Farsighted as ever, though, Cyrus had understood the danger and sought to insure against it, carefully providing for the hopes of both his sons. Before his death, he had appointed the elder, Cambyses, crown prince, and the younger, Bardiya, governor of Bactria. This was the largest and most important of the eastern provinces, and even though denied a kidaris, the fluted tiara of royal power, Bardiya had been exempted from paying tribute, a privilege properly befitting a king. Whether his resentment of his brother had been mollified by such an honor, or whether it had only piqued his taste for royal status, time would have to tell. Either way, due notice had been given to the world of Cyrus’ plans for its future: Cambyses was to sit on the throne of the Persians, and Bardiya was to be his lieutenant. No one else was to have a sniff of power. Just to press this point home, a scandalous match was arranged between Cambyses and his two elder sisters, Atossa and Rhoxsane, a spectacle of incest without precedent in the traditions of Persia, but which set a satisfying block on the ambitions of any rival noble house.31 After all, who worthier of Cyrus’ daughters than Cyrus’ son? The bloodline of the great conqueror had become—like a spring watched over by the Magi or the flames of a sacred fire—something precious, to be tended and preserved from all pollution.
Even as Cyrus’ corpse was laid to rest in a sarcophagus of gold, inside a tomb carefully oriented toward the rising sun, amid the prayers and lamentations of its Magian attendants, Cambyses moved to claim his birthright. The monarchy of the world was now his. True, as he took his place upon his father’s throne, a few eyes may have turned toward his brother; but Bardiya, confirmed in the governorship of his great fiefdom in the east, gave no sign of any treacherous intent. Cyrus’ last will and testament proved to have been most cunningly constructed. Both brothers had much to gain by interlocking their interests. It might have been thought that Cambyses would have sought, as his priority, to avenge his father’s death—but that would have required him to lead a massive army into the eastern provinces, and provoke his brother’s open resentment. Equally, it might have been thought that Bardiya, possessed of a menacing power base, would have sought to force further privileges from Cambyses—but that would have been to risk the open fury of the new king. Whether tacitly or not, the two brothers formed a compact. Bardiya was to be left undisturbed in his province, but he would guard his brother’s back;32 Cambyses, every bit as ambitious for conquest as his father, would turn his armies not against the impoverished tribesmen who had killed Cyrus but toward a kingdom at the opposite end of his frontiers, rich in gold and gargantuan temples, the one great power still surviving from the old world order, and that the most timeless and celebrated of all. He would wage war on Egypt.
Such a campaign, of course, could not be rushed. The might of the pharaohs may have been much diminished from its ancient splendor, having grown dependent upon the support of shiftless mercenaries, and been leeched of income by over-mighty temple priests, but it still posed a formidable challenge. Cambyses spent four years preparing for the invasion. The subject nations of the empire were leaned upon to provide tribute and levies. Ships were built or commandeered, and a Persian king, for the first time in his country’s history, became the master of a great and powerful navy. Intelligence was gathered and carefully analyzed. When the Persians finally met the Egyptians in battle, it is said that they did so with cats pinned to their shields, reducing their opponents’ archers, for whom the animals were sacred, to a state of outraged paralysis.33 Victory was duly won. Pelusium, the gateway to Egypt, was stormed, and the bodies of the defeated left scattered across the sands; a century later, their bones could still be seen. Nor, of course, was Cambyses’ army the only prong of his assault. All the while, the battle fleet was gliding along the coast. With navy and army shadowing each other in a perfectly coordinated amphibious operation, the Persians advanced to seize their golden prize. Resistance was brutally crushed. Egypt submitted. Her people hailed as pharaoh the “Great Chief of the Foreign Lands.”
But the speed of Cambyses’ victory had been delusive. A land so ancient and mysterious was not easily absorbed into anyone’s empire. True, some measures were easily taken: the income from one town, for instance, was channeled to keep the Persian sister-queens in shoes.34 Others, however, soon began to suck Cambyses into the sinking sands. Change in Egypt had never been a straightforward matter, and it so happened that the most pressing challenge, to tame and tax the priesthood, was also the most intractable. Cambyses, brutal in a way that native pharaohs had never dared to be, did succeed in forcing requisitions from the bloated estates of the temples, but the effort took him four years and naturally won him the eternal enmity of the priests. No effort was spared by them to blacken his name, and Cambyses would ever after be remembered in Egypt as a lunatic, much given to murder and to gibbering mockery of the gods. Sometimes he was even accused of combining both pastimes, as when he was supposed to have spitted a bull worshipped by the Egyptians as divine.
Lies, all lies. Far from having jeered at the sacred beast, as the black propaganda would have it, Cambyses had actually behaved with exemplary propriety, ordering the dead bull embalmed and reverently laid to rest. Just as Cyrus had done, he sought to show himself scrupulously respectful of foreign gods, no matter how outlandish. After all, as pharaoh, he had become a son of Ra himself. To a man only one generation away from wearing leather trousers, the grandiosity of Egyptian traditions, aureate like no other, must have provided scope for considerable reflection. Too much scope, perhaps: for while the Egyptian priesthood came to regard Cambyses as an oppressive maniac, so too, and far more fatefully, did the Persian clan chiefs. Cyrus, even as he conquered the world, had never forgotten his roots, and as a result he had been loved, and called the “father” of his people—but Cambyses would be remembered by the Persians in a very different way, as “cruel and haughty,” and they would label him a “despot.”35 As evidence, spectacular stories of his savagery would be adduced: how he had used his cupbearer for target practice, and shot him dead; how he had buried twelve noblemen alive and upside-down. More smears? Perhaps—and yet surely reflecting memories of a genuine crisis, one with which the Medes in Cambyses’ entourage would have been only too familiar, of a king intolerant of any hint of opposition, and resolved to break the will of the chiefs of rival clans. Many of these, having gone on the Egyptian adventure, had been kept securely by Cambyses’ side, where they could serve their king as hostages as well as lieutenants. Not all were in Egypt, however. Despite the absence of the court, Persia remained the surest fount of royal power. Whoever could master the heartland might also master the empire beyond. Cambyses’ long absence in Egypt served to make this an increasingly suggestive calculation. Treason began to be muttered in the clan lands of the Persians.
Three decades previously, the Median chiefs, in their desperation to topple Astyages, had been reduced to countenancing a foreigner as king; but the Persian nobility, even as they chafed under the imperiousness of Cambyses, had a more acceptable alternative to hand. Bardiya was not only the son of Cyrus the Great, but also—and just as importantly—proficient in all the qualities that the Persians most admired in a king. His physical strength had won him the nickname “Tanyoxarces,” or “Mighty-frame,” and his skill with the bow—the Persians’ weapon of choice—was legendary.36 That he had remained the master of the troublesome eastern marches for almost a decade was ample evidence of his talents as a warlord. In other ways, too, Bardiya had proved himself his father’s son. Like Cyrus, it appears, he could conciliate as well as fight. Sensitive to the resentments of the Persian aristocracy, he was also solicitous of the subject peoples, who were increasingly weighed down by the exactions of Cambyses. Whispering it to those who mattered, Bardiya began to moot a startling measure: perhaps, for three years, the subjects of the Persian people might be exempted from providing tribute and further levies to the king? Not that Cambyses would ever agree to that, of course. But a new king? A new king might agree . . .