The King and the Slave

by Tim Leach

  Cambyses smiled shyly. ‘I missed you, Croesus. I could not sleep when they told me you had been killed. Come here, let me touch you and give you my blessing.’

  Isocrates let the king run his fingers over his face, and Cambyses nodded in satisfaction. ‘Yes. It is you.’

  ‘How can I serve you, master?’

  ‘Tell me a story of my father. Tell me,’ Cambyses said, settling back comfortably in his throne, ‘what kind of a man was he?’

  Isocrates looked at Cambyses for a moment, trying to think of what to say. In his life, he had taken on many roles. He had been whatever his masters had wanted him to be. But he had never been asked to be a storyteller.

  He sat for a moment longer, collecting his thoughts, searching for a memory that he might shape to his master’s satisfaction. He opened his mouth, and began to tell a story.

  5

  Soon after Croesus rose from the dead to take his place at Cambyses’s side, another dead man breathed again. Word came, first travelling by rumour, then confirmed by a messenger, rowing up the Nile against the flow of the river. The impossible had happened. The king’s brother Bardiya had returned from the grave to take the throne at Pasargardae.

  Cambyses’s rage was terrifying, and even the bravest men in the court knew better than to attend to him. Finding his court deserted, the king stalked the palace with an arrow nocked to his bow, looking for someone to punish for the betrayal. They cowered in quiet corners of the palace, running away from their blinded king. Eventually, Cambyses grew tired of the hunt. He called for his horse to begin the long ride back to Pasargardae at the head of his army.

  Isocrates was there as the king leapt into the saddle. He heard the sound of warping metal, saw as the cap of the king’s scabbard fell off, worked loose by the gods or by assassins or by chance, and watched as the blade cut a jagged wound in Cambyses’s thigh. The king stared in disbelief at the blood that poured from his skin. Then he screamed. Isocrates watched, and said nothing.

  The king should have recovered quickly from the cut, and yet within a few days, his thigh was stained with the blackish green of a rotten wound. All remembered Apis, the divine calf that Cambyses had murdered years before. Some said it was divine revenge on a blasphemer, the wound appearing in the same place the king had struck the god, others that the surgeons had been bribed to smear excrement into the wound and make it rot. Whatever the truth was, divine vengeance was blamed, and Cambyses’s murderers, if ever they existed, escaped notice.

  None of the nobles lingered at the king’s side as he died. Perhaps they feared, even to the last, that he would take one final harvest of the court, that he would rise up from his deathbed and condemn them to the execution ground. Only Isocrates was there, listening to the rantings of the dying king. Even after all Cambyses had done, Isocrates would not let him die alone.

  Once, towards the end, Isocrates looked at Cambyses and, rather than the madness he had grown used to, he found a sane man staring back at him. ‘You are not Croesus, are you?’ the king said.

  ‘No. He took my place on the pyre. I am the man you wanted killed for sparing him.’

  ‘You are brave, to admit that to me.’

  ‘I do not think you will remember. In an hour or so, when the fever returns, I will be Croesus to you again.’

  ‘You could die in an hour. I could call my guards now.’

  ‘You could. But you will not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you do not want to die alone.’

  A silence.

  ‘Am I going to die?’ Cambyses said quietly.

  ‘Yes.’

  The king nodded, tears running silently from his eyes. ‘I am afraid.’

  ‘We all have to die.’

  ‘I do not want to die like this.’

  ‘None of us gets the death we want.’

  ‘They despise me. The people, I mean. As Croesus said they would.’

  ‘You made them hate you.’

  Cambyses closed his eyes. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘That may count for something,’ Isocrates said.

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Not much, mind. Not much. But it is better than nothing.’

  ‘Do you forgive me?’

  ‘No. I cannot forgive you for what you have done.’ Isocrates paused. ‘But I do not hate you. Not any more.’

  ‘Thank you,’ the king said softly. He drifted off to sleep, and returned to his madness.

  In the months after the king’s death, the noblemen of the court made their way to Pasargadae to beg for a place at the court of the new king. Some were given minor postings in distant corners of the empire. Some were quietly disappeared, Prexaspes amongst them. Of them all, only Isocrates was granted a private audience with the new king. Alone in the royal chambers, Isocrates and Bardiya stared at each other without speaking. After a time, the king broke the silence. ‘I saw Croesus several times when he served Cambyses,’ Bardiya said. ‘And you are not him.’

  Isocrates considered this. Then he said: ‘I saw Bardiya many times when he was growing up in Cyrus’s army. You have a good likeness, it is true. But you are not him. Bardiya died years ago, at his brother’s command.’

  ‘I see.’ The man who called himself Bardiya nodded once, then lapsed again into silence. They looked at one another, the impostor slave and the impostor king, each trying to imagine if they could trust one another.

  ‘I do not care who you are, or how you managed to steal the throne.’ Isocrates said. ‘I need a master to serve. You need someone who knows the court well. Perhaps we can help each other.’

  Bardiya nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps we can. What is your name? Your real name?’

  ‘Isocrates. And you?’

  ‘My name is Gaumata.’

  ‘Very well. Let us begin.’

  From the moment he took power, Gaumata must have known that another, more powerful group would inevitably try to take the throne from him, but he had been willing to trade his life to enjoy a few short months as a king. When the inevitable coup came and they searched the palace for the king’s closest advisor, he was gone. Isocrates had spent a lifetime reading the mood of one court after another. He had known the betrayal was coming long before it happened, before the thought itself had even fully formed in the mind of the conspirators. The night before they stormed the palace, he took two horses, some simple travelling clothes and what little gold he could steal from the treasuries.

  He headed west. Every night, he dreamed of the red cliffs of Thera, the island which had been his home six decades before, and so he made his way towards the coast, hoping to see the island again. He did not think he would live long enough to see it. Sometimes in the night he woke up gasping, his left arm aching, his heart beating sluggish and slow. Soon it would stop altogether. He told himself that it did not matter if he saw Thera again. He would try, and that, perhaps, might be enough.

  After a week alone on the road, Isocrates bought a slave. He spent days agonizing over the decision, but he was growing older and weaker. He needed the help, and, in private reflection, he could admit that he also needed the company. He understood now, for the first time in his life, the desire to own a slave. The craving for the loyalty that is bought and owned, that is beyond doubt. At the first auction he came to, he bought a quick-witted boy from Halicarnassus, sold to pay off his father’s gambling debt.

  The first night around the campfire, the boy looked at him warily. ‘I know what you must think, an old man buying a boy like you,’ Isocrates said. ‘I’m sure the other slaves told you what to expect. But that is not my intention.’ Isocrates broke off, and fed another piece of wood to the dying fire.

  ‘While I live,’ he continued, once the fire was roaring again, ‘you will serve me. Think of yourself as a servant, not a slave. Serve me well, and I shall teach you everything I can. I have learned a little about surviving in this world. And when I die I will give you your freedom, and whatever gold I have left. You can go back
to Halicarnassus, or wherever else you please. This, I promise you.’ He looked at the boy. ‘Do we have an agreement?’

  The boy nodded, and smiled shyly.

  Isocrates’s stolen gold did not last long, and so he had to find some other way to earn a living. He spent many nights pondering this particular problem, wondering how it was that an old man, useless to the world, would be able to live, other than as a beggar. Now that he was a free man, he had slowly begun to dream, for the first time that he could remember. Some forgotten part of his mind, rendered dormant through servitude, was slowly coming back to life. It was in one of these dreams that he found his answer.

  He wandered from one court to another, as Solon had half a century before, telling stories to kings, princes, satraps, and archons. He told the only stories he knew, the stories he had lived and witnessed for himself. His reputation spread, travelled faster than he did, and soon kings were vying for his favour, sending ever more generous gifts to tempt him to their courts. They asked for stories of Cyrus and Cambyses, of Persia and Lydia, of battles and intrigue at court. He spoke of the wonders of Babylon, the fall of Sardis, the wild plains of the Massagetae, the ancient tombs of Egypt. But above all, again and again, he told stories of Croesus.

  He told them of Croesus the king, and Croesus the slave. Of the man who had lost an empire but saved his people from slavery, who had hoarded wealth but craved only happiness. He embellished the stories for those who wanted myths, told them truthfully to those who respected the truth, made them more plausible for those who would never believe the things that he had seen with his own eyes. He taught them all to the boy, to earn a living with when Isocrates was gone, to spread amongst his own people in Halicarnassus when he could finally return home. He told every story of Croesus that he knew except one.

  At night, before he slept, he thought of the thousand deaths he could give his friend. Some heroic, some tragic, some quiet and peaceful. But none of them would do. In all the stories he spread amongst the courts of the Cappadocians, the Assyrians, the Medians, and the Lydians, he never once spoke of Croesus’s death. He left the stories to spread and breed amongst themselves, as stories will, to find a hundred thousand different endings without him. To evolve and live on, to make his friend immortal in story.

  He let Croesus slip quietly from the pages of history, and into myth.

  Acknowledgements

  First, my most sincere thanks are due to Caroline, Sara, James, Ravi, and to everyone at Felicity Bryan and Atlantic Books for their invaluable help in creating this book. My faithful band of early readers has been of great assistance: Gill, Michael, Vestal, Sho, I thank you all. Finally, many thanks to Jeff Fisher for another wonderful cover, and once again to Herodotus, the wandering historian who couldn’t resist a good story.

  A writer has many great debts to pay, one dedication at a time. This book is dedicated to the teacher (and friend) who was first to believe.