Son of Ishtar

by Gordon Doherty

  Dagon, nearby, turned to Hattu and Kurunta. ‘Are you feeling it too? It’s as if I’ve drunk the lot,’ he said, blinking hard.

  Giddiness seemed to take hold within moments, and he heard many of the other soldiers laughing, some uproariously. Tanku rocked on his haunches, hooting with laughter at some weak joke Sargis had aired. Then he fell onto his back as if hit by a stiff wind, looked dazed for a moment then exploded with more laughter. Then, suddenly, he seemed to fall prey to a sudden fright, clutching out at the ground around him, kicking, his face agog. ‘Spiders,’ he yelped, booting at a bare patch of dust, then sweeping nothing from his shoulders and swinging round, eyeing every patch of ground with terror. ‘They’re everywhere!’

  Hattu realised the enjoyable warmth of the wine and honey had changed within him too. He felt his head begin to swim and saw the faces all around him blur and contort like melting wax. Even the trees seemed to writhe and sway in the still night air like spirits. The vapour from the forest seemed to crawl out from the shadows and pour around him, enshrouding him.

  And now – now of all the cursed moments – he recalled Ruba’s words:

  A trader friend of mine used to go months on the road with few supplies. He would gather water from streams, shoot hare and geese, raid beehives for their nectar. One year he didn’t stop by Hattusa as usual. Turns out he had eaten honey from a bad hive. Somewhere in the north – a bitch of a forest, he said…

  Nausea swirled deep in Hattu’s stomach, rising and boiling in his chest. Nearby, he heard the sounds of retching and spitting. The laughter had faded. He heard thick thuds of men crumpling to the ground and saw the sentries around the spear palisade sinking to their knees.

  ‘It’s poisonous,’ he groaned weakly. The memory of the dead bees on the forest floor stung him. Of course… ‘Stop!’ he cried with all the air in his lungs, seeing his comrades still greedily eating. ‘The honey is bad!’ he yelled, batting the shards of comb from the hands of the nearest.

  Around him, other men rose, tossing down the shards of comb before they had eaten too much, gawping at the state of their comrades.

  He retched, spilling the contents of his belly onto the earth. When he lifted his head again he saw the writhing woods… this was no illusion – they were moving. He spun round… moving in every direction. Coming through the trees like a silent noose drawing tight. Men… a ring of armed men! Kaskans?

  ‘It’s a trap. A ploy!’ He rasped.

  ‘Kaskans!’ Dagon yelled, seeing it now too.

  The cry spilled from the lips of a few others then exploded in one almighty chorus.

  A thunder of boots sounded all around him. Those who were able raced to cover the perimeter where the sentries had fallen. They coughed and spat, taking up their shields, swords and spears.

  ‘More men… more,’ Kurunta howled, swaying alone at an unguarded stretch of the perimeter. Hattu, Dagon and Sargis and a knot of fifteen other Wolves were fit to go to his aid. They clattered into place with him, forming a wall of shields behind the spear palisade. Hattu gazed into the blackness, seeing the fiery, eager eyes of the mountain men, coming to within a handful of paces of the clearing’s edge. But the boom-boom-boom of Hittite shields and clack-clack of spears being levelled multiplied. Hattu shot a look over his shoulder. The perimeter was covered. Thinly, but covered all the same.

  ‘Tarhunda… coat my… ’ Kurunta gasped, struggling.

  ‘Coat my heart in bronze!’ Dagon and Hattu finished for him. Another chorus followed, rich, full, defiant. The cry fell away. The Kaskan noose slowed to a halt, deathly silent. It was a moment in which men considered their very lives, a battle of wills. Then, with a muted rumble of boots and gruff voices, the Kaskan watchers receded, the cruel eyes and sharp weapons melting back into the blackness.

  Hattu stared at the spot they had been for what felt like an eternity.

  ‘They’re gone. The woods are clear,’ cried Gorru the Mesedi from the far side of the perimeter.

  ‘Clear this side too,’ Orax replied a moment later.

  ‘Damned hag! A moment later and we would have been like… ’ Kurunta started, ‘pigs in a pen.’

  Hattu rested his spear on its haft, panting. His head ached, feeling as though he was wearing a red-hot and way-too-tight bronze helm.

  Muwa staggered over, head switching this way and that, eyes alive with fear that the danger was still keen. ‘Up, up,’ he demanded of the prone, retching men. Nearly half of the army lay like this.

  ‘We have the perimeter covered, Tuhkanti,’ Kurunta reassured him.

  Volca leapt down from the driver’s berth of the royal wagon and strode over. Hattu noticed how he wore an odd look on his face – like that of a man denied the company of a woman. But as he approached, his face changed: handsome, bright and smiling. ‘Give worship to the Gods,’ he bawled so all could hear. Then he took one of Hattu’s hands and raised it in the air. ‘Give thanks to Prince Hattu – the brightest mind amongst us tonight – for raising the alarm before we fell prey to the Kaskans. Ishtar truly has blessed him with her gifts.’

  Many heads had turned to the address now. Most rose clenched fists in support. ‘Son of Ishtar!’ they cried in a baritone chorus.

  Muwa’s maddened eyes darted all around at the men lauding Hattu.

  ***

  King Mursili held the wagon curtain open, seeing this strange glade they were in. He felt a horrible sense of puzzlement at his whereabouts. The air smelt odd, the trees looked wrong. Then he saw an old hag give out honey to the men. He heard their cheery talk, especially the perimeter sentries, as they ate. Oddly, he felt no appetite for the fare. Tired by the small effort of observation, he made to lie back down again, when the wagon rocked a little. Volca had leapt up to sit on the driver’s bench with a shard of the waxy nectar. But while other men ate, Volca merely watched. Odder still, the Sherden then dropped his piece of honeycomb and didn’t bother picking it up again.

  Mursili fell back into a deep sleep. When he woke, it was to terrible sounds, sounds of wounded men. He tried to prop himself up on his right elbow, but even those muscles were failing him. He managed only to lift his trembling right hand to the curtain and draw it back a fraction.

  By Tarhunda’s grace, what is this?

  Men staggered and fell, vomited, pitched over as if shot. Befuddled, he poked his head from the wagon windows and looked around for Lady Danuhepa. She could help them, just as she had helped him. But she was absent, far away back in Hattusa, he realised, feeling foolish. Instead, he saw Volca. The red-cloaked Sherden sat there on the driver’s berth of the wagon, watching while his comrades fell.

  ‘Hel… help them,’ Mursili said in a half-whisper.

  But the Gal Mesedi continued to watch, motionless, as they fell. He was like a sober man in an arzana house.

  ‘Stop: the honey is bad!’ a cry sounded.

  Hattu? Mursili mouthed.

  He heard muffled exchanges, then a brash cry: ‘Son of Ishtar!’

  The moniker crept across his skin like wriggling insects. ‘Hattu?’ he whispered.

  Then another shout: ‘Laud your King and your Chosen Prince… not mere foot soldiers.’

  ‘Muwa?’ he croaked, hearing his older son’s words clash with the cries of acclaim like a sword. He tried to twist his head, to look round and locate his sons.

  Then Volca filled the squared window and cupped a hand behind Mursili’s head to lift it a little, then held a skin to his lips.

  ‘All is in hand, My Sun. Now drink. Drink it all. It will help things along…’ he said in a soothing voice.

  The root brew flooded into Mursili’s mouth, washing away the confused thoughts. He drank every last drop, then fell back into a deep, exhausted slumber.

  Chapter 17

  Island of the Dead

  Summer 1300 BC

  With a cacophony of snapping twigs and branches, the Hittite army surged through the northern half of the rhododendron forest the following day. Men bore fiery l
ooks and marched doggedly, despite many sporting sore heads and foul bellies. Hattu looked ahead, to the King’s carriage, making its way through the woods with great difficulty, and behind, to Muwa, leading the Fury with a face that did justice to the name.

  A hand clasped onto Hattu’s shoulder. It was the slit-eyed, aged captain from the Leopard Clan. His face was stony still, but his words were very different now.

  ‘My granddaughter was born the day we left Hattusa. I was fearful I might never return to see her, to hold her. Last night in the woods I thought we were done for, but you saved us, Prince Hattusili. I will never again speak ill of you.’

  Hattu tilted his head a little to one side, unsure how to respond, then saluted.

  At last they broke clear of the muggy, dark woods and found before them a broad, verdant heath, bathed in noonday sunshine. Just ahead lay another carcass of a Kaskan camp. A sea of mud domes and rough timber shacks, pig bones, broken clay pots, uncovered cesspits. And as they approached, they saw something else.

  Three spears, hafts fixed in the earth, long-haired human heads impaled upon the tips. Around the two spears at the sides lay torn white Hittite soldier-garb. By the base of the central one was a black garment. A priestess robe. Even from here, Hattu could see the ragged section where a strip had been torn off. His hand moved to the rag in his purse, his eyes fixed on the impaled head.

  ‘No… ’ he whispered, feeling his body tremble.

  ‘Stay back,’ Kurunta cried across the lines, he and Nuwanza at once scouring the seemingly empty landscape for further threat.

  But Hattu broke ranks and staggered forward, sliding to his knees before the three heads. He barely noticed Muwa do likewise by his side. Laments rang out from the men behind. Tendrils of bloody sinew and skin trailed from the leftmost head, the flesh blackened and the poor guard’s face unrecognisable. The cheeks and forehead of the rightmost guard’s head pulsed and writhed for a moment in a grim parody of life, before a set of black, shiny pincers cut through the skin from within and a flood of insects and maggots spilled over his face. The last head – that of the priestess – was veiled by hair, just the gawping mouth visible. Muwa and Hattu looked at one another, pale, then reached up, together, to sweep the hair back. The Elder Priestess’ lifeless face was twisted in the pain of her final moments.

  ‘Bury them,’ Muwa snapped, rising and turning away.

  ‘We should have sent a force ahead. You should have listened to me,’ Hattu called after him. ‘They were here, last night. Atiya was here. We could have freed her.’

  Muwa swung to cast a scourge-like glower on him. He shot a fiery look of his own back. A murmur broke out amongst the men as they watched their two princes quarrel like this. Arrow flew down from above the woods to join them just then, settling before Hattu’s feet as if to mediate.

  ‘Had you done the job I asked of you – prepared the Tapikka escort properly – then she would never have been taken captive.’ Muwa raked his fingers through his hair then, with a snarl, kicked out at Arrow, who hopped back and screeched at him. ‘Damned bird. I’ll cook it if it gets in my way again!’

  The many watching ranks gasped in shock and dismay as Hattu fell to one knee to scoop Arrow up.

  ‘They say death follows you, Brother… well, look,’ Muwa towered over him, gesturing at the heads, ‘look!’

  Hattu’s limbs shook with fury. Muwa swung away and stalked back to the army lines. Had he not, Hattu wondered just what anger might have driven him to do.

  ***

  The Hittite army marched on through the sultry north, following the Kaskan tracks like hounds. They trekked through marshy flats, over low bluffs and winding hill tracks. Only dusk halted them, and they set up camp on a green saddle of land between two brown, earthy hills – each peak serving as a natural lookout post.

  Hattu woke in the middle of the night, his thoughts nagging him, the argument with Muwa echoing over and over in his head. And any time he did start to dose off, the grim image of the spiked heads stained the brief beginnings of innocent dreams. When he heard the urgent chatter of sentries atop one of the lookout hills he woke fully. Many of the Wolves were already awake, chatting mutedly or polishing their armour. He nodded to a few as he rose and dressed, then made his way to the brown earth slope and climbed to the hilltop. The night air was cool up here and he could see for many danna in every direction. The lookout sentries were in deep discussion with Raku flat-face, pointing and gesticulating towards a kidney shaped lake a few danna away, its surface reflecting the crescent of the waning moon like a highly-polished sickle blade.

  ‘Trouble?’ Hattu said.

  Raku turned to him. ‘On that islet,’ he said.

  Hattu followed his outstretched finger. He noticed how a section of the lake’s surface moved and roiled, ever so slowly. It was not quite black, he realised as his eyes adjusted, but grey. Mist crawled across the water, and he could just make out a crooked neck of land, stretching out into the lake, a causeway leading to a small isle.

  ‘One of the horse scouts reckons it’s an old sacrificial isle – sacred to the Kaskans,’ Raku said.

  ‘We saw torchlight on it,’ one of the lookout sentries said.

  ‘And up here we heard a distant noise carrying on the night breeze,’ the other sentry added. ‘A terrible noise.’

  Hattu’s smoke-grey eye ached as he scoured the misty islet. For just the briefest of moments he thought he saw a dull orb of orange. The flicker of a fire or a torch right enough? What if she is there? he fretted. He felt a pang in his breast, an urgent need to find out, to right the wrong, to shove Muwa’s cruel and unjust accusations down his throat. He felt his emotions run high, and took a moment to think, rubbing his temples, trying to let his mind make sense of it and not his heart – just as Nuwanza had taught him and the Wolves at the academy: A good soldier knows when to become deaf to his heart.

  He eyed the scene again. Bare countryside lay around the lake’s near shore. The approach was free of ambush points, as best as he could tell from the pale moonlight. The darkness would aid any covert investigation. More, the causeway offered an excellent means by which to pin down whoever was on that islet. The cold, clear pieces of his thinking clicked together, his head and heart in accord.

  ‘We should send a scouting party,’ he said, flatly.

  ‘Aye,’ Raku agreed.

  ‘Does the Tuhkanti know?’ Hattu said, the words sticking in his throat.

  Raku shook his head. ‘The Tuhkanti sleeps. He placed me in charge of night scouting.’

  Now Hattu’s heart took over. ‘Then send the Wolves,’ he said, gesturing to the restless company down on the saddle between the hills.

  Raku looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know, Prince Hattu. I-’

  Hattu clasped a hand to Raku’s bicep and held his gaze – in the way he had seen Father regard men. ‘We hesitated in the woods. Let us not make the same mistake here.’

  ***

  Kol of the Eagle Kin had always been a selfless type – the kind of fellow who enjoyed a tasty meal most of all if he gave it to another more in need. And he had spent much of his life giving what little he had: his wheat, wine, bread and meat rations often went straight to the House of the Wounded, a wing in Hattusa’s Great Barracks where the stricken veterans lived out their days: blind men, one-legged men and poor wretches confined to their beds. He would cook hearty stews for them and listen to their stories.

  In his boyhood, tasty meals were few and far between; indeed, food of any sort was a luxury. Living in Hattusa’s slums, he had often given what meagre fare he could buy to his sickly young sister. They owned a ramshackle hut, left to them by their plague-claimed parents, and they would huddle there at night, eating scraps of bread or the thinnest of soups, hearing the night calls of the wretched in the slum streets staggering between taverns. He would cradle her in his arms and tell her tall tales of adventure and good deeds to drown out the sorry din.

  One summer a nobleman, low on slaves,
had hired him. The rich man had put him to work on a sprawling villa up on Tarhunda’s Shoulder. He spent many days there, mending the roof under a cruel sun, wearing his fingers to the nub in the process. By dusk on the last day, the roof was mended and Kol could barely stand. He almost fell down the last few rungs of the ladder. The nobleman had thrown two thin copper rings across the dust towards him in the way a man might toss a scrap of meat to ward off a mangy dog.

  Kol did not dwell on the chasm between the rich man’s lot and his. What good would it do to moan over that which he did not have? Instead, he loped down the hill into the Ambar valley market to trade one ring for four eggs and a sweet loaf, then to the Storm Temple, to place the other ring before the votive altar by the gates, whispering a few words of prayer for his sister’s wellbeing. Someone claimed they later saw the noble taking the offered ring back for himself, but Kol chose not to believe the story. A man was little more than his thoughts, he had always said, and if you chose to dwell on the darker thoughts, then they would become you and you them. Instead, he cooked the eggs, broke and buttered the sweet loaf, fed his sister and told her a new story, where she was the heroine at the heart of the adventure. He noticed that her smile was broader than ever… and that her breaths seemed shallower. When she fell asleep in his arms that night, it was forever. It had been the saddest moment of his life… but he did not cry, for he knew, beyond doubt, that he had done everything in his power to make her short life as pleasant as possible. ‘Sleep well,’ he had whispered, kissing her cold forehead.

  For those precious few moments of introspection, Kol could see nothing, hear nothing. He was a boy again, his sister alive once more. He could feel nothing of the grazes and bruises on his skin from the ambush on the approach to Tapikka, recall none of the horrors his Kaskan captors had subjected him and his comrades to since. It was akin to being underwater.

  Then, like a diver being hauled from the depths, the sound of all going on around him returned: sharp, brutal sounds of metal ripping skin, of harrowing cries and of foreign tongues barking out dark oaths to strange gods. ‘A good fisherman knows how to fillet a carp!’ a Kaskan laughed as the sawing continued. Kol’s eyes slid open to see a veil of coiling mist. He could smell the coppery stink of blood and the stench of loosened bowels, mixed in with wet earth and the incongruously calm lapping of gentle waves on a shore.