I, the Sun Read online

  “Get out of here.” My mouth was dry and fuzzy. Swinging my legs to the floor, I made it to my feet, then had to hug the wall.

  I pushed her away when she tried to help me, sending her sprawling across the bed. I had not meant to push her so hard. I looked at my white-wrapped arm, then at her. Her high-browed face was flushed.

  “What is the matter with me?” I muttered, as the room twirled slowly.

  “The Storm God touched you.”

  “Get out of here. I have to –”

  She laughed. I looked down at myself, hard with morning, naked, “Who do you think cleaned you up, dressed that precious skin of yours, put you to bed, little princeling?”

  “Are you a lady?”

  “What do you think?” Her delicately hooked nose sought the air. She had mane enough, but under the blue dress she seemed a dead stick.

  “I think you should act like one and go out and let me use the pot.”

  “I will turn my back.”

  “No, if you are going to stay in here, you have to help me.” To my surprise and chagrin, she did that, with her face turned away and a disdainful look on her. I judged her a few years older than I.

  “You’re Hurrian?” I asked. “Your name, I mean – ‘Daduhepa’?” I rolled the ‘h’ in my throat. She shot up like a startled bird, her cheeks burning, that anyone might mistake her for a Hurrian. “Surely that name is Hurrian.” I had just done to her what the boys in Hattusas used to do to me.

  I wondered why I had done it, yet did not apologize.

  Her eyes sparked. “And you? You are Tasmisarri, are you not?” she purred, as I cautiously sought the bed, too tired to argue the insult she implied.

  “I am. Can you give me one good reason why you will not take my order and get out of here?”

  She gave me an interminable recitation of who she was, back almost to the legendary Anittas. I was unimpressed, but enlightened. A spoiled lord’s brat, serving a short spell in the Sun Goddess’ temple to make her holy before she was traded off for peace on someone’s boundary and bred by the man who bought her.

  “You must be the only person in Hatti to whom I am not related,” I said flatly, letting the inference that she lacked even a drop of royal blood among all her progenitors do its work for me. A flush rode her long neck down below her dress.

  “I should spank you, little boy! I would if you were not so weak.”

  “Keep a lady’s silence, or I will pay your father his bride-price and have you scrubbing floors in Hattusas.” She paled, and hurried wordless out the door, not knowing that I could not buy a cart ox and did not have a floor to call my own.

  A day later, I had had only one more headache and was allowed, after a long and difficult session with the Old Woman, to walk outside on the condition that I took the girl, Daduhepa, along.

  The blight of her presence was almost bearable in the crisp air. I felt the first stirrings of life as if the season’s change champed upon its bit. Kuwatna-ziti had been avoiding me, for his own reasons, and I was rank with being pent up so long. I refused to wear a woolen dress, saying I wanted no fouling of my stride, but what I wanted was the feel of the weather on me. The pale sun was high. We climbed in silence, she scrabbling behind me. I pushed the pace viciously, to show her that I was no longer weak, and when we reached the summit she cast herself on the ground, lying face up, her hand between her breasts, panting. Sweat glistened on her forehead.

  I stalked off to see if the lightning had left any marks on the hillside.

  I was not disappointed – I found a seared patch of ground.

  “Tasmisarri, please wait!”

  I broke a budding branch off in my hand and drew in the dirt. The third time she called I went back to her. She still lay on the ground in her blue, high-necked gown, but her right leg was drawn up and her left arm bent back under her head, pushing her breasts against the wool. She had traced along her eyelids with kohl, as do the Egyptian women; until now I had not noticed it.

  “I have heard, from some, that Kuwatna-ziti sold the lords to Tuthaliyas for you,” she said sweetly.

  An anger that would not let me walk away rose and filled my throat, bitter.

  “Women should not mix in politics,” I growled, and hunkered down on the balls of my feet, playing with buds on the branch, flicking them off, one by one, onto her dress.

  “So speaks the son of Asmunikal?” she smiled viciously, and added: “Or are you?”

  Her long, curving eyebrows raised, she pushed up on her arms. Her tongue wet her lips. “Do you think things will be any better for the lands with Tuthaliyas as Tabarna? Or must we wait for you, my lord?” Her white teeth flashed.

  “I think you have waited long enough,” I said, reaching out to take her by the throat. At the last moment, I took her by the gown instead and ripped it to her waist. She got out only one startled yelp before my palm closed over her mouth and my weight bore her to the ground. Her eyes huge and rolling above my hand, she bit and screamed into my palm as I pulled up her dress and thrust my knee between her thighs.

  “Say please,” I suggested when my fingers touched her moisture, but she only threw her head about and moaned low in her throat. Under the wool her breasts stood, anxious, straining toward my tongue.

  I was aware of her virginity only when I took it; by then it did not matter. When she began to shudder under me I took my palm from her mouth and replaced it with my lips. Her teeth were clenched; her hips thrust up begging under me. I buried my triumph in her pulsing throat and when she cried like a kitten she cried my name.

  I lay with the blood of her violation on my fingers, staring from them into her eyes. “Why did you do this to me?” I asked her. “What are you going to do now?” I made her lick the blood. The trap, once closed on my foot, became clear.

  But she did not admit to it, even then. She lay with a softened mouth under me and said woodenly, “I do not know, my lord, what it is that you mean. You have violated me, and be you prince or no, you will pay.”

  “I can imagine.” She made sharp angry gestures against my chest. Still lying on her, I stretched out my good arm and, leaning on my fist, said, “Now you ‘my lord’ me. Have you tired of your taunting? Just what is it you expect me to pay, your bride-price?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. Little fists beating against me, she squirmed so fiercely that I slid off her. She pulled her dress together over her breasts and curled her exposed legs under her. “I expect nothing from you, Tasmisarri,” she gulped, her upper lip trembling, and burst into tears. I went down the hill and left her there.

  *

  “You what?” roared Kuwatna-ziti, when I told him.

  We stood in the temple stable. He pushed the grey’s searching nose irritatedly away from him. I explained once more, though I was sure he had heard me the first time. “She deserved it. She asked for it. She has been at me since she first saw me…” I trailed off. There was something odd about his face, and in the fact that he was not lecturing me or pounding his fist against the wall.

  “That may be,” he said levelly, “but it is a weak man who uses his strength on a woman. That is no start for a marriage.”

  “Marriage? She nearly raped me.”

  “That is no harlot up there, no namra bitch to use and throw back in the slavepens. I, that is… we…. Tasmisarri, I can arrange this so that there will be no repercussions. You might even profit from it –”

  “Rein in. I am not marrying the sharp-tongued hunting dog.”

  “A girl of that rank cannot be just a concubine.”

  “Kuwatna-ziti, you are not listening.” I slid down onto a pile of straw and picked my teeth with one.

  “Tuthaliyas might stand the bride-price, what with his urge to consolidate the lords.” His back was to me; his fingers, clasped behind him, twined each other. “There will be reciprocal gifts from her family, because of who you are. We might just heal all our troubles here in Arinna with this one –”

  “Kuwatna-ziti, l
ook at me.” The Shepherd turned. His face was impassive. “You planned this! You and the rest of them!”

  “Tasmisarri, you are now a man. I am going to talk to you like one.” He squatted down beside me. “You have split my ranks from behind me, you have caused dissension between brothers in their own houses. Your presence here has made it difficult for me to finance certain expeditions, and more than difficult for me to retain the confidence of the lords here. Now, with one concession you can quiet all the uproar you have started. Does it matter so much to you whose legs you split, or does all that I have done for you matter so little?”

  “You did plan it then! Am I now to have copper nails driven through my wings? Will you divine the future from my entrails?” His hand was on my leg. I drew it up.

  “It is true,” he sighed, “that we thought perhaps you and the young lady might make a match. However, I didn’t expect you to storm her battlements. I must wonder, now, if she will even accept you. Have you dropped a civil war into my lap?” His slanted eyes adamantine; his lips drew thin as he spoke. “Tasmisarri –”

  “I told you not to call me that.”

  “It is your name. If you do not like it, pick another. You are too old for ‘Tasmi’.”

  We had no proper wedding: announcements of our elopement were sent to the parties concerned, and so in keeping was this with my image that no one turned a hair. Asmunikal saved Kuwatna-ziti from financial ruin by standing Daduhepa’s bride-price: my mother’s wealthy new husband was pleased that the ill-reputed Tasmisarri was showing signs of settling down. Daduhepa’s family, heavily landed and conservative, was very powerful in the Upper Country; the bride-price started a river of wealth flowing between my mother in Ziplanda and Tuthaliyas in Hattusas and my in-laws in Arinna. But though my house was much enriched, I had no more than I had before.

  My wife and I communicated by means of the little, light-colored scribe, Pikku, who ran with messages back and forth between my wife’s estates and Kuwatna-ziti’s, where I continued to abide.

  We had a very polite relationship that conformed to all proprieties but one: we did not sleep together. Tuthaliyas himself attended the family gathering that celebrated the affair. He had been doing the New Year festivals, and was on a swing that would take the kingly presence through all the inner towns before the campaigns began – so he said. My wife bowed to the Great King; my in-laws beamed; Tuthaliyas found time to take from me my word before the Oath Gods, a thing he had not been able to do at his accession, since I was not yet then a man. One would have thought it was he who had taken a new wife, so jovial was he.

  Daduhepa stood beside me and greeted endless people whom she knew and I did not. “May the Sun Goddess grace your house,” she would simper, kissing some old hag on the cheek, then whisper to me: “I hope the Gasgaeans geld you,” smile, and greet the next.

  When I finally retorted, beneath an aching smile, that she might start keeping snakes, for she would never have me again, she pounced on that, and held me to it as a promise. Cursing her so roundly that one of the bejeweled crones who waited to greet me stumbled over her cane, I stalked away to begin getting drunk, taking a gilded jar of very imported wine – Ammurite; I was holding a soldier’s weekly wage of it in my hand – out into the fresh air.

  Sitting down against the courtyard wall, I began to work on the wine. When I had worked my way half-through the jug, a crash sounded on my right and then a form slid heavily down the wall by my side. I steadied the jar. “Greetings, guest.”

  “Greetings, nephew,” eructed Tuthaliyas. “Nice looking girl. Is she good?”

  “Terrible.”

  He burped again. “That’s the way with the ladies. Take concubines, my boy – and slaves. And leave that kind to their child-bearing and their genealogies.”

  I was silent, wondering if I had already said something I shouldn’t.

  “Kuwatna-ziti’s trying to find out without offending anybody whether I, ah – you know… you can call yourself anything you want. I care not about it. Just you mind your oath, and you’ll come out of this a general.” His hand slapped down on my arm. “I’d even give your mother that winter villa she likes so much, if you’d turn some of that revolutionary fervor against the Gasgaean enemy…” I leaned my head back against the brick and tilted it his way.

  “I take my oaths seriously, O Great King, even if you are an old snake.”

  He scowled at that.

  Three days later the weather broke and I took a billet with the Shepherd’s men. Meanwhile Kuwatna-ziti had put me on the role as an auxiliary (thereby avoiding having to decide whether or not we dared call me “prince”); assigned me back to himself as a driver while requisitioning another chariot for my personal use; allotted me a marshal’s pay scale while having me draw “special” funds from the auxiliaries pool; found two men to teach me what I was already supposed to know and put them on double pay. When furrow-browed scribes came bearing armfuls of contradictory tablets he would listen patiently, nodding, smiling, and when they were done reiterate that he had meant exactly this, and send them away. I thought it might not be so bad, being a general.

  I dropped into bed each night with every muscle in my body screaming, rose before dawn and ate more than I used to in a full day, and worked the sun into bed. My arms and shoulders and the backs of my legs put on muscle; I took to wearing a driver’s belt and did exercises to strengthen my back; I learned how to stay alive against a battle-ax and how much heavier a bronze warsword is than a boy’s wooden one; I grew like a weed. We were in the field before I knew it.

  The Shepherd’s men understood Gasgaeans; we burned them out; trapped them; strung a few on pikes. Some of us younger men used to go down to the bootytrain and take out live namra, offering them freedom if they could win it wrestling. Snapping a neck takes practice, and practice on them we did. It lasted well into the spring, until one of the lords had his neck snapped, and the rest of us were assigned to fortifications as a disciplinary measure.

  It was Samuha we were fortifying, seemingly house by house. In former times the enemy from Hayasa had come and sacked all the Upper Country and made Samuha its frontier. Tuthaliyas had reclaimed it. All the Shepherd’s men had to do was keep it. The location was not altogether peaceful: the enemy from Hayasa and the Gasgaean enemy both abutted the land; it had been sacked so many times that trees were scarce and the wind blew ash and the sky was always yellow.

  I did not mind the construction work, though I took pains to conceal that from my fellow penitents, who were much demeaned by it. I liked the feeling I got when a sketch in the dirt became a wall, and I went thrice to Kuwatna-ziti with ideas to improve the strength of our defenses. When our punishment was over and we returned to the main business of making war, I found I had made a friend of the commander of fortifications, one Hattu-ziti; and when I took a deep gash in my side and was campbound, he and I spent long nights drawing Hattusas in the dirt and fortifying her.

  Some say the driver’s craft takes the strongest nerve of all; I disagree, but it is no easy thing to go into war without a weapon. Two hands on the reins and a quick eye for flying missiles and tight corridors among steeds and wheels are what is needed. I became good at flicking a man from his feet with my whip, and better at ducking. We say of war that it is a season, but it is actually two seasons: after New Year, in the warming spring of hameshant, the campaigns begin, lasting through the harvest, until zenant, when the weather comes down low on the Upper Country and the rivers rise. There had been no snow in the winter of my passing into Kuwatna-ziti’s care, and the lands were dry all year.

  It was this threat of famine that had brought the Shepherd’s flock to Samuha, whence we were expected to hold the Upper Country while Tuthaliyas split the armies and sent Hittite forces raiding rich towns along all our borders, to bring back sheep and cattle and grain for the winter.

  Tuttu – in whose 1,000 we fell – commanded the Upper Country, and did a bad job of it, even managing to die awkwardly: his dea
th caused Kuwatna-ziti to be made commanding general; and I found myself with his place to fill – at the head of the flock.

  I filled it well enough; the men with whom I had built walls and towers were in my personal thirty, and we became as one hand.

  So when, reluctantly, I came home from Samuha to Arinna with Kuwatna-ziti, I left the commander of fortifications, Hattu-ziti, as field commander in my stead. It seemed to the Shepherd and me that if the troops were going to winter in Samuha, we should be there too, but we had no choice: the Great King commanded us to meet with him in Arinna.

  I scratched the scar that marked me “Favorite of the Storm God,” and picked a weed and chewed it.

  “Just say nothing about it,” Kuwatna-ziti was advising me, while trampling a circle in the high grass of the hill.

  “You will make us both dizzy,” I complained. “He surely must know that I have my own command. Tuthaliyas said –”

  “You told me what he said to you, but he was drunk. And things are not going well.” He sat down cross-legged and rested his chin on his fist. His club he wore braided now, as men did in the Old Empire. Putting the end of the braid in his mouth, he sucked it absently.

  “It is his own fault for spreading the troops so thin. They’ll be burning down Hattusas while he’s out looting villages. You watch.”

  “Tasmisarri, try not to criticize the policies of the Sun, Great King, your, uncle. What would you do, were you Tabarna?” He had that casual smile which meant he was intensely interested.

  “You know very well what needs done,” I said, rolling on to my belly, staring down at Arinna glittering coldly amid the yellow hills. “And you know it will not be I who does it. I am content doing what I am doing.”

  “Except when someone gives you a direct order. Tasmisarri, men like you are fit only to give orders; a soldier’s craft is to take them. The kingship, alas, is the only work to which you are suited.”

  I said that I would make a sacrifice to Istar of the Battlefield, to ensure that the Lady of the Armies withdrew her support from him.