Creation (7 page)

“You will find many enemies at Susa.” Hystaspes spoke to me as if I were a thoughtful statesman and not a child. “Most of the Magians are devil-worshipers. Particularly the ones from ancient Media. They follow the Lie. They are also very powerful at court. My son is much too tolerant in his dealings with them.”

Hystaspes’ willingness to criticize his son Darius always shocked the old-fashioned Persian nobility. But neither he nor Darius had been brought up at court. In fact, to tell the truth, the main line of the imperial family—the Achaemenids—ended when the sons of Cyrus the Great were murdered. As a distant relative of the Achaemenids, young Darius seized the throne with the aid of The Six—and of the Wise Lord. He then invited Zoroaster to attend him at Susa. But my grandfather would not leave Bactra. If he had, he might have had a longer life and I would not have lived in such peril for so many years.

Hystaspes arranged and rearranged the useless arm. “My son swears to me that he follows the Truth. As he is a Persian, he cannot lie.” Now that I have become a historian or counterhistorian, I must note that for us Persians there is nothing worse than the telling of a lie while for the Greeks there is no pleasure more exquisite. I believe that this is because Greeks must live by selling things to one another and, of course, all merchants are dishonest. Since the Persian nobility are forbidden by custom either to buy or to sell, they may not lie.

Hystaspes was never happy with his son’s lack of religious zeal. “I know that Darius must govern more than a thousand cities, each with different gods. When he restored our fire temples, your grandfather was pleased. But when he restored the temple of Bel-Marduk at Babylon, your grandfather was horrified. So was I. But since my son rules all the lands, he believes that he must accept all religions, no matter how abominable.”

Hystaspes passed his good hand very slowly through the flame of the torch beside him, an old Magian trick. “The Great King’s court is split into many factions. Be on your guard. Serve only the Great King—and the Wise Lord. Each of the principal wives has her supporters. Avoid them. Avoid the Greeks at court. Many are tyrants, driven out by the new democracies. They are forever trying to get my son to go to war against other Greeks. They are bad men, and very persuasive. Since your mother is Greek ...” Hystaspes left that sentence unfinished, too. He disliked my mother because she was not Persian, and he would have disliked her son had not the hybrid child been chosen to hear the words of the Wise Lord himself. This must have mystified Hystaspes. A half-Greek boy had been chosen to hear the voice of the Wise Lord. Plainly the ways of divinity are not easily understood. This is a point that everyone agrees on.

“You will have the run of the harem until you are old enough for school. Be alert. Study the wives. Three of the wives are important. The eldest wife is a daughter of Gobryas. Darius married her when he was sixteen. They have three sons. The eldest is Artobazanes. He is now a grown man. He is expected to succeed Darius. But the Great King is under the spell of Atossa, the second wife, who is queen because she is the daughter of Cyrus the Great. Since she bore Darius three sons after he became Great King, she claims that the eldest of the three sons is the only legitimate heir. Also, as Cyrus’ grandson, the boy is truly royal. He is called Xerxes.” Thus did I hear for the first time the name of the man who was to be my lifelong—as long as his life, that is—friend.

Hystaspes gazed at me gravely. I fought off sleep; did my best to look alert. “Atossa is the one that you must please,” said Hystaspes, having just warned me to avoid
all
the wives and factions. “But do not make enemies of the other wives or of their eunuchs. You must be sly as the serpent. For the sake of the Wise Lord, you must survive. It won’t be easy. The harem is an unholy place. Astrologers, witches, devil-worshipers, every kind of wickedness is popular among the women. And the worst of the lot is Atossa. She believes that she ought to have been born a man so that she could have been Great King like her father, Cyrus. But since she’s not a man, she tries to compensate through magic. She has a private chapel where she prays to the devil-goddess Anahita. Between Atossa on the one hand and the Magians on the other, your life won’t be easy. The Magians will try to convert you to the Lie. But never give way. Never forget that you are the agent on earth of the Wise Lord, that you have been sent by him to pursue at Susa the way of Truth, to continue the work of Zoroaster, the holiest man that ever lived.”

This was all somewhat overwhelming for a sleepy child who wanted to grow up to be a soldier because soldiers did not have to spend as much time in school as Magians and priests—or sophists.

IN FREEZING WEATHER WE WENT UP TO Susa. Wrapped in wool, I rode beside my mother atop a camel, the one form of transportation that I have never learned to like. The camel is a disagreeable creature whose motion can make one every bit as sick as the tossing of a ship. As we approached the city, my mother kept muttering Greek spells to herself.

Incidentally, Lais is a witch. She admitted this to me some years after our arrival at court. “A Thracian witch. We are the most powerful on earth.” At first I thought that she was joking. But she was not. “After all,” she used to say, “if I hadn’t been a witch, we’d never have survived at Susa.” She may have a point there. Yet all the time that she was secretly indulging herself in Thracian mysteries, she was piously advancing her son as the true heir to the unique prophet of the Wise Lord who had been, of course, the sworn enemy of all those devils that she secretly worshiped. Lais is a clever woman.

It was dawn when we came to the Karun River. In slow single file the caravan crossed a wooden bridge, whose planks sagged and groaned. Beneath us the water of the river was solid ice while just ahead of us was Susa, sparkling in the sun. I had no idea that a city could be so large. All of Bactra could have fitted into one of the marketplaces. It is true that most Susan houses are ramshackle affairs, built of mud brick or—most oddly—built below ground in narrow earth trenches covered with layers of palm fronds to keep out the melting summer heat, the petrifying winter cold. But it is also true that the palace Darius had recently completed was by far the most splendid building in the world. On its high platform the palace dominates the city in much the same way that Susa is dominated by the snow-striped peaks of the Zagros Mountains.

Susa lies between two rivers in a fertile plain ringed on all sides by mountains. For as long as anyone can remember, the city was the capital of Anshan, a territory subject first to the Elamites, then to the Medes. The southwest corner of Anshan contains the Persian highlands, whose clan leader was Cyrus the Achaemenid, hereditary lord of Anshan. When Cyrus finally broke out of Anshan, he conquered Media and Lydia and Babylon. His son Cambyses conquered Egypt. As a result, the whole world from the Nile to the Indus River is now Persian, thanks to Cyrus and Cambyses; thanks to Darius and to his son Xerxes and to
his
son, my current master, Artaxerxes. Incidentally, from the accession of Cyrus to the present day, only one hundred and seven years have passed, and for most of this marvelous century I have been alive, and at the court of Persia.

In summer, Susa is so hot that lizards and snakes have been found cooked in the streets at midday. But by then the court has moved two hundred miles north to Ecbatana, where the Median kings had built for themselves the largest and perhaps least comfortable palace in the world; made entirely of wood, this building occupies more than one square mile in a high cool valley. During Susa’s cold months the Great King used to remove the court two hundred and twenty-five miles to the east, to that most ancient and voluptuous of cities, Babylon. But, later, Xerxes preferred Persepolis to Babylon. So the court now winters in the original homeland of the Persians. Old courtiers—like me—very much miss languorous Babylon.

At the gate to Susa we were met by a king’s eye. At any moment there are at least twenty king’s eyes, one for each of the twenty provinces, or satrapies. This official is a sort of general inspector and surrogate for the Great King. It was the task of this particular king’s eye to look after members of the royal family. Reverently he greeted Hystaspes. He then provided us with a military escort, a necessity at Susa, since the streets so twist and turn that a stranger is soon lost—sometimes forever, if he is not attended by guards.

I was delighted by the vast, dusty marketplace. As far as the eye could see there were tents and pavilions, while bright banners marked the start or terminus of this or that caravan. There were merchants from every part of the earth. There were also jugglers, acrobats, soothsayers. Snakes writhed to the music of pipes. Veiled and unveiled women danced. Magicians cast spells, pulled teeth, restored virility. Astonishing colors, sounds, smells ...

The new palace of Darius is approached by a wide straight avenue, lined with huge winged bulls. The palace’s façade is covered with glazed brick on which bas-reliefs depict Darius’ victories from one end of the world to the other. These delicately colored life-size illustrations are modeled in the brick itself, and I have yet to see anything as splendid in a Greek city. Although the figures tend to resemble one another—each is shown in profile, according to the old Assyrian style—one can still identify the features of the various Great Kings as well as those of certain of their close companions.

On the palace’s west wall, near the corner, opposite a monument to some long-dead Median king, there is a portrait of my father at the court of Polycrates in Samos. My father is shown holding a cylindrical message, marked with the seal of Darius. He is facing Polycrates. Just back of the tyrant’s chair is the famous physician Democedes. Lais thinks the resemblance to my father poor. But then, she dislikes the strict conventions of our traditional art. As a child, she used to watch Polygnotus at work in his studio at Abdera. She likes the realistic Greek style. I don’t.

The palace at Susa is built around three courtyards on an east-west axis. Before the main gate the king’s eye turned us over to the commander of the palace guard, who escorted us into the first courtyard. To one’s right is a portico of tall wooden columns on stone bases. Beneath the portico a row of royal guardsmen—known as the immortals—saluted us.

We passed through high corridors into the second courtyard. This one is even more impressive than the first. Young as I was, I was relieved to see the sun symbol of the Wise Lord guarded by sphinxes.

Finally we entered the so-called private court, where Hystaspes was greeted by the palace chamberlain and by the principal clerks of the chancellery who do the actual work of governing the empire. All chamberlains and most clerks are eunuchs. While the old chamberlain—Bagopates, I think it was—greeted Hystaspes, a number of aged Magians extended bowls of smoking incense toward us. As they chanted their incomprehensible prayers they stared at me closely. They knew who I was. They were not friendly.

When the ceremonies were ended, Hystaspes kissed me on the lips. “As long as I live, I shall be your protector, Cyrus, son of Pohuraspes, son of Zoroaster.” Hystaspes then turned to the chamberlain, who cringed dutifully. “I commend this youth to you.” I tried not to weep when Hystaspes left.

A minor functionary escorted my mother and me to our quarters in the harem, which is a small city within the large city of the palace. He showed us into a small empty room that looked onto a chicken yard.

“Your quarters, Lady.” The eunuch smirked.

“I had expected a house.” Lais was furious.

“In due course, Lady. Meanwhile Queen Atossa hopes that you and the child will be happy here. Whatever you want, you need only command.”

This was my first acquaintance with the style of a court. One is promised everything; then given nothing. No matter how often Lais commanded, pleaded, begged, we were kept confined to that small room which looked onto a dusty courtyard containing a dry fountain and a dozen chickens that belonged to one of Queen Atossa’s ladies-in-waiting. Although the noise of the chickens annoyed my mother, I quite liked them. For one thing, I had no other company. Democritus tells me that chickens are now being imported to Athens. They are called—what else?—Persian fowl!

Despite Hystaspes’ official protection, Lais and I were kept prisoner for almost a year. We were never received by the Great King, whose various arrivals and departures were accompanied by a tumultuous sound of drums and tambourines that caused the chickens to run about the yard most comically—that caused my mother’s face to set most tragically. Worse, when summer came we did not follow the court to Ecbatana. I have never been so hot.

We saw none of the wives except for Artystone, full sister to Queen Atossa—and so a daughter of Cyrus the Great. Apparently she was curious about us. One afternoon she appeared in our courtyard. I must say that she proved to be every bit as beautiful as people had said she was. This came as a surprise to Lais, who has always taken the view that whatever a famous personage is noted for tends to be the one thing that he notoriously lacks. For a witch, everything is illusion. Perhaps they are right. I do think that it was something of an illusion that Artystone was the only woman whom Darius had ever loved. Actually, he loved nothing on earth except earth itself; that is, he loved his dominion over all the lands. Xerxes was the opposite. He loved too many people; and so lost dominion over earth, over all the lands.

Artystone was accompanied by two handsome Greek eunuchs not much older than I. They had been sold to the harem by an infamous merchant of Samos who trafficked in abducted Greek youths. Since Greeks are the most reluctant to be castrated, they are the most sought-after eunuchs. The Samian became very rich.

Actually, the most agreeable and
useful
eunuchs are Babylonian. Each year five hundred Babylonian youths joyously undergo castration in order to serve in the harems of the Great King and his nobles. By and large, these boys are uncommonly intelligent; they are also uncommonly ambitious. After all, if one has not been born a noble, eunuchhood is the only way to rise at court. It is no secret that to this day the true source of power at the Persian court is found not upon the throne but in the harem where ambitious women and sly eunuchs plot. Today, not only are the eunuchs the attendants and guardians of the wives and concubines, they are also councilors to the Great King, ministers of state and even, sometimes, generals and satraps.