The Last King of Lydia (32 page)

Cyrus installed himself in the palace even as the slaves still scrubbed blood from the stone floors. It had been the only battlefield in the conquest of the city. There had been no looting and
no other bloodshed. It was the most peaceful conquest that Croesus had ever known. The city taken for the price of fifty dead.

Cyrus rested his chin on his hand, and smiled at his slave, reading his silence.

‘You are disappointed with Babylon?’

‘No, it is undoubtedly beautiful.’

‘You do not sound particularly interested.’

‘I used to live for wonders, and if one lives for wonders, one must come to Babylon. Now that I am here, I am not so sure.’

‘What do you live for now, then?’

‘I do not know.’ Croesus shrugged. ‘I’m hoping I will find out. Before I die.’

‘What a morbid thought. Perhaps I should ask myself the same question. The wonders don’t move me either. What is my excuse?’

‘You too are old, Cyrus.’

The king laughed. ‘I should have you beheaded for that. But that’s not it. As a symbol, Babylon means everything to me. As a city, it is a troublesome prize. It will make one of my
governors over-powerful, and the rest jealous. I desired the essence of Babylon. To be the man who rules the greatest city in the world. The reality is rather tedious.’

Croesus shook his head. ‘And they called me a dreamer when I was a king.’

‘Perhaps that is my secret. I can dream greater than those I conquer. Including you.’ Cyrus toyed with a silk curtain that ran from the ceiling and trailed beside his new throne.

‘Babylon,’ he said. ‘I came to this city not knowing whether I wanted to possess it or destroy it. I almost burned it to the ground.’ He turned back to Croesus.
‘Would that have been a terrible thing?’

‘You would have destroyed a place of beauty.’

‘Yes.’ Cyrus thought to himself for a moment. ‘I had in mind to write something. A proclamation. It is the custom here. First, the king must go north to a temple and perform a
ritual of theirs. I have sent Cambyses to take care of that. Then, each new king of Babylon writes of his ambitions on a clay cylinder, declares them to the people, and buries the cylinder in one
of the walls.’

‘What will you write?’

‘Some of it will be straightforward enough. I have to vilify my predecessor.’

‘Will you enjoy that?’

‘It is hubristic to enjoy it too much. That is the fate of kings like us. Gods whilst we live, objects of mockery the moment we die. I have to win over their Gods as well, proclaim myself
as their champion.’

‘You aren’t afraid of blasphemy?’

‘There is only one God, Croesus. He takes many aspects. This Marduk is just another one.’

‘What else will you say?’

‘I don’t know. I have yet to decide how to rule this city.’ He turned to face Croesus again. ‘I was hoping for a little help from you.’

‘I am not much of a man of words.’

‘I have scribes for words, Croesus. I am interested in your ideas.’ He leaned forward. ‘What do you think makes people happy?’

Croesus said nothing at first. He looked at Cyrus’s face, that ageless face that had conquered countless nations, but saw no sign of mockery there. ‘Master?’

‘What makes people happy? Not men like you and me. Ordinary people.’

‘How can I answer that?’ Croesus thought for a time. ‘By the river, Isocrates told me he is happiest when nothing is changing. He just wants to be left alone by his
master.’

‘I wouldn’t have called him an ordinary man.’

‘No?’

‘Perhaps you don’t see it, having known him for so long. But it is an interesting idea. Being left alone. I shall think on it.’ Cyrus yawned. ‘You may go,’ he said.
‘I will summon my scribes to begin their work. I will be curious to see what you think, when we are done. And I have a reward for you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I want you to take a day of freedom,’ Cyrus said. ‘You and your friends. Isocrates and his woman. Explore the city, and see if you change your mind about it.’

Croesus stared at the king for a moment, unsure if he had heard correctly, if Cyrus had really uttered that old, now unfamiliar word. ‘Freedom?’

‘Yes. No soldiers to escort you. No one will summon you to serve them. You shall have free passage throughout the city.’ He paused. ‘I will be disappointed if you run from me.
I will punish you if I catch you. But do as you will.’

Croesus laughed. ‘I am an old man, Cyrus. Where would I run to?’

‘Thank you, Croesus. Enjoy your freedom, for a day at least.’ He paused. ‘I can never free you fully,’ he added. ‘I am sorry for that.’

‘I know.’ Croesus tried to smile. ‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t care any more.’

He left the king and passed down through the palace, searching for Isocrates.

Everywhere he went, he saw Cyrus’s people at work, once again trying to understand the business of a flawed, alien government. Through doorways that had been carelessly left open or torn
from their hinges in the attack, he saw ministers hunched over desks with translators at their sides. Some studied the treaties the city had signed with its neighbours, trying to untangle the knots
of alliances and enmities that had built up over centuries of war and diplomacy. Others wrestled with the city’s strange, obscure, and barbaric system of justice, noting down laws that should
be repealed and those that needed to be enacted to establish Babylon as a civilized part of the empire. The most harassed-looking Persians were those who examined tax receipts and records of
expenditure, where, inevitably, the latter was greater than the former by several orders of magnitude. They shook their heads over the profligacy of their predecessors, trying to draw the numbers
closer together, to prevent the indebted city from collapsing in on itself.

Elsewhere, guards explored the corridors of the palace and recorded its layout on wax tablets, identifying the paths that an assassin might take, the positions that soldiers could hold secure in
the event of invasion or insurrection, the routes by which a monarch could quietly slip out of the palace if it became necessary to make a discreet exit: the palace redrawn as a labyrinth of
potential violence.

Croesus observed Persian servants talking animatedly to Babylonian slaves, unable to speak each other’s languages yet communicating their needs through tone and gesture. He almost laughed
when he saw one give an unmistakable, uncanny impersonation of Harpagus. He imagined the essentials were simple enough to communicate without words. Good masters, cruel masters, stupid masters. The
rest was just so much detail.

Several times he stopped and asked the Persian servants to help him find his friend. They stared at him in silence, and the Babylonians mimicked this unspoken aggression. That he was not one of
them, that he was neither a master to command nor an equal to be aided, was, it seemed, another concept that could cross the boundaries of language.

He eventually found Isocrates in one of the cellars. After Croesus had told him of Cyrus’s reward, he sat down on a sack of barley. He did not speak for a time.

‘I don’t want to go,’ he said quietly.

‘What? You must be joking.’

Isocrates offered him a thin smile. ‘I don’t know what I would do as a free man,’ he said. ‘I am not scared of much. But that does scare me.’ He laughed. ‘A
day without being at another’s command? I think I might go mad.’

‘I don’t believe that. You are not as weak as that.’

‘No. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps I am afraid that I would like it too much. If I can have only one day of freedom, I would rather not have any at all.’

‘You are sure?’

‘I am quite sure.’ He hesitated.

‘Something more you want to say?’

‘Yes.’ But he paused for a long time before he spoke again. ‘Take Maia, will you?’

‘Maia?’

‘Yes. Take her out into the city.’

‘You don’t think she will feel the same way as you?’

Isocrates smiled. ‘No. She is stronger than I am. Smarter, too. She will take it for what it is. A day of freedom. Nothing more.’

‘Very well.’ Croesus gestured to the heavy bags that filled the cellar. ‘You have plenty of work ahead of you, anyway.’

‘Yes. A grain counter in the most fertile land in the world.’ He laughed. ‘How could I take a day off? There is more wealth in bread here than you ever had in gold, Croesus. I
could count it for the rest of my life and still not finish before I died.’

Croesus hesitated, struck by a thought. ‘How old are you, Isocrates?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How can you not know?’

‘You forget what I am.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Irrelevant,’ he said. ‘No royal celebrations marked my birth, Croesus. No priests inscribed the date in their annals. I honestly don’t know how many years I have lived.
I am a little younger than you, perhaps, but not by much. We are both getting old now.’

‘That is strange,’ Croesus said. ‘Perhaps I envy you. All I see is my age increasing. The time that remains to me ebbing away. Knowing the date of your birth is almost like
knowing the day you will die.’

‘Well, you have one day back. A day of freedom. Go and enjoy yourself, Croesus. There won’t be any more after this one.’

‘How do you know? Perhaps Cyrus will reward us again.’

Isocrates paused. ‘I had a dream last night.’

‘I thought slaves didn’t dream.’

‘I don’t, usually. Perhaps I knew this reward was coming, this little piece of freedom, and took it in my sleep instead.’ He picked a handful of barley from the sack at his
side, and let it run through his fingers like sand. ‘Do you believe in the truth of dreams?’

‘I don’t know. What was your dream?’

‘I dreamed that I was back on Thera. I wish I could show my island to you, Croesus. The red cliffs, the way they plunge straight down, like a diver into the sea. When the sun sets, it is
like watching a great golden coin melting into the water, and the sky seems to catch fire. I’ve never been anywhere more beautiful than that.’

‘When were you taken from there?’

‘When I was a child. In my dream, I was in my village in the west of the island. The cliff below my village is near vertical, but there are steps, cut or worn by gods or men, that go down
to the water. And down there is the port. My father was a fisherman, I think. He used to take me there and teach me knots.’

‘Were you a boy in this dream?’

‘No. I was as I am now. I went down the steps, but there were no ships in the bay, no fishermen sorting nets or dogs begging for rotten fish. There was only a woman, bathing naked. She was
beautiful. A goddess, I suppose. I apologized for interrupting her—’

Croesus laughed.

‘It’s true, I promise you,’ Isocrates said. ‘What else can you do if you come across a goddess bathing? But she just looked at me in silence. She seemed to be waiting for
me to ask her something.’

‘What did you ask her?’

‘I had the feeling that whatever question I asked her, she would answer it truthfully. And I knew that there was some question, the right question, that I should put to her. But I
couldn’t think of it. All I could think to ask, standing beneath those cliffs, was whether or not I would ever find my way back to my village in the waking world.’

‘What did she say to that?’

‘She looked a little disappointed. She smiled nonetheless. She told me that I would live long, and travel far, but that I would never see my home again.’

‘And that was the end of your dream?’

‘Not quite.’ Isocrates turned to look at his companion, a smile playing on his lips. ‘I told her I had a friend,’ he said. ‘I asked her if she had anything to say
to him.’

Croesus laughed, a soft and rueful sound. ‘Now I don’t know whether you are lying to me or not. I can never tell. If it is true, I wish you hadn’t, I haven’t had much
luck with oracles in the past.’

‘Don’t you want to hear what she said?’

‘Very well. What did this naked goddess have to say about my future?’

‘She said that you would live long as well. But that you would never be happier than this day that is to come. That is when I woke up.’ Isocrates waited for Croesus to reply, but the
other man said nothing. ‘What if that were true? What would you do then?’

‘I don’t know,’ Croesus said. Then he remembered Solon, remembered the words they had traded almost twenty years before. He knew then what he must do on his last day of
freedom.

In the communal room he had been assigned to, he placed his bedroll so that he would be woken first by the sunrise. It was not a hard position to secure, for most of the slaves
were keen to sleep far from the light of the sun, to remain in their dreams for as long as possible.

As soon as the dawn woke him, he rolled out of his blankets before he could be tempted to doze. Stepping over the slumbering forms that were packed into the room, he made his way out into the
silent palace. Somewhere on the other side of the palace, he knew that Maia was doing the same.

They met like conspirators by one of the great fountains. Laughing together, not quite believing, they made their way to the gates of the palace. The guards, yawning from their long night spent
on watch and cursing those who were late to relieve them, laughed at Croesus and Maia as they approached. ‘Eloping?’ one of the guards asked with a wry smile. But when Croesus handed
over a parchment marked with the unforgeable seal of the king, the guards opened the gates without question or hesitation. They left the palace behind, and stepped out into a city that was just
beginning to wake.

Most cities grow unplanned. A village that stumbles on some sudden wealth and expands to become a town, a town that is occupied by a wandering warlord and grows larger still. Then there is an
influx of migrants, drawn to the promise of work, and the city is finally born. Buildings appear more by accident than any kind of design. Later attempts to provide architectural unity, by kings
eager to shape and control their possessions, only serve to highlight the disorder that lies at the heart of every city.

Babylon was different. From the very first brick, it seemed to have been precisely planned, each building carefully placed like a tile in some great mosaic. Or like a miracle of geometry, as
though designed by a mathematician to solve a great equation if it were viewed, impossibly, from above.