Ink of Ages Fiction Prize

Zannanza

Zannanza’s young soul rises up from his body into the hot air above the desert road. They are still in Hittite territory, the empire of his father, the Hittite king. He feels a sense of rueful surprise that this was it – at only fifteen years old, this was how he died.

He looks around to see if the Annunaki, the twelve gods of the underworld, have arrived to escort his royal soul to the nether realm, but

there’s nothing. Just the silence, the bright sun, the mess of horses, men, baggage, and hopes on the road.

He realizes that he will never know who killed him, or who sent them.

His party was just short of the Egyptian border, south of the Mitanni city of Qadishu, when a hundred horsemen swirled out of the east, their faces covered against the sun and dust, and rode them down. Messeni, his chamberlain, and Taya, who led his bodyguard, formed a ring around him, but the attackers had already brought the Hittite outriders down with arrows and were upon them before anyone could draw a sword in defence.

He heard Taya shout, ‘Cut the baggage loose!’ and in the same moment saw a blade, curved like a sickle moon, cut into Messeni’s neck and

shoulder. The old man’s blood jumped out towards him in an arc of astonishing heat. Who knew that this old man, who was always complaining of Hattusha’s cold winds, had such hot fountains within him?

Then he felt noise, a sharp pain, heat, and a wave of great weakness. A pair of hostile eyes looked him over, making sure that the damage

done to Zannanza, prince of the Hittite empire, son of Suppiluliuma, had been mortal.

This was his last feeling: that he was falling from his horse.

And now this – the quietness of death on an empty road and the desire to cry, without access to the body’s tears.

Zannanza fiddles about, trying not to cry or panic. Only moments ago, he had been a bridegroom on his way from one empire to another, to marry a queen. He had been the desired-one, the solution to great and important problems, the one whose fate had been in the care of the Gul Ses, Istustaya and Papaya, who spin the fates of kings.

All because of a letter.

My husband has died and I have no son, she had written.

When the letter reached his father – who was in the middle of besieging Karkemish – no one had been surprised that the inbred Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamun was dead. He had left his sister-wife Ankhesenamun alone and unprotected. So far, so Egyptian. Zannanza’s father had shrugged and kept pounding Karkemish’s walls.

They say you have many sons, she wrote. You might give me one to be my husband.

But that had been a surprise. This forlorn request by a girl-queen might have been routine from any nation but Egypt, which gave its princesses to no one and protected the integrity of the royal line jealously.

I would not wish to take one of my subjects as a husband.

Suppiluliuma had paused his siege to consider the logic of this. Tutankhamun’s father, Amenhotep – or Akhenaten, as he insisted on calling

himself after his mysterious epiphany – had been mad. He had upended a tradition so old it seemed eternal. He had forbidden the worship of any god but the Aten, the solar disk – with himself as absolute and only intermediary. He built a new capital, wrote new hymns, founded a new priesthood, patronized a frightening new kind of art. He came to a frightening new kind of end. No pharaoh had been murdered before.

Akhenaten’s name had fallen to chisel-blows. His tomb was forgotten and unmarked. Pharaoh’s soul wandered the trackless shadows of the Egyptian underworld, unworshipped and unremembered.

Tutankhamun carried the stigma of his father’s madness: crippled and drooling, breasted like a woman and bent like an old man, he had not even lived twenty summers. You cannot marry your sister and expect your children to be like Nile reeds – straight, true, and proliferant.

On the road, alone in death and with no sign of anyone coming for him, Zannanza fears that he too may go the way of the mad pharaonic dead. Perhaps there is a realm in the underworld for failed kings, who drift and wander there eternally, powerless and confused.

I am afraid, she had written to Zannanza’s father.

Of whom, or what was the girl-queen Ankhesenamun afraid? 

They had decided – or Suppliluliuma had, after he had got over his surprise about the letter, that she was afraid of her vizier, Ay. An old man whose wife had been wet-nurse to Ankhesenamun’s mother. An old man who was also Ankhesenamun’s uncle. An old man who had advised three pharaohs and knew the virtue of striking first and fast.

Ay, the Hittites decided, was going to force his niece to marry him and take the throne. Unless she found herself a husband first.

Zannanza remembers all this, as the sun hovers in the sky exactly where it was when he was struck down. No time seems to pass when you are dead, he thinks.

He can hardly blame Ay for killing a competitor. Zannanza’s own father had killed his brother for the throne. The Hittite priests were never done muttering that it was the crime of the dynasty.

I am afraid, she had written.

So Suppiluliuma had thought about his sons: Arnuwanda, Telipinu, Piyassili, Mursili, and Zannanza. Arnuwanda could not be spared – he was his father’s heir. Telipinu was keeping the muttering priests in line, Piyassili governing far west of the Euphrates. Mursili might do, he thought. In the end, he sent Zannanza. The youngest, the least proven. At least you won’t be marrying your granny, his father had laughed. She’s near your age, even if her family line has more loops in it than a horse’s bridle.

And now it was all over. The bridegroom was dead on the road, his party lying in pieces around him, their attackers vanished back into the dry silence east of the Horus-Way.

Maybe the queen had changed her mind and found a better husband. Was it easier to kill the bridegroom than send him home unwed and unwanted? Was it easier to do this than admit that the Great Queen had been forced into marriage with a servant, or that the new Pharaoh had usurped the throne?

I am afraid, she wrote.

As they rode from Hattusha to Waset, Zannanza had imagined life as her consort; two teenagers afraid and alone amid plotters. He had believed it would be bearable, and profitable for everyone. Now he wonders – why would his father have pitched him into such a state?

Here, at last, is the thought that Zannanza’s soul does not want to think. And it is this: that the father who gave him life took it from him. His father had killed his way to the Hittite throne. Under his rule their people had spread and conquered further than ever before. Suppiluliuma consumed kingdoms the way the sand consumed rivers. Perhaps, Zannanza thinks, his father had finally set his sights on Egypt. Not as a co-operative neighbour ruled by his son, but as a vassal state brought into the Hittite fold by war. A war provoked by an outrage: the murder of a Hittite prince.

I am afraid, she wrote.

Families, he thinks. You should be afraid.

The people most affected by events have least control over them. They have least knowledge of what is really going on. This is how it is to be a prince and powerless: you are days away from a throne, and in the space of a breath, you are no more than blood, already drying on the sand.

At last, they are coming. In a swirl of sun and dust, two women are making their way unhurriedly along the road towards him. Larger than any mortal, brighter and more real than the desert that is already fading around him, they hail him. Istustaya and Papaya, who spin the thread of fate and who have so lately cut his.

He bows to them.

‘Come, prince.’ They are not smiling, but not stern either. They simply are, as fate is.

‘May I not know who did it?’ Zannanza says.

‘Does it matter?’ says Papaya.

‘It is already done and past,’ Istustaya adds.

‘Was it Ay? Or Horemheb? Was it just bad luck, or did Ankhesenamun change her mind? Was it … was it my father? Will I see him again?’

‘You will see him again,’ Istustaya says.

‘Soon,’ Papaya adds.

And as he walks away from the last scene of his life, he sees the outcome of the whole affair, because time has started up again for him and he is moving away from it, the way you move away from a frieze, seeing more and more the further away you go.

He sees his father’s anger at the letter informing him of Zannanza’s death. He sees new attacks, by the Hittite army on Egyptian towns, avenging Zannanza’s death. The capture of Egyptian prisoners, who bring with them a sickness that spreads across both empires. He sees his father, dying of this plague. He sees his brother dying of it too.

He sees himself, a small figure between the weavers of fate, disappearing into the darkness of time.