“Thank you, Zida, but it is the Great Shepherd who must be convinced of my loyalty. I can hardly perform those duties my Sun expects of me without his ratification,” purred Khinti. Then:
“Kuwatna-ziti, you are sprung from one of the oldest Hittite families; in the old empire all the lands you call Arzawaean were Hittite. Yet you speak to me of being ‘Arzawaean’ as if it were an epithet. How would it be, if we all thought thus? How will the people become united, if we hold them divided in our hearts? How---”
“Tasmi, tell her how much you loved the campaigns for Uda; how pleasant you found the battles to reclaim the cult-city Tuwanuwa. Speak to your lady of treaties ignored by Arzawaean princes. Or, more recently, of Mount Tiwatassa and all that was spent in vain there. Mammali’s life not the worst of it. Himuili, walk across the room for us. Tell us while you do it how you love the lower country.” He was up on his feet. “Tasmisarri, you have not spoken of how you love your wife’s people: of how cruelly you have treated those lands, we all are well informed. Are you as vengeful and spiting with this woman in your bed as you are with the cities and towns who did not bow down to you?”
“That will do, Shepherd. Sit down and keep silent until I give you leave to speak again. Khinti, perhaps you had better explain to the Shepherd that you are Arzawaean by adoption only, rather than trying to make him see the error of his Arinna-born provincialism.”
She did that, with closed eyes reciting her lineage through her mother back to the Hattian lords who first became kings of Alashiya. We have controlled the free ports of Alashiya for generations. Those kings who were originally installed by the ancient conquerors yet give their children good Hittite names, and though Alashiya conducts a certain amount of her own foreign policy, she has always been a Hittite protectorate and those who claim Hittite blood make up the ruling class of that country.
I waited a long time before I spoke; waited until Khinti had come and taken a seat by my side and a gulp of wine and sat breathing short fast breaths, straight and unsmiling; until all were tense and the silence strained and no expression showed on anyone’s face, and even Mariyas put aside his wine. “Anyone else? No? Hear then, what we will do:
“My Tawananna and I will do the New Years tour of the god to all his stations.
“Kuwatna-ziti will let his nails grow and appoint some other to his stead in the temples, take the men and chariots I will furnish, plus those not needfully deployed in the Upper Country and those Hayasa will provide and march toward Ishuwa. When the Shepherd’s flock rests in Artatama. I will meet him, and we will both do the ceremony of the borders there.
“Hugganas, can you give me more than a hundred chariots?”
“Two, my lord, but then the Hittites must be responsible for the Gasgaeans respecting our shared border. And I will give you Mariyas, though myself I will stay home and make love this season, with my lord’s permission.”
“Done. Mariyas, I have lost you a wife and some sleep, unless I miss my guess, over the treaty your father signed. Can you battle my cause with an easy heart? If not, it will not go ill between us – I will simply appoint another and you can do as you wish.”
“Uncle, command me,” said the thick-chested step-son of my sister. “Wives, I have many, but adventures, paltry few.”
“Then we are of one mind. Himuili, I give you another chance at a dignity you rejected when the lure of fighting had you in its grip. Be a Chief of 1,000, take an advisory function under the Shepherd. Whatever our sorrows and wherever the blame for them might lie, you are in no shape to lead a column and too valuable a tactician to lose.”
“I bow to my king’s wishes.”
“Zida, I know you would as fain run with the soldiers, but stay and do my work for me while I play kingly games.”
I got that from him, on a chuckle, and coupled with a threat to suborn my wife and make her divorce me, and marry her himself while I was in enemy lands.
“Now, I am concerned. Not one of you has seen the connection between what affairs are rising in the south and what Khinti brings us. If I spoke Hatib’s name, would that jog anyone’s memory?”
I saw the Shepherd, who was leaning back on his elbows with his outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, give a visible start. None of the others were that quick of wit. But Kuwatna-ziti yet smarted under my reproach and my ban of silence, so I let him stew.
“Then, behold: Khinti’s sources are such that she knew what the old snake who was once called my mother has done before we did: she spoke to me of how Asmunikal had filled our Alashiyan cousins with evil tales of us. I am going there, to see what may be seen.” That moved them, but I held up my hand and all subsided. “I am going there, I have said. And when I am there I will ask the king of Alashiya how it is that he has come to write to the king of Egypt advising him to make no new treaty with Hatti, when he himself is a Hattian subject.”
Khinti’s head snapped around, her fingers to her lips, for she had not told me that: Hatib had.
“And while I am there, I will meet with Hatib, whose man brought me this.”
I held out my hand and Hattu-ziti scrabbled about in search of the advisory in question. He found it, put in my palm, grinning though he tried not to let me see.
I held the tablet up. “Here is the news from Egypt’s own chancery: all the dispatches brought in to Pharaoh’s secretaries will reach our eyes as soon as his. Hatib has bought us a scribe from among the Hittites employed by the Egyptians. When I combine my roaming Sutu with Khinti’s father’s agents, none will have intelligence superior to ours.”
I broke the meeting up soon afterwards, turning the talk to horses and chariots in the guise of assigning duties to Hannutti, my Master of Horses.
When Hugganas and his son and Takkuri had departed, and Zida and Himuili followed, announcing that they would be lying in a drunken stupor in the Gal Meshedi’s house if anyone should need to find them, I motioned Khinti to await me without. I did not have to signal Hattu-ziti, who slipped through the door behind my lady, murmuring about slaves to clean up the place.
“Shepherd, why must you put me in such a position? Am I an enemy, that you demean my woman and myself thereby?”
“Am I now allowed to speak?”
“Kuwatna-ziti, do you want to see how far you can push me? This season it is I who must pin you to the wall, if it comes to that between us. And don’t say you’ll run back into the temple. I will not allow it.”
“I should have cut out your tongue when I had the chance. It will strangle you one day. You host a serpent in your mouth and another in your bed. What do you expect me to do?”
“Meet her at the river. Negotiate a truce. You are the diplomat, not I. For the sake of the Storm God and the Sun Goddess of Arinna and all the years I took your orders and counsel unquestioning, please, Shepherd, do not war upon my wife.”
“Which one?”
Now you sound like Daduhepa.”
“And you sound like a garrison commander. You are not yet a king in spirit Tasmi, not yet a king by far. You are a fine soldier and a passable general, and though you are less than might be hoped with regard to the gods, at least you try. But you have not consulted the omens for this campaign. You have set no sacrifices in the temples. The Sun Goddess has not even been informed – if your new girl is so pious a priestess and has the ear of Hebat, my Lady, as she claims she does, then why is none of that reflected in her behavior? All these tablets – where were you when the weather broke and the messengers and envoys from other countries started appearing in Hattusas? Out driving around in the woods after that half-breed, that’s where – and don’t tell me about her royal Ahhiyawan ties: those folk may be worthy of notice in a thousand years, but now they are no better than Gasgaeans. You are so concerned with the international court of opinion – what do you think those diplomatic couriers made of arriving in Hattusas and seeing neither king nor queen, then asking and finding out that no one had any idea when your Majesty the Sun of Hatti would be returned t
o his city, nor even where he had gone nor why? The whole Hayasaean treaty almost turned to offal because you were not here to smooth Hugganas’ feathers. I only thank the Storm God, my Lord, that that demented sister of yours was not with him. Let her torture the Hayasaeans. As for me, I have had just about enough.”
“Stand still, Shepherd!”
I did not ask him what he wanted from me, though I thought of that. I did not tell him that if he would just wait until I had things organized all his fears would disappear. I did not even say that I would take back what I said about the temple: I would have. Instead I walked over to where he had frozen in his tracks at my order and spun him around.
He swung first and so I did not have a chance to say anything at all, only defend myself, thinking: “I must not hurt him,” even while I sought to pin his arms. Ten years older than I was the Shepherd, and I learned that a few silver hairs do not make an old man, though in the tussle on the floor I had gained a seat astride him and was just dragging a submission from his lips when a white-faced Khinti and almost equally paled Hattu-ziti burst through the doors with Meshedi at their heels.
I shouted them out, but they had seen. I rolled off the Shepherd, who was no longer struggling, and sat with my legs drawn up, swallowing salty blood and waiting for my breathing to ease.
Kuwatna-ziti, on his knees, wiped his mouth on a torn sleeve and sank down on his haunches, staring at the floor, shaking his head. After a time he raised it up and pushed back his square-cut mane from his eyes and looked me up and down.
“Why don’t you grow your hair back and give up the temples and come fight with me, as of old?” I rasped.
“Why don’t you cut yours before some enemy hangs you with it, and take heed to the wisdom –” he stopped, of his own accord, and chuckled.
And I found myself laughing also, that we had come all this way and not the smallest iota had changed between us, and thus had gone nowhere at all.
When my sides ached and tears blocked my vision and the Shepherd, gasping, leaned on me for support, I made an end to it, offering peace and sealing it with shared wine.
I had forgotten about Khinti until a timid knock came upon the doors, whereupon I remembered not only my wife and Queen but that these chambers were another’s, and suggested we go up to my rooms.
Once, long ago, we had made a treaty over a girl in Babylonian; the Shepherd got the east of her and I got the west. Now, it was not like that, but it was almost like that as the Shepherd and I renewed acquaintance in the smooth warm sea of wine and the wine led to women less in need of honoring than my new Tawananna.
In the morning she only asked me why the Shepherd called me Tasmi, to which I answered her that though he did, she might not.
Then I bade her help me seek the iron short sword I had long favored, for I could not find it anywhere. While we looked for it I queried her of the intimacy of her relationship with Hugganas of Hayasa, and she answered me that since of old he had been a client of her father’s, and at length since we could not turn up the battered scabbard anywhere in my chambers I settled for a golden-hilted sticker whose butt was fashioned like a two-headed lion and whose blade would hardly have cut wheat, but which I had kept around because of its provenance, said to be that of ancient empire.
As I girded it on Khinti cautioned me not to deal too harshly with my eldest.
“His troubles,” I grunted, “stem from me having failed to deal with him at all. I’m just going to scare him a little. Either he cleans up his own mouth or some other will do it for him. All I intend is to impress upon him the importance of princes remaining princes until they are kings: I would hate to be forced to act harshly later because I acted not at all today.”
To that end I had sent Meshedi earlier to prepare Arnuwandas for a private audience in the huge judgment hall whose twenty-five pillars stood as my predecessor Tuthaliyas’ greatest monument.
I sat upon the gilded throne of kingship with my lituus and my conical crown and my standard bearers and keepers of the cup gathered round. The walls were lined with Bearers of the Golden Lance and pages tended the doors and the hierophants of the temples stoked their fires. All that was different from a day of public judgment was that the Queen sat not in her throne upon my right nor did supplicants and prisoners throng the vast altar hall beyond the bronze bound doors.
I heard the Meshedi’s marching feet before the herald’s strident call rang out and the doors drew back and my eldest in his finest red robe was marched between men twice his height to the foot of my throne’s dais.
At my signal all but two Meshedi drew back from the white-faced child who glared up defiantly at his father. For a moment I felt regret, inundated by the thousand horrors of my youth. For an instant it was as if I became him, damned to a world in which his every thought and word were devalued by his size and age, and I recalled the pain, and the rage, and the fury which must bubble unvented within whenever he would hear that most terrible of advisements: wait until you are a man.
Then I snapped my fingers, and the scribe at my feet piped his offense as if it were upon a regular docket.
“Arnuwandas II, son of Suppiluliumas, Great King, and of Daduhepa, Great Queen, stands accused of casting aspersions upon the person of the Sun Suppiluliumas, Great King of Hatti. How say you? Speak!”
Daduhepa’s unyielding hatred seethed in my son’s face.
“I say,” said he dearly in his child’s voice, “that if the Sun, my father, wishes ever to recover what he has lost, he will make an end to this.” His small brown fists rested on outthrust hips, his chin, though it trembled, was raised high. Over his head one Meshedi elbowed the other, and the second found need to turn his face away.
Myself, I was struggling not to make a show of my surprise, twirling the lituus in my fingers, torn between doubling the punishment I had had in mind or beating the whereabouts of my sword out of him right then and there. But then as I watched the cool gold of the lituus turning in my fingers, I thought what a kingly thing it was that the boy had done.
“Perhaps,” I conceded, “we could negotiate a treaty. If you wish it, that is.”
“A formal treaty, wherein my rights, as well as yours, are written?” said Arnuwandas and I yet recall the low murmur of wonder that response wrested from the corners where the braziers crackled and belched smoke.
“Even the King of Hayasa has strictures upon him whereby he must love the Sun’s head as his own, the Sun’s person as his own self… I will be no more lenient with you, though you be prince. Can you put your seal truthfully to such an indenture, knowing that the Oath Gods oversee it?”
Gravely, my son allowed, with only a momentary squeezing shut of eyes and a surreptitious exhalation of long-held breath, that he would be willing to have the aforementioned conditions laid to him under oath, and I signaled the scribe to begin taking down my words.
We had the treaty made into a bronze tablet and deposited in the temple of the Sun Goddess of Arinna; Arnuwandas demanded proof of this having been done before he would return the iron blade he held as surety.
I thought about it all on the thirty-eight day tour Khinti and I made of the god’s stations in the different towns. With the long slow-moving train of wagons creeping along in our wake I had a surfeit of time to consider my sons and whatever else I chose. And I determined that Arnuwandas’ behavior held in it a lesson never well enough learned between kings and princes. And so to this day I have continued the practice started then: if between fathers and sons matters of obligation and fealty can become hazy and distorted, then how much more so between kings and princes? Every one of my sons who are kings now understand, if they did not in former times, why between each other and most especially with their sire their oaths of allegiance are preserved on bronze tablets and on file in the temple of the Sun Goddess of Arinna, who regulates kingship and queenship.
CHAPTER 17
In the matter of omens taken for the armies, either the gods had changed their verdict or the o
men-takers were more disposed to my favor.
In the matter of Hatib and a sea-journey to the island of Alashiya, all agreed we could not risk it that season. Khinti’s own divination bespoke it as emphatically as my dreams rendered me warnings that shook me from my sleep sweating in the middle of the night. But I had promised her, and would not disappoint her if I lost all on that account, and so said nothing whatsoever about a ship swamped and smoking, her mast and sail aflame, and made preparations to debark.
But my Queen came to me and laid her cheek against my throat and whispered that though she would obey me in all things and knew how much I had hoped to accomplish on our journey, the omens boded ill, and she was afraid.
So I sent an envoy in my stead upon the long sea voyage, and though he made the trip without incident, we were never sure what might have befallen us if indeed we had attempted to cross the sea, as is the way with omens.
But in my surprise at her revelation I had mentioned the blue-cloaked lord who walked, speechless, ever before me; for it was he who had dropped a tablet on my dreampath and what was written upon it that had precipitated the dreams that made me reluctant to undertake a visit to Alashiya at that point in time.
“Perhaps it is the Storm God who appears to you thus,” she ventured.
“The vision never speaks. Nor is it confined to my dreams: I have seen him turning corners before me in the palace, walking on the walls, lurking here and there over the years. I thought I saw him at our wedding feast, though what he would have been doing there still eludes me.”
“You do not think it is the Storm God,” she said, her little brows drawn down.
“I do not know what to think. But I am glad you are not smiling.”
“Smiling? Hardly. With your permission I will ask the Sun Goddess, my Lady, the nature of this evanescent ally of yours.”
“Ask her in confidence, then. I would not want my men knowing their commander is in the habit of seeing things.”
I, the Sun Page 23
