I sound mad, but even as I was having these thoughts, I knew I needed rest, sleep, food. It occurred to me to hurry back to Heraclitus to tell him that I had found a place where the stream ran twice — that I could be in two times at once, merely by running a few hundred stades without rest or food.
My next memory is of sitting in a cool garden, eating lamb. It is a curious thing — one I have experienced all too often — that as soon as the rich, sweet food passed my lips, the curious half world of battle and gods vanished and I felt like a man again.
I was sitting across a broad cedar table from Cyrus, now captain of a hundred noble cavalrymen in the bodyguard of Datis.
I ate ravenously, and he watched me carefully — a healthy mixture of friendly concern and suspicion. We’d crossed swords often enough in the last years for him to know perfectly well where my sympathies led. On the other hand, I had saved his life and his master’s, and that means more to a Persian than mere nationality.
He watched me eat, and he put me to bed, and the next day his slaves awakened me, and I ate again. I was young, bold and healthy — I recovered swiftly.
On that second day, he was waiting in the courtyard. ‘Welcome to my house,’ he said in Persian.
I knew the ritual, so I made a small sacrifice — barley cakes — to the sun, and ate salt on bread with him.
He nodded at my bag and gear. ‘You are carrying a fortune,’ he said. My gold and glass Aegyptian bottle was sitting before him on the table. He twirled his moustache. ‘It pains me, but I must ask you how you come to be here.’ He looked into my eyes. ‘And why.’
Slaves brought me a hot drink. Persians drink all sorts of things hot, because mornings are often cold in their mountains, or so I’ve been told. This had the aroma of anise, and tasted of honey. I held his gaze, and I decided that having come all this way, I would behave as a hero and not as a spy.
‘My lord,’ I said, ‘I will tell you everything, and to the utmost degree of honesty — like a Persian, and not like a Greek. But let me first say three things. And then you may decide if you need to know more.’
He nodded. ‘Well spoken. Please, be my guest.’ He waved at bread and honey, which he knew I loved, from the days when I was Doru the slave boy, and he and his friends fed me just to see how much I could eat. He raised a hand. ‘I doubt not that you will tell me the truth. But lest you misunderstand — I know
I stood. Persians are very formal. ‘It is an honour to be the friend of Cyrus, captain of the hundred that guards Artaphernes,’ I said.
He blushed and rose, and I saw that his right arm was swathed in bandages. ‘Wounded?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘A petty skirmish over horses at Miletus.’
‘Last autumn, at the edge of winter?’ I asked.
He nodded.
‘I was there!’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I know, young Doru. So — you will tell me three things. I must hear them.’
I sat back and warmed my hands with the ceramic cup full of hot tea.
‘I serve Miltiades of Athens,’ I said carefully.
Cyrus nodded.
‘I love Briseis, daughter of Hipponax, wife of Artaphernes,’ I said.
Cyrus started, and then slapped his knee. ‘Of course you do!’ he said. ‘May Ahura Mazda blast my sight — I should have known.’ Then he schooled his face. ‘He is my lord, of course.’
‘I am in Sardis seeking news of how Datis will fight us,’ I said. ‘But the bottle of scent is for Briseis, and the money is my own, and none of it is to buy treason.’
Cyrus drank tea, looking at the roses that grew up the wall of his courtyard in the morning sun. ‘If I arrest you,’ he said, ‘you will be sent to Persepolis. The Great King has heard your name. You will be a noble prisoner and a hostage. In time, you might rise in court and be a satrap — you might command me.’
I shrugged.
‘Or I might kill you. You do not deny that you are the enemy of my master?’ He raised his eyebrow.
‘No. Nor do I deny that I am here to learn your weaknesses. You see — I am a bad Greek.’ I laughed.
He did not laugh. ‘I never thought to say this — but a small lie on these matters would have let me sleep better.’
I shrugged. I had the advantage that I didn’t care. I never loved the Ionian Alliance, friends. They were mostly East Greeks to me, soft-handed men who argued about firewood while the flames of their fire died. They had great men among them — Nearchos and Epaphroditos come to mind. But Briseis had hurt me, and I cared for nothing.
But — my role as a hero required me to speak.
‘Instead of a lie, I’ll give you a truth. I am here as a private man. I seek to give my gift to Briseis, and speak with her in Ephesus. I make no war on Sardis.’ I frowned.
‘Unlike the last time, you rebel!’ He slapped his knees again. ‘I was sword to sword with you in the marketplace!’ He looked around. ‘Does she love you, Doru?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know, Cyrus. I have loved her — since I was a boy. And she loved me.’ I shook my head. ‘Once, she loved me.’
‘You have lain with her?’ Cyrus asked. Persians are not shy about such things.
‘Many times,’ I assured him.
He nodded. ‘She loves my master,’ he said. He twirled his moustache again.
Now — I have to go off the tale again, to explain that among Persians, adultery, a mortal offence among Greeks, is something of a national aristocratic pastime, like lion-hunting. So my passion for his lord’s wife made me all the more Persian, to Cyrus. I wasn’t in a mood to calculate and manipulate — but I knew that this simple truth would render my mission for Miltiades almost incidental.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘He ruined her mother, of course.’ Cyrus knew it as well as I. We had both been there. ‘I would say — to a brother — that she tastes the forbidden because it is forbidden. That she loves power, but not Artaphernes.’
I might have rushed to her defence — except that his words struck me as truth.
‘To lie with the mother and the daughter is a sin in Persia,’ Cyrus went on. ‘Many of us want him to leave her.’
I took a breath and let it go, and the balance changed.
‘Let me go, and I will try to take her with me,’ I said.
‘Hmm.’ He put his hand on the table. ‘I am caught between what I want for my lord and what he wants. I will not be the agent of corrupting his wife. Despite my misgivings.’ He contemplated me and combed his beard. ‘I find I cannot order your death, although, to be honest, I have a feeling that would be best for the King of Kings.’
I remember shrugging. A foolish response, but then, what should a man do when his death is proposed?
‘Swear to me that you will do nothing to harm my master, and that you will leave this city in the morning,’ he said.
I put my hand in his. ‘I swear that I will return to Ephesus tomorrow, and once there, my only purpose will be to see her and leave,’ I said. If your wits are quick, you’ll see how full of holes my oath was.
We clasped hands, and he finished his tea. ‘I have business in the marketplace,’ he said. ‘Gather all the news you like. It will only discomfit you. You cannot fight the Great King. His power is beyond your imagination. I should send you to Persepolis as a prisoner — I would be doing you a favour. But I will let you see your doom — and then let you go to it. Perhaps you will save a few Greeks to be the Great King’s subjects.’ He pointed out the gate. ‘Go — learn. And despair. And leave Briseis to her own end, is my advice.’
We embraced like old comrades. It is odd how we saw each other only in snatches, here and there — and how he had known me, not as a great hero, but as a slave boy — and yet we were ever friends, even when our swords were bloody to the wrist and we swung them at each other.
Never believe that Persians were lesser men. Their best were as good as our best — or better.
His permission — and it was that — to go and spy in Sardis chilled me, and I dressed and went out into the agora.
