The Last King of Lydia (6 page)

He witnessed the coronation of his waking self as king of Lydia. Borne by a soldier on the walls of Sardis he watched the parade go past, watched as the new king waved to the cheering crowds and
smiled at the chanting of his name. As a man, that day had meant everything to him. As a weapon he felt only the hope that he might finally go to war. A new king always went to war.

The wars came, but he remained in his armoury, growing older and weaker. As the years passed, some of his fellows descended into a senile madness, boasting of wars they had never fought,
claiming to have been the personal weapons of renowned warriors who had died centuries before. Some rusted, were taken away, and never returned. Croesus wondered if he would prefer that fate, to be
cast out to rust and dissolve back into the earth, rather than this eternity of waiting. But that was not his destiny.

He was taken from the armoury, bundled with half a dozen of his fellows, covered with hide and strapped to the side of a pack animal. For days he jolted along the road, listening to the excited
chatter of his companions, roused from their stupor and going at last to war. He lived in darkness, shielded from the elements, waiting. He was reminded of his first days beneath the earth, and he
prayed that the journey would not end, that he would remain for ever in this same exquisite state of anticipation.

But the battle came at last, the air alive with the screams of fearful men, the animal cries of the enemy, the sound of iron against iron, iron through skin, iron into bone. He circled the edges
of the conflict, waiting patiently. He felt the practised hand that gripped him with a dry palm, waiting to make a throw that would count.

The entire world stood still. His master let him fly, and he felt the air roar, sensed a single figure growing large and filling his world.

He struck deep, tasted blood. Buried in flesh and bone, he could feel the dying heart beat through him, and knew that the wound was mortal. His master’s hand gripped him once more, and
with a single motion he was pulled loose and hung suspended above the body of his enemy. He saw the face of the man he had killed.

It was his son, Atys.

Croesus woke. He sat alone, his wife far away in her own private quarters, and shook silently in his bedclothes until he found the strength to move. He went to a basin of water and washed his
face, swallowed a goblet of wine. He could still feel his son’s blood on his face, still taste it on his lips.

He cried out for his guards. They entered the room in a moment, checking the corners, prodding the curtains with the tips of their spears, their hands running over Croesus to search for a hidden
wound. He waved them away. ‘Listen to me.’ He voice trailed off, and his eyes flickered across the bodies of his guards. He saw the iron daggers and iron short swords strapped to their
waists, the iron-headed spears they clutched in their hands. He thought of the thousands of iron weapons in Sardis, of a death waiting in every part of the palace.

‘Leave all your weapons here,’ he said. ‘Then go to my son and guard him with your lives.’

They exchanged uncertain looks. ‘Guard your son without our weapons?’ one of them asked.

‘Yes,’ Croesus said, ‘exactly that. Go, now.’

It was not for them to question the king further, and so they placed their weapons before him and left to obey their orders. Croesus sat on the stone floor and ran his hands over the blades,
trying to feel for anything that felt familiar. He held each one up in turn to his ear, as though hoping that it might whisper its name to him. In his dream, each of the weapons had spoken with a
different voice, and the individual patterns of the iron had been as diverse and familiar to him as the faces of his own family. Now they all looked the same, had no voice of iron to mark them
apart. He spent the rest of the night crouched there, cradling the blades in his arms, trying to discover if one of them might be the weapon that would kill his son.

In the morning, a new decree was announced in the city. Croesus commanded that all iron weapons outside of the armouries were to be taken from the men’s quarters and hung up in the
women’s quarters. All the armouries were to have their guard doubled, and no weapons were to leave them without his permission. Soon after, the palace guards were rearmed with bronze weapons.
The guards complained to their captains when the soldiers of the city jeered at their inferior, effeminate weaponry, but the edict stood.

The fear was choking at first. For weeks afterwards, he would spend much of his free time in one armoury or another, touching each spear and sword and arrowhead in turn, trying to locate his
dream self, his iron double. But, gradually and inevitably, the fear receded. He had been granted a vision, and surely no vision would come without the ability to change that future. The Gods would
not be that cruel.

The absence of iron weapons soon became nothing more than another strange custom of the Lydian court. Rumour spread in the neighbouring countries that it was an aesthetic choice, that Croesus,
in his vanity and his love of glittering wealth, found bronze more pleasing to his eyes than iron. The king enjoyed this rumour, and began to spread it himself.

In time, he almost came to believe it.

The priest brought two sets of hands together, pronounced the old words, and they were married. The watching crowd cried out, and Croesus tried to give his voice to the
celebration. But no words came, only air – a soft sigh of relief.

Five years had passed, five years in which Lydia had grown stronger. Tribe and city, island and township – all people west of the Halys river soon came under the power of Croesus. Some
fought or endured siege for a time, others surrendered as soon as the flag of bull and lion was seen on the horizon. After the wars, the eastern tribes brought Croesus offerings of honey, necklaces
of gold beads, patterned silver bracelets. The Ionians gave him red wine in black and brown amphorae, the black the colour of Nubian skin, the brown the colour of wet earth, the deep red wine like
blood and water.

Five years of conquest and prosperity, and only now had his son chosen to take a wife.

He had made countless introductions to the daughters of the Lydian nobility, but his son, smiling shyly, had rejected each one. Croesus could have forced his son to respect his wishes, but found
he did not have the heart for it. He wanted more than anything for his son to be married, but, it seemed, was powerless to bring it to pass. The king waited, and each day he woke and prayed for his
son to fall in love.

He looked around the temple, at his family. Atys sat drinking wine with the other young men as they pledged countless toasts to the health of the new couple. Occasionally one of them would lean
in close to Atys to whisper something in his ear. Obscene suggestions, judging by the way Atys blushed and shook his head. Amongst them, drinking quietly, was Adrastus, the man who had thrown
himself on Croesus’s mercy five years before. Croesus remembered how the priests had poured pigs’ blood over Adrastus’s hands, reading the spooling gore as it ran down to the
floor and pronouncing the omens to be good, the blood guilt cleansed. The priests had received a gold statue four cubits high from Croesus in return. Good omens did not go unrewarded, and Adrastus
had been taken into the royal household without complaint.

He looked at the women. Danae moved through the crowd, mollifying disappointed fathers, entertaining visiting ambassadors and diplomats. He looked at Iva, the woman his son had chosen at last to
be his wife. She had a delicate beauty, and it was not difficult to see why Atys had been drawn to her, though she was thinner than Croesus would have liked, and shy too. She was the daughter of a
minor nobleman, and it was a match that gave no political advantage, but to the king that no longer mattered. He saw Maia sitting with the new bride, talking quietly. He supposed she was telling
Iva of what would happen in the night ahead, telling her not to be afraid. Beside them both, Gyges sat with a bewildered expression on his face, looking in on a strange ritual from this other
world. He had, at least, understood enough to remain quiet during the ceremony. The king wanted no ill omens on this day of all days.

Croesus turned away from the wedding crowd, and found Isocrates at his side, waiting silently for orders.

‘Isocrates.’

‘Master.’

‘Everything is well with our guests? No trouble from the Ionians?’

‘They seem to be behaving themselves. Do not worry, all is as it should be. It is a fine wedding.’

‘Yes. I suppose it is.’ Croesus smiled.

‘You are happy, master?’

‘Relieved. It’s a difficult thing, having one’s happiness depend on those one cannot control. Don’t you think?’

‘I wouldn’t know, master.’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t.’ Croesus turned away, but did not dismiss his slave. ‘I’d like you to do some investigating for me.’ He gestured to the milling
crowd. ‘Talk to the Athenians. They have a small delegation here. Afterwards, send our messengers and emissaries to the city.’

‘Yes, master. And what am I to enquire about? The state of the Athenian army perhaps? Or their relations with Sparta, with Delphi?’

‘No, no. Nothing like that. I want you to find out about Tellus.’

‘Tellus?’

‘Yes.’ Croesus looked closely at his slave. Few would have noticed a change in the man, for he had given no obvious outward sign. The slightest tensing of the slave’s body, a
particular flatness to the eyes – it took a man as familiar with him as Croesus to notice this response. ‘You have heard of him?’ the king said.

‘I do not think so,’ Isocrates replied. ‘Whom do you mean?’

‘A man of some fame. Dead now, or so I have heard. Killed in battle against Eleusis. Solon spoke of him. It shouldn’t be hard to learn more of him. Not for a man of your
talents.’

Isocrates bowed low to hide his eyes. ‘As you wish.’ He turned to walk away.

‘Isocrates?’

He looked back at his king. ‘Yes?’

‘You are sure you have not heard of Tellus?’

‘No, master,’ Isocrates said.

It was the first lie he had ever told his king.

Far north of Sardis, the woods of Mysia sprawled across land that lay beneath high mountains. They were dense, broken only by the path of the great Macestus river, and the
occasional natural clearing where the trees would not grow. It was in one of these rare clearings, at the same moment that Atys’s marriage was taking place in the great city to the south,
that a hunter lay on a bloodied patch of earth. He lay, quiet and still, and waited to die.

It was a monster, larger than any boar he had ever seen or heard of before. They had heard the rumours, he and his friends, and had gone out into the woods to hunt it. To protect their lands. In
pursuit of glory. They were all experienced hunters, careful and skilled. It hadn’t mattered. The boar had killed them all.

He had set the spear perfectly as the boar charged at him. Again and again, he re-created the moment in his mind, trying to think what he could have done differently, but there was nothing. The
spear had been positioned without error, but as soon as the point touched flesh, the shaft had shivered and snapped as though the beast’s hide were made from stone. It had carried on its
charge at full force, and for an instant, when it was only a few spans away from him, he had seen himself reflected in the boar’s eyes. He had seen his death there. Then the sharp pain as the
tusk entered his stomach, the taste of wet dirt in his mouth as he rolled against the ground again and again until he came to rest against a tree.

Then, he lay still and listened to his friends as they died.

He was alone now. Distant but growing closer, he could hear the thud of the boar’s hooves against the grass, the angry snorts that escaped its nostrils. He had pulled himself upright, his
back against the tree. His skin was cold, cold enough to make him shiver in the heat of the midday sun, but he could feel a thick warmth seeping down into his groin and to the top of his thighs.
Hesitant, he reached down to touch his wound. His fingers brushed against a hot wet coil. A piece of himself exposed to the air, and he pulled his hand back as though it had been burned, and turned
his head away. He didn’t want to look at his wound.

His eyes fell on the high mountain that loomed in the distance. He wondered if that was where the boar had come from. He had heard it said that gods lived there.

As he lay dying, he hoped that the boar was a god. It would be a good thing, he thought, as the padding and snorting of the boar grew louder behind him, to have been killed by a god.

Again, he smelled the stench of the boar. He felt its hot breath against his neck.

Rumour travels faster than horses. By the time a delegation from Mysia had arrived in Sardis to plead for help, the city was already alive with stories of the boar.

It had killed a dozen men already, it was said, and every village and town for a hundred
stades
around lived in fear of it. Crops remained unplanted, and animals wandered wild in the
fields whilst their keepers remained barricaded indoors. It was like a monster out of the old myths, and the people of Sardis argued endlessly as to whether it was merely an overgrown monstrosity
or the child of a god. Auguries were taken by priests throughout the city to try and provide some answer to the mystery, but their results were inconclusive and contradictory, and each night the
air in the city was alive with the scent of burning fat from a dozen different temples. The stray monster of a distant land had come to obsess the Lydian people. Perhaps, invincible as their empire
was, they wanted an enemy to be afraid of, a threat against which to unite. If so, they found it in the beast haunting the woods in the north.

After the Mysians arrived at court, Croesus let them make their plea in front of a public crowd. After they had finished speaking, he threw up a hand to quiet the room.

‘My honourable subjects,’ he said. ‘I grieve for the sons that you have lost, and am dismayed that your people have been reduced to fear and terror. No doubt the Gods have seen
our prosperity, the great wealth and strength of our kingdom, and have chosen to test us.