I, the Sun

by Morris, Janet

  I looked down on the Egyptian whom Hatib held so highly, and he was no bigger than my wife who chatted with him in her most charming fashion.

  Let me say of my Queen only that she had chosen to flaunt both her figure and the riches of Hatti, and admirably succeeded. Those effects of my former mother which had belonged to the state and yet which no man dared demand from her at the time, my Queen wore about her neck and waist and on her fingers and in her ears.

  “Ah, King Suppiluliumas,” said the Honorable Egyptian upon our introduction, “I have heard your chariotry is the finest in the world. I would love to see them, and your horses.”

  “You will see them,” I promised him.

  Without twitching an eyelid, he rejoined, “Might I construe that as an invitation to drive up to Hattusas? I have a pair of mares which you might find worthy, should you see them, and another which I would dearly love to breed to one of your famous stallions.”

  “Is this an official request?”

  “Everything I say, my most renowned lord Suppiluliumas, is official. If I ever step out from under the shadow of my Lord of Diadems, King of Upper and Lower Egypt –” There followed a number of titularies evidently necessary before the speaking of the Egyptian King’s name, “– if ever I should be acting upon my own initiative, I assure you I would make such an inconceivable act well known aforehand.”

  “Oh,” I said, “then you expected to see me here, when I myself only learned of your presence last evening?”

  “The Sun of Hatti suspects treachery? No, my lord, there is no treachery, only good will between our two countries.”

  “That is nice to hear. I was wondering whether the cautions of my host here, and the grousings of a certain upcountry pretender had come between us.”

  “Ah, you make a jest at my expense, I think, and before I have even given you the gifts I have brought all the way from Egypt, at the behest of his Majesty –”

  I crossed my arms, broke in upon his recitation of titularies. “Let us leave out all that. You call me Suppiluliumas, and your master Pharaoh or something similarly succinct, and we will both know who is meant. And I still want to know how you came to bring me gifts when none knew I would be here, let alone meeting with you.”

  “My suspicious Great Prince of Upper Retenu, I had thought to leave the tokens of my – master’s brotherly regard with our host to ship northward, since the coastal shipping these days is much disrupted, and the inland trading routes so plagued with bedawin brigands and Hapiru bands and border skirmishes between the Syrian princes –”

  “You mean between Tushratta and the princelings he endeavors to swallow, do you not?” I broke in, piqued at being called ‘Prince’.

  “Most revered king, I am trying to tell you what you want to know,”

  Over his shoulder, Hatib gave me a knowing look and a cautionary headshake.

  “Say, then.”

  With a sigh, the little Egyptian continued: “So, this being safest for so rare and precious a cargo, we had thought to let Alashiya, whose ships are harried by none, get the gifts up to Hatti. They seem to have no trouble getting other shipments to you“

  “And I am not going to tell you how.”

  “Lord, I am not a devious man.” Someone snorted, and I turned just enough to see who it might have been. A lean, dark warrior in the last flush of youth lounged against a pillar near the doorway, neither announced nor marked by anyone until then.

  Turning my eyes again on Lord Hani, I realized that my wife and sons had disappeared somewhere with our host.

  Hatib had slid off the wall where he had been sitting and was approaching the young man in such a way that Lord Hani’s attention was not diverted from his speech.

  “Will you allow me to present these tokens to you in honor of –”

  “Yes, yes, do let me see them,” I murmured, wondering where my host and wife and sons had gone, and stepping from between little Lord Hani and the young warrior to see what would develop.

  What developed was that Hani stopped in mid-word and closed his mouth and I saw in him then what Hatib had said lay under his disarming manner.

  “My Lord, the Prince of Amurru, Aziru,” said my host as he hurried through the arch from wherever he had gone. A quick glance showed me my sons by their step-mother, pretending to pick among the delicacies laid out for our pleasure by the arch.

  Aziru stroked his short, black beard, fingers smoothing its point, and thrust himself from against the pillar without his eyes ever leaving Hatib, who had positioned himself where he could protect his Egyptian master most effectively no matter what move the young Amurrite might make.

  “Who’s your hunting dog, Hani? Call him off,” said the prince of Amurru very quietly.

  Lord Hani hissed, and Hatib lessened his menacing stance ever so slightly.

  “Let us all have a drink and sit to table,” proposed the Alashiyan king hurriedly, his hand on the young, somberly dressed prince’s arm.

  “I came here to talk to him, not to drink. I don’t drink with my enemies, nor with their trained apes, no matter how well they mimic their masters.”

  “Aziru, what use is all the trouble I have gone to in this affair if you will not –” pleaded my Alashiyan in-law.

  “Who is he? It was supposed to be just the little monkey and me. And who are they? Did you bring me that girl, there, as evidence of Pharaoh’s good will? Or those warrior cubs? I have no taste for boys.”

  “I, my lords, will answer that,” I said to Hani and Khinti’s uncle who were both white as bleached bone and struck dumb with horror. Only Hatib, who well knew me, was smiling, and he ran his hand over his mouth and wiped his grin away.

  My boys were up straight with their hands at their hips waiting to see what I would do, ready to avenge Khinti’s honor by the look of them.

  The silence I let thicken until I and the young warrior in robes the color of clotted blood stood close enough to count the hairs in each others’ noses, and until he stepped back a pace, then stopped and met my eyes once more.

  Then I said, “I am Suppiluliumas of Hatti,” and offered him my hand.

  “Aziru, son of Abdi-asirta of Amurru,” said he, taking it very slowly and very carefully as a flush rose in his cheeks.

  “May I present the Queen of Hatti, Tawananna, Khinti,” I motioned her forward, and she quit the viands table and came to my side.

  “My apologies, noble Queen,” murmured Aziru most sincerely. And to my sons, when I called them forth, he bespoke similar sentiments.

  I adjudged him only a few years older than Arnuwandas, despite his fine black beard, and saw in my boys the same thought.

  Then the Amurrite prince turned again to me and said through unmoving lips: “My lord, I have heard great things of you in strange places.”

  “And I have heard less of you than I might wish. Doubtless we will remedy that.”

  Then the Egyptian insinuated himself into the conversation as smoothly as a sharp knife slices blubber, and the Alashiyan King drew us into the palace proper to the feast he had readied.

  During it, Aziru gave me a toast and when he had made it he proposed that since I knew nothing of the affairs in which he and the Egyptian representative were embroiled, I would be a better arbiter than even the Alashiyan king, whose function it was to provide an unbiased ear, but whose ear, in Aziru’s reckoning, was not unfamiliar enough with those matters under discussion.

  At his words I frowned and said that though I would be glad to hear the case and render judgment, I would expect my judgment to be adhered to by the parties concerned, and that under the circumstances this might not prove acceptable.

  This saved my host from death by terror, by the look of him, and earned me an appreciative smile from the Lord Hani, but frowns from my sons, who plainly had already decided the case, whatever its particulars might be shown to be, in the young warrior-prince’s favor. As had I.

  And so, though I could not in conscience arbitrate between them, I sat
with them while affairs of the coastal principalities were discussed, and when I had heard of the terrible things this Aziru had done to the sovereign nation Ugarit’s fleet, and the even more awful persecution his father had undertaken against certain individuals who served as Pharaoh’s agents in the cities of Byblos; and the way this King of Amurru had been increasingly swallowing up smaller countries on his march to the sea, I became intensely interested in places which before to me had been no more than foreign-sounding names thick with the romance of palm and incense.

  This curiosity about the southern coast was increased by Hani’s most obvious displeasure at his faring with the young Amurrite, and I vowed that when I returned to Haiti I would make a thorough study of these tiny nations and strategic Egyptian-controlled cities. Then, I just tasted their names: Sidon, Tyre, Byblos, Ugarit the Kingdom, Aziru’s own Amurru, only recently recognized by Pharaoh as a sanctioned Kingdom under putative Egyptian control. So far went Lord Hani, in the heat of his anger, as to threaten in plain words to remove Aziru’s father from both kingship and life itself.

  Upon hearing that, since the Alashiyan did not, I felt it necessary to intervene. Should I not have, Lord Hani might go home thinking he could someday threaten to lift my butt from its seat upon the throne in a like fashion.

  “Is this, too, official Egyptian diplomacy? This man is son of a King, a Crown Prince, unless his bearing deceives me, duly recognized in kingship by even your master Fierce-More-Than-Panthers-Southern-One-Thousand, or whatever his name is. Surely the jackal does not take down the wolf! Leave off, Lord Hani, or all us monarchs of Retenu, the Upper and the Lower, might find in your unilateral manner reason to band together.”

  “My bold Hittite, think what you are saying!”

  “I am thinking, fey ambassador, I am thinking. Either this man is a prince and son of a king, or he is not. If he is, then you are not the one to be threatening to dethrone him in such a cursory fashion, as if all that makes a king is your master’s sanction.”

  Aziru of Amurru only flicked me a momentary glance, and I saw in it that despite his manner, the prince was worried, for it was like the look of a trapped beast who has been allowed a chance to escape, only still does not believe it.

  The Egyptian, in a flutter of engaging phrases, backed down from his position: saying he had meant this, not that, and we had misunderstood his intention, and lastly that his master so-and-so of this-and-that would go no farther in the affairs of the coastal cities than would insure the safety of Egyptian merchants.

  Whereupon the talk was changed deftly by our host to the Sea Peoples, whose point of origin none knoweth, and whose piratical activities were confined almost entirely to the barques and galleys of “Upper and Lower Egypt;” and the young Amurrite breathed an audible sigh of relief and quaffed a full goblet of wine without lowering it from his lips.

  The conjecture ended with the service of a sweet tray filled with candied figs and dates and honeyed loaves rolled in nuts and something else that when I swallowed made me lightheaded even before Khinti’s soft whisper in my ear warned me that the treat was intoxicating in the extreme.

  I took her hand from my arm, and kissed it, and asked her if, so far, I had met with her approval.

  She allowed that I had.

  I did not say to her that I had only done what I would have normally, any more than I had told her that her advice and Hatib’s had been exactly opposite. But I thought: She gives me the Alashiyan view, and Hatib gives me a Sutu’s view. This Aziru speaks for the desperate little kings being squeezed like grapes between the trough of Egyptian might and the trampling feet of each other. And Egypt, she sits and waits and collects tribute from each and all, and when they have destroyed one another she will still be sitting there, licking her sphinx’s paws and waiting for offerings to be placed at her feet. And I thought how it must feel to commission a lake built for your wife and hand a piece of gold to each of your subjects that all would feast when feasting was decreed.

  “What are you thinking, husband?”

  I had been turning the wine in my hands, trying to slosh it round the rim as high as I might without letting it spill over. “That it is getting late.”

  “My friend is right,” bespoke the Egyptian, who overestimated my good will. “I beg the Sun of Hatti’s indulgence, for I would show the gifts I brought in celebration of the Good God’s Jubilee.”

  Now, I had no gifts for him, and I did not know whether he had any for Aziru or my host and cared less, though I could see Khinti’s brow knit. I bade him present what he would, and as I said it my wife slipped her chair, and was soon lost to sight in the stream of servants who appeared at my host’s call to clear away the banquet’s remains.

  The hall in which we sat was commodious, flagged with alabaster and slate, pillared with limestone, big enough to hold therein an audience or a troupe of dancers or whatever its king might choose.

  While around me slaves bustled and Hatib gave low orders to one of the stewards of the house and the Egyptian strutted around arm in arm with the Alashiyan king making expansive gestures, I had a moment when the only ones who might have overheard anything I should choose to say to Aziru were my two sons.

  Leaning over the table to grasp a rhyton whose silver sides were beaded from the wine within, I said to Aziru: Have your father write to me. There are things for us to discuss. Or better still; come up to Hattusas when you can.”

  The young warrior grinned widely, and raised his cup to me, then turned aside and asked my eldest if he might see the dagger that resided in so kingly a sheath.

  My wife returned with a look comprised both of relief and uncertainty and slipped into place beside and shushed me when I asked her where she had been.

  “Look, the bearers are coming.”

  “Indeed.”

  And they were: Egyptian pomp is not legend for nothing, though later Lord Hani apologized for such a thrown-together affair. He had not, he reminded me, expected to oversee a presentation.

  The “presentation” commenced with him making a long speech in which he copiously praised his Lord. Next, bearers brought chests on poles and behind them more bearers brought a carrying chair which was enclosed, and all about this curtained box creamy skinned little Egyptians cavorted, playing strange instruments and tumbling.

  I remember thinking that it was a scene contrived to enthrall just the sort of person this Hani must have conjectured me to be.

  Upon a drum roll, all stopped in their places and the redoubtable Hani began with a flourish to open the first small but opulent chest. From it came a silver box whose top was inlaid in the Egyptian manner, and a palette of ivory. These he gave to my wife, after showing them about for approval, and with a snap of his fingers sent the chest- bearers away.

  I would rather have had the chest.

  The second chest was larger and finer than the first and contained measures of precious oil in decorated pottery jars and I then understood why the men bearing it in on their shoulders had been slow and cautious as they made their way down the hall. The chest, it seemed, was mine this time, for the whole thing was laid to one side.

  “Now, my gracious lord, to those gifts for Your Majesty, without further delay.”

  The whole entourage moved up at a pace with the bearers of the tall, spacious enclosure and they all knelt down. From within its latticed screens a door was opened, and a slave came up and another and they let down from out of the miraculous sedan a series of steps like a ladder that unfolded until it touched the floor.

  Then went the Lord Hani over to the gauze-lined gilded cage and down the stairs came a woman all wrapped in white linen, whose feet upon the stairs were dusky, and whose hand when Hani’s took it was dark as night.

  From around me came a murmur, and I slid down in my chair and found need to pick my teeth, keeping my eyes on Hani, who had now escorted this person to a place a little away from the kneeling bearers and the house of screens and returned to the steps once more.

&n
bsp; As for the first girl, all I could see was her upper face, and it was like obsidian.

  Again Lord Hani reached up to take a dusky hand and again a white-swathed woman whose feet were ebony dusted with carnelian descended the stairs, and Piyassilis observed in a loud whisper that since there were two of them perhaps I would give them to my princes, so as not to split up the pair.

  Khinti gasped and I heard a slap ring out, but did not even turn to see which had had the misfortune to receive proof of their step-mother’s ire, for Hani had placed the second girl by the first and returned to the carrying chair once again. Aziru leaned forward, elbows on the table, and with cocked head squinted into the doorway, remarking that old Shining-In-Truth had never offered him anything but a pair of copper bracelets, and those had had links joining them.

  I chuckled politely, and then Lord Hani announced: “Behold, the magnificence of the gift of friendship from Pharaoh (Life! Prosperity! Health!) unto his brother, King of the Kheta, Great Prince of Upper Retenu.”

  And I beheld first a pointed-toed leg, then a thigh like finest diorite, then her foot found the stair. Now, black skinned people are rare in the north, but for the Ethiopians in Egypt’s army or an occasional Nubian slave. But what blacks I had seen had not given me even an intimation that such as the girl who descended those steps so fluidly might exist. She was dressed in only a wisp of golden cloth about her loins, the ends of it hanging down before and behind, and golden anklets between which a delicate chain ran, surely for show. Her breasts hardly jiggled on the stairs, their nipples were painted gold, their shape as perfect as the rest of her. She stood before her handmaidens proudly, her gilded eyes calm upon me and her mass of black curls swaying slightly. Then very slowly, taking evident pride in the eyes upon her, she knelt down on her knees, and her attendants did the same.