Son of Ishtar

by Gordon Doherty

  Controlled rot, he reaffirmed, a smile tugging at the edges of his mouth.

  ‘Ah, Volca,’ a voice spoke.

  Volca swung round to see the king’s favoured, weak-chinned asu approaching.

  The healer held up a fistful of leeks and a leather bucket of wet red clay ‘I have had a thought: the Labarna enjoys leeks, aye?’

  Volca glowered at the asu.

  ‘And the red clay of the Ambar is said to be sacred, healing, even. So perhaps if I was to cook him a broth of leeks and clay, it might prove to be enjoyable and beneficial.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Volca said. What next – bread and ox-shit?

  ‘Well, you don’t seem too perturbed by the notion, so I’ll give it a try. Thank you.’ The asu turned to leave, but halted, looking back at the cup in Volca’s hand. ‘Ah, is this the famous root-brew the king talks of?’

  ‘Yes. Now I’d best get it to the ki-’

  ‘My, it does look thick indeed.’ The asu’s eyes widened, his head craning over the cup. ‘May I ask what the ingredients are?’

  ‘Maybe next time I can show you,’ Volca said, brushing past the healer.

  But the asu caught his arm. He stared down at the fragile man, knowing that his horned helm and a stiff look was enough to ward off most bothersome types. Yet the healer was insistent. ‘I really ought to find out now. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I did not thoroughly test the potion and have the ingredients catalogued by Ruba and his scribes.’

  Volca laughed. ‘You are dedicated to your duties, aren’t you,’ he said, slipping an arm around the asu’s shoulder. ‘Come, I will show you,’ he said, walking the fellow back to the bench. He lifted the wooden box from his purse with one hand, placing it on the top of an upright barrel of wine next to the bench. ‘This is the key ingredient,’ he said. ‘Take a look.’

  The asu rested his hands on his knees and crouched a little to inspect the box. He reached out to lift it, then opened the lid. His nose wrinkled and he turned his head towards Volca. ‘It smells revol-’

  Volca shot one hand down to grip the back of the asu’s neck and with the other, batted the lid from the wine barrel. The asu’s strangled cry had barely begun when Volca then plunged the healer’s head into the blood-red wine.

  As the healer thrashed, Volca’s arm shuddered to hold him there. Wine bubbled and leapt from the barrel. ‘It does smell dreadful, doesn’t it?’ he said, catching the box as it slid away with the barrel lid. The asu’s arms flailed now, his gurgling cries barely audible from deep within the barrel. ‘And so will you, if and when they find you washed up on the Ambar’s banks.’

  As the healer’s body convulsed and gradually weakened, Volca looked up at the scullery ceiling, imagining King Mursili on the floor above. ‘Aye, controlled rot… ’

  Chapter 11

  Under the Shadow of Peruwa

  Spring 1301 BC

  The distant pipes of the Festival of the Earth played for thirty eight days, the skirling song just audible at the Fields of Bronze. Every night, Hattu lay in his rough soldier’s bed, the barrack dorm empty, imagining the goings-on back at Hattusa. The celebrations would begin with a procession to the north of the city through the ossuary fields known as the Meadow of the Fallen, and on to the Rock Shrine. He imagined the feasting, the strong beer, the song, the games and the laughter. Strangers would share each other’s homes and exchange food and gifts. Nobody would be alone… nobody back in the city, at least.

  He sighed and rolled over in his bed, now wondering if Arrow had made it back to Hattusa safely, and if Atiya had received the bracelet. For a moment, he mused jealously at the thought of Muwa giving her something finer.

  His days were spent helping Kurunta and the small knot of veterans still stationed here to drag equipment to various spots on the training fields, to sweep out ox byres and to count and distribute weapons around the various armouries attached to the many dormitories. On the thirty-ninth day the rains stopped and so did the tantalising pipe music. The day after, as he chopped logs for firewood, the distant call of the campaign horn sounded. He stopped in his duties and shielded his eyes to peer to the east. He could see nothing at this distance but rising vapour from the drying rain pools, but he knew what was happening: the army was on its way to Pala and Tummanna, King Mursili and Prince Muwa at their head as always.

  A momentary ire flared as he thought of Father, but it faded fast. ‘Gods be with them. Let them take back Sarpa’s dishonoured head,’ he whispered, imagining his dead brother’s wraith marching with them.

  A few days later, the sky was cloudless and the sun warm on the skin. And so Hattu began his fourteenth summer knee-deep in a pit near the edge of the academy grounds, shovelling spadefuls of ox dung onto a heap at one side. It reminded him of something – about this time a year ago...

  ‘Hattu?’ a voice said. Hattu swung round to see Dagon standing there, clean and looking the better for a winter at home. Hattu, on the other hand, was smeared in filth. The pair gawped at one another for a moment, a mirror image of their meeting like this the previous year, then each buckled in two with laughter.

  As that day and the next few wore on, companies of men trickled in from Hattusa – veteran hundreds who had been left behind by the king. Every so often some of the Mountain Wolves would arrive. The last to arrive were Tanku and Garin who sauntered in when Dagon and Hattu were still working together on the infinite dung-pile. ‘Ah, it’s as if we’ve never been away,’ Garin teased.

  Yet it turned out – as Tanku explained – that the two new arrivals had spent a winter of squalor, living and working at Kurunta’s home in Hattusa’s lower town, also slipping and sliding in animal filth whilst the general’s favourite pig terrorised them, chasing them and sneaking up behind them before squealing shrilly. ‘And Kurunta’s wife was worse,’ Garin said, quickly looking over his shoulder to check who was within earshot.

  ‘At least Kurunta wasn’t there for long,’ Tanku said. ‘After two nights on the receiving end of his wife’s fiery tongue, he upped and left, back here – to torture you, no doubt,’ he nodded to Hattu.

  ‘Welcome back, hurkelers,’ Kurunta barked, sneaking up behind them.

  ‘Sir!’ the four replied in panicked unison.

  ‘My wife is a walking earache, isn’t she?’ he said dryly.

  Tanku and Garin’s faces drained of colour. ‘If you were listening to us a moment ago then you must have misheard,’ Tanku started.

  ‘The rest of the Mountain Wolves,’ Kurunta cut Tanku off, embellishing the appellation with a scoff, ‘are in the barracks. You pair are the last to arrive.’

  ‘I apologise, sir, it is my fault,’ Tanku said. ‘I’ll have them kitted out at the muster area within the hour. Come,’ he waved the other three towards the gates of the vast barrack compound.

  But Kurunta held an arm out to bar Tanku’s path. ‘Oh no, not for you.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘This one is to be trained on the chariot,’ Kurunta stabbed a disdainful finger at Hattu.

  Tanku, Garin and Dagon all looked at Hattu. Hattu’s mouth moved wordlessly as he tried to find some sort of explanation.

  ‘And he needs others to train with him. Kisna will lead the Wolves while you’re away.’

  ‘Away?’ Dagon said, bemused.

  A frantic rumble and a crunch of gravel and stone split the air.

  Hattu and the rest swung round to see an apparition coming for them, ploughing across the dust from the stables like a serpent: The tongue was a thrashing mass of hooves and dancing manes of a pair of yellow-dun stallions, laced with strips of bronze and dangling ropes. The head was a wooden, bronze-trimmed war chariot, the copper hobnails in the two wheels glittering as they blazed across the dirt. And the fat plume of dust spiralling up in the contraption’s wake was the serpent’s body and long tail. It sped for them, maybe three times faster than the quickest sprinter Hattu had ever seen. He saw, just behind the two stallions, an ebullient, leathery-skinned driver with wind-tous
led brown hair, streaked white at the temples – white as his grinning teeth – and a brown, forked beard: he was a fair age but his eyes were wide and gleaming like a boy’s at the first sight of lightning, mouth agape in his cajoling of the horses, the whip cracking high over the traces to urge them onwards. For that instant, it seemed certain that the chariot was about to trample straight over the group of four and Kurunta. Garin screamed in a fashion that would have embarrassed a girl.

  But, with a sharp tug on the reins and a cry: ‘Ho!’ the chariot horses leaned to one side, bending the path of the charge around the five in a wide arc. The chariot slowed and settled, having circled them once. The stallions’ mouths and necks were laced with sweat and white froth as they panted through the bronze bits in their mouths, and the pungent smell of stableyard grew suddenly rife. The driver’s wild expression settled, but only a little.

  ‘Old Horse,’ Kurunta enthused, pumping his clenched fist in the air in greeting.

  Instantly, Hattu recognised the driver even though he had only seen him a few times in his life. Just as General Nuwanza was the army’s Master Archer and Kurunta the Infantry Champion, Colta was the famed Master of Chariots. Colta was a Hurrian by birth, and as with all Hurrians he was an expert trainer of horses, he had come into the service of the Hittite King many years ago, schooling the army on the construction, repair and operation of war cars and raising the herds that would haul them.

  The charioteer lashed the reins to a small hook on the bronze-lipped rim of the chariot then leapt down from the open back of the carriage, his bare feet slapping onto the dust. He wore an ornately etched brown leather cuirass with no under-tunic. His legs were like the trunks of an aged tree – knotted and bulging with muscle like Kurunta’s upper body. He was not a big man but all the same, the vehicle slumped forward a little as soon as it was unburdened with his weight. As Kurunta and the Chariot Master embraced, dust puffing up from their garments, Hattu and the others shared suspicious looks.

  ‘Come late summer, the Labarna will judge this shower in the Chariot Ordeal,’ Kurunta said, sweeping a finger across Tanku, Dagon and Garin. ‘Should they fail, then they will forever be infantrymen,’ then he pointed at Hattu. ‘And should this one fail, then he will fail as a warrior… leave the Fields of Bronze and return to his tablets. No prince can serve as a low-ranking foot soldier – it would be a bleak omen.’

  Hattu’s body clenched with fright and fire.

  ‘Put them through their paces, Old Horse,’ Kurunta said to Colta, then swivelled his good eye at the four – particularly Hattu – and grinned. ‘Then tonight, when they’ve soiled their loincloths or fallen under a horse, send the whimpering curs – or their remains – back to me.’

  Kurunta turned away, roaring with laughter at his own words, and stomped back towards the infantry barrack compound.

  ‘Hilarious,’ Dagon muttered. ‘I think I might have laughed up my liver.’

  A warm breeze swept around the four. Hattu beheld the chariot. His heart thundered at the closeness of the vehicle. His stomach melted at the thought of riding one.

  ***

  Later that afternoon, Hattu, Tanku, Dagon and Garin stood under the hot sun on the chariot fields just north of the academy with no armour or weapons. The dusty grounds were hemmed by the red fells to the west. On a tall boulder there, the pale-stone statue of a prancing mount – an effigy of Peruwa the horse-god – watched as a group of veteran chariot riders sped across the training area in a blur of bronze, hooves, lashing hair and whips. They operated a good arrow shot away, leaving this edge of the chariot plain free.

  The Lords of the Bridle, as they were called, counted nearly four hundred battle cars in their ranks. Some three hundred of the vehicles had been disassembled and packed onto the wagons that had gone northwest to Pala with King Mursili, and another fifty were distributed to the garrison towns and the frontier forts, leaving this handful of thirty or so in reserve. Each chariot bore a team of two men, one with a bow, tipless arrows and an equally tipless spear, the other grasping reins and whip, the long, flowing hair of each snapping in the wind like night-black banners. They sped to and fro, criss-crossing the plain like snakes in some ritual dance. All the time, the armed man on each car turned to face the nearest speeding vehicle, eyes tracking the movements of their ‘foe’. One man hurled his spear pole across the void. It was like the lash of a lizard’s tongue, striking the driver of another car square in the chest. The driver fell from sight onto the car floor and the chariot rounded quickly and almost toppled over. A moment later, the coughing, spluttering driver rose with the aid of his warrior and the pair saluted the opposite chariot crew who had bested them. The victorious two saluted back then rode off with a whoop and a lash of the whip.

  ‘Warrior and driver,’ Colta said of the spectacle. ‘Like the bee and the flower, each depends upon the other, and one has an almighty sting!’

  Hattu glanced to the tutor, and noticed that a trio of stablehands had begun fussing around the resting chariot nearby.

  ‘Yet men are but components of the whole. A chariot is not just a fine carriage,’ he moved over to trace his hand over the blue-dyed poplar planks and bronze lip that formed the three sides of the chariot. ‘Yes, it involves metallurgy, woodworking, tanning and more. Then he strode over to stoke the muzzle of one of the two sorrel-red stallions they had led here from the nearby byre that morning. ‘Nor is a chariot the horse, nor is it the crew. Neither is a chariot the mere coupling of these things.’ He held up one finger. ‘A chariot is the result of these things becoming one in mind and body – when driver and warrior think the same thoughts, when the horses speed up even before the crack of the whip, when the carriage’s timbers bend under the impact of a hard rock, saving the wheel.’

  The stablehands beckoned the four over to assist in belting a thick, bronze-studded cloth around the stallions’ heads to protect their heads and necks. The beasts began snorting and pawing at the ground, no doubt sensing the training schedule that was to come. Hattu smoothed one beast’s mane and this seemed to calm it. Next, the stablehands lifted two bronze scale aprons from a storage hut. Hattu took the edge of one and gasped at the weight as they lifted it onto the leftmost stallion’s back. Tying the straps, he now felt genuinely sorry for the creature – burdened with such weight in the hot afternoon. But even when the stablehands secured a breast harness around the stallion’s necks, still they did not show any sign of complaint, standing firmly, their thick muscles bunched under their smooth dark-red hides.

  ‘Don’t pity the horses – they are arrogant creatures, eager to confound their drivers,’ Colta said, while the stablehands took to grappling with and plaiting the horses’ tails. Hattu almost laughed at the vain practice, then noticed the horses pulling the chariots sparring nearby all had their manes and tails neatly groomed likewise. The mesh of reins and gear lashing, tightening and slackening all around them illustrated the purpose: to stop the creatures’ hair becoming entangled.

  ‘This is Rage,’ Colta said, patting the muscled shoulders of the leftmost mount, then did the same with the other, ‘and this is Thunder. A lovely, peace-minded pair,’ he grinned. The horses nickered as if in reply. ‘They came to us from Troy as foals and enjoyed play and pasture when they were colts – thought they were in for an easy life,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Then, last year while you were being broken on the red hills, this pair were put through seven months of galloping around the oval,’ he pointed to the foot of the fells, where a well-worn racetrack was marked out with wooden posts. ‘They rode alone, at first, then with light riders sitting on their croup – and, by Tarhunda, they were not easily pleased with those passengers. After that, we slit their nostrils,’ he pointed at the dark, healed gashes either side of the beasts’ noses. ‘They near-enough kicked one of my grooms across the Red River, but we only did it so they could draw in deeper breaths and maintain longer charges. After that, we taught them to race with empty chariots in tow. Now… what could possibly be
next?’ he said, eyeing the four, drumming his fingers on his chin.

  For Hattu, the answer was obvious. ‘Next, you train them to tow chariots with men on board?’

  Colta’s eyes lit up and he shot a finger out at Hattu. ‘Wrong! Next… you will train them to tow chariots with men on board,’ he clarified, leaping where he stood, clapping his hands once and laughing.

  Two stablehands were now securing an ox-horn shaped willow yoke across the shoulders of the two armoured red stallions, securing it to each beast’s breast harness. ‘Pay attention,’ Colta said to the watching four. ‘You will be doing this yourselves after today.’ The third hand then lowered the hinged draught pole attached to the base of the chariot car so the free end came down across the centre of the yoke, where the other two stablehands clipped it in place with bronze rings. Lastly, they skilfully coaxed the horses to open their mouths with a handful of hay, then inserted a bronze snaffle bar in each duped mouth and threaded the four reins through the loops at either end of each snaffle, back and through loops on the yoke and then rested the free ends of the tethers on the bronze rim of the chariot car.

  ‘Your vehicle awaits,’ Colta beamed. He waited just long enough for each of them to stammer some half-word of doubt and confusion, before hopping up into the car himself. ‘One at a time, with me. You first,’ he summoned Hattu. ‘Come on, don’t stand there shaking with bravery.’

  ‘We’ll share your bread tonight in your memory,’ Dagon whispered after him. Hattu cast him a sour look and nearly stumbled, then gingerly climbed up into the car to stand just left of Colta. The space was limited, with his and Colta’s hips touching. He detected an odour of horse, sweat and leather and couldn’t quite work out whether it was coming from the Chariot Master or the horses. The car only came up to his thigh, giving him the feeling that a sudden push in any direction and he would be pitched out. He righted his feet for balance and, to his surprise, the car floor flexed under his soles: it was made not of solid wood but of a thick lattice of rawhide strips.