I was glad when she composed herself and relieved when with a smile like the sun breaking over the mountains she bowed back from me and turned and ran down the soldier- crowded aisle between the chariots, and with a sigh said to myself: “You are home. It is begun,” and felt wry and a little amused and gave no more thought to her in all the leave-taking and order-giving and counsel-rendering incumbent on a king who is a general at such times.
It was not until the sun settled onto the peaks and the shadows stretched and woke themselves up to begin the siege of the sky that I managed to extricate myself and slip out of the citadel to seek the rock sanctuary.
On the way, I passed my “father” Tuthaliyas’ mausoleum, and my “father” Arnuwandas’ mausoleum, and almost stopped to tell them what I had done. But the day died around me, and I wanted another to hear me, so I did not stop but climbed on. I climbed past the spot where I first had seen the blue-cloaked lord strolling in the moonlight, and past the spot where I had hid when no bigger than my youngest was now and watched Hattusas burning bright and lurid in the moonless night.
It was the morning after the fire that the eagle and I had first met: the smoke from the fire must have disoriented him; he had flown into a spire of stone and damaged a wing. He was vile, at first, the black eaglet, dancing around with his hurtful wing outstretched and charging me with vicious beak stretched wide. Those birds around the sanctuary are said to belong to the dead: from that first time when he ate of the twitching rabbit I impaled alive in a crack on the ledge we shared, he was mine. In my heart, our fates had always been linked, and so I had brought my sons up, each one, for his approval, and always climbed to the foot of the great rock on which he nested when I had something to sniff out or some kingly deed to report.
There was hardly any light left when I gained the ledge, just two lines of molten gold turning pomegranate over the mountains, like chariot-ruts in the sky.
I gave my eagle-call, and heard back a soft challenge, a rustle and snap of wings. Craning my head I thought I could just make out a beaked head, an arch of wings against the oncoming night.
“Ah, old bird, you have your throne, yet. Is it well with you? Things are well with me, exceedingly well. I have brought you no sacrifice… would you eat from my hand, still, after so long?”
Only a dry rustle, like twigs, answered me.
“No reply? So be it, overlord of the air. I have kings enough licking my palm clean, though none of them are better than falcons: they take to the hood and the fetter, strike at my bidding, then return to hand though the cage awaits. What think you: must a man make do with such allies?”
I heard an answer, then, and another call in reply, softer, and I began to suspect the truth, though it was not until the following day that I saw the black eagle’s wife.
CHAPTER 18
When Arnuwandas’ fourteenth year and his manhood trial blew in on the harvest wind, the black eagle and his brindle mate had raised a brood and thrown them from the nest, and I was feeling a like inclination myself.
That year was the year of Amenhotep III Nimmuria’s First Jubilee: they sent up those faience beetles from Egypt with a commemoration of the event inscribed on its reverse in their picture language and a copy of the text in Babylonian so we could read it. It was also the year Pharaoh raised up to co-regency his son and successor, Amenhotep IV, whom we would come to address as Naphuria, or Huri. How innocent would have seemed these official communications from the Egyptians if Hatib had not been telling me what swam beneath the surface of that river of diplomatic inanities. If it had not been for Hatib, I would never have known even the proper names for these kings with whom I exchanged cool but friendly letters, and gifts of silver and gold.
For a little more silver than I spent officially, I was receiving from a man named Duttu, who was employed by the Egyptians as an official of the chancery, terse accounts in excellent Hittite of what was noteworthy in those dispatches that crossed his desk, Now, though written Babylonian as it exists in diplomatic correspondence is as corrupt as commonly spoken Hittite when compared to ancient Hattian, it is the language of the times. Writing to me in Hittite was as good as writing to me in code: None but my own could read it, save folk like this Duttu, who had gotten his place in a kingly court because he could write the tongues of the princes of “Upper Retenu,” which is what the Egyptians call everyone north of “Lower Retenu,” which is all of the coastal plain below Amqa and Kinza and east of Mitanni, which the Egyptians call Naharin. I am telling you this for a reason: the barriers of language may have been breached by the polyglot called Babylonian, which contains Hittite words and Hurrian words and words for which none recall the origin, but the walls have not been tumbled. And though I am no better at the ancient Hittite tongues than the folk who mouth them by rote at cult ceremonies, I took the time to instill in my children the importance of literacy: what a king can read himself, none can misinterpret to him; what a foreign scribe will do, no man may know in advance.
I was to finally take Khinti to Alashiya, as I had promised: for three full seasons, and also as I had promised, I had kept close to Hattusas whenever I might, which was more frequently than I had expected. The matters of my concern in that period became sharply circumscribed. The comportment of my new allies needed constant scrutiny. The terms of the treaties I oversaw stringently, that they would hold over the years. I rearranged the assignment of troops levied from treaty signatories: though a treaty specified that someone’s troops be posted in a certain place, I used them elsewhere, and from such simple necessities great altercations grew like weeds which must be pulled up one by one from between precious seedlings.
Increasing the flow of Alashiyan copper was my real concern, though my mother of former times had given me a final gift: she had died and rendered me an excuse to visit the island of her exile I would not have sought, but which well served me. So when I debarked from the ship with my queen and her three princes and my son of the second degree, Kantuzilis, who was the same age as my youngest, Telipinus, I did so in the most somber and suitable circumstances I could have conjectured.
It was the first time I had been anywhere of interest in nearly three years time, and I had been close to pawing the ground when the news of my mother’s death had proffered the excuse I needed to be quit of the Hattian nobility for awhile.
The Sun, Suppiluliumas, who had never but for the headaches attendant on my appointment as “favorite of the Storm God” been ill a day in my life, had experienced an agony near unto death at the bidding of the geniuses of the sea. Never have I been gladder to take to my bed than that first evening in Alashiya when the unctuous, dissembling solicitation of my host the King finally dribbled to a halt.
“In the morning, most honored King, my brother, I myself will lead you and your beauteous family on a tour of the island. Khinti, dearest Queen, think upon what you would like our guest to see.”
All evening he had been like that: slickly sweet, just short of insult, ever reminding Khinti that she was a part of his ‘we’ and I and mine were the strangers whom they together must entertain.
“Then get a commander of ten or two to put on my boys’ tails, if you want anything left of your island at sunset.” I growled at him, and pulled Khinti roughly to her feet and pushed her before me in the direction of the gilded lintel.
I heard the King of Alashiya chuckle uncertainly. The next day, he was not laughing. Though it was Arnuwandas whose behavior had Khinti in tears when I first got back from Kizzuwadna, and though I had taken my eldest firmly by the scruff of his neck and proved to him that might is greater than right on more than one occasion, I had apparently started on him too late. If it takes one hundred ninety days to break a chariot horse, how much longer, then, a prince? I had been about a hair’s breadth from throwing Piyassilis into the ocean, nor was the smug godliness of little Telipinus any easier on my nerves. Kantuzilis, who I had begot on Takkuri’s sister, was a sickly child and browbeaten by his more-royal siblings, and
it was Khinti’s compassion that had him added to my troubles for the length of our Alashiyan journey.
Now you must realize that vandalism and theft and assault and disobedience are often part of a boy’s maturing; I did. I had not forgotten. But I found myself at a loss to understand it in them, whom I had so carefully spared those agonies of childhood which had turned me into the streets. So when I found them as rebellious (in the case of Piyassilis perhaps more so) as I had been without those provocations I well remembered, I was at first tempted to make light of Khinti’s distress. Soon Piyassilis’ looting of my brother Zida’s purse convinced me as to the errors of omission I had committed as far as he was concerned, and upon the heels of that, before the furor had died down among the adults, my eldest forced a concubine to his bidding in the palace halls, and my recourse was clear.
I spent an afternoon knocking them down, one at a time, and when they would rise up I would knock them back to their knees, and they could not say I took unfair advantage because Arnuwandas was hard on his manhood and Piyassilis a scant year behind, and both of them and their younger brothers Telipinus and Kantuzilis I included in the bout for good measure: four against one evened the odds.
But my sleep was disturbed by my princes until, just before we left for Alashiya, I called to audience my eldest, whose head reached my shoulder and whose body had the stretched-out look of someone whose girth is but a promise to come, and recollected to him his oath and told him that if indeed he continued to behave thusly, I would have to judge him in contempt of that agreement laid between us.
“In the case of a boy breaking an oath, it has little meaning, but in a man, this is a different matter. If you cannot mind your oath, we will get the tablets out from the temples and destroy them, and then you can proceed as you have been doing and I will not have to take your life for it.”
So he had agreed to recollect his duties as regards the Oath Gods and I had agreed to allow the celebration of his majority to proceed as planned upon our return.
But barely a day upon Alashiyan soil, all my fears came home: Arnuwandas and Piyassilis disappeared into the city.
“How,” I demanded of my host, “could they have eluded your praetorians?”
“How,” snarled he in a moment of forgetful openness, “can you raise such lions? What do you expect me to say to this vendor whose premises was torn asunder, or to my shipmaster whose daughter will never be the same?”
“I will reimburse the vendor and take the girl to Hatti as a full concubine,” I said flatly. “Now, give me a moment to think.”
Growling, the pectoraled monarch subsided.
“Leave them where they are: a night in a cold cell will bank their ardor.”
When I had Khinti in my arms later, I was even able to forget altogether my princes, who despite all the wisdom of Arnuwandas’ fourteen years were doubtless shivering in each others’ grasp upon prison straw. And that worked so well that I contrived with the king to leave them there for the duration of our stay.
I walked the pale beaches with my beloved. We ate of the sea’s bounty and trod the twisted alleys of the bazaars. We saw black Nubians on Egyptian oars, and black-sailed Ahhiyawan ships with their clean-limbed, pale-skinned crews. We saw the small folk who once ruled those far-western isles, brown-skinned, yet sharp-featured like Hittites under their glossy, square cut manes. Khinti called them Minoans, and told me stories of their maze-like palace and its destruction that she had heard from an old man who was a courtier of Minos’ court when he was king of Knossos and the earth and sea had not yet risen up and swallowed his empire whole. You still see them, the disinherited Minoans, sailing the coast dazed and silent, living artifacts from an entire culture which is no more. Some say that the gods shook the earth from under them for their wickedness, and that monstrous creatures not wholly man-like roamed their streets.
I bought her the red-striped pottery she begged to own, not caring if, as she said, it would increase in value now that the country of its origin was no more.
She never tired of shopping; we would walk the quays and she would laugh with delight and point out a ship from Ugarit, a war galley from Amurru, or a round-bellied freighter from Tyre. And while Khinti shopped I adjudged the soldiers and the crews of the different ships, judging their mettle and their weapons by eye, and gathering impressions of the lands they represented.
I mentioned to Khinti that I would have some of the purple cloth dyed from the shells found on Amurrite and Ugaritic beaches, and asked her if she thought it might go well with this room or that, and she offered to arrange to have me meet her uncle the King’s representatives to those countries.
I also met Hatib, for it was the night of the full moon, as we had prearranged.
I had slipped away as easily as my boys from the Alashiyan watch, meeting none in the corridors of the palace overlooking the bay who dared even raise their eyes to me, and meeting my own man at quayside where the Hittite ships rocked complacent, their masts splitting the night. Hittite ships have moored in Alashiya since ancient times; we are no monarchs of the ocean, and yet a great country must have some naval forces – thus, Alashiya was conceived, to supply the clement port our mainland coast lacks. Over the years the two nations have grown unfamiliar, like dimly-recollected cousins distant in time and space, and the trading colony of Alashiya has waxed so mighty that Hittite ships no longer are the mainstay of her defenses. Still, when I had first boarded the little boat which rowed us out to the magnificent black ships adorned with gold that rocked smug off the mountainous coast, I had boarded a vessel manned and commanded by Hittites and designed for the very purpose of ferrying Hattian monarchs whence they chose, and had needed neither my personal troops nor a moment’s thought to feel secure doing it. The sail is about the distance a racing chariot can make in a day, I am told. It takes a little less time than that, and I have made it often since then in my determination to reacquaint Alashiyan government with its responsibilities to those who created it – not in my lifetime will we lose a single arrow fit to the bow of Great Kingship.
That night I was pondering the difficulties of such a determination, in streets filled with folk of every color and style known to civilization: Ugaritics, their curled heads oiled; Egyptians with their shining shaven pates; Amurrites in blood-brown, arm in arm with the slight, jut-jawed sailors from Sidon. Even Assyrians lounged in doorways stroking their squared beards and laughing. I had brought Lupakki across the sea, and my personal thirty, and those were sprawled among the bales and pottery urns filled with oil and stamped with the seal of my own palace like so many trained leopards, so that I was alone and yet not alone at all. If I had put them to watch my elder boys instead of giving each and all leave to explore the city, my princes would not be spending that full moon night among thugs and murderers on a bed of straw.
But a man cannot think of everything, and I had simply assumed that those of Alashiya who wore the gold and black of Alashiya’s Hittite navy would be the equal of two mainland adolescents, though they be princes of the blood.
I sighed, banished my regret and the nagging discomfort of a man out of his element and not ready to admit it, and when I had finished rubbing the salty grit from my eyes, a man sat to my left upon a bale of wool, swinging his feet and humming softly as if he had always been there.
The shadow that was Lupakki lengthened, wavered as if thrown by a flickering candle, and sank back with a rattle of bullae between the waist-high shipping jars:
“I bow down seven times before thy majesty – figuratively, of course, my lord, lest the sharp-eyed shipboard take notice.”
“Greetings, Sutu, what happened to your princely side lock?”
“Ah, a sacrifice for my neck’s sake. It is one thing to flaunt your heritage among the ignorant, another to offend the sun folk of Pharaoh’s court.”
“Where you are now employed?”
“Most exactly, my astute young lord.”
“And how do you find the service of the Egy
ptian kings?”
“Profitable; their gold is ruddy but as good as any’s.” He looked quickly round him. His snake’s voice susurrussed suggestively: “The very quays have ears. You are looking less kingly, like a mercenary or a pirate yourself, young lord, and such cause less comment in a tavern than lurking about on the dock.”
Neither myself nor my men had chosen this evening to flaunt any rank. I hitched myself off the bale on which I had been sitting and scratched my bare head: once, twice in the light of the moon.
As I headed off down the pier with the man of Egyptian dress by my side, shadows writhed and split, and if anyone was looking he saw those shadows drift one by one down the winding ally in our wake.
“My deepest consolation in the matter of the little mother, Daduhepa,” hissed Hatib. “And of the pale-haired Titai, my heart is too choked to speak.”
“Ah, that is old news. It reminds me of how long it has been since you and I shared a cup.”
“Indeed, traveler. This place now, has a better vintage than its facade warrants.” And we stepped together down three stairs, round a corner, down three again and into one of those crowded, noisomely dissolute taverns that seem to be the only attraction all cities hold in common. Though the girl dancing in the pit of sand wore less upon her sweating buttocks than would her Hittite counterpart, her bangles and beads and the thump of her belled feet mixed as well with the shouts and clapping of the men, and the air was as thick with plot and scheme and the reek of man and beer as in the lower city in Hattusas.
Ensconced in a corner, Hatib ordered wine and something else which I did not recognize from the girl who came and postured at our table, and who might have stayed there, her speculative leer unmistakable, had Hatib not hurried her with foul imprecations.
Myself, I was feeling more comfortable than l had since I left my plateau and its mountain stronghold.
While we were awaiting the girl’s return my men drifted in one by one, wandered, settled about the long low hall in two’s and three’s, and prepared with unconcealed relish to await me in the style suitable to a man in such an establishment.
I, the Sun Page 25