[What Might Have Been 01] Alternate Empires Read online

  Mithredath kissed more cheeks. After the satrap’s example, his aides could hardly show the eunuch less favor. The feel of Hermippos’s face was strange; only among his own kind was Mithredath used to smooth skin against his lips. Not being the only beardless person present made him feel extraordinarily masculine. He laughed at himself for the conceit.

  “Here, sit by me,” Vahauka said when the introductions were done. He shouted for his servants to bring Mithredath food and wine. “Refresh yourself; when you have finished, perhaps you will favor us by telling what business of the King of Kings, may Ahuramazda smile upon him and make long his reign, brings you to this far western land.”

  “With pleasure, my lord,” Mithredath said. Then for some time he was busy with food and drink. The wines were excellent; the satrapy of the Yauna of the western mainland was known for its grapes (one of the few things it was known for) even in Babylon. The food pleased Mithredath less. Vahauka might be used to salted olives, but one was enough to last Mithredath a lifetime.

  Servants lit torches as twilight gave way to darkness. Insects fluttered round the lights, whose smoke was sweet with frankincense. Every so often, a nightjar or bat would dive into view, snatch a bug, and vanish again.

  The majordomo led in three flutegirls wearing only wisps of filmy cloth. Vahauka sent them away, saying, “Our distinguished guest’s news will prove more interesting than their songs and dances, which we have all seen and heard before, and surely he will not miss them in any way.”

  Mithredath glanced at the satrap from under lowered brows. Was that a sly dig at his condition? If so, Vahauka was a fool, which might account for his governing only this undistinguished satrapy. Eunuchs’ memories for slights were notoriously long, and Mithredath soon would be far closer to the ear of the King of Kings again than Vahauka could dream of coming.

  For the moment, of course, Mithredath remained the soul of courtesy. “As my lord wishes. Know then that I am come at the command of the King of Kings, may Ahuramazda smile upon him and make long his reign, to learn more of the deeds of his splendid forefather the first Khsrish, called the Conqueror, that those deeds may be celebrated once again and redound to the further glory of the present King of Kings, who proudly bears the same name.”

  A brief silence followed, as the officials thought over what he had said. Vahauka asked, “This is your sole commission, excellent saris?”

  “It is, my lord.”

  “Then we will be pleased to render you such assistance as we may be capable of,” the satrap said fulsomely. His aides were quick to echo him. Mithredath heard the relief in their voices. He knew why it was there: No misdeed of theirs had come to the notice of the King of Kings.

  “You want to learn how the first Khsrish took Hellas, eh?” Hermippos said. Mithredath almost failed to recognize the King of Kings’ name in the man’s mouth; flavored by his native speech, it came out sounding like Xerxes. The ganzabara went on, “The ruins of Athens, I suppose, would be the best place for that.”

  “Aye!” “Indeed!” “Well said!” Vahauka, Rishi-kidin, and Tadanmu all spoke at once. Mithredath smiled, but only to himself. How eager they were to get him out of their hair! Perhaps they, or some of them, were up to something about which Khsrish should know.

  Still, Hermippos had a point. As Mithredath had learned in Babylon preparing for this mission, Athens led the western Yauna in their fight against the Conqueror. The eunuch sighed. Having come so far already, he supposed poking through rubble could not make things much worse.

  Hermippos said, “If you like, excellent saris, I will provide you with a secretary who reads and writes not only Aramaic but also the Hellenic tongue. It is still often used here, and in the ancient days of which you spoke would have been the only written language, I suppose.”

  “I accept with thanks,” Mithredath said sincerely, dipping his head. He’d picked up a few words of the tongue of the Hellenes on his westward journey, but it had never occurred to him that he might also need to learn the strange, angular script the locals used. He sighed again, wishing he were home.

  Vahauka might have been peering into his thoughts. “Tell us of the news of the court, Mithredath. Here in this distant land we learn of it but slowly and imperfectly.”

  Nodding, Mithredath gave such gossip as he thought safe to give: he had no intention of setting out all of Khsrish’s business—or his scandals—before these men he did not know. He was, though, so circumspect that he blundered, for after he was through, Tadanmu observed, “You have said nothing, excellent saris, of the King of Kings’ cousin, the great lord Kurash.”

  “I pray your pardon, my lord. I did not mention him because he has been seeing to his estates these past few months, and hence is not currently in attendance upon the King of Kings, may Ahuramazda smile upon him and make long his reign. Lord Kurash is well, though, so far as I know, and I have heard he has new sons by two of his younger wives.”

  “And likely hiked up the midwife’s skirts after she came away from each one of them, to celebrate the news,” Tadanmu chuckled; Kurash’s prowess—and his zeal in exercising it—were notorious.

  The general asked more of Kurash. Mithredath declined to be drawn out, and Tadanmu subsided. Mithredath made a mental note all the same. Kurash’s ambitions, or rather the forestalling of them, were the main reason the eunuch had come to the satrapy of the Yauna of the western mainland. New glory accruing to Khsrish the Conqueror would also reflect onto his namesake, the present occupant—under Ahuramazda—of the throne of the King of Kings.

  Mithredath drained his cup, held it out for more. A servant hurried up to fill it. The eunuch sipped, rolled the wine around in his mouth so he could appreciate it fully, nodded in slow pleasure. Here was one reason, anyhow, to approve of this western venture.

  He cherished such reasons. He had not found many of them.

  “My lord?”

  Mithredath looked round to see whom the young Hellene was addressing, then realized with a start that the fellow was talking to him. The ignorance of these provincials! “No lord I,” he said. “I am but a saris in the service of the King of Kings.”

  He watched a flush rise under the young man’s clear skin. “My apologies, my … excellent saris,” the Hellene said, correcting himself. “You are called Mithredath, though, are you not?”

  “That is my name,” the eunuch admitted, adding icily, “You have the advantage of me, I believe.”

  The fellow’s flush grew deeper. “Apologies again. My name is Polydoros; I thought Hermippos would have mentioned me. If it please you, I am to be your guide to the ruins of Athens.”

  “Ah!” Mithredath studied this Polydoros with fresh interest. But no, his first impression had been accurate: the fellow was well on the brash side of thirty. Wondering if the ganzabara was trying to palm some worthless relative off on him, he said cautiously, “I had looked for an older man—”

  “To be fluent in Aramaic and the Hellenic tongue both, you mean?” Polydoros said, and Mithredath found himself nodding. The Hellene explained, “It’s coming from a banking family that does it, excellent saris. Most of the inland towns in this satrapy still cling to the old language for doing business, so naturally I’ve had to learn to read and write it as well as speak it.”

  “Ah,” Mithredath said again. That made a certain amount of sense. “We’ll see how things go, then.”

  “Very good,” Polydoros said. “What are your plans? Will you travel up to the ruins each day, or had you planned actually to stay in Athens?”

  “Just how far inland is it?” Mithredath asked.

  “A parasang and a half, maybe.”

  “Close to two hours’ walk each way? In the little time I’d have in the ruins, how could I hope to accomplish anything? I’d sooner pitch a tent there, and spend a much shorter while in a bit more discomfort. That will let me return to the east all the sooner.”

  “As you wish, excellent saris. After tomorrow, I shall be at your service.”
r />   “Why not go tomorrow?” Mithredath asked, rather grumpily. “I can send my servants out at once to buy tent cloth and other necessities.”

  “Your pardon, sir, but as I said, I am of a banking family. Tomorrow the monthly silver shipment from the Laurion mines south of here will arrive, and I’ll need to be present to help with weighing and assaying the metal. The mines don’t produce as they did when the great lode was found not long after Hellas came under Persia, but there will still be close to a talent of silver: forty or fifty pounds of it, certainly.”

  “Do what you must, of course,” Mithredath said, yielding to necessity. “I’ll look forward to seeing you morning after next, then.” He bowed, indicating that Polydoros could go.

  But the Hellene did not depart immediately. Instead he stood with a faraway expression on his face, looking through Mithredath rather than at him. The eunuch was growing annoyed when at last Polydoros said dreamily, “I wonder how the conquest would have gone, had the Athenians stumbled onto that silver before Khsrish’s”—he pronounced it Xerxes’ too—“campaign. Money buys the sinews of war.”

  A banker indeed, Mithredath thought scornfully. “Money does not buy bravery,” he said.

  “Perhaps not, excellent saris, but even the bravest man, were he naked, would fare badly against an armored warrior with a spear. Had Athens been able to build ships to match the Persian fleet, the Hellenes might not have fallen under the Empire’s control.”

  Mithredath snorted. “All the subject peoples have their reasons why they should have held off Persia. None did.”

  “Of course you are right, excellent saris,” Polydoros said politely, wise enough to hide his true feelings, whatever they were. “It was but a fancy of the moment.” He bowed. “Till the day after tomorrow.” He hurried off.

  “I came to the proper decision.” Mithredath lifted his soft felt cap from his head, used it to wipe sweat from his face. “I shouldn’t care to have to make this journey coming and going each day.”

  “As you say, excellent saris.” With broad-brimmed straw hat and thin, short Hellenic mantle, Polydoros was more comfortably dressed than Mithredath, but he was sweating too. Behind them, the eunuch’s servants and a donkey bore their burdens in stolid silence. One of the servants led a sheep that kept trying to stop and nibble grass and shrubs.

  Something crunched under Mithredath’s shoe. He looked down, saw a broken piece of pottery and, close by it, half-buried in weeds, a chunk of brick. “A house stood here once,” he said. He heard the surprise in his voice, and felt foolish. But knowing this wilderness had been a city was not the same as stumbling over its remains.

  Polydoros was more familiar with the site. He pointed. “You can see a fragment of the old wall there among the olive trees.”

  Had he noticed it, Mithredath would have taken it for a pile of rocks. Now that he looked closely, though, he saw they had been worked to fit together.

  “Most of what used to be here, I suppose, has been carried off over the years,” Polydoros said. Mithredath nodded. Stealing already-worked stone would be easier for a peasant than working it himself. Polydoros pointed again, to the top of one of the hillocks ahead. “More of the wall around the akropolis—the citadel, you would say in Aramaic—is left, because it’s harder to get the rock down.”

  “Aye,” Mithredath said, pleased to find the Hellene thinking along with him. It was his turn to point. “That is the way up to the—the citadel?” At the last moment, he decided against trying to echo the local word Polydoros had used.

  The Hellene dipped his head, a gesture Mithredath had learned to equate with a nod. “Of course, it will have been an easier ramp to climb when it was kept clear of brush,” Polydoros said dryly.

  “So it will.” The eunuch’s heart was already beating fast; he had endured more exertion on this western journey than ever before in his life. Still, he had a job to do. “Let us go up. If that is the citadel, the ruins there will be important ones, and may tell me what I need to learn of Athens.”

  “As you say, excellent saris.”

  On reaching the top of the akropolis, Mithredath felt a bit like a conqueror himself. Not only was the ancient ramp overgrown, it was also gullied. One of the eunuch’s servants limped with a twisted ankle; had the donkey stumbled into that hole, it likely would have broken a leg. Mithredath was winded, and even Polydoros, who seemed ready for anything, was breathing hard.

  Rank grass and weeds also grew on the flat ground on top of the citadel, between the stones of the wrecked wall, and over the lower parts of the destroyed buildings the Persians had sacked so long ago. One of those buildings, a large one, had been unfinished when Athens fell. Marble column drums thrust up from the undergrowth. Mithredath could still see scorchmarks on them.

  In front of those half-columns stood a marble stele whose shape was familiar to the eunuch—there were many like it in Babylon—but which did not belong with the ruins around it. Nor was the inscription carved onto that stele written in the local language, but in Aramaic and in the wedge-shaped characters the Persians had once used and the native Babylonians still sometimes employed.

  A thrill ran through Mithredath as he read the Aramaic text: “‘Khsrish, King of Kings, declares: you who may be king hereafter, of lies beware. I, Khsrish, King of Kings, having pulled down this city, center of the rebel Yauna, decree that it shall remain wilderness forevermore. You who may be king hereafter and obey these words, may Ahuramazda be your friend and may your seed be made numerous; may Ahuramazda make your days long; may whatever you do be successful. You who may be king hereafter, if you see this stele and its words and follow them not, may Ahuramazda curse you, and of your seed more may there not be, and may Ahuramazda pull down all you make as I, Khsrish, King of Kings, have pulled down this city, center of the rebel Yauna.’

  “A mighty lord, Khsrish the Conqueror, to have his decree obeyed down across the years,” Mithredath said, proud to be of the same Persian race as the long-ago King of Kings, though of his own seed, of course, more there would never be.

  “Mighty indeed,” Polydoros said tonelessly.

  Mithredath looked at him sharply, then relaxed. Polydoros was, after all, a Hellene. Expecting him to be overjoyed before an inscription celebrating the defeat of his forefathers was too much to ask.

  The eunuch rummaged in one of the packs on the donkey’s back until he found a sheet of papyrus, a reed pen, and a bottle of ink. He copied the Aramaic portion of Khsrish’s inscription. He presumed the Persian text said the same thing, but could not read it. Perhaps some magus with antiquarian leanings might still be able to, perhaps not. The present Khsrish would only care about the Aramaic. Of that the eunuch was certain.

  He looked at what he had written. He frowned, compared the papyrus to the text carved into the stele. He had copied everything written there. Still, something seemed to be missing.

  Perhaps Polydoros could supply it; he was a native of these parts. Mithredath turned to him: “Tell me, please, good Polydoros, do you know the name of the king of Athens whom Khsrish the Conqueror overcame?”

  The Hellene frowned. “Excellent saris, I do not. The last king of Athens whose name I know is Kodros, and he is a man of legend, from long before the time of Xerxes.”

  “I might have known this was going too smoothly,” Mithredath sighed. Then he brightened. “It was to learn such things, after all, that I came here.” He scratched his head; he did not approve of loose ends. “But how is it you know of this—Kodros, you said?—and not of the man who must have been Athens’s last king?”

  “Excellent saris,” Polydoros said hesitantly, “in the legends of my people, Kodros is the last king of Athens.”

  “Ridiculous.” Mithredath snorted. “Someone must rule, is it not so? This Athens must have been an enemy worthy of Khsrish’s hatred, for him to destroy it utterly and afterward curse it. Such an enemy will have had rulers, and able ones, to oppose the King of Kings. How can it have lacked them for all the time si
nce the death of Kodros? Did not one lead it all those years? I cannot believe that.”

  “Nor I,” Polydoros admitted.

  “Very strange.” Mithredath glanced over to the unhappy sheep his servants had urged—and dragged—up the overgrown ramp. “Here, before Khsrish’s victory stele, seems as good a spot as any to offer up the beast.” He drew the dagger that hung from his belt, cut a spray of leaves from a nearby bush. He put the leaves in his cap. “They should be myrtle, but any will do in a pinch.”

  Polydoros watched him lead the sheep over to the marble pillar, set the dagger against its neck. “Just like that?” the Hellene asked. “No altar? No ritual fire? No libation? No flute-players? No grain sprinkled before you sacrifice?”

  “The good god Ahuramazda does not need them to hear my prayer.”

  Polydoros shrugged. “Our rites are different.”

  Mithredath cut the sheep’s throat. As the beast kicked toward death, he beseeched Ahuramazda to help him succeed in his quest for knowledge with which to glorify the King of Kings. He was forbidden to pray for any more personal or private good, but with this sacrifice had no need to do so in any case.

  “Does your god require of you any of the flesh?” Polydoros asked as the eunuch began the gory job of butchering the carcass and setting the disjointed pieces on a heap of soft greenery.

  “No, it is mine to do with as I will. A magus should pray over it, but as none is here, we shall have to make do.”

  “Is that garlic growing over there? It will flavor the meat once it’s cooked.” Polydoros licked his chops.

  Mithredath felt saliva flow into his own mouth. He turned to a servant. “You can get a fire going now, Tishtrya.”