Son of Ishtar

by Gordon Doherty

  ‘And its guardian,’ Dagon added, nudging Hattu and looking up to his right.

  Hattu and the rest turned to see it: atop a steep, dusty golden hill, speckled with knots of goat-thorn on the western side, stood Baka Fortress. The stronghold was founded on silvery stone blocks and topped with parapets of red clay.

  ‘Only one approach,’ Dagon mused, pointing up the western slope, almost blinding such was the reflected glare of the sun.

  Indeed, Hattu thought, seeing that instead of a matching slope on the eastern side of the hill, it looked like there was only sheer, golden rock face. It was as if a giant had bitten away that far half of the hill – perhaps a scar of the earliest lead miners. The back wall of Baka Fortress was perched right on this precipice.

  They came to the foot of the western approach. Nobody spoke as they halted at the base of the hill, yet every mind asked the same question as they looked up to the high fortress and the parapet in particular. Not a man was to be seen.

  ‘Well the Galasman garrison here also appears to be shy,’ Garin remarked wryly, then looked over his shoulder nervously, eyeing the shady pine woods behind them, then the Soaring Mountains and the deserted gorge just a stone’s throw to the north.

  Hattu eyed the broad dirt path leading up to the fort’s main gate – that was the obvious approach, but he knew it could not be trusted until they sighted one of their own up there. He saw Arrow circling up above the fort. What can you see?

  ‘Darizu of the Watch,’ Kurunta called up the hill. The call died as a lonely echo. Silence. ‘Galasman soldiers,’ he tried again. Nothing.

  Hattu eyed each rounded merlon on the battlements, the absence of life up there feeling more wrong with every passing breath. Then, at last – movement. A single head rose above the parapet. Darizu. His head of thick, curly hair hung to his brow, casting his pig-eyes in shade. ‘Brothers!’ he called down, punching a fist in the air.

  ‘A garrison of one man?’ Hattu heard Nuwanza say.

  ‘Half a man, I’d say,’ Kurunta replied saltily. Then filled his lungs to bellow again: ‘I have been told that the Galasman Watch are here. Yet they are either very shy or afraid of the sun. Where are they?’

  ‘Indeed, eighteen hundred men were mustered from the farms and came here. But it is just me and a few others who remain within these walls.’

  Hattu recalled the grovelling Bel Madgalti’s excuses that day at the Gathering. Watching from the balcony while his soldiers went to war for him.

  ‘Where are the rest?’ Nuwanza shouted up.

  After a pause, Darizu replied: ‘They went into the gorge, two days ago. To block the Kaskan advance from the north.’

  Hattu looked north with every other. The empty, wide, silver-walled gorge stared back, the air swirling and the thin grass on the floor rippling in a hot breeze.

  ‘And they left you, their leader, behind?’ Nuwanza asked, shielding his eyes from the sun.

  ‘I stayed behind with a skeleton watch of ten others… I thought it best to make sure the fort remained safe.’

  ‘Did you now,’ Nuwanza laughed without humour.

  ‘He’s shat himself again,’ Tanku whispered to Hattu and the rest of the Wolves. Hattu had told them all about the Gathering and Darizu’s blubbering excuses.

  ‘Ten others? Then where are they?’ Kurunta asked, his voice cracking in exasperation.

  Again, Darizu hesitated. ‘They have been stricken down with fever, I am afraid. They ate some bad bird meat – the worst of omens. But I have consigned them to a barrack hut at the corner of the fort.’

  ‘You are trained as an asu?’ Nuwanza asked.

  ‘No, but I have seen how the healers work,’ Darizu replied. ‘Now where is the Labarna?’ he said, craning his neck over the parapet to look back down the path the two hundred had approached from. ‘I will slaughter ten sheep in his honour.’

  ‘Each more courageous than you,’ Hattu muttered.

  ‘You should bring him here, bring him inside,’ Darizu continued. ‘He will have his pick of the storehouse and I can prepare him a comfortable bed in the command building. The sick-men’s malady will not trouble him. I can ferry water down for the rest of you.’

  ‘Generous bastard,’ Kurunta grunted quietly, then squinted up at the sun before replying. ‘The king is not with us, but aye, send water down.’

  Hattu saw Arrow still circling up there, agitated.

  ‘But the king is coming, isn’t he?’ Darizu persisted. ‘I do not think I should be opening the gates unless it is for him.’

  ‘Damn you, man,’ Kurunta snapped. ‘Either open the gates or come down here and speak to us.’

  ‘Wait a moment,’ an elderly voice croaked. Old Ruba hobbled into view on Onyx’s back. He mopped his sweat-lashed brow with a rag. ‘I know Darizu well. He is an awkward type, but I think I know how to deal with him. When he railed against my teachings, I used to tell him stories. He didn’t realise that there were lessons in every tale. He would sit with me by the fire, eating bread and honey, learning obliviously, happily. Let me go up and speak with him.’

  Nuwanza and Kurunta exchanged a look, then sighed and agreed.

  Hattu stepped forward to help the shaking Ruba from Onyx’s croup. ‘Be careful, old tutor, I do not trust this Darizu.’

  ‘Nor do I, lad,’ Ruba said, eyeing the woods behind them and the empty gorge on their left, ‘but I trust this silent land even less.’

  They watched Ruba whisper fond words to his pony, stroking its muzzle, before the scribe slowly climbed the hill. Baka’s narrow guard gate opened and the old fellow hobbled inside. Nuwanza and Kurunta gave the order to fall out, then the pair crouched to their haunches and muttered in discussion about their next move.

  The men of the two companies sat, drawing off their helmets and setting down their shields and weapons. Some dug out bread and salty cheese from their leather bags, hungrily gulping down water from their skins to combat the lack of shelter from the sun. A few put up their bivouacs such was their discomfort at the heat.

  ‘My loincloth smells like the academy latrine pits on a midsummer’s day,’ Dagon remarked as he sat cross-legged, hitching his crotch and sniffing the air to test his description.

  Garin halted, mid-mouthful of a chunk of cheese wrapped in bread, his nose wrinkling. ‘Dagon, I hope that one day a tiger pounces upon you when you’re doing your business in the woods,’ he said before returning to chewing, albeit more slowly and reluctantly.

  Hattu chuckled. Other groups chatted likewise. But the light-hearted words were a veneer. He saw each man’s eyes every so often shoot to the gorge. Could the few thousand Galasman warriors somewhere in there truly hold back Pitagga’s Kaskans if they came in the numbers reported? Was that melting, rippling air in the gorge about to part and reveal a wall of bearded warriors, Galasman heads on their spears?

  He shuddered and looked uphill at Baka fort to seek distraction. The blue sky above was now spoiled by a murder of seven crows, who flapped down to rest upon the parapet, looking inside. A moment later, a pair of vultures began to circle overhead. Something reminded Hattu of that lame Galasman back at the farming village by the Green River brooks.

  It has been some time since the King of the Grey Throne visited these parts…

  ‘No winter scouts came here – the snows were too deep. Nobody knew the king was coming…’ he whispered into the ether.

  ‘Hattu?’ Tanku said.

  ‘How did that old fellow know the king was coming?’ Hattu said, a cruel shiver shaking him. ‘And why does Darizu also expect the king?’ The pair shared a silent look, trying to piece it all together, finding only that they could not.

  Suddenly, a distant groan of timber echoed from within Baka’s walls. All heads turned to look up.

  The grunts of stressed timber grew as a great pillar swung up from within the fort, coming vertical and quivering to a halt. Across the top of the pillar was a shorter beam forming a crossbar, and upon it hung old Ruba, his arms outs
tretched, nailed to the crossbar through the wrists, his white robes torn into ribbons, streaked with crimson and fluttering in the gentle breeze. His skin was flayed and hanging in strips too. His head was lolling and trying to rise, and from the empty red pits where his eyes had been, runnels of blood poured like ghastly tears. His legs dangled, crooked and broken in many places. A weak, animal moan sounded from this misshapen remnant of life, the stub of his cut-out tongue glinting red from within his mouth.

  Hattu’s skin crawled and he staggered forwards up the first few steps of the golden slope then fell to his knees. Gasps rang out around him. Onyx brayed in fright. From the corner of his eye he saw Kurunta rise from his haunches, the water skin he was holding falling, splashing on the ground. Nuwanza rose with him. ‘Old Goose?’ Kurunta whispered, reaching out towards the hilltop with one trembling hand as if he did not believe his lone eye.

  ‘Darizu?’ Nuwanza cried uphill, his brow fiercely bent into a V. ‘DARIZU!’

  The birds on the fort walls scattered across the sky, and an eerie silence followed.

  Then, with a fierce, animal cry, a wall of bearded, snarling warriors rose up from behind the battlements, hefting and shaking spears, swords and axes. Twenty Kaskan noblemen. Central was Pitagga, atop the fort’s gatehouse, his black armour shining, the lion-skull helm glaring, his double-headed axe gleaming.

  Hattu staggered back, gawping. The heads of the others in the small Hittite reconnaissance party flicked this way and that.

  ‘Men, come together,’ Kurunta bawled, Nuwanza echoing the order.

  Panicked shouts rang out as the men scrambled to and fro, tossing down half-eaten food, kicking over the few bivouac tents, roaring at comrades, taking up the nearest weapons. It was a ramshackle line, ten deep, twenty wide, facing the slope up to Baka Fortress. Hattu shared a glance with Garin, Tanku and Dagon, each panting on the shielded front line. The hot air seemed to crackle. Then Kisna cried out: ‘The gorge – up on the gorge sides!’

  Hattu swung his head to the north to see the tell-tale glints of copper and bronze up there on either side of the rocky passage. Kaskan soldiers – Pitagga’s ten thousand, he realised – hidden moments ago, now rising to peer south at this paltry group of Hittite soldiers. He caught sight of spears, arrows, rocks – an arsenal designed to crush an unsuspecting army on the gorge floor. ‘We’ve stepped into a hunter’s pit. They were waiting for the king, for the divisions entire, to wander into that corridor,’ he realised.

  ‘Send up the signal!’ Nuwanza demanded of one of the Ravens. An archer fumbled with his bow and dropped an arrow – already wrapped in a resin-soaked cloth. Nuwanza growled and snatched the weapon from the man, nocking the arrow and striking a pair of flint pieces to light the soaked rag. His powerful body bent as he tilted the weapon skywards and loosed. The arrow sped up, up and into the blue, slowing and hovering for a moment, ablaze, before streaking back down into the earth with a thud.

  Pitagga laughed long and loud from the walls of Baka. ‘Empty your quiver, famed Bowman,’ he roared. ‘None will see your flaming sticks.’

  ‘The hills are too high,’ Nuwanza said, his voice tight and his eyes bulging, shooting across the golden southerly hills hugging the banks of the Green River. ‘The army will not see the signal – they will stumble on to this place unawares.’

  ‘Today was the wrong day to volunteer for reconnaissance,’ Pitagga cried. ‘This,’ he gestured to the gorge and the waiting snare, ‘is not for you. This is for your Labarna. As was this,’ he stabbed a finger towards the cross from which poor old Ruba sagged. ‘For I will have his skull, and his Tuhkanti’s too, when they come through. I will stride over the carpet of Hittite dead and pluck their heads from their necks… to add to my collection.’ He swung up a spear to hold it aloft in the sky.

  Hattu’s eyes locked onto the spear tip. Affixed there was a gaunt, hairless, shrivelled human head. Its features were unmistakable. ‘Sarpa?’ he wailed.

  ‘And now I must bid you farewell,’ Pitagga said, ‘to the Dark Earth with you, so I can prepare my snare once more before your king comes this way.’

  Kurunta stepped back from the slope, head shooting to the meandering river valley through which they had come. ‘Back… we’ve got to get back… we have to warn th-’

  ‘Destroy them!’ Pitagga roared.

  As if a sudden breeze had struck up, the woods opposite Baka fort, behind the startled knot of Hittites, rustled and shook. Hattu twisted his head to look behind him, towards the disturbance. A shiver ran up his legs, across his back and over his scalp as he saw the shade within the pine woods writhe. With a shrill cry, a wall of men spat forth from the trees. Not Kaskans, but short-bearded, dark-skinned men in leather armour. The loyal watchmen of Galasma had appeared at last: over a thousand hardened fighters, armed with swords, spears, bows and brutish clubs. They ran at their erstwhile allies.

  ‘Turn… face!’ Kurunta shrieked.

  The instincts honed in training bested the panic in every man’s breast as they swung to face the Galasman charge. Hattu and the front-liners sifted back through the ranks to present their shield-front to the oncoming wall of warriors, a hundred paces distant and coming fast. Then, from behind, the creak of Kaskan bows and whirring of slings sounded from up on Baka’s walls.

  ‘Square!’ Nuwanza howled. Another flurry of movement and the line of two hundred dissolved into a tight and tiny box of men, the Ravens presenting shields to the missile troops on the fort walls and the Wolves showing their wall of shields to the racing Galasman army.

  Hattu’s veins were suddenly drained of blood and instead pumped full of some horrible, icy, viscous soup as he saw the Galasman warriors now just thirty strides distant and bounding for him: screaming maws, wicked eyes and sharp metal honed to cut through necks and break bodies. He saw moments of his childhood, flashes of rare pleasant days and of momentous storms, tasted honey and brine, felt long past thrill and misery as if they were here and now. The day of the Kaskan raid staggered into his mind. There, he was a fleeing boy, and flee he did. Here, he was a soldier: trained to stand, to fight and to die. And each of those things felt equally certain. He heard the rain of bronze arrowheads and slingstones battering down on the fort-facing shields behind him, heard the gurgling scream of one man stricken. Poor Onyx brayed in agony and crumpled to the ground as a Kaskan arrow took the pony in the neck.

  Twenty paces.

  ‘Shoulder to shoulder, shield to shield,’ Kurunta bawled, then brought his twin curved swords out from his back-sheaths with a zing. ‘The Gods are with us!’

  Another barrage from the walls of Baka saw the hot, stinking blood of a comrade shower the Wolves’ backs.

  Ten paces, nine, eight, seven…

  Hattu’s muscles quaked with a glacial chill and his belly and bladder demanded to release their contents. He sensed Dagon and Tanku – each pressed by his sides – shaking.

  ‘Tarh… Tarhunda… c-coat my heart…’ Garin tried to wrap his lips around the Storm Division’s battle cry. ‘Tarhunda, coat my heart in bronze!’ Kurunta finished for him.

  ‘Ishtar,’ Hattu snarled through snatched breaths, thinking at the last of his guardian goddess who had so far offered him nothing but a life of bleak riddles. ‘Hear me… stand with us!’

  Tanku repeated this with a roar as the Galasmans leapt across the last few paces. ‘Ishtar stand with us!’

  Hattu discharged an animal cry as a fiend with bulging, red-veined eyes shrieked and loped towards him. Then came a blow like the kick of a horse and a din like the wildest storm as the flood of Galasmans crashed against the small Hittite party with a clatter of shields and screeching bronze. He and the red-eyed one were nose-to-nose for a moment, panting, gasping, growling. But the Galasman, far bulkier, drove Hattu back a pace then two. Blood puffed and sprayed across them as Hittite soldiers fell to Galasman blades, and Hattu was sure he was to be next when Red-eyes freed an arm and swung his axe down for Hattu’s head.

  Hattu ducked
down and threw up his shield as the red-eyed one’s axe struck. The blow was fiercer than anything he had experienced in mock-combat, tearing through the shield. Red-eyes hacked at him again and this time the act of deflecting the blow sent Hattu staggering back.

  Indeed, the entire Hittite line was rocked, forced to walk backwards up the Baka slope. Hattu righted himself and surged back to the gap he had left between Tanku and Dagon. Red-eyes came at him again, his and Hattu’s shoulders crashing together. Hattu dug his boots into the earth but only when the Mountain Wolves behind him added their weight to his back was Red-eyes matched. Hattu lashed out, elbowing the Galasman in the jaw, sending the foe back a pace or two. It was enough for Hattu to bring his spear level again. The fellow’s neck was exposed. But the enormity of this moment cast a spell upon him: a first kill… a man’s body would be rent. A life would be ended. The Galasman’s red eyes changed then – into those of a frightened man – a son, a father? Hattu’s heart crashed twice before he noticed Red-eyes bringing up a mace, the fearful family man now a fiery killer again.

  Hattu at last thrust his spear forward, the tip plunging through the man’s neck, splitting it like thin cloth. A deep red weal bulged from within and then a torrent of blood spat with the man’s every dying heartbeat. Hattu’s heart thundered as he pulled his spear free and the man fell away. But, with a surge, the Galasmans drove the Hittites back pace by pace up the hill, Pitagga and his Kaskan nobles whooping with delight as they loosed arrows and slingstones on their ever-closer targets.

  ‘For the Storm God!’ Garin screamed to rally his comrades, only for a Galasman axe to rip away his shield, tearing it to pieces, then a fire-hardened club came down on his head, crumpling the leather helm and crushing his skull like an egg. His head fell away in pieces and his body slackened and pitched backwards. Hattu gawped at the mangled corpse. A friend, dead in a trice. Bone-shaking reality. Then the two Hittites either side of Garin’s corpse were cut down in quick succession. Kisna and Sargis, in the rank behind, found themselves facing the gap where the three had been. The pair were agog, frozen.