The Last King of Lydia Page 7

  ‘You were very brave at the funeral today,’ he said. ‘It is not an easy thing to bury a husband.’

  ‘Not an easy thing to bury a son,’ she ventured.

  ‘Yes. Well.’ He looked down and picked absently at the engraving on the table. ‘Did he ever tell you that I dreamed of his death?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I suppose you laughed about it together. Laughed at me. The foolish thoughts of a silly old man.’

  ‘No. Atys would never laugh at you.’

  ‘I’m sure. I pressed him to marry young, you know. But he always refused the women I brought him. Fine ladies. Most of them from better families than yours. But he wanted to wait, to marry for love. He loved you.’ He looked up from the table. ‘Did you love my son?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘Are you carrying his child?’

  She stared at him and said nothing.

  ‘I see I shall have to repeat myself. Are you carrying his child?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure? He did not leave so long ago. Perhaps—’

  ‘No. I am sure. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I see.’ He nodded slowly. ‘A shame. It would be better if there were a child.’ Croesus poured himself a cup of unwatered wine, and drank it down in a single draught. ‘What should I do? Leave my empire to my idiot son?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She hesitated. ‘Perhaps your wife—’

  ‘My wife? No. Her womb is stopped. Since she gave birth to Gyges. He has been a curse in many different ways.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘It really would be better if you had a child.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  He hesitated. ‘You are very beautiful,’ he said.

  She looked to the door.

  ‘They won’t let you,’ he said. ‘The guards, I mean. Not without my order.’

  ‘My lord—’

  He poured her another cup. ‘Come. Drink with me. Don’t look so frightened. You misunderstand.’

  Her hand shook slightly, but steadied as she took the silver cup and drank deeply.

  ‘Was he kind to you, my son?’ the king said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was shy when he was courting you, was he not?’

  She felt the ghost of a smile pass over her face. ‘Yes. I could not understand why the king’s son seemed so nervous around me. I thought that was just his way with everyone.’

  ‘It was just for you. I hope he was not so shy when he took you as his wife.’

  She flinched. ‘My lord—’

  ‘Forgive me. I knew him so well when he was a boy. But they grow away from us, our children. There comes a time when we don’t know them at all. You must have known him better as a man than I did. I wish I could have known him as you did.’ Croesus blinked, and did not understand why he still could not see. It was not until he put a hand to his face that he realized he was weeping.

  She looked up at him, and he saw pity in her eyes. He took her hand. He felt her tense, but she did not pull away. He leaned forward, and kissed the top of her head. He felt her relax slightly at the fatherly gesture. Then, with his other hand, he tipped up her chin and kissed her mouth.

  She submitted to the kiss, but when he tried to take another, she turned her head away.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  He said nothing.

  ‘Please. Let me go.’

  ‘You owe me a son.’

  ‘Let me go. Please, my lord.’ She stood, hesitant, and looked again at the door.

  He stood up and seized her arms. She twisted out of his hands and he felt a sudden anger at how easily she escaped him. He seized her again, gripping tighter this time until she cried out in pain. He shook her, once, like a dog shaking a rat, and she turned her face away and closed her eyes.

  He put one hand to her robe. He had the idea that he should tear it loose, that this was what he should do next. He tugged hard, but the heavy fabric held firm, and he merely spun her around and pulled her off balance. Then he hit her, an open-handed slap to the face; he regretted it at once. It wasn’t necessary.

  He put his hands into the folds of her clothes, searching for the place where he could loosen the fabric, his eyes firmly fixed on her body, away from her face. He tugged, frustrated, until at last the stubborn folds began to come away. Inside her robe, he felt his hand touch cold skin.

  Now he had to get her to the floor. She stood rigid, unresisting but not acquiescent, and he pressed a hand on her shoulder and a hand on her throat to push her down. She fell awkwardly; the harsh slap of skin against stone echoed through the chamber. She sobbed once, and from the door she heard the creak of leather and metal. One of the guards outside, shifting uneasily from one foot to another. Only a few feet away, unable and unwilling to help her.

  Croesus knelt beside her, raised his hands to her again and opened her robe. He went quite still. She opened her eyes and looked at him. He stared at her body, his eyes hidden from her. Hesitant, fearful of what she might provoke, she placed her hands on his shoulders, and pushed them back until she could see his face.

  He did not meet her gaze. She felt his hands trembling.

  ‘Croesus?’ she said softly.

  Slowly, he lay down beside her and bowed his head, his shoulders shaking. She breathed heavily, her arms limp by her side. She pulled her robe to her. Then, slowly, she rolled to her side and embraced him on the ground, holding his head against her stomach.

  He wept against her empty body, the tomb of his hopes. The place he wished to bury another son, but could not.

  On top of Atys’s barrow, two guards sat in the dust and cast dice for pieces of copper beside the embers of the fire. When the sun rose, the priests would come to bury the ashes deep within the barrow. It would be placed in a hidden chamber, away from the centre, in an attempt to mislead the swarms of grave robbers who visited the barrows like jackals in the night, mining for the gifts of the dead. Until the morning came, the guards were to watch over the casket, to ensure that no thief came to take the treasures from it.

  Some time after midnight, they heard a sound in the darkness. Someone was walking towards them. They did not get to their feet to issue a challenge. A robber would not be so careless. Before night had fallen, they had seen the figure up on the hills. They knew who was coming, and when Adrastus came into the light of the fire, they did nothing more than nod once at him before returning to their game.

  Adrastus stared at the casket. He thought of the moment when the spear had left his hand. He had seen Atys on the far side of the boar even as the shaft slipped through his open palm, and had closed his hand again in an attempt to summon back the death that he had thrown. He had grasped only air. Atys had spat blood and screamed as he died. Adrastus thought of his brother, how his face had turned from laughter to horror when Adrastus had slipped and the sword slid home, all those years before.

  Adrastus put his hand to his chest, feeling for the heartbeat to fix its location in his mind, running his fingers over the ribs that were his obstacles. He clasped the sword in his hands, his arms shaking. The guards stopped their game to watch, but made no move to stop him.

  Life called out to him, and he wavered for a moment longer. He thought of the things he might do, now that he had no fear of death. Perhaps he would take a wife. Perhaps in love he would find forgiveness.

  He leaned forward and thrust the sword into his stomach, wrenched it loose, and fell.

  The blood flowed thickly and freely, but not swiftly enough. He cried out with the pain, but death did not come to him.

  The two guards watched without expression. After some time, one of them came forward and knelt beside him. He leaned down close and whispered a question in his ear. Adrastus nodded weakly in response. The guard stood up, reversed his spear so that the tip pointed straight down. With a single thrust he ended the life of the man who could kill no one, not even himself, except by chance.

  In the palace, in his favourite
garden, Croesus sat on a bench with his wife, lit only by the flickering torches. They sat close but did not touch, both of them far beyond tears.

  ‘Do you know,’ Croesus said, ‘I don’t think I would have minded. His death, I mean. If he could have given me a grandson.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I mean.’

  The silence grew between them.

  ‘I remember you asked me once,’ he said after a time, ‘when I would stop worrying about him?’

  She nodded dully. ‘I remember.’

  ‘I told you that I would stop worrying when I was dead. But I meant I would stop worrying once he had given me an heir. How terrible that is.’

  She said nothing, and in the quiet he thought of all the memories he would have to uproot and destroy. Memories of Atys when he was born, tiny and silent, filled only with possibility. As a boy, roaring and charging around the gardens of Sardis, tripping and crying, then standing and running once again. As a man, his character shaping and forming like iron in a mould, becoming something remarkable. Each memory had been a treasure to him, now a splinter in his mind. He would have to forget them all, he thought. There was no other way.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Croesus said eventually.

  She looked him in the eyes. ‘What do you have to be sorry for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Croesus swallowed deeply, but the tears would not come. ‘I was weak,’ he said. ‘I loved him too much.’

  ‘Croesus . . .’

  ‘I will never love that way again.’

  The King

  552 BC

  1

  Even as a child, Croesus had loved to play at being king.

  It was a part that he liked to play only when he was alone. Croesus had no shortage of slaves and other children to keep him company, all of them happy to play any game the prince chose. But he would not play at being a king in the company of others; if the game were even referred to, he would blush, then shout and scream until he had driven them all away. It was a secret fantasy that Croesus liked to explore when alone, and, for him, solitude was as much of a luxury as company is to the lonely child.

  Whenever he could escape his army of helpers and drive away the children who were assigned to play with him, he would run to some abandoned room in the palace and there hold court. As soon as he was sure he was quite alone, he would construct a throne: an upended wicker basket, a chipped stone step, an old, high chair that he had to clamber on to. He needed nothing more than this. His shyness had made him secretive, and he learned to make do with this single prop which could resume its usual function as soon as he stood away from it and affected to ignore it. Ideally, the room he adopted as his court would also feature an obsidian mirror or a chunk of polished stone, and he would position himself so that from time to time he could glance at his own reflection and judge his performance.

  Once seated on his makeshift throne, he had to wait only a few moments before the room filled with movement and noise. Generals and statesmen, slaves and guards; the air took shape to produce them all. The abandoned room became draped in rich silks, the floor tiled with gold, the tables littered with goblets of sweetened grape juice and Egyptian honeyed fruit.

  Sometimes he held court as a silent king, barely moving, unspeaking. He would rule through the most minute gestures; a fractional nod of the head would be enough to reprieve a man from execution. A hand, held palm down, cutting briefly through the air to exile a traitor for ever. Two fingers straightened from a closed fist would silence an imaginary courtier as he spoke out of turn.

  At other times, he would practise his oratory. He would rise from his throne (or hop down from it, depending on its height), strike a pose, and prepare to speak. He believed that the longer the speech, the greater and more persuasive it would be – the aim was not so much to speak clearly, but to speak continuously for as long as possible. He would deliver, even at a young age, rambling orations, lasting for more than half an hour, an apparently unending stream of words stitched together from speeches of his father’s, and from the pronouncements of kings in the stories his mother told him.

  Croesus could not remember much more of his childhood than this. In the months that followed the death of his son, he explored the recesses of his mind, searching for an innocent memory to escape into, some moment that could make sense of the world again. He had only the vaguest sense of his early years, and while he could recall the occasional event, moments of particular joy and shame, the actual sensations were lost to him. Recalling the past, it was as if he somehow viewed another man’s memories, a man from some alien world that he could not understand. But this game of kings, that he had played ten thousand times in as many different ways, was the one memory he did still retain in all of its detail, and of all the times that he played the game, there was one instance that he remembered most clearly of all.

  It was autumn, and he was eight years old. His mother was beginning to show the first signs of the wasting sickness that would end her life a year later. There would be no more innocence for him after that, and no more happiness for his father, Alyattes, but on that autumn day that pain was a long way off. His mother had fainted in court, and in the middle of the ensuing distraction he had managed to steal away for an hour of play.

  He was in the middle of a speech, promising a dozen sacks of jewels and a hundred slave women to a wandering hero, when he became aware of an intruder at the doorway behind him. A scrape of leather against stone, the faintest sound of rustling cloth, were enough to let him know that he was being watched. Slowly, afraid of what he would see, he turned to face the doorway.

  His father, Alyattes, stood there with a small, ambiguous smile on his face. He was a lean and wiry man, dressed in red robes that hung on him a little loosely. These robes tended to trip him up whenever he forgot himself and hurried somewhere, which was often.

  Beneath his father’s gaze, the boy hung his head. His father was the only person Croesus could not rage at when he was caught unawares. In front of Alyattes, he felt the heat in his throat and lungs, the pain around the heart of a deep and confused shame. He stood still, awaiting and dreading the mocking remark, the reprimand or, worst, of all, the pretence that his father had observed nothing.

  ‘I am sorry to have interrupted you,’ Alyattes said lightly. ‘I thought you would want to know that your mother is recovering now.’

  ‘Should I go and see her?’ Croesus tried to keep the reluctance from his voice, but he knew it was there. He had no desire to return to the court and comfort his pale-faced mother. He wanted to finish his game.

  ‘In a little while. Can I show you something first? A new invention of mine.’

  ‘Of course,’ Croesus said quickly. The shame at being discovered would be with him for weeks, and he was relieved to have any distraction.

  ‘Come here.’ Alyattes went to one knee, and Croesus walked over to his father. ‘Close your eyes, and open your hands.’

  Croesus felt a little object drop into his right hand. Keeping his eyes closed, he rolled it forward on to his fingers. Hard and cool and metallic, he could tell no more than that. He opened his hand, opened his eyes, and looked down at it.

  It was an ugly thing. Small, like a shrivelled grape in size and shape, pale yellow in colour. It wasn’t even pure gold, he realized, recognizing the shade with an already practised eye, but electrum, an amalgam of gold and silver. An image was stamped on one side, but Croesus could not tell what it was. He asked his father.

  ‘It’s a lion.’

  ‘The sign of our household,’ Croesus said quickly, just as he would give an answer he knew his tutor would like. Looking again, he thought to himself that the design was like the drawing of a clumsy child.

  ‘Do you know what this thing is?’ Alyattes said.

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘It is a coin. What do you think it is worth?’

  ‘Not very much.’ He expected to see anger on his father’s face, but Alya
ttes nodded calmly, as though this were the expected response. ‘Is that the wrong thing to say?’ Croesus said.

  ‘No, no, quite reasonable.’ Alyattes shrugged. ‘It’s a lump of electrum that any man could sift from the Pactolus. Not pure gold or silver, which is a shame. I should have liked it to be gold. You’re right – it should be worth very little.’ He leaned forward. ‘Can I tell you a secret?’

  Alyattes pointed at the image of the lion. ‘Without that stamp, it is valued at whatever some metal trader tells you it is worth. With that mark, it’s worth as much as I say it’s worth.’

  Croesus frowned, and tried to understand. Alyattes continued: ‘It’s harvest season, now. The farmers are gathering their wheat from the land.’ He reached out a finger and tapped the metal disc in Croesus’s palm. ‘If I say it is so, one of these coins will buy the crop of a poor farmer’s field. Forty of them, and you’ve got the worth of everything that farmer will ever produce. The entire value of a common man’s life, and I could put it into a bag that you could wear at your waist and you would barely feel the weight. Men will spend their whole lives chasing after these little pieces of marked metal. They will be willing to kill for them. Think about that.’

  ‘What will you do with it, Father?’

  ‘I will use it to raise an army, and go to war in the East.’ Alyattes reached forward and ran his hand through his son’s hair. ‘I will win you a great empire. Won’t you like that?’

  Hearing this, Croesus tried to hide his disappointment. His father had gone to war several times already in the boy’s short life. Croesus liked to hear stories of the battles, but the wars took his father from him for months, sometimes even years, and they made his mother unhappy.

  ‘Isn’t there something else you could do, Father?’

  ‘With these riches, what is there to do but go to war?’ Alyattes asked. ‘You can barter bread for eggs or a horse for sheep in the marketplace, but with this you can buy a new world. That is what my coins are for.’