One by one, the remaining eleven carts followed, and the fire flared up, brighter than before. Soon, the cushions of the couches were blackening in the heat, the wood popping and cracking, the inlaid gold melting and running in priceless rivulets down to the bloody ground. Golden goblets warped and melted, finely worked leather belts cracked and disintegrated into ash.
Croesus watched as each family came forward in turn to make an offering of its own. The poor could offer only the crude clay pots and bowls that they had used for decades of simple meals, an old blanket for the cold winter months, the small, crude smock intended for a child that had been stillborn. Merchants offered the fine wines that they had hoarded for a day of celebration or for the bribery of a stubborn official, pulled the gold rings from their fingers and hurled them into the hungry, wasteful flames. Old men threw in the iron spears they had kept to remember their glorious, younger days, and children were encouraged to donate the toys and trinkets that were their own personal treasures. Many of the people burned too much, burned away their legacies of golden cups or silver jewellery that they had spent a lifetime trying to acquire and pass on to their children. Dozens of families ruined themselves for generations, infected by the sacred destruction of so much wealth. Within an hour, a tenth of the wealth of the city had been burned as an offering to the Gods.
After it was done, the people of the city returned to their homes, moving slowly through the crowded streets. Croesus waited, and soon pale smoke began to rise as they lit thousands of fires. The rich scent of cooking meat clung to the smoke, and the separate tendrils intertwined and thickened in the air until a single cloud hung over the entire city. A traveller viewing Sardis from a distance would have thought that it must have been burning under the torches of a foreign invader. The city had never known a festival like it.
Croesus waited on the balcony, until the stars were clustered thick in the clear sky, and he could identify the constellations of the Gods whose favour he sought to buy with blood and gold. After a time, he became aware of another presence behind him. He turned quickly, hoping that it would be his wife come to ask forgiveness.
But it was Isocrates. The slave looked weary, and had permitted himself the luxury of leaning against a wall as he waited. He gazed at his master with attentive eyes, ready to serve.
‘Of course,’ Croesus said. ‘Everywhere I turn, there you are.’
‘Would you like me to leave you alone, master?’
‘No. Please, stay.’
Croesus looked down on the square, empty of people, filled with ashes and blood. ‘Can a god be bought?’ he said. ‘Or is it men that I buy with this sacrifice?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Quite.’ Croesus hesitated. ‘My wife hates me, I think.’
Isocrates said nothing. A moment later, Croesus continued.
‘No, she doesn’t hate me,’ he said. ‘But she has closed herself to me.’ He leaned forward slowly, rested his forehead against the stone lip of the balcony. He straightened up a moment later, as the weakness passed.
‘You are well, Isocrates?’
‘I have no complaints, master.’
‘You never do. It is remarkable. And your wife?’
‘She is well, master.’ The slave paused for a moment. ‘She says she has not seen you for some time.’
‘I have no time for Gyges,’ Croesus said. ‘Not now, in any case. But I am sorry not to have seen Maia. You heard about the statue?’
‘I did, master. You honour us too greatly.’
‘No, I don’t think that I do.’ The king turned to face his slave. ‘I trust no one but you now. Isn’t that strange?’ Without waiting for a reply, he brushed past his slave and disappeared into the darkness of the palace.
Isocrates waited until his master’s echoing footsteps had fallen silent. Satisfied that he was alone, he walked forward and looked out over the balcony, resting his elbows on the edge where his master’s arms had rested only moments before. Had any citizen been gazing up from the streets below and seen the distant figure looking down over the city, they would have thought Isocrates was the king, watching over the people he ruled and weighing the fates of nations. Not a slave whose life depended on the whims of the man who owned him.
He looked down, and watched another convoy leave the gates of the palace. The third sacrifice, the gifts that had taken months to produce, taking their first steps towards the oracle at Delphi. The sacrifice of the animals and the burning of the people’s treasures had been but a prelude to this, the great gift to the Gods.
The darkness was almost impenetrable, and the convoy had lit no torches to illuminate their way, but Isocrates thought that he could identify the glinting outline of a golden statue of his wife in one of the carts below.
He imagined the journey that the gifts would take. He thought of the carts rolling along the clear, wide merchant’s road along the banks of the Hermus to Phocaea. They would spend at least a night there, the convoy guards drinking and whoring in the port taverns, brawling with sailors who had come from half a world away to trade for the golden coins of Lydia. Then they would roll onto a ship and sail out upon the deep Aegean, its colour that of the sky in another, perfect world. They would travel past the islands that loomed in the distance like mountain peaks above a sea of clouds, past solitary merchant vessels and the pirate ships that hunted them, until they made landfall at Phaleron and continued to Athens. The excisemen of Athens would extract double the usual levy from the foreigners, and the Lydians would pay gladly, the bribe a mere fraction of the riches they carried with them.
On dry land once more, the convoy would pass along the good, clear path to Thebes, the soldiers doubling their sentries at night to guard against the bandits who were always watching the road. Then it would ascend the steep mountain paths, to Delphi itself. The Lydian offering would join a gallery of riches, the only place in the world that could perhaps overshadow Croesus’s treasuries. There were gifts from Croesus’s father there, and from the kings that had ruled Sardis before him, four generations of Lydian kings who had sought to buy favour at a temple that none of them had ever seen. Their offerings joined gifts from dozens of kings, given over centuries, each ruler seeking the favour of the Gods.
Isocrates had never seen these places. He imagined the journey through lands that he knew only from travellers’ tales. Perhaps along the way, he thought, they would have reason to put in at one of the islands as they crossed the Aegean. Bad weather, or sickness amongst the crew might lead them to a friendly harbour. Perhaps the winds would drive them far, far south, like wandering Odysseus, and of all the places they might put in, they might find themselves landing on the island of Thera — the one place, apart from Sardis, that Isocrates had seen with his own eyes. Dimly, he remembered red cliffs and black beaches, the songs his father sang as he laid out the fishing nets, the smell as his mother baked bread. It was the land he had been taken from as a boy, could now no longer clearly recollect, and would never see again.
Isocrates yawned and pinched the bridge of his nose. He went inside to find his master.
6
The answer from Delphi came swiftly.
With hesitant hands, like a shy lover, Croesus unrolled the parchment. On it were written four simple lines of prophecy:
Croesus thought of the wealth that had bought each stroke of every letter. The hundred gold ingots that had acquired the first letters of Persia, the colossal golden lion that had perhaps been enough to purchase the words great empire. He wondered which stroke his wife’s necklaces and girdles had earned. What power there is in words, he thought. The force of these words is enough to win me an empire.