The Last King of Lydia (10 page)

‘What will you do with it, Father?’

‘I will use it to raise an army, and go to war in the East.’ Alyattes reached forward and ran his hand through his son’s hair. ‘I will win you a great empire. Won’t
you like that?’

Hearing this, Croesus tried to hide his disappointment. His father had gone to war several times already in the boy’s short life. Croesus liked to hear stories of the battles, but the wars
took his father from him for months, sometimes even years, and they made his mother unhappy.

‘Isn’t there something else you could do, Father?’

‘With these riches, what is there to do but go to war?’ Alyattes asked. ‘You can barter bread for eggs or a horse for sheep in the marketplace, but with this you can buy a new
world. That is what my coins are for.’

Alyattes reached down and took the coin back from his son, and Croesus found his fingers reaching for it even as it was taken from him. His father held the metal oval between finger and thumb.
‘Listen to me, and try to understand. I love this,’ he said, gesturing to the coin, ‘more than I love you. And I love you very much. But this . . .’ He shrugged. ‘It
is a remarkable thing. A remarkable thing that I have made. It will change the world.’

Alyattes stood and turned to leave, and as Croesus watched his father walk away he felt for the very first time the sensation that no child can forget – the sense that one’s father
or mother is wrong. There was something else to be done with this invention, he was sure of it. It could create something greater than a war.

‘Can I keep it?’ Croesus said, just as his father was about to leave the room.

Alyattes turned back, and smiled approvingly. He threw the coin to the boy, and Croesus took it from the air with a hasty grasp of his hand.

War is an infection that breeds in the minds of kings. Once caught, it may come on slowly or burn hot like a one-day fever. It will not die until it is treated with blood.

For Croesus, the first infection came from the sight of a map.

In the early years of his rule, he had fought several small wars of conquest, the inevitable actions of a powerful king surrounded by weak rulers. A dozen cities fell beneath the banner of bull
and lion, but the wars meant nothing to him, and they did not compare with the grand campaigns of his father’s life. Occasionally, he would glance without interest at a crude map of his
empire, but he never felt any desire for anything more precise. His world was Sardis and his family. What more did he need than that?

Yet, after Atys’s death, he asked his cartographers to draw up two maps, accurate in every measure, flawless in detail. For a year, his people rode to every corner of the kingdom, counting
the beats of their horses’ hooves to measure distance. They waited for clear days and climbed mountains to better view the land, producing sketches from the heights of icy peaks. They
corresponded with the mapmakers and librarians of distant cities, waiting months for the arrival of crumbling, faintly inked copies of maps they had thought long lost.

At last, the work was finished. In one of the king’s throne rooms they first unrolled a handsome scroll of the Lydian empire, deeply inked with the conquered cities, the dividing rivers,
the great Aegean sea that bordered the empire to the west.

Croesus looked at the empire he had inherited. He let his hand brush over the soft skin of the scroll, thinking of the thousands of lives that lay beneath each stroke of his finger, all of them
paying their fealty to him. From the sea to the west to the river Halys in the east, all these lands belonged to him. He stared at it until he had the image of his empire firmly fixed in his mind.
Then, he asked the cartographers to uncover the other map.

Hesitantly, they unrolled the second scroll. This one showed much more than Lydia. It did not venture across the Aegean to the Hellenic city states, but it stretched far to the east and south.
He looked on Egypt, Media, Assyria, the nomad plains of the Massagetae, the great city of Babylon. The cartographers, bound by the king’s orders, had not played tricks with the scale as they
might otherwise have. There was no hiding the vast expanse of land that lay to the east, the hundreds of thousands of men and women who knew and cared nothing for the king of Lydia.

Croesus noticed that one of the mapmakers was shivering nervously. The king smiled at him. ‘Don’t fear me. I cannot rule the whole world, can I?’ Croesus raised his hand,
intending to click his fingers and dismiss the mapmaker and the troubling vision he had summoned. He hesitated, his finger and thumb pressed against each other, but not yet making a sound.

He looked over the map one more time. He began at the far edge of his kingdom, the western city of Phocaea. His eyes roved south to Smyrna, the port where ships from half a hundred nations
arrived with jewels, silks and spices. He travelled north, reached the banks of the Hermus river and followed it until he reached Sardis. He paused briefly at his capital, then struck east, heading
for the Halys river at the border of his lands.

From there, he imagined his eyes as a marching army. He went beyond the Halys, taking Cappadocia and the great city of Trapezus. He led his conquering gaze south, down the Euphrates to Babylon.
He lingered there for a time, imagining what it would be to rule the greatest city in the world, a city unmatched in beauty and spectacle by any other. Then he went east again, pausing at another
great river. It was the Tigris, and beyond it lay the land of the Medes.

In his father’s time, the Medes and the Lydians had been enemies. After many a bloody and inconclusive war, Croesus’s sister had been married to Astyages, king of the Medes, and the
two peoples had lived in peace for decades. In his mind, Croesus broke the thirty-year peace in a matter of moments, his eyes passing over the Tigris, into the land of the Medes, and seizing his
brother-in-law’s kingdom.

But his gaze was still hungry, and continued its march east until finally his eye chanced on the river Medus in the heart of Persia, and came to rest there. For some reason, it seemed like the
right place to stop.

Gazing at the maps, he understood why war had so captivated his father. He was grateful for the kingdom of the Medes on his borders, the peace treaty with Astyages that he could never break, for
he did not trust this ache that he had, this longing for the East. Without his son, there was such an absence in his life. It would be so easy to fill it with a war.

Croesus tried to leave his thoughts of conquest buried deep in the heavy, yellowed curls of the map. He left the throne room for the one place where he would be able to forget them.

As he descended through the palace, Croesus shed his followers like so many layers of unwanted clothing. First, he disposed of the noblemen who begged favours from him,
dispatching them one by one until there were none left to bother him. The band of slaves that trailed after him, half of them in service to him, the other half monitoring his movements on behalf of
his nobles, was dismissed with a few brief commands. He kept his guards with him for most of the journey deep into the palace, but dismissed them too before he descended the last stairwell.

Alone, he reached a door in a dark and forgotten corridor of the palace. He took a gold key on a silver chain from within the folds of his clothes. He unlocked the door and went inside.

Croesus was in darkness. By touch and memory he made his way to a table at the end of the room, taking one of dozens of oil-soaked torches that had been left piled there. He felt his way to the
far end of the table, his hands fumbling for the flints he knew were there, and he struck sparks until the torch caught.

The room flickered into view. The table and floor were furred with dust, and no slave had cleaned here for years. The floor was covered with many trails of footprints, but they were all exactly
the same shape and size. They all belonged to him.

He paced around the abandoned room, filled with broken shards of pottery and crumbling chunks of stone. He reached a rotting wooden chest which, when he was a child, had once served as a throne.
He poked at one corner with the toe of his boot, and watched the wood crumble into splinters, accompanied by an eruption of insects and tiny grey spiders.

He drew aside the heavy drape at the far end of the room, felt cool air from the tunnel behind it. He reached up and pulled on a cord hanging by the wall. Deep down below, too distant for him to
hear, he knew a small silver bell would be ringing. Now they would know that he was coming.

He held the torch in front of him to light the way, and began to descend. He made his way along the narrow corridor, the ceiling just high enough that he could walk without stooping. It had been
made specifically for him.

The passage wound down, until glimmers of light began to appear in the distance. The air grew brighter, then too bright, as though he were heading towards the heart of the sun. The end of the
passage opened up into an enormous chamber, and the king entered the lower treasury.

He had begun work on these chambers as soon as his father had died. It had taken years to plan and excavate, and he had kept the digging as close a secret as possible. The slaves who had
laboured there had been dispatched to work in the mines at the far corners of his empire immediately after the project had been completed. Croesus sometimes wondered to whom they might have told
their secrets in the few short years before rockfalls and rotten lungs had silenced them all, but this did not genuinely concern him. If the bandit kings and petty officials of the outer kingdoms
knew of the treasury, he did not fear them, but he wanted none within the palace to know the details of this chamber. The treasuries of the upper floors held hundreds of diverse and priceless
artefacts. This lower floor was devoted to a single form of treasure.

Thousands of gold and silver coins were piled high throughout the room, forming towers and buttresses and fortresses. Elsewhere they were piled into hills and mountains of gold and silver.
Dozens of burning torches ringed the chamber, the polished stone walls and glittering coins reflecting and amplifying the light until it was intense, near blinding. But it did not trouble the king.
Croesus had grown used to staring into the sun of his riches.

His father had long desired gold coins. Alyattes had known that gold and silver both hid within the electrum of the Pactolus river, but his alchemists were never able to discover the technique
of separating them. His dream had been to stamp the seal of Lydia on golden coins that would fill the markets of Sardis and the Hellenic cities on the far side of the sea. But he died
unsatisfied.

Croesus’s metallurgists had finally perfected the art of turning electrum into gold and silver. They had tried every possible combination of heat and pressure that they could imagine, to
no effect. One day, in sheer desperation, they added salt to the molten metal, as though it were a gamey meat in need of seasoning, and once the fire was scorching hot, the silver separated to the
top, enabling it to be skimmed away like scum from a stew, and the bottom of the crucibles shone with pure gold.

Croesus had kept finding reasons to postpone the day when the coins would enter circulation and replace the electrum coins that had so fascinated his father. Soon, every merchant and tradesmen
in Lydia would tally his life in these ovals of gold and silver, each one marked with the lion and bull. But, for now, the coins remained within this sealed chamber. They belonged to him alone.

The room was still, near silent. He could hear the crackling of the torches, the occasional thud as a sack of coins arrived down one of the steep tunnels that led from the mints above ground.
Soft beneath these other sounds were the shuffling, hesitant footsteps of the money counters.

They were all blind. These slaves lived within the treasury, in a small antechamber separate from the coins. Food and water reached them through the same shafts where the coins came from above.
They would never be permitted to leave. They would grow old and die in a world of gold.

Croesus had no idea what they spoke about to pass the long days, what couplings occurred down here in the darkness, what half-remembered poems were recited, the imaginative journeys that they
went on together to escape their closed world, the petty fights and squabbles that broke out over the few luxuries they were allowed. He could only imagine what they did to alleviate the maddening
boredom of shifting and polishing and ordering the endless mountains of coins.

When the silver bell rang, they knew to light the torches and be silent, until they could be certain he had gone. Even without sight, they always knew where he was; the king’s confident
footsteps identified him as one who bore the privilege of vision.

He approached a large, loose pile of gold coins. He thrust his hands into them, gently working his fingers into the heavy metal until his forearms were buried. It felt as though he held his
hands in a stream of cold water, and he sensed his burning blood cool.

The small pile of silver near his feet was a healthy slave. In the mound of gold next to it he saw a galleon; the larger mound that towered over it was a fleet. From one corner of the room,
where gold and silver mingled freely together like captains and spearmen, he could hear the marching feet of ten thousand soldiers.

On to even larger mounds, and he saw towns, cities, entire races of people locked into the gold and ordered at his command. He saw an empire, stretching across leagues and nations and rivers and
seas, all contained within a single, high-chambered room, and perceived by him alone.

He did not yet know what he would do with his wealth. The possibilities were overwhelming, each idea giving way to another as soon as he thought of acting on it. But he knew that, given time, he
could find the right use for it. All creation was there, waiting to spring into life. He only had to choose what form it would take, and he could shape a universe with his vision.

My father was right in one thing at least, Croesus thought as he stood amidst all his wealth, new worlds waiting to be born. This is worth more than love.