Son of Ishtar

by Gordon Doherty

  The Black Room, forbidden to all.

  ‘Why?’ he whispered. He touched a hand to his left cheek. The graze Father’s rings had cut across his flesh – as painful as Pitagga’s strike – had long ago healed, but the memory was fresh. The king’s anger had been fierce that day – and Hattu had only been playing near the door.

  How dare you. You must never tread near that room, never!

  The Black Room, forbidden to all.

  ‘But why?’ Hattu muttered.

  As if in reply, the winds outside grew strong, the shutters along the corridor chattered again. The black door rattled too, angrily. And long after the wind had calmed and the shutters had fallen silent, the door still shook … as if there was something locked inside. Dead fingers stroked his neck.

  Father’s demons live in that high room… you can never enter.

  ‘Why!’ he hissed, railing against his fears.

  The Black Room, forbidden to all…

  And now he had the key.

  He stepped forward ever so slowly. ‘Banish me from the room, berate me, beat me if you will. But tell me why,’ he whispered.

  The timber floor bent under his weight, groaning sadly as he went. Icy breaths searched under his tunic from the cracks in every set of shutters he passed. On he went and on the Black Door rattled. He climbed the few steps at the end of the corridor, then froze as the Black Door suddenly fell still. He reached out with a shaking hand. The copper handle was deathly cold. He took a long, deep breath, then inserted the key and turned it. The lock shifted with a thick clunk. He twisted the handle and, with a moan of ancient, dried-out wood, the door opened.

  The air inside the shadowy chamber was perishing and the dust thick. Just one set of recent footprints marked the dust on the cedar floor: Father’s he realised, recognising the shape of the king’s boots. A finger of gloomy light stretched across the floor, coming from the opposite side of the room – from the doorway that led out onto the high balcony. His gaze was drawn to that arched opening… and to the writhing, floating shape silhouetted there.

  His blood ran cold as ice for an instant, before he sighed in relief and broke down in weak laughter. It was merely an old purity hide, pegged to one side of the balcony door; sun-bleached and frayed, rapping in the wintry breeze. More pegs and fragments of the veil were dotted around the rest of the doorway’s edge, as if it had been ripped in haste long, long ago. He became deaf to the growing clamour on the main way outside, his attentions instead on the other contents of the forgotten chamber: a bed, a small table, a set of strange bronze implements, knives, pans and cushions. He lifted each one, examining it carefully: surgical tools of some sort, he realised. He was oblivious to the voices outside, on the acropolis. Then there were bones, small bones. He knelt, lifting one and realising it was the remains of a long-dead lamb, and the others were of crows. All this lay around a strange, curved stool. Realisation crept across his skin: he had seen the like before, in the courtyard at one of the villas on Tarhunda’s shoulder when a noble’s wife was in labour. ‘A birthing chair?’ he asked the ether. Alone, he could expect no answer.

  But he was not alone.

  The tortured creaking of the door falling shut behind him was the first herald of the unexpected visitor. The shaking, storm-dark voice was the next:

  ‘So little I have asked of you, and in every way you have defied me,’ King Mursili said.

  Hattu swung round on one knee, his whole being ablaze with fright. The towering king was damp with melting snow, silvery hair plastered to his face, eyes alight with fury.

  ‘I arrive at my city to find the gates in tatters, entire wards reduced to heaps of rubble. My second son… dead,’ his thin lips struggled to contain an animal twitch. ‘And then I return to my home… but instead of sanctuary I find my errant issue, railing against my every rule. Again, and again,’ he said, his voice trembling, ‘and again!’ he thundered, then strode across the room, his ringed hand drawing away for a backhand blow.

  Father’s anger had always destroyed Hattu, more than any beating. Yet this time, Hattu felt a fierce spark of defiance, like that which had occurred on the day of the Kaskan raid, at the moment of the strange apparition of the green-cloaked warrior when he had saved Atiya. Damn your anger, Father, I will not cower under it any longer. He shot to his feet, his head held high as if preparing to take any blow that might come his way.

  ‘I’m not afraid of you,’ he said.

  Mursili halted, shocked, the pair a half-stride apart, the king’s raised hand juddering like a taut bow. Both held breaths captive. The king’s eyes shone like wrathful embers. Nearly level with his own, Hattu realised; last winter, he had been just shoulder-high to his sire. At last, the fire in the king’s gaze died and Mursili’s malevolent hand fell limply by his side. His eyes grew rheumy, darting over Hattu. ‘By all the Gods, my boy, it seems Kurunta and Ruba were right: you have grown in this last summer,’ he muttered, then brushed past, out onto the balcony.

  Hattu felt his breath return in short gasps, and realised his heart was racing like a maddened colt’s. He twisted to the arched doorway with the rippling old veil, seeing his father out there on the balcony, back turned, fresh snow settling upon his shoulders. The king’s head was dipped and he seemed to be clutching at one armpit in discomfort. Concerned, Hattu stepped out onto the balcony too, brushing a patch of piled snow from the balustrade with his leather bracer to rest his hands there. The king’s moment of pain seemed to have passed, and now Hattu felt acutely awkward at having followed him out here.

  From the vantage point of this veranda he could see almost all of Hattusa. Immediately below, on the acropolis grounds, men moved to and fro, taking horses to the royal stables, unhitching the king’s carriage and towing it into the wooden byre in which it would winter. One guardsman carried Zida’s red cloak, head bowed. The brave Gal Mesedi had perished on the campaign, he realised, his blood cooling.

  With the leaderless Mesedi was a pale stranger wearing a long-horned helm – the likes of which Hattu had never seen before. Yet all of this was like a dull, distant buzz of gnats in comparison to the crackling air between him and Father.

  ‘This is the room in which I was born, isn’t it?’ he said flatly, looking over his shoulder into the Black Room. ‘Mother died in that bed.’ He laughed once and without humour. ‘She died and I lived. That is why you hate me.’

  King Mursili lifted his surly gaze to one side. Hattu felt pinioned by it, his plucky words suddenly drying up.

  ‘I’ve never hated you, Hattu. But I can barely look upon you without seeing my beloved and knowing… knowing that I chose for it to be that way.’

  Hattu’s face pinched in confusion.

  ‘I chose for you to live,’ Mursili said, the next words coming after a great struggle, ‘and for your mother to die.’

  ‘You… chose?’ Hattu stammered.

  The king traced his fingertips along a section of untouched snow on the balustrade’s edge, as if handling a delicate treasure, sparkling crystals of ice falling away in a light shower. ‘On the night of your birth, mighty Ishtar came to me.’

  Hattu gulped, the verse coming to him.

  ‘You and your mother were dying, so perhaps I should be grateful that she gifted me the chance to save one of you.’ His light fingers curled into a shaking fist and he battered it down on the balcony edge, sending the snow plummeting in great lumps. ‘But damn, it was no gift,’ he shook his head, biting his bottom lip and closing his eyes. Tears tremored there, then he looked up and wagged a finger into the white-flecked ether as if reprimanding an unseen form there. ‘Yet I did as you demanded. I made my choice.’

  Hattu glanced out through the thickening snow with Mursili.

  ‘I chose for you to live, Hattu. I did all Ishtar asked of me – declared her as your protector, offered her a place almost as high as Tarhunda himself.’ He waved a hand down to the lower town where, by the snow-blanketed grounds of the majestic Storm Temple, the smaller but
no less beautiful shrine to the Goddess of Love and War stood, a small cupola roof topped with an eight-pointed bronze star. ‘All the time I hoped it might placate her,’ he shook his head and let it loll.

  Hattu suddenly felt the winter chill acutely. Ishtar’s words and ways were renowned for their devious ambiguity, her every promise entwined with a curse. ‘Like a sandal that trips the wearer,’ he muttered, Ruba’s teachings coming to him. ‘Like a castle that crushes the garrison.’ He hesitated, then thought of the wicked verse: ‘Like the son that brings death and destruction upon his father’s throne. The Cursed Son… the Son of Ishtar?’

  King Mursili’s eyes narrowed. ‘Ruba?’

  Hattu nodded.

  ‘I made him swear not to tell you, but he seems to have forgotten his vow. Indeed, the old goose is more forgetful than usual when it suits him.’

  Hattu’s mind swirled. ‘Ishtar’s verse can have no bearing on things, can it? It talks of bloodied thrones and turmoil. But look at me: I am merely a scribe.’

  ‘Are you?’ the king said with a wry laugh. ‘Ruba tells me you have been spurning your lessons more often than ever in this last year,’ the king said. ‘He says you have been taciturn and sullen.’

  Hattu adopted a stony sincerity to tell his father what he thought the king would want to hear: ‘I will work harder, Father. Whatever it is you wish me to become – a diplomat, a travelling envoy – I will see to it that my mind is strong for such a future.’

  Mursili waved a hand. ‘I didn’t commit you to the Scribal School to train you as an emissary. I assigned you to Ruba’s classroom because I wanted to protect you – because I was afraid.’

  ‘Afraid?’ Hattu said. The Hittite Labarna was a creature who evoked fear but never felt it. ‘Of what?’

  Mursili hesitated for a moment, the snow settling thickly on his eyebrows in a way that added years to him. ‘Kurunta told me how dear Sarpa met his end.’

  All at once the foul memories rapped back into Hattu’s mind like a colony of bats.

  ‘It will begin on the day he stands by the banks of the Ambar, soaked in the blood of his brother,’ King Mursili recited in little more than a whisper.

  Hattu shook his head and took a step back from the balcony. ‘Ishtar’s words are once again laced with trickery and insinuation. Sarpa died on the end of Pitagga’s axe. That his blood poured upon me is of no consequence,’ he said, drawing on Ruba’s earlier words of support.

  ‘Yet Sarpa’s body lies in the Dark Earth, while his head is far to the north, no doubt staked like a trophy for Pitagga to admire,’ Mursili said. ‘Ishtar toys with men, but her words are rarely without substance.’

  ‘Then you believe the rest of it? That I will slay princes and kings. That I will seize the throne… bring the world down around us? It was but a foul dream, was it not?’

  ‘Hittites should always heed their dreams,’ the king said in a low drawl.

  Hattu’s flesh crept. Father, Muwa and he were the last of the direct royal line. Not in his darkest nightmares could he envisage harming either of them. ‘Ishtar is wrong,’ Hattu snapped.

  Mursili looked up and around them, eyes momentarily timid as a stiff wind cast the snow around in a sudden blizzard. ‘Be careful of such words, Hattu.’

  ‘But she is wr-’

  Mursili pressed a finger to Hattu’s lips, silencing him. ‘Swear an oath to me, my son.’

  ‘Anything, Father,’ Hattu said.

  Mursili took Hattu’s hands in his own. It sent a warmth through Hattu that he only now realised had been eternally absent. ‘My flesh and blood, my precious boy. Swear to me that never… never will you take up weapons against your family.’

  ‘Never,’ Hattu said without hesitation.

  ‘And always you will stand loyally by he who sits on the throne.’

  ‘Always,’ Hattu agreed, pride swelling his heart.

  Mursili stared into his eyes for a long time, and Hattu wondered what he was seeking. He thought of restating his affirmations, but remembered seeing his Father dealing with foreign kings in the past, never once repeating himself. It was all part of that magnificent, fearless aura. So Hattu said nothing more and held his father’s gaze. Eventually, the pair turned to look out over the snow-cloaked acropolis grounds again.

  ‘What lies ahead for me now?’ Hattu asked after a long, shared silence.

  ‘You tell me, Hattu,’ Mursili replied, his eyes narrowing to crescents.

  ‘As I stated. I will resume my schooling. I will fulfil Ruba’s expecta-’

  ‘From your heart, Hattu,’ Mursili grabbed him by the shoulders so they were face on once more, shaking him. ‘Cast everything out into the snow, everything but the voice… the voice in your heart.’

  ‘You know,’ Hattu said, his breath puffing between them. ‘You know what I wish for.’

  ‘Say it,’ the king demanded.

  ‘I… I want to be everything the son of a Labarna should be. I want to travel with you on campaign. I want to learn the hardships of the march. I want to be there to put my body before yours like a shield. Surely now it is imperative that I am trained? With poor Sarpa gone, only Muwa stands capable of succeeding you.’

  Mursili flashed a wry smile. ‘You seek the path of the warrior? Then it is as I thought.’ He stood tall and turned away from Hattu, leaning on the balcony again and looking out over the lower town and off into the white wastes of the western countryside beyond. ‘Were I to forbid you this, you would merely defy me, wouldn’t you?’

  Hattu said nothing, but both knew the answer.

  Mursili sighed long and deep. ‘Very well. When the snows have come and gone, when spring arrives, you will go to the Fields of Bronze.’

  Hattu felt a shiver of disbelief. He had never set eyes upon let alone been to the great military academy, a morning’s trek to the west. ‘But my schooling with Ru-’

  ‘You shall be trained in the arts of war just as Muwa was,’ the king shot a sideways look over his shoulder at Hattu. ‘As an infantryman and as a charioteer. But you should be aware: a Hittite Prince must show he is stronger and hardier than any other. You will be given no quarter because of your blood. You will suffer like the rest. For two long years: one as an infantryman, the next as a charioteer. I had to do this. Muwa too.’

  ‘And it shows: the people look up to him,’ Hattu replied. ‘That is all I crave: respect – from others, aye, but most vitally from myself.’

  King Mursili turned back to him and drew him into an embrace. Hattu felt his whole being glow in the bear-like hug. The smell of oil, smoke and the dust of foreign lands on Father’s damp woollen cloak were so unfamiliar – this embrace itself virgin territory. ‘I will do you proud, Father. I will do it all.’ He thought of what remained of his small family: Father and Muwa, each utterly beloved. ‘And our oath shall be like Tarhunda’s bronze shield – unbreakable, sacrosanct.’

  Mursili turned from the balcony, leading Hattu back inside. As they walked through the room, the king glanced over the forgotten birthing tools. ‘So tell me: why were you outside the city walls – on the day the Kaskans came?’

  Hattu thought it an odd question given all they had discussed. ‘I took Atiya to the high hollow – where the hunting birds nest. It was a foolish thing to do.’

  ‘Foolish? Why?’ the king replied, a fond, distant look on his face. ‘I took your mother there when we were young. She wept tears of happiness up there. I am the fool, for I never took her there again.’

  ***

  The snow continued to fall as the light faded, and most within Hattusa had hurried back to their homes now that the king’s return had been observed. But one figure braved the cold, padding around the Storm Temple’s gardens. Atiya took to brushing the snow from a statue of two life-sized terracotta bulls pulling a copper chariot. Keeping them free of dust, dirt, frost and snow was a simple duty but one thought to draw much favour from Tarhunda himself and the many other gods.

  ‘You don’t need to do that now,�
� a voice called over from the shelter of a nearby colonnade.

  Atiya turned to see the Elder Priestess there holding a tallow candle, shivering, beckoning her back to the kitchens and bedchambers. The thought of a hot bowl of stew and then the warm caress of her bedding did appeal, but sleep? That was a different matter: the nightmares since the Kaskan raid had been incessant. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said, ‘I can’t sleep anyway.’

  ‘I’ll set aside some stew for you then,’ the priestess sighed.

  As the Elder wandered off, Atiya turned back to the monument before her, and realised she was smiling. Few made her smile. The Elder Priestess had been good to her since the Kaskan raid, since Prince Sarpa had been struck down. Sarpa had been a close companion, and she missed him terribly. She thought of young Hattu, shivering and drawing her robe tighter as she imagined what it had been like for him, to see his brother slain before him. Yet in the time since the raid, she had noticed something different about him: a callousness, a sobriety that had been absent before. Was he still a mere boy? Not according to her dreams.

  That moment outside the walls, when she had fallen with countless Kaskans bearing down upon her, was where the nightmares always began. They ended every time not as nightmares but as dreams, with Hattu lifting her to safety – it was then she would awake, panting and startled. Frightened, yet comforted at once. The thought of his hands upon her, holding her firmly, carrying her to safety… yes, Hattu was another who made her smile.

  And then there was another, one who had been gone so long…

  ‘Brushing bulls is no way for a girl like you to be spending her evening,’ a voice said. She turned to face Prince Muwa, swaddled in black robes, military boots and the shining white cuirass, crunching across the snow towards her.

  ‘And sneaking up on templefolk is not the business of a prince, is it?’ she said, trying to sound stern but failing, especially as a coy giggle escaped after her last word with a puff of breath.

  Muwa’s face split with a matching grin.