He watched them take the beast away, and felt a kind of weary relief. This sacrifice committed him. The moment for doubt, the moment when he could have changed his mind, was past. The pressure of choice had lifted, and now he had only to follow the course through to the end. He turned to share the thought with his wife. But when he looked back, Danae was gone.
For a single, irrational moment he thought she must have thrown herself from the balcony down into the square below, passing from the world with a single sudden step. Then he saw a long piece of fabric fall back into place over one of the entrances to the balcony, disturbed by her passage. He hurried inside to follow her.
Far below the balcony, the streets of Sardis were wet with blood. The stones of the square were thick with the holy gore, which mixed with the earth and dried in blackish whorls. The priests walked calmly through the crowd, finishing off wounded animals where an inexperienced hand had botched the job.
The rooftop onlookers came forward, daubing their foreheads with the blood that ran on the ground in shallow streams. A swarm of prostitutes who had waited at one side of the square as the sacrifice was prepared now advanced in a surge of incense and clinking jewellery, trying to entice the men to honour the Gods in another way. Children dipped their hands deep in the blood and tore off through the streets, chasing each other and tagging every wall and doorway with tiny bloody hand prints, spreading the mark of the Gods to every corner of the city.
Inside the palace, Croesus pursued his wife.
Like a figure in a dream, her pace seemed to slow and hasten along with his. At any moment that he seemed on the verge of reaching her, she somehow drew further away from him. He almost called out to her, but realized that he had no confidence that she would respond to command.
Finally, after following her through the rooms and corridors of the palace, he found her waiting for him at the entrance to the women’s quarters.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘What is it?’
She looked at him, her eyes disbelieving, and under her gaze, he felt a sudden shame. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I have not been kind to you.’
‘You haven’t been anything to me,’ she said. ‘A husband, or a king. Ever since-’
Croesus bowed his head and raised a hand, palm forward. He gestured to a cushioned couch in the corner of the room. ‘Sit with me. Please,’ he said.
They sat together in silence, and as they did, Croesus tried to remember how to speak to his wife. Once he could have said anything to her. He thought back, tried to think of the last time they had spoken that had not been at some official function, a private conversation that had not been merely an empty exchange of pleasantries. He could not. He had let her become a stranger to him.
She broke the silence. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she said.
‘Doing what?’
‘Fighting this war. And don’t speak as you do to the others. Of glory or honour or necessity. They may believe it, but I don’t. It’s about you. It’s always been about you.’
‘I considered peace,’ he said. ‘I knew it is what you would wish for. But I realized that it might never come again. That I might pass my whole life without another chance.’
She shook her head. ‘For what?’
‘What is more real than this? What matters more than a war?’ He paused. ‘I wish there could be something else. But there is not.’
‘My father once told me that only a fool chooses war,’ she said. ‘He said that in peace, sons bury fathers, but in war, fathers bury sons.’
‘We buried our son in peacetime.’
‘And now you ask others to bury theirs.’
‘Perhaps you are right,’ he said quietly. Then: ‘I wish I still had a son.’
‘You have a son.’
‘But not an heir. I want to make a mark on this world, before I leave it.’ She opened her mouth to speak, but he continued: ‘Lesser men can be content with. . I don’t know. . I honestly don’t know how a slave or a common man can look back on his life and feel it worth anything. Fifty years of scratching at a field, haggling in the market. But I can do something remarkable.’
‘We could be happy,’ she said. ‘Did you think of that? We have all the wealth of the world. You could spend it on anything you like. Why spend it on a war?’
‘What could we buy that we do not have already? Spend it on the people? The greatest festivals are soon forgotten, and even if I were to make the streets of Sardis run with gold, what difference would it make? There’s no glory in throwing money to the poor.’
‘And there is in this?’
‘People remember wars, don’t they?’
‘A name on a map, Croesus. That’s all you’re fighting for.’
No,’ he said. ‘It is a signature written on history. It lasts for ever. Atys should have been my legacy. I shall leave an empire behind instead.’
She sat in silence. At last, very quietly, she said, ‘Do as you please. When this war is over, if you are still unhappy, come to me again. Perhaps then you will see how wrong you are. Perhaps it is only then that you will try and find a way to be happy with me. And your son.’
She stood, and before he could find another word to say, she walked away into the women’s quarters, the one place in the palace where he could not follow her. He listened, and thought he heard laughter from somewhere within, before all sound of her was lost.
He waited on the couch for a time, to see if she would return. When she did not, he rose and walked back out onto the balcony.
The sun was low in the sky, the red light echoing the carnage of the sacrifice. The stone floor of the balcony had been scrubbed clean and no trace of death remained, but when he looked down at his hands he found blood dried beneath his fingernails. He picked at it and rolled it to powder between his fingers, and then looked down on the streets below.
He saw a fire burning in the centre of the square, ringed by a dozen priests in heavy white robes. Piled beside them were the fat and bones of the twelve thousand dead — a mountain of offerings over which the flies swarmed in a cloud of black motion. All around the square, the people of Sardis had returned to the rooftops, having shed their bloody tunics for their finest clothing, ready to observe the next stage of the sacrifice.
For over an hour, the priests fed the offerings to the Gods. The unburned bones piled thickly around the fire, and it came to resemble one of the mass funeral pyres that are to be found at the end of a great battle. The crowd watched in respectful silence as each sacrifice was offered, though here and there he saw mothers hushing bored children with sharp warnings and slaps. The only other sounds were the roar and crackle of the fire, and the deep, throaty chants of the supplication the priests made to the Gods.
When all of the meat had been offered up to the fire, the time came for the second sacrifice: the gift of gold.
Croesus watched as the gates of the palace opened beneath him, and a convoy of a dozen carts rolled out, each one piled high with wealth from the heart of the palace, much of it from his own private quarters. Gold cups and silver-edged plates, elaborately crafted wooden chairs, heavy weaves of rare fabrics that had travelled from half the world, gilded couches studded with jewels. Each cart held more wealth than most of the people of Sardis would have seen in a lifetime.
The priests cleared a path for the carts, until the convoy was at the edge of the fire. The men with the first cart crouched down and laid their hands upon it, rocking it back and forth on its axles once, twice, three times. The third time, they gave a wordless cry and thrust it forward, their legs pushing hard against the stone and driving the cart towards the fire. They released it a few feet from the edge and skidded to a stop as the cart plunged forward, rocked up over the wood at the edge, tipped to one side and fell into the heart of the fire.