I, the Sun

by Morris, Janet

  Nor were my duties only religious; I had the youngest court, in the history of Hatti, and such as Himuili and Kuwatna-ziti were not so pliant as the aging aristocracy would have been under a king such as I. Unease and dissent were subvocalized among the remaining elders, and as a block they sought to weigh us down, to slow us, to act as a buffer-state between us and the precipitateness they saw in our coming campaigns.

  But there is a thing about buffer-states: on one side of them is the frontier; beyond that, the enemy, so that no matter how one tries to stay the process, the buffer-state is consumed by the expanding empire within it, until there is no buffer-state anymore; just the enemy eye-to-eye with the empire. Notwithstanding how far one treks, regardless of how many countries a man brings under his control, one fact remains ineluctable: wherever there is a frontier, there is an enemy just beyond it.

  So as I mentally expanded the frontiers of Hattusas, absorbing those neutral and those undecided and enlisting them to my cause, always and to the exact extent that I strengthened my position did my detractors bring up reinforcements for their own.

  My throat became sore from talking and my patience thin from stretching, and often I considered glumly the disadvantages of clearing away the brambles of my court with sword and ax. But I did not, lest by that law which I have just described, I finish only to find more grown up in their place.

  I ordered the palace smith to make for me a full arsenal of good iron weapons – even to fit my chariot with iron rather than bronze. This ostentation had a purpose beyond irritating the conservative: the ice-colored metal, long reserved for gods and kings, strengthened my image: they conjectured that my heart was made of it, I gave them proof of it. If the people saw an omen in the bleeding metal, it was no less true than a thousand other omens concocted in the past by kings and priests to serve their intentions. Half of becoming invincible is becoming renowned. I was much concerned with making Hatti fear me, so that the fear might spread to my enemies and numb their souls. Good iron is mystical stuff to most: kings do not have it in Babylon, nor in Egypt, nor in Mitanni; they try to wheedle it out of us by sending costly treasures, so that we must dispatch precious gifts in return; even now, only infrequently do I send it.

  I spent many days working with the smith’s products, accustoming myself to the differences in balance and weight of my new weapons. I could come to no terms with the first ax, and the smith and I drew in the dirt together once again. At length he brought me another, this one thinner, with a marked flare to its head and longer claws on the tearing side. The sword, however, was good on the first try, we only weighted the hilt, to get a feel like my old one. I gave the first ax to the Storm God, but still he did not break his silence and speak in my heart.

  The room in which I slept overlooked the joining of the palace and city walls and a day’s drive of countryside, forest and plain. One morning when the trees were first budding I came in from an interminable wrangle with the Lower Country lords – just up from the winter’s recess which they so piously observed--and found there a great oval mirror of bronze, hinged on a standing frame gilded with electrum, placed near the tall window opposite my bed.

  “What is this?” I snapped at Titai, though I knew perfectly well what it was; and even whom that looming warlord behind his curtain of bronze, haughty and challenging, might be. He and I turned our backs upon one another; each taking a moment of privacy, for kings must not show such emotion as I then felt. In that first glance, before recognizing myself, I had seen him who I had become. Had it happened in a night, this transformation of Tasmisarri into Suppiluliumas? Had the form come with the name? Or had it simply occurred so slowly that, glimpsing myself in pool and stream and shield, I had not seen? I wore a turquoise cloak, an accession gift from Amenhotep III whom we call Nimmuria, Great King of Egypt; I wore the conical crown of Hatti; and I wore the aspect of a lord glimpsed in moonlight by a boy on a hill. For an instant, my counterpart/image misted and softened by the haze of bronze between us, I had thought it even him: the blue-cloaked one, come again to wisk round a corner and rub his hands together at the edges of my vision. But while I, the Sun of Hatti, wore my black hair braided, lately my visions of the lord in blue had shown him with his hair cropped off square at his neck. All this I experienced in a blink’s time, then saw myself, and found need to turn away, to growl at Titai.

  She answered: “It is a gift from your wife.” Softly, disapprovingly, she added, “Do you see in it what she wishes you to see?”

  “Must I have weighted words from you, too? If your tongue curls like Daduhepa’s, you may find yourself sharing her bed instead of mine. Can I not have peace even between the women of my house? How can I unite the land if I cannot unite the palace? Mirrors from Hatti are not fine enough for my wife, who must import better.” Thinking ill of all things Egyptian, I ripped the, gift-cloak from me and cast it to shroud the mirror. “And my concubine is not content with being a foreign sorceress so inept as to be unable to protect herself from discovery by Old Women and sniveling seers – is not content even now, when a convocation of priestesses has lodged a formal complaint against her; but is content indeed to flaunt her ignorance and disinterest of all things Hittite; is content not to –”

  I had my hand in her hair by then, and her back against the window sill. Windows, in Hatti, extend almost from floor to ceiling. Though they may be curtained, these were open to the day, and high above the ground – high enough that my view of the countryside was unobstructed by the palace walls.

  Totally yielding, tears streaming from wide eyes, Titai conquered me without a word, in an instant. Her terror and her abject pliancy dousing my rage, I pulled her against me and said unkingly things for a time. For I was disquieted: Titai had in no way earned my wrath; I had long ago sworn to myself never to vent my temper on her; I had made gentleness my custom. “Titai, I am… pressed. Patience – Bah! I resolve to acquire it, but I have little. I am the Sun, Great King: words only! The lords ring me round with words. One thing is said, another done.” She murmured, I let her go, and she sought the bed and sank, trembling, onto it.

  I faced her. “A man can be called king in their mouths, and not be king in their hearts. I did that which I must; many hold it against me. They say that I sacked Hattusas. If I did, it is because she would not yield. And if they fear me, since they will not love me, then that is the next best thing. Later, they will love me: my deeds will speak for me. Even as at first you served me in fear, and now serve in love.”

  “I loved you from the beginning,” she demurred. Titai seldom wasted thought on things that did not directly concern Titai. What did concern her was the Old Women and their feud with me over her, grown open since the death of one of their number. “What will you do, Suppi-luli-umas?” she asked, dutifully sounding out my new name in her musical, foreign accent. “About the priestesses, I mean?”

  “I want you to choose a Hittite god, and I have arranged with the Old Women and a seer from the palace to oversee your instruction….”

  She was shaking her head slowly back and forth, neck bent, so that her tawny hair brushed her knees, whispering no, repeatedly. But I insisted. “It is the only thing that will quiet them! Once they take you in hand, the hierodules are responsible to me. Otherwise they will never overlook your foreignness, nor the loss, on your account, of Tunnawi, one of their mighty. In a sense, I owe them a person, though the king cannot truly be held accountable. But there is our advantage: they demand a person; the person is you. If I cede them your education – which is long overdue – I do not have to be concerned for your life. What is familiar is less threatening than what is strange. They will come to know you, to see you are no evil witch, and my troubles with the clergy, and, hence, the great preponderance of unfavorable omens now attending my every plan and proposition, will drop off like a snake shedding a too-small skin. Now, Titai, I have not asked you for anything, ever. Now I am asking this. I will not force you, nor even order you, only say that if you behave with l
ove in your heart toward me, you will come to my aid…”

  In the end she did as I asked her, though she was right and I was wrong – as wrong as I was to feel humiliation because Hattusas did not love me. Everything said of my first year of kingship is true: I sacked Hattusas, entire, and all her entrenched bureaucracy with her. I have treated conquered cities more kindly. Twenty years later I would treat the capital city of my most hated enemy more gently than in those days I treated Hattusas. I occupied my capital as a foreign town. I took nothing on faith, not one allegiance on trust, and those who opposed me I ground into dust. But it is from the easing of that siege, by my very passage from warlord-in-possession to overlord, that I derived the vision that I have made law as far south as the Niblani Mountains. And if I can now look Egypt in the eye and spit upon her pythoned brow, it is because I was tireless and implacable in the face of exhaustion and despair.

  It is a lonely thing to be a king unloved by his land. It is anguish deep beyond measuring, to be a general separated from his armies. Power’s curse comes in an ache behind the eyes from reading and folds around the belly a snakelike girdle of fat from sitting. Therefrom had Tuthaliyas turned to drink and Arnuwandas before him to endless rituals aimed at placating the gods. I aimed my rituals at my nobility, that each be an arrow in my quiver. I would make them what they had to be: true vassals, as tight under my command as had been my thirty in Samuha. To that end, I abstained from drink, lest I stumble from it as my stepfather had done.

  But the fear of losing my armies to other men while I must stay in Hattusas, in those days, I could not allay. To leave Hattusas would be to lose her; Himuili had resigned his titulary as chief of 1,000 in favor of a field command – had done it before the ranks of the armies, so that I had no choice but to accept. He was possibly the only man who could have done it and survived, but the fact that he had done it left me with no alternative but to face the result: I must remain in Hattusas while my armies went out to war. I consoled myself with my new-found wisdom, saying that the real war was in Hattusas this season, but though it was true I did not believe it, and conjectured endlessly as to how I might hurry my consolidation attempts and where I might meet up with the armies in mid-season, should I have a working court by then.

  I cursed Kuwatna-ziti endlessly. The Shepherd had gone deep into the temple, shaved back his forehead and cut off his nails and taken up the work of the Storm God with ardor. Now, while I most desperately needed him, he mixed the God’s dinner and worked his diplomatic skills on cattle and sheep due for sacrifice. I sent a series of more and more querulous messages, inviting the “Man of the Storm God” down from Arinna, but always he “could not come.” Finally, white-knuckled with rage, I summoned the highest official of the Storm God’s temple to my palace yard, where I was working with Hatib at wrestling behind the residence.

  “Am I not ‘High Priest of the Storm God’?” I demanded, pacing before the man, who knelt nose in the dirt, and would do so until I saw fit to bid him rise. He sneezed, and agreed that I was.

  “Get up. I want Kuwatna-ziti here, and he will not come. I am the Sun, am I not?”

  The priest, arisen, agreed that I was. His nose was pale with dust, but I did not look away long enough for him to wipe his face, but transfixed him with a hostility which was not feigned. This man, whom the gods favored with their counsel, had lost no time informing me of the fact – in truth, he continually informed me of intelligence gleaned from gods’ mouths which countermanded my orders and made naught of my most meticulous plans. “Then, as the Sun, as your Tabarna, as Favorite of the Storm God, I order you to present Kuwatna-ziti here by the full of the moon.” This I was saying very slowly, as if the priest might have trouble understanding.

  “But – does the Sun, my lord, realize that I am but a poor priest? I cannot order –”

  “Have the Storm God order it! Begone!”

  Hatib, who had been engaging a Man of the Golden Lance in deliberate conversation, sauntered casually away from the steps leading diagonally up the inner wall to the gatehouse. I have not spoken much of Hattusas and her fortifications. Later, she came to wear all the gilded armor the labor of my years has provided. In those early days, she was aglitter in my mind only: where I saw great crenellated bastions only rubble awaited the building crews; the postern gate was but a clay tablet crudely sketched, shelved until time and funds allowed its undertaking.

  “Hatib, show me that hold again.” The wrestling of Egypt is equally of mind and body; perhaps because they are slight, they have developed it, but in any case I found lessons more far-reaching than brawling practices in Hatib’s southern wiles. If overbalancing a man upon his left allows you to throw him to his right, how much more in the land of scheme and counterscheme could such a ploy be worth? What we learn from a man’s eyes is dependent upon only what we have learned about men; Hatib had taught me a great deal more than canny holds in those months he had been wrestling me into the dirt. He had taught me so much that when he crouched down beside me – when the king squats, no man may stand erect – I felt sure of my capacity to throw him. And I did throw him, because as he squatted down I came up out of my crouch and pulled him forward while levering myself onto his back; in a moment I bestrode him in the dust, holding his one arm pinned with my knee and twisting the other up behind him, whereupon he yielded with that thick, hissing laugh of his, and I rolled away, so that we both lay in the dust. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the Golden Lancers hunched down uncertainly, not daring to either lie down or stand up, their gaudy uniforms gathered about them:

  “Hatib,” I grunted, sitting erect, “when are you leaving?”

  He stared, raised an eyebrow, and sat up also. “Is the Sun, my lord, getting messages from the mountains?”

  “From your manner: it speaks plainer than the mountain gods. Don’t ‘Sun’ me, either. I cannot convince you otherwise?”

  “My friend, my lord employer, young king, we both know that you can order.”

  “And make you run? And an outlaw?”

  The big Sutu caught at the braided lock growing above his right ear and tugged on it. “There is that. I was going to ask you to release me. Most of mine would be content to stay.” He paused, perhaps waiting for me to speak, tracing with a finger the thin, white scar that collars his throat. When I said nothing, he added, “How did you know?”

  “The Great Queen took exception to the parting gift you gave Arnuwandas.” Daduhepa had taken exception to more than the amulet Hatib had given my eldest son: the boy had picked up such oaths from Hatib, in pidgin Babylonian, in Egyptian, in Hurrian, that had he been a man, he would likely have been brought to trial for blasphemy.

  “The Bastet? She is a potent goddess, fit for a kinglet, who must be fierce as She upon the field. She and Istar of the Battlefield, they are one and the same.”

  I did not say to him that the cat-headed, full-breasted woman’s body carved in lapis that young Arnuwandas now wore around his neck bore little resemblance to our own battle-goddess, though I was aware of the convention that equated them. “They are Oath Gods, both. But I think it the womanly form to which my wife objected, as women will.”

  We both laughed, as I had intended. When he sobered, I asked, “Hatib, how is it that you, a Sutu, can teach my son Egyptian curses? How is it that a man with the style and size of a Libyan can invoke Kubaba” – I had not forgotten that moment, in his consternation, that he had called on the Hurri god while bending over Titai’s unconscious form, “write Babylonian, and give gifts like pharaoh’s?”

  “When a man becomes Sutu,” said Hatib stiffly, “he forgets the answers to those questions, Great King, my lord.”

  “Hatib, let us walk awhile.”

  We did that until we came to the stairs, and climbed them, coming out upon the wall. Leaning between two of its plastered teeth, I bespoke my proposition to him: “Hatib, if you are willing, you shall wander wheresoever you choose, while serving me as if you were yet in Hattusas.”
r />   “How may that be, my lord?” murmured Hatib, trying not to smile.

  “Continue to advise me in matters of foreign affairs.” Hatib, whose sources of information seemed limitless, had at my order been gathering intelligence: of Mitanni’s King Tushratta; on the machinations of the Syrian princes; about Alashiya, where my mother and most of my relatives now abided. “Your holdings here in Hatti, I shall protect and increase, even as you roam.”

  “And all Hatib must do is whisper in the king’s ear from afar?”

  “By caravan, by messengers bought with silver. You already know what I would hear. Soon enough and thanks partly to you, my boundary with Mitanni will be farther from Hattusas…”

  “Kizzuwadna?” He guessed rightly.

  “Once I have reclaimed that country, Tushratta and I will be neighbors.”

  “And then?”

  “Who can say? Perhaps we will live in peace, the king of Mitanni and I.”

  Hatib chuckled. “My lord, I bow down before you. I only wonder how I may fulfill your expectations from my destination: I go from here to the Two Lands.” He meant Egypt. “Still, it could be done. All true knowledge comes to reside in Pharaoh’s hands – or in his scribes’.”

  I was staring, in spite of myself. A man who robes himself a Libyan, shaves his head to a mere lock, and commands Sutu should not dare to speak so casually of Pharaoh’s court. But Hatib, I was beginning to learn, fits no man’s mold, even when that man be king.