And I found myself looking out from his eyes, even as if I were in his place. So I said: “Old man, I am not trying to sack the fields of your years, nor would I put any prince into slavery. By the Storm God, keep your country! Only aid me with information and I will ask no more. Do not formally acknowledge Mitanni, and I will be content. Later, when I can protect you from those who hold the sword over your head from Akhetaten, then I will take a formal allegiance. Now, keep your self-determination, if it means so much to you.”
And the old king fell down upon his knees and began thanking me in a tremblous voice and I found that for some reason I, too, was saddened by the outcome of this, a triumph for which I had waited long.
So I quieted him and raised him up and we drank and ate and studied the particulars of our bond, and when we were finished with that the day was over, so in the light of torches I received the gifts he had brought up for me: the lion, who was said to be tame as a kitten; and the man who handled him; four teams of horses and the ornate chariots they hauled; ten women, the same amount he had sent to Egypt upon Akhenaten’s request: all were paraded before us.
Of my booty from the Hurrian protectorates I gifted him back an equal number of girls, and gave him a pair of gold cuffs from the palace of Nuhasse.
After the presentation, the old king begged to retire, and since I was feeling very friendly I had Lupakki go with him to arrange for his comfort and make sure that no harm came to him that night among the Hittite host.
All the evening long, Aziru had been quiet, only listening, and making casual talk with Piyassilis, trying to sniff out what had occurred. I thought he would go with his father, but instead he waited until all but Piyassilis and myself were gone from the tent, which was no more than a sunshade open to the sweltering night, its sides tied up to let in the sparse Syrian breeze.
It was only moments into the assessive silence that fell between us before my son excused himself, saying that since he, too, had received a gift from his brother Aziru, he would be remiss in courtesy if he did not go taste of her.
Aziru absently replied that if she did not suit, Piyassilis need only tell him, and he would provide another. Piyassilis invited him to join him in princely recreation, and departed.
Drawing up his knees and resting his elbows on them, his hands turning his cup, the Amurrite looked once around and then said: “Do I wear your bracelets, king of Hatti; is your brand on my butt and your sword on my manhood?”
“Do you not trust your father to do better for you than that?”
“Abdi-asirta is a wise man. He does what he must. You have not answered me, King Suppiluliumas, what is my status?”
“As it was before, except that your land and mine have established friendly relations. I aided you in the past with out asking any recompense, what makes you think I would change my manner?”
“However-many thousand men who are out there on my father’s soil make me think you are ready to collect.”
“Not yet, Aziru, not yet.”
“When?”
“When I so decree. Until then, you may play your game of suzerainty with Egypt, and I will say nothing. Just do not think you can fool the Sun. When I am ready, I will bring you into my country.”
“And if I do not want to come?”
“When I am ready, the time will be right for you, also.”
“What conditions have you levied on my father, that you will drive away with but a few women and horses after coming all the way down here?”
“Only that he cease his pretense of friendly relations with the Mitannian king Tushratta, my enemy.”
The cup rolled on the grass, so violently did Aziru of Amurru throw it down as he was rising. So that he would not be guilty of standing while I sat, I rose also, thinking that this was no boy, but a man near thirty, and that for showing vile temper before the Sun, men in former times had perished.
But he only spat, “I will begin work on my father’s mausoleum,” and wheeled around and strode out.
I did nothing whatsoever about it, although Lupakki stuck his head in immediately upon the Amurrite prince’s exit to ask if I had anything for him to do.
So I invited him in, and we talked of the withdrawal, imminent, of my troops upcountry for the winter, and all that time I was wondering what it was about this Aziru of Amurru that caused me to give him so much rein. I am not one for men, but I felt almost that way about the close-bearded, assertive prince, and that night I dreamed of him instead of Khinti. I dreamed that he walked with the blue-cloaked lord, that one’s arm about him protectively. Behind them were waves and the sea. When I woke in the morning, I woke from a sleep more restful than any I had had since I demoted my Tawananna and exiled her to Ahhiyawa, and so I sought out the prince of Amurru and took a meal with him
His father may have calmed him, or he had come to understand my intent, for he was as pleasant as he had been acerbic the evening past, making jokes with Piyassilis, who was much taken with him, and not saying anything at all about what had passed between us.
Throughout the long leisurely campaign homeward I looked for Tushratta to come fight with me. But as we drove through town after town and met no resistance, I began to suspect that he would not come.
We went up through Nuhasse to see our vassal, whose first acts as a Hittite subject king were to clear the rubble of the investment from his streets and exile those former Hurrians who could not adjust to becoming Hittites. Seeing that he seemed to have the matter well in hand, I advised him to continue in that fashion and the Hittite armies rolled homeward over newly-Hittite ground. And still we experienced no resistance, though I had left much of my foot along my new borders: in truth, we marched home at half strength, but nothing came of it. And we were triumphant: we had made the Niblani mountains and Byblos our frontier.
Speaking of Byblos, when we arrived in Kizzuwadna we heard that. Ribaddi, the Egyptian governor of that city, had sent to Egypt saying:
“The Hittite has overcome all the lands that belonged to the king of Mitanni” and that “Abdi-asirta has gone over to the Hittite”.
Piyassilis was visibly upset.
“Do not worry, my son. Aziru has taken care of himself in the past. His father is an old man only because he was wily enough to survive to become one. They want no aid from us. I cannot send it.”
“Then send to Duttu and have him make light of Ribaddi’s words to Pharaoh! Something, we must do! I do not want it on my head. It is not even true! They have not come over to us… have they?”
“They have, and they have not. Ask, better, how the matter came to be known to an Egyptian.”
All that winter, we looked for who it was that served Egypt from amid our ranks. We never found him.
CHAPTER 27
Crowns wobble on the heads that exercise kingship. That which is conquered must oftimes be reconquered.
In the spring following the campaign that had made Sarrupsi of Nuhasse my vassal, Syria – Retenu the Upper and the Lower – burst apart like a ripe melon dropped from atop the citadel wall. All the coastal princes who called themselves kings for servants or governors, depending upon to whom they were speaking, were yet playing the faithful vassals before whomsoever held them in thrall, while behind the back of myself, or of Tushratta of Mitanni, or of Naphuria Akhenaten, they postured at independence and schemed to bring reality out of dreaming.
This has always been so on the seaboard, where Egypt makes governors of hereditary kings and servants of those born to rule. It was so, inland, because my foray had shown the kings of Ni’i and Mukis and Amurru that Mitannian power was not unshakeable.
I had come, and plundered, and gone away, taking formally only the allegiance of Sarrupsi of Nuhasse. But informally, I had loosened a lot of fetters from about the ankles of subject-kings whose task-master had long been Mitanni. Who could blame those princes of the southern plains if they cast acquisitive eyes upon one another’s borders, thinking that Mitanni was afraid to come out to battle, and Egy
pt was yet slumbering in the tropical sun rays of her new god, the Aten?
I did not blame them: I cheered them on. It was the very confusion for which I had by my foray agitated.
It made the pyre-builders and stone masons, the makers of funeral urns and funerary accoutrements rich.
But where was the Sun, while all this was taking place? I was in Hattusas, leashed, collared as securely as the lion given me by the king of Amurru. He walked his enclosure, and I walked mine, and out to battle neither of us could go.
And there were battles aplenty. I kept track of them through my Egyptian informant Duttu, through Hatib’s couriers, through my sons Piyassilis and Telipinus who fought in Nuhasse while I wore through the king’s shoes and stalked through the king’s halls and tried to hold what I had gained and waited to see what Tushratta would do… but, ah, I will tell it to you as it was told to me:
First came from Telipinus news of dissent and foreign agitators in my eastern provinces. The news was that these matters were escalating, fast becoming formal revolt. A favorite trick of restive provinces is to say: “We are no longer Hittite subjects: we are Hurrian subjects,” whether that is the truth, or even their desire, or not. So, sending troops into Tegarama and Ishuwa to subdue them, I had crossed the Mala river into what was now calling itself Hurrian territory.
Even while I was doing it, I received a message from Tushratta of Mitanni. I had just come back from conferring with the commander of the border guards into Kumanni. Telipinus ran out to meet me, all his dour posturing over the matter of the deportation of his former step-mother forgotten:
“Listen to this!”
And the Priest of Kumanni read to me the Mitannian’s words: “Why do you plunder on that side of the Mala? You are plundering, I will do the same. If you plunder, I will cross the Mala and so likewise; if one lamb or goat comes to harm then I will do likewise!”
So for the second time did the Mitannian “threaten” me. When I had made common cause with Artatama, he had said he was “making himself terrible” against me, but he had been like a gnat; I brushed him away; I did not notice him. Something told me that this time I would notice. He must be doing something, I thought, or else the message would have been an invitation to me to take his submission.
So I quieted all battles; the Hattian army waited expectant; even in Ishuwa, we pressed for no advantage, only maintained the shrunken borders as they were.
Barely had I dispatched my messengers with the above-mentioned orders when I heard these things from the south:
Abdi-asirta had taken the city of Sumuru, which belonged as much to Egypt as did the city Byblos, or the city Tyre he had acquired last season in a like fashion.
All with any understanding of the grave consequences that must develop from such overt warfare among the vassals of Egypt were speaking very quietly and long into the night about Egypt’s reactions. The only thing not suggested by Hattu-ziti or the Shepherd or my sons or myself was that the sphinx would not bestir herself.
I had planned to clean up the boundary problems in the east and proceed southward. I dared not.
And I was soon upheld in my caution. Tushratta launched an expedition against me, crossing the Mala. I had only just confirmed that fact, when Sarrupsi of Nuhasse’s urgent request for troops was borne in by a charioteer who killed two teams getting to Hattusas, whence I myself had just arrived.
To aid Sarrupsi I was bound by treaty. If I wanted to acquire any more vassals in Syria, I could not let this one be executed by my enemy the king of Mitanni.
Why Tushratta did not come against me directly, I could not understand. And it occurred to me that though the king himself was said to be leading the expedition, I could not truly know that he was. Even more, I realized that I could not take a chance on leaving my sons in Hattusas while I went out on campaign. The times were unsettled in the extreme.
So, though I swallowed the bitter bile of pent hatred and heard in my ears the phantom cry of “coward, who sends his sons to battle for him!” from a pair of fat disembodied Hurrian lips, I dispatched Lupakki and Piyassilis and Telipinus for good measure down to aid Sarrupsi.
Arnuwandas I sent eastward to Kumanni, to see if he might fare better than had the Priest in calming the lands.
I ceased to sleep. So bad did it become that I resorted to a priestess who made potions which forced rest upon me. As will happen with what one is not supposed to have, I craved her and took her to my bed, for because of the unsettled conditions from Hatti to Babylon and the beleaguered routes in between, Burnaburiash of Babylon was hesitant to send me his daughter just then, and I was tired of what concubines and lesser wives I had collected.
“Do you think,” I demanded in exasperation of Hattu-ziti, who had been overseeing the incoming presents and the out-going counter-presents, “that he has changed his mind? Have I become suddenly less suitable? Is he waiting to see how I do?”
“No, no, no, the Sun must not think that.”
“Then tell him for me that I will receive her at Alalakh next year, when the first day of summer comes.
“My lord?”
Alalakh is in Mukis, a country which did not yet know that, by my decisions, next year it would be a Hittite country. “I said, tell him that. I will have his daughter then, or not at all. Now go do it!”
And without a word, Hattu-ziti departed, to return but scant hours later with news that Tushratta of Mitanni had left a siege force in Nuhasse and marched on to war-torn Sumuru, which when last I heard had been occupied by Abdi-asirta of Amurru’s soldiers.
“Tushratta is smoothing things over with Egypt. If he hands the city over to the Egyptians, whose own Rabbit of Byblos, Ribaddi, could not hold it, then the Pharaoh will be reassured of his might. And if he reclaims my very first vassal in all of the lower lands so easily, it will then be my might that is lessened, and my eyes that must look upon the ground. May the Storm-God smite him! May his head pop from his neck to be washed in the spurting fountain of his blood! May his seed fall the one upon the other, and all his kin be eaten by the demons of the under-world! May –”
“Does the Sun, my lord, wish to be alone? I have further news, but perchance I could come back –”
“Hattu-ziti!”
“Ah, yes. We have heard that Tushratta has cast his eyes upon Amurru.”
“What does that mean? Has he taken it from me? I am going down there my –”
“No, my Sun.”
“No, what?”
“No, it does not say here that he has taken it, only that he has looked upon it.”
So I snatched the tablet from his hand, and indeed that was all Hatib had said about the matter. I vowed that I would choke him with his Libyan braids when next we met, and curtly ordered out Hattu-ziti, him who was private secretary, chief scribe, chancellor and pillar of the portico that holds Hattusas on her scarp.
Until I heard back from Lupakki that all was well in Nuhasse with my sons and with my vassal-king Sarrupsi and with my new country and all its people, I did not have a moment’s quiet in my heart. But then I was suffused with joy, for Lupakki also reported that Tushratta had been expelled by the fierceness of our battle back across the Mala into Mitanni. Of course, there was no water in Lower Retenu in the second year of the drought, and lack of water might have had something to do with Tushratta’s withdrawal: thirst wreaks havoc with a horse army.
But I was delighted. I took the twins up in my arms and drove them out into the country for the day. I hunted and wrestled with the Shepherd; who joined me in celebration of the Hattian army’s success, and laughter was upon the lips of the Sun once again.
I was still seeking a traitor in our midst, one who was reporting our movements south, but not even Kuwatna-ziti had been able to nose out the slightest clue as to whom that person might be.
It was that traitor which still occupied our attention when, two days before the armies – and Piyassilis and Telipinus and Lupakki with them – were due at Hattusas that my son Arnuwa
ndas arrived in from Kumanni bearing a worrisome look.
“Evil tidings?” I surmised.
“So I estimate them. What the Sun will say I have come to find out.” My eldest was clean-shaven, doing the god’s work in Telipinus’ stead. His thick black hair hung down to curl around his elbows. We had shared more than a woman or two in last year’s campaign, and the season in the field had made a difference in the way he regarded me which I could immediately sense but could not so easily name. He had finally named it for me, saying: “I had not realized… seeing you with the armies, I looked on you from out of different eyes than those of sonship…. Do I ever come to be even half of what you are, I will lay such sacrifice before the Storm God, my lord, as he has never seen before. Do you smile, that I have come over to you as a person, and spoken it to you?”
And I had said: “You know, you think you have come over to me, and you expect me to be surprised. I smile because I have been here waiting, all along!”
After that day, I counted Arnuwandas dearer than even the Shepherd, and took heed to his opinions as if we were of an age.
“So tell these tidings to me, and we will see if they are as bad as your face says you think they are.”
“Should I leave, Tasmi?”
“No, Shepherd, stay. Speak, Arnuwandas!”
“Abdi-asirta has been killed by Egyptian sea-borne forces. They invested Amurru and executed him for not paying his dues to Mitanni. Aziru is fled, hiding until he sees what Egypt will do, but he has made formal claim to his father’s throne.”
The Shepherd whistled a prey-bird’s cry, but when I asked him to comment, demurred.
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