“My lord?”
“The Great Queen lies abed and the priesthood convenes a court in her chambers! Hattusas has become a shambles while I have been gone! How did you come to take these omens considering my concubine? Who gives you the right to adjudge sorcery? Is that not the king’s prerogative? Or have you appointed yourself in my place, and just forgotten to inform me?”
The man’s shaven forehead furrowed, but he stood his ground. Titai, just behind him, stared steadily at me, half supported by the hierodules around her.
“My lord, I took my orders from the Great Queen herself. This woman’s name was entered into the temple; she is a servant thereof. She offered her services in the matter of the queen’s illness, and from her ministrations the Great Queen has suffered. It was by your wife’s –”
“Titai! Is this true?”
The man melted back, and Titai was borne forward by two stolid Old Women.
I forsook my wife’s side and went to meet her. Her tawny hair was tangled and damp against her cheeks; her hands jerked convulsively at her sides, as if she would throw herself against me at any instant.
“I said, is this true? Did you do this?” We were so close I could have kissed her, but I did not. My eyes spoke to hers, counseling silently.
“Yes, my lord.”
Arnuwandas tells me that I stepped back from her. I do not recall it. I remember my own moment of blankness – all she would have had to do was deny it. I had been afraid she would refuse to speak, as she sometimes did, and put herself in danger thereby. It had never occurred to me that she would admit to it, though it had occurred to me that indeed the priest might speak the truth.
“Do you know what you are saying?” I wondered into the utter silence.
“Yes, my lord.” The two Old Women took firm hold on her then, as all about us a buzzing like bees began. The high priest of the Sun Goddess put away his tablets, fussing long to hide his satisfaction. I heard more than one sigh of relief.
I said, “There will be no further oracles on the subject. No trial at the river, no additional interrogation, no sessions in the cellars – nor another with me.
“Titai, take this moment to recant, or be ‘Ti –’, bereft of name, banished from Hatti, my wife’s ills taken upon your head –” Quickly, I pronounced my judgment, the lightest possible, while the priests and priestesses murmured their disapproval, and my little concubine began visibly to tremble.
“Get back from her, you hags! Titai! Once more: did you do this? Are you responsible for my wife’s condition?” At that moment Piyassilis’ control deserted him and he began to sob. Titai, swaying, reached out a hand, pulled it back, and once more affirmed her guilt.
“Why?” I spoke harshly, forgetting our audience, but she only whispered that she had done it for me.
“Take her,” I ordered, incredulous that she would speak so and planning to seek her later and find out why.
As a man will, when the ground rumbles and his life tumbles stone from off of stone to lie about him in ruins, I searched among the wreckage of my heart, hoping to salvage what I might. I had done as well by Titai as any man could do. I would send her to one of the islands with which I had relations, I thought, and visit her whenever I could.
But when I went down into the cellars to say everything that I, High Priest of the Storm God, could not say under those circumstances in which she was indicted, I found that she had had little faith in me. Who gave her the dirk I never determined. When I had arranged her on her prisoner’s pallet and said what I had to say to ears which could no longer hear me, and when I had smoothed her hair back and kissed her cool lips and covered her bloodied chest with a blanket, I took the dirk and hacked off the braid I had been growing since first manhood and closed her little fist around it.
I went from there straightaway to the stables, putting Arnuwandas’ blacks in harness myself. The day was nearly ended, and I drove into hills on which the dying sun dripped fire. Flaming tongues flashed from the mouths of purple dragons whose underbellies were of purest gold and whose venom, dribbled over the distant hills, made it seem that the mountains leaked flames of their own. Death always turns my eyes upward; perhaps I believed, even then, in kingship in heaven. But notwithstanding, on days of death I always recollect the weather, as on days when the gods have touched me outright.
I drove to a hill sanctuary a short distance north, past the burial grounds, past the rock sanctuary. Later I put a finer altar there, and caused other shrines to be built; my second queen and I put our seals thereon, and a town grew up where that night there existed only a slope and trail.
I tethered the blacks and walked from where the cedars break. It was deep dusk and above me I heard low chanting and saw a glow as the priests lit their torches. So I waited until the singing died away, then climbed up to the altar of the Storm God of Hatti which crowned the hill. It was plain then, no columns adorned it, just the old worn stair and the rectangular terrace defined by, the torches’ line.
When I had satisfied myself that all the priests had gone down the other side to their lair, I spoke to him:
“Storm God, my lord, hear me. See, I am praying to you. Take off this weight from my spirit. Show me the truth. A man comes to his god saying: ‘I will do what is right. Show it to me!’ And his god shows it to him. Show me in a dream, tell me by incubation. If evil has been done, let him who has sinned be shown to me: let punishment be meted out. Let the lightning come down and point him out to me. Let the thunder chase him across a hundred empty fields so that he gets lost and cannot find his way. If any have broken their oaths, let these persons be made known to me. If a woman has foresworn the king, may it be as if she has foresworn You, my lord. And whosoever has foresworn the king, Your steward, may it then be as if he has offended the whole company of the gods. May no seed come from his loins nor out of her belly; may the spirits of the dead come up from the ground and take them, any that you the Storm God have decreed. And may I know it! May the Storm God make a servant out of me; may I be a son whose deeds are welcome in thy house. If a son comes to a father, then that father tells his son what is right; he answers his questions; he does not let him go home unsatisfied; he shows him the way. Show me what has angered the gods and let me take the cause of that anger away and make things right.”
After I had done that I poured out a libation I had brought and while I was doing so it began to rain.
CHAPTER 12
“After I spoke the curses,” I said to Kuwatna-ziti, “I came back to the citadel and waited to see whether the god had indeed heard me. First a temple official coughed his spirit out during the night; then one of the priestesses was bitten by a brown spider and she also died. So I thought the gods had heeded me, even though that very night my wife went up to heaven to become a goddess –” This euphemism for death I could not speak in those circumstances without smiling; seeing me grin, the Shepherd frowned. Though he had come down from Arinna immediately upon receiving my official summons, by the time he arrived, Daduhepa was dead, Titai was ash upon the wind. He had brought a peace-offering; the orphaned babe I had sought to ease Titai’s hollow belly. This baby came too late for her, but showed me that Kuwatna-ziti had submitted to me in the matter of my concubine. So I took the infant anyway, a last service to my dead girl, giving him to my sister’s care. Thus my relations with Kuwatna-ziti became once more as they had been before Titai’s sorcery drove him away. And when he refused to utter her name or hear anything about her, then I would recall the orphan, Zidanza – the apology he was too proud to speak – and let it go at that. I needed Kuwatna-ziti.
“Tasmi, you question too closely the will of the gods.”
“Still,” I insisted, “it cannot be that my every curse is efficacious, anymore than my every triumph in battle is to the gods’ credit, while every defeat is debited to me. How is it that all good is ascribed to gods, yet all evil to man? If Daduhepa died of my curse, then she died because she had done evil, not because I pointed that e
vil out!”
“Tasmi, as Tabarna, you have the Thousand Gods of Hatti behind you; your curses brought a reckoning upon the guilty heads of those involved. Do not take the gods so lightly. If you are wise, you will henceforth save your curses for treaties and kings. Let us speak no more about it, but consider matters at hand.”
Matters at hand were twofold: firstly, the chasing down of my son, Arnuwandas, who had bullied a gatekeeper into letting him out Chariot Gate with his blacks before first light, and had not returned when the day was half spent and my sister finally worked up her courage and informed me; secondly, the question of Hugganas, King of Hayasa, who slept away the toil of his journey in a palace bed with a pair of twins I had provided while Kuwatna-ziti and I, with six Sutu supporting us in chariots went searching for my son in the cedar forest; above the rock sanctuary; even up where the Storm God lies in the hills.
All the while I was driving and Kuwatna-ziti was lecturing, I kept wondering whether my curses had truly brought low the evildoers in the matter of Titai and Daduhepa – and if so, whether it might not be a good idea to have those curses laid on me by Tunnawi the Old Woman removed, since it was her magic and her murder that started all the others dying.
I spoke of this to Kuwatna-ziti, and he gravely agreed it would be wise to have the ceremonies performed promptly, especially since her imprecations had it related, as curses will, not only to me but to my seed.
It was good, sensible advice, but when I heard it I jerked my horses down on their haunches so that the Shepherd was nearly unseated and the teams behind split left and right to avoid trampling us. But the Sutu oaths at my driving which rolled back to us on the wind were nothing compared to the vengeance I swore – not only upon Kuwatna-ziti and the institution of Old Womanhood, but upon the Thousand Gods themselves – should ill befall my eldest son.
Kuwatna-ziti said nothing until I had turned back to my team and shaken their reins, at which command they lunged forward, unwilling to be thought in the least bit hesitant to obey. Then, very deferentially, the Shepherd remarked that he, too, was concerned about the young prince, but that the blacks were nearly ten years old, and Arnuwandas was surely competent to drive that team which had been under the Sun’s tutelage, so long.
I recollect looking sidelong at him, as I charged through the Sutu to the head of the wedge, to see if he mocked me. He did not; he was in earnest. The time had come for Kuwatna-ziti to acknowledge the Tabarna he had helped make: he had just done it. It felt strange, though I had long desired it. In all ways but one did the Shepherd from then onward become as valued a vassal as any brother king later won to my cause: never, in all these years, has he stopped calling me Tasmi.
When we finally found Arnuwandas, and the wreckage of his chariot and the corpses of the blacks and, close by, a bear impaled upon a spear wedged into some rocks, no one said a word – not even the Sutu, who will mutter and make signs over a smoky fire if the wind blows wrong. This bear was about half the size retelling has made him, and all bears are slow, irritable, and hungry at that time of year. But still, it was no small feat, albeit the gods doubtless helped my son who, when we found him, was sobbing over the blacks, one of which yet struggled to rise while his blood soaked into the ground.
After I had lifted up the boy and determined that – though shaken and hysterical – he was sound, I carried him over to where my Sutu crowded around the slain bear lying face down amid the rocks with the spear’s head protruding from its back.
Although I eventually convinced Arnuwandas that he bore no guilt for the loss of the team (finding it prudent to ignore how he had come to be there in the first place), I could never convince the Sutu that my son was not divine, and from that day forward, none of mine enjoyed less than slavish devotion from the mercenaries.
We butchered the bear and took it back to Hattusas, wrapping the meat in cedar bark to fool the horses (who were not fooled but bore with us for Arnuwandas’ sake). Thus when the Hayasaean chieftain sat down to feast with us, he sat on the right of my eldest who in my mind had won a place at any man’s table – and ate of his kill. Afterward, the skin was displayed to all, exactly as if the hero who had performed the feat were old enough to be awake past the rising of the moon.
My sister took that opportunity to pull me aside.
“How can you do this? He will be worse! He should be disciplined, not congratulated!” she hissed through angled teeth marring what had come to be an otherwise peerless beauty.
“Then he will be worse, worse!” I mimicked her. “How perfectly did you behave when our father died? I seem to recall that you were much tended by everyone about.”
“You recall nothing of the sort! You were not even there, hero, but ran for the hills and missed the whole funeral – all but the last day, and that only because the Meshedi dragged you! Shall I –” she faltered, began again, stopped, silenced by something she sensed in my demeanor.
“That is right, sister, I was not there! And if Arnuwandas, who was like a mountain through the entire thirteen days of mourning, and who did more to console Piyassilis and the baby than anyone, feels like running off his grief, I will not move to stop him.” I looked over her shoulder draped in ebony curls, at my son, trying desperately to hide his fatigue and stretch himself a bit taller as our Hayasaean guests toasted his prowess.
“Look at him, sister: is that not a king, born, sitting there?”
She peered up at me out of almond eyes ringed with sooty stibium and red with weeping, and agreed that Arnuwandas II was a child of which his grandfather would have been proud.
“You could make his spirit proud, yourself,” I said, laying an arm on her slim waist and heading her back toward the feasting board.
“Tasmisarri – pardon me, Suppiluliumas, what is it you want? Surely my duties as nanny to your brats are not sufficient cause for this sudden show of brotherly affection.” She slipped from my grasp with an irritable shake of her body, not unlike a dog shedding water. “No, my caretaking of your children is not what you have on your mind at all.”
I stopped so that she must, for the Hayasaeans’ eyes were on us, rather than the displayed bear’s toothy grin.
“I am right, am I not? It takes something more momentous than concern for your offspring to bring you, so solicitous, to my side.” She had not forgiven me for deporting our mother; until she died, she bore that grudge.
“You are right – it is my concern for you.”
Her laughter pealed; glancing about my guest-filled hall, I thought I should have chosen a better time, prepared her aforehand. Though she was a woman, she came out of Asmunikal’s belly and if I had been born with her wits, I would have put the entire world under tribute by the time I was twenty.
“You are getting too old to remain a maiden.” That silenced her mirth. “And too meddlesome to remain a princess. Have you considered wedding some suitable lord, perhaps some fellow king of mine, and thereby attaining the position for which, by nature, you are eminently suited but to which, while you remain a Hattian princess, you can only aspire in vain?”
“Bastard! Demon’s spawn! You cannot mean this. You cannot!”
Kuwatna-ziti arose from the board and started toward us with a countenance showing equal measures of annoyance and trepidation.
“I mean it. Take your time. Be calm. I will not force you to accept a man for whom you have no tolerance. I am only telling you to start looking closely at those men you see brought to my table; eventually, you will have to choose among them.”
She stared at me; then at the Hayasaearr chieftain – a man ten years my senior with a lion’s head on which black hair curled thickly, shot here and there with silver; then at young Mariyas his son – the warlord who had distinguished himself at Himuili’s side – who was of an age with her, but shorter than she and thrice as broad. Then, with a wail, she fled into the Shepherd’s arms.
CHAPTER 13
Shall I tell you of every battle that I did between that night and the consumma
tion of the marriage of my sister to Hugganas of Hayasa? Shall I detail each campaign by means of which I shored up the foundations of my kingship and insured my sleep? I paid for Hayasa’s chariots and foot soldiers in the same coinage as procured for me autonomy on the plateau, the necessary precursor to the restoration of Hatti’s boundaries and her glories: my youth. Like the various meals set out for the Gods, I gave it up in sacrifice. And like the steward-king who comes and eats of the sacramental meal, the ravenous New Empire gobbled up my years, swallowing them in great untasting gulps, I sometimes think – without notice, without pleasure, without satiation; the only import of all my sweat being the satisfaction of an empty bowl so the heavenly herald may cry: “It is finished!” as they do when the Sun consumes the Storm God’s meal and steals away back to the palace. When the bowl of my life is licked clean and all that remains is a wine-soaked pyre and the flame, someone will doubtless say that ancient, formula over me. And if indeed I have gone up and become a god, then the Storm God and I will laugh about it.
Then shall I be free from trepidation and forgetful of long evenings of agonizing over what is and what is not, and the compromise between the two that kingship perpetually demands.
It was hard for me to send my sister to Hugganas, “King” of Hayasa, harder than I imagined it might be, when first I was bedazzled by his offer of fellowship and beguiled by the strength of his arm. A man does not become king in Hatti without laborious tutelage in foreign affairs: yet nothing I learned had prepared me to send a woman of my own blood into the arms of a barbarian who arranged marriages between his own sons and daughters and who took his brothers and sisters, even his offspring, to bed without compunction. Hence the stringent warnings and conditions I levied on Hugganas, tribal chieftain more than king (though for diplomacy’s sake in Hattusas he was referred to as my brother). And yet, I have had no vassal more steadfast. From those days down to these, relations have been friendly between our two countries, notwithstanding the trend lately to speak of the “Azzi” interchangeably with “Hayasaean” – even in those days Hayasa and Azzi were a confederacy: mere fashion decrees which name is applied to those lands over which my sister and her husband rule.
I, the Sun Page 17
