Yet, after Atys’s death, he asked his cartographers to draw up two maps, accurate in every measure, flawless in detail. For a year, his people rode to every corner of the kingdom, counting the beats of their horses’ hooves to measure distance. They waited for clear days and climbed mountains to better view the land, producing sketches from the heights of icy peaks. They corresponded with the mapmakers and librarians of distant cities, waiting months for the arrival of crumbling, faintly inked copies of maps they had thought long lost.
At last, the work was finished. In one of the king’s throne rooms they first unrolled a handsome scroll of the Lydian empire, deeply inked with the conquered cities, the dividing rivers, the great Aegean sea that bordered the empire to the west.
Croesus looked at the empire he had inherited. He let his hand brush over the soft skin of the scroll, thinking of the thousands of lives that lay beneath each stroke of his finger, all of them paying their fealty to him. From the sea to the west to the river Halys in the east, all these lands belonged to him. He stared at it until he had the image of his empire firmly fixed in his mind. Then, he asked the cartographers to uncover the other map.
Hesitantly, they unrolled the second scroll. This one showed much more than Lydia. It did not venture across the Aegean to the Hellenic city states, but it stretched far to the east and south. He looked on Egypt, Media, Assyria, the nomad plains of the Massagetae, the great city of Babylon. The cartographers, bound by the king’s orders, had not played tricks with the scale as they might otherwise have. There was no hiding the vast expanse of land that lay to the east, the hundreds of thousands of men and women who knew and cared nothing for the king of Lydia.
Croesus noticed that one of the mapmakers was shivering nervously. The king smiled at him. ‘Don’t fear me. I cannot rule the whole world, can I?’ Croesus raised his hand, intending to click his fingers and dismiss the mapmaker and the troubling vision he had summoned. He hesitated, his finger and thumb pressed against each other, but not yet making a sound.
He looked over the map one more time. He began at the far edge of his kingdom, the western city of Phocaea. His eyes roved south to Smyrna, the port where ships from half a hundred nations arrived with jewels, silks and spices. He travelled north, reached the banks of the Hermus river and followed it until he reached Sardis. He paused briefly at his capital, then struck east, heading for the Halys river at the border of his lands.
From there, he imagined his eyes as a marching army. He went beyond the Halys, taking Cappadocia and the great city of Trapezus. He led his conquering gaze south, down the Euphrates to Babylon. He lingered there for a time, imagining what it would be to rule the greatest city in the world, a city unmatched in beauty and spectacle by any other. Then he went east again, pausing at another great river. It was the Tigris, and beyond it lay the land of the Medes.
In his father’s time, the Medes and the Lydians had been enemies. After many a bloody and inconclusive war, Croesus’s sister had been married to Astyages, king of the Medes, and the two peoples had lived in peace for decades. In his mind, Croesus broke the thirty-year peace in a matter of moments, his eyes passing over the Tigris, into the land of the Medes, and seizing his brother-in-law’s kingdom.
But his gaze was still hungry, and continued its march east until finally his eye chanced on the river Medus in the heart of Persia, and came to rest there. For some reason, it seemed like the right place to stop.
Gazing at the maps, he understood why war had so captivated his father. He was grateful for the kingdom of the Medes on his borders, the peace treaty with Astyages that he could never break, for he did not trust this ache that he had, this longing for the East. Without his son, there was such an absence in his life. It would be so easy to fill it with a war.
Croesus tried to leave his thoughts of conquest buried deep in the heavy, yellowed curls of the map. He left the throne room for the one place where he would be able to forget them.
As he descended through the palace, Croesus shed his followers like so many layers of unwanted clothing. First, he disposed of the noblemen who begged favours from him, dispatching them one by one until there were none left to bother him. The band of slaves that trailed after him, half of them in service to him, the other half monitoring his movements on behalf of his nobles, was dismissed with a few brief commands. He kept his guards with him for most of the journey deep into the palace, but dismissed them too before he descended the last stairwell.
Alone, he reached a door in a dark and forgotten corridor of the palace. He took a gold key on a silver chain from within the folds of his clothes. He unlocked the door and went inside.
Croesus was in darkness. By touch and memory he made his way to a table at the end of the room, taking one of dozens of oil-soaked torches that had been left piled there. He felt his way to the far end of the table, his hands fumbling for the flints he knew were there, and he struck sparks until the torch caught.
The room flickered into view. The table and floor were furred with dust, and no slave had cleaned here for years. The floor was covered with many trails of footprints, but they were all exactly the same shape and size. They all belonged to him.
He paced around the abandoned room, filled with broken shards of pottery and crumbling chunks of stone. He reached a rotting wooden chest which, when he was a child, had once served as a throne. He poked at one corner with the toe of his boot, and watched the wood crumble into splinters, accompanied by an eruption of insects and tiny grey spiders.
He drew aside the heavy drape at the far end of the room, felt cool air from the tunnel behind it. He reached up and pulled on a cord hanging by the wall. Deep down below, too distant for him to hear, he knew a small silver bell would be ringing. Now they would know that he was coming.
He held the torch in front of him to light the way, and began to descend. He made his way along the narrow corridor, the ceiling just high enough that he could walk without stooping. It had been made specifically for him.
The passage wound down, until glimmers of light began to appear in the distance. The air grew brighter, then too bright, as though he were heading towards the heart of the sun. The end of the passage opened up into an enormous chamber, and the king entered the lower treasury.
He had begun work on these chambers as soon as his father had died. It had taken years to plan and excavate, and he had kept the digging as close a secret as possible. The slaves who had laboured there had been dispatched to work in the mines at the far corners of his empire immediately after the project had been completed. Croesus sometimes wondered to whom they might have told their secrets in the few short years before rockfalls and rotten lungs had silenced them all, but this did not genuinely concern him. If the bandit kings and petty officials of the outer kingdoms knew of the treasury, he did not fear them, but he wanted none within the palace to know the details of this chamber. The treasuries of the upper floors held hundreds of diverse and priceless artefacts. This lower floor was devoted to a single form of treasure.
Thousands of gold and silver coins were piled high throughout the room, forming towers and buttresses and fortresses. Elsewhere they were piled into hills and mountains of gold and silver. Dozens of burning torches ringed the chamber, the polished stone walls and glittering coins reflecting and amplifying the light until it was intense, near blinding. But it did not trouble the king. Croesus had grown used to staring into the sun of his riches.
His father had long desired gold coins. Alyattes had known that gold and silver both hid within the electrum of the Pactolus river, but his alchemists were never able to discover the technique of separating them. His dream had been to stamp the seal of Lydia on golden coins that would fill the markets of Sardis and the Hellenic cities on the far side of the sea. But he died unsatisfied.