The Last King of Lydia (25 page)

The sea was filled by a fleet of fifty oared ships. They rode low in the water, weighed down by huge sacks of grain and jars of water wrapped in fishing nets and lashed to the sides, their decks
packed to overflowing with women and children. The entire city of Phocaea, its people and its treasures, were safe inside the wooden hulls and launched onto the ocean. The oars struck the water and
drove the ships to the west, in search of a new world where war could not touch them.

Croesus thought of what might lie in those ships. Parchments that would be ruined by salt water, deciphered and copied and guessed at until they said something quite different. Heirlooms and
treasures with stories that would be half-forgotten and misremembered, until their owners had invented a new past for themselves, better than the one they had left behind. Perhaps they had even
taken with them a few chipped fragments of the statues that were too heavy for the boats, fragments that would inspire the next generation of Phocaean sculptors to recreate their lost artworks. A
civilization that would be reborn when the ships again touched land.

Croesus sat and watched the fleet for a long time. Long enough for the ships to blur into each other on the horizon, as if they had been transformed into earth and stone and turned into a new
island by the Gods.

When he finally looked away from the sea, he found Harpagus standing beside him.

‘You knew they would sail away, didn’t you?’ said Harpagus eventually.

‘Yes.’

Harpagus nodded. ‘As did I. Don’t think that you tricked me.’

‘You let them go? Why?’

‘Cyrus wants the port,’ he said, looking out over the sea. ‘I don’t believe he cares much what happens to the people.’

‘And you?’

‘I don’t care either.’ He looked back at Croesus. ‘The Phocaeans are my gift to you, Croesus.’ He gestured towards the fleet, the new city on the sea.
‘Remember this sight. There will not be much mercy after this.’

After that, the wars in the north passed like a nightmare remembered in fragments. Scattered sensations and scenes of chaos that were vivid to him when remembered individually,
but made no sense when he tried to piece them together.

Nations he had himself conquered, years before, were enslaved once more. Cities that had been lain beneath the bull and lion were marked now with Cyrus’s gold eagle. Teos, Myrus, Priene,
Colophon, Erythrae, and all the others. A thousand dead for each city taken.

As a king, he had seen nothing of the places he had defeated. The arrival of a messenger, an unrolled scroll, a single inked line, was all he had seen of conquest. Now, as a slave, he saw
everything. Burned cities where the bodies of the dead melted and fused with the buildings, creating monsters of flesh and masonry. Temples stripped of their treasures and used as burial chambers,
the flies teeming above the altars. The tiny armies that lined up before the Persian forces, armies which had no chance of victory, cobblers and bakers with rusty armour and the shields and spears
of their fathers. They fought and died, and were forgotten, heaped together by slaves into huge piles that burned for days when the torches were put to them, sending towering pillars of smoke up
into the sky. Offerings to the Gods, a warning to the men who watched from neighbouring cities, waiting for the Persians to come for them.

Croesus fought a war of his own. He had as many enemies as Harpagus had cities to conquer. Routine, complacency, betrayal, exhaustion and fear were what conspired against him, and he spent each
day resisting them.

He barely slept, finding a different hiding place each night to close his eyes for a short time, never sleeping in the tent he was assigned to. When he did sleep, he dreamed only of wars and
conquered cities. His dreaming life and waking life were the same, to the point that in the small hours of the morning, or deep in the night, one mirrored the other so well that it was impossible
to tell them apart.

When they passed through burning cities, Croesus would steal from the ruins, from the dying and the wounded, gathering gold to bribe others for information about Harpagus, or to buy a
night’s protection from one of the soldiers. Gold could buy anything. Even a longer life, if one spent it wisely enough.

Each morning, Harpagus summoned him, and questioned him about the city they were marching against, asking about water and fortifications, religious customs and superstitions, spearmen and gold.
Croesus gave his knowledge, yet he always held something back, only hinting at what he knew of the next city they were to conquer, hoping that his usefulness might keep him alive. Harpagus was a
practical man, after all.

He remembered when he was a boy, sitting on his mother’s lap and enjoying the spicy smell of her hair, as she laid out samples of poison for him to taste and learn. He tried to remember
those tastes again, and wondered which one Harpagus preferred. He was always watchful for a knife in the darkness, the bowl of food that had been prepared especially for him, the wineskin that was
offered to him first with a smile.

To his eyes, the encampment resembled the labyrinths of legend, with one exception: there was no path by which he might escape. The only way out was the passage of time. Each day that passed was
another step towards the ending of the wars, and their return to the east, to the safety of Cyrus’s court. But with every city that they conquered, his knowledge became a little less
valuable. He imagined his life weighed on the scales; the satisfaction of his death placed against the value of keeping him alive. As he woke each morning, he wondered if this would be the day when
the scales would finally tip.

They came, at last, to Pedasus. It fell just like the others that had fallen before it, its secrets betrayed, its army destroyed, its fortifications breached, its people
butchered.

Croesus gave it no thought. He could think only of sleep.

He could not remember when he had last been able to buy a safe night’s rest. The world, washed out and grey, like a landscape in a half-forgotten memory, no longer made sense to him.
People had to repeat themselves many times before he could understand them. Mundane objects became fascinating to him – he could spend hours staring at a candle flame as it shuddered in the
air, or running his fingers one way and then another through tall grass, or watching the motion of water over stone. He had taken to keeping a thorn in his hand, so that he could close a fist and
force himself awake with the pain.

He sometimes wondered, in the dull way of someone too exhausted to care, if he might have died weeks before and passed on without noticing. The next world might be a mirror of this one, a world
that slowly disintegrated one sense at a time, that rotted like a body, until one was left with only an incomprehensible blankness. Or perhaps he had simply gone mad, and no amount of sleep would
return the world to sense. He would be trapped in this half-life for ever.

He could focus only on knowing where Harpagus was, hoping to retain some illusion of control, but Harpagus had the general’s gift of being everywhere and nowhere at once. Ask half a dozen
different people where he was, and you would receive twice as many answers. He was consulting an oracle in the hills, was in a whorehouse in the city, inspecting the cavalry, overseeing an
execution and arguing with an emissary, seemingly all at once. Still Croesus continued to ask, like a man picking at a wound, even when he knows it will not bring him peace.

The night that Pedasus fell, he received, for once, a clear answer. Looking out of his tent towards the end of the day, he asked a passing soldier where the general was.

‘The general has gone on already,’ the other man replied. ‘Through the woods with some of the men. We are to follow him in the morning.’

‘He’s not here in the camp? You are sure?’

‘Yes.’ The soldier smiled dryly at him. ‘Glad to be away from the master’s gaze?’

‘More than you can know.’

The soldier laughed. ‘Sleep well, mighty king, sleep well,’ he said, and walked away.

Croesus watched him go. He began to think about where he might snatch a few hours of sleep that night. He sat down on the ground inside the tent to rest his legs and eyes for a short time before
he went out again. His mind occupied by other things, he leaned back and lay flat on his back.

He was asleep within moments.

‘Croesus!’

The torch was in his face again, the fire curling towards his mouth. He flinched from it, and woke, his mouth thick with the taste of sleep.

A soldier stood over Croesus, looking down on him, his eyes two dark voids in the shadow of the torchlight. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Harpagus wants you. He doesn’t sleep. That
means neither do you tonight. Come on.’

At his touch, Croesus woke up fully for the first time in months. The world came back into focus, and he understood what was happening to him.

‘Wait,’ he said, ‘just one moment.’

He reached towards the bundle of cloth that held his possessions together. He groped at it, hoping to feel the hard shape of a statue, the thin metal strands of a golden necklace, the round
weight of coins, something with which he could buy his life. But there was only worthless fabric beneath his fingers.

He looked up at the soldier. ‘It must be now?’ he said slowly.

‘Yes, of course. Come on.’

Croesus remembered the morning they came to take him to the pyre in Sardis. He wondered at how calm he felt, now as then. The strange lack of urgency that came from being locked into an
unfamiliar sequence of events, shaped by another’s hands and quite out of his control.

He could not truly believe that he was being led to his death. He kept imagining that each moment might bring a chance for escape or reprieve. His mind would continue to fabricate these
impossible escapes, he thought, even as the sword was being drawn, or the noose fastened around his neck. Perhaps, in the final instant, just for a moment, he would truly understand that he was
about to die.

They passed out of the camp, and into the surrounding woods. This will be the place, Croesus thought. Each time he saw the captain rein in his horse, his heart shook. But it was always for some
trivial reason – a debate over the route with one of the scouts, uncertain ground that the horses needed to pass over slowly, a brief wait for some lagging member of the column to catch up. A
mad desire grew within him to yell at them to get on with it. Anything was better than this, waiting for them to choose a place at random where he might be put to death.

He heard something. A soft rattle in the woods. The sound of wood against wood. A sound that was almost natural, but not quite; this was wood guided by human fingers, not by the wind or by the
passage of an animal. It was a familiar sound, and he tried to remember what it was.

The first arrows came so fast that it was as though they grew from the things they struck. Cancerous, murderous eruptions, sprouting from the thick earth at his feet, from the flanks of suddenly
screaming horses, and from the throats and eyes of the men ahead of him.

A heavy weight fell against his back and pinned him to the ground. He felt a warmth soaking through his tunic, then hot against his skin. He felt a shudder pass through him as another arrow
struck, and the man on his back lay still. He watched as some of the soldiers broke and ran, and others charged into the woods, screaming war cries. He lay against the ground, shaking and weeping
in fear. He had never wanted to live more than in that moment.

Croesus felt the weight lift off his back. He covered his face with his hands, but it was a Persian soldier who pulled him to his feet, and told him to run.

They ran together, half tripping with every step, barely able to see in the darkness. Behind and around him, Croesus heard the dull sound of arrows striking wood, the skipping rattle as they
bounced and spun through the undergrowth. His chest burned, as though he had swallowed the fire of his dreams, and the strength went from his legs. ‘Don’t leave me,’ he said, but
the Persian soldier ran on ahead, leaving him alone in the darkness.

Croesus leaned against the closest tree, his breath rasping like that of a dying man, his eyes tight shut, as though he could wish the waking nightmare away. He heard the sound again behind him,
of arrows in the quiver. He forced himself to keep moving, waiting to feel the arrow bite into his back.

He broke out of the woods, stumbling in an exhausted half-run, and saw the lights of the camp ahead. Now would be the time, he thought. With sanctuary in sight, now was the time for the arrow to
find him, but still it did not come.

Staggering now on aching feet, driven forward by empty lungs, he made it to the picket line. The Persian sentry yelled at him to stop, seeing only a bloody foreigner charging towards the camp,
but Croesus ran on, sinking to the ground before the man who stood over him, spear raised.

‘Please,’ he said, clasping his shaking hands together around the man’s knees. ‘Please.’

Harpagus sat by torchlight. On the heavy table in front of him, parchments concealed a stained, yellowing map so that it could barely be seen at all. A fragment of Egypt, a
scattering of Hellenic islands, were all that remained uncovered. He preferred it this way. Soldiers and servants speculated over the contents of the three deep chests that Harpagus kept closely
guarded in his tent. They would have been disappointed to discover that they were filled only with paper.

His captains complained incessantly (behind his back, thinking that he did not know) about the reports they had to deliver almost every day. Exact inventories of weapons, food stocks, the
condition of armour, state of morale, reports on praiseworthy soldiers and troublesome individuals. His spies were instructed to produce reports with the same precision. The exact height of walls,
depth of wells, consistency of soil. Here in his tent, with the army itemized and inventoried, the next city reduced to a few sheets of parchment, he could create a world on paper. A world that he
could conquer.