Son of Ishtar

by Gordon Doherty

  ‘You risked much by seizing the silver god,’ a voice said in the Hittite tongue, ‘too much. Had word of this reached King Mursili sooner than it did, he might have ordered his divisions to turn away from the mountains and towards Tapikka to intercept your bandits.’

  Atiya’s head swam: that voice…

  ‘Nonsense,’ another voice said in Hittite but with a Kaskan twang. ‘Mursili is obsessed with tracking me. In any case, my man infiltrated Hattusa, planned the ambush well and brought me the prize I asked for. We always needed silver to fund this war. It was an unexpected prize to steal their holy women too – all the more bait to draw the Hittites through the mountains to these parts. And are the divisions of the Grey Throne not right now marching to this land?’

  ‘They are right now halted at the spine of the mountains, awaiting my word,’ the hauntingly familiar voice corrected the other speaker.

  She began to prize open an eye, seeing the interior of what looked like a dome of dried mud and twigs – like an oversized bird nest turned on its head. The light from a pig-fat lamp nearly blinded her, but after a few moments her eyes adapted and she could see the gloomy home she was in. She was lying on her side upon a bed of bracken and ferns. The lamp sat on a low, crude table on the dirt floor. Nothing else? Then she rolled onto her back and saw, at the foot of the bed, an arc of dim pre-dawn light; a doorway. A cane grating covered the doorway like a cage, but beyond, she could see the edge of a colourful forest and a few other such mud-dome huts dotted around. She blinked and rubbed her eyes, seeing the wagon with the silver statue of Tarhunda resting there, uncovered, shamed, bedecked with Kaskan trinkets and painted in their gaudy dyes. Her heart wept at the sight. Bearded, tousle-haired Kaskan men sat around dung-fires, naked to the waist, tearing at joints of roasting meat like wolves as blue smoke billowed from the burning manure. Kaskan women, bare-breasted, danced around the men and the stolen wagons to the buzzing tune of a flute, drunk, faces painted in streaks of red. And then she saw him: the handsome amber-haired fellow, bare-chested like the other men, his chin now sprouting with the beginnings of a shaggy beard. He tore at meat with the rest, some slapping his back and offering him congratulatory beer.

  ‘Fine work, Bagrat,’ one barked gruffly.

  Shame crept over her as she realised it had been her fault. She had talked loosely with the man, told him of the high road and the low road. Her wretched thoughts were scattered when two figures stepped over the cane grating like jailers. The two she had heard talking. Pitagga, crowned with a lion’s skull, eyed her like a lecherous drunk, a greasy, half-chewed pork steak in one hand, his red beard stained with pig fat. The one with him, however, beheld her like a treasure.

  ‘Volca?’ she croaked.

  He peered through her as if she wasn’t there.

  ‘The silver effigy will buy us many mercenaries,’ Pitagga enthused, looking over to the wagon and the statue of Tarhunda. ‘Already, more tribes of different blood come to my side simply because they have heard that the great Storm God of Hattusa lies in my camp. And I have sent word again to the distant Azzi, telling them that I can pay them what they seek.’

  Volca looked around with a doubtful eye. ‘Talk of great numbers is all very well. But all I see here are your twelve Kaskan tribes. Ten thousand, I told the Labarna, yet you probably only have eight thousand here.’

  Pitagga threw his head back and laughed. ‘I will tell you all… in good time.’

  Volca’s nose wrinkled in disapproval at this. ‘Be sure that you do, and remember how important I am to your ambitions.’

  ‘No one man will make or break me,’ Pitagga said stonily with an ill-fitting smile.

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ Volca said, returning his cold gaze to Atiya, ‘for I may well have found the key. The Azzi and the many tribes will be crucial, and the statue is a fine prize… but this priestess is the most valuable of them all,’ he said in little more than a whisper.

  ‘Volca?’ she whimpered, backing up against the back wall of the hut, drawing her knees up to her chest. She saw two Hittite Eagle Kin being carried on poles across the clearing behind Volca and Pitagga, trussed by their arms and legs like animals, their necks opened and their lifeless faces sheeted with dried blood.

  ‘She will bring you what you wish, Lord Pitagga,’ Volca continued as if Atiya had not spoken. ‘If my potions do not suck the life from King Mursili, if the snares you have laid out in these lands do not crush his army, then this priestess will break them from within… the two princes – the king’s last hopes – yearn for her… and grow resentful of one another.’

  ‘What have you done?’ she croaked.

  They ignored her, Volca turning to the fires then looking out over the surrounding forest. ‘But first, the snares. Be sure to stock your fires high and let them burn brightly at full light. If all goes to plan, then come the next dawn this clearing will be heaped high with Hittite dead… ’

  Chapter 16

  The Dark Woods of Hatenzuwa

  Early Summer 1300 BC

  Morning came and the Soaring Mountains, cadaver-grey in the twilight of the night before, now shone like coral. The Hittite army struck camp and climbed the last stretch towards the spine of the range – the highest point of the pass. By noon, they came to the jagged ridge, bare apart from an ancient stone stela erected by some long-forgotten king, all framed by the pure blue sky. The chill zephyrs whistled and sang. The Fury Division at the head of the column crested then poured over the ridge first. Next came the Storm.

  Hattu crested the ridge and drank in the sight of the land below and beyond: the mountains descended into a low land, emerald and gold, with rounded hills and river valleys, teeming woods and squat cliffs draped in lush greenery.

  ‘The Lost North?’ Dagon cooed as they at last began their descent.

  ‘Aye,’ one grey-haired veteran of the Storm nearby whispered in reply, then pointed to the tract of dense forests hugging the foot of the mountains. ‘And first we must make our way through Hatenzuwa.’

  ‘A dark maze of woods and necromancers,’ a comrade replied.

  Kurunta’s head switched round at this, his lone eye wide. ‘Hatenzuwa… a land that was once ours,’ he corrected them. He held his spear out like an extension of his arm, swiping it across the northern horizon. ‘As all this once was. All the way to the Upper Sea. The Mother of the Rivers. The edge of the world.’

  ‘And that?’ Dagon asked, pointing to an odd rock formation in the distance, near a river, incongruous with the surroundings. Splinters of grey stone rising from the Hatenzuwa forest and largely coated in moss and vines, almost completely swallowed by the vegetation.

  ‘That is… was, Hakmis,’ Kurunta said wistfully.

  Hakmis, Hattu mouthed.

  Many of the soldiers gasped and repeated the name. They had only heard tales of the place. The nearest of the three fallen holy cities, lost many generations ago to the Kaskans who razed it and drove the Hittites from this strange land. Hattu struggled to tear his eyes from the sight as they marched on down the mountainside. He could not help but think of Ruba and the teacher’s tales of these lost lands – stories of imagined adventures and the elusive glory of reclaiming them. ‘Old tutor, you should have been here to see this with me,’ he said quietly.

  ‘He is, lad,’ Kurunta said in an uncharacteristic whisper so no other would hear, ‘he is.’

  Hattu stretched a fraction taller. ‘Wherever Pitagga is, we will find him. All this… all of it… can be ours again.’

  Kurunta’s lips bent a little in a wry smile. ‘There was a boy I knew who once spoke like that – as if victory was a certainty.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He lost an eye and realised he was mortal,’ Kurunta grinned then jogged on ahead. ‘For-waaard!’

  The army crunched down the mountains, descending from the cold heights into warmer, humid air. They eventually halted on a broad, grassy spur that overlooked the forest. The generals drew together around
the royal carriage, pointing this way and that. There was talk of the missing Gal Mesedi, and confusion about where he had gone the night before.

  Hattu, Tanku and Dagon crouched around a small fire, chewing on flatbreads freshly-baked in the flames, eyeing the land ahead. The Hatenzuwan woodlands just below seemed impossibly dense and impenetrable. Hattu noticed his comrades’ eyes combing over the roof of leaves nervously, gulping, dry tongues darting over dry lips.

  ‘No army can move through such a maze,’ Kisna whispered.

  ‘We may have to. It’ll be just like the forest drills we did at the Fields of Bronze,’ Hattu said, belying his own doubts. ‘We move carefully, stay in sight of one another, keep our eyes sharp.’

  ‘Slowly, steadily,’ Tanku replied, encouraged.

  ‘But which direction do we take?’ Dagon mused.

  Hattu dragged his gaze over the jumbled roof of green. Dagon was right – no tracks, no tell-tale dust clouds from enemy boots or scatterings of disturbed birds. His eyes did snag on large break in the trees – a huge oval shaped clearing, about three danna in the distance. His grey eye ached and he saw the small, dark brown shape sweeping across the sky above the clearing. Arrow!

  ‘There’s something in there,’ he said. Only when he became aware of the many heads nearby turning to him did he realise he had spoken.

  ‘How so?’ the slit-eyed Captain of the Leopard Clan grunted. Hattu recalled the fellow’s efforts in dissecting the poor sparrow at the camp on the first night of the march. Now his demeanour was awkward, like milk and wine curdling: the old, fading mistrust mixing – ever since the events at Baka Hill – with a droplet or two of respect.

  Hattu pointed to his falcon. ‘Bird signs…’ he said. The kind I trust, he added inwardly.

  The men muttered, craning necks and shading eyes to see Arrow.

  ‘How can you be sure?’ one soldier grumbled.

  Suddenly, a riot of breaking twigs and snapping branches sounded, form the foot of the spur, from within the trees. ‘Archers!’ Nuwanza rasped. A score of bowmen were on one knee, bows nocked and trained on the spot. Hattu’s heart thundered.

  Like a brawler being tossed out of a tavern, Volca emerged, panting, coughing, dishevelled. He scrambled up the steep path leading onto the spur, one foot bare, blood spattered on his horned helm and his cheek bearing a gash as crimson as his cloak – and he was sopping wet, streaked with marsh slime. ‘They’re in the woods,’ he panted. ‘In the northern clearing. We saw them, but the two riders with me were shot through with arrows before they could even turn to run.’

  ‘By the Gods,’ Slit-eyes whispered, staring at the clearing then glancing back at Hattu. The big man rose and joined the chatter with his comrades. Amongst their words he heard a few that sent a chill across his shoulders. The Son of Ishtar saw it first.

  ‘Be quick and we can catch them – they assume we are still in the middle of the mountains,’ Volca urged.

  ‘Hold on. If they saw you and know you escaped then they will also know we will soon be coming for them,’ Nuwanza argued.

  Volca gestured to his bloodied robes. ‘They shot me too – or they thought they did: the arrow skimmed by my arm and I fell from my horse and into a bog. I hid there in the reeds as they hunted for my body. I heard them laugh when they found my boot, and they seemed to think I had been sucked down into the morass. They gave me up for dead, taking my horse and wandering back towards the clearing. I waited in the mud hours, then ran back. No Kaskan knows I live. They think they are safe, their location unknown.’

  The generals mutedly called their divisions into order, as if fearful that whoever or whatever lurked in that strange forest might hear. ‘Can we be sure?’ Hattu heard them muttering.

  Just then, a series of wispy grey columns rose from the clearing, growing dark blue. The army babbled in interest.

  ‘See?’ Volca exclaimed. ‘They cook and celebrate around dung fires, unawares that the mighty army of the Grey Throne watches on.’

  Arrow swept across the top of the forest, arcing round to land on Hattu’s shoulder, screeching in Volca’s direction over and over. ‘Is it true, girl?’ he asked her. She was agitated, that much was certain, stamping her feet on his shoulder. Eventually, Muwa stood on a rock and announced that they were to enter the woods and converge upon the clearing in a bull horn formation. ‘For the silver effigy, for the captured priestesses… for the Gods!’ he growled. The army responded with a gruff chorus of agreement.

  They set off, crunching down the scree path that led from the plateau to the edge of the Hatenzuwan woods. The scouts dismounted and went barefoot into the trees, spreading out like the fingers of a hand searching through thick hair. The three divisions spread from a thirty-man wide column into three fronts, five-hundred men wide, ten ranks deep, poised on the edge of the treeline. Whispered prayers to the Spirits of the Woods sailed up into the air, before they plunged forwards into the green maze in the direction of the clearing.

  Hattu set Arrow off in flight, and stepped into the trees. At once, the air became muggier, hot, still as a tomb and tinged with the odour of musty foliage. They moved at a slow walk, most men half-crouched, spears twitching at every quivering branch or falling leaf. The woods were not so thick at first, with elm, lime, chestnut and beech spaced well enough to allow them to make decent headway across the bracken floor. It was not too dissimilar to the alder woods near Hattusa, Hattu thought. He took to glancing across the advancing men either side of him to be sure they were moving in line. The Wolves and the veterans wore owl-eyed expressions, faces beaded with sweat. From somewhere above the trees, Arrow did her bit by keening every so often as if to keep them in touch with reality. At one point, Hattu looked up and was overcome with fright as he saw a cluster of dark shapes up in the branches. For that heartbeat, he was certain it was a band of Kaskan warriors, poised and ready to leap down upon them. But in the next, he realised it was just a set of large, abandoned nests.

  The deeper into the trees they penetrated, the thicker the woods grew, and the fewer the shafts of sunlight became. Strange bird calls trilled and sang from the shade. After what Hattu reckoned was a two danna trek, they entered a dark labyrinth of tall, sprawling rhododendrons. A sea of pink, purple and dark green, along with night-black shadows where the canopy of leaves blocked out the sun entirely, and pools of swirling grey vapour where the dampness and the stifling heat mixed – surely a lair of dark and vengeful forest spirits? And Hattu noticed how he couldn’t even hear Arrow’s calls any more. Myriad strange insects croaked and chirped as they ventured deeper. Wet bracken, leaves and twigs crackled and snapped as they walked, now no longer in tight formation – men spreading out to take the clearest route forward. Hattu looked either side of him, seeing Tanku and Dagon who had been right next to him for the whole march now ten paces distant. They slipped in and out of view thanks to the vapour – now thick and heavy like wet linen. Tanku cursed as time and again his green cloak caught on branches, and Dagon groaned as creepers snagged on his spear tip every few paces. Sweat traced a hundred paths down Hattu’s skin in never-ending rivulets, so humid it was, and the faster he drank from his water skin, the more copious the sweat became. Before long, his water was gone and his head throbbed, demanding more. And it was only mid-afternoon, he reckoned. At one point, Tanku had strayed in front of him and Hattu saw shapes writhing on his shoulders. To his horror, he saw that it was a scurrying clutter of spiders – the white, wool-like traces of spider eggs still stuck to Tanku’s cloak where he must have brushed against and ruptured them. Tanku hadn’t noticed, so carefully, Hattu reached forward, lifting one hand and skilfully brushing the eight-legged denizens of the forest off with one stroke.

  ‘Hattu?’ Tanku said, jolting.

  ‘You had a vine on your back,’ Hattu lied.

  On they went until the forest floor before them was freckled with livid crimson toadstools and stumps of bedrock coated in a silver lichen that seemed to glow from within. In the occasional spo
ts where oaks had managed to sprout up amongst the horde of rhododendrons, they were draped in weightless, pale streamers of the same lichen, which wafted as they passed like an old woman’s hair. Creepers and vines hung like nooses, sometimes so thickly Hattu had to part them like curtains or slice them with his spear to progress. Likewise he had to bend back clawing branches and scramble over knotted roots where trees had grown too close together. His skin itched with what felt like a hundred bites, cuts, grazes and scurrying insects. He heard the groan of a bending branch and then a thwack and Tanku, several paces away to one side, yelping, followed by a hushed – if not entirely genuine – apology from Dagon. They saw pale, waxy orbs dangling from branches and clinging to the wrinkles on tree trunks. Beehives, Hattu realised. The sight stirred some memory – something Ruba had told him, something he was infuriatingly unable to recollect.

  On they went until at last they saw a golden glow ahead. The clearing.

  ‘Slow,’ Kurunta’s voice hissed from somewhere in the arboreal gloom.

  At once, each of them fell into a warrior’s crouch, spear levelled. Hattu glanced left and right, seeing the maw of spear tips nearest him. He looked ahead, thinking of what lay in the clearing: Pitagga and his mountain men. His heart pounded fiercely and his mouth grew as dry as the ashes of a pyre as he recalled the clash on Baka Hill. Then he thought of the taken priestesses, of the great silver effigy of Tarhunda, of poor Sarpa’s head, of Ruba, of Garin... of Atiya. He reaffirmed his grip on his spear and his fears backed down like an obedient dog.

  ‘We are the Mountain Wolves,’ Hattu growled in a low drawl.