The King and the Slave

by Tim Leach

  It took only a moment to see what would happen. The Egyptians stood their ground as best they could, and one who had never seen a battle before might have thought the two sides evenly matched. But, after only a short time, Croesus saw where the Egyptian flanks were already beginning to draw back. Just a little, but he knew it would be enough.

  From the edge of the battlefield, over the course of an hour, he watched as the Persian line reached around on both sides, like ten thousand creeping fingers. First, they drove the Egyptian army into an uneven line, then they began to fold it into a curve, a horseshoe, the way a man might break a branch in two, bending both ends against one another. They were driving it into a circle from which there could be no escape.

  At last, the circle was closed.

  As the Egyptians fought and died in their thousands, Croesus watched and tried to think only of the desert, a purifying place of heat and emptiness, where all this would be forgotten. Where he and the king might learn to forget together.

  When the killing was over, the king gathered his councillors to him again, among them Chephren, appearing unmoved by the slaughter of his countrymen, and Prexaspes, untouched by the battle, for his wars were fought entirely within palace walls. They came to the king, but one amongst them was missing.

  They waited in silence for a time, to see if Phanes would come to them from the field of the slain, perhaps bearing a wound that would explain his delay. Then they waited for others to find the man, though none doubted by then what must have happened. At last, a messenger came from the field, to tell them what they already knew.

  The soldiers cleared a path through the sea of the dead so that the king’s horse would have no chance to trip and throw him; a corridor of reddened sand, flanked by five thousand dead on each side. Looking down, Croesus saw how most of them had died without a wound on them, run down or crushed to death without having given or received a blow. That, he thought, was something that none of the stories of war told you.

  They found Phanes with his sons, the bright new blood laid over the old blood in the ground, the dagger still gripped tight in his hand, his throat opened like a sacrifice on the altar.

  Croesus remembered how the Hellenes believed the spirits of the dead are restlessly thirsty, that they wander through the afterlife like dying men in a silent desert, that only the blood of the living can satisfy this thirst. Perhaps that is what Phanes wished to buy with his life – one last gift from a father to his sons, to ease their suffering in the next world with a gift of blood.

  ‘Why did he do it?’ Cambyses said at last.

  ‘Master?’

  ‘I would have given him a kingdom. Why did he do it?’

  ‘They took his children, master.’

  ‘Yes, that is true,’ said the king. ‘So that is the worst thing, Croesus?’

  ‘Master?’

  ‘To lose your children.’

  ‘Yes. Yes it is.’

  ‘The worst thing I could do to someone?’

  Croesus hesitated, caught. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am glad I have no sons. And I am glad that I know this.’

  ‘Why, master?’

  Cambyses tilted his head towards Prexaspes. ‘The Pharaoh is dead. Or so Prexaspes tells me.’

  ‘Amasis died in battle?’

  ‘No,’ said Prexaspes. ‘He died of a sickness.’

  ‘Before he even knew that we were coming,’ said Cambyses. ‘If he had only known that we were going to destroy him. He died believing that he had won, that his trick had worked. But it does not matter. Chephren tells me that he has a son.’

  ‘Psamtek,’ the oculist said.

  ‘I will have my revenge on his son, Psamtek. On the sons of his son. You have given me that, Croesus. Thank you.’

  The king had a strange expression on his face, and Croesus thought at first that it was some sign of doubt, or of mercy. Then he realized the truth of it. The king was trying not to smile.

  ‘What will you do, master?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much.’ He looked at Croesus, and let the smile fully emerge. ‘When we have taken Memphis, I will have a parade. That is all.’

  4

  On the outskirts of Memphis, there was a short stone tower, open topped. It had been built for the Pharaohs to sit and watch the great displays of power. A victorious army returning to the capital, a procession in supplication to the thousand gods of Egypt, a burial train for a nobleman, the arrival of the harvest from the banks of the Nile.

  Now, Cambyses sat on the shaded wooden throne that had once been reserved for the Egyptian ruler, his face painted in a mocking imitation of the style of the Pharaohs. Croesus sat to his left, and Psamtek, Pharaoh for only six months, was bound to a chair on his right. This son of Amasis was a little less than forty years old. Younger than I was when I lost my kingdom, Croesus thought.

  They sat in silence for a long time. Then distantly, but growing closer, Croesus could hear the drums. The approach of the parade.

  The women came first, the wives and daughters of the Egyptian noblemen. Most were little more than girls, and many were children, all of them dressed in the filthy rags of slaves, each one struggling to carry an urn of water from which they were forbidden to drink.

  Fringing the group, laughing and dancing, were the prostitutes of Memphis. They were the worst of the city’s whores; their faces gouged with disease, their hair crawling with lice. They were dressed in silk and linen and gold, all the finery of the nobility gifted to them, queens for a day. They flirted with the soldiers, and spat and clawed at the women who now wore their rags. And at the front of this procession of whores and noblewomen, her face marked out with a stripe of excrement, was Amasis’s only daughter, the one he had hoped to save from marrying Cambyses, now given as a common whore to the Persian army.

  On seeing her, Cambyses laughed. ‘She’s an ugly girl, is she not?’ he said to the Egyptian king. ‘There was no need for all this trouble. If your father had sent her to me, I would have sent her back.’ Psamtek did not reply. His face had not changed at all, even as his sister and daughters marched by, shamed and violated. Cambyses turned back to the procession. ‘Look, Psamtek,’ he said, pointing at the next group to arrive. ‘Here come your boys.’

  Two thousand men walked barefoot on the hot stones, twenty columns of a hundred, marching to the beat of the drums. They carried metal bits in their teeth and wore bridles on their heads. Each one was roped by the mouth to the man behind, the taut hemp cutting furrows in the flesh of their necks. They were the sons and brothers and cousins of the Egyptian nobility. Their execution ground lay a short distance ahead of them, in full view of the stone tower. There, a regiment of Persian soldiers leaned in boredom against their spears, waiting for the killing to begin.

  To his horror, Croesus saw that the men of the column struggled and fought against each other. Some walked forward quickly, going eagerly to their deaths, wanting nothing more than an end to pain and shame. Others moved as slowly as they could in spite of their suffering, trying to snatch some last sensation from the world, some treasured memory from their minds, before both sense and memory were taken from them for ever. Each pace the column took was a wretched tug of war between the slow and the quick.

  Still, Psamtek did not cry; even when his sons walked past, marching to the killing field, his face remained quite still. Cambyses frowned, disappointed. He had nothing more to show the Egyptian. He opened his mouth to speak, to find some goad that might finally break his prisoner, but before he could say anything more, a new sound interrupted him. Another group was approaching, trailing after the men and women, streaming in from the city.

  They were beggars. The deformed, the mad, the blind and the deaf. Hundreds of them moving in a ragged mob, those who could not walk leaning against those who could not see, those who could not see listening to the barked, contradictory directions of the mad to find their way. Codependent, more like some vast, misshapen entity than a crowd of individuals, they made their way to
wards the tower, a besieging army of the destitute.

  They cared nothing for the war between the Egyptians and the Persians, too sickly to be press-ganged into the fight, too poor to have anything to lose in defeat. Most had not even been aware that the war was being fought, lost as they were in the battles of their own private madness, or in the more immediate conflicts in the streets of Memphis, their own struggles against hunger and disease. But a festival was something they did understand; a place where money and food would be given freely, where even the cruel would forget their cruelty for a day. They had heard the distant drums and marching feet and seen the soldiers round up the prostitutes, a sure sign that a festival was about to begin. They roused themselves from the doorways of temples, the rooftops of abandoned buildings, the ditches outside the city walls, the broken-open tombs of the dead that served as their resting places. They woke and gathered and marched to the stone tower, puzzling when they arrived that the only men there were the soldiers and the condemned. Still they came forward, hoping for bread or coin enough to last another day.

  Psamtek stared out into crowd of beggars, his face suddenly deformed with grief. At first, Croesus thought he had finally been broken by the sounds of execution. The marching columns had reached the killing ground, and somewhere amongst them Psamtek’s sons were dying. But as Croesus followed his gaze, he saw that the Pharaoh was looking at one man in particular from the crowd.

  The beggar returned the Egyptian king’s stare, and broke from the mob. An old man, older even than Croesus, who walked with the deliberate, unsteady steps that children and the elderly share. He came towards the tower, his eyes bright with hope. He seemed not to understand that Psamtek was no longer a man who could dispense favours, that the Pharaoh could no longer even help himself.

  Psamtek sobbed once, clapped both hands over his mouth. He did not cover his eyes, perhaps hoping that the beggar would be revealed as an illusion, the way dreams crumble under the sight of the waking mind. The old man did not disappear, hobbling closer and closer, both palms held up in supplication.

  ‘Who is that man?’ Cambyses asked.

  The Egyptian let his hands fall from his mouth. ‘A friend of mine,’ he said in a monotone. ‘He was wealthy once, and happy. Now he is a beggar.’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  Psamtek looked at the king. ‘My own suffering is beyond tears. But my friend, reduced to a beggar in his old age, all hope taken from him. I can cry for that.’

  Croesus looked down again at the old beggar. He came forward to the tower, his hesitant, hopeful palms extended, and the guards around the tower watched him approach. Once he had come close enough, crossing some invisible, arbitrary line, one of them stepped forward and pushed the beggar back. Undeterred, the beggar circled round and tried again. This time, the guard kicked him to the ground and barked a curse at him. The beggar tried one last time to break through. Another guard swung up the butt of his spear, and the beggar fell, blood pouring from his nose. Without uttering a cry or complaint, the beggar picked himself up, and tottered back to rejoin his companions.

  Croesus stared at the king, who looked back and forth from Psamtek to the beggar, a confused, satisfied smile on his face. He remembered the king as a boy, always serious; for him, even games seemed to have so much at stake. Cambyses had hated to be scolded, always appearing on the verge of some terrible humiliation that would wound him for days and weeks. But he always had, like all children, the aching need to be loved. It had emanated from every part of him. Now that had gone. The king had given up all hope of such things, and replaced it with something else.

  Croesus faced the parade once more, closed his eyes and listened to the screams of dying men. What a thing it was, to be an old man and to see such things, to have no hope of living long enough to forget them. There was always hope for the young, that the world would heal and be reshaped as the decades pass, if only you could survive to see it. An old man looks on the broken world that surrounds him, and knows he will die there.

  Croesus found he was crying. He did not know when or how he had started, but now the traitor tears spilled from his eyes like a confession. He turned his head from the king, but it was no use. Cambyses had already noticed.

  ‘Stop crying, Croesus.’

  Croesus nodded, but the tears continued to fall. ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Stop!’

  ‘I cannot.’

  The king hissed. What order he wanted to give, Croesus did not know. A command of punishment, banishment, execution. But before Cambyses had the chance to speak, the king saw that Psamtek had stopped crying and was looking at him. The Persian courtiers observed him. Even his guards were watching him in silent judgement. Under their eyes, Cambyses hesitated.

  ‘Even I can be forgiving, Psamtek,’ he said slowly, trying to find the words, like an actor recalling a long-forgotten part. He glanced at Croesus, as if the slave were a prompt. ‘You shall enter my service, Psamtek. The way Croesus has.’ He glanced at those around him, and found them expecting more. ‘Your sons will be spared as well,’ he said. Beside him, Prexaspes shook his head. ‘Ah,’ Cambyses said. ‘It seems we are too late for that.’

  Croesus stared out to the execution ground. Half of the two thousand had been killed already, and the others marched patiently forward into the thrusting spears, stumbling over the corpses of the dead to find their own private place to die. The Pharaoh’s sons, at the head of the column, would have been amongst the first to be killed. They had missed their reprieve by a matter of minutes.

  ‘Never mind,’ Cambyses said. He leaned forward and placed a brotherly hand on Psamtek’s shoulder. ‘Let us go and see your father.’

  When they broke open the tomb, Croesus braced himself to smell, once again, the stench of the dead. But when the trapped air of the burial chamber flowed out over them, there was only a soft, alien combination of odours. The sickly scent of dry spices, a hot smell a little like leather.

  The soldiers removed the remaining stones that sealed the chamber, and began to loot the treasures that had been buried with Amasis. There was no time to differentiate between priceless relics and worthless clay totems or embalmed animals. Everything went into the soldiers’ sacks, to be categorized later. The most valuable would be sold or traded in the markets, the gaudy and worthless would be given as gifts to lovers, the religious relics would be discarded entirely. Cambyses let them do as they pleased. It was the soldiers’ reward for their part in the blasphemy. He ignored all of the relics, walked forward to the sarcophagus, and gave an order to his bodyguards. With bronze levers, they prised the lid off.

  A man lay sleeping there. For a moment, Croesus wondered if the Egyptians had enacted some strange conjuring trick, some unfathomable joke, by placing a sleeping man in the tomb of Amasis and hiding the old Pharaoh’s body elsewhere. Then he looked closer, and saw that the skin was stiff and dry, that what he had mistaken for the colour of life were dry whorls of paint. Croesus had heard of the skill of the Egyptian embalmers, of corpses that could survive a thousand years without a single sign of decay. This was the first time he had seen their work for himself.

  He saw that Cambyses was smiling. Perhaps it pleased the king that the body still had the illusion of life. That it still resembled a living thing, on which he could extract his revenge. A living thing that would feel pain.

  The king turned and gestured. The torturers came forward.

  The three of them laid out their tools, uncoiled their whips, struck fire from flint and tinder and began to heat the stones and boil pans of water, motions as practised and ordinary to them as a merchant laying out his wares. If they found the task they had been given strange, they showed no sign of it. They understood the relationship between pain and truth. Inflict enough pain, and a truth would emerge. What truth could be extracted from a corpse was not their concern. If they inflicted enough pain, even on a body that could not feel it, eventually Cambyses would be satisfied.

  ‘Begin.’r />
  They started with the whips, and soon the small chamber echoed with the dull thud of leather against dead flesh. They whipped his genitals, the soles of his feet, his mouth and his eyes. After a time, the torturers traded their plain leather whips for those with spikes and barbed pieces of iron and let the strokes fall harder and more heavily, but the skin would not part beneath their blows.

  They took their pliers and pulled out his fingernails. They tore out his hair, in single strands and great clumps. They held the corpse’s nose and poured torrents of boiling water down his throat. They took half a dozen foot-long iron spikes and pierced the corpse with them, tapping them in gently with hammers, placing them carefully to miss the vital organs that were no longer there, sheering through nerves that could no longer feel pain. Finally, they took their tongs and picked up the stones that were now red with heat. They inserted the stones into his anus, under his armpits, upon his testicles and his palms. One of them broke the corpse’s jaw and prised it open, and put another coal into his mouth.

  Cambyses watched in silence at first, his fists slowly clenching and unclenching. Occasionally he would mutter something to himself that Croesus could not hear. Then as the torture continued, he spoke more often, and louder.

  He began with curses on Amasis, on the man’s family and on his country, repeated again and again like a sorcerer’s incantations. Soon he was speaking so rapidly that Croesus could barely make out what he was saying. He could hear only names – the names of the people that Cambyses hated. Sometimes, Croesus could hear Cambyses screaming his own name. Sometimes he shouted his father’s name.

  He leaned forward and screamed into the dead man’s ears, while the torturers continued around him, leaning over and under him, waiting patiently for him to move so they could access certain parts to work upon.

  After the stones had been placed, he pushed the torturers aside impatiently. He climbed onto the sarcophagus and straddled the corpse, began hitting it with open-handed blows to the face and neck. Stiff with death, the entire body moved as one under his strokes, the feet jerking as the head was struck. He stepped down and pulled out his sword and began to cut into the dead man. Bloodless wounds opened, but the body would not come to pieces. The embalming had made the tendons and joints like stone, and try as he might, the king could not destroy the corpse.