The Last King of Lydia (31 page)

He reached up and felt the stone above his head, still wet from where the river had touched it not an hour before. Hyroeades remembered the feel of the stone at Sardis. Suspended between worlds,
he had felt calm and fearless. He had, he thought, never been happier. Perhaps if he had fallen then, he could have died happy.

The quality of the darkness changed, and Hyroeades’s trailing hand touched not stone, but air. They were through the tunnel, and into the alien city.

They gathered together, and the captain counted down the line and divided the group in two, taking one man aside as leader of the second group. Hyroeades watched as twenty-five men left silently
behind their new leader, circling west below the city wall. They were the men who would take the north-west gate, and Hyroeades watched them with envy. Some of them might still live to see the rest
of the army arrive, he thought. But we won’t.

They headed deeper into the city. Each man, under his breath, repeating the directions they had been given. They had all sat and memorized them the night before, chanting them together like
children reciting a song. Two hundred steps south, and then left along the canal. Proceed until the temple of Nabu, then left again, up the steps and into the royal palace. Keep the ziggurat on
your right, and do not go towards the drums.

They were on the canal path, heading east, when the captain waved them to the ground, whispering a curse. Hyroeades was near the front of the group, and he could see a Babylonian walking down
the street towards them.

It was a young girl, a slave or a daughter running an errand, occasionally stopping to gaze wistfully in the direction of the drums. She reached a small bridge over the canal and stopped,
considering in which direction to go. Right, towards the drums and the festival, or straight ahead, towards the Euphrates. She shrugged and turned to her right, stepping on to the bridge. Hyroeades
heard the captain exhale slightly.

The girl gave one last look down the canal path, and stopped, one foot on the bridge and one on the bank. She blinked, and peered more closely.

Hyroeades felt the slinger to his left shift his weight. A slap of leather, the sharp crack of rock against bone, and the girl fell.

They came forward, and stood over the girl. She twitched and jerked on the ground, blood pouring from her head, but she still lived, her eyes looking up at the men who stood over her, her mouth
struggling to form words. One of the others knelt over the girl, and drew his knife. Hyroeades turned away. She could not have been older than fourteen.

In front of him was a dark, narrow alley. He could slip down it, perhaps, while the others were not looking. Throw away his sword and armour, wash the soot from his face, and plunge into the
crowds. Who would notice a strange face? Babylon was the city of a thousand languages, he had been told. There was no such thing as a foreigner here. He could find a woman at the festival, and if
he married her before dawn her family would have to take him in. He might still live beyond this night, if he could find the courage to take a chance.

The moment passed. One of the other Immortals tapped him on the shoulder, and Hyroeades fell into step with the rest of the men. He kept his eyes open for another moment when his companions
would be distracted, when he might have an opportunity to escape. But no chance came, and they were past the temple of Nabu and at the palace gates.

The captain divided them again. Ten men concealed themselves as best they could outside the palace gates, and fifteen were chosen to go inside the palace. The ten were sure to die, buying time
for the others, but they took up their positions without question. Hyroeades wondered if it were blind chance that he was chosen as one of the fifteen, or if the captain believed that he had the
Gods’ blessing, and wanted to keep him close to the very end. He felt a strange, useless comfort in the thought that at least he would live a little longer than the men outside.

They headed up the steps, expecting at any moment the shout of alarm, the hail of javelins and sling stones that would end their lives. It did not come. Outside the unguarded entrance, they
pulled off their muddied boots and cast them aside. Barefoot, like penitents before a temple, they passed through the gates.

The palace was deserted. Almost all of Babylon was attending the festival, but the king, so their spies reported, would not be there. Only he and a few of his guards would remain in the palace
that night for, unpopular as he was, he appeared at as few public occasions as he could for fear of mockery. From time to time they heard someone passing through the corridors. A slave on some
late-night errand, a wandering guard, a nobleman creeping from one bedchamber to another. In the empty palace, sound carried and echoed to such an extent that they could not tell if they were on
the opposite side of the building or only a single corridor away.

Hyroeades found the emptiness unsettling. Great halls, built to hold hundreds, echoed their soft footsteps back to them. Kitchens with dozens of cooking pots and ceilings black with soot were
empty and silent. It was as if the palace, perhaps even the entire city, had been abandoned in the wake of some great disaster, or as if the Babylonians, anticipating the fall of their city, had
left it for some other world, melting away into the air in an act of collective magic.

Kings had ruled here for thousands of years, Hyroeades had heard. He could not imagine that the world could be so old. He wondered if, in all the centuries, intruders had ever stepped inside the
sacred palace walls, if this was the first time armed foreigners had made it this far. Their presence had the feeling of desecration, of blasphemy. Somewhere, he was certain, a god was stirring to
punish them. They had only a short time to complete their mission before he came for them.

They reached the stairwell that led to the royal chambers. After a moment’s hesitation, while he listened for some clink of armour above that might indicate that it was guarded, the
captain led them up.

They were packed close together in the winding stairwell, designed so that few could hold it against many. A pair of guards above them could have held off fifty men. Hyroeades was reminded of
the water tunnel, though now, rather than the smell of the river, the air was rank with the sweat of the men around him. Slowly and silently, they made their way to the highest level of the
palace.

They were not alone. Close by, Hyroeades could hear talking in a language he did not understand. Though the tongue was unfamiliar, the tone he understood – bored men passing the time with
idle stories. After the long silence it was almost a relief to hear other voices.

The captain looked around the corner and ducked back quickly. He held up both hands and extended all his fingers, repeated the motion. Twenty was the signal. Twenty men guarding the king’s
chamber. Their luck, it seemed, had finally run out.

The captain pulled the man next to him close and whispered in his ear. The other man listened and nodded, then moved down the line, tapping a number of other men on the shoulder as he went. He
hesitated beside Hyroeades, and looked back at the captain, who shook his head. The other man continued down the line, until he had touched nine other men. He beckoned to them to follow him back
the way they had come.

The ten made their way silently back down the stairs. The captain, Hyroeades, and three others went into an empty chamber. They waited.

He thought of how easily he and the others would be replaced. The next day, fifty men would be summoned to serve the king. The Immortals, the ten thousand who had worn a hundred thousand
different faces, the regiment that could never die. What did his life matter, if his place could be taken so quickly? He thought of how swiftly sons replaced fathers, infants replaced the elderly.
Barely had you stopped breathing before you became an irrelevance, as though you had never lived at all. What did anyone’s life matter, king or soldier or slave, if they could be replaced in
moments and the world go on without them? Our lives mean nothing, he thought to himself. My life means nothing.

Distant sounds, piercing in the silence, reached him from another part of the palace. War cries, the clash of swords. The other Immortals, he realized, had gone to cause a diversion. Somewhere,
Hyroeades could hear some great copper gong being struck. The alarm, summoning the guards from around the palace to defend their king, calling the Gods to let them know there were intruders in a
sacred place. Either way, he thought, at the Gods’ hands or the Babylonians’, we will all be dead soon.

They listened as the guards ran past and tried to count how many had gone, how many would remain for them to face. Once the footsteps had faded away, the captain crawled back out to look around
the corner again. He looked back, and this time, he held up just two fingers.

The captain looked at each man in turn and nodded, giving an order and asking a question in one gesture. Hyroeades found himself nodding back, giving his consent without thinking. They stood and
touched their swords together, then charged out into the corridor.

The two Babylon guards turned to face them, their faces frozen in shock even as they set their spears. The two Immortals in front, the captain and his second in command, died on those iron
points. They must have known they would, pitting swords against spears, buying victory with their lives, and before the Babylonians could withdraw their weapons the others were on them, striking
them to ground, their swords falling, rising dark with blood.

The others hurried into the king’s chamber, but Hyroeades remained at the entrance. He knelt and looked back to the stairwell, listening to the muffled screams from within as the king
died.

He had been in Cyrus’s army for almost a decade, but he had always tried to find his place away from the fighting. Who knew how many deaths he had caused, leading the Persians into Sardis.
But he had never killed a man with his own hands. And he would not kill one now. It was not much of an ambition at the end of a life, he thought. He wished he could have done something else,
something better. He wished that he could have lived differently.

He heard the sound of feet pounding up the stairs, echoing louder as they drew closer. A dozen Babylonian guards came into view, their faces marked with the blood of his companions. They looked
at him with death in their eyes.

As he saw them, saw their eyes fix on him, a terrible relief struck him. He knew then that he was going to die, that the time for choices was over and only one path lay ahead of him. He
understood, at last, what courage was – when there are no choices but one. His dreams had given him other paths to follow, his hopes had made him a coward. Now, at the end of all hope, he
knew he could be brave. He knew he could die well. He ran forward, his sword held high, and hoped that they would kill him quickly.

The gates opened, and the Persians entered Babylon.

Marching in close order, row after row of spearmen and archers went into the city. It was one of the largest armies that the world had yet seen, but it had almost met its equal in this vast
labyrinth of streets. It was as if the city had been designed to provide a last line of defence if its people failed to protect it, built to swallow up armies like some beast of the ancient
times.

The Persians filtered through the city like a medicinal compound absorbed by the blood, past gardens and towers and temples, spreading to every corner of Babylon, as if it were only by
traversing every street before the dawn came that the city would be conquered. They wandered, less as warriors now, in the absence of any army to oppose them, and more as curious travellers to a
strange and alien place. Gradually, disbelieving that the city could be taken so effortlessly, the Persians were drawn by the sound of the drums to the heart of Babylon, and once there, they gazed
on a spectacle that they could never have dreamed they might see.

Perhaps a hundred thousand people filled the main square, equal at least in number to the army that came to conquer them, moving to music that seemed to shake the earth. They gathered in small
circles around elderly storytellers, swam like clumsy children in the diminished waters of the Euphrates, made love openly on the ground. They drank and danced, and shouted their welcome to the new
arrivals.

If they were aware that their city was being taken, that these were invaders come to impose a foreign rule over them, the Babylonians gave no sign. Even when a regiment of Persian spearmen
marched into the square, in a confused and unnecessary show of force, the people of Babylon seemed as delighted by the newcomers as by the arrival of a troupe of acrobats or a great musician from
the east. They held up their hands, and asked the Persians to join them, for on the night of the festival they understood the irrelevance of kings and slaves, of cities and empires. They knew that
the world would be reordered in the morning, but it did not matter. For one night alone, there was nothing but the dance.

The Persians laid aside their tall spears and wicker shields, their decorated quivers and curved bows. They called for drums and flasks of wine, and came forward unarmed into the square, not as
conquerers or liberators, but as revellers.

They drank and danced together under the stars, until the dawn came to banish them all back to their homes the way thought banishes a dream, and time destroys all things.

The sun rose, the people slept, knowing that when they awoke they would be ruled by a new king. They slept contentedly, and dreamed deeply, for they knew that this did not matter. They knew that
it changed nothing.

‘What do you make of it?’

‘Master?’

‘The city, Croesus. What do you think?’

Croesus hesitated. He did not know what to say.

Cyrus had entered the city that morning to find Babylon still sleeping after the evening’s revelry. The few who were still awake, blinking at the harshness of the light and heavy-headed
with drink, had come out on to the streets to meet their new king.