand. Get up.” His sandaled foot connected with my belly. “Go on, get up. Let us fight!”

  I did not get up: I pulled him down. It did not last long.

  *

  I could barely see through my right eye, and my left arm was half pulled from its socket. Kuwatna-ziti, his cloak torn, his cheek sporting three long angry gouges, said: “There,” and pointed to a tavern still open.

  “By Serris’ organ, no!”

  “Why?” demanded the Shepherd, still combative.

  I touched my tongue to my split under lip. “I cannot go in there. The owner has a daughter –”

  “You are popular with the people, also. That is good,” said the lord for whom I would thenceforth drive. “Is there a place in Hattusas where you are welcome?”

  “I have never been in there,” I offered, pointing to the Blue Ram, whose prices and policies were beyond a boy’s reach.

  We headed for it. The proprietor looked dubious, but Kuwatna-ziti palmed him some shekels, and we were led through a sparsely crowded room with low benches into an odd-shaped chamber with thick plastered walls and a stout door which might be shut. There was a small, high window with bars and, in the corner, stacked kegs.

  Kuwatna-ziti approved it, and ordered a certain wine that lit the proprietor’s face with pleasure. From the large room, a piper’s playing could be heard.

  I slid between the bench and table and leaned gingerly back in the corner. My gut still hurt when I breathed.