by Tim Leach
There was silence for a moment.
‘Very well,’ Cyrus said. ‘Leave us. My men will give you food and wine—’
‘No wine,’ the messenger said. ‘Just water.’
‘As you wish. You will have your response soon enough. Now go.’
Croesus watched the messenger walk away, his gait the strangely awkward one of a man whose legs and hips had shaped themselves to a horse’s barrel chest from a lifetime in the saddle.
‘What do you think?’ the king said to his council, and it was Cambyses who spoke first.
‘We can defeat them wherever we fight under your leadership,’ the king’s son said. ‘Why worry about which side of the river the battle is held?’ Cambyses smiled. ‘You and I could fight them alone, Father, do you not think?’
Croesus could not help but wince at this. This council, which had fought and won a hundred battles without loss, approached war with respect to the gods and careful planning, not the empty promise of heroics. And Cambyses, feeling the quality of the silence and knowing that he had blundered, dropped his head and looked to the ground.
‘Thank you, my son,’ the king said slowly. ‘Your bravery, it is commendable. Now, Harpagus? What were you going to say?’
‘Let them come over to this side. When we defeat them, we shall drive them into the river.’
There were nods from the other men in the room. Cyrus looked to his slave. ‘Croesus? What do you think?’
‘I am not much of a strategist.’
‘Surprise me. Give me some of that original thinking.’
‘Very well. No one has mentioned the possibility that we might lose.’
The king did not reply for a time. ‘Well,’ Cyrus said at last, ‘that is an original thought. We outnumber them. They fight with brass, we fight with iron. We will not lose.’
‘But we could. It may be bad strategy to fight with your back against a river. But if we lose on that side of the river, your empire is protected. If we lose on this side, there’s nothing to stop them from sweeping down through the northern kingdoms as well.’
Cyrus laughed. A hard-edged, mocking laugh that Croesus had never heard before. ‘I asked for original thinking,’ the king said. ‘Not something that a child might say. We have fought the greatest armies in the world, and you think we will lose to these horsemen? That is the kind of thinking that lost you your own kingdom.’ Now laughter broke around the tent, Cambyses loudest of all.
The king turned to Harpagus. ‘We will bring them to our side, as you suggest. Give the word to the army—’
‘Very well,’ Croesus snapped. ‘Let them say Cyrus the Great gave ground before a woman. If that is how you want to be remembered, so be it!’
Silence followed. The sharp silence that is a prelude to disaster.
‘Out,’ Cyrus said softly. ‘All of you.’
The others filed slowly from the tent, and Croesus got to his feet, clasped his hands behind his back. He waited for the rebuke and the announcement of his punishment. But no words came. He lifted his head, and saw that the king was not looking at him, but was still sitting and staring listlessly into thin air.
On their last day in Babylon, before the long march to this northern frontier, Croesus remembered that he had been called to the king’s chamber, and had found Cyrus arguing with one of his wives, Cassandane. Dark-eyed and beautiful, she spoke insistently, in some dialect that he did not understand. Whether she were trying to dissuade him from marching, or seeking some last gesture of love, he did not know.
The king had said nothing to her. Not a single word. It was only when he had turned away from his wife that Croesus had seen that Cyrus was not angry or sorrowful. He had been blank-eyed, as he was now. He seemed driven not by thought or desire, but by some irresistible compulsion.
‘Why are we here, master?’
At last, Cyrus looked at him. ‘There was a time when you would not have dared speak to me like that,’ he said.
‘Call it the privilege of age. A king’s wrath is less intimidating to an old man.’
‘You are angry at me?’
‘You told me once that the wars were finished. That we would stay in Babylon. And now, we are here. I just want to know why.’
‘I do not know, Croesus. I am sure there was a reason, once. But I have forgotten it. Perhaps we should not be here. I think that God has punished me for it.’
‘Why, master?’
Cyrus bowed his head into his hands. The king had always had an energy to him that was almost tangible. Now, Croesus thought it was still there, but much diminished. It is possible to feel the cold more acutely in the presence of a dying fire than in front of no fire at all. That was how Croesus felt in front of Cyrus, like a man shivering in front of a failing fire.
‘Another message came today,’ the king said, his head still in his hands. ‘From Babylon. I have told no one of it.’
‘What does it say?’
Cyrus looked up at him, and his eyes were without hope. ‘My wife is dying,’ he said.
Croesus did not reply. Some of the king’s wives had been taken for passion, some for diplomacy. Before he had marched the army north to the plains, he had even sent a proposal to Tomyris of the Massagetae, seeking to win her kingdom through marriage. But there was only one woman that he could be speaking of now.
‘Cassandane has caught a fever,’ the king said. ‘The surgeons say that it will kill her. I love her, more than any of the others. More than I have ever loved anyone. I never said that to her. I thought I would have more time.’
‘I am sure that she knows, master.’
Cyrus did not seem to hear him. ‘I wonder if she is dead already,’ he said. ‘It has taken that rider many days to reach us. I think that she must be.’
‘I am sorry, master.’
‘Tell me what I should do. I know what to do when the odds are against me. I’ve fought many battles that way. But I do not know what to do with the impossible.’
‘You think that I do?’ said Croesus.
‘You were a great king once. Now you are a slave. For you to still be living is an impossibility. And yet here you are. I think you have found your way out of many impossibilities in your time.’ Cyrus tried to smile, but there was no joy in it. ‘What should I do?’
Croesus tried to remember his own wife. She had taken her life the day his city had fallen, the day he lost his freedom. The truth, he realized, was that he could not remember her, and he knew that this was the truth that Cyrus was not ready to hear – that he would forget Cassandane, would be glad to forget her and the pain of her. That he would be left with only an absent hollow, like a lake that has been lost with the passing of time and leaves nothing but a scattering of stones, the worn bones of fish that drowned in the air, to mark where it once was.
‘Write to her,’ he said. ‘Think of all that you want to say to her, and write it down.’
‘She will never live to read such a letter. What good can that do?’
‘None. But write it anyway.’
Cyrus gave an almost imperceptible nod. ‘I will. And I will think on what you said.’ The king turned his head aside, and Croesus knew that he had been dismissed. He bowed deeply and left the tent, glad to go back into air, and light.
Back inside, the king sat still and alone in silence for a time. He beckoned to a servant to bring him a small table, clay and a stylus. When they were laid in front of him, he placed his hands on the clay and closed his eyes for a moment, like a man at prayer.
He opened them again, and began to write.
3
Near to the river, there was a point where the ground sloped up slightly. It could not be called a hill, but it was as close as the plains came to such a thing. It was from this point that a solitary nomad watched the Persian army.
The Massagetae feared the lone rider on the plains more than a marching army. It was the mark of a madman if he rode hard, driving his horse to death to run from the phantoms of his mind. If he ro
de hunched low on his saddle, he had been flogged and cast out of his tribe for some crime or betrayal. Either way, to ride alone was a death sentence for the nomads. No man could survive on the plains alone for long, and no other tribe would take in a rider with scars on his back or a madman’s words falling from his tongue. They made an exception only for the mystic, who wanders between tribes the way a river meanders through the plains, belonging to all and none at the same time.
This lone rider was such a man; he had gone to the high place by the river to fast and meditate. Every few years, he would ride out from the tribe he had adopted to spend some time in contemplation; then he would wait and see what other home he could find, taking up with whatever tribe happened to come along first.
He had heard of the call to arms that Queen Tomyris had put out, summoning every warrior of the plains to gather together and resist the Persian advance. Such things held no interest for him. What was a man’s attempt to carve up the land one way or another, when the Sun proclaimed his sole mastery at every dawn?
The army below might mean his death. Not through direct action; even if their scouts had come across him, a solitary man would be of no interest to them, his old horse not worth stealing. But they had driven away every tribe that might have given him shelter for ten parasangs in every direction. The plains were filled with the skeletons of holy men who had cast themselves into the sea of the steppe and had not found safe passage with another tribe. He might join them soon, yet he bore the army no grudge. If it was his time, it was his time. His dreaming life would be over, and his spirit would sink into the grasslands that he had made his home, would travel to the next world. As a mystic he knew what the afterlife looked like; he had seen it in his dreams. It was an endless plain, a mirror of this world. It held no fear for him.
He meditated and waited for several days, watching as a group of Massagetae boats arrived to meet the Persians, as the army gathered itself and prepared to cross the great river. On the third day, he saw that the dawn was the deep shade of red, the colour of omens, that told him it was time to move on. He would ride south with the sun at his left hand and see what his fate held for him.
Though the war between the Massagetae and the Persians did not matter to him, on a whim, the mystic decided to cast an augury before he rode out, more for practice than out of any genuine curiosity. He carved the sigils into the earth in blessing of the Sun, carefully wiping the blade free of dirt and muttering an apology to the god that he had no better sacrifice to offer. He took up the rabbit he had snared that day. It kicked weakly against the leather thongs that bound it, trying to squirm free of his hand. He knocked it between the ears with the butt of knife and opened its throat with the bronze blade. He let the blood soak into the marked earth, then opened its belly and spread its entrails cleanly.
Looking down into the red knots of flesh, he read the outcome of the battle that would soon be fought. He clucked his tongue in surprise at what he saw. Then he swung into the saddle and rode south, leaving the army to its destiny and going in search of his own.
Beside the river, Croesus watched the boats come from the other side, dozens of sturdy, simple craft made from bone and leather. He watched those Persians who had experience of river and sea come forward to check that the boats had not somehow been rigged to sink. One by one they disembarked, signalling to their companions that there was no trick. The captains moved back through the army, shouting and gesturing, trying to impose some kind of order, to move close to a hundred thousand people across the water.
Croesus looked away. Down near the river’s edge, he saw a figure sitting by himself, tearing up clumps of rushes and throwing them into the fast-flowing water, a pair of bodyguards sitting a discreet way off.
When Croesus drew close enough for his footsteps to be heard, Cambyses turned his way. The young man leaned forward, blinked and stared, but it was not until Croesus was very near that the prince seemed to recognize him. His eyes were growing weak as the years passed, and already he had the frail vision of an old man three times his age. Cyrus had brought doctors and medicine men from countless different lands, but none of their treatments had worked. Croesus had heard rumours that Cyrus had sent emissaries as far as Egypt, hoping that their old knowledge could provide some kind of a cure. None spoke of it, but all feared that the prince would one day be blind. And a blind man could not rule.
‘May I join you, my prince?’
Cambyses shrugged and turned back to the river. Croesus sat a respectful distance away.
‘I am sorry that I laughed at you,’ Cambyses said. ‘Before, in my father’s tent.’
‘You never have to apologize to me, Cambyses.’
‘I know. But I wanted to, anyway.’ He tossed another piece of grass into the river. ‘Anyway, he took your advice. I embarrassed him, and so he ignored what I said.’
‘A whim of the king. A favour to an old man. It means nothing.’
‘No,’ Cambyses said. ‘He did what you suggested because he respects you. He does not respect me. I disappoint him. That is true, is it not?’
‘We all disappoint our fathers. But they forgive us.’
‘I do not want to be forgiven.’ Cambyses looked out across the river, at the plains. ‘I hate this place,’ he said, and Croesus wondered just what the other man could see of the plains, with his eyes as weak as they were. Perhaps in mountainous country he could still see the ridges and peaks, and near the sea he could hear the sound of the rolling waves. A city would be alive with sound and colour, and have its own appeal to the near-blind man. Out here, he saw only an empty world.
‘I wish I was with my family,’ the young man said.
‘I understand. I miss my friends as well, master.’
‘You have friends?’
Croesus almost laughed at the baldness of the question, but saw that Cambyses was quite serious. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘Two slaves, like me. Hellenes, from the coast and the islands. Isocrates, and Maia.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘In Pasargadae. They are helping to build your father’s palace there.’ He thought for a moment, and smiled to himself. ‘Isocrates will be organizing things as usual. He would have made a good king, if things had been different.’
‘You have told him this?’
‘Oh, no. He would be insulted if I did.’ He paused. ‘I do not know what Maia will be doing. But I am sure she will find some way to make herself useful.’
‘You will see them again soon?’
‘If the gods will it.’
‘I hope I will see my mother as well. I miss her.’
‘Yes,’ Croesus said slowly. ‘I hope you do.’
‘Why did you come to me, Croesus?’ Cambyses said. ‘None of the others want to talk to me.’
‘They do not presume to intrude on your time as I do, master.’
‘No,’ Cambyses said flatly. ‘That is not it. Perhaps soon I will understand why they hate me.’ Then the prince stood, and strode off without another word.
Croesus sat on the bank alone for a time. He thought of his own sons.
One he had buried long ago. The other, Gyges, a mute Croesus had mistaken for a madman, had been taken as a slave when Sardis fell. Many years later, in Babylon, Croesus had sent him away with a family of horse traders so that his son could be free of the city that threatened to drive him insane. Those who took Gyges in had been Massagetae.
Croesus had never thought that Cyrus’s army would come this far. He imagined where his son might be, out somewhere in this vast plain. He had no fear that Gyges would be in the army that waited for them beyond the river. He had never done anything that he did not want to. You could no more hand a spear to him and expect him to use it than you could command a dog to eat grass. Perhaps, he thought, that was at the root of the boy’s strangeness. What had been mistaken for madness was simple resolve to be who he was, not what he was commanded to be. He wondered whether his son still lived, what place he had found amongst the p
eople of the plains.
Nearby, Croesus could hear a familiar voice calling out orders to his men. He looked over his shoulder and saw Harpagus stalking through the army, leaving shaken captains in his wake, orders ringing in their ears. Croesus waved to Harpagus, and the general looked at the slave with a sour twist in his mouth. He turned, gave one particularly barbed set of commands to the soldier who stood to attention close by, then wandered over to join the old slave on the banks of the channel.
‘I see you are shirking your duties to stare at a river,’ the general said.
‘When I was a king,’ said Croesus, ‘there was a man in my court called Thales. He seemed to spend all his time staring at the sun and the moon and the stars, and they called him a philosopher for it. I have seen many great rivers in my life. The Pactolus, the Halys, the Euphrates. Now this one. Perhaps I could be a philosopher of the rivers. What do you think?’
‘I hope you like crossing them as much as you seem to like staring at them. And I hope you are pleased that Cyrus has ignored my advice to indulge your fantasies.’
‘I do not suppose that’s what you had in mind when you took me to the council. My apologies.’
‘No matter. We shall win either way.’
‘I am sure you are right.’ Croesus stretched his feet forward, and felt the cool water run over them. ‘Why are you here, Harpagus?’
‘I came to rescue you from the prince.’
‘I needed no rescuing. I am fond of him.’
Harpagus raised an eyebrow.
‘That is unworthy of you, Harpagus.’
‘He is not a king yet. I wonder if he ever will be,’ Harpagus said. ‘What do you see in him?’
‘Something of my sons, perhaps. I have buried one, and the other is lost to me. I miss them. You must forgive an old man his indulgences.’
‘Oh, I shall try.’
They sat for a time on the bank of the river, two old men looking out on the running water.
‘I have an interesting plan for when we get to the other side,’ Harpagus said, breaking the silence.