The Last King of Lydia Read online

  Alyattes reached down and took the coin back from his son, and Croesus found his fingers reaching for it even as it was taken from him. His father held the metal oval between finger and thumb. ‘Listen to me, and try to understand. I love this,’ he said, gesturing to the coin, ‘more than I love you. And I love you very much. But this . . .’ He shrugged. ‘It is a remarkable thing. A remarkable thing that I have made. It will change the world.’

  Alyattes stood and turned to leave, and as Croesus watched his father walk away he felt for the very first time the sensation that no child can forget – the sense that one’s father or mother is wrong. There was something else to be done with this invention, he was sure of it. It could create something greater than a war.

  ‘Can I keep it?’ Croesus said, just as his father was about to leave the room.

  Alyattes turned back, and smiled approvingly. He threw the coin to the boy, and Croesus took it from the air with a hasty grasp of his hand.

  2

  War is an infection that breeds in the minds of kings. Once caught, it may come on slowly or burn hot like a one-day fever. It will not die until it is treated with blood.

  For Croesus, the first infection came from the sight of a map.

  In the early years of his rule, he had fought several small wars of conquest, the inevitable actions of a powerful king surrounded by weak rulers. A dozen cities fell beneath the banner of bull and lion, but the wars meant nothing to him, and they did not compare with the grand campaigns of his father’s life. Occasionally, he would glance without interest at a crude map of his empire, but he never felt any desire for anything more precise. His world was Sardis and his family. What more did he need than that?

  Yet, after Atys’s death, he asked his cartographers to draw up two maps, accurate in every measure, flawless in detail. For a year, his people rode to every corner of the kingdom, counting the beats of their horses’ hooves to measure distance. They waited for clear days and climbed mountains to better view the land, producing sketches from the heights of icy peaks. They corresponded with the mapmakers and librarians of distant cities, waiting months for the arrival of crumbling, faintly inked copies of maps they had thought long lost.

  At last, the work was finished. In one of the king’s throne rooms they first unrolled a handsome scroll of the Lydian empire, deeply inked with the conquered cities, the dividing rivers, the great Aegean sea that bordered the empire to the west.

  Croesus looked at the empire he had inherited. He let his hand brush over the soft skin of the scroll, thinking of the thousands of lives that lay beneath each stroke of his finger, all of them paying their fealty to him. From the sea to the west to the river Halys in the east, all these lands belonged to him. He stared at it until he had the image of his empire firmly fixed in his mind. Then, he asked the cartographers to uncover the other map.

  Hesitantly, they unrolled the second scroll. This one showed much more than Lydia. It did not venture across the Aegean to the Hellenic city states, but it stretched far to the east and south. He looked on Egypt, Media, Assyria, the nomad plains of the Massagetae, the great city of Babylon. The cartographers, bound by the king’s orders, had not played tricks with the scale as they might otherwise have. There was no hiding the vast expanse of land that lay to the east, the hundreds of thousands of men and women who knew and cared nothing for the king of Lydia.

  Croesus noticed that one of the mapmakers was shivering nervously. The king smiled at him. ‘Don’t fear me. I cannot rule the whole world, can I?’ Croesus raised his hand, intending to click his fingers and dismiss the mapmaker and the troubling vision he had summoned. He hesitated, his finger and thumb pressed against each other, but not yet making a sound.

  He looked over the map one more time. He began at the far edge of his kingdom, the western city of Phocaea. His eyes roved south to Smyrna, the port where ships from half a hundred nations arrived with jewels, silks and spices. He travelled north, reached the banks of the Hermus river and followed it until he reached Sardis. He paused briefly at his capital, then struck east, heading for the Halys river at the border of his lands.

  From there, he imagined his eyes as a marching army. He went beyond the Halys, taking Cappadocia and the great city of Trapezus. He led his conquering gaze south, down the Euphrates to Babylon. He lingered there for a time, imagining what it would be to rule the greatest city in the world, a city unmatched in beauty and spectacle by any other. Then he went east again, pausing at another great river. It was the Tigris, and beyond it lay the land of the Medes.

  In his father’s time, the Medes and the Lydians had been enemies. After many a bloody and inconclusive war, Croesus’s sister had been married to Astyages, king of the Medes, and the two peoples had lived in peace for decades. In his mind, Croesus broke the thirty-year peace in a matter of moments, his eyes passing over the Tigris, into the land of the Medes, and seizing his brother-in-law’s kingdom.

  But his gaze was still hungry, and continued its march east until finally his eye chanced on the river Medus in the heart of Persia, and came to rest there. For some reason, it seemed like the right place to stop.

  Gazing at the maps, he understood why war had so captivated his father. He was grateful for the kingdom of the Medes on his borders, the peace treaty with Astyages that he could never break, for he did not trust this ache that he had, this longing for the East. Without his son, there was such an absence in his life. It would be so easy to fill it with a war.

  Croesus tried to leave his thoughts of conquest buried deep in the heavy, yellowed curls of the map. He left the throne room for the one place where he would be able to forget them.

  As he descended through the palace, Croesus shed his followers like so many layers of unwanted clothing. First, he disposed of the noblemen who begged favours from him, dispatching them one by one until there were none left to bother him. The band of slaves that trailed after him, half of them in service to him, the other half monitoring his movements on behalf of his nobles, was dismissed with a few brief commands. He kept his guards with him for most of the journey deep into the palace, but dismissed them too before he descended the last stairwell.

  Alone, he reached a door in a dark and forgotten corridor of the palace. He took a gold key on a silver chain from within the folds of his clothes. He unlocked the door and went inside.

  Croesus was in darkness. By touch and memory he made his way to a table at the end of the room, taking one of dozens of oil-soaked torches that had been left piled there. He felt his way to the far end of the table, his hands fumbling for the flints he knew were there, and he struck sparks until the torch caught.

  The room flickered into view. The table and floor were furred with dust, and no slave had cleaned here for years. The floor was covered with many trails of footprints, but they were all exactly the same shape and size. They all belonged to him.

  He paced around the abandoned room, filled with broken shards of pottery and crumbling chunks of stone. He reached a rotting wooden chest which, when he was a child, had once served as a throne. He poked at one corner with the toe of his boot, and watched the wood crumble into splinters, accompanied by an eruption of insects and tiny grey spiders.

  He drew aside the heavy drape at the far end of the room, felt cool air from the tunnel behind it. He reached up and pulled on a cord hanging by the wall. Deep down below, too distant for him to hear, he knew a small silver bell would be ringing. Now they would know that he was coming.

  He held the torch in front of him to light the way, and began to descend. He made his way along the narrow corridor, the ceiling just high enough that he could walk without stooping. It had been made specifically for him.

  The passage wound down, until glimmers of light began to appear in the distance. The air grew brighter, then too bright, as though he were heading towards the heart of the sun. The end of the passage opened up into an enormous chamber, and the king entered the lower treasury.

  He had begun work on thes
e chambers as soon as his father had died. It had taken years to plan and excavate, and he had kept the digging as close a secret as possible. The slaves who had laboured there had been dispatched to work in the mines at the far corners of his empire immediately after the project had been completed. Croesus sometimes wondered to whom they might have told their secrets in the few short years before rockfalls and rotten lungs had silenced them all, but this did not genuinely concern him. If the bandit kings and petty officials of the outer kingdoms knew of the treasury, he did not fear them, but he wanted none within the palace to know the details of this chamber. The treasuries of the upper floors held hundreds of diverse and priceless artefacts. This lower floor was devoted to a single form of treasure.

  Thousands of gold and silver coins were piled high throughout the room, forming towers and buttresses and fortresses. Elsewhere they were piled into hills and mountains of gold and silver. Dozens of burning torches ringed the chamber, the polished stone walls and glittering coins reflecting and amplifying the light until it was intense, near blinding. But it did not trouble the king. Croesus had grown used to staring into the sun of his riches.

  His father had long desired gold coins. Alyattes had known that gold and silver both hid within the electrum of the Pactolus river, but his alchemists were never able to discover the technique of separating them. His dream had been to stamp the seal of Lydia on golden coins that would fill the markets of Sardis and the Hellenic cities on the far side of the sea. But he died unsatisfied.

  Croesus’s metallurgists had finally perfected the art of turning electrum into gold and silver. They had tried every possible combination of heat and pressure that they could imagine, to no effect. One day, in sheer desperation, they added salt to the molten metal, as though it were a gamey meat in need of seasoning, and once the fire was scorching hot, the silver separated to the top, enabling it to be skimmed away like scum from a stew, and the bottom of the crucibles shone with pure gold.

  Croesus had kept finding reasons to postpone the day when the coins would enter circulation and replace the electrum coins that had so fascinated his father. Soon, every merchant and tradesmen in Lydia would tally his life in these ovals of gold and silver, each one marked with the lion and bull. But, for now, the coins remained within this sealed chamber. They belonged to him alone.

  The room was still, near silent. He could hear the crackling of the torches, the occasional thud as a sack of coins arrived down one of the steep tunnels that led from the mints above ground. Soft beneath these other sounds were the shuffling, hesitant footsteps of the money counters.

  They were all blind. These slaves lived within the treasury, in a small antechamber separate from the coins. Food and water reached them through the same shafts where the coins came from above. They would never be permitted to leave. They would grow old and die in a world of gold.

  Croesus had no idea what they spoke about to pass the long days, what couplings occurred down here in the darkness, what half-remembered poems were recited, the imaginative journeys that they went on together to escape their closed world, the petty fights and squabbles that broke out over the few luxuries they were allowed. He could only imagine what they did to alleviate the maddening boredom of shifting and polishing and ordering the endless mountains of coins.

  When the silver bell rang, they knew to light the torches and be silent, until they could be certain he had gone. Even without sight, they always knew where he was; the king’s confident footsteps identified him as one who bore the privilege of vision.

  He approached a large, loose pile of gold coins. He thrust his hands into them, gently working his fingers into the heavy metal until his forearms were buried. It felt as though he held his hands in a stream of cold water, and he sensed his burning blood cool.

  The small pile of silver near his feet was a healthy slave. In the mound of gold next to it he saw a galleon; the larger mound that towered over it was a fleet. From one corner of the room, where gold and silver mingled freely together like captains and spearmen, he could hear the marching feet of ten thousand soldiers.

  On to even larger mounds, and he saw towns, cities, entire races of people locked into the gold and ordered at his command. He saw an empire, stretching across leagues and nations and rivers and seas, all contained within a single, high-chambered room, and perceived by him alone.

  He did not yet know what he would do with his wealth. The possibilities were overwhelming, each idea giving way to another as soon as he thought of acting on it. But he knew that, given time, he could find the right use for it. All creation was there, waiting to spring into life. He only had to choose what form it would take, and he could shape a universe with his vision.

  My father was right in one thing at least, Croesus thought as he stood amidst all his wealth, new worlds waiting to be born. This is worth more than love.

  3

  Two years after Atys died, word came that the empire of the Medes had fallen.

  The conquest had been sudden, like some disaster of the earth or sea that is precisely managed by the Gods. An exhausted messenger arrived at the court of Sardis to bring word that a Persian army was marching on Ecbatana, the capital of Media. Before Croesus could decide whether to send the man back alone or accompanied by the entire Lydian army, another messenger arrived with the news that the Medes’ army had been destroyed and Astyages had been captured. Cyrus of Persia now sat on the throne of the Medes.

  Cyrus. The name meant nothing to Croesus, but rumours soon followed the messengers. That he was of a Persian noble family was all that could be said with confidence – all else was the stuff of folktales. Some said that Cyrus had been raised by wolves, that he fed only on the flesh of kings and drank only the waters of the river by which he had been born. Others claimed that wild beasts formed the vanguard of his army, while immortal demons served as its elite warriors. Persian sorcerers were said to have destroyed the army of the Medes with lightning from the sky and earthquakes that shook men to death; not a single blow was struck. Croesus soon gave up any attempt to identify the truth behind these wild tales. A new power had risen in the East. The only thing that mattered was how to respond.

  At the council of war, they began with numbers. The respective sizes of the Persian and Lydian armies, the cost of mercenaries, the yields of croplands, the wealth of mining regions. Above all, they sought to calculate what Lydia stood to gain and lose. The fate of a dozen nations was reduced to numbers inked on parchment and etched in wax: a balance sheet for a war. It was only after they had finished their calculations that they talked of what should be done.

  It was unacceptable, one man said, for the Persians to rule an empire. The Hellenes to the west could be bargained with and understood – they were a civilized people. But there was no negotiating with the Persians. Who knew how they would use their new-found power?

  Others of the council were unconvinced by the case for war. Sandanis, the commander of the army, was the leader of this faction. An old man now, with the loose-skinned and weary features of a soldier who had spent a lifetime fighting enemies abroad and politicians at home, he had led the army even in the days of Croesus’s father. Repeatedly and forcefully, he argued that Lydia had grown strong through trade and good governance; why risk it all on war with the East? What did events so far away have to do with the Lydian empire?

  It was only after the discussion had continued for some time, growing increasingly heated, that the men around the table realized that the king had yet to speak.

  One by one, they fell silent and turned to face their ruler. ‘Forgive us,’ said one of the young noblemen. ‘We have spoken at great length, and not waited to hear you, as we should have done.’ He coughed apologetically. ‘What, may we ask, do you think?’

  What did he think? Croesus almost laughed. How could so grave a decision be made on the basis of doubt and suspicion, but nothing more? He could feel the excitement around the table at the thought of war, but he found himself unmoved by it.
It mattered little to him who ruled over the lands to the east – Astyages had been his brother king in name only. Given a little more time, another year or so, he believed he would find the right way to use his wealth.

  And yet, for all this, when he came to speak, he could not find the words for peace. ‘I thank you all for your counsel,’ he said. ‘What an embarrassment of riches you have given me; enough to put those of my treasuries to shame!’ Laughter broke out around the table. ‘I have no hunger for war,’ Croesus continued, the words coming easily now, ‘but will the Persian be satisfied with his new-won kingdom? I think not.’ He looked across at Sandanis. ‘Do not worry,’ Croesus said. ‘I will not be rash. We shall consult with the oracles, and with our allies. I have detained you all too long from your own affairs.’ He gestured towards the door. ‘You may leave.’

  The king drummed his fingers on the marble table, smiling and nodding as each of the noblemen departed the council chamber. He sat in silence for a time after they had gone. He turned to Isocrates.

  ‘Your thoughts?’ Croesus said.

  ‘Of war with Persia?’

  Croesus shook his head, and nodded at the empty chairs. ‘Of them.’

  Isocrates shrugged. ‘Divided. They will follow where you lead.’

  ‘Yes. Or where the Gods lead.’

  ‘That is true, master.’

  ‘We must have a prophecy to guide us. To which of the oracles should we turn? Abae?’

  ‘The prophet at Abae is a stubborn old man, master. He doesn’t like foreigners. If you were a Hellene, I might recommend it, but as a Lydian . . .’

  ‘Ah. That is unfortunate. You know much of these matters?’

  ‘I rely on the opinions of men who are wiser than I, master.’

  ‘Well, what do these wiser men have to say of Dodona?’

  ‘I have yet to hear him give a favourable word for war. He lost both his sons in battle many years ago.’ Isocrates hesitated for a moment. ‘He would give you a prophecy to prevent a war, not to begin one.’