Son of Ishtar

by Gordon Doherty

  He entered through the Tawinian Gates. The main way was sombre and quiet. All knew that their Labarna lay enfeebled up on the acropolis hill; a sign that the Gods were not happy with his rule or with his subjects. And a double watch stood on the walls, for rumours of Pitagga’s whereabouts were rife, and the system of northern watchtowers lay broken, many ungarrisoned. Grand Hattusa reeked of fear and doubt.

  He held his chin high and made his way through the sparse crowds. A smith working a sickle over an anvil stopped hammering and scowled at him like a hawk. Hattu looked the fellow square on with a confident glare, the smoke-grey eye glinting in the pale light. The man bowed from the neck, respectfully.

  He strode on up the main way, to the Noon Spur and then up the steep, narrow approach to the Ramp Gate. When a screech split the air, he looked up to see Arrow, circling high but spiralling towards him. ‘Here, girl,’ he whispered, his heart soaring, thrusting out his arm with the leather bracer. Arrow swooped down and landed on his forearm, then began pecking playfully at his face.

  ‘Easy, girl,’ he laughed. Then her neck lengthened and she keened shrilly over his shoulder. Hattu heard from behind a pair of stifled yelps from Orax and Gorru – the two Mesedi who were escorting him a few paces in his wake. ‘She says she has missed you,’ he threw back with a wry look. In truth he wished these two no harm. He had seen the pain in their eyes when Father had collapsed. Good soldiers, he realised.

  The Ramp Gates groaned open as he ascended the slope towards the acropolis, the chill wind whistling at this exposed point. Hattu did not wait to let the Mesedi and Golden Spearman pairing atop the gatehouse decide how they would react to this new, hardened version of the Cursed Son, instead shooting up his clenched fist decisively.

  ‘Prince Hattusili,’ they barked in reply, returning the gesture. His self-assurance grew stronger with every such happening.

  Once inside, the wrath of the wind ebbed. The open centre of the acropolis ward was an odd thing to behold: warming and familiar, yet cold and melancholy at once. Slaves busied themselves grooming the stallions in the royal stable and bringing water to the kitchens from the cistern. He noticed the spot near the stone pool where he had so often played, alone on the red slabs, fashioning toy boats and joking with invisible friends. So many days spent gladly away from Father’s anger. His gaze swung up to the northwestern edge of the acropolis. Up there on the palace building’s forgotten balcony, he saw himself with Father, on that snowy day when everything had changed.

  ‘My pupil returns,’ a familiar voice said.

  Hattu turned to see Ruba, mounted on Onyx, ambling towards him. The Chief Scribe looked painfully old these days, and so small too. He helped Ruba down from the pony’s croup. He was overcome with a desire to embrace his tutor. But he offered the scribe a clenched fist salute instead.

  Ruba tilted his head a little to one side and eyed him shrewdly. ‘Very good. They have made a soldier of you, then?’

  ‘They tried to crush me first,’ he said. ‘It took me a long time to figure it out.’ Another glance to the balcony. ‘He sent me there to fail.’

  Ruba nodded once with tight lips, as if holding back his true response. ‘He… loves you, Hattu,’ Ruba said. ‘A man’s fear for his loved ones can manifest itself in the most unexpected of ways.’

  Hattu sighed through his nose. ‘How is he?’

  Ruba’s eyes grew distant for a moment, and he seemed confused.

  ‘Tutor?’ Hattu asked again, placing both hands on the old man’s shoulders in a tentative embrace. Ruba’s eyes sharpened on Hattu, as if the gesture had drawn him back from the fog.

  ‘The King? No better, I’m afraid,’ Ruba said. ‘His left side remains asleep from face to toes. His speech is still halting and slurred. It is a sad thing, for I can tell that the brightness remains within his mind… and how I envy him for that,’ he finished with a dry laugh.

  ‘Can he be healed?’ Hattu asked.

  Ruba’s brow creased. ‘Several asus have been living in the palace for this last moon. None of them are a patch on the one who vanished – not that he was particularly good, anyway. The Wise Women were here too: tying bells to the feet of mice and making tallow effigies. By the Gods, we all had to suffer their droning for two whole months. They had the clothes he was wearing on the day he fell taken by ox-cart to distant Kummani, hopeful that his affliction would travel away with the garments. They rubbed honey, meal and mud into the left side of his body, then took to laying the still-warm organs of a ram there too, thinking those bloody morsels might take on his illness. I was not sad to see them leave.’

  ‘Then they have given up on him?’ Hattu asked.

  ‘Oh I’m sure they’ll be back,’ Ruba replied. ‘But now another tends to him – Lady Danuhepa of Babylon. She was sent here recently by the Assyrian King with a dowry – a token of temporary truce.’

  Hattu’s sardonic expression was reply enough.

  ‘She is not like the others,’ Ruba smiled, looking towards the harem where a pair of scowling women glared out, faces streaked with so-called ‘beauty-paint’. ‘They crawl to the king when he is strong and beg him for fineries, she coddles him when he is weak and asks for nothing.’

  Hattu gazed at the palace, suddenly reticent about facing his ailing father. The Fields of Bronze had taught him much, but nothing that would equip him for this.

  ‘Go to him, Hattu,’ Ruba said. ‘He has asked for you more than once.’

  ***

  He watched from the shadows of the hallway, yet to make his presence known. The king’s bedchamber was thick with white spirals of incense vapour, the air warm from the sweet cedar logs on the crackling fire, defying the cold autumn afternoon beyond the closed, wind-trembling shutters. King Mursili lay prone, his sun-disc circlet resting on his sweating brow. A young lady sat by the edge of his bed. Danuhepa, Hattu surmised. She had seen perhaps twenty summers, he reckoned. She was a beauty indeed: high, sharp cheekbones and thick, glossy dark hair hanging to her waist in bold tresses. It was such an odd sight: Father and intimacy were strangers, yet this Danuhepa stroked at his hand like a doting mother. Hattu heard her gentle words to the king:

  ‘Enkidu ate grass in the hills with the gazelle, ranged over the mountains with the goats, lurked with wild beasts at the water-holes... he filled in the pits of hunters…’

  Hattu realised he was smiling. The words of the Epic came to him as if he had never been away from Ruba’s classroom. ‘… he helped animals escape from their traps.’

  The woman looked up, startled.

  ‘Lady Danuhepa,’ he said, stepping into the room.

  Her eyes searched his face for a moment, switching between his odd eyes. ‘Ah… Prince Hattusili?’

  He bowed curtly in affirmation.

  She clasped her fingers round the king’s hand. ‘The few times the Labarna has spoken since my arrival, it has been of you. He was certain you would not come to him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it has been three moons since he fell ill and you have not come to him in that time.’

  Hattu cocked his head to one side, looking at the king. Even in sleep, the lop-sidedness of his face was stark. ‘He wished me to see out my two years at the Fields of Bronze. I want him to respect me, to trust me, and so I stayed there till the very last day before winter billet set in.’

  Danuhepa smiled sadly. ‘Three times he asked, today alone: has my son arrived home yet?’

  Hattu sat on a stool at the opposite side of the bed and clasped his father’s free hand. ‘I am here, Father. My training is complete. I am your loyal servant, just like Muwa.’

  The Labarna did not stir.

  Hattu eyed Danuhepa from the corner of his eye. Noblewomen rarely travelled without purpose. Had she known the king was ailing so badly when she came here? ‘Did you foresee this?’ Hattu asked, thinking of Ruba’s description of the world. ‘When you journeyed all the way from Babylon, at the edge of the world?’

  She laughed
. ‘As I see it, I have travelled from the heart of the world to its edge. Babylon is a wonder: a land of green rivers, swaying date palms and smooth, sunbaked plains.’

  ‘One day I hope to see it with my own eyes,’ Hattu said wistfully. He gestured towards the shutters as if to indicate the lands beyond, ‘and you must have longed to see our legendary country?’

  Danuhepa measured a smile. ‘The Hittite realm is… different.’ The wind moaned and the shutters chattered as if to chuckle at her subtlety.

  ‘The Empire of the Hittites is as its soldiers: rugged, mettlesome, dauntless,’ he said, recalling one of Kurunta’s ‘motivational’ cries as he urged them on through a gruelling all-afternoon run headlong into a vicious dust-gale that swept through the red-fell valleys. ‘Anyway, I fear I interrupted you just as your story was building. Enkidu soon faces Gilgamesh, does he not?’

  Her face broadened with a warm grin. ‘The king also mentioned you were a scribe. Ruba’s protégé, no less.’

  ‘Part of me always will be,’ Hattu smiled.

  ‘The Epic is one of the things that binds our world together, don’t you think?’ Danuhepa said. ‘From one edge to the other, all know of the tale.’

  Hattu smiled and looked at her hand, clasped around Father’s. ‘And now you and my father will form another bond. You are to wed him, no?’

  Her eyes glinted in the firelight. ‘I am an offering,’ she said gently, ‘from the Assyrian King. Tensions run high between the throne of Hattusa and that of Ashur. My part is to take your father’s hand, to buy a few years of trust and truce.’

  ‘You speak candidly for a woman of high station,’ Hattu remarked. ‘What will happen if,’ he faltered, looking at King Mursili’s sleeping form, his shallow breaths, ‘if…’ his words were choked off by a thickening in his throat.

  ‘I will wed your father,’ she said. ‘War will be staved off.’

  ‘How do you know it is right?’ Hattu asked, thinking of Father’s sullen nature and fiery moods. ‘Not for the kings who arranged it, but for you?’

  ‘I had opportunities to marry men before. Some I cared for, one I loved.’

  ‘Why didn’t you wed the one you loved?’

  ‘Because he was poor and that meant it was forbidden,’ she replied. ‘And because my Father caught him stealing into my chambers and had him beheaded.’ She said this flatly, in a well-practised way that seemed to act as a wooden stopper on her true feelings. ‘I will always remember him. In my heart, we have lived this life together.’ The stopper was coming loose. ‘I feel a flutter in there when I think of him, and I know he’s still with me.’

  ‘There is a girl I know, she is the daughter of the Storm Temple,’ Hattu said gingerly. ‘I feel that same feeling.’ He drew the lock of hair with the teardrop beryl stone from his shoulder as he said this, stroking it with a thumb.

  Her face brightened. ‘Then you are a lucky young man. She feels the same?’

  Hattu felt a sudden pang of fright. ‘Well, I haven’t… ’

  ‘You haven’t told her?’ Danuhepa gasped.

  Suddenly, he felt like a boy again. ‘No, I couldn’t. What if-’

  ‘What if you didn’t, and someone else did?’ Danuhepa laughed. ‘Would you want to forever look back and wonder, like me?’

  Hattu felt his mouth grow dry. This was fear altogether different from that experienced at the Fields of Bronze. He imagined Atiya shrieking with laughter if he even tried to put into words just how she made him feel. ‘Aye, but. Well, maybe I… I don’t know.’ He looked at Father once more, then made to leave, bowing again. ‘I had best be going. Let Father know I was here when he wakes.’

  With that, he left the bedchamber. The corridor was bitterly cold in comparison, and he passed Volca on his way – the Gal Mesedi was carrying a cup. ‘Good to have you back, Prince Hattu,’ the Gal Mesedi bowed with a convivial smile.

  ***

  That night, Hattu entered his bedchamber and felt lost in the well of silence within. No snoring, no scratching, no sudden gastric outbursts. Just the plump bed in the centre of the room and an old oak chest by the window, set out with a copper wash bowl and white linen towels. He moved over to the window which looked down upon the square of the acropolis’ upper ward. The wind had ebbed and the shutters lay open. He drew back the curtain hanging there and inhaled. The citadel grounds were inky-blue under the moonless night sky. A sharp, beaky poke to the wrist brought his attentions to the outer portion of the sill, and Arrow’s nest. She glared up at him.

  ‘Let me guess: food?’

  Arrow cocked her head to one side, with a look Hattu read as outrage – for she already had a worm held captive on the sill.

  ‘Then what?’

  Arrow screeched quietly, then stepped from her nest. Shards of speckled eggshell and the down of fledglings lay in the swirl of twigs. A moment later, a trio of shrieking young falcons flapped down to bother Arrow, and she took to tearing up the worm and giving each a piece.

  Hattu stared for a moment and then laughed aloud. ‘So the mate you found was a good one?’

  Arrow cocked her head one way then the other as if carefully evaluating her mate’s pros and cons.

  He noticed the young falcons had a full plumage and were almost ready to leave the nest. ‘Tend to them well, girl. Keep them warm.’

  Arrow waddled back to her nest and settled down, back turned to him, her attentions fully on her three worm-munching progenies.

  Laughing at the typically abrupt snub, Hattu leaned back in, drew the curtain, closed the shutters then stepped over to the bed. He swept the pristine white linen sheets and grey woollen blankets back. A large copper flask full of hot water lay there, warming the bed. It was an odd sight after seventeen months on an uncovered mattress of hay. He didn’t even hear the barefooted slave boy scuttle in to take the flask away, bowing as he went. Hattu tried to thank the boy but this caused the slave to hurry away all the faster. Suddenly, being a prince again felt odd.

  He slipped off his clothes and slid into bed. The soft comfort soothed his hardened limbs and should have cajoled any man to sleep, but his thoughts would not settle. For most of his early months at the Fields of Bronze, he had eagerly anticipated this return home. Now that he was here, he realised that part of him was impatient to return to the academy and the enjoyable balance of shared hardships and camaraderie that went with that life. He thought of Atiya, and this lured him into a half-slumber, until he remembered Lady Danuhepa’s words.

  Would you want to forever look back and wonder?

  This wrenched him awake. ‘I should go to her and tell her how I feel. Tomorrow, I will,’ he asserted, then rolled over to lie on his other side. But time passed and still he could not switch off. When the scuffing of a guard’s boot outside cut through another spell of drowsiness, he sat up with a frustrated sigh. He rose and moved to the shutter to peer between the cracks, and saw Gorru and Orax down there in muffled hysterics, Gorru performing some crude mime, mock-thrusting into a make-believe animal and mouthing the word hurkeler.

  Hattu’s annoyance evaporated as in his mind’s eye he saw Dagon, Tanku and Garin back at the barracks, acting up just like that. He wondered what the other lads were doing right now in their homes and winter billets. Sleeping, probably, he mused, returning to bed. The entire city was no doubt asleep. But when he heard more footsteps outside, he rose again. Through the cracks in the shutters he saw… Kurunta. Nuwanza too. And Colta was with them, entering the palace in the dead of night. What was this?

  ‘Is this a soldier I see before me?’ a voice said from behind, startling him.

  Hattu swung to see Muwa in the chamber doorway, clad in black robe and cape. ‘Brother,’ he cried, the pair embracing. It was the first time they had seen each other since the day of Father’s collapse. They pulled back, and Muwa clapped both hands on Hattu’s shoulders as if measuring their width. ‘The warrior-prince – as I always knew you could be,’ he beamed.

  ‘Not if you had knocked
me from my chariot at the Ordeal,’ Hattu replied with an arch look.

  ‘Ah, yes. Fortunate I let you loose your bow on me then, isn’t it?’ Muwa grinned.

  ‘Let me… of course,’ Hattu said, then the pair erupted in laughter and hugged again.

  The burst of jubilation faded then as Hattu thought of the king. ‘Father is no better,’ he said. ‘I sat with him today.’

  ‘He is weakened, but he is not beaten,’ Muwa gave him a reassuring shake.

  The sound of boots on the polished stone floor downstairs sounded.

  ‘The generals are here. What’s happening?’ Hattu asked.

  ‘Father called upon them and me too. He woke a short while ago and despite the hour, he feels strong enough to begin planning for spring – how to set up our armies against the threat of Pitagga. It will be a long night,’ Muwa said, striding away towards the top of the stairs.

  Hattu watched him go and felt that old, sinking feeling of isolation. Talks between the king, the Tuhkanti and the generals, with no place for the Cursed Son. Old habits crept into his mind, and he glanced out of the window to the night-bathed cistern and the spot he was so used to playing, alone.

  But a squeak of halting boots on the floor turned his attentions back to the top of the stairs. Muwa had stopped and turned to him.

  ‘Hattu? Are you coming or not?’

  Hattu cocked his head to one side.

  ‘Father waited to hold these talks,’ Muwa explained with a smile. ‘He waited for you to return to the city. It was your visit to his bedside that roused him, Danuhepa reckons. Now come, there is much to discuss.’

  ***

  Hattu followed Muwa along the corridor towards the tall oak door. He had rarely been allowed into the planning room at the rear of the palace, and certainly never when Father was holding council. Muwa entered first, Hattu sucking in a deep breath before he entered too. Pale moonlight glowed through the high windows, shining weakly on the polished floor, and the torches in the copper sconces lent a fine lustre to the emerald-green relief of a hunting scene on the other three walls. A smell of polished bronze and old leather hung in the air, as if to underline that it was a room for military matters. He felt his anxiety swell and his stride grow clumsy as he realised the company he was in: already seated at the hexagonal map table in the centre of the room were General Kurunta, General Nuwanza, Chariot Master Colta and the Sherden, Volca.