Croesus could not remember much more of his childhood than this. In the months that followed the death of his son, he explored the recesses of his mind, searching for an innocent memory to escape into, some moment that could make sense of the world again. He had only the vaguest sense of his early years, and while he could recall the occasional event, moments of particular joy and shame, the actual sensations were lost to him. Recalling the past, it was as if he somehow viewed another man’s memories, a man from some alien world that he could not understand. But this game of kings, that he had played ten thousand times in as many different ways, was the one memory he did still retain in all of its detail, and of all the times that he played the game, there was one instance that he remembered most clearly of all.
It was autumn, and he was eight years old. His mother was beginning to show the first signs of the wasting sickness that would end her life a year later. There would be no more innocence for him after that, and no more happiness for his father, Alyattes, but on that autumn day that pain was a long way off. His mother had fainted in court, and in the middle of the ensuing distraction he had managed to steal away for an hour of play.
He was in the middle of a speech, promising a dozen sacks of jewels and a hundred slave women to a wandering hero, when he became aware of an intruder at the doorway behind him. A scrape of leather against stone, the faintest sound of rustling cloth, were enough to let him know that he was being watched. Slowly, afraid of what he would see, he turned to face the doorway.
His father, Alyattes, stood there with a small, ambiguous smile on his face. He was a lean and wiry man, dressed in red robes that hung on him a little loosely. These robes tended to trip him up whenever he forgot himself and hurried somewhere, which was often.
Beneath his father’s gaze, the boy hung his head. His father was the only person Croesus could not rage at when he was caught unawares. In front of Alyattes, he felt the heat in his throat and lungs, the pain around the heart of a deep and confused shame. He stood still, awaiting and dreading the mocking remark, the reprimand or, worst, of all, the pretence that his father had observed nothing.
‘I am sorry to have interrupted you,’ Alyattes said lightly. ‘I thought you would want to know that your mother is recovering now.’
‘Should I go and see her?’ Croesus tried to keep the reluctance from his voice, but he knew it was there. He had no desire to return to the court and comfort his pale-faced mother. He wanted to finish his game.
‘In a little while. Can I show you something first? A new invention of mine.’
‘Of course,’ Croesus said quickly. The shame at being discovered would be with him for weeks, and he was relieved to have any distraction.
‘Come here.’ Alyattes went to one knee, and Croesus walked over to his father. ‘Close your eyes, and open your hands.’
Croesus felt a little object drop into his right hand. Keeping his eyes closed, he rolled it forward on to his fingers. Hard and cool and metallic, he could tell no more than that. He opened his hand, opened his eyes, and looked down at it.
It was an ugly thing. Small, like a shrivelled grape in size and shape, pale yellow in colour. It wasn’t even pure gold, he realized, recognizing the shade with an already practised eye, but electrum, an amalgam of gold and silver. An image was stamped on one side, but Croesus could not tell what it was. He asked his father.
‘It’s a lion.’
‘The sign of our household,’ Croesus said quickly, just as he would give an answer he knew his tutor would like. Looking again, he thought to himself that the design was like the drawing of a clumsy child.
‘Do you know what this thing is?’ Alyattes said.
‘No, Father.’
‘It is a coin. What do you think it is worth?’
‘Not very much.’ He expected to see anger on his father’s face, but Alyattes nodded calmly, as though this were the expected response. ‘Is that the wrong thing to say?’ Croesus said.
‘No, no, quite reasonable.’ Alyattes shrugged. ‘It’s a lump of electrum that any man could sift from the Pactolus. Not pure gold or silver, which is a shame. I should have liked it to be gold. You’re right — it should be worth very little.’ He leaned forward. ‘Can I tell you a secret?’
Alyattes pointed at the image of the lion. ‘Without that stamp, it is valued at whatever some metal trader tells you it is worth. With that mark, it’s worth as much as I say it’s worth.’
Croesus frowned, and tried to understand. Alyattes continued: ‘It’s harvest season, now. The farmers are gathering their wheat from the land.’ He reached out a finger and tapped the metal disc in Croesus’s palm. ‘If I say it is so, one of these coins will buy the crop of a poor farmer’s field. Forty of them, and you’ve got the worth of everything that farmer will ever produce. The entire value of a common man’s life, and I could put it into a bag that you could wear at your waist and you would barely feel the weight. Men will spend their whole lives chasing after these little pieces of marked metal. They will be willing to kill for them. Think about that.’
‘What will you do with it, Father?’
‘I will use it to raise an army, and go to war in the East.’ Alyattes reached forward and ran his hand through his son’s hair. ‘I will win you a great empire. Won’t you like that?’
Hearing this, Croesus tried to hide his disappointment. His father had gone to war several times already in the boy’s short life. Croesus liked to hear stories of the battles, but the wars took his father from him for months, sometimes even years, and they made his mother unhappy.
‘Isn’t there something else you could do, Father?’
‘With these riches, what is there to do but go to war?’ Alyattes asked. ‘You can barter bread for eggs or a horse for sheep in the marketplace, but with this you can buy a new world. That is what my coins are for.’
Alyattes reached down and took the coin back from his son, and Croesus found his fingers reaching for it even as it was taken from him. His father held the metal oval between finger and thumb. ‘Listen to me, and try to understand. I love this,’ he said, gesturing to the coin, ‘more than I love you. And I love you very much. But this. .’ He shrugged. ‘It is a remarkable thing. A remarkable thing that I have made. It will change the world.’
Alyattes stood and turned to leave, and as Croesus watched his father walk away he felt for the very first time the sensation that no child can forget — the sense that one’s father or mother is wrong. There was something else to be done with this invention, he was sure of it. It could create something greater than a war.
‘Can I keep it?’ Croesus said, just as his father was about to leave the room.
Alyattes turned back, and smiled approvingly. He threw the coin to the boy, and Croesus took it from the air with a hasty grasp of his hand.
2
War is an infection that breeds in the minds of kings. Once caught, it may come on slowly or burn hot like a one-day fever. It will not die until it is treated with blood.
For Croesus, the first infection came from the sight of a map.
In the early years of his rule, he had fought several small wars of conquest, the inevitable actions of a powerful king surrounded by weak rulers. A dozen cities fell beneath the banner of bull and lion, but the wars meant nothing to him, and they did not compare with the grand campaigns of his father’s life. Occasionally, he would glance without interest at a crude map of his empire, but he never felt any desire for anything more precise. His world was Sardis and his family. What more did he need than that?