The Last King of Lydia (35 page)

Croesus, knowing that time was running out, had no time for subtlety. He begged his son and shouted at him, dragged him and slapped him through the streets, as a small crowd of idle Babylonians
gathered and followed them, cheering and jeering, entertained by the sport of an old man wrestling with an imbecile like a farmer with a stubborn mule. At last, as Croesus was on the verge of utter
exhaustion, they reached the market square.

The market was closing down for the day, and at first Croesus thought that he was too late. But then, past the merchants packing their wares into carts, he saw the people he was looking for.

‘They are here, Gyges,’ he said. ‘Will you come with me? Please?’ Gyges, dull eyed and even more exhausted than his father, nodded in defeat. They crossed the square, and
came to the stall of the horse-taming Massagetae.

They were a family of six nomads, a man and woman, three sons and a daughter. As Croesus approached the father looked him over with an expert eye and saw that he was a man with no money. The
horse trader crossed his arms, preparing to have his time wasted.

Croesus turned to look for a translator to help him, and found a boy of twelve or thirteen already standing at his side. The boy had the dirt-rimed face of a beggar child, but looked up at him
with bright, intelligent eyes and stood with a merchant’s confidence. Did he have a family, Croesus wondered? Surely not. He was an orphan who should have starved years before, but had
learned to live on words alone.

‘You are here to trade?’ the boy said.

‘Yes. You speak their language?’ Croesus said doubtfully.

‘Of course.’

‘Will you speak for me? I have no money to give you.’

‘I need to practise it anyway,’ the boy said, giving a small shrug. ‘What do you want to say?’

Croesus hesitated. ‘Tell him I want him to take this man with him,’ he said at last. ‘Out of the city.’

As this was translated to him, the horse trader frowned. He spoke a few brief words in response.

‘They have no interest in buying your slave.’

‘He is no slave. He is my son.’

Hearing this, the nomad bristled. He barked out two short sentences.

‘He is insulted that you would sell your son. He asks you to leave.’

‘Tell him again that he is mistaken. I am not here to sell him.’ Croesus paused. ‘I cannot help my son. I want this man to take him in. Take him from the city, and north to the
plains.’

The trader threw back his head and laughed. He spoke again.

‘He asks you to tell him why he should take this madman into his family.’

‘Tell him I can give him no good reason. If he takes this man in, he will save his life. He was meant to be free. This city is a prison for him. Please.’

The nomad listened to the translator. He shook his head and raised a finger in admonishment, but paused before he spoke, his eyes focused behind Croesus. Croesus turned to follow the other
man’s gaze, and saw his son approaching one of the horses.

It was a white stallion, tall and obviously skittish, but it stood quite still as Gyges approached, then reached out with a shy hand and stroked the horse’s cheek. The animal leaned into
his touch, snorting its approval, and Gyges took another step forward, placing his arm flat against its head, his elbow on the horse’s nose as his fingers curled into the top of its mane.

He took a last step forward and let his arm fall back to his side, and rested his head against the stallion’s, like an exhausted traveller placing his head beneath running water, his eyes
closed, his breathing slow. The horse whickered in affection, and Gyges gave a small sob in response. Here at last, Croesus thought, in a city of madmen, was something that his son could
understand. Something unspoiled by words.

Croesus turned back to the horse trader, ready to argue again, but found him wearing an almost rueful expression, like the face of a man who has made a bad wager. The Massagetae held up a hand
to silence Croesus, then called the rest of his family together into a semicircle. They began to debate.

‘What are they saying?’ Croesus asked the boy at his side.

‘They are speaking too fast. I can’t understand them.’

It was true that they spoke rapidly, over and under each other, the argument growing increasingly heated. After a few minutes, the divisions became clear. From what he could tell, two of the
sons seemed to be of one mind, the mother, the daughter and the other son of another, with the father still undecided. Which of the sides was for him and which was against, Croesus did not
know.

At last, the father held up his hands for silence. He looked at each of his family in turn, and they all said a single word in response. He shook his head in disbelief, then turned back to
Croesus and spoke.

‘They will take him,’ the boy said, and Croesus bowed his head and closed his eyes. The world around him seemed to recede, to disappear entirely, as if the entirety of existence, for
a single moment, had been reduced to one point of grief. His aching lungs, his weary heart.

When he could speak again, Croesus said, ‘Thank him for me.’

He heard a laugh. ‘He is telling you to get out of here before he changes his mind,’ the boy said.

‘I will. My thanks to you as well.’

The boy gave his small shrug once again. ‘It is as I said. I am grateful for the practice.’

Croesus watched the boy walk off into the crowd, looking for one last commission before the market broke up entirely. He turned back, and found Gyges watching him. Croesus tried to smile.

‘You had better go with them now, Gyges,’ he said. ‘I hope . . .’ His voice trailed away.

Gyges opened his mouth, trying to find the words that he knew his father would want to hear. He seemed on the verge of speech when Croesus waved his son into silence. He knew that there was
nothing that needed to be said, that they both knew it all already, had always known, perhaps, but had forgotten until the moment of parting. Gyges nodded, to show that he understood.

Then he stepped forward and took his father’s hand in his own. He held it loosely, just for a moment, before he let go and went to join his new family.

The mother threw a sheepskin over his back to keep out the cold and handed him the reins of a horse to lead out of the city, and together, now seven instead of six, they made their way from the
market square, to begin their long journey to the steppes and plains of the north, a world of wild herds and wandering rivers, of thousands of people but not a single city.

Croesus stood motionless, and watched them for as long as he could before they were gone from his sight, lost in the crowds of Babylon. He then looked up, back to the royal palace and the
balcony at its highest point. If he hurried back, he thought to himself, he might still get back before the sunset. He did not want to die in darkness.

Croesus watched the merchant caravans leave the city. He watched the low sun bathe the city in a soft red light. He tried to remember all of the sunsets he had lived to see, to
remember how they each compared with this one, whether the last one he saw would be the tenth or the hundredth most beautiful he had ever seen. He stood quite still, and tried to find his strength
again. The strength to step up and step forward.

It had been hard enough the first time, and now, even when it felt more right than ever before, it was harder still. His coward’s spirit held him by some intangible, compelling force. Each
breath came more ragged and painful than the last, and he began to count them. On the tenth breath, he decided, he would jump.

He thought of Isocrates and Maia, and hoped they would be well. He thought of Harpagus and Cyrus, and was surprised by his sadness that he would not see them again. He thought of Gyges one last
time, disappearing north to a new life in the wild lands. This was what Isocrates’s dream had meant, he thought. That at the end of his foolish, selfish life, he would find the way to save
his son. Now, at last, he could die happy. He counted the tenth breath.

‘Croesus.’

At first, he did not respond to his name. He wondered if it were some trick of his mind, desperate to save itself, conjuring some aural phantom. But the voice came again, real and insistent.

‘I should have known I would find you here,’ Isocrates said as he came forward, and leaned against the balcony. ‘Well. Did you enjoy your day with my wife?’

Croesus looked across at the other man, and tried to smile. ‘Yes,’ he said carefully.

‘Good, good. And did you find what you were looking for?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’ Croesus thought for a moment. ‘The city disappointed me, but still, I am glad to have seen it. Your dream was not wrong. I think I have been happy
here today.’

Isocrates laughed.

‘Something amusing?’ Croesus said.

‘You, you pompous fool. Always talking about happiness as if it is some kind of holy thing.’

‘What is happiness to you then?’

Isocrates thought for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Eating a good pear with a sharp knife,’ he said. ‘Making love to Maia, when she’ll have me. Falling asleep with the sun on
my face. Shall I go on?’

Croesus shook his head. ‘Sensation. Relief from pain. That’s not enough.’

‘It is enough for me.’

‘It is not enough,’ Croesus said.

‘I suppose not, for you. That’s why you’re out here, isn’t it?’

Croesus said nothing. They stood together in silence for a long time, Isocrates running his fingers along the edge of the balcony, Croesus standing quite still, counting his breaths. They were
some way past a hundred now.

After a time, Isocrates spoke again. ‘Would you like me to go?’ he said. ‘That’s not what I want to do. But I will, if you ask me to.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I’d like to go back inside to my slave’s life. I would like you to come with me.’

‘For how long?’

‘For years. Decades perhaps. There won’t be much joy along the way, but I’d like you to be there with me. That is selfish of me, isn’t it? But it’s the only reason
I have.’ He paused. ‘Croesus. Would you like me to go?’

Croesus said nothing for a long time.

Then he said, ‘No.’

‘What would you like me to do instead?’

‘Stay here, and watch the sunset with me,’ Croesus said. He paused. ‘It might be a good one.’

‘It might.’ Isocrates leaned on the balcony, and looked down at the city.

‘This is Cyrus’s greatest conquest, isn’t it?’ he said, after a silence.

‘Yes.’

‘A fine city to rule an empire from. A fine home for a king, and for slaves like us. Is this the end of his wars, do you think?’

Croesus shook his head.

‘No?’ Isocrates said.

‘We shall stay here for a time. But he will grow bored. And one day he will look at his maps, and find another place to conquer. And we will go with him.’

Isocrates gazed down on the streets of Babylon. Then he shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let us try to enjoy ourselves until then.’

Far below, the city stretched on as far as an old man’s eyes could see.

Babylon. As close to a perfect city as men had yet managed to build. The Persians had come to make it greater, to make it the heart of an empire. They had, instead, initiated its slow decay. It
might take centuries or merely decades for it to be destroyed entirely. Some unknown time after that the city would become myth, then die altogether, lost to memories and stories alike.

The people of Babylon, had they known this, would not perhaps have cared. They had been taught, ever since birth, that the Gods loved decay as much as they loved creation, that death and
rebirth, entropy and regeneration, were the way of things, that nothing lasted for long, least of all a man or a city, a king or a slave, a memory or a story.

If any of the people down below had looked up at the balcony of the palace, they might have assumed that it was their new ruler looking down on them, a trusted slave at his side, though which
was the king and which was the slave, they could not have said. Those with keener eyes might have seen the glint of silver in their hair, and wondered whether their wandering lives were over, and
they would grow old together and die in the city, or whether their travels had hardly yet begun.

The two men remained outside until the sun had set. If they were still visible through the darkening air, an observer from the streets below might have seen the two men draw together for an
instant. It was possible that the blurring of the two forms was a mere trick of failing light and tired eyes. It was also possible that they embraced once, sudden and joyful, the way that children
do. Then they returned to the palace, to serve their king, and wait for the next war to come.

Very many thanks to Ravi Mirchandani, James Roxburgh, Sara Holloway, and the rest of the Atlantic Books phalanx who have worked so hard on this book, and to Caroline Wood at
Felicity Bryan, whose undaunted enthusiasm and keen eye for storytelling have been truly invaluable.

This book has had many readers, and I owe a huge debt to Maureen, Tim, Nick, Gaby, Helen, Vestal, Thom and to all the others who have offered their support and advice along the
way. Special thanks to John and Jayme, who set me on the right path in the first place.

Last, but by no means least, I must thank Herodotus, who first told this story so long ago.