I, the Sun Page 8

  I have held dying men. I have embraced men seeking my death. I have never been so weak-limbed as when I first held my eldest and he sought to conquer my chin with his flailing, white-nailed fingers.

  “Not like that, like this,” she smiled, and adjusted my hold on him.

  “He will be tuhkanti, someday,” I promised her – and myself. “I will take him to Kuwatna-ziti’s and we will acknowledge him before the lords.” I would not have his status be questionable, as mine had been. Kuwatna-ziti was a man of the Storm God; by acknowledging the boy in his presence I acknowledged him my son before the god. “Daduhepa, you do not know!”

  “Know what?” she said, snuggling into my arm, watching me hold the baby.

  “We have to send word to his grandfather – to my father. That is. Tuthaliyas adopted me.”

  “What? Oh Tasmi, how wonderful! We must have seals made! I will get a place in Hattusas! Here, give him to me.”

  “Hold, princess. I’m commander of Samuha. From the sound of it, for the rest of my life. He only keeps me out of the way. I am not tuhkanti, yet – just his son.” Arnuwandas yawned widely, content in her arms.

  “You are his heir,” she sniffed, rubbing her nose. Then her eyes widened. “Samuha! That’s not even in Hatti.”

  I chucked her under the chin. “Now you see it. It surely is not, and it’s no place to raise a child. There’s been war in those lands so long the dirt is red, not brown. I am not putting you, or Arnuwandas II, in the way of the Hayasaean enemy, the wild Gasga tribes –” I was counting them off on my fingers.

  “Stop! I am supposed to stay here while you live in the… the… oh, Tasmi,” and she began to wind up to weep again. “I do not care about the enemies. I will write the Great King – my parents will not let –”

  “No. Stop this, I command you, wife! You be a good girl and stay here and help me keep the lords quiet. Sonship has its price. Do you hear?”

  But she was not listening. Her face was stony, puffed with tears. She did not pull away, but went stiff as a dead thing.

  “You hate me,” she said, very low. “You’ve hated me since Arinna. Go on, go to Samuha and your war and your harlots. Just do not expect me to aid you.” She reached blindly behind her, caught up her robe and pulled it about her, all while holding the baby, who squirmed and began to scream. “Now see what you’ve done. You’ve scared him. Get out, go on. And stay out. Leave us alone!”

  I went first to Asmunikal, on whom I laid my displeasure, blaming her and her influence for my troubles with my wife. I was deaf to her injured explanation that often women fresh from childbirth act thusly, though experience has taught me that she was right, over the years. Then, I blamed her, and slammed from the estate, black of temper. I almost killed the horses driving to meet Kuwatna-ziti, but to no avail. I missed him, and Himuili, who was with him. So I swapped teams there and left the greys, driving my own blacks down to Samuha, no longer caring whether or not I acknowledged my first born before the god.

  CHAPTER 5

  The garrison at Samuha billeted anywhere from thirty men to three hundred. Hattu-ziti, the commander of fortifications, was like an extra hand to me, taking the administrative details of the fortified town onto his shoulders, leaving me free to war. And war I did, all that fall and into the winter, against the Gasgaean enemy.

  The problem with the Gasgaean enemy was that they had no real organization, no one king with which to treat. The wild tribes fought in a loose brotherhood, and when one tribe was vanquished two others would come to take its place. Just before the winter froze everything with heavy snows, I got a message from Daduhepa that she was pregnant once more, the result of our brief assignation in celebration of Arnuwandas’ birth.

  I took some ribbing from the men over it, and sent her an invitation to come to Samuha and bring Arnuwandas, boasting that I had made it safe.

  There were rumblings in the air of meetings between Hayasa and the Gasga enemy: Gasga and Hayasa as one power would be difficult indeed to fight. Kuwatna-ziti came in with the first break in the weather, and was stranded with us when the storms recommenced. With him he brought news of foreign lands: of Hurri and Amurru and Babylon and Egypt: and of the lords and the game of kingship.

  He tutored me, that winter, in the ways of the Storm God. I struggled with him futilely about it, but at length gave in, assisting him in performing ceremonies long neglected by the troops. He provided me with the formulas for discerning truth by incubation (a sort of meditation), and expected me to remember my dreams. When I had managed to master that he was much pleased, but insisted that I must then learn to divine the meaning of them. At that I threw up my hands and stalked off to see if any of the namra still remembered my name.

  Which was where I lay when my wife’s little light-skinned scribe, Pikku, arrived from Arinna. In a spiteful mood, Kuwatna-ziti merely told him where I was. Though I tried, in those days Pikku was at Samuha, to suborn him, and, failing that, to browbeat him with threats of violence upon his person, I had no doubt that when he rode out toward the setting sun that he would tell Daduhepa everything he had seen and heard in camp. None of it would be to my benefit.

  Her message to me had been polite, but firm: she was closing the house in Arinna and moving into Hattusas. She did not say where in Hattusas or who had provided the wherewithal for the move.

  Kuwatna-ziti and I speculated as to who among the contenders had precipitated these events, but came to no conclusions.

  “So much for her coming here,” I said glumly to Kuwatna-ziti.

  “You didn’t really want her. You’d have to sleep at night. What would the namra do? We’d have a revolt in the pens.”

  “What should I say?”

  “I think you’re doing badly enough with your wife without my help. Let us write this treaty.” He tapped the clay before him. I was learning ‘statecraft,’ so he said – spelling and punctuation in Babylonian, the diplomatic language in use from Assyria to the Upper Country, and I did not like it.

  “Look you, this Pikku could add to my troubles. Let us put this aside and concentrate on writing something to my wife which will work a spell on her and turn her into a woman. I will take this up again when Pikku leaves.”

  “Your wife, lord prince, needs your arms about her, nothing more.”

  “I embraced her when I saw my son, and now she is pregnant again and hates me even more, from the sound of this.” We were in the officers’ hut, huddled under blankets on our haunches around the hearth. Despite the fire, I could see my breath.

  “She will when she hears Pikku’s tale, that is sure. Why not see to it he never reaches her?”

  “She would know I did it.”

  “Let us think, then.”

  We thought. Eventually we composed as beautiful a love missive as any woman ever received, slowly, drinking our way to inspiration.

  “Do you think ‘your thighs smeared with honey’ is too much?” I asked him, rubbing my eyes.

  “No, no.” He emptied the jug. “Fine. Fine. Look here, this should be ‘pouting lips’.”

  I had a headache all the next day, and gave it no more thought. Kuwatna-ziti had the message sealed and gave it to Pikku, who had reins in his hands and orders to be back by New Year.

  At dusk Kuwatna-ziti brought me a meal and an eager prescription for my headache, and we made a treaty over her in Babylonian; he got the east and I got the west.

  We had by mid-summer seemingly come to the end of the Gasgaean tribes.

  Tuthaliyas sent word that he was making a rare excursion into the field, and that we should meet him on Mount Nanni.

  I had written previously to him three times to allow me to raid outside my territory, and he refused each time. I had asked twice to leave Hattu-ziti with the command and come down to Hattusas to see my wife. That, too, he had denied me. When the invitation to meet him on Nanni came, I was in the car, as some call the body of the chariot, before the horses were hitched.

  I took thirty chariots u
p Nanni’s slope, holding two men each. It was a habit of mine to take these particular men, and one that may have saved my life, for I had not expected fighting there. Tuthaliyas’ march was quasi-religious; he was visiting stations for the gods.

  The population of the town had revolted and gone over to the wild tribes, which explained why we had not been catching any Gasgaeans in Samuha, and Tuthaliyas’ overburdened, slow-moving processional was encircled and besieged before the drunken Great King’s eyes. Soft they may have been, but Tuthaliyas’ men were still Hattian soldiers. When we rode into the smoke-filled town we found them in possession of it. Their archers almost put out my driver’s eye before identifications were made. Then I set my men at what they did best, and we slew Gasgaeans until they slunk away in the dusk.

  Tuthaliyas was full of senseless talk about reestablishing the population of this town in their place, and of what he had heard here and there about various men and towns plotting against him. But he thanked me, and even said that he believed I might have saved his life.

  “Then send me against the Hayasaean enemy,” I said back to him, as we sat with our cars pulled close and the light of the flaming town flickering through the dark.

  Tuthaliyas took another drink and coughed mightily, holding his side. “I need you to watch the Gasgaeans.”

  “I can do both.”

  “I will give you no more men.”

  “My thanks, lord.” It was a tacit acceptance. My heart leapt. And sunk at his next words.

  “Take me to Samuha. My back hurts, and the wine is running low. You love the Hayasaeans, they are yours. But you stay based in Samuha. Whenever you set foot out of there I will know it, and approve it, beforehand. And if it is not so, then Kuwatna-ziti will suffer for it just as you will. I’m not that drunk, and I’m not that sick.”

  “Yes, my lord,” I said. I could not get used to calling him father.

  I went, soon after, out to meet the Hayasaean enemy, full of expectations. I did not meet them. I could find none along the borders. So I went after them, into Hayasa, but still I did not meet them. I met the Gasgaean enemy instead.

  And it discomfited me, that this should be so. I wrote to Kuwatna-ziti, saying that the Gasgaean enemy, in great force, had met with me and that I had defeated them. The mention of where I had defeated them was casual, but I knew he would mark it, in its position just before the god-list.

  And indeed, it was as I wrote him: the gods stood by me: the Sun Goddess of Arinna, the Storm God of Hatti, the Storm God of the Army, and Istar of the Battlefield, so that the enemy died in multitude.

  I took many namra and brought them back to Samuha.

  When we had enlarged the pen, I went back out again, for I had not yet met the enemy from Hayasa and that was what was in my heart. The season was getting late, and the grass turning brown. I scratched the line of hair that had come to be on my belly, and surveyed the trap that I had laid for the enemy. My archers were secreted, my foot in plain sight. Kuwatna-ziti held one ridge-top, I held another. In between, on the flat, stood the Hittites who would serve as bait. We had “borrowed” troops from Himuili, and the three of us would be in dire straits if the battle turned out not to our advantage.

  Himuili’s troops, waiting below, had driven the tribal troops from his station – farther east – to ours. But of all the massed tribes whooping like demons as they swarmed across the tableland, none were Hayasaeans.

  I took some small consolation in the ending of that season: we smote the massed Gasgaeans; whomsoever we met there, we slew. As we were setting our trap for the Gasgaean enemy, all the shepherds from the country which had been laid waste by the enemy came down from the hills with their dogs and their flocks to help us, and their bowmen mixed with ours. The Gasgaean enemy had brought hired Sutu and auxiliary troops down on us from the rear, but still we triumphed. Into the dark did we fight, by torch and burning chariot, and the Gasgaeans with their auxiliaries died in a multitude. Of the Hittite troops, all but a very few survived.

  And the captives that we took were countless. We divided them up and apportioned the booty before Himuili’s men departed westward with the dawn.

  I had chosen a pair of Gasgaean horses and wanted to see if they would drive. So in the morning, as the army made lazy preparations for a triumphant march home, I hitched up the Gasgaean horses and took them out on the tableland.

  Hittites do not ride horses; we are not barbarians. But it seemed to me that a horse who has a bit in his mouth feels it whether the rein is long or short, and even for a horse it is not too difficult a thing to understand a centerpole and a pair of traces. They were wild at first, not knowing how to run together nor caring to learn; but I turned them loose to dull their edge running themselves out across the plain before I tried to teach them any fine points.

  Soon the army was out of sight and all that existed in the world were the horses and the terrain and the yellow sky where it met the mountains draped in morning mist. The road, old and grassy, led through a gutted village – hardly more than steaming timbers and a few of those round-topped, mud-brick hovels that the barbarians make.

  As we came into the village, I touched the whip to the horses’ flanks, for they were both tired of running and leery of the steaming ruins. They snorted and struck out with their feet, just as something ran into the road from between two of the hovels. I sawed on their reins, but even as I drew them up I knew it was too late. When I came around to their heads and backed them off, I saw that the corpse they trampled was a young boy’s.

  Perhaps it was that I was newly a father, perhaps it was the uselessness of the death; I found my stomach was queasy.

  I was calming the horses, who knew what they had done, when I heard the noise like a sob or a muffled scream. I put my palm on the near horse’s muzzle and listened. It came again. Tying the horses to a heavy, overturned wagon, I went seeking among the huts for its source.

  The hut from which the sounds came was battened closed from the outside. Prying the boards loose, I slid back a heavy bar painted with warding signs against sorcery, and ducked within. The sounds had stopped.

  Those huts are shaped like eagles’ eggs, and have no windows. The barbarians curve the mud-bricks centerward, so that the circular wall becomes a dome at whose apex is a small opening. It was dark, steamy, and stinking within. When my eyes adjusted I saw why; its occupant was bound to a post dug into the ground – had been for several days, judging from the filth about the post’s foot.

  Huge eyes in a pinched, sweating face watched me silently as I cut away the ropes, holding my breath against the stench. She was unable to stand on her own. I carried her out into the light and lay her in the dust of the street. She could not have been more than fourteen.

  “Can you speak, little sorceress?” She blinked eyes the like of which I had never seen – colored like the sky when drizzle comes from it – and touched my hand, then seemed to go to sleep. I stripped her, cleaned the filth from her at the village well, wrapped her in my cloak, and took her back with me.

  She lay unmoving on the chariot’s floor, except that she put her head against my sandal. It is not easy to drive that way, but somehow I did not push her away.

  “What’s that you’ve got, Tasmi?” teased Kuwatna-ziti, leaning from his car to peer into mine.

  “A souvenir.” She had drunk a little wine for me, but still huddled against the high curve of the chariot’s side, my cloak pulled around her, her legs drawn up under it. Her hair had dried; clean, it was the color of ripe wheat.

  “What is she?” he said, squinting.

  The girl hugged the leather padding. “A woman. What does she look like, a goose?”

  “You know what I mean. Where’s she from?”

  “She hasn’t said. Not Gasga, that’s certain.” She hadn’t said anything. I was beginning to wonder if she could speak. “I found her in the sacked village to the west.”

  “Well?” said Kuwatna-ziti.

  “Well what?”
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br />   “Aren’t you going to put her with the namra?”

  “No, I am not.”

  “So it’s like that, is it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I just do not want to misplace her.” That was a real possibility, considering the multitude of captives we had to herd back to Samuha. Some always escape. “Besides, she’s too little, she’d never survive it.”

  “That,” said Kuwatna-ziti, taking up his reins, “is what I thought.”

  I found her some old clothes of mine, and set about the business of shepherding my men and their spoils back to Samuha.

  The omens are cast at the end of the season; a seer goes through the motions and speaks a ritual which proclaims that it is too late for more fighting this year. And thus the season is ended, as far as the gods are concerned. Whether the enemies abide by our rules or not is never sure.

  At Samuha two tablets awaited me; my wife had sent word that I had a second son, named Piyassilis; the Great King had written me to say that some enemy had penetrated into the Hatti lands themselves, and was razing the houses of the gods with fire; also he instructed me to send down the booty from the season to a certain town, where the Great King’s troops would receive it.

  I wrote him back immediately, saying that it was not too late in the year for my men – if he would send me after the enemy into Hatti then the gods would not be wroth the winter long; should he send me on the campaign I proposed, then, I promised, what was in my heart, the gods would fulfill. I had seen this in a dream, I assured him.

  Meanwhile, I prepared the Gasgaean namra to go down into Hatti, and all the cattle and sheep and the deportees I readied to become gifts to the palace. I took my time with this, for I was sure that Tuthaliyas, in dire straits, would not refuse my plea.

  He did not. We drove down into the Hatti land, and where the temples had been desecrated, we cast away what was burnt, and built the gods’ places anew. We brought along our trained namra, and as we went through the country we left some here, some there, fortifying the border towns. But we did not meet the enemy who had been scourging the land with fire. We were always a town behind them.