Son of Ishtar

by Gordon Doherty

  Darizu the Galasman, sitting opposite the king, hung his head in shame.

  ‘Perhaps that’s the way he wants you to think?’ Nuwanza reasoned, his eyes locked onto the fire, then switching suddenly to Mursili. ‘You have sensed it too, My Sun, I know you have: a feeling of being toyed with. Last night when we slept at the camp on the high plain, I lay awake and watched as a feral cat bounded back and forth with a mouse in its mouth. The mouse was fine, alive and all, but I could see in the tiny creature’s black eyes that it knew that things were far from good. It is time to take the army home, My Sun.’

  Mursili sighed. He had ignored Nuwanza’s words too often recently, and every time, the shrewd general had been proven right. It was in an archer’s nature, he realised, to wait, to measure, and never to shoot without absolute certainty of a clean strike. ‘Home, you say?’ he said, breaking off a chunk of offered bread and chewing on it absently.

  ‘We have triumphed in part,’ Zida added, stopping in his efforts to raise the tent. ‘We can detach a thousand men, perhaps, to rebuild the broken watchtowers here, further north than before, to reclaim Wahina as our own.’

  ‘Let us take the soil of Wahina as a blessing from the Gods, and look to next year,’ Muwa agreed. ‘The men are growing weary of this campaign, Father.’

  Mursili looked around him, seeing that the ranks were not busy wrestling, drinking and bantering as usual. Many sat in silence, way worn and no doubt thinking of their loved ones. The balance of the argument was tilting, until he noticed a commotion near one end of the camp. A clutch of spearmen wrested a trio of men in from the darkness of night. Zida laid down his hammer and pegs, letting the part-erected pavilion slouch, taking up his spear instead. ‘What’s this?’ he said keenly.

  Mursili rose, Nuwanza and Muwa doing likewise. The king peered at the apparitions being brought to him. Three men with the heads of bulls, it seemed. An army of chill-footed ants raced across Mursili’s skin.

  ‘What the?’ Prince Muwa gasped.

  But as they drew closer, the firelight showed them as no monsters: they were men – warriors – but in the oddest garb. To each of their helms were affixed two horns. The middle one of the three reeked of charisma, and was clearly their leader. His eyes were pale blue, his skin fair and his narrow nose and lips were almost sculpted. His hair was thick and flaxen like the noonday sun, tumbling from the back of that remarkable helm. He wore a green-painted, armless scale corselet with a wide gold band clinging to his right bicep, and plate-sized copper rings dangled from his ears. He carried a fierce-looking trident – which Zida swiftly denuded him of as he was brought before Mursili.

  ‘My Sun,’ a Mesedi said. ‘The scouts found these three on the nearby hills. They were staked out by an ants’ nest.’

  The crawling death, Mursili thought, one of the Kaskans’ favoured ways of despatching their enemies.

  A momentary silence gripped the crowds who had gathered round.

  ‘This one asked for an audience with you,’ the Mesedi escorting them added, nodding to the central stranger.

  The leader of the odd trio’s eyes widened as he beheld Mursili. ‘Lo-ord of Hit-tite?’ he said in a jagged accent. Clearly the Hittite tongue was not his native language.

  Mursili appraised the fellow for some clue of his origins, while Zida hissed in the newcomer’s ear. ‘Labarna, Great King of all you see around you. Now bow before him. You will address him as My Sun.’

  The stranger obediently sank to one knee, dipping his head. ‘My Sun,’ he said, ‘I am Volca, from the Isl-and of the Sher-den.’

  Mursili’s eyes narrowed.

  Nuwanza leaned in close to whisper: ‘The Sherden. A tribe from far, far to the west. Beyond Troy, beyond even the dark islands of Ahhiyawa. I have only heard traders and adventurers speak of them before.’

  Volca looked up at Nuwanza now. ‘This true. We only passed the Ahhiyawan coastlands near end of journey to get here.’ The throaty hiss and the way he pronounced Ah-hee-yaaa-wan lent a mystical air to his words and seemed to chill the night just a fraction. ‘My men and I travel long, long way to come to My Sun. Sailed towards the dawn for many moons,’ he swept a hand across the sky as if outlining their voyage.

  ‘A mercenary? Did King Alaksandu not warn us of his like?’ Muwa whispered. ‘The sea warriors from the faraway western islands.’

  The slightest twinge on Volca’s lips suggested he had heard – and understood – this. ‘Some of Sherden are pirates, this true,’ he agreed, the copper rings in his ears jangling as he spoke. ‘But I am not. I carry trident, not cutthroat dagger. Indeed, I loathe sight of blood,’ he grinned, his teeth shining like the gold band on his arm, ‘particularly my own.’

  ‘What do you ask of me?’ Mursili said.

  ‘Bread, broth and the chance to serve a good king. Nothing more.’ He held out a hand either side to his two companions. ‘I bring you no treasure or army, but I hope to offer you knowledge and advice.’

  Zida laughed a single barking laugh. ‘What can you tell the Great King of the Hittites about his own realm?’

  Volca shrugged. ‘I know where Kaskan army is. They were ones who tied me and my men to ants’ nest.’

  Silence. A thousand captive breaths.

  ‘My Sun, now is not the time to change your thinking.’ Nuwanza started. ‘You were on the verge of ordering the march ho-’

  Mursili held up a hand, cutting him off, then crouched to be level with the kneeling Volca. ‘Tell me… ’

  Chapter 4

  From the Soaring Mountains

  Autumn 1303 BC

  Hattu took Atiya’s hand as they edged sideways along the narrow shelf of rock, halfway up a silvery crescent of bluffs, a few danna north of Hattusa. He glanced up, seeing on the cliff wall a giant and bold etching of the Haga, a mighty, two-headed eagle – a stamp of Hittite power, a symbol of heroes. The sight sent a frisson of excitement through him: they were nearly there. His climbs and ventures like this had been a much-needed contrast to what had been a quiet spring, summer and autumn in the Scribal School, like gold thread in a dull grey garment.

  The fresh morning wind cast up a playful russet storm of leaves from the ground – the height of four men below, causing Atiya to whimper.

  ‘Don’t look down,’ he whispered, squeezing her hand. ‘Look at me.’

  She gulped and smiled, her free hand switching from the rocky wall at their backs to her red headscarf, which the wind threatened to steal away. ‘You promised me wonderful things, Hattu.’ She said with a tremor in her voice. ‘This… isn’t quite what I expected.’

  ‘This isn’t what I meant. You’ll see, soon. I promise,’ he smiled.

  Within a few steps, the ledge widened and there was a small gap in the cliff wall at their backs – as if a giant stonemason had chiselled into the stony redoubt. Atiya gasped, turning, peering through the gap. ‘What is it?’ she whispered.

  ‘It is invisible to the eye from the ground. I only found it when I last came out to climb,’ Hattu winked, then took her hand and edged through the gap, leading her with him. The tight gap became a narrow corridor, through which their every footstep echoed. The corridor widened and then yawned open to reveal a round, green, stone-walled hollow – like a giant washing bowl, sheltered from the autumn winds high above but open to the sun’s heat.

  Dust motes floated languorously in the air as he led her across the soft, lush grass on the hollow floor. He let Atiya’s hand slip from his and watched as she walked almost on her toes, turning, eyes drinking in the scene: at the far end of the hollow, a tall, terraced waterfall fell in sleek, glossy sheets over smooth stone into a cerulean tarn. A fine mist rose from the fall, iridescent haloes of sunlight growing and changing in the air before them. Dragonflies hovered just above the water’s surface, capriciously darting from one spot to another. The pebble-smooth banks of the tarn shimmered in the sunlight, and where it was wet, patches of glistening lichen had grown in delicate shades of sorrel and cream. Cherry trees a
nd honey-scented broom lined the edges of the water. But the real wonder lay up above.

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  She tilted her head back and looked up with him. Hawks, falcons and eagles banked and soared in the zephyrs, plunging down into the hollow then swinging up again.

  ‘Wondrous, isn’t it?’ Hattu grinned.

  ‘I dream of such places,’ Atiya whispered. ‘So… beautiful.’

  ‘Aye, it is,’ Hattu agreed, his eyes on Atiya.

  With a flutter of wings, Arrow swept into the hollow and came to a rest on Hattu’s bracer, then looked up at the heavenly dance.

  ‘Are the big birds putting you to shame?’ Atiya teased Arrow.

  Arrow extended and shook her wings in impotent fury.

  ‘She can swoop and dart with the best of them,’ Hattu laughed, linking arms with Atiya and coaxing Arrow onto her wrist. ‘When she was a nestling, I taught her to hunt,’ he said, unravelling a long ribbon of light-coloured linen and tying one end around a fat earthworm. Holding the other end, he ran until the linen billowed up into the air behind him. Arrow’s head dipped, her eyes locked onto the prize on the ribbon’s end. She shot off to catch it, only for Hattu to sweep his hand sharply, bringing the floating ribbon round and away, the worm safe. Arrow keened in disgust, but did not give up the chase. Round and round they went before the falcon got her prize. Next, Atiya took a turn. Hattu stood behind her, guiding her arms to hold the ribbon correctly, then running with her. ‘Now, flick your hand up and…yes!’ Atiya squealed with delight as the ribbon fluttered and leapt up into the air. She spun and ran, leading Arrow in a merry dance.

  At noon, they sat on a carpet of soft moss. Hattu lit a small fire to cook a rabbit and they ate it with flatbread and drank berry juice, watching the concert in the sky. Arrow joined the winged masses above and they talked – of simple things, of silly stories from past play, of dreams for the future. She told him how the Elder Priestess at the Storm Temple had hinted that she might one day be appointed the keeper of the holy silver effigy of Tarhunda. He recited for her part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. When at last they fell silent, Hattu gazed wistfully northeast. Atiya once again read him like a tablet.

  ‘The king and Muwa will return from Wahina unharmed, I am sure of it,’ she said.

  Hattu felt ashamed for a moment. In truth he had been thinking not only of their welfare but of the injustice of it all: left behind again while Father and Muwa chased glory in distant lands.

  She squeezed his arm, then gazed through the corridor of rock in the rough direction of Hattusa.

  ‘Aye, we should be getting back,’ he mused.

  After edging off of the cliffs, they made their way across the exposed hills, the fresh autumn wind buffeting them again. About half a danna away from Hattusa, they passed the great Rock Shrine; the place resembled an ancient crown of grey stone, pushed through the earth from below, its sides etched with scenes of the Gods. The ring of natural, fin-like shards sheltered a small and very sacred area within – where kings were buried, where gods were honoured, where highborn men and women were joined in marriage. He unconsciously reached out and took Atiya’s hand.

  Arrow, following, came swooping down and landed on his shoulder, shrieking. ‘Food? You’ve eaten plenty – any more and you won’t be able to take flight.’ Yet on she shrieked, not at him but at the sky behind. ‘What’s wrong?’ Hattu cooed. He glanced back but saw nothing.

  Ahead, the bulky outline of Hattusa rose into view. The outlying croplands were nearly deserted for the coming winter, with just a few farmers busy repairing their homes. One man was sitting on the roof of his mud-brick home with his three-legged dog, enjoying the heat from a small brazier. The fields themselves were stripped bare, the grain having been carted into the city and stored in the pits atop Tarhunda’s Shoulder – the smaller tor opposite the acropolis mount.

  Without warning, Atiya halted, looking whence they had come.

  ‘Atiya?’ Hattu whispered.

  ‘Something is out there,’ she said, agitated like Arrow.

  ‘We’re alone,’ he reassured her. The cool wind did its best to convince him otherwise.

  Hattu took her hand again, carrying on towards Hattusa at a faster pace. He could not help but look back once more at the still and silent north – bleak hills and skeletal alder woods, deserted.

  Suddenly, a loud, deep clang of bronze shuddered across the sky from Hattusa. The warning bell. A harbinger of some grave threat to the city. He had only heard it once before, some eight years ago. Then, he had been within Hattusa’s walls and it had come to nothing.

  ‘Hattu?’ Atiya wailed, looking all around. Suddenly, the few people outwith the city walls took flight, throwing down tools and bolting towards the Tawinian Gate, well ahead of Hattu and Atiya. Arrow shrieked and leapt into flight, swooping towards Hattusa and coming back again in circles as if urging them on.

  Clang!

  Hattu saw the few sentries on Hattusa’s northern walls pointing, gesticulating to the north, shouting to one another. He and Atiya broke towards the city in a stumbling half-run, Hattu looking back in the direction of this unseen threat. A sharp pain shot through his smoke-grey eye and suddenly he saw everything a little more clearly.

  ‘What’s happening, Hattu?’ Atiya quailed as they ran.

  ‘There’s something in the woods…’ he gasped, turning to run backwards.

  Then he saw the strangest thing emerging from the trees: many hundreds of bobbing heads. Heads with long, flowing black hair, some with leather Hittite helms on. ‘Our soldiers?’ he panted, unconsciously slowing. But something was wrong with the sight: the heads bobbed high – higher than any man. When he saw the red ribbons of flesh and sinew that dangled from the neck of one of the heads, the riddle was solved. Hittite heads, right enough – severed and affixed on top of spears like grim totems.

  Just then, the woods spewed forth a landslip of shapes – mountain warriors festooned with bronze and copper axes, swords and those foul spears.

  ‘Kaskans?’ Hattu gasped, seeing the many screaming mouths, manes of shaggy, tousled hair, unkempt beards and faces daubed with hideous bright streaks or handprints. They wore fleeces or rough woollen capes on their shoulders, with leather corselets and caps or headbands of brightly dyed wool.

  How could it be? Pitagga and the Kaskans were in Wahina, right now being dealt with by the Hittite Army, were they not? This host numbered too many to count, and many more than the thousand soldiers of the Storm housed in Hattusa’s Great Barracks. They swung and waved their weapons in the air like a bronze crop field, and they brought many rudimentary ladders with them, tall enough to scale Hattusa’s walls.

  ‘Run,’ Hattu stammered, suddenly swinging to face the city and speeding up. ‘Run. Run!’

  He and Atiya now broke into a headlong dash towards the Tawinian Gatehouse – its heavy gates still wide open, the smattering of Hittite sentries there in disorder. Yet the gates seemed so far away and the Kaskans were bearing down on them like stampeding bulls.

  Clang! the great bell tolled again, shaking the earth.

  Then came the cry of the mountain men as the Kaskans came to within a few hundred paces of the city and broke into a fervent charge. And a terrible wail erupted from what sounded like a Kaskan ibex horn – low like a demon’s growl then suddenly and jarringly high and deafening.

  Clang! the great bell of Hattusa sounded in reply, this time barely audible over the Kaskan horn.

  Hattu and Atiya sped, hand in hand towards the Tawinian gatehouse. But they were greeted with the sight of the last few field workers scrambling inside before the bronze-strapped gates swung shut, and heard the thick clunk of the locking bar within being lowered into place. He, Atiya and the three-legged farm dog were alone, outside, in the shadow of the gate like cornered sheep. Up on the battlements a sentry looked down on them, his face draining of blood when he realised what had happened.

  ‘It is the Cursed… it is Prince Hattu – Prince Hattu i
s outside!’ he yelled. But the few others on the walls barely heard – perhaps even chose not to, running to and fro, tossing spears and shields out across the battlements from the tower guard rooms.

  ‘Open the gates,’ Atiya cried as the din of the onrushing Kaskans seemed to swell up behind them.

  ‘Those gates will not open now. Not for anyone. Come,’ Hattu said, twisting towards the small, triangular alcove dug into the bedrock under the walls, just left of the Tawinian Gates. All had been taught well the location and purpose of the postern tunnels around the city – wide enough for a single man to pass in or out – or a boy and a girl.

  But he felt Atiya’s hand slipping from his and, with a twist of her ankle and a cry, she fell. Hattu swung round, his hair sweeping across his face, the smoke-grey eye sharp like a blade on her – sprawled, a few paces back. The swell of Kaskan warriors coursed towards her. She was struggling to rise, her face gaunt, terrified, mouth open, wordless in panic, eyes screaming for help. The foremost of the charging Kaskans – a red-bearded monster of a warrior – was bounding in her direction, just thirty paces distant, a fire-hardened club gripped and readied to stave in her head.

  ‘Prince Hattu,’ the sentry shouted down from the walls, ‘get into the postern tunnel – now!’

  Hattu twisted to the dark postern burrow and the small triangle of light at the far end. Safety within the walls beckoned. His smoke-grey eye ached again and he made out a shape through there, momentarily – a figure, part-silhouetted: a slender, aged man with odd eyes, wearing scribe’s robes, shoulders rounded and head hung in timidity… alone; when he swung back to Atiya, there was another figure. Hattu started: a stranger, back turned to him, facing her and the Kaskans. Tall, broad, draped in a magnificent green cloak, crowned with a warrior’s helm.

  He lurched towards Atiya, hoping the stranger might help him save her. He stooped swiftly to pick up a hand-sized, pitted rock as some means of defence. When he rose and bounded on, the stranger was gone, just as a shadow might vanish with the coming of the sun: it was just him and Atiya outside Hattusa’s walls, with a multitude of plunder-hungry mountain men about to fall upon them. His stomach flipped over at the sight of Red-beard, leaping across the last stretch behind Atiya, club raised, face agape in an animal cry.