‘For how long?’
‘For years. Decades perhaps. There won’t be much joy along the way, but I’d like you to be there with me. That is selfish of me, isn’t it? But it’s the only reason I have.’ He paused. ‘Croesus. Would you like me to go?’
Croesus said nothing for a long time.
Then he said, ‘No.’
‘What would you like me to do instead?’
‘Stay here, and watch the sunset with me,’ Croesus said. He paused. ‘It might be a good one.’
‘It might.’ Isocrates leaned on the balcony, and looked down at the city.
‘This is Cyrus’s greatest conquest, isn’t it?’ he said, after a silence.
‘Yes.’
‘A fine city to rule an empire from. A fine home for a king, and for slaves like us. Is this the end of his wars, do you think?’
Croesus shook his head.
‘No?’ Isocrates said.
‘We shall stay here for a time. But he will grow bored. And one day he will look at his maps, and find another place to conquer. And we will go with him.’
Isocrates gazed down on the streets of Babylon. Then he shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let us try to enjoy ourselves until then.’
Far below, the city stretched on as far as an old man’s eyes could see.
Babylon. As close to a perfect city as men had yet managed to build. The Persians had come to make it greater, to make it the heart of an empire. They had, instead, initiated its slow decay. It might take centuries or merely decades for it to be destroyed entirely. Some unknown time after that the city would become myth, then die altogether, lost to memories and stories alike.
The people of Babylon, had they known this, would not perhaps have cared. They had been taught, ever since birth, that the Gods loved decay as much as they loved creation, that death and rebirth, entropy and regeneration, were the way of things, that nothing lasted for long, least of all a man or a city, a king or a slave, a memory or a story.
If any of the people down below had looked up at the balcony of the palace, they might have assumed that it was their new ruler looking down on them, a trusted slave at his side, though which was the king and which was the slave, they could not have said. Those with keener eyes might have seen the glint of silver in their hair, and wondered whether their wandering lives were over, and they would grow old together and die in the city, or whether their travels had hardly yet begun.
The two men remained outside until the sun had set. If they were still visible through the darkening air, an observer from the streets below might have seen the two men draw together for an instant. It was possible that the blurring of the two forms was a mere trick of failing light and tired eyes. It was also possible that they embraced once, sudden and joyful, the way that children do. Then they returned to the palace, to serve their king, and wait for the next war to come.