Tim Leach - The Last King of Lydia

Croesus fought a war of his own. He had as many enemies as Harpagus had cities to conquer. Routine, complacency, betrayal, exhaustion and fear were what conspired against him, and he spent each day resisting them.

He barely slept, finding a different hiding place each night to close his eyes for a short time, never sleeping in the tent he was assigned to. When he did sleep, he dreamed only of wars and conquered cities. His dreaming life and waking life were the same, to the point that in the small hours of the morning, or deep in the night, one mirrored the other so well that it was impossible to tell them apart.

When they passed through burning cities, Croesus would steal from the ruins, from the dying and the wounded, gathering gold to bribe others for information about Harpagus, or to buy a night’s protection from one of the soldiers. Gold could buy anything. Even a longer life, if one spent it wisely enough.

Each morning, Harpagus summoned him, and questioned him about the city they were marching against, asking about water and fortifications, religious customs and superstitions, spearmen and gold. Croesus gave his knowledge, yet he always held something back, only hinting at what he knew of the next city they were to conquer, hoping that his usefulness might keep him alive. Harpagus was a practical man, after all.

He remembered when he was a boy, sitting on his mother’s lap and enjoying the spicy smell of her hair, as she laid out samples of poison for him to taste and learn. He tried to remember those tastes again, and wondered which one Harpagus preferred. He was always watchful for a knife in the darkness, the bowl of food that had been prepared especially for him, the wineskin that was offered to him first with a smile.

To his eyes, the encampment resembled the labyrinths of legend, with one exception: there was no path by which he might escape. The only way out was the passage of time. Each day that passed was another step towards the ending of the wars, and their return to the east, to the safety of Cyrus’s court. But with every city that they conquered, his knowledge became a little less valuable. He imagined his life weighed on the scales; the satisfaction of his death placed against the value of keeping him alive. As he woke each morning, he wondered if this would be the day when the scales would finally tip.

They came, at last, to Pedasus. It fell just like the others that had fallen before it, its secrets betrayed, its army destroyed, its fortifications breached, its people butchered.

Croesus gave it no thought. He could think only of sleep.

He could not remember when he had last been able to buy a safe night’s rest. The world, washed out and grey, like a landscape in a half-forgotten memory, no longer made sense to him. People had to repeat themselves many times before he could understand them. Mundane objects became fascinating to him — he could spend hours staring at a candle flame as it shuddered in the air, or running his fingers one way and then another through tall grass, or watching the motion of water over stone. He had taken to keeping a thorn in his hand, so that he could close a fist and force himself awake with the pain.

He sometimes wondered, in the dull way of someone too exhausted to care, if he might have died weeks before and passed on without noticing. The next world might be a mirror of this one, a world that slowly disintegrated one sense at a time, that rotted like a body, until one was left with only an incomprehensible blankness. Or perhaps he had simply gone mad, and no amount of sleep would return the world to sense. He would be trapped in this half-life for ever.

He could focus only on knowing where Harpagus was, hoping to retain some illusion of control, but Harpagus had the general’s gift of being everywhere and nowhere at once. Ask half a dozen different people where he was, and you would receive twice as many answers. He was consulting an oracle in the hills, was in a whorehouse in the city, inspecting the cavalry, overseeing an execution and arguing with an emissary, seemingly all at once. Still Croesus continued to ask, like a man picking at a wound, even when he knows it will not bring him peace.

The night that Pedasus fell, he received, for once, a clear answer. Looking out of his tent towards the end of the day, he asked a passing soldier where the general was.

‘The general has gone on already,’ the other man replied. ‘Through the woods with some of the men. We are to follow him in the morning.’

‘He’s not here in the camp? You are sure?’

‘Yes.’ The soldier smiled dryly at him. ‘Glad to be away from the master’s gaze?’

‘More than you can know.’

The soldier laughed. ‘Sleep well, mighty king, sleep well,’ he said, and walked away.

Croesus watched him go. He began to think about where he might snatch a few hours of sleep that night. He sat down on the ground inside the tent to rest his legs and eyes for a short time before he went out again. His mind occupied by other things, he leaned back and lay flat on his back.

He was asleep within moments.

‘Croesus!’

The torch was in his face again, the fire curling towards his mouth. He flinched from it, and woke, his mouth thick with the taste of sleep.

A soldier stood over Croesus, looking down on him, his eyes two dark voids in the shadow of the torchlight. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Harpagus wants you. He doesn’t sleep. That means neither do you tonight. Come on.’

At his touch, Croesus woke up fully for the first time in months. The world came back into focus, and he understood what was happening to him.

‘Wait,’ he said, ‘just one moment.’

He reached towards the bundle of cloth that held his possessions together. He groped at it, hoping to feel the hard shape of a statue, the thin metal strands of a golden necklace, the round weight of coins, something with which he could buy his life. But there was only worthless fabric beneath his fingers.

He looked up at the soldier. ‘It must be now?’ he said slowly.

‘Yes, of course. Come on.’

Croesus remembered the morning they came to take him to the pyre in Sardis. He wondered at how calm he felt, now as then. The strange lack of urgency that came from being locked into an unfamiliar sequence of events, shaped by another’s hands and quite out of his control.

He could not truly believe that he was being led to his death. He kept imagining that each moment might bring a chance for escape or reprieve. His mind would continue to fabricate these impossible escapes, he thought, even as the sword was being drawn, or the noose fastened around his neck. Perhaps, in the final instant, just for a moment, he would truly understand that he was about to die.

They passed out of the camp, and into the surrounding woods. This will be the place, Croesus thought. Each time he saw the captain rein in his horse, his heart shook. But it was always for some trivial reason — a debate over the route with one of the scouts, uncertain ground that the horses needed to pass over slowly, a brief wait for some lagging member of the column to catch up. A mad desire grew within him to yell at them to get on with it. Anything was better than this, waiting for them to choose a place at random where he might be put to death.

He heard something. A soft rattle in the woods. The sound of wood against wood. A sound that was almost natural, but not quite; this was wood guided by human fingers, not by the wind or by the passage of an animal. It was a familiar sound, and he tried to remember what it was.

The first arrows came so fast that it was as though they grew from the things they struck. Cancerous, murderous eruptions, sprouting from the thick earth at his feet, from the flanks of suddenly screaming horses, and from the throats and eyes of the men ahead of him.