“About a quarter-watch would be enough. My wife, that’s who.”
Kuwatna-ziti silenced me by decreeing that since I had invited them, I must pay the proprietor, who then set food and drink before us. Himuili was detailing suitable methods of torture, displaying that little-boy’s smile he takes up with his sword. I sipped my drink and studied Kuwatna-ziti while he squinted at me. Finally, he put his hand on Himuili’s arm and said, “What’s this about, Tasmisarri? If I did not know better, I’d think something happened to upset you.”
“Daduhepa knew about this all along. She was polite, restrained, prattling on about being listed with the royal family. I should have known, when she offered me no fight about Titai. She knew then! I’m going to kill her before she gets me killed. I –”
“Stop! What are you talking about?” Kuwatna-ziti demanded.
Himuili picked a hair out of his cup, held it up to the light, and swore that he would have the place closed down.
“Tuthaliyas has reassigned me to Hattusas,” I said, while Kuwatna-ziti stroked his long nose and Himuili twirled the hair between his fingers, both seemingly unperturbed. “I cannot stay here. The lords will make short work of me!”
“Are you frightened, hero of Samuha, favorite of the Storm God? Or do my ears deceive me?”
“Yes, Shepherd, I am frightened. If you listen you’ll hear my teeth chatter. There are too many of them and they are too smart for me.”
The lord Himuili chuckled, but Kuwatna-ziti silenced him with a fierce glare. I looked between them.
“Did you know of this? If you knew and did not tell me…. Shepherd, the days are gone when you could pin me against the wall.”
“Tasmi, eat your food and let me think. You’ll need more than a little height and a couple of years in the field to back that threat up. I’ll forget I heard it.”
Himuili’s face mirrored my own consternation in the ensuing silence during which I emptied my plate without noticing what was on it. Then Kuwatna-ziti said, “Who has Samuha?”
“You do,” I replied.
He grunted, entwined his fingers before him on the table. “Tasmisarri, Tushratta of Mitanni is not yet seventeen. A mere youth. Your age. Do you see the parallel? Tuthaliyas thinks to avoid any similar ideas the Hattian lords might have… he’s sick, but he’s not feeble.”
“I cannot stay here. I don’t want to.”
“You can. You will. And you’ll get used to it. But no more talk of laying hand on Daduhepa, or you’ll answer to me.”
I got up abruptly, causing the whole table to teeter. “I smell my mother’s spoor! If ever I thought you were in league with Asmunikal,” I warned him, “if ever I even suspect it, or if you plot to aid me without my knowing it, and I hear about it, there is nowhere in the Hatti lands you will be safe from me, Kuwatna-ziti.” The Shepherd’s eyes slitted into crescents. Himuili muttered about his bladder and disappeared.
“It’s that tawny bed-warmer of yours, that’s what’s troubling you,” called Kuwatna-ziti as I stamped out the door.
When I pounded on my own threshold, demanding admittance, there was a scurrying within, then nothing. The curtains across the alleyway slammed down, after the neighbor I had awakened cursed me roundly.
Then I remembered to ask if the greys were yet lame. Still the bar was not slid from within. I was about to forsake door for window when I heard the wood grate.
The main room of the house was dim and the air blue with acrid smoke. The curtains were rolled down and something ill-smelling boiled on the hearth. Beside it, the new winter cloak I had bought her was thrown. Titai’s hands were behind her, and she backed from me toward the hearth.
“What’s this? What are you doing? What’s that awful smell?”
Her upper lip trembled. Above it, her eyes were wide. “I was afraid for you, my lord…”
Pushing the door shut with my foot, an awful foreboding crawled up my spine. Sniffing the air repeatedly, I bore down on her. She sank to her knees beside the cloak at the hearth, murmuring something unintelligible.
I remember such hesitancy as has never come over me in battle, a rage of conflicting emotions so that I shook like a woman.
“Pick that up,” I ordered her. “I would see what is underneath.”
Head bowed, she wadded up the cloak and held it against her. Beneath was what I did not want to see, but what the smell told me must be there: little jars and bits of feathers and small molded clay figures. I crouched down and, one by one, crushed the clay figures in my hands.
“Sorcery,” I snarled at her, my voice thick to my own ears. “Titai, what are you trying to do to me?” She began to weep. “For striking a snake and speaking a man’s name, a slave must die. How much more for this? Titai, even your name would not be spoken for fear of contamination. Girl, mark me. A witch’s is a very long and painful death.” As I spoke I was methodically emptying, then crushing, jars and casting their shards into the fire. I could not look at her, so dark was my heart.
The door was thrust open; I had not slid the bar. I sprang up. Kuwatna-ziti and Himuili poised there, and the Shepherd’s nostrils quivered. Himuili made a warding sign and backed with a mutter from the threshold.
“Kuwatna-ziti, she’s not Hittite, she –”
“Do not say anything, Tasmi. It is not what you think. You are mistaken. So is Himuili. As for me, I see nothing but a barbarian cooking her meal. Nothing! Get rid of this stuff, and air out the house. I will be at Himuili’s a few days.” His face bore no expression as he pulled the door shut behind him.
I found myself braced against the window, my fingers digging splinters off the sill: Not daring to look at her, I stared blindly through my rage at my hands. I heard her, behind me, rustling around – little hiccoughs and sobs marking her progress as she did Kuwatna-ziti’s bidding. “If ever again you make magic in my house,” I grated at last, “I will take you back where I found you, and bind you again to that .post, and write the warding signs on the boards myself.”
CHAPTER 7
“Abuya! Abuya!” screamed Arnuwandas in delight when he saw the black eagle bating in his nest. There is something about it when your first-born calls you “father,” successfully, at last.
“No,” I said, “not ‘father.’ Eagle. And there,” I pointed to the town, below. “Hattusas.” Dutifully, black eyes narrowed to the task, Arnuwandas repeated the words after me. I had been hesitant to bring him up here: a climb I had made a hundred times in pitch dark seemed suddenly hazardous, with the child’s arms locked around my neck. Below, by the opening to the rock sanctuary on whose crest we perched, my blacks cropped the sparse grass, then raised their heads, ears pointed. I followed their gaze and saw a chariot driving slowly, toward us.
It was not Kuwatna-ziti, but Himuili who put his car next to mine and assayed the climb.
“What are you, Tasmisarri, a goat? No wonder we could never find you when we needed to.” I had had to hail him twice.
He was there because I had sent a message to his house, inviting him or Kuwatna-ziti to meet with me. I had not seen either since we had found my little sorceress at work; there were things that needed to be said. A lot of those things were said by Kuwatna-ziti’s absence – though I had realized he might send Himuili in his place, I was hurt.
“Fine big boy,” said Himuili of Arnuwandas, who was exploring my old hiding place in the rocks.
“Where is Kuwatna-ziti?”
“In Arinna, by now. He has gone to cleanse himself before the god. He asked me to request that you, too, present a sacrifice.”
There was no doubt in my mind as to why the man of the Storm God felt in need of cleansing. He had dwelt in the house of a sorceress, cohabited on occasion with one. “Gladly. I will sacrifice a sheep for him, also. Tell him that.”
“He will be pleased. Tasmisarri, I have not much time.”
“Nor I. I have to go with Tuthaliyas on his tour of the god’s stations. My lord, you and the Shepherd have my life in your hands.
Are you going to hold it, or drop it?” He was, as I had hoped, somewhat taken aback.
“My lord prince,” he toyed with his sandal’s strap, “I could kill you in a fair fight by the time this rock –” he threw one over the ledge’s edge “– strikes the ground. Therefore, I have long been able to take your life, if I wanted it. I keep out of the lords’ games.”
I remembered when he had walked away while Kantuzilis and my uncles took a strap to a boy’s behind – and the time he and the Pale One had liberated Muwatalli the Elder’s head from his body.
“And I am no carrier of tales. If you end with a death sentence because of your sorceress, it will not be on my account.” In Hatti, if the crime is severe enough, not only the guilty but that one’s wives and children, his servants and their children, may also be sentenced to accompany the wrongdoer to his fate. And Titai’s crime – mine by implication – was severe enough.
“But you must consider your sons, and your wife.”
“I have considered them.”
“And you will continue to keep the namra.”
“I will.”
“Then may the Storm God protect you,” he said, gathering his legs under him. “It is such an unnecessary danger she brings you that I find it hard to accept. But Kuwatna-ziti said you would feel thus, and –”
“I want you to take this to him. It is a list of what is mine in Samuha. Say that I ask this of him only because I have no other to whom I can turn – if he will aid me in settling these affairs, in respect for what we once shared, I will be grateful. Say also that I will ask nothing further, henceforth, and that I am… sorry… about all this…” I waved my hand aimlessly, and wished I had not come upon such humiliation.
Himuili stuffed the list in his pouch and straightened up, his hands to the small of his back. “Tasmisarri, a lot of folk think you might make a king. Get rid of that barbarian bitch, or she will be as a wall up to heaven between you and the kingship.”
I found it necessary to go fetch up my son, and when I had done that, Himuili was climbing down toward the chariots.
CHAPTER 8
I sold all that I had gathered in Samuha – the booty, the building namra, the girls – and with it procured a modest house in the better quarter of the upper city. There I installed Titai, in spite of the uproar caused by Daduhepa (who preferred lodging both me and my concubine to enduring the impropriety of it all). But I dared not, because of the sorcery. If Daduhepa ever even suspected the truth, I would wear her leash forever more.
I managed to have the thirty men who had been the nucleus of my strength in the Upper Country transferred to me in Hattusas, and to bring the architect and commander of fortifications, Hattu-ziti, into my house to live.
I made him my aide and second-in-command, advising him to think seriously about fortifying Hattusas; when I went out on campaign with the Great King, I left him in charge of my house and what resided therein, as well as of my correspondence and my finances – as perilous as ever.
I have not spoken much of war and the waging of it. To some extent, I have done this because my life as I look back upon it was one long campaign, and in my mind all the battles of my youth have flowed together: the Samuha campaigns were for the most part small guerrilla actions, only noteworthy when strung together.
But war with the Great King’s chariots was different. My heart grew heavy that first season, watching the ever-besotted Tabarna misuse his men, and my thoughts turned toward the kingship, and how it might better be administered.
Once I found him so soaked with wine that he slumped spreadlegged against a six-spoked wheel, snoring, while all around us the enemy of the country of Kammala howled and died. Once he sent us west when everyone knew the enemy was in the east; we had no choice but to go where he commanded. Let me tell you about man and drink: as a man ages, the drink that would only have warmed him in his youth takes him prisoner and vanquishes his mind. So it was with Tuthaliyas, and the army grumbled, growing dull-eyed and sour.
Often he split the force so small that I had only my thirty, as if we fought handfuls of Gasgaeans in the Upper Country and not the civilized, canny warriors of the steppes. Often, when Tuthaliyas’ imagination overcame him, we would be sent like Sutu to kill this man or that or to subdue a fantasized rebellion of a loyal, quiet town.
It was not good with the armies, that season. While we were down in Kammala, the Gasgaeans awoke, entering into the land of Hatti, and burned down the empty towns behind which my men had built fortifications, despite all of Kuwatna-ziti’s efforts to hold them at bay.
So when Tuthaliyas and I came back from Masa, though the summer was done, we had to go into the lands of Kathariya and Gazzapa, who – backed by Gasga – kept destroying our towns and carrying away their goods: all the silver and gold, bronze utensils, and articles of the gods. But the gods helped the army of my father – which we all sourly observed could not help itself – and we destroyed Kathariya and Gazzapa and burned them down. And all the Gasgaean troops who had come down to help Kathariya, we smote, so that the Gasgaeans died in multitudes.
Though the season was late for it when I and my ‘father’ Tuthaliyas came back from there, he immediately prepared to go to the country of Hayasa and fight with King Lanni, who had sent him a taunting invitation.
I would have stayed in Hattusas, but no one asked me. We had two nights and a day in the city, long enough to refurbish our gear and hitch fresh horses; then we were gone on campaign once more.
My men were tired beyond forbearing; there were fights in the camp. I went to Tuthaliyas and asked him to reconsider. It was the wrong thing to do. He was seeing enemies all around him that night, and became wroth with me, and I spoke harsh words back to him, and pushed him from me into the mud. But in the morning he did not remember. So, in a way, his drinking saved my life.
Lanni, the king of Hayasa, was late arriving for battle at the agreed upon spot below the town of Kummaha, which gave my men time to rest and Tuthaliyas time to get falling down drunk.
Thus, when the enemy king’s chariots appeared below the town, it was I who led the men out to face him. I learned that day just how much Samuha and Kuwatna-ziti had taught me: the advantage of unpredictability is incalculable in war. My thirty mountain fighters led the charge, and Lanni’s Hayasaeans fell under us like wheat under a scythe. They were polite, impeccably mannered, perfectly disciplined; they died polite, impeccable, disciplined deaths. I found myself in the classic position: chariot to chariot with the enemy king. I had a bowman with me, and a driver who knew my blacks. My sword slipped through his neck like butter; and when Tuthaliyas woke he saw it piked up before him in his tent.
No one had been able to wake him when the Hayasaeans broke into retreat, to receive the royal permission to follow, so we failed to destroy the enemy multitude. When we received the Sun’s order that day to depart to Hattusas to spend the winter, we left Hayasa bearing only some loot and horses.
“This is idiotic!” fumed Mammali, a man of my thirty. “Did Tuthaliyas not expect to take them? Just go home? Why not leave enough men to occupy the country? We’ll just have to fight them again next season.” But there was nothing I could do about it: the battle was won, decisively; the war was not. There was some talk of a treaty with Lanni’s sons from Tuthaliyas, to which I listened glumly, as disheartened as my men: none of us were used to going home for the winter and expecting the war to simply go away until spring.
He may have been right, old Tuthaliyas, about Hayasa; then he seemed very wrong; and his mismanagement of the kingship was common jest among the troops, despite the dangers of sedition. Almost as common were stories of me and my thirty that waxed out of proportion to our actual value.
In Hattusas, men whom I did not know began to seek my company, high-born women sent me invitations to functions both public and private, and I was the subject of many joyous offerings at the Festival of Haste.
My men and I grew closer while the city made much of us; they were as unco
mfortable as I with Hattusas society, with our decorations and our honors and the endless parade-ground ceremonials at which we received them.
My mother came down to Hattusas and with furrowed brow tried to cajole me into moving in with my wife. The scandal, she said, was such that she could not raise her head in the streets. Remarking that she had been bearing up well enough at the numerous fêtes she’d been attending, I saw a smile flicker across her lips.
Titai had flowered over the season; her litheness was now swathed in woman’s curves. Her joy at my homecoming was overwhelming, and though at first I had little time for her, not even one sigh of dissatisfaction marred her pliant beauty.
On the other hand, Daduhepa was ever more aggrieved, and seemingly felt her sons were weapons she could wield against me with impunity. She wasted much of my time with her society dinners – attended by all the proper, boring people---until I simply let a few of these insipid non-occasions go by without my presence.
Then she granted me my first private audience since returning from the field. Frost paled the ground that day, and I had brought a pair of very old, very, small horses for Arnuwandas.
“Do you not think you are rushing things a little? With the horses, I mean?”
“He is almost three years old.”
“Indeed. Am I supposed to get him a driver?” She had regained her figure; her eyes were traced with green paint, her chin lifted so that I had thoughts of taming her anew. Remembering little Titai, whose hips were not made for begetting, I replied, “Daduhepa, this game is wearing on me. If you would remain my wife in name, then you will be one in truth. I shall put another child in you.”
Her hands went to her throat, fingered the Sun Goddess’ amulet she wore. But I had planned it well: the danger of her with nothing to occupy her time deeply concerned me.
But I did not expect her to come willingly into my arms, to moan and clutch me, or that afterwards her face would be alight with love. When she begged me once more to bring Titai with me and move in, I could only answer her that I could not do so.
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