A Heroic King

by Helena P. Schrader

  “Not yet, perhaps,” Tisibazus responded as soon as Zopyrus had translated, “and war is what the Great King, in his divinely inspired mercy, is anxious to avoid. He wishes nothing more earnestly than peace for both our peoples.”

  “Well, he can have it. We aren’t going to attack him,” the short, dark king declared decisively, glaring at his fellows as if daring them to contradict him. Zopyrus was relieved that at least one of the kings had the backbone to act like a king, while his co-regent raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  “That is wonderful news!” Tisibazus declared when he heard Zopyrus’ translation. He laid a closed fist on his chest and bowed first to the king who had spoken, then to the other king, and finally to the ephors. He then asked via Zopyrus, “Then you will send the tokens of submission back with us?”

  “What tokens of submission?” the dark king demanded.

  “Earth and water―a jar of each―mere symbols,” Zopyrus explained without waiting for Tisibazus’ answer.

  “Symbols of submission, did you say?” the taller king asked.

  Zopyrus repeated the word, confident he had made no error of translation here, embellishing on his own, “Yes, yes, a mere gesture to show that you wish the Great King no harm and accept him as your overlord.”

  What happened next was confusing. As if the five ephors had indeed fallen asleep during the bulk of the speech, they now all came to life, looking at one another and repeating the word “Overlord?”

  “What is the matter?” Tisibazus asked Zopyrus irritably.

  “They seem unhappy with the word ‘overlord’―or, indeed, with the idea of submitting earth and water.”

  “Nonsense!” Tisibazus exclaimed. “Tell them it is a small price to pay for peace.” Zopyrus passed on the message.

  “Small?” the taller king asked in a voice that silenced the room. “You call it small?”

  “Yes, of course,” Zopyrus answered even before translating.

  Tisibazus elaborated on the answer. “Most subjects of the Great King are compelled to send tribute of all kinds and worth thousands of gold pieces. Yet, in his infinite mercy and generosity, Darius the Great has chosen to ask for only tokens from you: a jar of earth and a jar of water, mere acknowledgment of the objective facts.”

  “What facts?” the stocky king demanded, frowning.

  Zopyrus began to suspect that the man was thick in the head. “The plain facts that you are weak and Persia is strong,” he replied without first seeking Tisibazus’ answer. “You cannot hope to defend yourselves against the might of the Great King,” Zopyrus replied in Greek. Tisibazus added in Persian for Zopyrus to translate: “By submitting freely to Darius the Almighty, accepting his sovereignty over you, you do no more than bow to the inevitable, to what is reasonable and what is right.”

  “How dare you tell us what is right!” the stocky king growled belligerently.

  This latter remark Zopyrus translated with some trepidation. However, Tisibazus was an experienced diplomat and took the insult in his stride. He bowed with mock respect to the petty king, with a smile on his lips that betrayed his contempt. “Forgive me. Perhaps it is presumptuous for us to tell you what is right, but you must concede―whether it is right or not―that the Great King commands armies of millions and fleets of thousands. Your pitiable army would be crushed like ants beneath the heel of a giant if it dared to defy us―just as your brothers in Ionia learned.”

  Everyone in the room seemed to hold their breath while Zopyrus translated this reply. When he finished, it was the taller, fairer king who answered: “That, sir, is tantamount to saying that the prospect of defeat is grounds for surrender.”

  “Isn’t it?” Tisibazus asked, opening his arms in a gesture of absolute innocence, and his answer seemed to need no translation. He continued, “Is it not the duty of reasonable men to bow to the inevitable? Is it not the privilege of intelligent men to avoid foreseeable disaster? You look like an intelligent man to me,” Tisibazus admitted generously, gesturing for Zopyrus to do his part. Once his message was delivered by the translator, the ambassador added, “Surely you can see that it is sometimes wiser to bend with the wind than to fight a storm you cannot beat?”

  “You have misjudged me,” the tall man snapped, rudely (or so it seemed to Zopyrus) rejecting the compliment the Persian had paid him.

  Baffled, Tisibazus cast his colleague a look of incomprehension. They had expected the Athenians to be emotional and foolish, but the picture they had been given of Sparta was of a single-minded, disciplined people, well suited to life within the Persian Empire. These men were so docile and obedient, they had been told, that the sons of even their noblemen allowed themselves to be publicly flogged!

  Tisibazus’ companion took over, speaking in shorter sentences to ensure the translation went faster. “My colleague has been too oblique, perhaps,” the second ambassador said. “The Great King is making you an offer. It is a simple and fair offer. Surrender your sovereignty to him and enjoy his benign reign, or face his wrath.”

  “Surrender? Without a fight? To some stranger on the other end of the earth?” the stocky king demanded in a loud voice, his face turning red. “You’re out of your minds!”

  Zopyrus did not dare translate that verbatim, but he didn’t need to. Tisibazus, who understood some Greek, had understood the gist of it without translation, and answered immediately. “No. Rather, you are mad not to accept this generous offer. The Great King could simply have come with his armies and wiped you out. He could have obliterated your entire insignificant city!” He gestured with his hand as if he were shooing away a fly. “Instead, His Magnificence has shown the kindness of a father toward a wayward son. He has given you the chance to be taken under his care. He has given you an opportunity to become part of his great empire. You should be grateful.”

  The two kings looked at each other, and then both stood and walked out of the chamber together without another word. One of the five officials hastily announced, “We will have to take this to the Assembly. We will put it to the Assembly. You will have your answer in three days.”

  The twins looked at each other. They hated each other. They were rivals. They did not trust the other farther than they could spit. And they had never been so utterly in agreement. They would not surrender. They would not give the “Great King” so much as a single pebble or a drop of water. They would rather die.

  They did not speak. They turned their backs on each other and went their separate ways―which was the same way: to tell their friends and followers what was at stake and where they stood.

  Even after five days in Sparta, Danei hated going out in public.

  Danei was a harem eunuch serving Zopyrus’ newest wife, Phaidime, the only wife the Persian interpreter had brought on this voyage. Danei had been captured at the age of thirteen, and castrated because he was one of those beautiful, golden youths that the Greeks occasionally produced. Persian noblemen liked to surround themselves with things of beauty, both animate and inanimate, and Danei fit that category. So for five years Danei had looked after Phaidime, going as part of her dowry to Zopyrus’ household when she married at the age of twelve. Phaidime’s dependence on Danei had compensated him a little for his fate.

  But Danei had never expected to find himself back in Greece. When he was ordered to prepare his mistress for a long voyage, no one bothered to tell him where they were headed. The Persian Empire was so vast that a “long voyage” need not take one beyond its borders. Even when slave gossip suggested Zopyrus had been given an important “diplomatic mission,” there was no reason to assume the mission was to the Greeks. It could just as well have been to the Egyptians or the Nubians or the wild peoples to the east.

  It was only after their ship put in at a Greek port after a frightful voyage that Danei learned where he had landed. The realization that he was in Lacedaemon had filled him with amazement―but not joy. Rather, he felt confused and ashamed. In fact, he wanted to hide, but slaves soon learn to a
ccept everything ….

  The ambassadors traveled with almost sixty slaves altogether, and while the ambassadors kept inside the guest house to underline their displeasure with the reception they had received from the Spartans, the slaves were expected to purchase fresh goods for their masters’ kitchen, to replace broken pottery, to find workshops to repair damaged tack and equipment, to find and use wash houses to clean their masters’ clothing, and to do all the other things necessary to ensure their masters’ lives were comfortable.

  Because Danei could speak Greek, the other slaves insisted he accompany them on their errands. At first Danei was terrified that someone would realize he was Greek and recognize that he was a slave and a eunuch. In Persia there were tens of thousands of eunuchs, many in powerful positions, so it didn’t seem so bad. Here, among his own people, Danei felt mutilated and unnatural. So far, however, no one appeared to have taken particular note of him at all.

  And today he was alone. He was dressed in the clothes of a Persian slave: unbleached raw linen trousers bound at the waist with a drawstring, and a long-sleeved shirt. He wore a floppy cotton hat to cover his blond hair, and straw sandals that rasped (rather than clicked) on the paving stones. He hobbled around the edge of the agora, clinging to the shadows as best he could, with his head down to avoid catching anyone’s eye. As he moved, he cast furtive glances in the direction of the produce stands being set up.

  Phaidime had one of her headaches. She got them for no apparent reason and they drove her almost mad with pain. She claimed that crushed poppy seeds helped to ease them, and she had begged Danei to find some for her, pressing into his palm silver coins of far too great a value. Phaidime was illiterate and innumerate and had absolutely no concept of the value of things. But her generosity was of little use to Danei. He could not run away because he could hardly walk. Nor did he have any place to run to. His family was dead or enslaved. His island was occupied. His farm was tilled by strangers.

  Danei thought he saw a stand selling nuts and other dried goods in small canvas bags standing open side by side. He approached cautiously, his eyes down so that he saw the goods but not the man behind the stand. Walnuts, cashews, pistachios, chestnuts, sesame and caraway seeds, nutmeg, and black pepper―but no poppy seeds.

  Danei risked a glance up at the shopkeeper. He seemed a humble man, with a bushy, graying beard, naked scalp, and weathered skin. Certainly he was not one of the terrifying Spartiates that Danei had glimpsed from a distance on his hurried excursions. “Excuse me, sir,” he muttered.

  The man did not hear him, and concentrated on opening a bag of something on the cart behind him.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Danei spoke up louder.

  “Huh?” The man looked over at Danei.

  “Poppy seeds.”

  “What about ’em?”

  “Do you have any?”

  “Can’t you see for yourself? If I had ’em, I’d have ’em out, wouldn’t I?”

  “Where might I find them, sir?” Danei persisted.

  “Try over there,” the man replied, gesturing vaguely toward some stalls that spilled out of the agora and down a side street. Danei noted with relief that these were manned by women. Danei was more comfortable with women. He hobbled over to the women’s stands.

  The first was laden with baked goods: flaky crusts oozing honey, tarts with raisins and crushed walnuts, sweet bread pockets stuffed with apples, and other delicacies that made Danei’s mouth water. What a wonderful surprise for Phaidime, he thought at once, his eyes widening.

  The woman at the next stall burst out laughing. “Looks like you’ve got a new customer, Laodice!”

  The woman behind the sweets stand smiled at Danei with an expression that reminded him so sharply of his mother, it made his heart miss a beat. When the Persians came, he and his mother had been separated almost at once. He had never seen her again. She was not young even then, and she had raised four children almost to adulthood. Danei hoped they had spared her the indignity of rape. There had been so many young girls to satisfy their lust …. He preferred to think of his mother like the slaves in the harem, looking after the children of Persian wives and concubines, cooking and cleaning for the privileged women of the rich. But sometimes, when he saw a slave woman bent under a load of firewood, or struggling with an amphora of water, he pictured his mother’s face―lined and worn and hopeless.

  “What can I sell you today, young sir?” said the woman behind the sweets stand, bringing him back to the present.

  “Oh, I’m just a slave,” he hastened to correct her, ever conscious of his status. “But―but I do have money to buy―for my mistress. I’m sure she’d like some of these.” He pointed to the honey squares.

  “Only those?” the saleswoman asked, astonished. “What about some of the raisin and walnut tarts? Or my lemon squares? Do you want to test my wares to be sure they are good enough?” she suggested with a little wink.

  Danei understood her gesture as one of kindness from a woman showing sympathy for a boy in bondage. Her kindness lured a smile from him as he glanced up and asked, “May I try the lemon squares and the almond tarts, please?”

  She smiled back and bent to retrieve a knife from under the counter to start cutting into her wares. His eyes focused hungrily on the sweets, Danei did not realize someone had come up behind him until a deep male voice asked, “Where are you from, young man?”

  Danei nearly jumped out of his skin. He turned to look over his shoulder at the owner of the voice and felt his heart in his throat. It was one of the Spartiates―tall, muscular, tanned, and wearing bronze armor including a helmet tipped on the back of his neck, the nosepiece resting on his forehead. Danei wanted to flee. He started to shrink back, away from this man who smelled of sweat and bronze and freedom. “I―I’m―no one,” Danei told him. “I’m sorry.” He turned to run, but the woman stopped him.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of, young sir. That’s just the master come to snatch a slice of cheesecake for himself. Here.”

  Still poised to flee, Danei turned to look at her. She was smiling at him, an almond tart on the palm of her hand. “You need it more than he does,” she noted with a little nod in the direction of her master―who, incomprehensibly, laughed at her impudence. Danei gaped. No Persian’s slave would risk using such a tone of voice with his master, and if they did, they would probably have their tongue torn out. “It’s all right,” she assured him gently, “the master won’t hurt you.”

  “She’s right. I won’t.”

  Danei still hesitated, but now it was in shame rather than fear. The man was the embodiment of masculinity, and Danei felt the scar between his legs as if he were naked. He looked down at the pavement beneath his feet, rooted to it from sheer humiliation. He was remembering how they had been lined up and castrated on a bloody block, one after the other, without so much as a glass of wine. Two men held the boys down backward over the block. The surgeon made a few expert cuts with his knife. The removed genitals landed in a bucket that had to be emptied several times before the day was over, and then each new eunuch was pushed off the block to make room for the next victim.

  Danei had struggled too much at the wrong moment. The surgeon’s knife slipped and the man cursed in professional annoyance. Another man grabbed Danei and crushed a cloth down into his wound with all his might, ignoring Danei’s screams. Danei passed out. When he came to again, a crude bandage was made fast to his crotch with tarred twine and the bleeding had slowed to a trickle, but he would never again walk without a limp.

  He was yanked from his memories by the saleswoman. She reached out and took his hand, pressing her pastry into it. As he looked up and met her eyes, he saw only his mother looking back at him, not just pitying him but encouraging him, too. He closed his eyes, unable to bear it.

  “You speak with the accent of the islands,” the terrifying Spartan hoplite insisted. “Which island are you from?”

  Danei looked up at him and mouthed the word. When was the
last time he’d dared utter it? “Chios, master,” he whispered, and then he dropped his eyelids over his eyes to hide his tears. The word, said at last, instantly conjured up images: the sun coming up over the Aegean, the smell of the soil when his father turned it with a plow, the humming of the bees in their little orchard, his mother singing ….

  “Chios?” the Spartan inquired, unsure if he had read the youth’s lips correctly.

  Danei nodded, his eyes still down and staring, unintentionally, at the Spartan’s sandaled feet while his free hand tugged unconsciously at the hem of his shirt, pulling it down to cover his crotch more completely.

  There was a pause. Then the deep voice said softly, “A man’s heart―not his extremities―make him a man. My life was once saved by a squadron of Chian triremes. I know the Chians did not go crawling on their bellies to the Persians, but died upright, as free men. I believe the sons of such men have the hearts of lions―no matter what the Persians have done to their bodies.”

  Danei gasped and looked up. Their eyes met only for an instant, and then the Spartan turned and was gone. Danei stood rooted to the pavement and watched the Spartan continue down the street. He was filled with a strange sensation of lightness.

  Danei’s father had been boatswain on one of Chios’ proud triremes, and he had been killed at sea in the great sea battle. More than half of Chios’ ships had been crushed and sunk in that battle, but the remainder, with shattered rams and crushed sides, limping and listing, had been dragged to Chios by the triumphant Persians. There the captive men had been hog-tied and run up the halyards of their own ships like bunting. There they had been left to die slowly of thirst as the sun burned them like rotting grapes. Danei had recognized some of the men, the fathers and brothers of friends, his cousins, a maternal uncle. While the men died overhead, the Persians had herded the boys onto the open decks and divided them into categories: the galleys, the mines, whores, eunuchs ….

  Danei stared after the Spartan until he turned a corner and was lost from sight, and still he stared after him, trying to remember with every nerve of his body what he had said. A man’s heart, not his extremities…. The image of his father, dressed as he had been the day he sailed away for the last time…. His father had died a free man…. The sons of such men…. He turned and looked at the saleswoman in wonder.