I, the Sun Page 4

  “Why?” snarled Tuthaliyas, wheeling around. The wine slopped. He threw the goblet to the clay, strode to Kuwatna-ziti and pressed his barrel chest against the taller man’s, until Kuwatna-ziti stepped back.

  “My lord,” said Kuwatna-ziti, quietly, “I was such a youth. Someone took me in hand. He is a warrior, born. Let him make war. He will be no trouble to you when he is occupied with what he does best.”

  “You consider this a personal favor, you say? Mind, I am not drunk. Not drunk enough to accept that answer. You play your game. I will play mine. Do three things for me, and you take him with you.”

  “Do not,” I said. They both turned to look at me. “Old boar, I do not want to go with him. I do not want to stay here. Most fervently, I do not want all of you deciding when I will eat and when I will be shod and when I will sleep. I am not a horse. I –”

  “Tasmi, say one more word and you can hang your tongue on your belt for a remembrance.” That was Kuwatna-ziti.

  Tuthaliyas grinned broadly, peered pointedly at me and said, “Wonderful. When my majesty asked you, Kuwatna-ziti, to do for him three things, what was your reply. I did not hear it in the din of these noisy slaves.” The slaves were silent. I flushed, ground my teeth harder, and did not move.

  Kuwatna-ziti looked down at tomorrow’s king, whose jaw jutted out as far as his belly, and said, “My lord, ask of me what you will. Did I not put thirty lords, each with thirty other lords, into your service at Arziya? Did I not labor the season past, and the one before, and the one before that, to keep the frontiers clear?” Kuwatna-ziti’s eyes glittered. “There is little I and my brother lords cannot accomplish to serve the Hatti lands.”

  His threat hung in the air like a vulture.

  The Sun Tuthaliyas muttered to himself and brushed past me to the table. From behind it, fortified anew with drink, he spoke: ‘“I can do anything I want to you, Kuwatna-ziti. Anything. How goes the law? Ah, I have it: ‘if anyone rejects the judgment of the king, his house shall be made a shambles.’ Just for my Meshedi’s ear, I can take your estates as security. Do not try me. You and your lords are a factor. We know that you have many friends.”

  “What do you want, Tuthaliyas?” said Kuwatna-ziti with unconcealed weariness.

  “I want you at formal audience tomorrow, there to swear before the Oath Gods to serve me.”

  “That I will do. I had rather expected it today.”

  “I need not hurry. There has been enough stretching of form in this interment. There are two other conditions. You will take a general’s commission in the regular army, and cause your flock to put itself at the disposal of my majesty and whatever agents I shall appoint. You will –”

  Kuwatna-ziti closed his eyes, and opened them.

  Tuthaliyas loomed over the table, his huge hands gripping its edge. “Yes, Shepherd?”

  “My lord, please continue.”

  “And you will promise to maintain such surveillance on my… nephew… as to be able to cede him to me on command at any time. If, under the bond of this oath, you should not then cede him to me, your life is forfeit, as well as for any of the standard reasons: if he speaks ill of me, and you hear about it, if he plots against me, and you do not deliver him to me, thinking I will not find out – I will find out. And it will be as if you had spoken evil. For you the punishment will be the same as for him, even if your crime is only not presenting him at my request.”

  I straightened my cramped fingers and looked at the imprints of my nails in my palms. It sounded like a treaty with a foreign country, this bargain they made over me.

  “Do you agree?” he demanded of the Shepherd.

  Kuwatna-ziti stared stonily at him and pulled on his nose. “I see no other choice. But bringing my fellow lords into the regular army – that is no easy thing. It will take more than one season.”

  “You must do it in one season.”

  “Then,” gritted Kuwatna-ziti, “I will manage.”

  “Come over here,” and the Shepherd did.

  I heard his low exclamation and sidled near. They had been ready for him; a tablet repeating the conditions of his guardianship awaited his seal, as did his commission in the regular army.

  When he had done it, replacing the circular seal around his neck, he asked leave to retire. Lines worked in his forehead, and his hands were nervous.

  Tuthaliyas snapped a slave to him and dispatched the tablets to the scribes, as if the Shepherd had not spoken.

  Then he turned to me and with a contemptuous sneer said ,”Your father has gone to become a god; your mother is as good as exiled; by my leave you will live to fight as a man. I have proved myself a loving uncle, in the lands’ eyes. Now tell me, for I have long yearned to know: who was your real father?”

  I have never been able to recall how Kuwatna-ziti got me out of there.

  CHAPTER 2

  Arinna lies on a mound rising above the tableland, like a miniature Hattusas, her plastered walls gleaming. North of her, where the land humps mountainous, Kuwatna-ziti’s family had its estates, themselves like tiny replicas of fortified towns, enclosed within walls of bricks laved with plaster. From the southernmost of his holdings Arinna could be seen, baking in the harvest heat.

  I rubbed the scar that runs from my wrist up the middle of my forearm to my elbow, just beginning then to fill with flesh. I had gotten it, not in battle (though I had acquired others in that fashion during the season), but while taking my majority under the auspices of the Sun Goddess of Arinna. The Upper Country ritual differed from practices in Hattusas only in its incorporation of a night-long vigil during which the candidate sits on the hilltop above the Lady’s temple until an omen of favor comes from one of the gods.

  I had had no trouble with any aspect of the ritual: my reading was fluent; my behavior within the Sun Goddess’ temple impeccable; I enjoyed the eight prostitutes and sent them away weaving tales of me which would dispose the lords of Arinna to my favor and bring me many women in the months that followed.

  But that evening as I climbed the hill, oiled, dressed in a long woolen robe and shawl and a conical cap, to wait the night for some god’s hand to touch me, I had little hope for it. What if the omen did not come?

  I had contrived a tale to tell them, if all else failed: so small a thing as being deaf to the gods’ words was not going to keep me from my manhood. I stripped off my robe when halfway up the hillside – it fouled my steps. A torch was burning at the summit, where waited only the empty night, and the will of the gods – if indeed there were any about.

  All day the sky had been grey. No moon, no stars shone through the clouds. I sat upon the stone bench, my robe folded under me. After a time, I began to feel foolish, waiting for nothing, and my thoughts turned to Kuwatna-ziti, and all the trouble I had brought him. When the lords first learned of Tuthaliyas’ decree, there were clenched fists and angry words; ultimately a crowd gathered outside the walled estate slinging mud and insults, howling that he had sold the lords to Tuthaliyas, and suborned Arinna, writing curses on the wall in sheep’s blood. Few among even his staunchest supporters were ready to join the regular army, commissions or no. There were long passionate meetings after Kuwatna-ziti suppressed the crowds by force, and I learned in them, sitting silent while Kuwatna-ziti worked his wiles, the worth of words and the wielding of honor as a weapon. In those meetings he spoke unequivocally for the unification of the troops and the benefits the Hatti lands would reap thereby.

  In private, he chewed his nails and paced and muttered, and went frequently into the barracks among the troops and into the town’s taverns to gather the mood of the folk. He surely worried over the possibility of Tuthaliyas doing harm to me once I was enlisted; he searched procedural records for a way to keep me in his sight. This, I thought privately, he did to keep his own neck in place. If something should happen to me he would forfeit his life for it: Tuthaliyas had him neatly trapped. The military dispatches we had been receiving from Tuttu, in whose thousands his men and he
fell, stole away his sleep. I sleep little, usually less than a third of an evening, and often I would meet him, those first weeks in Arinna, walking his walls in the dead of night.

  Then he would talk to me, as if I were already a man, of what the lords would do this season: of Samuha; of the Gasgaeans who held the lands from Samuha to the sea beyond the northern mountains. Also he would speak of the Storm God of Hatti.

  I dozed on the bench and dreamed a vivid dream in which the blue-cloaked lord with the long black braid wielded a dripping battle-ax from a racing chariot, and woke to the roar of thunder.

  A downpour commenced. I rose up, thinking to seek shelter as the world shook with thunder, then exploded in a blazing whiteness that stabbed me behind the eyes. When I next knew anything, I knew a blinding headache and a roaring in my ears, and knew that I was falling, rolling. I struck a rock, clutched it, gasping. Pain washed over me with the downpour. I cradled my left arm with my right, and yelled my agony into the rain. Above, on the hilltop, the torch was soused, but I did not need to see. I could feel my torn flesh, blood dripping off my arm.

  I sat there in the mud a long time; grating bitter curses into the wind. All that immediately occurred to me was that my arm would not be fit to bear a shield for a long while. Before that thought I fled the hillside, no longer caring enough about my manhood to wait for the touch of the gods. I did not climb back to the summit to search out the cap and the long gown of wool, but ran on downward in the dark, my arm held stiff and close to my body. In a daze, I misjudged the slope and careened down the incline. Thus it was that I stumbled into the girl, who was crossing between the outer and inner temple at the hill’s foot, and took her with me into the mud.

  She yelped in surprise, sputtered, cursed, and scrambled away from me.

  I called her a clumsy slut. She indrew a quick breath. Then I heard her sandals slap away on the rain-slick flags.

  Next I was blinded with torchlight and surrounded with officials of the temple and someone tried to help me up by taking hold of my left arm. I snarled and shook the hand off, getting my feet under me. Faces swam in the torch-flickered rain. A scribe came soft-voiced up to me, offering assistance in the pedantic manner of his class.

  “Look at his arm!” crowed a rusty female voice. “Get clean cloth, Daduhepa, and bandage, in the rectory. Run, girl!”

  A disturbance came from the temple; torches flickered. Then Kuwatna-ziti’s anxious eyes peered into mine, sleep still riding their corners. Slowly he eased my left arm around his neck. Supported thus by him and the little scribe I was half carried through the Sun Goddess’ immaculate halls, my muddy feet hardly touching the flags.

  I tried to shake them off, but Kuwatna-ziti dragged me grimly on. A crowd of robed women flowed with us, its members always changing, full of murmurs and pious exclamations. Every so often one would dash inward and peer at my arm.

  Myself, I tried not to look at it. I saw my feet, and the stones beneath.

  We came into a small, dark wood chamber rich with bronze appointments. Under some shelves at its rear, three covered benches had been hastily flung back from a low table on which were a copper laving bowl and a number of clay vessels.

  Kuwatna-ziti eased me onto a bench. “Gently, my lord prince,” he muttered, though I was not to be called that in this place. “Let me see that arm.”

  “Great Shepherd, my lord, may I?” It was a woman, an “Old Woman,” a shawl drawn about her, who hunched over me. “Move that table. Good. Now, young man, just lay your arm there. Daduhepa, I said hot water.”

  A girl in a muddy blue dress fled the room. I squinted at the priestesses in their long brocaded skirts, at the walls, at the clay tablets banked on shelves against the wall, never once glancing at my arm.

  “What happened up there?” demanded Kuwatna-ziti.

  As I told him, trying to ignore my rolling stomach, the girl came back with a steaming basin, thumped it down upon the table and turned to go.

  “Stay,” snapped the Old Woman through pleated lips. Tossing her wet black locks, the girl took up a position behind the table, staring at me archly. Her nose was smudged with dirt; mud slashed her cheek. “You Pikku, stay also.” The little scribe bowed his head and squatted on a low stool by the Old Woman’s feet. “All the rest of you – begone.” Murmuring disapprovingly, the priestesses filed out.

  “Kuwatna-ziti, shut the door!”

  “Yes, Tunnawi,” said the Shepherd meekly.

  “Young man, this may hurt. There.”

  It hurt. Wiping the mud and blood from my arm, she cleaned the wound with hot water. A chasm of raw, open flesh seeped determinedly. I swallowed sour bile, at last daring to watch. When a pile of reddened cloths lay upon the table, she had the girl mix honey and butter and oil from the vessels, and applied it to the channel that ran up my forearm herself.

  “Girl, get him some wine,” ordered Kuwatna-ziti, and when she had gone he said to the Old Woman. “What think you, Tunnawi?”

  “About the wound? Nothing. It will heal. A decoration for him, is all.”

  “That is not what I mean.” The Shepherd looked pointedly at the scribe.

  I flexed my fingers; they moved. I tried to stop the jagged sound of my breathing; my ears were ringing.

  The Old Woman sat back from her work, her mole-strewn cheeks humping into furrows of amusement. “Kuwatna-ziti, you are like a mare with a foal. Young man, do you think you can keep that clean?”

  “He cannot,” said Kuwatna-ziti positively. “Bind it”

  “Pikku, more cloths. Only for the night.” Her gnarled finger pointed at me. “Can you hear me? Or did the Storm God of Hatti sear your tongue from your mouth? Kuwatna-ziti, can he speak?”

  Kuwatna-ziti laughed mightily, startling the girl just returning with a tray. “Pikku!” she snapped imperiously, and the little scribe hustled over, took the tray from her, poured and served. His skin and eyes were light, like a southern slave.

  I decided I had nothing to say.

  “Young man,” said the Old Woman Tunnawi, “I asked if you could speak.”

  “Tunnawi, may I be excused?” huffed the girl, picking at the mud drying on her gown. Unlike the priestesses, whose breasts were bare, she was covered from neck to toe.

  “You may not.” The girl, her chin lifted high and her mouth squeezed into a pouting red line, sniffed, swished to the benches, and sat with an exaggerated flourish. “Pikku, serve me wine!” The little scribe scuttled to her.

  “Young man, if you would not remain a boy forever, you had best answer me.”

  “Old Woman, I have nothing to say. My arm hurts and I am wet and in need of sleep. Kuwatna-ziti, let us get out of this place.”

  His hand came down hard upon my good arm and dug in. While squeezing, he said, “Tasmisarri, follow my lead,” so low the others could not hear. Then louder: “You must hear the words of the Old Woman, you must perform a sacrifice under her direction to the Storm God, you must –”

  “Kuwatna-ziti,” wheezed the Old Woman impatiently, “he is the sacrifice. He has performed it. Look,” and she reached forward and raised up my arm while I stared at her, “what do you see? Is the worship of the Storm God alive, or is it dead? When the god himself performs a ceremony, should we try to supersede him? You caution him of me, and follow after form to humor me? He is the form. The Storm God has proclaimed his patronage on his child’s very flesh! Shall I now pour some oil on a sweet loaf, and break it in two?”

  “What then, do you want with me?” I said.

  “The wound is to be tended in the temple. You will stay here and be served by her whom the Storm God and the Sun Goddess, in their wisdom, have chosen for you, until it is healed.”

  I said something one does not say in a temple.

  “What?” exploded the blue-gowned girl and came straight up on her feet. “Old Woman! Tunnawi!”

  “Sit down, Daduhepa, my lady,” said Kuwatna-ziti, and turned my way, his eyes slitted with laughter, his teeth bared, his finge
rs in his beard. He was dressed as a man of the Storm God, robed to his toes, a red shawl draped over one shoulder and bound about him by a belt bearing the long, curltailed ceremonial sheath. On his feet were cultic slippers with upturned toes. “I cannot leave him here, Tunnawi, you yourself must see that.”

  “Then stay yourself, Shepherd. We see you little enough at your Lord’s service. Stay and spend some time at your devotions. I –”

  “Old Woman, the situation –”

  “Is political, and has no meaning within these walls. When the machinations of men determine the due of gods, the towns will crumble to dust. I care nothing, for politics. This man –” she patted my hand “– is Teshub’s, and the Lady’s. No lesser can determine his time.”

  I drew my hand from hers and stood, whereupon a wave of dizziness assailed me, so that I leaned with my good arm upon the table.

  “Old Woman,” I said, “no one determines my time. I am not anyone’s; I am my own.”

  “So you may think,” she murmured, snaggle teeth gleaming. “So you may think.”

  I took a step toward her; she did not retreat. We glared at each other.

  Kuwatna-ziti pulled me away from her. His speech was a distant buzz when compared to the throbbing of my forearm which reached upward to echo in my ears. “I will stay here with you. You will get some sleep, we will sniff things out. Go on, sit there. Let me talk to her. Girl, attend him!” That last was very loud, and as I put my head in my hands to ease the pounding in my temples, I heard Kuwatna-ziti mutter to the Old Woman, and the door scrape against its frame.

  “My head hurts,” I said, as much to the air as to the girl and her scribe, and slumped forward.

  The headache was gone with my waking, but returned when I struggled upright to survey the little room. Kuwatna-ziti’s cloak was cast over the other bed, but it was the high-chinned girl, Daduhepa, who sat on it, wringing cloths in a basin.

  “You!” I said. “Go fetch me something to eat.” I eyed the pot near the bed.

  “I will get you a meal,” she agreed, equable, but only went as far as the door where she instructed some other as to what food to fetch.