“Put a robe on you that is less revealing; not even the Shepherd is that privy to my intimacy. And leave me alone with him.”
“Yes, my Sun. Husband? I love the head of the Sun, and the soul of the Sun, and the very own self of the Sun, more dearly than my own heart, my soul, mine own self. I did not know how dearly until I thought I knew too late.”
“Go do my bidding, woman, or I will give you cause to love me less.”
Her reassurance smacked of pity. Condescension was more intolerable to me than falsehood, more execrable than dogs in a temple, more odious than Tushratta’s malefic gloatings would surely come to be.
Out scurried Khinti, closing the doors just before the bitumen pitcher I threw reached her, so that it crashed into shards. I lay back, holding my right shoulder which was not yet ready for such exertion as throwing pitchers, and cursed until my vision blurred inexplicably and my voice broke and I found need to swallow repeatedly. Inside me was a bruise that seemed to extend about the whole of my person, impalpable but unbearably exposed. Soon Kuwatna-ziti would come to tread on this aching soreness, and then Lupakki’s eyes would have to be met. I wondered wildly for a moment if a man of thirty-two was too old to start a new life as a Sutu. The most awful of my nightmares had not prepared me, not for the failure so dismal and so complete. A man fears such a thing so much he does not think of it. Faced with the unthinkable was I from this moment onward: I would have to learn to live with it. Three years and countless minas of silver and horses and chariots would not soon be forgotten by the Hittite people, not when all went for naught.
Walking is not so easy after so long abed.
But I was doing it, stumbling around the side of the room with a hand on the wall. If I kept going that way, I would come to the window, but that was not what I sought. I slumped down into the chair before its table littered with woman things and had to wait until my palms dried and the rivulets of sweat stopped running down my throat and I was no longer shaking. When that was done, I picked up my wife’s hand-mirror and set about removing the gauze swathing my head.
It was slow work but not painful. My hair had been washed free of blood and bound back. Nowhere was the bandage clotted to the wounds. But the white cloth was voluminous, unwound, and my arms were tired momentarily, and then cold, and then full of pinpricks from the effort. When all was removed, I leaned back gratefully in the little woman’s chair of cane and cedar, and peered like Khinti at my image reflected in the silver.
I was not any longer as pretty as I once had been. Descending from out of the new, angry part in my hair above my right temple was a wide garnet scab that ended in my right eyebrow, which of a sudden was raised slightly, arched as if in sarcasm. The other end of the rough scabbed channel was back at the top of my head, the distance between a long, straight slash. .
Now, before that time I was not gentle of aspect, but arresting enough in, the way that angularity and strength of feature are handsome: my cheekbones and forehead are wide and high, my jaws flare out from chin to match them. My nose drops hawkish and severe from a protruding brow under which almond brown eyes are hidden deep and secretive, narrow slashes curved a little like a Hittite sword. My mouth has never taken to smiling, and frown lines bracket it, ridges of flesh that fall off into a shadowed downslope of hollow cheeks.
The whole of my countenance was transformed by the puckering, furious scar.
I sat back from it, lay the mirror down not really distressed. I had been curious, but the mirror sobered me. I have taken other scars, but none so fearsome as that. I stripped off the woolen robe, and took further stock. About my right shoulder, wound under the arm and up over the muscles that rise from collarbone to neck, was more bandage. The wound revealed was by the look of it an axe blow, and I remembered taking it. A ‘v’ a finger’s joint deep had been carved out of the upsloping flesh. If I had been carrying less muscle there, I would not have survived to write this, or to wonder, as I did then, how long it would take for the gouge to fill in.
Nothing else worthy of mention did I discover: I had been abed long enough for bruise to subside and laceration to disappear.
It was not until then that I realized how close I had come to finding out once and for all if there is kingship in heaven. I vowed three things:
I vowed never to take a son of my loins with me into war in my own car, for I had learned that such was one too many items about which to be concerned when battle is joined.
I vowed to squash Tushratta like a pregnant sow under my chariot, and render down his blubber that I might grease my wheels with it.
And I vowed to acquire a winter training camp on the plains of Syria, where my men and my horses could condition themselves ere they fought the tropical fight again.
I had just promised myself those things and was edging my way back from chair to bed when the Shepherd was announced and then entered to find his naked king feeling like a blind man along the wall.
“Tasmi, must you flaunt the Gods?” This he said as his sweeping glance took in the table and chair strewn with bandage, the rumpled bedcloths, and myself. With a whisper of sandals he was at my side, his arm slipping round my shoulders. “You gave me your word you would rest.”
“What am I doing?” I grunted, leaning against him, “Am I hunting boar?”
“You are sweating like it. Now sit there. Good. Not on those, they are soaked. Here,” and the Shepherd stripped off his mantle and cast it round me.
“Leave off, Kuwatna-ziti,” I pushed his hands away. “I need no one to dress me.” The mantle was patterned with lightning bolts, gold, blue and black, edged with an embroidered procession led by the Storm God himself astride his cultic bulls, Serris and Hurris. I fastened the gold chased closure at my right shoulder, over the axe-gouge, passing the embroidered edge first under my left arm, leaving it free.
“You need someone to do it, if your wife will not. She leaves you in soaking bedclothes, in a, curtained room at midday in the hottest month of the year. Tasmi, do not look at me like that.”
I had not been listening, but thinking how little he had changed in all this time. In kirtle of matching striped cloth, with a gold arm-bracelet about his ample bicep and a fillet binding back his shoulder-length hair, his aspect was no less imposing than it had been that night my mother commended me into his care before the elder Arnuwandas’ mausoleum. Time rode lightly on the Shepherd; his back was not bowed nor belly sagging, and only at his temples where the silver hair grew did his form at any way acknowledge the passing of the years. He went and rolled up the curtains and let the day in, then gathered all my strewn bandage and folded it neatly.
“Tasmi,” he said softly when all that was done, as he stared at something I could not see beyond the embrasure’s frame, “I am the bearer of some startling news. The temples are jammed with sacrificers; the lines extend into the streets; they are gathered in the citadel courtyard.”
“I do not blame them. What do they want, my life? The Oath Gods will have to take it from me.” I lay down then, my back propped against the carven cedar board, not caring if I showed weakness.
“No, no, no,” murmured the Shepherd, and turned from the window to drag over a claw-footed chair. Only when he sat in it, smiling slightly and looking at me like a mother at her newborn, did I ask him what course he had in mind, and only when I realized he was going to sit there mute until I did.
“Tasmi, you misunderstand, but I do have an action to recommend, and I want your word that you will do what I say.”
“Shepherd, I am weak, and the top of my scalp has been lifted from the bone beneath, but let me assure you, my mind is not addled. I will not do what you or anyone says without first hearing it.”
“Tasmi, the people are lining up for you in the temples. The sacrifices they present are not from malice or fear, but from joy and relief. Never in, anybody’s memory has Hattusas seen the like of it – not for a living king. It started when they heard you were dead, yet it is still growing. You are goi
ng to have to appear to them… if you listen closely, you can hear the singing. All the steps to the public court in the citadel, and the court itself, and even the streets are filled with them –”
“Wait! What did you say?”
“I said that you are going to have to appear to them. I have found a kingly litter in the storage magazines, and –”
“No! I am not going to be carried anywhere, nor displayed to harvest the sympathy of a folk that until now would gladly have nailed me like a bird to the gates. No, not like my crippled father, and in his very portable sick bed – I cannot. Do you hear –?” I was up, not knowing how I had done it, and dizzy. Kuwatna-ziti reached out the flat of his hand and pushed me backward, hardly more than a shove. Yet I staggered and my calves brushed the bed frame and I sank back down and put my head in my hands, only to wince at the pain as my fingers pressed against the naked wound.
“You must, Tasmi.” I did not raise my eyes to his, but stared at my feet peeking out from under the mantle, and the floor beneath, all of which rippled disconcertingly.
“My Sun, the time has gone for mindless audacity, and for charging like an enraged bull, and for swinging an axe at the chariotry’s point. The time has come for kingly words and kingly vision, and out of these alone may ever emerge a nation sufficiently united to be the sword you long to wield, with which you may someday do the ultimately kingly deeds of which you dream. If you throw away this opportunity, you will never have another. Be a king to your people; accept their love; be man enough to take it when it is offered. Or, in truth, it is all over for the lot of us.”
“I must be man enough to what?”
“To let them see you in your weakness, which they understand, and console you in your defeat: it has made you human in their eyes.”
“I am not going anywhere in a litter.”
“By the time you can walk about unaided, the moment will have passed.”
“Shepherd, you do not know what you are asking,” I heard the pleading tone of my words, but could not call them back. Those sincerely adamant brown eyes pierced me through.
“Anyone else I would have skewered to a gatepost for this;” I growled, at last.
But I agreed, finally, on the condition that I not be carried among them, but only shown from the portico overlooking the square, and that he would go away then and leave me alone; but send Lupakki to me forthwith.
When he went, he forgot his mantle, and I pulled it close about me and sat a time in bitter contemplation of this price exacted from me by the Gods, my Lords.
“Is it not enough that I am borne home to my bed senseless, bearing heavy wounds, defeated?” I demanded of the empty air.
Evidently, it was not enough.
“Is it not a surfeit of disgrace I have suffered already, that I must be trundled out before them like old Arnuwandas? Must I be forced into the nightmare of my childhood? Is not my present humiliation sufficient to conciliate you, my Lords?”
“No. Yes. No,” said the silence.
I determined that when I was well I would have it out with the Storm God, my lord, once and for all.
Then Lupakki came, and I girded myself to receive him.
Army kilt was about him, and sandals, and he bore his plumed helmet under his arm, and knelt down as he would never have thought of doing in the field, and when I commanded him to take his ease, shook his head so hard his earring rattled, and went down on one knee and pressed my hand to his forehead and began detailing his failings as a commander.
Since I had been ready to detail mine, and as remorsefully, it struck me funny, and I began to laugh. I laughed until I choked and Lupakki had to assist me. When I was eased on my bed, I made him sit himself down thereon and his countenance was screwed into a dark sad knot of features that constantly twisted, remaking themselves anew.
When I had my breath back, I wiped the laughter from my eyes and said to him that he must not be so grave, that I was not mad but only startled to hear from his lips all the things I had expected to be spouting bitterly to him.
He managed a grin, but it faded quickly. “Do you need anything? Drink? Clean bedclothes? When I had your care in Samuha, you would not have slept on these.”
“But you are no longer my aide, and I need more from you than a neat tent and a well-whetted blade, these days.”
“Command me, lord.”
“Tell me about the battle – after I went down, I mean.” He looked away, and back. “I have filed a statement, my King… I am guilty of –”
“Nothing but obeying orders.”
“Piyassilis –”
“Was in my care, not yours. Please, I will not detail my failings to you, and you grant me the same grace. How many did we lose?”
“Forty-four chariots, more than half of our foot. They’re still straggling in. When I saw you go down, and the boy, I was half-way down the slope. A cry went up: ‘The king is down.’ Then the Mitannians began howling: ‘The Hittite king is dead.’ I called our thirty in on the horn; they could not help their troops, the fighting was hand-to-hand. Then I rode over everything I saw, my own included. I could think of nothing but that the prince might yet live, and that they were not going to mutilate –” he broke off; started again. “There were two Mitannians in the iron car, driving it; I got them with arrows and your horses bolted. I took off after the horses, once the thirty were gathered in. But we were only in the forefront of the Hittite retreat. They chased us all the way to the Kizzuwadnan border, but the troops were scattered, so they thinned themselves trying to pick everyone off. There must have been twice as many of their chariotry, to begin with, as we had… I just wanted to get the prince to safety. We thought you were dead… all that blood, and your scalp laid open, and the chunk the axe bit out of your neck. I killed my first team, hid in the bushes until I could ‘commandeer’ a Mitannian team, and that was when we realized you were yet breathing. Then I had about forty cars that had rallied to me, and we drove all the way to Hattusas without a stop except to change horses. Your own chariot we left in Kizzuwadna.”
“Piyassilis?”
“The prince? He has a head like good iron, and a heart to match. His foot was yet skewered to the car when I took the reins, and when he woke from his little nap, it was all I could do to convince him that it was too late to regroup and counterattack.” He looked up, obviously hoping I had heard all I craved to hear.
“What of the Mitannian in the gilded chariot with burnished helm, him who drove the white team with the plumes – was it Tushratta? That was where I was headed when the spear caught me.”
“The sharp-bearded, gaudy warrior? If it was not him, it was someone very close to him, a prince perhaps. When he heard you were down; he pulled up his team like he was reviewing troops and bellowed all manner of curses upon us and lauded his gods and from his car blared the clarion’s call and the order to pursue…”
“Yet he did not offer to take a surrender?”
“No, my lord.”
“Nor did he single himself out to fight with me, or exchange any words of challenge… why so undecorous a battle between two kings?”
“If you will pardon me, my lord, from what he howled at us, I think he feels we are not honorable enough – you never sent a challenge to the Gasgaeans. Well, he said that the Hattian army was no better than a pack of jackals, and its king no king, but a puffed-up tribal chief.”
“Tsk. He fielded a lot of men to deal with so puny a threat. All thanks, Lupakki. You may go.”
“Lord –”
“Yes?”
“I never called that retreat…. I would have stayed there, but for you and the young prince, until I died. And I would have got that bebaubled Hurrian –”
“Then I am glad you did not. He is mine, and do not forget it. Tomorrow come to the chancery, and bring with you a list of survivors; the men will not be penalized by the errors of their superiors. We will make it, as closely as we can, so that none suffers from our loss but ourselves.”
And before he had shut the doors behind him, sleep came and grabbed me by the throat and pulled me down into a whirling pit wherein maimed kings passed by an audience stand on gilded litters, preceded by jesters bearing stag standards tied with mourning ribbons.
I woke to Khinti’s ministrations, accompanied by a host of questions as to what I would wear and what I would want her to wear, and so gathered groggily that the Shepherd had struck: this very day, before I had chance to think it over, he would have me out before the folk.
So I told her what I would and would not do: I would not ride in litter; I would walk; I would dress soberly in a dark cloak and mantle and expected her to do likewise; I did not want the children there; but I would likely need Hannutti and the Shepherd, and wanted them both at my door to accompany me down to the lower courtyard, where we might enter the administration building from the rear.
She objected on grounds of my strength and I chased her out to clear my thoughts and meditate on what I would say. But in through the doors as my wife left to prepare came my bodyservants, the black concubine among them, and I let them do what it was they did, hardly noticing, thinking hard on what Tasmisarri might say to Hattusas who, now that I cared little about it, had decided to take me to her bosom.
The black girl was beyond equal at kneading muscles, and under her hands my strength seemed in part to return to me. The fine black mantle trimmed in red and gold, and the kilt and belt and shortsword with golden sheath and kingly torque and armband and curl-toed slippers were on me before I knew it, my hair brushed and shining, and only the crown remained.
This I could not suffer: not any from the most formal conical crown to the skull-shaped cap, nor even the lightest of circlets could I tolerate.
“Enough, then,” I said. “Get back from me.” I took the lituus from its bearer just as the Shepherd and my Master of Horses, Hannutti, came in, my wife right behind in a soft tiered gown of gold and red that left one shoulder bare.
I, the Sun Page 31
