by Tim Leach
At last, Cambyses stopped, panting and exhausted. He looked again at his torturers.
‘Burn it,’ he said. ‘Give him the Second Death.’
The Second Death – Croesus did not know what Cambyses meant by this, but the king spoke with confidence. It must have been some fragment of Egyptian lore he had learned, some custom that he meant to use against the dead man.
The torturers hesitated. To the Persians, Croesus remembered, fire was a face of a god. It was an impious thing to give a dead man to the fire. But looking at the king, they saw there would be no question of disobeying. Slowly, reluctantly, they piled the kindling in the sarcophagus. They gave the body to that god of fire.
Psamtek had said nothing during the torture of the corpse. But now, as the body burned, Croesus saw his eyes tighten; it must have been a sacrilege to the Egyptians as well.
As the dead man burned, Cambyses seemed to remember Psamtek. He walked towards the Egyptian, and embraced him. The Egyptian did not flinch from this. His face broke into a smile, and it was as though, at that very moment, Croesus could see his mind breaking.
‘Now I know you will be loyal to me,’ Cambyses said. ‘My father took everything from Croesus before. And look, here he stands. My most loyal slave. You have nothing but me now.’
Psamtek stared at Cambyses. Then he knelt, and kissed the king’s hands. ‘I am yours for ever,’ he said.
5
‘Tell me everything,’ she said. And so he did.
After the parade and the desecration of the corpse, the king’s retinue returned to the palace at Memphis. Built on a hill, this sprawling white stone complex looked out on the city and the Nile, the pyramids of the necropolis, the black earth on the banks of the river and the red desert sands beyond.
Cambyses wandered the halls of this palace with Psamtek as his guide, telling him what treasures to take and what relics to destroy, erasing an ancient line of kingship and replacing it with the new. In all the chaos of the looting, none had noticed Croesus quietly slip away.
He could not run any more, but he managed a kind of quick and staggering forward motion, stumbling like a wounded messenger who does not care if he lives or dies, so long as he speaks the words that he must. Those slaves and servants he cornered and questioned did not ask him his purpose nor what authority he had to make such inquiries of them. His desperation was authority enough.
He found Maia, at last, in a storeroom of the palace. She was pale faced, and thinner than he remembered. The march across the desert must have been hard for her; like him, she was no longer young. When she saw him, at first she seemed ready to deliver a rebuke or dismissal. Then she saw the expression on his face. Without a word being passed, she led him away to a cellar of wine and grain. They sat down together, and she held his hands and let him speak.
He spoke as calmly as he could. From time to time he found himself wandering into silence, lost in the memories of what he had seen. Then he would start, like a man waking from his sleep, and speak once more, as though afraid he would forget what he had to say.
She did not speak when he had finished his story. He turned away from her, reached into one of the great clay jars, and slowly ran the grain through his fingers. A thousand-year empire, the great pyramids and temples, all founded on that simplest of things, the growing of grain, the baking of bread. The gift of the Nile.
He had heard it said that none knew why the Nile flooded, though all in Egypt and many beyond called it a blessing, a gift from the thousand gods of Egypt. He wondered if he believed that. For the rich soil had brought the farmers, then the kings to gather their wealth and hoard it jealously, then other kings to come and take it from them. All matters of pride and ownership had followed from this simple beginning. He wondered how differently the world might have been shaped, if the first farmer had never planted those first seeds. They had planted the beginnings of kings.
‘Is he mad, do you think?’ he said.
‘I do not know, Croesus.’
‘Neither do I. Perhaps a king will always go mad, given enough time. Even Cyrus, strong as he was. He almost lost his mind, at the end.’ He paused. ‘Was I? Mad, I mean, when I was king?’
Yes,’ she said. ‘I think that you were.’ And she looked worried for him, if he could not see something so apparent.
Perhaps she was right, Croesus thought. Somehow he had not thought of his years as a king as being years of a quiet kind of madness.
‘You would save him, if you could?’ she said.
Croesus hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘You have never . . .’ Croesus checked his words, but saw that she knew what remained unsaid.
‘No. You are right. I do not know what it is to have a child. But this is not your son. You do not have to save him.’
‘Yes, I do.’
She sighed. ‘I heard that with the older peoples of the world,’ she said, ‘no man was permitted to rule for long.’
‘Is that so?’
‘A king married the queen, was given the power to rule as he pleased, every luxury he could desire. He ruled for one year.’
‘What happened then?’
‘He was sacrificed to the gods, to make way for the next.’
‘Did these cults murder their queens too?’
‘No. The queens lived to see many kings. It seems they thought the women could withstand such things better. But we live in a world of men, now.’
She looked at him with what he took to be an exhausted, affectionate sadness, and Croesus thought again how tired she looked. She’s just old, like me, he told himself. We are all tired.
Slowly, the smile faded from her face. ‘I will not be able to see you again, after this,’ she said.
He did not reply.
‘You do understand, yes?’ she said. ‘I should not have seen you now. But . . .’
‘You will obey Isocrates in this?’
‘Yes.’
‘I did not think that was your way. You have made yourself a slave twice over?’
‘That is not worthy of you. It is as he told you. You made your choice, out in the desert. He loves you. But he cannot forgive the king.’
‘I understand,’ Croesus said. ‘He has made a choice too, though.’
‘Yes. That is true.’
Croesus looked down at his hands, slowly rubbing one palm with the thumb of his other hand, as though trying to wipe away some stubborn stain. ‘You love him very much, I suppose,’ he said.
‘I do not think about it.’ She shrugged. ‘Call it what you will.’
‘That is something I have never had. I did not think of it when I was a king. If I wanted a woman I could have her. My marriage was an alliance. We were fond of each other, but little more than that. I suppose now is the time for regrets, when it is too late to change anything.’ He paused. ‘I look at you and Isocrates with envy.’
‘I think you speak too highly of us.’
‘No. I do not think so. It must be remarkable, to love and to have that love returned. I am sorry to have not felt it. But I am glad to have seen it, at least.’ He shook his head. ‘I am an old man. Much too old to speak of such things.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said softly.
She should have gone then. It would have been the right moment to leave. But she stayed, and seemed to be waiting for something.
He reached over and took her hand again. He turned it over, held it in both of his for a moment, like a man holding a bowl of water. Then he lifted her palm to his lips, and held it there.
She sighed. She curled her fingers around his and held them for a moment, then pushed his hand away. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is another reason we should not see one another.’
‘What must I do, for Isocrates to forgive me? For you to forgive me?’
‘You already know, Croesus,’ Maia said. She stood, and walked away.
He looked after her, and thought for a moment she might look back, but she did not. She wen
t from the room, and he was alone once more.
*
The streets of Memphis were nearly deserted. No merchant drove his cart through the dust, no mobs of dirty children played in its alleys, and even the beggars seemed to be in hiding. A deaf man might have thought it an abandoned city, its people driven away by disaster, but one who could hear would make no such mistake. From many houses came the wailings of the mourners, crying out for the sons and daughters who had been taken from them, the thousands of dead inspiring twenty thousand voices of grief. They joined together, cacophonous, until it seemed that the entire city cried out.
Croesus went through these empty streets, moving slowly and carefully with neither purpose nor urgency. From the open doorways, he felt many eyes on him. Perhaps they took him for a beggar, or thought him mad. But none challenged the foreigner who walked amongst them.
Nearly two decades before, he had gone into the city of Babylon after the Persians had taken it. He had spent a last day of freedom there, wandering the streets, seeing the greatest wonders of the world. That should have been the happiest day of his life, or so a prophetic dream had told him. Maia had been with him then. Perhaps that had been why.
He turned a corner in Memphis, and there, at last, were people in the streets.
He could not count them all at first glance. Almost a hundred women stood there, each with a blanket-wrapped body in a cart beside her, so that two hundred, living and dead, waiting patiently outside the embalming houses.
Some had brought their sons from the execution grounds where Cambyses had put two thousand to death. The dead they bore with them seemed almost to be sleeping, if one could disregard the ragged spear wounds that had killed them. Others had the look of those who had travelled much further, accompanied by corpses that were grey and festering, that had lain unburied for weeks. Those mothers must have travelled to the battlefield where the Egyptian army had been destroyed, Croesus thought. He wondered what could inspire such a bleak pilgrimage across the land, there and back, bearing the putrefied dead with them. What a fear they must have had of death, of decay, to do such a thing.
One of the women turned her head to look at Croesus. Then another, and another, until they were all watching him, a hundred sets of eyes fixed on him in silence. Not with anger, or grief. Perhaps, seeing his white hair and wrinkle-cracked skin, each was staring at him and trying to imagine the old man their sons might have become.
It was beyond the street of the embalmers that he reached his destination, a place that he had sought, half without thinking. Croesus had seen the great building from afar, a high-walled fortress of carved stone, ringed by statues of kings or gods. The great temple of Memphis.
It was dark inside. A few diagonal shafts of sunlight cut through the air, slow trails of dust turning within them, and it took Croesus’s eyes some time to adjust. He looked over the carvings of animal-headed gods, reliefs depicting the deeds of kings long dead, the endless, alien lines of the Egyptian script. He found, deep within the darkness, what he was looking for. A priest, his head shaved in the Egyptian manner, his back bowed under the weight of his years.
Croesus hesitated, uncertain of whether or not the priest could be approached, or if even to look at the man constituted some unspeakable act of blasphemy. But the priest caught his eye and smiled at him, beckoned him closer. Croesus was prepared to be frustrated in his attempts to speak to the priest, to communicate only through mime and gesture, but he discovered in moments that the Egyptian knew Persian, the common language of their conquerer. When Croesus asked the priest how he came to speak it so well, the other man gave a little shrug.
‘I thought that it might be useful. It seemed likely that Cambyses would come to our land, sooner or later. Now, what brings you to my temple?’
‘I do not know.’ It was true. He did not know what had brought him to this place. It was not the consolation of a foreign religion. Their many thousand gods could give him no comfort. Perhaps it was quite the opposite, he thought. Perhaps it was not hope he sought here, but the ending of it.
The priest waited. From time to time an acolyte would come forward and begin to ask him some question or other, but the priest would smile at him and wave him off, content to wait for Croesus to find his thoughts.
‘What god is worshipped here?’ Croesus said.
‘We know him as Ptah. The Hellenes, I think, know him as Hephaestus.’
‘The forger of the world.’
‘The maker of the world,’ the priest said in gentle correction. ‘He needed no tools but his thought and his words. The world was begun in this place.’
‘Begun by words?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have heard many cities claim to be the centre of the world.’
‘I am sure. But here, it is true. The world began when the god spoke in Memphis.’
‘When was this? How long ago.’
‘None can say,’ the priest said.
‘And do your gods still walk the earth?’
‘As animals, sometimes. Once every thousand years, Ptah takes the form of a bull we call Apis. But the gods have not walked the earth since the world began.’
‘I am a slave now, but once I was a great king in Lydia,’ Croesus said, and waited to see what response this might provoke. If the Egyptian thought him to be some wandering mad man, claiming, like all mad men do, to be a god or a king, he gave no sign of it. ‘I was told by my father that within sixteen generations,’ Croesus continued, ‘we could trace our ancestry back to the gods. That the world began sixteen generations ago, when the gods stood beside men. I was wondering what you thought of that?’
The priest smiled gently, as one would to a child’s question. He did not speak, but beckoned for Croesus to follow him. They walked past the tall statues to a chamber deeper within the old temple, where the sun did not penetrate; fire gave the only light in this place, and a high wall loomed before them. It was decorated with collections of strange markings grouped together, separated by lines scored in the stone. There were more of them than he could count at a first glance, and though he knew little of the Egyptian script, Croesus knew them to be names.
The priest stepped forward, and tapped the lowermost marking on the wall. ‘My name,’ he said. He put his finger to the collection of symbols above it. ‘The high priest before me.’ Another tap, one higher again. ‘And before him.’ He gave another little shrug, and a wave of his hand. There was no need to say the rest.
Croesus counted the rows and the columns, and multiplied them against one another. There were more than four hundred names there – four hundred generations of priests who had worshipped in this place for tens of thousands of years. He checked his calculations again, thinking that surely he must have been mistaken. He was not.
He knew that the world was greater in size than he could fathom, that there were lands beyond the edges of the greatest maps that he had seen. Somehow this had never troubled him. But to see the world as so old, to think of the hundreds of generations that had passed and the thousands that were to come, filled him with sadness.
No, he thought, there is no fear in size. One need only stand before a single mountain to know that one is but a tiny creature in a world built for gods and monsters. But time, the age of the world, was fearsome to contemplate. If a man lives for close to a hundred years in a world that is only a few thousand old, that man’s life is small, but it still matters. Cast into ten thousand, or a hundred thousand years, and it meant nothing at all. How little one life counted for, he thought, in that annihilating ocean of time.
‘Thank you,’ Croesus said.
‘This sight pleases you?’
‘No. But I am glad to have seen it.’
‘I am sorry I cannot speak to you longer. We have much to do, to prepare for our new ruler. He is a good king?’
‘No. He is not.’
‘Ah. Well, we must do the best we can, no?’
As they walked back towards the entrance of the temple, Cr
oesus spoke again. ‘There is something else I wanted to ask you.’
‘What is that?’
‘The Second Death.’
‘You fear it for yourself?’ the priest said. ‘That is not the custom in Lydia. I know an excellent embalmer, if you wish to make preparations.’
‘No, you misunderstand. I do not know what it is.’
‘I see.’ He paused. ‘We Egyptians do not fear death, for we may live on in another world after this one. But only if our bodies are preserved.’
‘The body is destroyed, and the soul follows it?’
‘Yes. The body cannot live without the soul, nor the soul without the body. That is the Second Death.’
Croesus thought about this for a time. ‘There is no way of avoiding this?’
‘Very difficult. Without the body, it is very difficult. But there are charms that can work.’
‘Charms?’
‘Yes, there are many of them. Places where the soul can take refuge. Those figurines with which we fill our tombs. A carving on a wall. Even a memory.’
‘A memory?’
‘Yes. The most unreliable spell of all. A last resort. But it is only when a man is truly forgotten, his body destroyed and his memory lost as well, that his soul will finally perish.’
Croesus nodded. ‘Thank you.’
‘Come again, Lydian. I would like to speak to you again.’
‘I will not be free to come here again. I should not be here now.’
The priest nodded. ‘Then I wish you good fortune,’ he said, ‘and hope you find the death you deserve.’
Croesus almost smiled at this morbid statement, spoken like a blessing.
‘The same to you,’ he said. ‘And I hope you meet it well.’
