The King and the Slave

Tim Leach

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780857899231
• eBook ISBN: 9780857899248
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Ten years after the fall of Babylon, Cyrus's army is on the march again. His slave Croesus, no longer a young man, accompanies him as always, as does the king's son and heir Cambyses, who has inherited none of his father's diplomacy or charisma and all of his vanity and violence. When the warriors of Persia are unexpectedly crushed in battle Cyrus is put to death, and Cambyses assumes the throne. Croesus, once a king himself, is called upon to guide the young man; but the young man cannot be guided, and after taking offence at an insult by an Egyptian ruler, Cambyses takes the full force of his father's empire to Africa for bloody and brutal vengeance...

The City of the Dead

1

Out in the Ethiopian desert, the men gathered around the weak fire, huddling close with their arms around one another. A few thin pieces of wood, mummified by decades beneath the sun, burned reluctantly, giving smoke but little heat. These men were lucky. Few in Cambyses’s army had even this scanty fuel for their fires. They were burning other things now.

Beneath their armour, their ribs were pressed tight against weak skin, like those of cattle in a drought land. Their muscles had wasted down to tendons, barely strong enough to hold their starving bodies together, and their faces were so deeply sunken that, in the light of the fire, they had only shadows where their eyes should be. They sat, silent together, and waited for someone to have the courage to begin.

Finally, one man lifted his helmet from the ground beside him. Another man handed him a bag of small pebbles. He counted them out, one for each of the men left in the circle. One pebble was unlike the others; the same shape, but entirely black in colour. He lifted this pebble up between his thumb and forefinger, and showed it to every man in the circle. The others nodded to him, and he cast the black stone into the helmet. He shook it, and listened to the gentle rattle of stone against stone and stone against metal, like the breaking of the waves on a pebble shore.

Around other fires in the Persian army, the decision was made by brute strength, or by allegiances and factions that shifted and changed every night. But these men, who had fought together in a dozen nations and shared everything equally together, could not break their brotherhood. All was decided by the lot.

Each man assumed that if the black stone fell to him, he would meet his end well. Not like the others who had been taken before. Yet none could truly believe, or allow themselves to believe, that when they reached into the helmet they would draw their death out of it.

This time, it was the fifth man to reach in who took the black stone.

He had dreamed of it every night, but had still believed it was impossible that it would ever fall to him in the waking world. He wondered, for a moment, if he was still dreaming. Weakened, almost hallucinatory with hunger, day and night, waking and dreaming, had all long since melded together for him. When he looked up, saw the famished eyes on him, he found that he could not go peacefully. He leapt up, and, with the last of his strength, he tried to run.

They chased him, the starving in pursuit of the starving. They could barely move faster than a walk, all feeling the emptiness within that somehow still had weight, dragging them towards the earth. A few of the pursuers collapsed, unable to go further or unwilling to do what had to be done. The rest pressed on, almost bent double, each folded over his hunger like a dying man over a wound.

At last, the doomed man could run no further. He stopped and went to his knees and bowed his head, and the others fell upon him, in relief more than in anger or bloodlust. One of them leaned in close and murmured a breathless thanks to him.

The daggers rose and fell and came up again, the blood black on the blades under the moonlight. The dying man didn’t have the strength to cry out at their clumsy, exhausted thrusts. He lay mute as they murdered him.

The men collapsed around the body, their hands and faces dark with blood. Like an automaton, the first lifted his helmet again. Each reached inside once more, and the second man to pull a lot out was the one who took the black stone. He wept, as another man handed him the jagged blade. He knelt over the corpse, his knife working in the darkness, taking the body to pieces. The others waited, licking the blood from their hands, each man hating the saliva that flooded into his mouth at the sight of the dead soldier being prepared.

Theirs had been the first killing that night. Now men screamed all across the camp, first one at a time, then more and more, until hundreds seemed to cry out with a single voice.

Then there was only sound and smell of cooking meat. The army fell silent, and began to feed on itself.

The food lay untouched before her. Parmida found no desire for the rich meal that they had brought to her chamber. She had chosen this room in the palace for her own, purely because it faced south. Each day, Parmida sat by the window, pulled aside the thin fabric that covered it, and looked out across the funerary grounds and into the shimmering heat of the red sands, looking towards Ethiopia, waiting for them to return.

Maia sat beside her. The slave should not have taken her eyes from Parmida, while waiting for a command from the king’s sister. But she too looked out into the desert.

‘How long could we stay here, do you think?’ Parmida said.

‘There are stories among my people of those who waited twenty years to see their sons and husbands return from the wars.’

‘It must have been a more patient time. They are gone two months, and already . . .’

‘That is a long time in the desert, my lady.’

‘Twenty years, you say. I could not stand to wait so long. I would go mad. I am afraid of that, sometimes.’

‘You will not go mad, my lady.’

‘If my brother has lost his mind, perhaps I will too. We share the same blood, after all.’

‘That will not be your fate.’

‘And what will be my fate, do you think?’

‘That is not for me to say, my lady. Forgive me. I speak too freely.’

‘I am glad that you do. Your old stories: I suppose they were full of princesses who did nothing but wait.’

‘Only some of them, my lady.’

‘Oh? There is another fate open to me?’

‘I have heard there was a princess who did not want to marry. A great runner, restless and free, who would not wait for anyone. She would race any man who sought her hand, and kill those who lost.’

‘I like that story. My mother was a good runner, I have always been told. What happened to her? To your running princess.’

‘A man tricked her and caught her and made her his wife, of course. How else would such a story end?’

A noise from behind took their eyes from the desert. At the entrance to the chamber, Isocrates bowed to them. ‘Bardiya has asked to see you my lady.’

‘I wait for one brother, and another comes to find me. Isocrates?’

‘My lady?’

‘Do you think they will return?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Do you want them to?’

He hesitated, caught out.

‘You want Croesus to return, I think,’ she said.

‘I wish he had told me that he was to go, and I was to stay.’ His gaze drifted to Maia. ‘But I do not know if I want him to come back. I wish he could have been braver.’

‘You mean crueller,’ Maia said softly.

‘Yes. Perhaps I do.’

‘Enough of this. I will see my brother,’ Parmida said. ‘Leave us now.’

When Bardiya came in she tried not to flinch at the sight of him – he looked so much like his brother, it was impossible not to think of Cambyses. She knew that Baridya hated the way that people would look at him with fear, as if he were some ghost of the king. Or perhaps it was something else they saw in him – the king as he should have been.

‘Leave us,’ Bardiya said to Maia.

‘I have no secrets from her.’

‘No? But I do.’

When they were alone, she said: ‘There has been news?’

‘No. Only rumours.’

‘How long will the noblemen wait?’

‘They are all too afraid of him. They will want to know for certain.’

‘Are you afraid?’

‘Yes. But I think he will return. He will see sense, and turn back.’

‘I fear he may be beyond that,’ she said quietly.

‘I have heard others talking. Saying the same thing. That Cambyses should not be king. Sometimes I wonder, even if he does come back, if we should—’

‘No,’ Parmida said. ‘Do not even think of that.’

‘You are sure?’

‘We cannot. We are Cyrus’s children. We must protect each other. We must not turn against each other. No matter what happens.’

‘Yes,’ Bardiya said. ‘You are right.’ He sighed then, and some hidden tension seemed to unravel from his shoulders. ‘I am glad that you said that. I was so afraid, that I might have to . . . But I could not bear it.’

‘Will you sit with me?’ Parmida smiled at her brother. ‘You have chased away my slaves. I do not want to be alone.’

He sat beside her and looked outwards. They both knew that, if the army did return, he would be the one to see it first. Unlike his brother’s, Bardiya’s eyes had always been strong.

They let the silence return, and stared together into the desert.

2

‘Horsemeat. Disgusting.’

Croesus flinched as the bone, still half covered in meat, clattered back to the plate. The king wiped the grease from his fingers onto a piece of cloth, and Croesus felt his eyes linger on each brown mark on the pale fabric. The words fought to be spoken, the words begging the king not to waste the slightest smear of food, and he swallowed them down, hating himself for it.

The king finished cleaning his hands, and looked down at the meat. He hesitated, shrugged, and picked it up once again. ‘But I am hungry,’ he said, laughing as he tore a fresh strip from the bone, ‘so I shall not complain.’ Croesus felt a sigh escape his lips, beyond his power to restrain it, and heard it echoed by the others. They had all wanted, more than anything, for Cambyses to leave that food untouched.

Each night the king would dine, and once he had retired, Croesus and the other members of the council would feast on the food the king had rejected. They did not brawl for it, not yet at least; they silently divided it amongst themselves equally, for what happened around the campfires at night had given them a fear of the rule of force. The food was not much; every waking moment Croesus felt the yawning, dulling hunger that left no other thought behind it, and each night he dreamed of nothing else. But they had not yet had to make the terrible choices of the other men.

Cambyses did not know what was being done for him. When he rode out at the centre of the army, his failing eyes could not see the starving men who surrounded him, growing thinner, growing fewer. He had not even noticed the sudden disappearance of his cavalry, two weeks into their journey, not connected that with the sudden preponderance of horsemeat. When the killing began at night, a general would gesture to the musicians to strike their drums and sing. Usually it was loud enough that they heard only the occasional, solitary scream, but Croesus had come to hate and fear that music. It was like perfume covering the smell of a corpse.

He looked around the circle, in the half-light of the fire, to see if, at last, any man would speak out. General and councillor and slave al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• An Endless Plain
• A Garden of Paradise
• A Silent Desert
• The City of the Dead
• The Second Death
• Acknowledgements