The Last King of Lydia (18 page)

He looked down the wall for one last time. Before he knew what he was doing he had slipped off his boots, had hooked his fingers on top of the wall and was gently lowering himself down,
searching for a place to put his feet.

On the day of the great sacrifice to Delphi, a year before, one of his fellow soldiers had made a bet that no one would ever climb the south cliff. It was an idle gamble, not meant as a
challenge. But Ardys had spent his youth in the mountains, learning the secrets of weight and motion that blank faces of rock reveal to their followers. He had taken the wager, gone to the base of
the wall, and begun to climb.

After he had climbed ten feet, they were still yelling insults at him. Once he had climbed thirty feet, they were shouting at him to come back down. By the time he was fifty feet off the ground
they had all fallen silent, like men in a temple observing a sacrifice. That silence held until he made it all the way to the very top. He remembered that silence, afterwards, above all else.

There was no one to watch him now as he reversed the climb he had made many years before. With his face so close against the rock, the sound of his breathing was like a hard wind in his ears. At
each sharp intake of breath, he felt himself on the edge of panic. On each slow breath out, the fear receded just sufficiently for him to make one more move. Slowly, carefully, he felt his way down
the cliff, feeling the grain of the rock beneath his fingertips. A single misplaced hand or foot would be enough to send him down onto the boulders below. He pressed his feet flat against the rock
when he could not find an edge, pinching at the tiny holds until his fingers were white with pressure. The more he climbed, the more he became convinced that he could not fall.

Even as he focused almost entirely on the climb, a small part of his mind was free to wonder why he was doing it. Perhaps, he thought, it was to answer a challenge from the Gods, who had placed
his helmet there, in the exact place he had climbed once before, as a test of his courage. Perhaps there was no good reason at all.

It seemed as though only a few moments had passed, and suddenly he could feel his left foot brush against the branches. The wind grew strong, the breath of an angry God, and he felt his fear
return. He was almost equidistant from safety in either direction. His hands began to shake, and his feet felt as though they were balanced on nothing at all. His weight tugged him back into the
empty air. He began to fall.

His eyes found a hidden pocket in the rock just as his feet slid away from him. He jammed three fingers deep into the cliff face, and for one moment he hung there, his hand and arm sharp with
pain. Then his right foot found a dent in the rock. Barely an inch wide, yet it felt like a ledge ten times that size. He patted his other hand over the rock face until it found a hold. He was safe
once more.

He worked his way down a little further, then reached down tentatively, until his fingers hooked under metal. He placed the helmet back on his head, and breathed easy again.

He looked below him, and for a moment he hesitated, tempted to continue his climb to the bottom. It seemed a shame to go only halfway down the cliff and not to finish it. But he had been foolish
enough for one day.

He looked back up at the rock he had to reclimb, but felt no fear. He knew that he would not fall. He closed his eyes and breathed out once. Then he began to climb again.

He did not climb unobserved.

The Persians watched the south wall as infrequently as the Lydians patrolled it. Why waste time staring at the impossible? But, quite by chance, Ardys was spotted by a single Persian soldier, a
man called Hyroeades.

Hyroeades had been a shepherd with a love for the mountains. But he had a tendency to daydream and his flock had a tendency to wander, so he had been sent to the city by a disappointed father.
When the Persians conquered that city only a few days after his arrival and forced him to join their army, he did not try to escape. He was a man who always accepted fate with indifference.

Since the siege had begun, to get away from the others, he had taken to walking the deserted parts of the besieging line. The slack discipline of the army at siege suited him well – none
knew or cared if he stole away for a few hours each day.

On the fourteenth day of the siege, as he was walking alone by the south wall, he mistook the sound of the falling helmet for that of an arrowhead glancing off stone. He ducked into cover by
instinct, and lay still against the ground. He watched Ardys climb.

From a distance, Hyroeades felt none of the fear that Ardys struggled against, observed none of the moments where the Lydian came close to misplacing a foot, saved at the last moment by instinct
or judgement. To Hyroeades, even Ardys’s momentary slip onto one hand looked graceful, almost predestined. After Ardys had climbed back up, Hyroeades headed, almost shyly, towards the foot of
the cliff. He placed a palm flat against it and looked straight up.

At first he saw nothing but a blank rockface, and he wondered whether it was a man or a god that he had seen on the wall. But then, even as he stared at it, he saw a vertical path appear out of
the blank stone, that same path that Ardys had identified years before. Like Ardys, his first thought on seeing it was one of simple delight – the impossible made possible, a blank wall of
stone transforming into a causeway to the city. A shy smile played on his lips. Then he thought about the consequences of his discovery, and the smile faded.

Perhaps he would say nothing. Unlike many, he was enjoying the siege; the long, slow days without responsibility, where nothing was expected of him but waiting. He would have been happy, he
thought, to wait a hundred years beneath those walls.

But he was a man who was obedient to authority, who feared the consequences of disobedience above all else. Suddenly fearful, he looked around to see if anyone was watching him, and might attest
to his hesitation. He saw no one, but the fear remained.

He turned and began the long walk back towards the encampment, to go and tell his captain what he had seen.

Rough hands shook the king awake.

‘Master?’

‘What is it?’

‘They are in the city.’

‘What?’

‘The Persians are over the wall.’

Croesus said nothing for a time. He stared at Isocrates, uncomprehending. ‘How?’ he said at last.

‘They climbed the south wall.’

The king shook his head. ‘That’s—’

‘They found a way up. I don’t know how.’

Croesus seemed not to hear for a moment, one hand plucking absently at his blankets. Then he let out a single sharp sob, and pressed his fingers to his eyes. Isocrates looked away.

‘Is there any hope?’ the king said.

‘No, master.’

Croesus took his fingers from his eyes, and nodded slowly. ‘Where is Sandanis?’

‘He is dead.’

‘What?’

‘He took poison. When he heard the news.’

Croesus nodded dully. ‘He should have fallen on his sword. It would have been more fitting.’

‘Master, I need to go and find my wife.’

Croesus looked up at him. ‘How dare—’ he began. Then he hesitated, seeing the expression on the slave’s face. He doesn’t need to obey me any more, Croesus thought.
He is doing this as a last courtesy.

‘Of course,’ the king said. Isocrates turned to go, but Croesus spoke again. ‘Is there . . . Is there anything you think I should do, Isocrates?’ the king said.

‘No.’ The slave shook his head. ‘There is nothing left to do.’

Sardis burned.

For the Persians, the city was a monster to be slain – every temple, house and statue an appendage to be cut away and burned, every man and woman of the city a drop of blood to be
bled.

The people of Sardis knew that there was no hope for them. Some knelt and prayed openly in the streets, others gathered and barricaded themselves into temples that would soon become charnel
houses. Others tried to buy their way out, offering gold and slaves, their daughters and wives, in a bid to escape the slaughter. Many rushed to hurl themselves from the high cliffs rather than die
at the hands of the Persians.

The Lydian soldiers, for the most part, threw down their weapons and moved amongst the people. Some tried to maintain a sense of martial order, and here and there a group of soldiers would
assemble together and make a futile stand at a corner of a street where they had once played as children, or at a statue that one of them had worshipped every day of his life – anywhere they
could find that was of significance to them. One wild-looking soldier died after challenging a series of Persians to single combat on the steps of his favourite brothel, as though he were defending
a temple or the house of a king.

The people of Sardis knew that they would not survive the night. They each tried to find the right place, the right way, to die.

It was quiet in the throne room.

The marble room was located near the heart of the palace, and the Persians had yet to enter the grounds. Occasionally, he heard the solitary, panicked footsteps of someone running in a corridor
nearby, feet beating louder and louder against the stone floor, then fading back to silence. He tensed each time he heard someone approach, praying that they would not enter, hoping that they
would. So long as he was alone, he felt safe. So long as he was alone, he felt himself edging one step closer to madness. He wondered how long it would take them to find him.

He thought about how he used to play at being a king. Back then he had been forced to make do with a dusty room, a shattered chest for a throne, a host of imaginary courtiers for company. Now,
he saw that without others to serve him, he was no longer a king. He was a man sitting alone in an empty room, waiting to die. He couldn’t even bring himself to occupy the throne itself, and
he squatted at its foot like a dog or a slave, his back resting against it.

After a time, he heard something different. A pair of familiar slow, scraping footsteps approaching the throne room, inch by inch. At first they were so faint, and paused so often, that he was
certain he imagined them. Soon there was no doubting that the footsteps were real, no question whom they belonged to. Croesus sat still at the foot of his throne and waited for his son.

It had been many months since his son had permitted anyone to bathe him. He had a long beard and dirt-matted hair, and even from a distance the air was thick with the stink of him. He looked
like a wild man, a mad prophet. He looked like anything but a prince.

‘Gyges,’ Croesus said softly.

The king watched as his son slowly made his way to the exact centre of room and then stopped, perhaps compelled by some unspoken, geometric command. He looked up at his father with the
unchanged, blank eyes with which he had looked upon the whole world since was born.

Croesus rose from the steps of the throne, walked down, and gathered his son into his arms. Gyges did not acknowledge Croesus’s embrace, but he stood still to accept it. It was the first
time he had allowed his father to touch him.

Croesus released his son, and smiled at him. He placed a guiding hand on the young man’s back, and led him from the throne room.

‘Come with me, Gyges. Let us go and see the city.’

In the women’s quarters, a battle raged.

It was not a battle against foreign invaders. It was Lydians, not Persians, who sought to enter the women’s sanctuary, and the men who beat at the doors were brothers and cousins of the
women who battled to keep them out. As soon as they knew Sardis was lost, and that they would all be dead in a matter of hours, men from all over the city had swarmed to this forbidden place. Soon,
they would roam freely in a place where no man had set foot in generations.

The women fought against them, slaves and noblewomen united in barricading the doorways and using whatever weapons they could find, but they were outnumbered. The doors were splintering, and
would soon collapse entirely. The sanctuary would become a place of nightmares.

In a secluded corner of the women’s chambers, Danae sat alone. She did not help the others who struggled to keep the doors closed, did not think of what would happen when the Lydians broke
through. She thought only of what would happen when the Persians finally took the palace.

She knew what happened to the queens of conquered cities. She thought of the women in the stories she knew who had been taken as trophies, the countless tales of gods and heroes and princes who
celebrated their triumph with the capture of a wife or a daughter or a queen. She wondered if history could be reduced entirely to the endless kidnap and exchange of stolen women from one country
to another. She tried to imagine what favour the king of Persia would seek to buy with her.

She stood, and walked to a window. She stepped up, and looked out at the burning city.

With the same slow, careful step as his wife, Croesus stepped out into the streets of Sardis.

For a moment, he could pretend that nothing had changed in his city. The smoke in the air could have risen from the sacrificial fires of a festival, like the great sacrifice that had sent the
gifts to Delphi years before and filled the sky with sacred ash. The still bodies on the street could be beggars, or revellers in a wine-soaked stupor. The large fires were still distant, working
their way to the heart of the city, lighting the sky like a dawn come too early.

He let Gyges lead him through the city, the way a man in strong water might stop fighting and let the currents be his guide. His son moved quickly and confidently, in contrast to the slow,
dragging steps with which he had walked his entire life. Gyges recoiled from a marble statue of a goddess as though it were a monster, but smiled as he crouched down beside the corpse that lay
beside it. Perhaps, Croesus thought, he has always lived in a mirrored world. All the beauty and wealth of my city were a vision of horrors. Now on this last day, he sees the things that are
beautiful to him.

No one else would have dared to chance her life on the crumbling stone ledge barely half a hand wide, but Danae moved across it with ease, calm and fearless, and left the
women’s quarters behind. At the next opening she stepped back inside the palace again. She moved through the deserted corridors, searching for her husband and her son.