A Good Day To Join The Hittite Army: The Bullock of Hell

Four wheels, no brakes

Did you know you can just email me back whenever you get a new Chatner update? You don’t have to, of course, but I thought I’d mention it, since occasionally people do write back to say hello, or to tell me something interesting, and they almost always preface their emails by saying “I’m sure you won’t see this.” But I do see this! And I quite like it! I’m always emailing you, after all, and if you ever want to email me back in return, I’d be very happy to read whatever you have to say.

Since 2023 The Chatner has been following the adventures of an unnamed Bronze Age shepherd looking to join up with the Hittite Army. So far he has been unable to locate them, although he has managed to be taken hostage, serve as a galley-slave, narrowly escape the Uluburun shipwreck, and descend to the Underworld. And of course hope springs eternal.

A Good Day to Join the Hittite Army, Chapter One. Chapter Two. Chapter Three. Chapter Four. Chapter Five. Chapter Six.

“It seemed like a good day to join the Hittite army. I’d seen the advertisements at the trading-post – “Every day is a good day to join the Hittite army!” – and we were all great joiners at home. I come from a long line of persuadable men. My great-grandfathers had joined up with the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Amorites, the Old Babylonians, and the Hurrians, depending on whomever was sweeping down out of the mountains with terrible swift swords, or flashing unexpectedly out from the sea on terrible white ships, or flaring out of the desert on lightning raids, at the time.”

As it happens, you’re not meant to discuss any of the details of what happens in the Underworld after you’ve completed a katabasis. And it did happen as it happens, if you catch my meaning. What I mean, I should say, is that as it happens, you’re not to discuss the details, and that it happened to me, precisely as it happens more generally. One is tolerably at liberty to discuss the subject with ghosts and sandwraiths, but no further.

So I shall have to draw a veil of discretion around what happened after coming across my mother’s shade and Ninurta’s, who turned out to be a very good sort of fellow, and didn’t at all hold my childish skepticism against me¹, when I fell out of the Underworld’s antechamber — really more of a waiting-room to Hell than Hell proper — and into the Land of Dust itself.

The exit to the Land of Dust is as unremarkable as the entrance. I mean you wouldn’t know it if you weren’t looking out for it. Even if you were looking out for it, you’d be likely to miss it. But I was no longer alone. This was rather lucky, because I don’t mind telling you I felt more than a trifle shaken.

As I mentioned, there is something of an injunction on us poor fellows who have traveled the land of the breathless with the air of life still warm in our lungs. I don’t mean to sound important. I hope I don’t. It can be very tiresome, when a fellow tells you he’s not allowed to tell you something. There was a particular goatherd back home by the name of Piyamaradu who did that sort of thing all the time: “I know something, only I can’t say,” hanging around in the hopes that someone would ask him what it was. He would eat apples in the most irritatingly knowing manner, too. I never disliked anyone so much as I disliked Piyamaradu, and it came as no small relief when he was carried off to Byblos to feed the war-priests at the Temple of Reseph during the last barley-harvest. You must understand, therefore, that I would not withhold any detail or explanation unless it were a matter of real importance.

All I can say is that I had been washed ashore in the company of an auroch. They’re rather thin on the ground these days, aurochs. Although they’re not thin anywhere else. This one must have been the size of a dining-room. They were more plentiful in my grandfather’s grandfather’s day — or at least so my grandfather always said, and when he was not mad from date wine he was a reasonably honest man. This was my grandfather Phegeus, on my father’s side, not my grandfather Alaksandu, who often ran away to live in the hills. Phegeus was a through-and-through house-man. He liked sitting on chairs and criticizing my mother’s servants.

Aurochs are a bit like wild cattle, except they are much bigger and fiercer, and they can’t abide heat, which is why they’re so hard to find nowadays; Grandfather Phegeus says they have all left for the Tin Mountains and points north, which are closer to the moon and therefore colder than here.

This particular auroch was smoky black, with a narrow, rust-colored stripe along the spine that extended almost to his forelock. He had lived very nearly alone on a small island in the middle sea in Hell, which had been set aside for his especial use these last hundred years. He stood eighteen feet high at the foreshoulder and was quite big enough to eat anything that he liked, but it pleased him to eat grass, and plenty of it.

(A certain infernal power had requested, on condition of my safe return to the lands of the sun, that I would bring this auroch to the fields of the sun goddess of Arinna, whereupon I was to present him to the most senior herd-priestess, as the auroch had consumed all of of the bentgrass and ryegrass on all the islands in the middle sea in Hell, to say nothing of the sorghum, oats, alfalfa-grass, timothy hay and milkvetch.)

You need never worry about confusing an auroch for a bull, for aurochs were born big in the early days of the world, back when being big truly meant something, and everything living ran along the lines of hams, barrels, staves, and oak-trees. Back in those days, says my Grandfather Phegeus, there were only a few men in the world, of terrible size and strength, to contend with the beasts of the field, as there was no call for more.

In those days, too, he often added, women of property knew how to manage their staff effectively, and did not let their servants treat the barley-cakes like coals, to sit in the fire all the everlasting day, but pulled them out at just the right moment, to the pleasure and delight of the household. Mother was very proud of Grandfather Phegeus, and considered his chastisement a mark of distinction; not every home in our neighborhood could afford to support an old man who ate like a farmhand and yet produced only complaints. The more he complained, the more she swelled with house-pride, until there was scarcely room for both of them within doors.

The auroch had been calved in a red coat, like most of his brothers, which then steadily darkened over the next three hundred years of his long life. As he had already been old a long time since, all that remained of his birth coat was a light auburn dusting along his muzzle. His legs were as thick as young trees, and his back was so broad you could spread a tablecloth over it and have your tea there, provided you sat very still and with your legs crossed, since he was at his most immense about the neck and shoulders, like a battering-ram, and his back sloped precipitously downards to his surprisingly stubby hind legs.

Perhaps the tea trick would be best managed if you could somehow drink it while he was walking slowly down a gradual hill.

His hide was thick, and except for his forelock, short-haired, which distinguishes him from his cousin the wisent. Wisents are shaggy all over and mainly dwell in forests, and I have been told by reliable men that their backs do not slope merely, but are curved into distinct humps, although not so prominent as the backs of the night-camel.

My auroch’s mammoth dark head was girdled with two great horns of bone, each as wide as a man’s arm, which spread out low and foreward from his forehead, while a third and shorter horn grew out directly between them.

An auroch cannot exactly be said to have faces, as you or I do, since their features are scattered across too broad a canvas to have the same sort of relationship to one another. If the gods took a face and scattered it across the night sky, breaking it evenly across four or five different constellations, that might get you nearer the idea. But this one had a large brown eye recessed into each side of his great head, both fringed all the way round with lashes. About a foot behind each eye flared out a wide, soft ear. The eyes were separated by the broad plank of his forehead, and split his view of the world into two distinct halves, like an apple, no matter which way he turned.

At the depth of his muzzle were two soft nostrils, and underneath them, his pale mouth, small only in relation to the cavernlike dimensions of his skull, which held the wide, gray tongue that descended to the first of his four stomachs. All four of his stomachs worked without ceasing, and had done so since the first day of his life. The process of supporting such a mountain upon even great quantities of grass required a constant agitation of machinery. The auroch spent most of the day churning up fields with his teeth, but even when he stopped to rest or drink, some part of him was always eating. It was no wonder that this certain Power of Hell was eager to offer him as a bride-gift to the followers of Arinna. No one else could have afforded to support him.

But as I was merely acting as his guide, rather than his keeper, it was in no way expected I should be responsible for his maintenance, and to that end I had been assured that no king or farmer or land-owner could hold anything he ate against me, legally speaking.

Now, what I ought to have done was to ask for a letter or a seal or a signet-ring or some sort of token that might back up such a claim. At the time of the asking, I had been so overawed by the members of the Court of Dust that it had not occurred to me to ask anything. Now that I was away from their slow and colossal influence, blinking back daylight in the most prosaic-looking of hay-fields, I felt rather conspicuous, not to say foolish.

My auroch had fixed a single placid eye on me, uttered the word GRASS² in a voice like a deep hungry bell, and turned away to mouth the ground.

I rather liked the sound of his eating — his rumbling, forceful breath, the powerful, industrious grind of his jaws, the satisfied mumble that followed each bite — and although I couldn’t have told you whether we were in Sicily or Malta or the isles of Aeolus, nor how on earth I was to find the sacred city of Arinna (I didn’t even know whether the big fellow would follow me once I did find the way, or whether I was expected to drive him before me like a sheep), I nevertheless found myself following him with a bit of a spring in my step.

“I should like to call you something,” I said to the big fellow after a few minutes of grazing, “if we’re going to be traveling companions. You can call me Hani, if you like, son of Ammihatna the Lily-Fingered, who now serves in the House of Dust.”

My auroch made no answer. Possibly “grass” was the only word he knew, or saw fit to use. I weighed the comparative risks of calling him nothing against presuming to give him a name he found unwieldy or even offensive, and decided to hold off until we had gotten to know one another better.

I was on the verge of telling him as much when we were interrupted by the sudden appearance of two arrows on the scene. The first, which barely seemed to ruffle the thick hair on his flank, in no wise troubled him, but the second one struck me amidships, and resulted in my taking a quick and unannounced visit to the ground, where the last thing I saw before rather losing interest in my surroundings was his uninterrupted chewing. I might have said “Help,” or I might have only imagined it. Either way, the auroch did not leave off eating for a minute.

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1. I can’t imagine the Anunnaki would object to my mentioning that, it having nothing to do with the nature of the Underworld, its layout or civic codes, its inhabitants or governing bodies, et cetera. Besides which I distinctly remember most of our conversation took place as we were still falling from the outer hall, well before we reached the first of the seven gates of ash, and can’t possibly have fallen under their purview (Although we certainly fell under their purview ourselves, ha-hah! Oh, I wish I had thought to say that while we were still in the Underworld — it would have been a damn apt time to have said it —)

2. I haven’t quite gotten the hang of my auroch’s speech yet, only it sounded something like gʰreh₁ss.