by Tim Leach
Croesus returned to the palace, but he did not go in search of the king. Instead, through questioning those he passed, he looked for Psamtek. Croesus expected to find him in some communal chamber of slaves, but he soon found that the Egyptian had been given a chamber of his own, and had retired there. Quite the honour for a slave, he thought, and was surprised at the jealousy the thought provoked.
When he found it, in some near-forgotten corner of the palace, he saw to his satisfaction that it was not the grand private room of a nobleman. It was an old store chamber, a piece of rough fabric across the entrance converting the room to a private space. There was no guard there, and so Croesus at first assumed that Psamtek could not be inside. He would not have been left alone, unescorted. Yet, when he drew closer, he heard a gasp from behind the cloth, a little stifled cry of pain.
Croesus hesitated there, for he had no desire to intrude on the man’s private grief. He remembered his own suffering when he had been taken as a slave – months where, seemingly out of nothing, a great and terrible pain would strike him down, the pain of a man mourning for his lost freedom, his lost future. But, whether it was from empathy or curiosity or through fate, he lifted the piece of cloth, and looked in on a scene from a nightmare.
Blood ran on the floor. More, impossibly more than it seemed a single man could hold in his body, yet Psamtek still lived, hunched over on his knees in the centre of the chamber, a red stream pouring from his left wrist. In his other hand was a broken shard of pottery, the only blade that he had been able to improvise. In a moment, Croesus took in the many shallow reddish scores on the Egyptian’s arm, the tiny crumbled pieces of clay on the ground in front of him. He must have tried half a dozen times, each piece giving way just as he found the courage to make the cut, until he had found one strong enough to open the vein. He looked up at the intruder, his teeth bared, a man interrupted in a brutal, private act.
In a moment, Croesus was on his knees and at the other man’s side. Psamtek tried to fight free of his grip, scrabbling back into the corner of the room. Croesus pursued him, slipping on the bloody floor, tearing a strip from his tunic and pressing it to the wound.
Psamtek had made a bad cut – deep but poorly placed. It was not surprising that he did not know the art of self-destruction, for what need did a king have of such knowledge? The Egyptian could not have imagined that dying could be so difficult.
Still, Psamtek fought to die, clubbing at Croesus with a closed fist, pushing at the old slave’s face and trying to tear himself free. But he was not strong enough, in body or in will. His traitor muscles, knowing that they were fighting for their own destruction, gave no force to his blows. After a time, which could have been moments or minutes or hours, Psamtek stopped fighting. Whatever courage he had, he had used it up in a single cut. Croesus felt the Egyptian go limp, and lean against his shoulder. Keeping one hand pressed against the wound, he put his other around Psamtek’s back, and held him close. He waited in that strange embrace for the blood to cease flowing, like a man waiting for the changing of the tides. At last, when the wound had closed, Psamtek slumped back defeated against the wall, cradled his head and wept.
From a jar of water in the corner of the room, Croesus poured out two bowls. He carefully washed the blood from his hands and arms and face in the first, then took up the other, and drank it down in a single long swallow. He refilled it, and brought it back to Psamtek, but the Egyptian would not drink.
‘The Second Death?’ Croesus said, after a long silence. ‘Your father?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you must live, and remember him. That will prevent it, will it not?’
‘That is no use. I will die soon.’
Croesus tore more cloth from his tunic, and began carefully to bind the Egyptian’s arm. Psamtek did not resist. ‘I thought I would die when I became a slave,’ Croesus said. ‘But I have lived a long time.’
‘Are you glad of it?’
‘Yes. I do not know why, but I am. Perhaps it is nothing more than cowardice.’
‘I think it is cowardice,’ Psamtek said. He looked at his wound. ‘But I cannot be brave again.’
‘I will stay here tonight. I will not watch you after this.’ He pointed to the wound on the other man’s arm. ‘You may try this again. But if you want to live, I can teach you. If you want to learn.’
‘Why would you do this?’
‘Because someone once taught me.’
They fell into silence.
‘You do not need to stay,’ Psamtek said, after a long time. ‘I will not do it again.’ He paused. ‘What is it you live for? Why have you not done this yourself?’
Croesus drank again from the bowl of water, wiped the drops from his whitened beard with the back of his hand. ‘Once, I wanted a happy life,’ he said. ‘Then I wanted a good life, and thought I had found a way to live it. Now it seems that will be taken from me as well. All I have left is the hope of a good death.’ He passed the bowl to Psamtek, and the Egyptian took it.
‘And what is a good death?’
‘There are only two that I know of. One is to die an old man, with your children at your side. The other, to fall in battle, a great enemy dead at your feet.’
‘And which do you seek?’
Croesus paused. ‘I have no children left,’ he said.
Psamtek drank the water, leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. He was silent for so long that Croesus thought he must have fallen asleep. Then he said: ‘I am not like you. Perhaps I do still have something to live for.’
‘What is that?’
‘That is my concern, is it not?’
‘Of course. As you wish.’
‘I am glad that you stopped me,’ the Egyptian said. ‘And I think you are fortunate, Croesus.’
‘Why?’
Psamtek looked at him, his expression alien, unknowable.
‘Because you are an old man,’ he said. ‘You will die soon, and will not see what is to come.’
6
In the months that followed the fall of Memphis, Croesus, old as he was, sought to learn a new art: the murderer’s lonely contemplation. He had never thought before of how close death was, and now he saw it everywhere. Every piece of fabric seemed a garrotte to him, every hard surface – the stone hand of a statue, the pointed corner of a table – something to force a skull against. His hands wandered restlessly towards any object that might fit his hand, testing weight and sharpness. For all this, he did not yet know if he had the courage to kill, to die in the act of killing. He watched the king, empty of hope, waiting for some opportunity to find out.
Perhaps if they had left the palace of Memphis a chance might have offered itself. At night on the road, in the quiet corner of a temple, some moment in battle where all eyes looked outward, and none thought to watch the slave at the king’s side. But Cambyses would not leave the palace. His brother and sister arrived by boat at the dock of the city, and he did not come out to meet them. A great festival was organized by some ambitious local men eager to gain favour with their new master, but the king refused to attend. Each time a courtier suggested, gently or indirectly, that he might wish to go out and survey his new kingdom, they were met with snarls and curses. He remained within the palace at Memphis, but he did not languish in his throne room, or remain in his bedchamber like an invalid. He was constantly on the move, like a man looking for something he had lost and only half remembered. As he stalked from room to room, it was as though the palace was his empire, each chamber an unruly province that threatened rebellion, in need of supervision and suppression.
His entourage followed him on these endless circuits of the palace, Prexaspes, silent and attentive as ever, with Psamtek taking the place of Phanes at the king’s right hand. Croesus trailed a few spaces behind them all, for he could not match the king’s rapid footsteps, and it was only when his master paused in one chamber or another that he could catch up with the group. As they walked in the corridors, Cambyses would som
etimes look back and smile at him, and then increase his pace a little. It was as if he knew what Croesus was thinking about, knew he only had to stay ahead of him, like an antelope outpacing an old and starving lion for days on end, waiting for it to lie down and die.
Croesus was not privy to the king’s business. Few were, it seemed. Each day, emissaries were dispatched, but he did not know to where they travelled or what messages they carried. One day, word came that a great part of the army had marched west from the city, the generals and captains given sealed commands. But none seemed to know where they marched, or why.
From time to time Cambyses would cease his wanderings and speak to Croesus, but the old slave seemed to hold scant interest for the king. He received only a few stilted questions, spoken more out of some sense of obligation than anything else, the way a man with little taste for riding will feel obliged to take out an expensive horse from his stable. They never spoke for long, and never alone.
It was not until a month had passed in the palace that the opportunity came.
When he went to the king’s chamber that morning he found Cambyses waiting for him without his entourage, a single bodyguard his only company. Croesus opened his mouth to speak, but the king shook a finger at him, then beckoned for the slave to follow. In all the king’s restless wanderings, Croesus thought he had seen every part of the palace. But, as they walked, he soon found himself in corridors he had never been to. It might be, Croesus thought, that the king’s movements were deliberately disorientating, that he wished to share every place in the palace with his followers except for this one.
They came to a guarded door, and one of the spearman who stood there started when he saw Croesus, looking at the king in surprise. It seemed he was not used to seeing the king come here in company. They passed through the door, working deeper and deeper into the palace, and as they walked, Croesus prepared himself for what the king would show him. A torture chamber, perhaps, some elaborate dungeon where the king practised the most secret cruelties. A mausoleum, where Cambyses would toy with the preserved bodies of the Egyptian dead, like a child playing with painted wooden dolls.
The last door opened, and he stepped not into some place of forbidden violence, but a balcony that overlooked a garden.
It was a Persian garden in its infancy – the trees were saplings, the grasses newly planted. Perhaps Maia had been at work here, had been commanded to Egypt for this sole purpose, to bring the gardens of Babylon and Pasargadae to the land of the Pharaohs.
It should have been beautiful, but Croesus saw the garden was ringed by high walls to keep out the unwanted and unworthy. Or to keep someone in: the garden had the eerie emptiness of a room designed and kept for one who is absent. He had heard of kings who constructed elaborate homes for rare animals, reproductions of jungles and deserts and steppes and oceans, a miniature of the free world they had been taken from. Yet no matter how elaborate these places were, no matter how comfortable and ornate, they were still cages nonetheless. Any animal put into them, after a month’s restless pacing, would die.
He could see fountains of flowing water, a table filled with food, a place where musicians could play. But he could not see the person for whom this place had been built. It was not for the king, as Cambyses made no move to descend into the garden. Indeed, there was no way that Croesus could see of getting down to the garden from the balcony, nor any entrance below.
Croesus watched the king’s weak eyes moving restlessly, seeking something. Croesus joined him the search, and at last, almost concealed in the shadows of garden, behind the tallest of the slender saplings, his eyes picked out the shape of a woman. She stood so still that at first he thought she might be a carved statue. Her head tilted up, and she looked back at him, her eyes shining from the darkness. It was the king’s wife, the impostor they had called Nitetis.
‘Do you see her?’ the king said.
‘Yes, master.’
‘Where?’
‘The far corner. To the left, master.’
Cambyses leaned forward, squinting. ‘Yes,’ he said, and seemed to relax a little. ‘She knows I cannot see her without help, and so she hides from me. I have been bringing Prexaspes here, to be my eyes. But he does not understand. He looks at me in a way I do not like. You understand, do you not?’
‘Yes, master,’ Croesus said quietly, and did not take his eyes from the woman in the shadows.
During the bloody purge, when dozens of noblemen and hundreds of slaves had been put to death in a single night, the impostor Nitetis had vanished too. The people of the court had imagined a cruel death, spoken of how the king must have made her suffer for her deception. Croesus had heard some men insist that the king had spared her, that even in his great rage he did not have the heart to kill the woman he loved, but they had spoken like men who seek to convince themselves. After that deadly night, the long march across the desert, the bloody parade outside Memphis, there were none who now believed that the king could have mercy.
‘I cannot let others see her,’ Cambyses said. ‘And I cannot let her leave. They would laugh at me. Did you think that I had killed her?’
‘It is not for me to have such thoughts, master.’
‘Ah yes. The old slave’s defence.’
Croesus said nothing for a time. ‘Mercy can be the sign of a great king, master,’ he said eventually.
‘I do not think that is true. It is a sign of the weak. But, sometimes, even a king must be weak.’ The smile on his face faded. ‘I would like to have kept her as my wife,’ he said. ‘In secret. But I could see that she was afraid of me. That she did not want me in her bed.’
‘There are none who may refuse the king his desires.’
Cambyses turned on him, a sudden rage in his eyes. ‘I will not force myself on any woman. Do you think me so cruel?’
‘Never, master.’
Cambyses seemed to grow calmer. He gestured to the seats on the balcony. ‘Come. Sit down.’
Food and wine were brought to them, bread and meat and a knife to cut them with. The king sat down to eat and drink with great relish, seeming to forget that he had company. Eventually, he motioned to a slave to pour Croesus a cup of wine, doing so with a strange reluctance.
‘Sometimes I wish I could stay in this garden for ever,’ Cambyses said. ‘With her. But there is much more to be done.’
‘Master?’
‘I have sent half the army west. They are going to destroy Ammon. And my emissaries have gone south, to spy on the Ethiopians. I must conquer them as well, it seems.’ He shrugged irritably. ‘A king’s tedious tasks. But there is nothing else to do, is there?’
‘You may do as you wish, master.’
‘Again, you lie. Those kings who sought to become philosophers or peacemakers or men dedicated to the gods, what happened to them? Butchered and replaced, to a man. And that will not happen to me. I must make war, and I will live because of it.’ He looked away, his face solemn. ‘But I will have love. They will not take that from me.’
There it was. The moment. The knife, kept sharp for the meat, on the table between them. The lone bodyguard a step too far away. Cambyses had turned his head to face down into the garden, and Croesus could even see the shallow, rapid pulse of the vein in the neck, calling to him with every beat.
Then Cambyses leaned further back, the bodyguard shifted a little closer, and the murderous instant had gone, almost as soon as it had come. To see, know and act in one moment without doubt was what he had to do, Croesus realized. An assassin could not hesitate. What use was a doubting man?
He said: ‘Do you remember the desert, master?’
Cambyses blinked like a sleeper waking, and looked back at him. ‘What?’
‘The desert. Between Palestine, and here. You told me you wanted to go back there. To live with the desert tribes, and be free of this life. I said I would go with you.’ Croesus stared down at his hands. ‘Do you want to go?’
There was silence for a time, a silence so c
omplete it was as if some god had reached out to hold the world still. Then, just as Croesus was starting to believe the strange dream might come to pass, he heard the king laugh. He closed his eyes against the sound.
‘You are old, and stupid, Croesus,’ he heard the king say. ‘I would never say such a thing.’
‘Master, I—’
‘What have I to do in a desert?’ Cambyses said, interrupting him. ‘What work is there for a king in such a place? You are a fool. Look at me.’ Croesus opened his eyes, saw the king’s hand coming towards his face, and tried not to flinch.
Instead of a blow, Cambyses reached forward with an open hand. He stroked the side of Croesus’s face and patted his jaw with his absent-minded, gentle touch. ‘But I love you, for all your foolishness.’ The king stood. ‘We must go. There is so much for us to do together, Croesus. So much that you must help me with.’
Cambyses left, but the old slave lingered for a moment longer, looking again down at the woman in the garden, marking the image of her in his mind.
He turned away, and followed the king back into the heart of the palace.
7
The king’s emissaries returned from Ethiopia, in a convoy of camels like a merchant’s caravan. But they did not travel loaded high with spears or wine or grain. They carried only a single object, wrapped in scarlet cloth, a little shorter than a man.
They passed through the palace, one man carefully holding the crimson-wrapped gift close against his chest, the others ringed around him as if they were bodyguards defending a king. Prexaspes tried to delay them, to get some sense of what news they brought from the south, what gift they bore. But the emissaries, no matter how they were begged or bribed or threatened, did not speak of what they had seen. Their words were for the king alone.
Cambyses received them in his private chamber. Their audience did not last long. A matter of minutes, with no raised voices heard from within the king’s chamber, no calls for others to come and offer their opinion. The emissaries left the room, their faces unconcerned. Their hands were empty, the gift left within.