I, the Sun

by Morris, Janet

  “Why are you doing this?” He said out of that changed countenance. His nose went markedly leftward, and the white of his left eye was blood-red for half its extent. He was not however, more crippled of limb than he had been before, and if I had altered the way his green eyes sat in their bed of scars, then at least he had sight in them.

  “Why am I doing this? I have marked your head; I know you too well to have you exiled; I might not like what you would choose to do in foreign lands. And you are sensible enough not to do anything foolish where I might find out about it. Make no mistake…” I leaned forward, grasping the eagle claws of my throne, “I will find out about it, should you do evil in any matter, in any matter at all. So you be very careful to be an exemplary Hattian soldier. I am giving you a great deal of rein. Do not bolt. If you arouse my anger once again, I will kill you by torturing you at great length in the Assyrian fashion. I will import someone to do it. Is that understood?”

  He was kneeling down, not shackled, for he was no physical threat; his gait was halting, he could not run. He said: “It was not her fault, you know.”

  “Whose fault? Who remembers just what it was that went on that night? No one does, who craves to draw another breath. Zida, take him out of here and put him to bed.”

  CHAPTER 26

  When the winds began to sweeten with spring, word came up from Tushratta of Mitanni, warning me that he was “making himself terrible” against me because I had made common cause with Artatama the “usurper.” Likening his wrath unto the terribleness that had put him upon the seat of his kingship, he said to me that should I plunder across the Mala river then he would blot me out, that should my troops take one lamb then he would do like wise with thrice that many Hattian lambs.

  It was a very unfriendly exchange. It was not, however, the open declaration of hostilities I had been awaiting.

  But down on the Syrian plains, along the west bank of the Mala between the Egyptian coastal protectorates and Mitanni proper, awaited my partisan king Sarrupsi in the country of Nuhasse. The geographical location of this country Nuhasse was most strategic: below my Kizzuwadnan frontier were Tushratta’s vassals, the rich countries Ni’i and Mukis – and Mukis’ mighty city on the Orontes river, Alalakh; and a little inland, Halap. All of these countries and cities I raided on the way to Nuhasse, and the cattle and sheep and implements of the gods and namra that I took were countless. I stayed well away from Carchemish, the Hurrian city on the Mala, and across the river I did not go.

  But as the Hittite army plundered its way down from Kizzuwadna toward the soon-to-be Hittite Nuhasse, my might spilled over and here and there a Mitannian protectorate I vanquished.

  Since it was so hot and dry that year, it was easy, quick work, even for the foray army, which was mostly foot – five thousand of them; Hapiru, Sutu, Kizzuwadnan Hittites, Mirans Hittites from the Upper country and the Lower; Hittites from Arzawa, Hittites from Hayasa and Hittites from every conquered town upon our borders joined in battle with us. From Ishuwa and from Tegarama I levied additional troops, on the theory that if they were out fighting with me, they would not be troublesome to Telipinus who ruled in Kumanni and Arnuwandas who ruled from Hattusas in my stead.

  I have said it was an easy raid: it is always easy when an army only wants to loot a town, not occupy it. We fired our arrows and the sweltering countries burst into flame like tinder, and as the armies marched southward we would send back to the plateau all the booty, so that while the southern lands were obsessed with the drought and what it portended for winter, up above, the Hittite towns were getting fat.

  And, as I had hoped, while I was striking fear into the kings of Ni’i and Mukis’ hearts, my partisans grew strong in the country of Nuhasse. And, also as I had hoped, because of the ferocity of the Hattian army, Tushratta of Mitanni became afraid. Though I plundered only on the west of the Mala river, he took it as a personal affront, and up into my refractory eastern-most vassal-states he sent arms and agitators. But since he was making himself ‘terrible’ against his brother Artatama, he could not meet with me, and threats did not keep the Sun of Hatti from vanquishing what fortified towns stood between my army and its goal.

  Let me tell you where it was I was headed: Amurru. I sent word to Abdi-asirta, Aziru’s father and king of Amurrite and Hapiru people, to expect me, so that he would think: “The Sun is coming. This a good time for me myself to make war.”

  And I was hearing, as I led my point deeper into the navel of Syria, that my message had had the desired effect.

  Let it be said that I was very circumspect on this campaign: into Egyptian territory I did not so much as step. All the lands west of the Orontes I ignored as if they were covered by the ocean’s waves; I did not touch a hair on the head of any Egyptian official, not the smallest of lambs nor the poorest hovel did my fires lick.

  But Abdi-asirta did all that for me, as I had known he would: it was he who launched a massive campaign one midnight, and thereby Amurru gained control of all the adjacent coastal cities about whom Egypt cared little: Irqata, Amm/bi, and Sigata he overcame, and Amurru was suddenly possessed of a seaboard as extensive as Ugarit’s. And that was not all we heard. We heard that Aziru, with a complement of Sutu helping him, had slipped into the palace at Irqata and murdered its king, one Adtina. How we heard this was by way of refugees our scouts captured, and then, as I was resting with my troops in the newly Hittite land of Nuhasse, being entertained by my grateful new vassal King Sarrupsi, I got a message from Abdi-asirta saying that he would meet with me, and asking that I not do evil upon his borders, but drive in peace through the lands of Amurru, and promising that Hittite soldiers would be treated well by his people if their comportment allowed it.

  So I wrote nothing back to him, but made ready to embark southward once again.

  The king of Nuhasse, whom I had not personally met until I invested the land and freed him from Tushratta’s overlordship, was a fair-skinned man with a bulbous nose and feral eyes. He whined constantly that as soon as I left, the Hurrian king Tushratta, his sympathizers in the country, and the kings of Mukis and Ni’i whom I had not treated at all well while traveling in their lands, would descend upon him and destroy him, and his land would not be Hittite any more. So I offered to leave some troops with him, and calmed him, and told him that should such a thing occur, since the lands were Hittite lands, I would protect them as I would protect my own hearth, my own women, my own get. And though he mumbled about it, he was a vassal and there was nothing he could, do.

  So we went out of Nuhasse and struck toward Amurru in the yellow wavering heat, merciless though the summer was almost done up on the plateau.

  By the time we had entered into Amurru with our troops and our chariotry and seen for ourselves that the people were friendly, or at least not hostile, we heard that Abdi-asirta had procured the overthrow of the king of Tyre and slain its king, the king’s wife, and all their sons, and installed an usurper who was his man on the throne. As it happened, this king’s wife was the sister of Ribaddi, Egypt’s governor in the port city of Byblos, who wrote to Egypt’s chancery with all his woes.

  “What think you, Abuya?” said Piyassilis to me. “How do you estimate the likelihood of forging a sturdy peace from such low-grade ore?”

  “About like the forging of good iron: chancy. But if Ribaddi is, as he says, ‘shut up like a bird in a cage in Pharaoh’s city’; and if still Egypt does not aid him, their own governor, then it is just between the Amurrite, the Mitannian, and I. This foray is like the waxing of a blade’s tip before it is quenched: that which is tempered hard, but not brittle, will last forever. And if, like good iron, at times cold pounding will improve the temper, then upon Abdi-asirta I will pound.”

  We were driving round the country of Amurru, just looking, awaiting its king. “If you say so, for a man should not doubt the word of the Sun. But if Sarrupsi of Nuhasse loses his hold, then we will be cut off without a retreat from this accursed oven of a land.”

  �
��But I would then have a reason none could question for going after Tushratta of Mitanni.”

  “You have that, do you not, in the message he has sent?”

  We were driving around the foothills of the Niblani mountains, west of which lay Ugarit, into whose Egyptian lap I was not yet ready to settle, awaiting the king of Amurru’s visit. This was to be my boundary for the time being: I was not intending to enter Byblos. All that remained was to see whether Amurru would submit, or whether the friendly Hattian soldiers encamped round Apina like a plague of locusts would become unfriendly and vanquish the land of Amurru, or whether I could bring it into the Hittite lands by negotiation. I cared not too much about the method; though I liked Aziru well enough, he was no son of mine. And I was still hoping that Tushratta would come out and fight with me. Anything that kept me longer in these lands was welcome, for Tushratta had threatened me further but did not come out to meet me in battle, and my fingers itched to close about his fat throat:

  “The treachery of the Mitannian is boundless. Perhaps Tushratta will rest content without avenging the loss of his western lands; perhaps the Nuhasse lands mean nothing to him, after all.”

  “They mean something to me,” said Piyassilis, rubbing his bandaged right arm. He had taken an arrow in it in the resistance Nuhasse’s anti-Hittite faction had fielded. “I could become accustomed to the heat. The land is so fertile, the sky so vast.”

  “I will give it to you, if you like. Would you be a king here?”

  “I do not know how I would fare with Aziru as a neighbor.”

  “Then where would you rather reign?”

  The smile on his face faded. “You are serious, Abuya?”

  “Deadly serious. You cannot be a prince forever.” I had lost my first queen before the age Piyassilis was then: twenty-two.

  He looked at the driver we were using, one Teshub-zalma, another relative of the Shepherd’s who bore Kuwatna-ziti’s distinctive, wolfish stamp, and ordered him to halt the chariot. Behind us, fifteen drivers did the same.

  Out from the chariot we went, with silence between us, and climbed a little ridge by the road. When we had the summit, Piyassilis said:

  “Carchemish, of all I have seen, interests me the most. That city, with her crenellated walls and her river view, would content me for all time.”

  “Well spoken, prince, but an ambitious desire. You will have to wait a year or two for that town; next to Hattusas, I have not seen a city so fortified.”

  “Just why I want it; it is most like home.”

  “Then,” I promised him, “it will be yours.”

  I did not expect that it would take so many years to make that promise a reality.

  Nor did I expect the king of Amurru to be awaiting me in my camp when my thirty rolled in to the chorus of huzzahs that always, of late, greeted the Sun wherever my Majesty drove among the troops.

  Now, we were very many, I have said. I have not said that we covered the Amurrite lands as far as the eye could see, pikes burnished, fires glowing, horses and chariots littered like booty across the landscape.

  Neither, evidently, had the Amurrite expected us to be so numerous, for that was the first thing he said to me after the traditional wish that all be well with me, with my lands, with my wives, with my sons, with my horses and my chariots.

  The Amurrite king had come much bedecked: in his tiered kingly robe with its short cape and his circlet and his jewels he was magnificent, scintillant. His chariot gleamed, and his horses tossed their plumed heads and shook their golden manes. He was beside it, a broad, grey-haired man, olive-skinned and flat-faced with thick lips and a regal, generous nose. I judged him fifty, or sixty if he had lightly aged.

  Beside him was Aziru, looking about him in sharp quick glances like the falcon his retainer stroked upon its perch. Fifty chariots Abdi-asirta, king of Amurru, had led into the Hittite encampment, and my son whispered when he saw the horses that we might be well-pleased at what would come out of those Hurrian-bred mares should we let a Hittite stallion climb them.

  But I was concerned not at all with horses, just then.

  The hue and cry of the troops was just dying down when Lupakki detached himself from the knot of men before my tent and came to escort me.

  “What think you, Lupakki?”

  “I think I wish Hattu-ziti were here, to separate the princes from the kings.”

  Piyassilis was vaulting from the car and half-way to the Amurrite chariots. “Prince,” I admonished, “do not commit me to anything with Aziru, not even for ten teams of horses.” He grinned back and promised that he would make no treaty with Aziru on his own. It was then that I saw the cage and the lion who stood calm with his handler, a leash around his neck, apart from the kingly train but not far enough apart to suit my horses, who danced in Lupakki’s grasp and snorted.

  “How do you think I would look in one of those capes?” lisped Lupakki.

  “You may wear one yet, o provincial one. That is, if you can grow that much of a beard.” I had kept my own beard, though I was about ready to shave it, since it had served me well in my negotiations with brother kings thus far. At that time I was concerned with looking not so formidable, but rather trustworthy and wise, and was telling myself that the beard softened my aspect.

  As I strolled toward the grey-haired king of Amurru, Aziru and Piyassilis detached themselves and went in the direction of the lion and his handler.

  When Abdi-asirta had finished commenting on the multitude of my troops, he had still not shown even the smallest sign of deference, but treated me just like a brother king of equal rank.

  So I said back to him: “Come within,” without any dignities appended, and went before him into the tent wherein was a small shrine to the Storm God and little else but a brazier and some folding, footed stools.

  “Now, we are alone and I think you had better submit yourself, Amurrite prince.”

  I sat, but did not invite him to join me. He looked out from whitened, eyes filmed with the clouds of the years, and shook his head at me, and in an old man’s voice said:

  “Young king, you call me prince and make light of me and do not give me even the slightest courtesy. I had thought your intentions were friendly. My son said the Sun of Hatti was a reasonable man.” And he sighed, and sat down upon his own initiative, smoothing his long robe around his knees.

  I wondered how he could stand being so covered in the heat, and how well he could see out of those eyes, and how long it would be before he went up to kingship in heaven.

  “Bow down before me like you do to your Egyptian overlord, and you will find me very friendly. Stop sending tribute to my enemy the Mitannian king Tushratta, and do not aid him in any way, and I will increase your might. But continue to be impertinent with me, and you will not live to fight another day.”

  “Is this a trap then?” and the old man was dry-voiced like crackling leaves underfoot.

  “No, no. Submit to me, man, and I will make your borders my borders, and your people, your cattle and your temples I will protect, and your sons will not have to spend their lives with their noses to Egypt’s sandal.”

  “You boast, young man. Boasts are the most insidious of poisons. I cannot defy Egypt so openly as you demand. So, if those are your conditions, cut off my head, slay my sons, roast my people, all those but the ones you want for servants – that is what you have done everywhere else. I cannot become a vassal of yours.”

  “Yes you will. But under these conditions: you will continue your alliance with Egypt; you will cease to aid Tushratta; you will claim putative sovereignty over your own lands, as you have been doing. The only difference is that where you found room for Tushratta in your heart, you will put me there instead. And of course, keep me informed of what you do.”

  “If I do that, young king, it will be my death.”

  “You will die quicker if you do not do it. And do not try dissembling with me: we both know that Naphuria Akhenaten dwells in the temples with his One God, and
goes not out to deal with Egypt’s woes.”

  “Ah, but Horemheb leads the armies, and Hani, the Honorable Lord, disseminates Pharaoh’s will; Queen Tiy lives yet, and Aye the Divine Father is not befogged by the years: underestimate Egypt, my brash young warlord, and you will be brought before her with copper shackles on your ankles.”

  I almost killed him myself upon the spot. Instead, I got up and stood over him, saying: “Submit to me or the whole of Amurru will shine black like obsidian in the sun.”

  The sound of my rage filled the tent like a lion’s roar. And I heard from without, a commotion attendant upon my bellow of exasperation that included the voices of Aziru and Piyassilis and Lupakki.

  The elephant-skinned king merely looked up at me, and began quietly to explain further his difficulties.

  At length, by dint of implacable repetition, I extracted from him a nominal submission, and all I demanded in the matter of Tushratta he ceded me. But there was a sadness in him that seemed to have been festering there forever, as he appealed to my mercy in the matter of his country and his son:

  “As for Aziru, you must not take Amurru away from him; set no governor upon my people. He has labored too hard to be denuded of everything for which he has fought. And my Hapiru people, those I have let into the land: you must not exile them; they have no place of their own and I have promised them a place with me unto eternity.”

  “You know me not well enough: there are Hapiru among my troops, and at home in the Hatti land rest their families. As far as I am concerned they are Hittite people. As far as I am concerned, your people, henceforth, will be Hittite people –”

  The old king’s jaw trembled, but he did not look away, only said: “All my life I have fought the hippopotamus of Egypt trying to swallow me up, and the jackal of Hurri trying to gnaw me to death. I thought, now in the end of my days, I had a little time to assure Aziru something more than servitude. I tried to solidify the lands about me; I risked everything to acquire a seaboard from which my son might hold his independence. We are a proud folk. It will not go well with him to bend his head and see always another’s foot. He may die of it. Why I have struggled so long and attained so much only to lose it to you – of whom no one had even heard a scant few years ago – is a question for the gods. I will seek some comfort from them, and an answer.”