Persian Fire (9 page)

The conspirators were seven in total. All were of the highest rank. Among them was Darius, the young lance-bearer of Cambyses — and an Achaemenid. Not that membership of Persia's foremost clan necessarily guaranteed him leadership of the plotters, for it was shared by a second conspirator, a wealthy grandee by the name of Otanes, who also appears to have had an eye on the throne. Furthermore, according to a later tradition, it was Otanes who had first organised the conspiracy —with Darius invited to join only as an after-thought. But this version does not quite add up. For a supposed late-comer, Darius was acknowledged as the conspiracy's linchpin with remarkable speed. His status, right from the beginning, appears to have been pre-eminent. Linked by blood to Cyrus, he also stood at the heart of the web that bound together the seven conspirators. One of them, Gobryas, was both his father-in-law
and
the husband of his sister: marriage ties could hardly have bound the two any tighter. Darius' brother, Artaphernes, a man of rare daring and intelligence, was also, although not one of the seven chief conspirators, ready to move on whatever was decided. More than a hint, then, of a family affair. Wherever one looks, Darius seems to loom as the ringleader of the plot.

Why, then, the insistence that he had not been in on it from the start? How might he have benefited from this apparent distortion of the time-frame? What, to put it bluntly, might he have had to cover up? One obvious and fateful answer suggests itself — regicide. After all, who better placed than a king's lance-bearer to plot the murder of a king? Such an act of treachery would have been regarded even by Cambyses' enemies as beyond the pale. While Darius would soon prove himself as bold as he was ruthless, he was never one to flaunt his crimes. As a result, the truth of his guilt or otherwise is forever lost to us.
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Yet if Darius' involvement in the death of Cambyses must be reckoned not proven, his role in spurring forward the plot against Bardiya is far more certain. When Otanes, urging a course of prudence, suggested the recruitment of more conspirators, and playing for time, Darius argued for immediate action. They should rely, he insisted, not on force of numbers, but on speed and surprise. To haver would be to lose their advantage. The greater their daring, the greater their chances of success.

With his brother, Artaphernes, and a majority of the seven backing him, Darius had his way. His calculations had been precise. A rare opportunity was indeed now opening. As the conspirators and their train, following the Khorasan Highway, closed in on the foothills of the Zagros, they would have felt the violent heat of summer on the plains starting to diminish. Autumn was on its way. Soon, the king would be descending from the mountains. If the assassination squad could ambush him on open ground, somewhere on the road between Ecbatana and the heartland of royal power in Persia, then he might be dispatched with relative ease. Practised horsemen all — for there had never been a Persian nobleman not raised in the saddle — the seven conspirators and their accomplices rode at a scorching pace, desperate not to lose their chance. By September, they had arrived at the borders of Media. Ahead of them lay the Khorasan Highway, twisting through the mountains up to Ecbatana. And descending it, approaching them, somewhere, was Bardiya.

News of his progress would have been easily come by. The road was always busy. Merchants, profiting from the consolidation of

Persian authority, had begun to throng the great highway in growing numbers, businessmen from the wealthy trading cities of the lowlands, their talk an exotic babel, their laden pack-animals clopping in tow.''
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Those coming from Ecbatana would have been able to assure the conspirators that the king had indeed left his summer capital, that he was on the move, that he was not far ahead of them. Then, with Bardiya drawing ever nearer, the traffic on the road would have grown even more varied, the king's lackeys and outriders increasingly in evidence, their costumes rich, their beards and hair elaborately curled, their peacock extravagance alerting travellers to the approach of their master, the King of Persia, the King of the World.

Nevertheless, amid all the clamour and clarions and colour, traces of a far more ancient order still abided. By late September, as the conspirators pressed along the northern edge of Nisaea, the most fertile of the Zagros valleys, they would have been able to mark the most dramatic of these. Away from the courtiers and caravans on the highway, covering the clover-rich pastureland, there spread a spectacle familiar to numberless generations; indeed, a reminder of ways more primordial than Media itself. Horses, white horses, covered the plain — as many as 160,000 of them, it was said. These were the same breed that had been paid in tribute to the Assyrians almost two centuries before, 'the best, and the largest"
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in the world, for not even the fabulous kingdoms of India — where, as was well known, every animal grew to a prodigious size — had anything to compare. Once the Medes had been nomads, and now they were the subjects of a foreign monarchy; but riding across the Nisaean plain, abreast of the shimmering herds, they knew themselves supreme as the tamers of horses still. A splendid consolation to them in their slavery: for the white horses, so strong and swift and beautiful, were regarded by the peoples of the Zagros as creatures sacred, bound by mysterious ties of communion to the divine, and to their king.

Even the conquering Persians acknowledged this. At Pasargadae, a horse from Nisaea would be sacrificed every month before the hallowed tomb of Cyrus himself. Perhaps that was why Bardiya, turning off the Khorasan Highway and pausing in his descent towards the lowlands, lingered in the presence of the herd. Whether he sought legitimisation, or a sign from the heavens, or perhaps just the reading of bad dreams, he would have found in Nisaea ready experts on hand. Magi, interpreters of all that was mysterious, were the guardians of the sacred horses too. Did Bardiya summon these masters of ritual to his presence and ask them what his future might hold? Perhaps. What is certain, however, is that on 29 September
522
bc
, a man calling himself Bardiya was in Nisaea, in a fort named Sikyavautish — and that it was there that Darius finally tracked him down.

What happened next would be retold by all those who traced their lineage from the seven leaders of the assassination squad. Many versions must have been elaborated over the years. All agreed, however, that Bardiya was taken wholly by surprise. It seems that the conspirators and their followers, coolly riding up to the gates of the fortress, baldly announced that they had come to see the king. The guards, overawed by the rank of the new arrivals, scurried to let them in. Only in the courtyard, as they approached the royal quarters, did anyone think to challenge them — but by then it was too late. The assassins, overpowering the courtiers in their path, burst into Bardiya's chamber. The king, it is said, was with a concubine. Desperately, he sought to stave off his attackers with the leg of a broken stool, but to no avail. It is also said that it was Darius' brother, 'faithful Artaphernes', who finally plunged the dagger home.
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And Bardiya, the son of Cyrus, King of the Persians, slumped dead to the ground.

Or did he? No sooner had the assassins completed their bloody work than they themselves were promoting a quite different tale. The corpse of the murdered man may not have been exposed to public view, but a great deal else was now revealed, to universal amazement. The story told by the conspirators was staggering. The man they had slain, they claimed, was not Bardiya, the son of Cyrus, at all. That Bardiya was already long dead. Cambyses, jealous and savage, had ordered his execution years before. Had it not been for the acumen of Darius and his fellow patriots, who had stumbled upon the secret, and their courage in daring to expose it, the Persian people might never have learned of the monstrous scam.

All of which begged a rather obvious question. If the man assassinated at Sikyavautish had not been the son of Cyrus — and the rightful king — then who had he been? Here the revelations took an even more sinister turn. That an impostor had taken on the role of a prince of the royal blood was alarming enough, but that he had played it for years unsuspected even by his family and household could only be evidence of the blackest necromancy. Surely, then, a Magus, one who had been schooled in the mastery of the supernatural, was the likeliest suspect? Could it have been merely a coincidence that the imposter had been surprised in Nisaea, on the plain of the sacred horses, well known as a haunt of the Magi? It seemed not — for Bardiya's doppelganger, the conspirators hurriedly announced, had indeed been a Magus, 'Gaumata by name'.
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An obscure and low-born villain he may have been, and yet so potent had his sorcery proved itself, and so audacious his plot, that he had almost won the empire by his fraud.

Sensationalist retellings would tease out the full implications of this scandal and adorn them further. For all his powers, it appeared that the Magus had forgotten to conceal one crucial detail: his ears, for some unspecified crime, had long before been cut off by Cyrus. A daughter of Otanes named Phaidime, a wife of Bardiya who had never suspected that he might have been killed and replaced by a double, had brushed the side of her husband's head one evening while he slept, and uncovered the appalling truth. Telling her father of her discovery, she had thereby set in train the dramatic sequence of events which had culminated in the murder of the impostor. Such, at any rate, was the story which years later would be told across the empire. And there was nobody, by then, left to dispute it.

Even on the night of the assassination, if there had been anyone in Nisaea to query the conspirators' self-justification, or to point out some of its more glaring implausibilities, or to ask why the corpse of the supposed impostor had been disposed of with such speed, he would have known better than to speak his mind. With blood still being washed from the fittings of Sikyavautish, it was hardly the time for quibbles. The conspirators were in no mood to tolerate dissent. The warning given by Darius could not have been more stentorian: 'Thou who shalt be king hereafter, protect thyself vigorously from the Lie; the man who shall be a follower of the Lie, him do thou punish well!'
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Here, from a master political strategist, was a dazzling sleight-of-hand. It would serve to place not the assassins but their accusers on the defensive. Sceptics were to be anathematised as the enemies of truth.

And this, for any Persian, was a feared and dreadful fate. It was an article of faith to Darius' countrymen that they were the most honest people in the world. Three things were taught them, it was said: 'to ride, to fire a bow and to tell the truth'.
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Darius, by threatening those who might doubt his story of the Magus' crimes, was not just shoring up a rickety case; his claims were altogether more soaring. Only a Persian could have made them - for only a Persian could understand what truth really meant. He knew, as more benighted peoples did not, that the universe without truth would be undone and lost to perpetual night. More than an abstraction, more even than an ideal, it formed instead the very fabric of existence.

This was why, in the beginning, when Ahura Mazda, greatest of the gods, had summoned time and creation into being, he had engendered Arta, who was Truth, to give order to the universe. Without Arta, it would have lacked form or beauty, and the great cycles of existence set in motion by Lord Mazda could not have brought life into the world. Even so, the work of Truth was never done. Just as fire, when it rises to the heavens, is accompanied by black smoke, so Arta, the Persians knew, was shadowed by Drauga, the Lie. Two orders - one of perfection, the other of falsehood, each the image of the other — were coiled in a conflict as ancient as time. What should mortals do, then, but take the side of Arta against Drauga, Truth against the Lie, lest the universe itself should totter and fail? The wretch who weaves deceit will bring death into his country':
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so it had been anciently proclaimed. How much more deadly the peril, then, if a 'wretch' had somehow seized his country's throne. The Magus, by taking on the image of Bardiya, and impersonating the rightful king, had handed to Drauga the sceptre of the world. Darius and his fellows, by riding to Sikyavautish, had toppled an evil infinitely more threatening than a mere imposter. Far from staging a squalid putsch, they had been engaged in nothing less than the redemption of the cosmos.

And now, with Gaumata justly toppled and dispatched, the throne which he had tainted stood empty. The insignia of royal power — a robe, a bow and a shield — waited in Sikyavautish for the rightful claimant. Who that might be, however, and how he was to be recognised, remained, on the evening of the assassination, a mystery. Only the most garbled account of what followed has survived. The conspirators, it was said, rode out by night into the open plain. At an agreed point, they reined in their horses and awaited the coming of dawn. When the sun's first rays appeared above the rugged line of mountains to the east, it was Darius' horse who neighed to them in greeting. At once, his companions slipped from their saddles and fell to their knees in homage. The Greeks, when they repeated this story, would claim that it had been agreed among the conspirators that 'the one whose horse was first to neigh after dawn should have the throne'
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— and they added, furthermore, that Darius had cheated. His groom, it was said, had dabbled his fingers inside a mare's vulva beforehand, and then, just as the sun rose, placed them beside the nose of Darius' horse. But this was scurrilous nonsense, and typical of the Greeks. How like them to distort the holy rites of Truth!