Harry Turtledove (Editor) - Alternate Generals II

The King of Egypt and his army met the King of Hatte and his army outside the city of Ugarit, invited there by King Niqmandu and his Egyptian wife. Niqmandu spread offerings between them, fish, flesh, fruit and wine for the troops, gold and ivory and other precious things for the Great Kings. Their war had much disrupted commerce, the lifeblood of Ugarit. Niqmandu begged Egypt and Hatte for peace.

This meeting did not please Horemheb, but Niqmandu King of Ugarit was a faithful ally of Egypt, no friend of the Hittites who had burned half of his palace. Moreover, Akhenaten had long wished to see his enemy Suppililiuma of Hatte.

Horemheb and his men kept close watch on the Hittites; he permitted the soldiers to drink none of the wine offered by Niqmandu's servants and to eat none of the fish or fruit, lest they become sated and slow.

To honor their host's hospitality, like brothers the Kings spoke about their wives at home, the sons and brothers who sat beside them here today.

"There is a god you favor above all others, I hear," Suppililiuma said through his interpreter.

"He is the only god, my brother," Akhenaten said. "He is the creator, mine as well as yours. He appointed your skin and your tongue."

"And my kingdom?"

"The Aten has appointed every man his place."

"Then I like this god of yours, my brother!" And Suppililiuma laughed. "All is from the Aten, then?"

"Everything."

"Including this?"

Suppililiuma gave a signal with his hand, and as he did so, Horemheb's men, who had been waiting for such a thing, rose up with spears and daggers and axes and rushed to shield their King. Niqmandu's servants dropped their jugs of wine and platters of food and withdrew behind the Egyptian line. The Hittites stood behind their shields, motionless.

"What is this?" Akhenaten demanded. "You would defy the hospitality of Niqmandu, my loyal ally?"

"We destroyed half of Niqmandu's palace," Suppililiuma said. "The other half we did not destroy. We made it ours. This, then, is the will of your god, my brother."

A great pain seized Horemheb's side. The cupbearer beside him held a bloody knife. Horemheb shouted, "Kadesh!" and his men understood. As Aitakama had fallen, so were the Egyptians to fall, impaled on the blades of their allies. The Hittites withdrew from the banquet.

Horemheb was struck again, and he fell upon the body of another. On his back he lay, blinded by blood, while above him the Egyptians and Amurrites rallied around the King and butchered Ugarit's army of servants. Then an arrow struck Horemheb's thigh. Horemheb shouted for all to fall back. Hittite archers had come up to finish the battle.

Someone pulled him to his feet and thrust a shoulder beneath his arm. Horemheb wiped an arm across his face to clear away the blood, and found Aziru at his side. And at his feet, in a pool of crimson that spread from his neck like the Nile in flood, lay Prince Smenkhkare.

The Hittites retreated from Ugarit, scarcely beaten but it was late in the season, time to head home. They would return.

Whereas the Hittites had burned half the palace, Akhenaten burned the entire city. Everything in the treasury, all the copper and tin and glass, was put aboard ships seized at the harbor and sent straightaway to Egypt. The bodies of Niqmandu and his Egyptian wife, of all the royal family and all the servants and all the servants' families, hung from the city walls.

And then the King beat Aitakama with his own hands, Aitakama's blood spreading like sacred oil upon his skin. When would this war end? His brother! His beloved brother!

"It will not end," Aitakama said. "The Hittites will always return. In Hatte they are strengthened and refreshed. There is no relief."

"No night is eternal. Dawn always comes to the horizon."

"Likewise dusk."

The King broke Aitakama in the end. To do it he removed both hands and one ear, and pinned Aitakama's severed nose to a wall. "In the city of Hattusa, their capital," Aitakama said with the tongue Akhenaten had left him, "there is a tunnel leading to the south, to safety, for Suppililiuma greatly fears what lies to the north."

And he told Akhenaten of Kaska, of the tribes there who harried shepherds and merchants and burned Hittite crops, and how they had ever been the bane of Hatte. In the days of Suppililiuma's father, the Kaska-tribes had destroyed the kingdom of Hatte. "Don't you remember that once your father called for them? But the Kaska-tribes never came, my brother. Not for Nebmaatre Amenhotep."

At that instant Akhenaten killed him.

He hung Aitakama's body in a cage suspended from the rudder of his royal ship and sailed north and then south again, so that all from Kizzuwadna to Libya might see the wrath of the King of Egypt, and that word of it might travel to Nubia and the Isles in the Midst of the Sea. Then he returned to Akhet-Aten to bury his brother Smenkhkare in the hills from which the Aten rose every day.

The Hittites delayed the next campaign in Syria. Akhenaten remained in Egypt, learning from Horemheb's letters that the Hittite Upper Lands had been overrun from Kaska, and that Tushratta of Mitanni had at last reclaimed his rebel vassals. Akhenaten dispatched messengers through the lands of Mitanni. They rode tirelessly to Kaska and back again, bringing with them the flesh of Re stripped from the false temples of Canaan and Syria.

Hittite troops came into Syria that summer and several summers thereafter. Harried from Kaska, they could do little more than burn fields before Horemheb's chariots and infantry fell upon them and cut them up. In the wake of destruction, as always, came renewal: Hotep, tirelessly at work, establishing Righteousness in the name of the Sole-One-of-Re. Seated beside Nefertiti, with the princesses at their feet, Akhenaten heard of all of this from Tutu. It pleased him, as it pleased the Aten.

Then one campaign season was not delayed. It did not come at all. Tutu announced that the Kaska-tribes had destroyed a holy city and wrecked a number of outposts. Lands to the west had rebelled. Kizzuwadna joined its border with Mitanni, so now if the Hittites wished to enter Syria, they would have to fight through every pass, do battle on every plain, and risk leaving their homes open to attack. And there was, too, the plague.

It struck Egypt no less than Hatte, carried in the breath or the sweat of supplicants, messengers, and prisoners. The youngest princesses died, and soon thereafter Tiye as well. Akhenaten himself took ill throughout his entire body, and today, seated at the Window of Appearance, shivered with cold as though the warmth of the Aten could no longer reach him.

"I feel enveloped by night, but it is not yet noon," he whispered to Nefertiti, who held him and fondled him as she had always done.

Below, the hostage sons and royal princes of the Royal Academy paraded before the ambassadors to present the newly orphaned prince, Tutankhaten. The three remaining princesses leaned over the ledge of the Window, curious to see the youths whom they might someday marry. Already they looked to tomorrow.

The King said, "It is too soon for this. O my father who gives breath to all you create, it is not yet noon!"

The next day he died, collapsed upon an altar, thin and wasted before the ambassadors of Asia, as the sun descended to the horizon on the shortest day of the year, never to know whether there would be another tomorrow.

Encamped outside Aleppo, where Hotep had strung more bodies from the wall, Horemheb received news of the King's death. His widow had shed her old name and, as Ankhetkheprure-Beloved-of-the-Sole-One-of-Re Neferneferuaten, sat alone upon the throne of Egypt.