CHAPTER 29
“But they must get their honors from you. Should any one else preside, they will feel cheated. Would that it were not so.”
So spoke Arnuwandas to me of my army, of the heroes’ roll, and of the question of which of us, the Crown Prince or myself, would perform the ceremony.
“It is so late to be performing it, and there is so much else to do, that I will have to risk a few bruised feelings among the Great Ones of the army. And also, it is time you, Arnuwandas, started accustoming yourself to appearing from the halentuwa-house and performing kingly festivals. Telipinus has twice your experience in that regard. Now, do not argue with your father, but do as I have commanded you.”
Thus, I freed myself from not only the heroes’ audience, but the entire processional surrounding the Festival of Haste’s end. Nor did I intend to visit the god’s stations with my queen, who was not yet ready to perform any sacrifices. In the matter of festivals that winter, if my sons did not perform them, they were not performed; I needed more desperately the waking hours of my day than to waste them carting the deified fleece from temple to temple throughout the land.
And why was I risking the gods’ displeasure on the closure of such a successful campaign? There was the matter of my new queen, and how the people were accepting her. There was the matter of my Chamberlain Hattu-ziti, who had been in Kumanni since my arrival, and was just that day returning to my city on the scarp. There was a certain Great Shepherd whose counsel I had long been without. And there was the news: the inscrutable, wry words of Aziru; the bleatings of Ribaddi of Byblos; the death screams from the city Sumuru, turned Amurrite in the time it took me to climb back up the plateau. There were, not least of all, all the royal prisoners who were now deportees in Hittite prisons, waiting for me to find time to interrogate them, a task which I happily expected to take the winter long.
And there was, far down my mental list, the matter of Telipinus; the matter of my twins, Khinti’s children, and weaning them from their black nurse. The matters vying for my attention were piled up around me like snowdrifts, so deep that I could not walk, but must lunge through them, and when a man feels like that there is always something forgotten in the confusion; or worse, not seen at all.
In the matter of the new Great Queen, Malnigal, I was in turn perplexed, annoyed, enraged, mollified by her wiles, then perplexed once again. She, whose eyes had spat a surreptitious fire the whole time I was warring, looked discontentedly upon my palace. No Hittite oils were fine enough for her skin, which in the long months that she played the part of battlefield wife had first reddened, then peeled off, then bronzed until she looked like a Hittite warrior. As her tan flaked away, so did her awe of things Hattian, and she was disappointed in this and dissatisfied with that, and ordering all sorts of alterations in her palace quarters and costly imported cosmetics, fabrics, foodstuffs and medicines from afar. As if that were not enough, she found my palace lacking in “civilized comforts” and even said this to me. So I had suggested she go look in the residential palaces built on the terraces of rock above the pond, there where I had rebuilt the palace of the grandfather for my grown sons, and promised her that if she preferred it, I would move out of the main palace. I had done it before, when I sought privacy. But no woman had wheedled me into it. In her nosings about the storage magazines she had come upon the “glorious” Egyptian antiques I had ordered removed from my sight upon Daduhepa’s death. Now these pieces of furniture had plagued me with their too-low seats and too-delicate construction in the time of my first queen and before that all through my youth, and I was not at all pleased by the delight my new queen took in having discovered them. In fact, one of the first items on my docket was to find out from Hattu-ziti why they had not been given to someone, or sold off, or even destroyed.
“I thought I told you to get rid of them!”
“My lord?” he was just entering, arms laden with letters in their envelopes of clay, his sparsely-haired head swiveling as he crossed the room and laid them with a clatter on the table, so that never did his eyes leave mine.
“Those items of Egyptian manufacture Daduhepa used to collect – we were free of them, I thought. Well, Malnigal has found them, and we are not rid of them any more.”
“They are very valuable, my Sun.”
“They are very uncomfortable, my Chamberlain, who hates to ever discard anything, even when he is ordered. Tell me, if you can, what is the fascination women, to the last sloe-eyed one of them, as far as I can see, have with things Egyptian?”
“Ah-hah! Now, I have become an expert on Egypt, in the Sun’s behalf. In the matter of women loving Egyptian craftsmanship, it is the precious woods and the mysteriously pleasing depictions carved into them, but more than that, it is that Egypt is a land which is as if a woman had designed it all: the colors, the magnificent excesses, the statues colossal in dimension, are all executed like the most delicate of embroideries: no woman could resist a country which holds art and grace and pomp so high. And in their government, the Great Wife is more powerful than any Tawananna: any man who would be king in Egypt must have a blood or marriage connection with a solar princess, else in no way will the people accept him and let him be their god. But if that is done, then he is their god above all other gods: no god of diorite or marble or even of lapis is as precious to them, nor as richly adorned… ah, my lord, I have seen such wonders that I know not where to begin…”
“Begin by assuring me you are not ready to separate from the Sun and become a citizen of Egypt. You sound like Lord Hani, the Honorable.”
“Hani is a good man: a good man who serves a demented god who is also, though you may not understand this, good, and that is bad… but it is the Egyptian people who are truly most good. They are so good, so tractable, so accepting, so full with love for the institution of kingship that even when its seat is occupied by an unfit king who can barely keep from befouling himself, that even when such a man is their Good God, the people remain lovers of their king.”
“Hittite people love me,” I said uncomfortably, squinting as hard as I could at Hattu-ziti, as if I could peer between the network of lines on his skin and into his heart.
“Hittite people are not like these people. My lord, the Sun would not want the kind of love I am talking about, nor the kind of people capable of it. Next to Hittite people, the Egyptians are sleepwalkers, lost in a dream of love and not seeing anything which is not fitting – they call it maat, which means the degree, the order of rightness that indicates the place in nature’s scheme of each thing –”
“Enough. I can barely believe that each year at New Year’s the gods convene and assign us our fates. That they are peering over my shoulder every moment, I cannot accept. Rightness… Harken to this: When a king seeks the gods, he must supplicate and supplicate; when a priest seeks the gods, he goes through all manner of ritual to attract their attention. Even with the Oath Gods, one can never be sure that they, whose task it is to do so, are really overseeing the bonds of the treaties they are invoked to rule over. Tell me not of the gods of Egypt who are eternal. Tell me of their living god, him who is to die. Better, tell me in few words the tale of your journey from beginning to end, leaving out everything but what directly affects international affairs.”
“I would rather tell you of all the places I have been and the phenomena I have seen… there is no one else I could tell. But perhaps when the Sun has time…”
“Certainly, when I have the chance, we will talk of it. But now just give me what I need to know.”
“Know then, my lord, that the Honorable Lord Hani is nothing if not peaceseeking, that he is a reasonable man and that the whole time we were on the ship, and while we walked among the temples of Karnak, and even when we saw the Pharaoh’s mother bearing her new son – begotten on her at Istar of Nineveh’s coming to Egypt by Amenhotep III – that whole time, not one word did Hani speak of the Sun’s expedition, then in progress, against Mitanni.”
“So you are
saying you think they will not interfere with me in matters of expansion, and that they are raising a successor to this Akhenaten in all haste?”
“They will not be able to interfere where Akhenaten dictates no interference. And I am saying that though all seems well in the City of the Horizon, up the river lies the stronghold of the god Amun, and there reside those who are capable of interfering.”
“In your opinion, then, there is need? He is truly mad, young Naphuria Akhenaten?”
“Oh, no. It is normal to appear at audiences with towering crowns but no clothing, or clothing that might as well have been no clothing. Sane kings in Egypt they have none. But of a god on earth are they possessed, who even says this to them, and more than that: he has appointed himself sole intermediary between his deity the Aten and the people. But do not mistake me, we have powerful opponents in Egypt. In Akhetaten they were all gathered to receive the tribute of all the foreign lands. Aye, the Divine Father is as tall as yourself, and nearly as great in inner stature. Horemheb, also, bears watching, not only for his military prowess –”
“When has he done any good?” I laughed. “If he is responsible for Aziru’s successes, he is no threat to me.”
“But he is ‘Sole Friend’ and he is related to Aye, the chief councilor. It is they who prop up Akhenaten on his throne.”
“So, now you are saying tread carefully?”
“That is what I am saying, my Sun. I had more audiences in Egypt than either you or myself expected; this Aye decreed he must see me, and the mighty general Horemheb was in attendance. Yet they spoke not a single threat nor even broached the subject of Upper and Lower Retenu. And I had been sure that they would do so, if only because the Syrian princes were using the opportunity of their gathering together to try and dispatch each other, and three attempts on the lives of this monarch or that had been foiled at great peril by that day.”
“What did they talk about, then?”
“They asked me of your sons and were polite and went on at length about what I should see while I remained in their country, and queried me upon the impression I was taking back to you of their empire, and in all ways did nothing I expected and did not do anything which I, or you, or any king’s servants in Hatti would have done.”
“And what else?”
“Not a thing: it is quite remarkable. Everyone there pretends that all is well; that there is no war raging above their heads; that they are not losing strength and protectorates; that the royal family is untroubled and happy. Everyone strives to project the impression that he is unutterably content. I almost forgot the Sun was raiding whilst I stood there. I found it impossible to credit the actual situation with the danger I had placed on it beforehand. In the one instance war was mentioned, it was them proclaiming some triumph that either never took place or of which we in the north have heard nothing.”
“Most likely simply more Egyptian history: once spoken, it is thus evermore. I understand that. I was ordering my deeds for inclusion in a treaty prologue while at Halap. I left out the campaign I waged against Tushratta that got me this,” I touched the scar on my head, where it ran into my eyebrow. “I did not speak a word about it, though how it slips my mind now and then I cannot understand.” I grinned.
Hattu-ziti did not grin, but said: “My friend, Suppiluliumas, my king… think upon all the years I have served you. Give a moment to the days when the great double walls about Hattusas were just our dreams in the dirt of the infirmary floor in Samuha. Then hear me: do not make light of Egypt. The sphinx is treacherous. Should she be irritated enough to arise, she will crush us with a flick of her tail. The might of thousands of years is not conceivable until your own eyes have seen it. I have seen it, and I tell you: beware.”
“I had someone’s life taken for saying that to me once. An Old Woman, do you recall her?” He nodded, but he was not affrighted of me. He went on speaking as if I had said nothing at all.
“In the smaller arena of events, there is the boy Kantuzilis, who has been assisting me since our departure to foreign lands. He is a joy to the heart of a heartless old man who has begotten no children, but even allowing for that, he will shine in the Sun’s behalf in days to come.”
“Keep him, then. What of Duttu, our friend with the hole in his pocket?”
“Egyptian kilts do not have pockets.”
“Is that, then, his problem?”
“His problem is writer’s cramp: he sends double out of Egypt what he received back in. I instructed him to make small of Aziru’s detractors, and to bother Akhenaten as infrequently as possible with the depressing affairs of foreign wars. He was at first unsure that he could afford so bold a move, but since I agreed to further subsidize him –”
“What? How much more does this Duttu think he is worth. I could field a column of chariotry for what I am paying him!”
“Does my lord king want to give up on the Amurrite and let him lose his head? It would be half the cost to aid him openly, for it is twice as dangerous to Duttu to cause tablets to be misfiled and wrongly marked as having been under the king’s attention, as to us to send six hundred chariots to his aid.”
“That much?”
“Does the Sun wish me not to send it?”
“Send it. Send Duttu howsoever much gold you have agreed to send. No one helped me. It will destroy Aziru if I take things out of his hands so that he finds out about it. Aziru’s case – you do not understand my interest, do you?”
“I am not questioning you, Suppiluliumas,” he said, suddenly jowly.
“Look, then. Here I sit, and I am a Great King. And off goes Aziru to Egypt, because he is not. And of all the men I have faced in battle, none have been his equal. Had Tushratta of Mitanni been as kingly as Aziru of Amurru, he and I would have met face to face ere this. When Tushratta slipped through my fingers last season, I finally became clear about why I have been so generous to the Amurrite: he is a born king. I would have Tushratta’s fat rendered down to oil by now, had he half the kingship in him that Aziru has. It is a joke of the Storm God, to cause such a man to be born into the wrong race, into the wrong station. I have no son so kingly.”
“You have four sons as kingly: Arnuwandas, Piyassilis, Telipinus, and even young Zannanza. The Amurrite is but older, more desperate, more flamboyant. However, as I have said, it is not my place to tell you what to do, and I am not going to presume upon you further. Would you look at these documents I have brought?”
“No, I would not, but I must, so I will.”
When we had done with them, which were all concerned with my new vassals and their various reactions to Aziru’s taking of the city Sumuru, I excused him and went straightaway down into the dungeons, for while I had been reading over all the honeyed, grasping protestations of my new vassals, I had remembered the prisoner whom I had promised myself I would first look over: Aitakarna, the son of the king of Kinza, who had so valiantly lost to me in battle, and whose father had died on the journey of wounds sustained at my hand. The thing I wanted to do with him had not been decided in my mind until I heard all the words of his compatriots in Hittite Syria speaking from the clay: he would be ultimately useful if I could give him back his lands in a vassal king’s fief and reinstall him on his hereditary throne. I would be easing tempers and soothing fears from the Niblani mountains to Byblos, should I succeed in accomplishing such a thing.
I did not have him brought out: I went myself, alone, into his cell. He was in relative comfort, but he did not know it, and he spat defiantly at me, rattling his shackles and demanding to know if I would like my own sons treated thusly. Now Aitakama of Kinza had formerly shaved his head, and it was growing out since he had neither obsidian razor nor free hands to shave with, and the aspect he presented was arresting: down upon his chest lay his matted beard, and all about his skull stood out a bush of hair like a horses’ bristles when they are cut so that they stand up from the neck. He had wounds that were well into scarring on both of his arms, and his torso was striped here a
nd there with them. He was not of the nut-brown, wiry variety of person, with curly hair and curly nose, that populates some of Kinza, but a burly shock-headed bear, stoutly made and inclined to a bulging belly, the kind of man to whom no feat of endurance is too arduous. He was no boy, this Aitakama, who stood somewhere in his prime between Aziru’s age and my own, nor did he show any sign of contrition or fear on his sloping, boneless face.
“What do you want, king of Hatti?” he lowered, lumbering to his knees, arms held high so that the rope running between his neck and his fetters swayed as he shifted his weight from side to side. I wondered if I had miscalculated and there rested no real intelligence behind those flat, uptilted eyes.
“I want to make an ally of you, a vassal, should you agree. I want to win you to my cause, and restore you to kingship under my guidance. What say you?”
His mouth opened, hung there until he noticed it. Then he chuckled, and threw back his head and began to roar.
I found myself also amused, but not to tears. But then, it was not my life we were talking about.
“I say,” gasped Aitakama of Kinza, “let us discuss the matter in friendly fashion,” and when I cut the ropes securing his shackles, he could not at once free himself from them. He wiped his eyes on his forearm, rested a fettered wrist on his knee to steady it, and remarked that if I was making light of him, and meant none of what I had just said, then even so he thanked me, for hope had almost gone out of him.
And I was perfectly happy to put it back.
I gave him the run of the palace, in the care of Zidanza and a Meshedi, and I made sure that in all things he was treated like a prince. When my sons came to briefings, there also, I promised, Aitakama would be. And I impressed upon him the high value My Majesty placed on candor while I probed him for resentment held against me from the matter of his father’s death. I found none, only an appetite for life that I was more than willing to satisfy. I made plans to restore him in Kinza in the coming spring.
I, the Sun Page 45