‘Of course,’ the king said. Isocrates turned to go, but Croesus spoke again. ‘Is there. . Is there anything you think I should do, Isocrates?’ the king said.
‘No.’ The slave shook his head. ‘There is nothing left to do.’
Sardis burned.
For the Persians, the city was a monster to be slain — every temple, house and statue an appendage to be cut away and burned, every man and woman of the city a drop of blood to be bled.
The people of Sardis knew that there was no hope for them. Some knelt and prayed openly in the streets, others gathered and barricaded themselves into temples that would soon become charnel houses. Others tried to buy their way out, offering gold and slaves, their daughters and wives, in a bid to escape the slaughter. Many rushed to hurl themselves from the high cliffs rather than die at the hands of the Persians.
The Lydian soldiers, for the most part, threw down their weapons and moved amongst the people. Some tried to maintain a sense of martial order, and here and there a group of soldiers would assemble together and make a futile stand at a corner of a street where they had once played as children, or at a statue that one of them had worshipped every day of his life — anywhere they could find that was of significance to them. One wild-looking soldier died after challenging a series of Persians to single combat on the steps of his favourite brothel, as though he were defending a temple or the house of a king.
The people of Sardis knew that they would not survive the night. They each tried to find the right place, the right way, to die.
It was quiet in the throne room.
The marble room was located near the heart of the palace, and the Persians had yet to enter the grounds. Occasionally, he heard the solitary, panicked footsteps of someone running in a corridor nearby, feet beating louder and louder against the stone floor, then fading back to silence. He tensed each time he heard someone approach, praying that they would not enter, hoping that they would. So long as he was alone, he felt safe. So long as he was alone, he felt himself edging one step closer to madness. He wondered how long it would take them to find him.
He thought about how he used to play at being a king. Back then he had been forced to make do with a dusty room, a shattered chest for a throne, a host of imaginary courtiers for company. Now, he saw that without others to serve him, he was no longer a king. He was a man sitting alone in an empty room, waiting to die. He couldn’t even bring himself to occupy the throne itself, and he squatted at its foot like a dog or a slave, his back resting against it.
After a time, he heard something different. A pair of familiar slow, scraping footsteps approaching the throne room, inch by inch. At first they were so faint, and paused so often, that he was certain he imagined them. Soon there was no doubting that the footsteps were real, no question whom they belonged to. Croesus sat still at the foot of his throne and waited for his son.
It had been many months since his son had permitted anyone to bathe him. He had a long beard and dirt-matted hair, and even from a distance the air was thick with the stink of him. He looked like a wild man, a mad prophet. He looked like anything but a prince.
‘Gyges,’ Croesus said softly.
The king watched as his son slowly made his way to the exact centre of room and then stopped, perhaps compelled by some unspoken, geometric command. He looked up at his father with the unchanged, blank eyes with which he had looked upon the whole world since was born.
Croesus rose from the steps of the throne, walked down, and gathered his son into his arms. Gyges did not acknowledge Croesus’s embrace, but he stood still to accept it. It was the first time he had allowed his father to touch him.
Croesus released his son, and smiled at him. He placed a guiding hand on the young man’s back, and led him from the throne room.
‘Come with me, Gyges. Let us go and see the city.’
In the women’s quarters, a battle raged.
It was not a battle against foreign invaders. It was Lydians, not Persians, who sought to enter the women’s sanctuary, and the men who beat at the doors were brothers and cousins of the women who battled to keep them out. As soon as they knew Sardis was lost, and that they would all be dead in a matter of hours, men from all over the city had swarmed to this forbidden place. Soon, they would roam freely in a place where no man had set foot in generations.
The women fought against them, slaves and noblewomen united in barricading the doorways and using whatever weapons they could find, but they were outnumbered. The doors were splintering, and would soon collapse entirely. The sanctuary would become a place of nightmares.
In a secluded corner of the women’s chambers, Danae sat alone. She did not help the others who struggled to keep the doors closed, did not think of what would happen when the Lydians broke through. She thought only of what would happen when the Persians finally took the palace.
She knew what happened to the queens of conquered cities. She thought of the women in the stories she knew who had been taken as trophies, the countless tales of gods and heroes and princes who celebrated their triumph with the capture of a wife or a daughter or a queen. She wondered if history could be reduced entirely to the endless kidnap and exchange of stolen women from one country to another. She tried to imagine what favour the king of Persia would seek to buy with her.
She stood, and walked to a window. She stepped up, and looked out at the burning city.
With the same slow, careful step as his wife, Croesus stepped out into the streets of Sardis.
For a moment, he could pretend that nothing had changed in his city. The smoke in the air could have risen from the sacrificial fires of a festival, like the great sacrifice that had sent the gifts to Delphi years before and filled the sky with sacred ash. The still bodies on the street could be beggars, or revellers in a wine-soaked stupor. The large fires were still distant, working their way to the heart of the city, lighting the sky like a dawn come too early.
He let Gyges lead him through the city, the way a man in strong water might stop fighting and let the currents be his guide. His son moved quickly and confidently, in contrast to the slow, dragging steps with which he had walked his entire life. Gyges recoiled from a marble statue of a goddess as though it were a monster, but smiled as he crouched down beside the corpse that lay beside it. Perhaps, Croesus thought, he has always lived in a mirrored world. All the beauty and wealth of my city were a vision of horrors. Now on this last day, he sees the things that are beautiful to him.
No one else would have dared to chance her life on the crumbling stone ledge barely half a hand wide, but Danae moved across it with ease, calm and fearless, and left the women’s quarters behind. At the next opening she stepped back inside the palace again. She moved through the deserted corridors, searching for her husband and her son.
As she explored the palace, she stayed away from the treasuries. Even at a distance, she could hear the cacophony of another battle being fought, as slaves and citizens killed each other for riches that they would never get the chance to enjoy, just to possess them for a moment before they died.
Away from the treasuries and the women’s quarters, the palace was at peace. She did not see many others — mostly single figures running down the corridors, or cowering in isolated hiding places. The epidemic of rape did not seem to have spread beyond the women’s quarters.
She searched for Croesus and Gyges in bedchambers and dining halls, kitchens and armouries. Emptied of people, and with much of the furniture and decorations already taken or destroyed, the palace was like a place half remembered and recreated dimly in a dream. She fancied that if she pushed her hand up against one of the walls her flesh would penetrate it, like a hand pressed into water.