I, the Sun

by Morris, Janet

  But when I arrived at the stables in the morning it was only one son who awaited me: Arnuwandas, his little shoulders squared as if he faced his death rather than his sire.

  Two shamefaced Meshedi were waiting with him; the other two had gone in search of Piyassilis, who had, they said, “escaped.” I dismissed them with orders to call off their brothers who chased my second son. Too many times had I fled such men, twice my size, running me to ground on orders from king or prince.

  My son stood still for a moment, watching the Meshedi depart, his fingers stroking the amulet Hatib had given him. Then, looking up at me, in a small voice he said that one of his horses was lame and therefore he could not accompany me, all the while backing slowly into the shadowed stable.

  Not following, I leaned against the stable wall and suggested he let me look at the ailing horse. The time it took for him to produce the animal was time I dearly needed. As I gave certain orders to the stablemen who appeared from the shadows once my boy had disappeared into them, I wondered whether Arnuwandas would return, or find that his fear was stronger than his pride and follow Piyassilis into hiding.

  When at last Arnuwandas led his grey-muzzled old horse before me, I found I had been clenching my fists. A cursory examination proved the ancient one a victim of age’s infirmity – those swollen joints would get no better. But as I worked my way leg by leg around the horse, Arnuwandas moved also, always keeping the beast between us.

  Then, having given the old horse ten times the scrutiny he deserved, I straightened up and, leaning my elbows on the swayed back, said, “When a horse, even a prince’s horse, cannot serve, he deserves service. This old man has many sons, who carry on for him. If he were mine, I could put him in the south pasture of the Storm God to live out his days; I would choose from among his children a fit successor.”

  The boy gave me his mother’s cold stare.

  “But,” I continued, “I see you have problems similar to my own, and cannot risk a loyal servant’s loss with no replacement in sight. So, if I may advise you, you might accept aid from me, an adherent who seeks your good will.” By then the stablemen had brought up my blacks, not in the traces of my war chariot, but hitched to Arnuwandas’ own. The near horse snorted, striking out with a forefoot, and his sire wrinkled up his white-whiskered muzzle and let out a trumpet that made me reconsider all I had said.

  Only Arnuwandas remained unmoved; there was – and is – a great deal of Daduhepa in my eldest son.

  Fleetingly, I thought he had not understood. When I was his age, had anyone given me a seasoned war team in its prime I would have been halfway to Arinna by the time the giver had finished speaking.

  But there is a great deal of Daduhepa in Arnuwandas.

  So did he come to ask me: “What is it, Abuya, to become a wolf?”

  I found a tangle in the old horse’s mane and straightened it. “In the laws it says: ‘if a man takes a woman and makes her run (elopes with her), and if avengers go after them, if two or three men die there will be no compensation, for he has become a wolf. He has, like a wolf, taken what he needs to live; he will die, if need be, to protect it; he expresses his nature and cannot do otherwise. In the matter of wolves and the matter of kings, whoever stakes a territory, or claims that which his nature demands, cannot be held accountable for the force he applies to take and retain it – his success or failure are accounting enough. In Hatti, we do not bring a man following his nature to task for it: it is not right.”

  Still the boy looked at me unblinking.

  Very slowly I removed my arms from the horse’s back and started walking around it toward him: “If you do not understand, then this is my fault. When I was your age I had seen the head-wolf at bay, seen desperation upheld by strength and free from qualm. You have heard me call the Shepherd a wolf: he is a wolf for Arinna. Sometimes I think he is also a wolf for the Storm God.”

  When I had reached his side of the horse and he yet held his ground, I squatted down. “What did you think it meant? And who is the wolf?”

  Very gravely, through sticky lips, he replied, “You are the wolf,” and I thought, ‘Now he will run.’ So I stayed very still, like a man hoping to snare an eagle, saying only, “Who told this to you?”

  “Mother. Hattu-ziti. Zida. Everyone. They say you are a wolf for the Hatti lands; that you run in your wolf-form at night and cover the moon with blood; that –”

  “That is enough!” I dared not laugh: I made my voice deep and grave. “Do you believe it? That I run, I mean? If I were a wolf, would I not howl in the palace? The wolf of which they speak is a spirit-wolf, no fleshly beast. It resides in my heart. And if they say I am a wolf for Hatti, then they are not wrong, just speaking a subtle sort of truth. Men do not become animals, no matter what Hatib has taught you, any more than gods have the heads of beasts.”

  He was fingering his little cat-headed lapis amulet, and I thought that my wife had been right – .I should never have let him keep such intimate company with Sutu. After a thoughtful silence, he cocked his head, and his eyes flickered toward the black team, their coats shining blue in the morning light. “If you are not really a wolf,” he said, wanting to believe, but not quite daring, “then why does mother say that you are?”

  I thought of a number of answers, and discarded each settling on: “If your brother Piyassilis called you a snake because you two were fighting, would you be a snake? Would you slither through the palace halls?”

  “No.”

  “And if you beat Piyassilis every time you fought him – I am assuming that you probably do –”

  “I do!”

  “Then, if he said that the reason you beat him was because of your snake-magic, that it was your fangful, venomous bite which weakened him rather than your superior warrior’s skill which bested him – thus making nothing of a victory fairly won – would it be true? Or would it only seem true, though he said it so many times that others began to say it, and eventually to believe it? And if people began avoiding you because they had heard you were a sorcerer who could turn himself into a snake – people, remember, who had only heard about you from others and did not know you themselves – would it then not be as if you were indeed a snake? Would you not be just as fearsome and powerful as if you could really do snake-magic, simply because people believed that you could?”

  The answer might have been written in the packed earth between his feet, so intently did he stare at it. “Yes. I think….” He raised up his face, eyes tearing, and threw himself into my arms, sobbing that he never did believe it; it was only Piyassilis who believed.

  Lifting him up, I carried him to the chariot and set him down inside it, whereupon I asked if he did not think he might be able to sniff out his brother, and handed him the black team’s reins.

  While we were hunting Piyassilis, I mentioned that since Arnuwandas had accepted the team from me, in the way of kingship he owed me a service: thus Piyassilis was soon convinced that his father was no hairy-muzzled howler-at-the-moon. Then with my eldest’s permission I took back the team’s reins – only because I knew the way, of course – and set a pace that had my two brave little kinglets clutching the braces for their lives, but made up for the time I had lost while proving my humanity.

  We caught the army just entering the southwest gate and the procession took on the tone I had intended. Driving into Hattusas before the armies at harvest would raise the hearts of the dying. Ours was a triumphant return – and a rich one. Also, as I had intended, my sons were not unmoved. I made two wolves for Hatti there that day, for all the people to see. Arnuwandas drove the lathered blacks and Piyassilis bore my shield. The light of kingship shone from their eyes and the roar of it dried their mouths and made them breathless. Flushed with honor and glory, they cried out wordlessly to the crowd who ran up with outstretched hands to touch them. For Hatti, and for two boys destined someday to rule her, it was a good beginning.

  But for Daduhepa and myself, the morning’s revelations boded ill; inde
ed I had prepared much to say to her, but when the procession ascended to the inner citadel and the heroes formed up to get their due before the halentuwa-house court, my wife was not awaiting me.

  The ceremony, however, was. It was my first of these as king: when last I had observed this rite I had been lurking among the lauded, ready to take down the king when he emerged into the day.

  As they wrapped me in the Great King’s robe and replaced my helmet with the conical crown, the pages within the halentuwa-house informed me hurriedly that my wife’s condition had greatly worsened; that healers attended her and my presence was required urgently by Hattu-ziti as soon as I was finished with the ceremony. When I demanded to know if my chamberlain was with my wife, I was informed only that he was unavailable.

  I sent a page to find Hattu-ziti and one to my wife’s bedside and a third to my apartments to fetch Titai to the courtyard. By then the little halentuwa-house was filling with dignitaries and the clergy necessary to the ceremony, each followed by a Man of the Golden Lance, a Meshedi, and a page.

  I missed two responses before I could set my mind to it, but before my sons, the heroes and the ranks of the armies, my adherents and my detractors, I soon fell into the rhythms of call-and-answer I had learned by rote. Himuili was there, in the forefront of the triumphant, hairy as ever, with darkly handsome Takkuri close beside. Mammali, whose one eye was better than most men’s two, stood squat and immovable with a cloth-of-gold patch over his empty socket. Lupakki had earned his honors with me in the Salt Lake campaign, so I decorated him first.

  While I read aloud of deeds done in the Upper Country and congratulated my commanders, Kuwatna-ziti’s absence struck me ill – the Shepherd did me yet another disservice. I had not officially commanded him to come down to the capital previously, fearing that he might ignore my summons, leaving me no choice but to punish him: no man may disobey an order from his king.

  As Himuili received his honors from me and stepped back, I motioned to my brother Zida (who stood ever on my right in those days, as conscious as I of how easily we had usurped the kingship here a year before), then whispered a terse command, while Pikku, the little pale scribe who knelt close by, wrote it down. If Kuwatna-ziti stayed much longer in Arinna, it would be because he lay in his mausoleum there.

  That done, I decreed a feast for the valiant, made the libations to the gods, backed into the shadows of the halentuwa-house to the singing of an appropriate hymn. Then foreboding struck me squarely: still no Titai nor Hattu-ziti had appeared; not even one of the pages I had dispatched returned. Hidden from public view, I threw off my robe, thrusting the crown into a page’s chest, and walked as fast as is kingly down the covered hall that connects the palace and the halentuwa hut. When I was within the residence, I ran.

  Encountering the page I had sent to find Hattu-ziti and hearing he had met with no success, I put him into the hands of a convenient Meshedi with orders to help him find another trade, and left it at that. Pages and Golden Lancers are exactly the useless decorations that they seem, but what else we would do with the soft-palmed sons of palace officials and numerous scions of gods who come out of the bellies of temple priestesses, I do not know. If a Golden Lance’s bearer errs, his sandals are unlaced and he serves his duty thus, mortified, and of this shame such men stand in mortal fear. So I was not any more surprised that the page had been unsuccessful in turning up Hattu-ziti than I had been at receiving his summons to an unspecified meeting place – in the first place.

  Hattu-ziti was, as I suspected, in his own apartments, which bore no resemblance to living quarters, but looked like an archive just after an enemy sack.

  ‘‘We missed you at the Halentuwa-house. And my wife, also. Are the two events connected?”

  He was sitting on the floor, amid piles of tablets forming a half-circle around him. I knelt down beside him. At one end of the circle of piles, the uppermost document had its origin in the far south. Opposite I recognized a letter from Samuha. “North to south? What’s this? Well? Can’t I get a civil answer? Why are secretaries summoning kings, Great Queens absent from their duties, and clay tablets purloined from the Sun Goddess’ temple decorating your floor?”

  “Does the Sun, my lord, have doubts about me? Because if you do, then what I have to say may cost us both more than this whole thing is worth.”

  “What is it?”

  “Daduhepa is seriously ill. You yourself must have seen it. But you have not seen what the Old Women are making of it. Whatever possessed you to enter that namra into the temple?”

  It had been so long since I thought of Titai as “namra” that for an instant I did not know whom he meant. “It is not within your scope to question my motives.” I picked up a tablet, threw it down; it cracked in two.

  “Is the king, my lord, aware that the Great Queen might well be dying? Every omen taken has said this, and the Old Women have been busy ascertaining that the cause of your wife’s illness is sorcery: Even now they gather to divine who the sorcerous killer may be!” He had been with me a long time, since Samuha, long enough to know I would hear him out, whatever the matter. Yet he hesitated, pulling at his nose. I waited unspeaking until he continued.

  “Surely the Sun recalls how often Your Majesty has left Titai in my care…. Those foreign ways of hers, she did not hide from me.” He fingered a small bag strung on a thong at his neck. I have seen these bags in increasing numbers, the last few years; men today will wear anything around their necks: human teeth, feathers, all manner of cultic devices fashioned from clay. But then, charms were uncommon, heretical.

  “– Nor am I the only one to whom Titai has given an amulet or potion… When we lived in the upper city and you fought for Tuthaliyas, all the men used to come to her to heal them.” He looked up, as if expecting me to berate him.

  Instead, I rose, saying, “Is that why my concubine was absent from the halentuwa-house? Does Titai attend my wife in her sickbed? Or shall I find them both in the temple of the Sun Goddess?” I hardly heard my own words over the pounding of my heart. I could not say to Hattu-ziti that I had not known about Titai’s sorcery, or that I had known and forbidden it, any more than he could say to me that my concubine was about to be indicted for performing sorcery upon the person of Great Queen, my wife.

  “In the Sun Goddess’ temple,” said he, very low, “the Old Women and the Sorceress and their acolytes divine. Your wife lies abed in the residence.”

  I got slowly to my feet, hefting the weight of defeat up with me. If things had gone so far that Titai was divining her own doom in the temple, then the outcome rested in the god’s hands.

  With murmured thanks, I left him. At least they would not surprise me with it. I proceeded to my wife’s side as if I were yet unknowing, and when the most-nearly-divine of the hierophants, and the two eldest among the Old Women, and a robe-swathed Titai whose eyes were so big that they seemed entirely black, requested an audience, I had them admitted.

  Their addition made eleven people in the Great Queen’s bedroom, the rest being healers, handmaidens, and my sister who sat quietly in a corner biting her nails. When healers work there is always fire: this and that burned around the room; white and grey and black smoke mingled so that, though I had rolled up the curtains, the chamber was filled with an odorous pall. A middle-aged Old Woman droned tirelessly from her table by my wife’s head. When the doors were closed behind the newcomers, I silenced her, so that all that could be heard were the fires crackling the cauldrons’ contents bubbling and the labored breathing of my wife, who saw and heard nothing, but bespoke us unintelligibly from her own private world. To the first of these intermittent speeches I made reply, but not thereafter. The limp hand pale at her throat was cool, dry, and unknowing when I took it.

  She had spent freely of her waning strength to appear before me haughty and contentious two nights ago; on my way here, I had decided that she must have contrived some illness to blame upon Titai. I had been determined to drag the truth from her, by force if
need be. There was no forcing my wife even to recognize me; everything I had thought to say fled my mind at the sight of her, from whom all life seemed to hasten while I watched.

  I heard a flurry of disturbance from without, and as a Meshedi slipped through half-opened doors I saw why, and instructed him to allow the crown prince and Piyassilis to enter. Fate comes upon us when it will; wisdom is no respecter of age. They had ridden as princes before an army whose triumph and glory were profit from a deadly harvest; now they would become acquainted with that commodity in which all kings trade.

  Before the adults, my sons were dry-eyed, sitting where I placed them, one on either side of their mother, even keeping silent as I decreed they must.

  There is a gift the gods have given me of which I have not heretofore spoken: in those moments when a man eyes the unknowable, the world gets back from me; I am like a man encased in armor from head to foot so that only his eyes feel the wind. My heart becomes quiet. No pain nor fear nor doubt assails me, though later I suffer all which, while I am imperiled, the gods allay.

  In the wilds of her affliction, Daduhepa moaned and Piyassilis grabbed her hand and buried his face in it.

  “Now that we are all at last assembled, Great Ones, perhaps you can tell me by whose order my concubine was absent from my side this day, and at whose behest minor priests attended me while those present tended more pressing concerns?”

  A priest of the Sun Goddess, who regulates kingship and queenship, stepped forward and began to explain what had been done in the way of sacrificing and omen-taking in the matter of my wife’s condition, the surmise of each investigation undertaken, and to what and whom the divined answers portended.

  From his initial chronicling of unfavorable bird omens through a display of a clay liver, I kept silent. At last, when Titai’s name had been thrice mentioned as having been the subject of an oracle considering her complicity in these affairs, I stopped him. “And will you tell me how you came to ask questions like these?”