So, after a talk with my grousing commanders, we took all the men and reassigned them, so that the luckless had safer spots than those whose lot had not markedly changed. Out went my commanders from my tent, each bearing an amended list which would, on the long, make up for the weakened status of more than a half-hundred of my cars; but on the short, was bound to cause some confusion.
Men who had trained three seasons on each other’s right were separated; tens were broken up and reassembled in different configurations. Still, the disruption would be transitory; the result well worth it in my estimation.
“It is a pity,” grunted Lupakki, easing himself down by my side, “that we had not made it to the flatlands over that ridge before all this occurred.”
“Is it?” We were sitting outside my tent, a smallish affair of black goat’s hair which I had had pitched only for the privacy it afforded in meeting with my officers: the night was much too fine to be spent in a tent. “Over that last ridge, there is no cover, and there are Mitannian settlements on which I would like to descend like lightning from the heavens. It was no part of my plan to limp into Mitanni like a foundered horse.”
“Yet this defile and its configurations reminds me too much of Arzawa.”
“On Mt. Tiwatassa, you mean? There I had no Sutu, who love to scramble among the rocks, nor our multitude of Hapiru, not to forget the bedawin slinkers-in-the-dark.”
“Still, we are disadvantaged when not on the flat.”
“Tell me something I do not know.”
“What if Tushratta already knows we are here? Any one of those hill folk could have taken it into his head to run for the nearest official with a fat purse.”
“I said, tell me something, not ask me something. Lupakki, I will tell you something: it is a beautiful night. We are on the plains of Mitanni, where we have long desired to be. I brought no women with me because I am tired of whining and nagging. Now, if you have no cure for our dilemma, do not detail it to me.”
He got up stiffly, muttered something salutory, and strode off.
In the dawn, the Hittite chariotry resembled a basket full of snakes, writhing. I shouted myself hoarse correcting the misremembered or the misdirected, and it was nearly day when something resembling an army began to wind its way up the ridge-slope.
They hit us while we were on the slope. I can only conjecture that they had watched us all the night through, though Hittite scouts had reported nothing. But then, there had been no moon.
Tearing down upon us with the sun at their backs, the Mitannian chariotry punched through the ascending wagons and chariots like an awl through softest leather, until the basin between the hills was filled with milling charioteers and overturned wagons and all up and down the sloping sides of the defile battle was begun.
With Piyassilis driving, I had been standing in my chariot giving last minute instructions to the commander of the baggage train, and as the din reverberated from the ridge sides and the enemy from Mitanni descended upon my force I could do nothing but watch, helplessly, and prepare to receive them as best I could. Lupakki had been with the point, high on the hillside. No order I could give could reach him in time; I had the clarion blow a signal, then another, then one directed at Sutu ears, even while the point of the Mitannian wedge pierced our defensive scythe in the gentle bowl of the valley.
They were in my lap. I thought of nothing else, not Piyassilis’ death-white hands upon the reins or even that he was my own get. I snapped orders to “Driver” without even knowing that I did it, while beneath my feet the car rocked and jerked and I fit arrow after arrow to my bow.
If we had been ready, there would have been a third man in my chariot. If we had been the aggressors, it was I who would have had the sun at my back. As abruptly as a wheel sinking into mud the chariot beneath me stopped, mired in the press. Still I let fly with bow. Someone else of the same determination glanced an arrow off my helm. Another stuck in the centerpole. A third came whistling down vertically and nailed Piyassilis’ foot to the boards of the car.
But I had no attention for that. As I had been aiming round me with bow I had been looking for a worthy opponent; in the gold-gleaming chariot beyond a pool of pedestrians hacking at each other with axes I thought I had found him.
“Driver, break through and put me next to those whites. There, where that gilded helm shows!” As I spoke, I saw a man in a Hurrian helm down a Sutu, take up his spear, and turn in a momentary space that opened around him. Then the gap was closed and I only saw the spear as it whistled toward me, for a man with an axe was intent upon beheading my son from a car suddenly drawn close, and two horses simultaneously tried to climb into my chariot from behind. I was reaching around my son with sword, cursing my spent arrows, when the spear’s descent was preceded by a rush of air and split my helm like a ripe melon.
There was a roaring in my ears, then vertigo, and then I knew I was lying half on my side and half on another man, and tried to struggle upright. My knees were like ice and my thighs would not hold me. There was shouting, and the car lurched. I tried to see what was happening, but my sight was obscured by a film of red. I grabbed the rail and by it pulled myself up. When I had done that, when I was standing, legs braced wide, I tried to shake off the clouds that obscured my vision. A moment I recall very clearly: around was a deep silence, men stood frozen still in attitudes of battle, blades in mid-swing, axes buried in brains about to splatter. Then, as I tried to wipe away the blood streaming into my eyes, everything regained its motion and an axe came swinging toward me out of the grainy, blurred confusion, and all went white and I knew I was falling, though into what I could not say.
Intermittent consciousness visited me thereafter: triumphant shouting, as in a nightmare; the name ‘Mitanni’ spoken loud; a second when a shadow leaned over me, a voice speaking death, a kick I had not enough strength to acknowledge; a thousand years in my black isolation struggling to remember what was wrong, and where all the pain had come from; a lurching under me that took my breath and squeezed it out in long wheezing groans through my mouth. Then stillness, and dark once again where there had been a red and surging haze, and blessed surcease from all impossible remembering and forgotten urgency.
Another time, I heard all the crying that has ever come from every man wounded in the whole of all the battles fought on earth since man began, and cried along with them, unashamed. Shortly after that, I felt myself turned, and examined, and heard myself discussed in low voices, though I could not make out the words or the faces hovering like misted moons, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away.
When I was moved from the warm puddle of my blood into the wagon, I knew it, and when I was given to drink, I drank. But I cared not at all by then about anything but when the pain in my head would cease. It was every tooth that has ever needed extraction, every searing thump of motion made me wish for death. I sought the cave of unconsciousness, thinking to defend myself from the agony therein, but each time I wriggled into it, it spat me out.
Talk rattled round me and the wagon rattled under me and within me my mind rattled on and on, urging me to open my eyes, to sit up, to look about…
To find out. Soon that became an obsession more enveloping than the pain: I must be, I thought, who I think I am.
And what I recollect, it must have happened to me.
So it might be best if I just sat up and took a look at who was driving me and where.
But I could not sit up just then.
I listened to the sounds, seeking clues.
I opened my eyes, but the blaze of light wrenched a moan from between my clenched teeth, and I let the weights on my lids push them closed.
What I had seen was the sky and the wagon’s sides high about me, and horses’ heads, those of the team behind.
Still I did not know if I was being driven to my death; or even, should it be true, if that gaudy warrior I had tried to reach was indeed Tushratta, or even if he had survived. I considered that coldly: if we were both dead
, then I would not mind it so much.
And I determined to try and find out those things, and to end my own life before I would have it taken from me, an entertainment for the gloating Hurrians.
So, when next someone raised up my head, I was ready. I had accustomed my eyes to the day. I had wriggled all the muscles of my right arm and conserved my strength. When the man holding my head up brought his other hand to my lips to give me drink, I grabbed the wrist and by it pulled myself against him, embracing him like a lover.
With a shout of surprise and a splashing of wine, my benefactor found himself lying atop me on the floor of the wagon, his own dirk pressed to his gut.
Only then did what he was shouting come clear to me: I was done from the effort, and my eyes would not focus, and I knew that for whatever desperate purpose, I could not follow through. But as the knife slipped from my numbing fingers I realized who it was that was shouting at me, and what it was he was shouting:
“Abuya! Abuya!” screamed my son in a choking sob. “He lives! The Sun lives!”
CHAPTER 20
“Do not try and talk, my Sun,” Piyassilis advised, tears streaming unheeded down his face. “There, drink this. Lupakki! Lupakki! Driver, stop the wagon.”
The wagon lurched to a stop, and the wine slopped down my neck, and all about me the sky filled with brilliant tiny white spots as I tried to raise my head.
“Please, please, lie still,” crooned Piyassilis, though if I could I would have spoken and if I could I would not have lain still, and within me raged a pounding fury that this might be so: never had I been so sorely hurt. And then: how hurt was I? I recollected my “father” Arnuwandas, who had been struck cold and dead from the waist down, and with a fear I had not felt in battle, I attempted to draw up my legs. The effort brought the sky whirling down like a dust devil, and I could not do it soundless, but one by one I raised my legs and then with a sigh let the beckoning dark take me.
And so I was not to see Lupakki, until a lifetime later, when men’s talk and jostling woke me, and I found that I was being borne aloft on a stretcher into my own palace in the dead of night.
And then only did I realize the enormity of the thing, as torches bobbled down the wide palace steps and a shadow flew by them.
I heard a babble of angry voices, a high imperious command cut through them.
For a moment I thought to pretend insensibility and stave off all further anguish thereby. But I felt the heat of her cheek against my hand, heard her, low, chanting my name and calling on her Lady, and then Lupakki’s soothing tones:
“Come away, my lady, until we get him in. Come now, Great Queen, and get back. He would not like to see you crying, nor so shaken before the men. Come with me. We will…”
Her kiss I felt, and a drawing back, and I opened my eyes and put out my hand to reassure her, but the words would not form, and all I saw was the men bearing the stretcher and the sky above. So I tried to turn my head to the right, and bellowed at the pain.
By then she was attempting to extricate herself from Lupakki’s desperate restraint, and in my ears was a mingling of his apologetic refusals and her Queenly threats as to his demise upon the moment if he did not loose her, and then as the stretcher tilted and the men ascended the staircase, they both fell behind.
It was the Shepherd who caused me to open my eyes again, while his calm orders echoed incomprehensible in my ears.
He was pacing the stretcher, a hand on it, by my side, telling a Meshedi to get a physician to my wife with something to calm her, lest she do damage to the child, and to set a guard to watch her, and to tell her for him that she would not see the King until she had got rid of her rent garments and washed herself and combed the knots from her hair.
“Now Shepherd,” I whispered, “you know he cannot tell her that.”
Kuwatna-ziti whirled, hand outstretched, and caught his motion and changed it mid-way, so that the hand rested on my shoulder, not on my brow.
“Tasmi, you have done it this time…” and he smiled a little, and patted my shoulder. “Do not talk. We heard you were dead. Then we heard you were not. Now that I see you, I see that both are partly true. Just rest, now, and later we will talk about it.”
I was about to be lifted ignominiously from stretcher onto bed by two men at my feet and two at my head.
I objected, and they halted, and the stretcher-bearers with them, and I said in a slow and raspy voice that they must lay the stretcher on the bed and then help me sit up.
The Shepherd opened his mouth, then closed it, bowed his head, and stepped back a pace.
The sitting-up was harder than I had expected, and when I had done it I was erect by dint of will and balance, my hands gripping the bronze bed frame with all my desperation. But my feet were on the floor and my head I held, if not upright, then upward, by my own efforts.
The Shepherd said something unintelligible and then dismissed the men.
I had not one particle of strength available for gainsaying him.
When I heard the doors close, I heard also his voice, asking me if I would not then lie down. And since everything, my knees and my thighs and the floor between my legs, was taking that red-spotted tinge that precedes unconsciousness, I let him help me.
When he had made sure that my head did not snap against the soft pillows, nor bang against the cedar board, he turned to go.
“Shepherd, how many?”
“How many what, Tasmi?”
“How many did we lose?”
“Many… but not that many. I told you, do not worry. Get rest. Regain your strength. I will hold the borders for you. Have I not always done it?”
“Yes, you have always done it.”
“I will send in food and drink. You will eat it and drink it. You must try. The fever has burned away all but the hulk of you; you will not die of the wound, but you could die of starvation.”
I closed my eyes, and sighed, and nodded: If the Shepherd watched the flock, then I could do all those things he said. Perhaps even, if I was lucky, escape the pounding behind my eyes.
My wife appeared with my meal and fed me from her hand, her eyes red and swollen but bearing a beatific smile.
It went on a long time, the business of becoming well, and the procession of that first evening would make a pattern followed for many days:
Priests came. Old Women came. Physicians came. Upon my order and fortified by whatever the potion was that steadied her nerves, Khinti turned them all away.
She was enough of a nurse and enough of a priestess and enough of a comfort. If comfort indeed there was to be had.
For she spoke to me in a mixture of child-soothings and laments, and she wept and then she smiled, and told fanciful tales of what we would do when I was well: we would go to Kumanni, the two of us, and then sail down the Mala: we would travel round the world, go even to Ahhiyawa and down into Egypt, King and Queen of the realm. We needed no more honors. We would be peaceful and happy and content within our boundaries…
I fell asleep to her stories as I had to gods’ tales when I was a child.
And the blue-cloaked lord, who had made not an appearance for my sake since before I took Khinti to Alashiya, came to me. And three wasted years he cast down before him and the clay shattered on the rocky ground; and three times two stones he took and made of them a pyre that ascended unto heaven; and on its summit we both stood, and the lands we surveyed were bountiful with olive and fig and palm, and waving with topaz grain in the sun; and three times a thousand charioteers came over the rolling plain; but the grain in their path withered brown and smoking and the chariot horses fell down bloat-tongued and poke-ribbed, and the men who were driving cut their chariot poles into staves and trudged back into a dust-hazed valley which then revealed itself to my sight as a sack. And the blue-cloaked lord bent down and scooped up the sack by its drawstrings, and throwing it over his shoulder, marched away down a path for one only.
When I woke from that I was lying in a pool of soppin
g bedclothes, but I sat up and white flames did not course up my spine to explode at the base of my skull. I reached up tentatively and touched the bandages wrapped about my skull where they crossed left to right over my forehead, and groaned as my fingers pressed on the wound.
Khinti stirred from her sleep at my feet, and then her eyes sprang open and she sat upright in a start. And then she just stood, hovering.
“Queens do not sleep on floors.”
“Queens in Hatti, these days, do not sleep at all. They nap. They doze. But they do not sleep. My lord, how do you feel?”
“Weak. Hungry. Dizzy. Not ready for a woman, even one dressed as you.”
She was wearing only a thin seductive robe, and it had fallen open.
She pulled at it, her eyes never leaving me, as she approached. Falling down by my side she buried her head in my lap, her arms clasping me round, and sobbed.
I stroked her hair, thinking that though Piyassilis had been right, and I lived, living as a defeated and shamed king in a world where all knew it might not be quite the same kind of life as I had previously led.
Before, I think, I had been too ill to grapple with it. It had its claws deep in my neck that day my fever broke, and in my heart and in my belly. I was abruptly, unutterably relieved that I had not had to drive back into Hattusas at the head of however-many men I had not led to death in Mitanni.
“Get me Lupakki. I would hear of the war. Of what happened after I went down.”
“The Shepherd has an oath from me that he will be the first to speak with you when you request conversation.”
“Then get him, and now. And Khinti –”
“Yes, my Sun?” She was already at the door, her chiseled, piquant face was radiant in her pregnancy, and her gaze was as eager and unaccusing as a spotted fawn’s. She raised a hand and pushed her hair off her forehead without knowing she did, and the seal she wore around her neck danced between her breasts.
I, the Sun Page 30