The young hid themselves once again, and the old men and women waited in the fields and watched the army pass.
It was much reduced, some said by a quarter, others by a third. The old men had lived long enough to see many armies pass over the river. They had learned to read, in how the soldiers walked and in the tone of the songs they sang in languages that the villagers could not understand, whether the wars had been won or lost. Even the sound of the army as it moved, the rhythm and force of thousands of footfalls, could tell a story to those who knew how to listen.
The villagers saw that these soldiers did not march with pride, but neither did they have the hollow faces of men who have fought and been defeated. They marched with the exhausted air of men who had risked their lives, had seen their friends die, for the sake of a stalemate.
On the long journey back to the Halys, Croesus had fought the battle in his mind many times.
Everything, at first, had gone as Sandanis had said it would. When the first arrows fell, Croesus had looked from one army to another, wondering if by chance his eyes might alight on the first man to die that day, and realizing, with a kind of abstract horror, that there was a pleasure to be found in watching men die at his command.
The Persians planted their wicker shields on the earth and held their ground, and Croesus’s spearmen swept forward, hoping to break the line. The sounds that filtered back to Croesus were not what he had expected. There were few war cries and little screaming. What Croesus heard more than anything else was the sound of thousands gasping, as though there were not air enough in the world to keep so many alive in one place, as if they had to kill each other in order to breathe.
He watched as the Persian cavalry circled his spearmen and felt a sudden surge of fear. Sandanis had told him it was necessary, but even so, he shut his eyes when he heard a wail of panic break out from the trapped Lydians.
At last, Sandanis gave a second signal, and as though summoned by the cries of their countrymen, the Lydian cavalry, the greatest in the world, came forward. They lowered their long spears, and charged.
That should have been the moment. The moment that he would remember for the rest of his life, the moment when the Persians broke and ran, and he won himself a new empire.
But neither side broke. The horseman charged, but did not push through, and all movement ceased on the battlefield. The two armies fixed their positions against one another, and the killing began in earnest.
Hours passed. Each hour brought another ten thousand dead, but the two armies did not move more than a hundred yards. The excitement Croesus had felt when the first men fell had long faded. He sat on his horse, watching and wishing nothing more than for the battle to be over.
Suddenly, as if they had heard his thought, the armies moved apart. The hours of killing had erased the thought of retreat from their minds, until one man had rediscovered the ability to step backwards, and shared this gift with his companions. The two armies separated, a few wary paces at a time. The captains yelled at their men to advance, to attack again, but the men would not listen. Persians and Lydians had struck a silent truce. They had had enough of killing.
At last, the generals sounded the retreat. The battle was a stalemate. Croesus had not known such a thing was possible, that tens of thousands of men could die, yet nothing change, the world unmoved by such a quantity of blood.
The king had said little since the battle. He had mechanically followed his general’s advice in the aftermath without offering a word in response. Now, as his horse crossed the midpoint of the bridge over the Halys and he returned to the lands he ruled, he had found his voice again.
‘Why did we lose, Sandanis?’
‘We did not lose, my lord,’ the general said. ‘They retreated, and we retreated. There was no dishonour.’
‘Then why didn’t we win? We were better equipped. Better organized. That’s what you told me.’
The general shrugged. ‘There were more of them, and we were on their land. It evens out.’
‘So why were you so eager to fight that battle?’
‘I was confident that we would not lose. I was not sure that we would win.’
Croesus shook his head. ‘We lost a quarter of the army-’
‘They lost many more.’
‘Do not interrupt me. We lost a quarter of the army, and we have nothing to show for it.’
‘We will come back. Next year, we will have the Spartans with us. If you had waited for them-’
Croesus gave him a look of warning. The general bowed his head.
‘Forgive me,’ Sandanis said. After a moment he added, ‘We will come back next year. If that is your wish.’
Croesus nodded, but in his mind he saw a war that could continue for decades. Brief, bloody summers, and long, tedious winters spent waiting for those summers. Waiting for the killing to start again; a war that he might watch over for the rest of his life, as though he were raising another child.
‘I had hoped it would be over by now,’ he said.
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Was that naïve?’
‘A little. But we will win. You need not worry.’
Croesus nodded again. After a moment, he said, ‘I remember your words at the council. You think this is a pointless war, don’t you?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ Sandanis said. ‘I live to serve you, my lord. I hope my loyalty is not in question.’
‘Never, Sandanis,’ Croesus said. ‘You are a practical man. You and Isocrates should spend more time together. Perhaps you will get the chance, this winter.’ He turned to look back at the bridge that marked the edge of his lands. ‘We will be back next year,’ he said. ‘We will keep coming back every year, if we have to. We will come back until we have won.’
The villagers watched the army pass into the distance, and gave it little thought. A few of the men exchanged bets on whether or not they would see the army return the following year, wagering leather belts, knives of flint, and tortoiseshell brooches, but that was the extent of their interest. They went back to gathering their crops and cursing the soil.
Some time after the army had passed, the villagers saw two more riders cross the bridge. Each man held the reins of another, riderless horse beside his own. The men had dark skin, and wore strange leather clothes of a kind that the villagers had never seen before. The horses were thin, tall and sleekly muscled, bred for speed rather than war.
The men crossed over the bridge in a moment, quite unaware of the significance of their passage. They were the first men of their nation ever to cross the Halys river. Then they too disappeared into the distance, pursuing the army as it retreated back west.
Cautious, they maintained the distance of a day’s march from the Lydian army. For most of the journey, they never saw a single man from the army that they pursued. They followed a phantom across alien lands, a monster that marched with thousands of feet and left a long, unmistakable scar across the land.
The two scouts slept in copses and deserted farmhouses, drank from rivers and sucked dew from the grass. They ate small birds that they shot from the sky with curved bows. They sneaked into orchards at night like mischievous children and stole what fruit they could find. At one lean time, as they passed through a land ruined by both a failed harvest and the passage of the hungry army that had preceded them, the two men each opened a vein in the neck of one of their horses and drank a little blood to sustain them.