by Tim Leach
‘One arm burst from the sand. I clenched and unclenched my fist, to prove to myself that the arm truly belonged to me, that it was not some cruel illusion of a dying mind. I curled it beneath my head and wept my thanks on to it, then began the long, slow struggle to free myself fully.
‘After, I lay like a half-drowned man washed ashore, too weak to move. Then I dug through the sand, searching for water. When I found the first full waterskin I drank too greedily, coughing and vomiting sand and water.
‘I dug carefully into the desert. Deep below me, I knew there to be entombed regiments of infantry, herds of camels and horses, frozen mid gallop in the sand by the killing wind, slaves and servants fixed in servitude for ever. I uncovered only a scattered few of the dead, and took all the water and wine I could. The rest will never be found.
‘When the weight of water hung heavy from my back, I knelt and gave thanks to the gods for sparing my life, and asked them to look after my companions in the afterlife. I emptied one of my waterskins out on to the sand by way of sacrifice. I stood, and I walked out of the desert, back to Memphis, to tell this story that the gods have spared me to tell.’
When the man had finished his story, Croesus waited for the king to speak. To cry and scream, to shout and rage, to show any kind of response to the disaster. But he did nothing. He sat there, lost in thoughts of his own, and did not speak a word.
Slowly, the court returned to some pretence of normality. The messenger was taken away, doubtless to be cast into some kind of strange limbo, kept comfortable whilst they waited for the word of the king to bring him his fate: a reward, or torture, or death. The people of the court began to talk once more, half-heartedly discussing matters of state, though no one would say a word without half an eye on Cambyses.
Beside the king, Bardiya stirred restlessly. He leapt from his chair, and began to pace the floor of the court. He would reach one wall, then pick an angle at random, and following it along the floor until he reached the other side of the chamber. Before long this ceaseless crisscrossing brought him next to the wrapped Ethiopian bow. He reached down and plucked off the scarlet covering. ‘What is this?’ he said.
No one said anything. Though he trained with smaller bows openly, the king had been careful not to try to draw the Ethiopian bow in his brother’s presence. He repeated the question, his brow creased with princely irritation, for he was a man unused to being denied his will. After another silence, longer than the one before it, a voice spoke out.
‘It was sent by the Ethiopians,’ Psamtek said. ‘They say that no Persian can draw it.’
‘Oh. Is that so?’ And before any man could tell him to stop, he picked it up.
No one in the court had dared to touch it, as if it were some cursed weapon out of the old stories that would strike dead any who dared to take it from the ground. Bardiya turned it this way and that, admiring the quality of the wood, the perfect lines of the design. He gripped the bow in his left hand and stood in the archer’s stance, shifting his weight from foot to foot until he had found his point of balance, and put three fingers to the thick bowstring. He lifted it, rolled his shoulders, and began to pull.
He was not a large man, no bigger of frame than Cambyses, but he had that hidden strength of the natural athlete. Croesus watched the string, impossibly, begin to creep back.
A sigh broke out across the room when he pulled the string past where Cambyses had drawn it, drew it back almost as far as his left shoulder. He held it there, unable to take it further, unwilling to let it go. He gave one last great pull that seemed to possess every muscle, his jaw tense, his feet flexing against the ground, seeking some greater purchase.
The string slipped from his fingers, and loosed a whipcrack that shuddered through the chamber.
Bardiya did not seem to notice the stillness his efforts had provoked. Laughing, he put the bow down again, ruefully stretching and rubbing his shoulders, shaking out the fingers of his right hand, the tendons strained from the force of the bow. ‘It must be a land of giants,’ he said, looking at his brother, ‘to draw bows like this one.’
Cambyses said nothing. Neither his head nor his eyes had turned towards Bardiya during this trial of strength, and Croesus nurtured some vain hope that somehow the king had not registered what had occurred. Then Cambyses lifted his hands and brought them together, waited a moment, then did so again, in a slow series of hard claps that drove the amiable smile from his brother’s face.
Cambyses turned to his sister. He lifted her hand to his face and kissed her fingertips. She went quite still. ‘Are you well, brother?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am well.’ He stood from the throne, and his failing eyes hunted through the men and women staring back at him in silence, like the faces of the dead. He found Croesus, beckoned once to the old slave, and then he strode away.
In the privacy of the garden, watched over by a single bodyguard, they sat together in silence. Cambyses still had the absent expression of a man thinking of nothing at all, and Croesus found he could not open a conversation with the king. He was like a wrestler whose style demands that he must wait for the other man to attempt the first lock or throw, unable to make the first attack himself.
At last, the king spoke.
‘There can be no more conquest, can there?’ he said in a soft, resigned voice.
‘No, master.’
‘I was so proud of the war against Egypt. They seemed to give me so much respect for it. Now this. It is like Nitetis. Or Bardiya with that bow. First the honour, then the shame that follows the honour, that overwhelms it. Will this always be my fate, do you think?’
‘I do not know, master,’ Croesus said. ‘Perhaps the gods do not wish your empire to grow any larger. It might threaten theirs.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’ The king’s hand began to pluck restlessly at the robe he wore. ‘Psamtek tells me they have a thousand gods in this country,’ Cambyses said. ‘Do you think that can be true?’
‘I do not know, master.’
‘He says that only the king may hear and speak with them; that he heard them, when he was a king, and the moment that I took his throne from him, their voices fell silent.’
Croesus hesitated. ‘Do you hear the gods, master?’
‘No,’ Cambyses said. ‘I hear nothing.’ He lifted his thumb to his mouth and bit into the nail. ‘Did the god die?’
‘Master?’
‘That calf. The one I . . .’ His voice faded for a moment. Then: ‘I wish I had not done that.’
‘Because of the blasphemy, master?’
‘No. You think I am a fool, to believe an animal can be a god? But I have always hated those who are cruel to beasts. The priests deserved death for their stupidity. But that calf . . .’ Tears surged to the king’s eyes, hot and sudden. He wiped them away, then looked down at them and started in surprise, like a man who finds his hands bloody yet cannot feel a wound. ‘I am glad that I have never killed a man,’ he said.
Croesus tried to keep the disbelief from his face, but it must have shown, for the king immediately spoke again. ‘It is true. I have ordered many deaths. But what of that? What does it matter what I say? It is the one who does the killing who bears the evil of it. Men like Prexaspes. Or perhaps he too has other men that do it for him. That would be better. Then I am twice removed from that murder.’ He stared out into the air for a time. ‘What an awful thing that would be, to kill a man.’
‘Yes,’ Croesus said. ‘It is.’
‘I wish that you had not done that, Croesus. That you had not chosen to taint yourself in that way.’ Cambyses paused. ‘Sometimes I think that you must want to kill me. For what I made you do.’
Croesus shivered in sudden fear. ‘Master—’
‘Do not answer.’ The king leaned forward, until his milky eyes almost filled Croesus’s world. ‘Do you want to know the truth?’
‘Tell me, master.’
‘I do not care if you do or not. I do not fear you. You killed
a cripple. What of it? I know you cannot kill a man.’ He sat back in his seat. ‘You are weak. It is why you fell from being a king to being a slave. But I love you for it. If only the world was filled with men like you. Gentle, weak, stupid men like you. Instead of men like me.’ He beckoned for Croesus to rise. ‘Leave me now. I have much work to do.’
‘Let me help you, master.’
‘On this matter, you will not want to advise me,’ the king said, and there was something strange in the way that he spoke. He almost sounded like a sane man.
‘Why, master?’
‘Because I must do something other than a war. Something that I want, but am afraid to want.’
Before he left the king, Croesus lingered a disobedient moment longer, and looked over the balcony and down into the garden. It had grown much since he had last seen it, and it took a little time for him to be certain. He studied every shadow, each piece of thick foliage, until he was quite sure that his first thought had been correct.
The woman who had lived there was gone. The garden now held nothing but a ghost.
5
The season turned, and the flood began.
Of all the many hundred gods that the people of Egypt worshipped, the Nile was not one. It was too regular in its habits, its unfailing yearly floods. It lacked the capriciousness that any wise god must use to inspire fear and respect, and this made it something greater than a god.
There were none who knew where it came from, only that its origin lay deep within the uncharted lands to the south. Countless expeditions had been launched by one Pharaoh after another, each wanting to prove his brilliance above his predecessors’ by solving the Nile’s mystery. Some of these survey parties returned, their numbers depleted by sickness or starvation or bandit raids, always with no answer. Many never returned at all.
No one knew its origin, nor why it rose in such force each year. They only knew that, in the heat of the summer, when one looked up at the night sky and saw the star they named Sopdet appear, the flood would soon come. The waters followed the star as the moon followed the sun.
Now the Nile rose, advancing so quickly that some who could not run, drunkards and children and the infirm, were swept away and lost to it. The Egyptians did not mourn those taken in such a way. For these people, to whom a body lost to nature was usually an unspeakable tragedy, considered a drowning in the Nile to be a blessed death, a guarantor of eternal life.
There were a few radical thinkers amongst the Egyptians, often wealthy men tired of the yearly chaos and destruction, who spoke of stopping the flood. They said that the damage done to their property was unacceptable, the loss of life intolerable, and that exchanging a little of the land’s fertility for peace and security would be a worthy trade. They devised remarkable engineering innovations, great dams and systems of channels that they claimed would tame the waters. But these men were treated almost as heretics by the people of Egypt, who would not wish to still the Nile any more than one would seek to stop a heart because it beat too loudly.
After the sudden advance, the flood waters reached their highest point and paused there, the way that even a conquering army that destroys all before it must stop for a time to tend to its wounded and bury the dead, and when the river stopped, all things ceased with it, an entire country struck still by nature. They waited for the river to draw back, so that they could minister to the flooded plains, plant the crops and pray that the harvest was a good one. They waited, and prayed.
This great lassitude seemed to still the king as well – even he, it seemed, was not immune to the mood of the nation. No word came of whatever new project occupied his mind, and like the rest of the nation, he seemed content to wait.
But this year the waters did not fall, and soon all of Memphis was alive with rumour. The priests said that it was a curse from the gods, a rejection of the new king like the sandstorm that had destroyed his army. Some said the flood would last for ever, and Croesus found himself wishing that it could be true. Then the king might never stir from his torpor, like those ancient warriors who have been perpetually charmed to stillness by the gods to prevent their fury from splitting open the earth and tearing apart the sky.
It was not to be. Just as it seemed as though the river would never recede, the waters vanished as fast as they advanced. The people woke one morning, looked to the west, and what had been so high and so strong that they might have mistaken it for a sea had become merely a distant glitter of water on the horizon, leaving behind a drowned land that was ready for the planting.
The people swarmed out from their homes, all thoughts of omens and inaction forgotten, and began to tend to their fields. And the king stirred at last, like some ancient creature awoken by ritual, and prepared to commit the worst blasphemy of all.
Even after all he had seen the king do, Croesus could not, at first, believe what he was told. Such were the rumours that the king’s actions inspired, he had taken the news for some slander that a particularly vicious gossip of the court had spread. It was only when he saw the slaves and servants begin to dress the hall of the palace and prepare the wedding feast that he began to believe it could be true.
When he had been a king, half a lifetime ago, at the outset of a disaster he would rally his generals and his courtiers and his priests to his side, the way that Odysseus of the old stories, a greater recruiter than he was a warrior, had gathered the heroes of Hellas together to change the shape of the world. Now, as a slave, he sought to do the same with what little influence he had.
He went in search of Bardiya first, hoping, in spite of everything, that the ties of blood might still hold some power over the king. But the king’s brother was not to be found in his chamber, the throne room, nor any other place that Croesus could think to find him. Most of those he asked simply ignored his question, though one or two thought that the king’s brother had been sent back to Persia on some matter of state. At last, Croesus gave up the search for the king’s brother, and went to find Prexaspes in his private chambers.
There were few who came willingly to these rooms. Those that did came fawning, seeking protection by denouncing their companions, the way that some seek to buy the gods’ favour through sacrifice. But those that hoped to win protection through friendship did so in vain, for Prexaspes had sent as many friends of his to their deaths as he had enemies. If the king gave a name to him, there was no appeal that could be made. The king could not be wrong, and so that man disappeared and none would speak of him thereafter.
When, at last, Prexaspes received him, it was as though Croesus looked upon a different man. He was no older than thirty, his thin beard still the mark of his youth, and he had always had an unaged appearance that suited him to his role: the king could look on his face, unlined and innocent seeming, and not think of what this courtier did in the king’s name.
Now he had the manner of a much older man. It was as though he bore a year for every man he had put to death, and they had come upon him all at once. Croesus wondered how much longer he would be able to remain in his position, now that Cambyses would have to witness the record of his crimes, marked on the face of the man who had committed them.
‘You have heard, then,’ Prexaspes said.
‘He will not do it.’
‘He will. I am sorry, Croesus.’
‘After all you have done, you are sorry now?’
‘Every king kills, Croesus. But few act like this.’
‘Then you must stop him.’
‘She has tried to speak with him herself. She has pleaded with him. What can you or I do that she cannot?’
‘The judges will not allow it. It is against Persian law.’
‘He has spoken to them already. He gathered six of them together, and asked . . .’ Prexaspes faltered for a moment, hesitating to speak the crime aloud. Then, in a quieter tone, he said: ‘He asked if the law would allow him to marry his sister.’
Neither man spoke for a time. Croesus had yet to say those words himself, and he w
ondered if it was the first time that Prexaspes had given voice to the king’s blasphemy. All of those who had informed Croesus of what was to come had spoken obliquely. The wedding was only days away, but perhaps only half a dozen times had those words been spoken aloud.
The gods would not stir against a war or a murder or a rape. What were these crimes to them, these gods who killed on a whim, raped as if it were sport? They were transgressions for men to forbid, not the indifferent divinities. But parricide, and incest – these too the gods practised, but did not permit mortals to indulge in. They were the privilege of the divine alone. Prexaspes and Croesus waited, as if disbelieving that such blasphemy could be spoken and be uncorrected by some higher power. And yet, the gods remained silent.
‘What was their decision?’ Croesus said, breaking the silence.
‘They said nothing, at first. We waited, and I thought the king would have to repeat himself. Then one of them, the eldest, said there was no law that permitted a man to marry his sister. The king was furious. I thought he was going to have them all killed. Then one of them said that, while what the old man had spoken was true, neither was there a law that forbade such a marriage. They all nodded, and gave their assent, and the king was satisfied.’
‘I knew men could be cowards,’ Croesus said. ‘I did not know the law could be a coward as well.’
‘It would have done no good for them to resist.’ He hesitated, then concluded: ‘Or for us to resist.’
‘You must stop him.’
‘I do not know how.’
‘It is a little late to speak like that.’
‘You remember that night, in Pasargadae? When . . .’
‘Of course I do.’
‘He summoned me, and said that he would give me names. He did not tell me what I should do to those named. I knew it well enough. I thought it would be a handful. A few dozen. I never thought it would go so far.’
‘You have been well rewarded for it.’