Cyrus turned and spoke to his servants in Persian. One of them bowed, and pointed to the other side of the courtyard. Cyrus laughed, and turned back to Croesus.
‘He is here. You see? Already he is making himself useful to me. A clever slave indeed.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Isocrates!’
Croesus watched the slave come forward and bow at another man’s command. ‘How can I serve, master?’
‘Tend his wounds.’
Isocrates bowed again. ‘Yes, master.’
Cyrus turned to go, but looked back, snapped his fingers to one of his guards and beckoned him forward. He took the man’s cloak from him, tossed it to Croesus, and began to walk away.
‘Cyrus?’
The Persian king turned back. ‘Yes?’
‘What will you tell them? The people, I mean. As to why you put out the pyre. Won’t they take your change of heart as weakness?’
‘You are correct.’ Cyrus looked up at the clear sky and smiled. ‘We shall say a god put the fire out. Who could argue with that? I think it might even be true.’
Croesus wrapped the cloak tightly around him, for the comfort as much as for the warmth, and watched his new master walk away.
‘I shall not dress your feet for you,’ Isocrates said after the king had gone, ‘because I’m not your slave any more. Do you understand?’ Croesus stared sightlessly at the smouldering pyre, and nodded.
‘You must learn to understand and to act quickly,’ Isocrates continued. ‘Things will not be repeated for you. If you make the wrong choice, or you don’t understand, you will die.’
‘You make it sound like being a hunted animal.’
‘That is not far from the truth.’
‘What were you doing here, when Cyrus called for you?’
‘Pouring sand on that fire.’
‘So you saved my life?’ Croesus shook his head. ‘How touching.’
‘I also helped stack the wood this morning to burn you. So don’t be sentimental.’
Croesus looked down at the marks the heated chains had left on his arms. ‘Will I always be marked like this?’ he said.
Isocrates looked briefly, with little interest. ‘No. They will heal.’
‘But I will always be a slave.’
‘Yes. You serve at the pleasure of your master, now. Don’t forget it.’ Another man came with a poultice and bandages, and Isocrates took them from him. ‘Now,’ he said to Croesus, ‘watch what I do.’
Croesus watched as Isocrates demonstrated how to apply the poultice and the bandage, listened as the slave described what herbs went into the wrapping and what they did. When the other man had finished, he made a passable effort at wrapping his feet himself. The bandages were clumsy, but they did not unravel, and he repeated the effects of the herbs first time. He winced at the pain as he wrapped his feet, but did not cry out.
Isocrates nodded in approval. ‘Not bad. And that is good enough. For now, at least.’
‘Cyrus thinks I am a wise man,’ Croesus said. ‘That is why he is keeping me alive.’
Isocrates said nothing.
‘I am not a wise man, am I?’
‘No, Croesus. You are not.’
‘What do I do?’
Isocrates stared at him, and shrugged.
‘Learn quickly,’ he said.
The Slave
545 BC
1
The Persian army slept.
From a distance, the torchlit gathering of men could be mistaken for a city. Eyes would play tricks, connecting the disparate points of fire to form impossible architectures, conjuring a city of the mind out of nothing. It was only on drawing closer that one could see past the fires to the outlines of tents and sleeping pallets stretched out in every direction. A hundred thousand souls, sleeping and dreaming in a land that was not theirs. Small fires ringed the edges of the encampment where sentries fought to stay awake, watching the stars and counting away the time until they were relieved, and could rejoin the dreaming army.
At the heart of this gathering, this temporary city of the plains, Croesus, a torch dripping sparks in his hand, moved through the tents and sleeping men towards the place where Cyrus held court that night. He looked warily into corners where men might be hiding in ambush, watchful of figures that might lurk in the darkness. In his first few months in service to the Persian king, some of the servants had found pleasure in beating this slave who had once been a king. They called him to some quiet corner on a false errand, knocked him to the ground, and whipped him with their belts until his tunic was stuck to his back with blood. He had learned to be cautious.
No one stopped him on his journey across the camp, the few sentries he passed nodding to him without interest. They were used to the king’s slave being summoned at all hours, day and night. Distant at first, then drawing closer, he saw the ring of torches that identified the king’s open-air council for that night.
Cyrus ruled a nomad’s court, and whether it was in a forest clearing or the burned-out palace of a conquered king, he did not seem to care. He had spent his life as a king travelling at the head of an army, never remaining in the same place for more than a few days, for Cyrus was the only centre the kingdom had, his army its capital city. Not content with the half-dozen throne rooms that Croesus enjoyed in Sardis, he travelled through his empire scattering thousands of them, seeding the earth with ghostly courts that were used once and never again, marking his kingdom like an animal.
Cyrus’s court that night was bounded by a circle of tall torches thrust into the ground. At the edge of this circle, his bodyguards slouched on the ground like idle dogs, as if mocking the rigid attention of the ordinary soldiers. Croesus had seen them move fast enough to know that their indolence was merely an act. In the centre, a leaning stone the height of a small child served as a throne: the only feature that marked this circle out from the arid plains that stretched out in every direction.
When Croesus had left the court a few hours before, dismissed by the king to go and sleep, the gathering had been relaxed. A few issues of future strategy lightly discussed, without any sense of impending catastrophe. But there was now an air of near panic. The men of the court spoke over and across each other all at once. Some shouted each other down, others gathered at the edge of the circle and whispered to one another. Only Cyrus was calm, waiting patiently and silently in the middle of the circle like a man waiting for a storm to blow itself out. He alone noted Croesus’s arrival.
‘Ah, Croesus,’ he said, his slightly raised voice a sign for the others to fall silent. ‘How good of you to join us.’
All eyes turned to Croesus. He dropped his eyes to the ground. ‘You sent for me?’
‘Yes I did. Cyraxes? Tell him.’
The old man cleared his throat. ‘An emissary from Sparta has reached the camp,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know he was in the country, let alone this close to us.’ He shot a glance at Harpagus. ‘Our spies, it seems, are not as infallible as some have claimed.’
Harpagus ignored him. ‘I still think we should dispose of him. We have nothing to fear if he doesn’t report back to his master.’
‘Kill an emissary? Can you think of a more foolish idea?’
‘He knows too much.’
‘And whose fault is that?’
‘You don’t have to repeat what we all know,’ Harpagus said. ‘If you have nothing else to say, keep quiet.’
‘It is your failing that-’
‘Enough.’ Cyrus did not raise his voice, but the word cut through the air and brought silence with it. The king turned to Croesus and smiled thinly. ‘So. The Spartans are considering an expedition across the sea.’
‘What happens if they do?’
‘They will join with the Ionians, and we cannot stand against such an alliance. If they come, I expect we will fight a bloody war and be destroyed, Croesus. More fathers burying sons, as you once said.’