by Tim Leach
When he returned to himself, the fever burned from his skin and shaken from his bones, he was in darkness. There was only a single source of light, hidden somewhere close by, a small fire placed out of sight to protect his eyes. He could smell the odour of stale sweat clinging heavy on his skin, and feel improvised bedding under him, empty sacks that still bore a few stray stalks of wheat. He had not noticed them in the depths of his fever, but now he felt them worrying against his back like insects, and could not ignore them.
He shifted, and as if in answer, a shape moved in the darkness. Even with so little light, he recognized who the figure was. He fancied that he could have had half his senses taken from him, his mind broken with age and destroyed by sickness, and he would still know that man in a moment.
‘Has the king asked for me?’ Croesus said.
‘No,’ Isocrates replied. ‘He speaks to no one but Psamtek now.’
‘How long has it been?’
‘Five days. The fever broke last night.’
With difficulty, Croesus pushed himself up to a sitting position. ‘That is too long.’
‘Less than a week.’
‘You do not understand how fast Cambyses moves from one idea to the next.’
‘You forget. I do know how quickly he thinks. And acts.’
‘That is true.’ Croesus ran a hand through his thin, dirty hair. ‘Why are you here, Isocrates?’
Isocrates did not reply for a time. He lifted the small brazier, and fed it another sliver of wood. Croesus flinched from this weak light, for it seemed to physically press itself against his eyes. Isocrates glanced at Croesus, and placed the fire out of sight once again.
‘Was it as bad as they say, out in the desert?’ Isocrates said. ‘Worse.’
‘Did they—’
‘Yes. I do not want to speak of it.’ Croesus looked down at his hands, found them trembling slightly, and thought of that disease of the mind that began with shaking hands. Concentrating hard, he made them go still. ‘I do not even know why we were there,’ he said.
‘I do. The truth came out after you left, and the men of the court speak of little else.’ Isocrates hesitated. ‘Do you truly wish to know?’
‘Yes. I do.’
‘Cambyses’s men went to the Ethiopian court,’ Isocrates said. ‘They said they were there to honour the Ethiopian king, though really they were spying. The king sniffed them out. I have heard they select their king by finding the tallest man in the land, but it sounds as if he was as clever as he was tall.
‘They brought him gifts. A purple robe, a casket of myrrh, a golden necklace and bracelets, and a jar of wine. They said that he looked at the purple robe and when he heard it was dyed, he cast it aside and said that, like the messengers, it was pretending to be something it was not. He said the same thing about the myrrh, when he heard it was perfumed. He laughed at the gold, saying that gold was so common in their country that they used it to fetter the condemned.’ Isocrates paused. ‘He did like the wine, though. He said that was one thing the Persians did better than his people.
‘He told them that Cambyses was a liar and a coward, who craved lands that were not his and had already enslaved one nation who had never wronged him. He told them to be thankful that the children of Ethiopia were not afflicted with the disease of ambition, or they would come and take Cambyses’s kingdom from him. Then he sent them on their way. And he gave them a bow, of a kind that is common amongst their archers. He said that when the king of Persia could draw that back to his chin, that would be the day Ethiopia would fall.’ Isocrates spread his hands, and shrugged. ‘The messengers gave the bow to Cambyses when they returned, and he could not even draw it a finger width.’
‘An insult,’ Croesus said, and turned his head away. ‘Ten thousand starved and murdered, for such an insult. I had hoped they had died for something more.’
‘Wars have been started for less than that.’
‘I suppose that is true. I do not know why he sent a force west, to Ammon. It might have been for nothing more than a whim. Has there been word from that army?’
‘Yes. That is why you must attend the king tomorrow.’
‘Why tomorrow?’
‘A messenger has come back from the west.’
‘Word from the army at Ammon?’
‘They did not reach Ammon. No one has heard or seen anything of them since they left the city.’
Croesus did not reply at first. ‘I do not know that the king’s mind can withstand another disaster,’ he said eventually.
‘Is this the end, do you think?’
‘No. Not after what I saw out in the desert. Cambyses once told me that the people respected the cruel more than the kind, the strong more than the wise. Perhaps he sees it more truly than I can bear. And now he has Psamtek to help him see.’
‘Psamtek?’
‘He wanted us to stay out in the desert. And at the festival . . . I do not know why he acts as he does. Why he encourages the king.’
Isocrates did not respond, and in the darkness, Croesus could not read his face to understand what this silence might mean.
‘Has Parmida been kind to you?’ Croesus said, to break to silence.
‘Yes. I thank you for that. She is a good mistress.’
‘And is Maia well?’
‘She is well. She does not wish to see you.’ Isocrates leaned forward, put his head in his hands like an exhausted or defeated man. ‘When you came into the palace,’ he said slowly, ‘it was her you came to find, wasn’t it? Not me.’
‘Yes.’
Isocrates nodded absently. He stood, and walked to the door of the room, out of the reach of the dim light.
‘You were right, Isocrates. In the desert.’
Isocrates turned back. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was.’
‘I will do it. I will . . .’ Still, he could not speak the words. ‘Will you help me?’
‘No, Croesus.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you will never get the chance again. Because it is too late.’
With that, he was gone.
Croesus lay back down in the silence for a time. When at last he rose again, in the corner of the room he found a clean tunic and a deep bowl of clear water, left behind by the slave who had once been his friend. He stripped off his dirty clothes and poured the water over his head, rubbing the dirt from his arms and chest and face, the old skin moving slack beneath his fingers like that of some lifeless thing.
He stood naked, trembling with the cold like a newborn calf. He slipped the clean tunic over his head and went in search of the king.
*
Walking with slow, confident steps, Isocrates left the corridors of the palace behind, passed through the gate, and went down into the city. He was gambling with his life to do so. Had any of the guards chosen to question him, looked past the initial smooth evasions he would have given and found that he had no true excuse to offer, his offence would be punishable by death. But no man challenged him. Most of the guards had come from the desert, and leaned hollow-eyed against the walls, their bodies only partially restored by five days of feasting, their minds still reliving the things that they had seen and done out on the unforgiving sands.
He walked the same streets that Croesus had wandered through many months before. He passed market stalls that sold bread and wine and salted fish from the Nile, past the embalming houses where the poorest paid for the crudest of preservations, hoped for some chance of surviving in the next life, and those the wealthy families paid for miracles, their corpses so unaging it was impossible to imagine that they did not, somehow, live on. He saw too the dentists’ lodges, where every Egyptian went as inevitably as they went to the embalming houses, their teeth ruined by hard grains just as their bodies would be ruined by time. He walked next to the great temple of Ptah, but did not stop there. He walked on, until at last he found the place he was looking for.
It was a tradesmen’s house with no markings on it, no sign hung outside
. From it came the almost imperceptible scent of ink and papyrus, notable only when massed together, as if it were solely when these materials were gathered in some vast phalanx, countless thousands of rolls of paper and gallons of ink, that they had any kind of substance at all.
The scribe stood in doorway of his home, his thin fingers marked with ink, like little tattoos. Isocrates went to him, and began to try to speak. They stood for a time, each trading words that the other could not understand. They passed through half a dozen different languages, for in his long years of service Isocrates had learned pieces of speech from many nations. The scribe had such a knowledge himself, and slowly, switching between the fragments of language that each possessed, acting out in gesture when words failed them, Isocrates and the scribe pieced together some manner of speaking. They invented their own tongue, and when they had reached some common grammar, they began, at last, to try to understand each other.
It was difficult. Isocrates was asking for something that had not been done before; an idea that was hard to explain in a common language, near impossible in the improvised speech to which they were reduced. But they worked together, neither the slave nor the scribe showing any sense of rush or impatience, both men quietly confident that they could understand one another.
After hours of speech and gesture, at last the scribe clapped his hands together, nodded, and sat down to begin his work. Isocrates watched the man write, the ink marking out the strange pictograms that the Egyptians used instead of letters. He had heard tell of caves in the deserts that were covered with the paintings of ancient hunters, the first markings of thought made solid. Paintings of men and women making love, and swimming in seas in lands that were now parched of water. Paintings of great monsters of hair and teeth tumbling to the ground, bristling with spears, lost from the world and living on only in ash daubed on cave walls.
He knew that men now wrote down their taxes, debts, and inventories. There were rumours of poets, not trusting that their work would outlive them, who had begun committing their work to paper, fixing for eternity what had once been ever changing and told anew every night; of women writing letters of love on wax and clay and sending them to the men they desired. He wondered if any man had yet done what he sought to do, to commit murder with the written word.
The scribe finished writing. He looked up at Isocrates and smiled, revealing a mouthful of ruined teeth, worn away almost to nothing. Isocrates gave the Egyptian the last few coins that he had; a pittance, considering the quality and danger of the work, but the scribe received them with delight, it seemed at their novelty more than anything else. Egypt, somehow, was still a world without money.
He looked at the parchment in his hand, and at the alien script that was marked across it. He wondered if it said what he wanted it to, and if he would ever find the courage to put it to use. Then he rolled it carefully, placed it in a sewn pocket inside his tunic, and began the long walk back to the palace. Whether it was an omen or a trick of the mind, he did not know, but as he walked, Isocrates thought that he could feel the parchment burn hot against his skin. Like a newborn child, when you hold it in your hands for the very first time. Or like a weapon, still hot from the forge.
4
The next morning, in the throne room, they waited. Courtiers and generals, servants and slaves, all waited for the king to give the word, to summon the messenger from the west to deliver his report. But the king would not give the command. He had been told that the messenger had arrived as soon as he took his place in the court; later he was reminded once more, but Cambyses ignored both prompts. He sat on his throne, his brother at his left hand and sister at his right, and spoke only to them. He seemed most engaged with Bardiya, though Croesus could not hear what passed between them. Bardiya spoke more than the king, seeming to plead for something in an insistent undertone, but Cambyses shook his head and waved away his brother’s concerns. At last, Bardiya threw up his hands, and turned away from the king. Whatever it was they had discussed, Bardiya had been defeated.
When this conversation had finished, there was a moment of expectation in the room – surely now the king would call for the messenger. Instead, Cambyses reached down beside the throne, and picked up the bow that he now kept there, the shorter kind that was favoured by the Persians. On the other side of the throne room, still wrapped in scarlet cloth, Croesus could see the great bow the Ethiopians had given to the king as an insult.
He had heard that Cambyses did not let that weapon out of his sight. Each day, he practised with one bow after another, each one of a greater weight on the draw than the last, and now Croesus watched as the king stood from the throne and began his daily practice. He had been well taught, though with his weak eyes he would never make a skilful archer. Croesus supposed that this did not matter. The king did not want precision or grace. Only the power to one day draw back the Ethiopian bow. To loose a single arrow with it, that would be enough.
Slowly, all conversation in the room fell away to silence. Most of the men of the court did not dare to look at the king directly, but all waited in the still quiet. Cambyses continued his practice with no sign that he had noticed, moving like some repetitious piece of machinery, a waterwheel that will move unceasingly for as long as a river flows. At last, on what might have been the fiftieth or the hundredth pull on the bow, his sister reached out and gently covered his hand with hers, just as he was about to draw the string back once more.
‘Brother.’
He nodded in response, and, with an air of sadness, placed the bow carefully on the ground and sat back down in his throne. ‘Very well,’ he said.
The messenger entered the throne room, and for a moment Croesus thought that there must have been some mistake, that some madman or travelling soothsayer had bluffed his way into the king’s presence, for this man did not look like a soldier or an emissary. His muscles had wasted away, his bones sharp and prominent against his tunic. His beard, while not long, had the wild, unkempt quality of a man who lives in the world of the spirit more than that of the flesh. Whorls of grime and dust were apparent on his skin, and when he walked past Croesus to kneel before the king, he carried the heavy stench of sweat with him, horse and man mixed together into the new scent of some alien, hybrid creature. Normally, guests were bathed and given the attentions of a barber before seeing the king, but this man had refused. Whatever story he had to tell the king, it seemed that he thought his appearance was part of the telling.
Cambyses kept him kneeling there for a long time. He stared at the man and frowned in thought, as though seeking for some alternative to letting the man speak freely, searching for some way that he could refuse to hear the soldier’s story, regretting perhaps that he had not had the man silenced. It was too late now. The whole city was waiting to hear the man’s words, to hear what had happened to the army in the desert. To deny them would be to provoke a riot. To hear him speak would be to confirm disaster.
‘What news,’ Cambyses said at last, ‘do you bring the king of Persia?’
‘Your army is lost, my king.’
‘What?’
‘The expedition to Ammon. They are all dead. Except for me.’
‘How is this possible? Are you a coward, who ran at the first sign of battle?’
‘I am no coward, my king.’
Cambyses mouth twitched. ‘Tell me, then.’
The soldier stared at him with empty eyes, and began to tell his story.
‘It started just as the men were sitting down to their midday meal. It began with a soft west wind.
‘We tried to ignore it at first. My companions laughed and joked and cursed the fickle desert, dug the sand from their eyes, coughed it from their mouths, shielded their food and water from the attack. Eventually they gave up on eating altogether. They threw down their spoiled food, and stood in tight, protective huddles, braced against the wind, waiting for it to die down.
‘It did not die. The wind grew stronger and heavier. Soon, none of us could see furt
her than the man next to him. It was strong enough to carry twisting, solid columns of sand through the air as though it were bearing spears and battering rams. I saw men thrown to the ground, struck down by the airy force, some screaming with broken arms and shattered ribs.
‘The captains blew horns and beat drums, rallying the army to fight against this enemy of nature. We stood in formation, shields locked against each other, to try and hold off the storm. Half by trained instinct, half in superstition, some even set their spears against the wind. But in moments, the army of sand broke the shield wall. And as the shield wall broke, the army broke with it.
‘The cavalry ran first, hoping to outride the storm. The horses rebelled against their masters, shedding their riders to run faster, just as the infantry were casting down their weapons, scattering their shields, clawing off their armour to run naked and unhindered away from the killing wind. Weight was the enemy, weight pouring into every fold of our clothing, the edges of our armour, our hair and eyes and ears, dragging us to the ground to bury our feet and then our legs, forcing open our mouths and choking us with sand.
‘The fortunate ones died quickly, choked and blinded, but far more were buried alive, trapped but still breathing, waiting to be slowly crushed and suffocated. The wind blew on until the army was covered over entirely, the dying men screaming beneath the ground, as though it were some cemetery of men brought cruelly back to life by the gods to die again in their graves. They died in their thousands, murdered by wind and sand. As the last screams faded away, the killing wind died away with them.
‘I was alone in the desert. Buried up to my neck, I shook the sand from my face and gasped for air. Breathing was enough at first, for I wanted nothing more than the luxury of air, taking each breath as a thirsty man would swallow water. But then I wanted to be free.
‘I fought for hours against the weight that imprisoned me, my skin and lips blistering beneath the sun, every muscle straining against the sand, each movement fractionally greater than the one before it. The ground grew hot and began to scald my skin. I wondered if I had been spared suffocation only to be slowly burned to death, half buried.
