Book Title: The Moon That Fell from Heaven
Series: Empire at Twilight
Author: N.L. Holmes
Publication Date: September 26th, 2023
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Page Length: 307
Genre: Historical fiction
Ehli-nikkalu, eldest daughter of the Hittite emperor, is married to a mere vassal of her father's. But despite her status, her foreignness and inability to produce an heir drive a wedge between her and the court that surrounds her. When her secretary is mysteriously murdered while carrying the emperor a message that would indict the loyalty of his vassal, Ehli-nikkalu adopts the dead man’s orphaned children out of a guilty sense of responsibility.
A young cousin she has never met becomes a pretender to the throne and mobilizes roving armies of the poor and dispossessed, which causes the priority of her loyalties to become even more suspect. However, Ehli-nikkalu discovers a terrible secret that could destabilize the present regime if the pretender ever learns of it.
With the help of a kindly scribe, her brave young ward, and an embittered former soldier trapped in debt and self-doubt, Ehli-nikkalu sets out to save the kingdom and prove herself to her father. And along the way, she learns something about love.
N.L. Holmes is the pen name of a professional archaeologist who received her doctorate from Bryn Mawr College. She has excavated in Greece and in Israel and taught ancient history and humanities at the university level for many years. She has always had a passion for books, and in childhood, she and her cousin used to write stories for fun.
These days she lives in France with her husband, two cats, geese, and chickens, where she gardens, weaves, dances, and plays the violin
Ehli-nikkalu closed her eyes and opened her nostrils to the perfume of the woods—the elusive sweetness of bracken and the pungent hint of fir now and again as the hardwoods began to give way to the darker conifers. So rich in memories. Cicadas droned. An occasional animal crashed through the underbrush, but no human voices could be heard. Ehli-nikkalu thought of the black forests that surrounded the city, perched between the high plateau and the higher hills, where she had been born. In her homeland, the mountains themselves were divine. Her father was named for the god of a mountain. Surely anyone could sense the sacredness of the place through which they sailed in the lumbering, rocking barque of their carriage.
She opened her eyes once more and, in a state of tender nostalgia, watched the passage of age-old trunks, of dense shadow and brilliant clearings, and of the brief flash of wings as a jay or pigeon fluttered from branch to branch. The swaying of the carriage almost lulled her into a state of wakeful dreaming.
Thus, at first, she wasn’t sure how to react when, much later in the afternoon, Teshamanu appeared at the side of her wheel. He was a bit winded from having bypassed the intervening mules at an uphill trot. To stay abreast of her vehicle, he had to walk carefully sideways to avoid being scraped off the road by the trees, which enclosed them more and more tightly.
“My lady,” he said with ill-concealed alarm, “I think we’ve taken a wrong turn.”
“What? What makes you think so?” She became wide-awake.
“I’ve been to Apsuna many times, my lady. This is certainly not the road. We’re heading east, up the mountainside.” His dark eyes were wide with concern.
Ehli-nikkalu’s first instinct was to say that that was nonsense—the soldiers had to know the way. And indeed, there seemed to be no contradicting such an obvious fact; the king would never have confided them to guards who didn’t even know the way to their destination. Or at least, the animal drivers must know... Less sure of herself, she said, “What do the muleteers say?”
“I asked one fellow, and he said it looked to him as if we were off the route, but he wasn’t that clear on where we were heading.”
She fell silent, a niggling tendril of doubt working its way up her gullet. After a moment, hoping he had an answer, she asked, “How could that be? Perhaps there’s been a detour.”
He shrugged and said nothing, but his eyes pierced hers and infected her with his doubts. She whispered, “What’s going on, then?”
The secretary looked around him and said uneasily, “Perhaps nothing, but—” He was cut off suddenly when he had to step back into the woods to avoid striking a tree that crowded the passage of the carriage.
A moment later, a high-pitched scrape sounded as a wagon barely passed through the narrowing road, and a muleteer let out an outraged cry. “What in the name of all that’s holy! This can’t be the right way!”
She stuck her head out the window of the litter and called out, “Officer, come here a moment.”
Beside her, Ba’aluya sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Are we there yet?”
Ehli-nikkalu waited a decent space of time, measured by the thudding of the mules’ steps, but no one responded. She saw Teshamanu had fallen back to the wagon where the servants rode, and he walked alongside its driver. Shamumanu stuck his head out the front of the wagon. The three of them were talking.
She called again loudly, “Soldier! You there! Tell your officer to come back here. I want to speak to him.”
The man was only a few paces in front of her, at the side of the righthand mule. He turned his head, grinned at her, and turned back, never breaking stride.
Fear fluttered its wings in her heart, a gray dove that saw overhead the shadow of more powerful wings.
“What’s wrong, my lady?” Amaya asked.
But Ehli-nikkalu had no answer. She knew only that something was gravely amiss
Ahead of the carriage, the mule’s driver plodded at its side, flicking it absently with his folded whip. Ehli-nikkalu watched the man’s sweaty back flex with each climbing step, and the appearance and reappearance of his heels in their dirty boots.
She cried out imperiously, “Muleteer! Stop this vehicle. I want to get out.” But he seemed to be deaf. His steps continued at the same trudging pace. “Do you hear me, man? It’s the queen who commands. Stop the mules.”
But nothing.
This is unnatural—like a nightmare where you want to scream for help but can’t make a noise. She called out and called out, and no one seemed to hear. Have I died? Am I nothing more substantial than a ghost, lamenting in a voice no living being can hear? Or is something more physical—and more sinister—taking place?
Amaya, at her side, asked, “What’s going on?” The girl’s voice seemed to echo, as if she said it again and again.
Those words hammered in Ehli-nikkalu’s head like a pulse. She calculated her chances of climbing out of the litter as it moved, but the trees, which were little more than saplings, were closely serried, crowding in around the vehicle. The scrapes and curses behind her grew more frequent, but the path had become so steep that she suspected the carters feared to stop their wagons lest they roll backward.
She looked back at the wagon that followed, where Teshamanu and the muleteer and the chamberlain still appeared to converse heatedly, waving their hands and pointing. She could hear only “wrong road!” and “going on?” and “tell the king.”
“What’s happening?” she shouted to them.
Teshamanu slipped into the trees and began to squeeze his way through their slim trunks toward her.
In an anxious, high-pitched voice, the chamberlain called, “No one is sure, my lady.”
Her secretary drew level with the carriage and hoisted himself awkwardly into it with his one hand. She drew the girls to the side to make some room before he fell over her legs.
Amaya caught at him, crying, “Uncle, what’s happening?”
That seemed to be the only thing anyone could say, the thing that consumed all their thoughts. The younger children awoke and stared open-mouthed, infected by the adults’ fear.
“What’s wrong with the soldiers? Why don’t they respond to me?” Ehli-nikkalu demanded.
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