The Last King of Lydia by Tim Leach Page B

clamber on to. He needed nothing more than this. His
shyness had made him secretive, and he learned to make do with this single prop which could resume its usual function as soon as he stood away from it and affected to ignore it. Ideally, the room
he adopted as his court would also feature an obsidian mirror or a chunk of polished stone, and he would position himself so that from time to time he could glance at his own reflection and judge
his performance.
    Once seated on his makeshift throne, he had to wait only a few moments before the room filled with movement and noise. Generals and statesmen, slaves and guards; the air took shape to produce
them all. The abandoned room became draped in rich silks, the floor tiled with gold, the tables littered with goblets of sweetened grape juice and Egyptian honeyed fruit.
    Sometimes he held court as a silent king, barely moving, unspeaking. He would rule through the most minute gestures; a fractional nod of the head would be enough to reprieve a man from
execution. A hand, held palm down, cutting briefly through the air to exile a traitor for ever. Two fingers straightened from a closed fist would silence an imaginary courtier as he spoke out of
turn.
    At other times, he would practise his oratory. He would rise from his throne (or hop down from it, depending on its height), strike a pose, and prepare to speak. He believed that the longer the
speech, the greater and more persuasive it would be – the aim was not so much to speak clearly, but to speak continuously for as long as possible. He would deliver, even at a young age,
rambling orations, lasting for more than half an hour, an apparently unending stream of words stitched together from speeches of his father’s, and from the pronouncements of kings in the
stories his mother told him.
    Croesus could not remember much more of his childhood than this. In the months that followed the death of his son, he explored the recesses of his mind, searching for an innocent memory to
escape into, some moment that could make sense of the world again. He had only the vaguest sense of his early years, and while he could recall the occasional event, moments of particular joy and
shame, the actual sensations were lost to him. Recalling the past, it was as if he somehow viewed another man’s memories, a man from some alien world that he could not understand. But this
game of kings, that he had played ten thousand times in as many different ways, was the one memory he did still retain in all of its detail, and of all the times that he played the game, there was
one instance that he remembered most clearly of all.
    It was autumn, and he was eight years old. His mother was beginning to show the first signs of the wasting sickness that would end her life a year later. There would be no more innocence for him
after that, and no more happiness for his father, Alyattes, but on that autumn day that pain was a long way off. His mother had fainted in court, and in the middle of the ensuing distraction he had
managed to steal away for an hour of play.
    He was in the middle of a speech, promising a dozen sacks of jewels and a hundred slave women to a wandering hero, when he became aware of an intruder at the doorway behind him. A scrape of
leather against stone, the faintest sound of rustling cloth, were enough to let him know that he was being watched. Slowly, afraid of what he would see, he turned to face the doorway.
    His father, Alyattes, stood there with a small, ambiguous smile on his face. He was a lean and wiry man, dressed in red robes that hung on him a little loosely. These robes tended to trip him up
whenever he forgot himself and hurried somewhere, which was often.
    Beneath his father’s gaze, the boy hung his head. His father was the only person Croesus could not rage at when he was caught unawares. In front of Alyattes, he felt the heat in his throat
and lungs, the pain around the heart of a deep and confused shame. He stood