Creation (52 page)

“I am entirely out of the world,” he said as we crossed the waterfront to the street that leads up the hill to Artemisia’s palace. “Invisible. Forgotten.”

“Invisible to the court. But not forgotten. What are you doing here?”

Mardonius paused at the foot of the hill. He was breathing hard and sweat shone on his brow. “When I lost my command, I told the Great King that I would like to retire from court.”

“Forever?”

“Who knows? I mean, the only true forever is death. Isn’t that so, dear cousin?” He gave me an odd look. “Who would have thought that you’d ever marry into our family!”

“
Their
family.” And I mimicked his tone: “Dear cousin.”

“Mine, too, by blood. Yours through marriage. And Xerxes’ unswerving love.” As we began the ascent to the sea palace, Mardonius took my arm. He did not limp so much as swagger, the body swinging from side to side as he tried not to put too great a weight on the shattered leg. Halfway up the hill he let go my arm. “Climbing is the worst,” he gasped; and sank onto a limestone ledge.

I sat beside him. Below us the houses of the town looked like so many game dice strewn at the rough edge of the purple channel that separates the mainland from the dark-green mountains of the island of Cos. Home of the god Pan, I thought—then checked myself. I thought of the pirates who live in those lovely mountains, of the island’s lax civil administration, of the taxes in arrears. I was very much the stern inspector, the entirely incorruptible king’s eye.

Mardonius then told me that “As soon as the young Artaphrenes and Datis left for Greece, I came to Halicarnassus. And I’ve been here ever since.”

“Regaining your strength?”

“Yes.” Mardonius gave me a somewhat challenging look. “I expect to be in command next year.”

“But will there be a campaign next year? Once Athens is destroyed, what’s the point?” I picked at a small stone fish that had been imbedded in the limestone, a relic from the time of the Babylonian flood.

“The point is Greater Greece. Sicily. Italy.” Mardonius grinned. “I never showed you my map, did I?”

“No. But then, I never showed you
my
map of the Indian kingdoms.”

“We shall never agree.”

“No. But why should you care?” I was somewhat bitter. “You always win. You have some sort of magic over the Great King. When you say attack the Greeks, he attacks.”

“Hippias has the magic. He is the sorcerer.” Mardonius was serious. “I only pray his spells are still effective. Old as he is, he’s with the fleet. All our Greeks are, except Demaratus, who stays at Susa, where he has the Great King to himself.”

“What do you think Demaratus wants?”

“The world! What else is worth having?” Mardonius positively shouted in my ear; and the pale face turned, briefly, coral-pink. That was when I realized that not only was he going to recover but he would once again obtain if not the world, the command of the Great King’s forces.

A goatherd with his flock approached us. He bowed low; said something in dialect and moved on. Plainly, he had no notion who we were. We were simply foreigners on the way to the sea palace.

Mardonius’s reaction was the same as mine. “We govern millions of people,” he said, with a certain wonder, “and they never even know our names.”

“Not ours, perhaps. But they know that Darius is the Great King.”

Mardonius shook his head. “That goatherd doesn’t know who Darius is.”

I disagreed; and so we made a bet. While Mardonius rested on his rock perch, I made my way through the flock of goats to the herder, who looked alarmed. I said something to him; he said something to me. I found his primitive Dorian dialect as baffling as he found my Ionian Greek. Eventually we worked out a language suitable for my purpose, which was, simply, to ask, “Who is your sovereign?”

“Demetrius, young lord. He owns the whole of the back of that mountain over there. He owns this flock.”

“But who is Demetrius’ lord?”

The man frowned, and thought. As he wrestled with this new concept, a louse took advantage of the stillness to make a swift journey from the hair that was pulled back from the herder’s left ear to the tangled beard that started halfway up his cheeks. The louse found a safe refuge in the beard forest, and I was pleased: those who are not by nature hunters side with the hunted.

“I don’t know,” he said at last.

I pointed to the gray palace above us. “What about the queen?”

“Queen?” He said the word as though he had not heard it before.

“The lady who lives up there?”

“Oh,
the lady
!
Yes, I’ve seen her. She rides a horse like a man. She’s very rich.”

“She is the queen of Halicarnassus.”

The man nodded. The phrase was plainly unfamiliar to him. “Yes, yes,” he said. “The goats are straying, young Lord.”

“But who is
her
lord?”

“Her husband, I suppose.”

“She is a widow. Yet there is one person above her, and he is her sovereign.”

Once again I had produced an unfamiliar word. “Sovereign?” he repeated. “Well, I don’t come over to this side of the mountain all that much. There are a lot of people here I don’t know.”

“But surely you know the name of the Great King. He is your sovereign and he is my sovereign, and everyone in the world knows his name.”

“And what would that be, young Lord?”

Mardonius was delighted to win the bet. I was not. “There must be some way of reaching those people,” I said.

“Why bother? He looks after his goats and pays some sort of rent to a landowner who pays tax to the queen who pays tribute to the Great King. So what more can we want of a yokel like that? Why should he bother his head with who we are, or who Darius is?”

As we made our way to the top of the cliff, sweat covered Mardonius’ face like a warm Indian rain. “The court is not the world,” he said somewhat unexpectedly.

“No.” I was very much king’s eye. “But it is our world—and theirs, too. Whether they know it or not.”

“You have never been to sea.” Mardonius’ response was cryptic. When I reminded him that I had crossed the southern sea, he shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. You’ve never commanded your own ship. There is nothing like it.”

“Yes, sea lord.” I mocked him amiably. But he could not respond; he was again out of breath. We sat on a broken column just opposite the palace and watched the suppliants come and go.

“What news of Xerxes?” Mardonius mopped his face with a sleeve. The sun had lost its dawn-chill, and the heat now seemed to rise from the earth itself.

“He’s at Persepolis,” I said. “Building.”

“Building?” Mardonius picked up a pine cone. “That’s no life.” He pulled back the cone’s hard leaves in search of nuts. Finding none, he threw the cone at the tree that bore it. “I told the Great King that Xerxes should lead the armies against Athens.” This was a lie, but I made no comment. “Darius agreed.”

“Yet Xerxes was not allowed to go.”

Mardonius rubbed his hand over the rough granite surface of the column. “Xerxes must have victories,” he said, caressing the stone as if it were a horse. “Last year when I realized that I wasn’t going to be strong enough to take the field, I advised Darius to call off the spring offensive in the west and send the army to that monkey-land of yours.”

“Is this true?” The question was rude. Because I did not know the answer.

“A Persian noble may not lie,” said Mardonius, not smiling. “Even,” he added, “when he does.” He looked in pain. “Yes, it’s true. I want only one thing—to be the conqueror of the Greeks, and I don’t want to share that distinction with Artaphrenes and Datis. So I had hoped that this year Xerxes would take the army across the Indus River.”

“Then next year you would take the army west?”

“Yes, that’s what I wanted. But that’s not what I got.”

I believed Mardonius. After all, it was no secret that he wanted to be satrap of the Greeks in Europe. Since it now looked as if young Artaphrenes would enjoy that high office, I changed the subject. “Is Queen Artemisia contented with her position?”

Mardonius laughed. “Which one? She has several.”

“I speak as king’s eye. She ignores the satrap. She deals directly with the Great King. The satrap is not happy.”

“But Artemisia is happy, and so are the people. This is a Dorian city, and the Dorians tend to worship their royal families. And then, of course, she’s popular in her own right, as I discovered. When I dismissed the Ionian tyrants, I dismissed her, too. So she sent me a message, saying that if I wanted to replace a dynasty as old as the gods of the Aryans, I would have to fight her in the field.”

“Hand to hand?”

“There was that implication.” Mardonius grinned. “Anyway, I sent her a soothing message, followed by my handsome person, with leg intact.”

“Did she greet you on the floor?”

“On the throne. Then on the bed. Floors are for the very young. She is a formidable woman and I’d give a ... I’d give my
bad
leg to marry her. But that is not possible. So I live quite openly with her, as if I were consort. It’s amazing. These Dorians are not like other Greeks, or anyone else. The women do as they please. They inherit property. They even have their own games, just like the men.”

Except for Halicarnassus, I have never visited a Dorian city. I suspect that Halicarnassus must be the best of the lot, just as Sparta is the worst. The independence of the Dorian women always annoyed Xerxes. Eventually he divorced or sent away his Dorian wives and concubines on the ground that he could not bear their melancholy. They actually resent being sequestered in the harem! I have found that there is no attitude so bizarre that one will not encounter it sooner or later if one travels far enough.

Artemisia received us in a long low room with small windows that looked toward the sea and dark-green Cos. She was somewhat stouter than I remembered, but the golden hair was still golden and the face was agreeable despite the recent birth of a second chin.

My herald announced me, as is the custom. The queen bowed not to me but to my office, as is the custom. After she had welcomed me to Halicarnassus, I told her of the Great King’s affection for his vassal. In a loud voice she swore obedience to the Persian crown; then our attendants withdrew.

“Cyrus Spitama is a ruthless inspector.” Mardonius was now in a good mood. “He has sworn to increase the tribute you pay by half.” He stretched himself out on a narrow bed that had been so placed that he could see the harbor from the window. He told me that most of his days were spent watching ships come and go. That morning, at first light, when he had recognized the sails of my ship, he had hobbled down to the port to greet me.

“My treasury is the Great King’s.” Artemisia was formal. She sat erect in a high wooden chair. I sat almost as erect in a chair that was not quite as high as hers. “So is my army, and so am I.”

“I shall tell that to the lord of all the lands.”

“You can also tell him that when Artemisia says that she is his, she really is. But not for the harem. For the battlefield.”

I must have looked as surprised as I was. But Artemisia was perfectly placid in her belligerence. “Yes, I am willing, at any time, to lead my army into any battle that the Great King sees fit to fight. I had hoped to join the spring offensive against Athens, but I was rejected by Artaphrenes.”

“So now we console each other,” said Mardonius. “Two generals without a war to fight.”

Artemisia was somewhat too masculine for my taste. Physically, she was a well-fleshed woman, but the fair hard face that she turned toward me was that of a Scythian warrior. All she lacked was the mustache. Yes Mardonius told me that of the many hundreds of women that he had known, she was the most satisfying to make love to. One never knows what others are really like.

We spoke of the war in Greece. We had heard no news since Artaphrenes burned the city of Eretria and enslaved its inhabitants. Presumably, he had occupied Athens by now. Thanks to Mardonius’ removal of the Ionian tyrants, the democratic element at Athens was pro-Persian, and the city was not expected to put up much resistance. After all, most of the leading men at Athens were either pro-Persian or in Persia’s pay or both.

As I spoke of our victory at Eretria, Mardonius fell silent and Artemisia looked concerned. This was not a subject calculated to delight our wounded lion. She cut short my profound analysis of the military situation in Greece: “We have heard that you were recently married to the daughter of the Great King.”

Mardonius brightened. “Yes, he’s my cousin now. One day he’s a sort of Magian, guzzling haoma, and the next day he’s a member of the imperial family.”

“I am
not
a Magian.” I never cease to be annoyed when people say this, as Mardonius knew. Boyhood friends are like that, when they are not open enemies.

“So he says. But let him near a fire altar and he’ll grab the sacred twigs and chant the—”

“Which of the noble ladies is mother to your wife?” Firmly, Artemisia silenced Mardonius.

“The Queen Atossa,” I responded formally, “daughter of Cyrus the Great, for whom I was named.” I was somewhat surprised that Artemisia did not already know my wife’s name. But perhaps she did; and chose to pretend that she did not.

“We are so far away, here by the sea,” she said. “Do you know that I have never been up to Susa?”

“You’ll come with me when I go back to court.” Mardonius slowly raised and lowered his bad leg, exercising the muscles.

“I don’t think that would be tactful.” Artemisia gave us one of her rare smiles; she looked womanly, even handsome. “What is this great lady your wife’s name?”

“Parmys,” I answered.

Democritus wants to know more about my marriage. He is intrigued by my wife’s name. So was I. After listening to Atossa castigate Darius’ wife Parmys, I could not believe my ears when the court chamberlain told me that I was to marry Atossa’s daughter Parmys. I remember asking the eunuch to repeat the name, which he did, adding, “She is the most beautiful of Queen Atossa’s daughters.” That is a conventional court expression, which means if not the opposite, nothing at all. When I asked if she was called Parmys after the daughter of the usurper, the chamberlain could not or would not answer.