The Last King of Lydia (17 page)

‘I wish you would not talk like that,’ Croesus said. ‘Do you not have a voice? A mind of your own? You offer me nothing but sycophancy? What use are you to me?’

‘Master—’

Croesus hit him; the clumsy, open-handed slap of a man unused to violence. Isocrates took the blow without complaint, running his tongue over his lips to check for the taste of blood. Croesus
slumped back and turned from his own action in disgust.

‘Can I speak freely?’ Isocrates said after a moment.

‘I wish you would. Just for once.’

Even with this permission, it was a long time before the slave spoke again. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘that you had asked me that a long time ago. I wish I could have told you not to
go to war.’

‘But you could not speak without being asked.’

‘No, master.’

‘Perhaps you are right. Maybe we should not return.’ He stared at Isocrates. ‘And I think I may have to free you, if your slavery means that you must keep your thoughts from
me. Would you still serve me, if I gave you the choice as a free man?’

Isocrates looked at the ground. ‘I don’t know, master.’

‘Ah. An honest answer. Thank you.’ Croesus paused. ‘I am sorry I struck you. It was a mistake.’

‘You never have to apologize to me.’

Croesus turned away. ‘I wish the winter was over,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand to be trapped in this city any longer.’ He closed his eyes. ‘You’re still
here?’ He waved a hand at the slave. ‘Go.’

Afterwards, as always, there would be stories of omens. Of horses consuming snakes in the fields, of sacrifices that went rotten in moments on the altars, and of predictions
that had been made five generations before. But, in truth, there were no signs. When it came, it came as all true disasters do, with no warning at all.

A farmer beneath the walls of Sardis saw it first. He was cutting wood on the outskirts of the city, working fast to keep warm in the cold winter air, when the wind blew against his back and
brought with it some strange fragment of sound. A distant voice in a foreign tongue, coupled with the sound of metal on metal.

He assumed at first that it was some trick of the wind, and continued cutting. The sound came again – stronger, more insistent, like the repeated calling of a name. He placed his axe to
the ground, turned and looked to the east. It was there that he saw the unimaginable.

A numberless mass of men sprawled across the land to the east, consuming the horizon. Even then, confronted by the sight, he could not understand what he was seeing. His mind refuted it. It was
not until he looked more closely, saw the horsemen whose steeds snorted frost, the spearmen with heavy sheepskins slung over their necks and rags wrapped around their hands, that he believed
it.

The farmer looked on the legion who had done the unthinkable, marching for days and nights on end through a foreign land in winter, faster than any messengers who might have been sent riding
ahead of them. Surely no army had ever achieved its like before. Even at this distance, he could see the alien banner under which they marched; the towering eagle that held a globe in each talon,
as though even the conquest of one entire world would not be enough to satisfy the king who marched beneath that banner. It was the flag of Cyrus, and of Persia.

‘No army marches in winter,’ Sandanis said at last, to fill the terrible silence.

‘What?’ Croesus said.

‘No army marches in winter.’

‘Is that your excuse?’

‘I was—’

‘Why not? Custom again, I suppose?’

The general said nothing. Croesus looked away in disgust.

They were in the emerald throne room, its pillars studded with jade, green silks falling from the ceiling, and the king wished they had moved to some private meeting room when the news had come.
It was no place for a council of war. Croesus felt like a man pretending to be a king.

He turned back to Sandanis. ‘Can we defeat them?’

Sandanis hesitated. ‘Perhaps.’

‘That is all you can say?’

‘Yes. That is all.’

Croesus looked around the room again, and the men and women of the court regarded him silently. Defeat hung heavy in the air around him.

‘Gather the army,’ he said at last.

Sandanis bowed, then looked up at the king again.

‘There is something more?’

‘You will have to come with us, sire.’

‘You think I will inspire the men?’ Croesus said bitterly.

‘Yes, my lord.’

He stared into space. ‘Isocrates?’ he said.

The slave stepped forward. ‘Yes, master?’

‘I left you behind before, and it was a mistake. You must come as well.’

For a moment, Isocrates said nothing – a half-beat of disobedience. ‘As you wish,’ he said.

The Persians waited, with a strange courtesy, for what remained of the Lydian army to take up position. In spite of their winter march, it seemed that they still had some
regard for the habits of war.

Croesus watched the Lydian cavalry move to the vanguard, and despite the great numbers that stood against them, he let himself feel some small hope. He told himself that the Persians must be
exhausted by their forced march across the continent. Perhaps it was here, beneath the walls of Sardis, that he could win his greatest victory.

Before he could speak and order the attack, a series of horns sounded from the Persian army. Every other man on their front line stepped to the left, exposing a series of empty columns. Through
these gaps, strange figures advanced, bulky creatures that seemed to have two heads and six legs. Croesus wondered if the rumours were true, that the Persians had tamed monsters as part of their
army. Then his eyes began to make sense of what he saw and recognized the figures for what they were. They were camels, being led by servants to the front line.

The men walked forward hesitantly, dressed in ragged clothes, their heads bowed. The ungainly pack animals, still heavily loaded, bleated stubbornly and spat at their handlers. They seemed to be
aware that they were being taken somewhere they did not belong.

‘What are they going to do,’ Croesus said, ‘charge us with their baggage train?’

There was no response from Sandanis. He saw the general’s mouth open a bare fraction in disbelief. ‘Sandanis?’ Croesus said, suddenly afraid. He felt a wind blowing on his face
from the east.

With that wind, a wave of madness passed through the front ranks of the Lydian cavalry. The horses reared and bolted, twisted and fell. He heard the animals cry out in fear and all Croesus could
think, at that moment, was how human their screams sounded.

He saw riders falling from their saddles and kicked to death, saw others jumping clear and running, and soon every horse was free of its master. They broke in every direction at first, then
gathered together, re-formed into a herd like wild horses in the plains. They galloped away to the north, and were lost from sight.

A thick, heavy stench came through the air, diluted by distance, but still powerful enough to make his own mount stamp and toss its head. Croesus looked up at the strange, humped animals, led by
slaves and laden with supplies, that formed the unlikely vanguard of the Persian army. He closed his eyes.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Their horses must travel with the pack animals,’ the general said, his voice dull. ‘They are used to the smell.’ He shook his head. ‘Quite brilliant.’

Croesus heard the horns sound, and saw the Persian army begin its advance.

‘We have to retreat,’ the king said.

‘No, my lord.’ Sandanis’s voice was firm.

‘Without the cavalry—’

‘Yes. We will be defeated.’

‘Then—’

‘You must go back to the palace. The rest will stand here and fight. It is too late to run. If we retreat now, our army will scatter and they will take the city.’

Croesus thought of the thousands of men who were about to die for him, of how their last thoughts would be of their king and how he had betrayed them. ‘It isn’t fair,’ Croesus
said, barely louder than a whisper. ‘I won’t do it.’

Sandanis leaned in towards the king, his voice close to anger. ‘It is their fate to die. It is our fate to live, and rule over them.’ He placed a hand on Croesus’s shoulder.
‘Go now. I will give the orders, and then I will follow you back to the palace.’

Croesus felt the touch of a hand on his arm. It was Isocrates. The slave said nothing, and his face gave no sense of what was in his mind, whether he wanted his king to retreat, to live, or to
stay and die. But in the silence of his slave, as he had so many times before, Croesus let himself find some kind of forgiveness. Croesus bowed his head, and turned his horse back towards the
city.

He heard the first screams behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the great Persian army spill forward like a flood. He watched the unhorsed Lydian cavalry, their lances gripped like
spears, run out to meet them.

Then he turned away. He did not want to see any more.

Sardis waited.

On the fourteenth day of the siege, Croesus finally found the courage to go out on to the city walls and look down on what had once been his army.

He imagined that those more familiar with such matters could inspect the pattern of the dead and reconstruct the battle from it; where the first men had fallen, where the battle had turned, when
the losing side had tried to run. He stared at the heaped mound of Lydian dead on the plains beneath Sardis, not a horse amongst them, and he wondered if they had tried to surrender and had been
butchered even as they threw down their weapons, or if they had died fighting to the last man, waiting for a relief that was never going to arrive.

It seemed likely, he thought, that the city would now die too, just more slowly. A death by encirclement that would take months, rather than hours. On its sheer-sided hill, with only a single
path leading up to it, Sardis looked like a city that could wait for a thousand years, if only it were manned by automata, and not by men. Without a harvest or foreign traders to supply it, Sardis
was not a fortress. It was a tomb.

During the day, the Lydians assessed their dwindling supplies, and looked down at the Persians below. They did nothing else – there seemed little point in doing anything but waiting for
each day to pass, both hoping, and fearing, that nothing would change. At night, Croesus imagined that everyone in Sardis must have dreamed the same dream, of exhausted Lydian messengers arriving
in foreign courts, of allied armies hastily assembled that would march day and night to reach Sardis and rescue them. Every morning, the people of the city woke from these dreams, flocked to the
walls and windows, and stared out to the horizon. But no army came.

He looked down the steep walls, and saw, far below the upper city, the waiting Persians. The scattered buildings of lower Sardis were not sufficient to contain them, and so they had built a new
city of their own, a city of tents and animals, an echo of the first settlement that had sprung up in that place centuries before, when a gathering of nomad tribes, tired of wandering and hunting,
looked up at the steep hill and imagined a fortress to call their home.

Already, he saw, their encampment bore the marks of civilization. Clear paths had been traced through the tents and masses of waiting soldiers, the grass worn down into roads by thousands of
marching feet. Commerce did not take long to establish itself. Even from above, Croesus could see the large clearing on the northern side of the camp that had become the centre of a black market
trade, where the soldiers gathered to trade their weapons for food, their food for slaves, then their slaves for weapons again whenever rumours came that an attack was imminent.

From every corner of the waiting army, he could hear music echoing. Men gathered around fires, playing drums edged with metal rings, singing to drive away the cold and the boredom. Every day,
Croesus listened to this music as though he were listening to the heartbeat of some great monster. When the music faded away entirely, it would be because the men were too starved to play, and it
would be time for them to retreat back to the east.

He turned away from the Persians, and back to Sardis. It was a silent city. In the streets, people tried to talk, but their conversations would soon falter and fade, sometimes even mid sentence.
It was the silence of those who are afraid to speak, as though the safe deadlock of the siege were a spell that could be broken by a single misplaced word. The Lydians waited behind their walls,
and the Persians in their tents, two cities facing each other, and waited for something to change.

As Croesus began his slow walk back to the palace, to the endless councils of war and meetings that awaited him, a movement caught his eye. It was a young Lydian soldier rushing along the south
wall, his helmet in his hand. He was late for his post, no doubt. The king turned away, and gave no further thought to what he had seen.

As this soldier ran along the south wall of Sardis, he tripped on a loose stone and reached out his hands for balance. His helmet slipped from fingers that were still numb with
sleep, bounced once on the parapet and tumbled far below.

His name was Ardys. He had overslept, and was going to be late to his post for the second day in a row. Despite the cold air his helmet had stifled him, and he had taken it off as he ran. Now,
he would be punished for something much worse than a moment’s lateness.

He saw, by some miracle, that it hadn’t fallen all the way to the ground. It had caught on a tough old bush, its bark gnarled and whorled like ancient skin, that clung to the cliff just as
it clung stubbornly to life. One of the branches of this bush had hooked the helmet as it fell, and now it hung there sixty feet beneath him, the bronze giving him a mocking wink of reflected
sunlight when the wind stirred the branch.

There was no great reason to go down after it. If he didn’t, his captain would scream abuse at him and shame him in front of the others. He would be assigned the worst duties for a week or
so, and be the victim of jokes for somewhat longer than that, but that was all.