The Gates of Athens

Conn Iggulden

ATHENIAN

The Gates of Athens

Contents

About the Author

Conn Iggulden is one of the most successful authors of historical fiction writing today. He has written three previous bestselling historical series, including Wars of the Roses, as well as Dunstan, a stand-alone novel set in the red-blooded world of tenth-century England, and The Falcon of Sparta, which saw him return to the epic Ancient World. The Gates of Athens is the first novel in his brand new Athenian series.

Also by Conn Iggulden

Dunstan

The Falcon of Sparta

THE WARS OF THE ROSES SERIES

Stormbird

Trinity

Bloodline

Ravenspur

THE EMPEROR SERIES

The Gates of Rome

The Death of Kings

The Field of Swords

The Gods of War

The Blood of Gods

THE CONQUEROR SERIES

Wolf of the Plains

Lords of the Bow

Bones of the Hills

Empire of Silver

Conqueror

Blackwater

Quantum of Tweed

BY C. F. IGGULDEN

EMPIRE OF SALT SERIES

Darien

Shiang

The Sword Saint

BY CONN IGGULDEN AND HAL IGGULDEN

The Dangerous Book for Boys

BY CONN, ARTHUR AND CAMERON IGGULDEN

The Double Dangerous Book for Boys

BY CONN IGGULDEN AND DAVID IGGULDEN

The Dangerous Book of Heroes

BY CONN IGGULDEN AND

ILLUSTRATED BY LIZZY DUNCAN

Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children

Tollins 2: Dynamite Tales

To Simon Broome. A great teacher.

‘He spoke to me – his words had wings.’

– Homer

‘Quick, bring me a beaker of wine, that I may wet my mind and say something clever.’

– Aristophanes

Pronunciation

Military terms

Underlining indicates stressed syllables.

Locations

Characters

Additional words

Ten tribes of Athens

Prologue

The dust of mountain flowers lay thick on the air, like perfume or boiled varnish. Living things panted in the shade. Goat’s-thorn grew on all sides, with scrub grass and bare rocks too hot for anything alive to rest upon. Crickets creaked and sang in the branches of pines that clung to stone and somehow endured.

Into a stillness as old as the hills around them music sounded as a faint thread on the air, swelling into something that rang with brass and voices raised in song. Lizards scuttled out of sight as the king’s dancers reached the crest, making the air tremble with cymbals, pipes and drums. At a single order, they halted, panting, dripping with sweat.

The king himself came forward on his stallion, dismounting with a hint of the grace he had known as a young man. Darius tossed the reins to a slave and clambered onto a huge flat stone to stare over the plain. From that height, he could see the scars of the land, the marks of war and fire. He frowned, moved by both the distance and the closeness of the past. He had stood in that same place thirty years before. In that moment, it seemed as if he could take a single step and be there once again, with his father at his side and his life all ahead.

Ruins lay where the city of Sardis had been. The flames had died down long before, though when a whisper of breeze rose, Darius thought he could smell char on it, a scent of burned bricks or perfume, or rot. There were people too, in the distance. The air was so clear, Darius could see the sparks of cooking fires, with thin trails of smoke rising above. No doubt some of them had run, only to return when the conflagration had died down, or perhaps they had come to loot the ruins, searching for beads of gold that had once been coins.

The funeral pyre of a city could never be a small thing. On that day, from the height and distance of the mountains, it was hard to imagine entire streets and parks and districts consumed in flame. The watchtowers along the great wall had fallen, Darius saw, spilling their stones. Roads too stretched away from the walls, clearly marked. The steps of families had carried ash and soot, making dark trails like the veins in an old man’s arm. The king knew pestilence would stalk there now. Those who had survived cared nothing for the dead, not without leadership. Flies crept over corpses – and the living hurried past, desperate not to see.

The Great King did not wince or shake his head at the thought. He had known death before, many times. He knew his workers would have to bury the fallen in vast shallow pits outside the city before they could even begin to rebuild.

Darius turned at last, looking to include his young son in his deliberations. Xerxes sat some way back from the front ranks, one leg tucked beneath the other as he balanced on the shoulders of a young bull elephant. Darius saw the boy was distracted by something, perhaps one of his pets. Xerxes could always find some creature to train and amuse him. The most recent had been a cricket, the one before a tiny blue lizard that held food in both hands to devour it. The Great King had never felt the need for such things himself. He worried the boy was not concerned enough with the empire he would inherit. He sighed. The cares of a father were legion.

The royal procession had come to a halt at his gesture. Having climbed steadily all morning, relief shone in their faces. Behind the king stood sixty thousand men, back and back, reaching so far down the trail he could not see an end to them. Darius had come prepared for war, but found only ashes.

Ahead, the dancing women rested, quivering in their exhaustion. One of them had fallen just that morning, dropping to the ground in loose-limbed delirium, then shrieking as carts and men behind passed over. Only the royal elephants had stepped around the broken girl, fastidious in what they chose to crush.

Darius knew he didn’t have to say a word to his seneschal. Ashar’s grim countenance and faint blush was evidence enough of his shame. The mistress of the dancers would certainly be beaten that evening, perhaps bound to a tree and simply left, for lions and wolves to find. The others would see her fate and know not to shame the Great King in the honour he did them.

Darius was no longer the vital young warrior he had once been. As he contemplated climbing down from the rock, he suppressed a wince at the twinge in his hips and lower back. There was a time when he would have leaped down, delighting in his strength. His servants knew him well, however. Steps had been brought as he’d stood and looked out. He walked down then, back straight, his expression perfectly calm.

Xerxes watched warily as his father approached, wondering if he would be punished for something only the king could possibly have noticed or cared about. Seated on a pad of stuffed silk, the boy wore just sandals and a kilt of leather studded in gold. Bare-chested, he was a living reminder of youth that could only sour his father’s mood further.

Servants sprinkled dried lavender and myrtle on the dusty path as the Great King approached his son. It was an insult for Darius to be made to look up, but Xerxes seemed frozen in his seat high on the elephant. The enormous young bull swung its head to eye the man at its side. Both boy and beast were at the most awkward of ages. With a gesture, Darius waved the petal servants away. They trembled on the edges of his vision, ready to make the ground fragrant once more, for steps that shook the world.

‘Come down from there, Xerxes,’ the Great King said softly.

His son nodded and put out one hand so that his elephant could see. The trunk curled round and he stepped onto the muscled length, brought to the ground in perfect smoothness. The boy seemed proud of it. Darius showed no reaction to a trick more suited to the markets or the logging camps. He put his arm around his son’s shoulders and walked with him to where he should have been standing, waiting on his father. There, Darius rested one hand on the great stone, feeling its warmth.

‘You see that city?’ he said. ‘Dark with ash?’

Xerxes made a show of peering in the distance before he nodded, still unbending. Darius found he was proud of the young man who would surely follow him, if Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom, allowed it. It did not pay to be too sure of the future, aloud or in the most private thoughts. The God of Light heard all.

‘It is Sardis, the capital of this entire region,’ he said. ‘Or it was. It was sacked by an enemy and burned, including the great temple that had stood for two thousand years. This is why I brought so many soldiers, Xerxes. By tomorrow, every home and temple will be cleared to the foundations. We will rebuild it all.’

‘Who would dare attack one of our cities?’ Xerxes asked.

‘Men of Athens, men of Eretria,’ his father replied. ‘The Greeks. I thought … They sent ambassadors here a dozen years ago, asking for friendship. I thought they had agreed to become one of my chosen – my beloved subject peoples. They gave earth and water to my governor and they went home, across the sea. I confess I hardly thought of them after that.’

The king smiled and tried to ruffle his son’s hair. He hid his hurt when Xerxes pulled away.

‘This is the edge of the world, Xerxes. The sea lies not two days from here – and beyond it, lands which have never known the blessing of our laws, our soldiers.’ He waved an arm over the plain. ‘I rule here, from the slave markets to the gold mines. Every pot and cup is mine, every coin and beam and child. Yet we are a long way from civilisation, from the heartlands. Perhaps I have been too gentle with them, too forgiving. I trust too easily. It has always been my weakness.’

He saw his son shift uncomfortably and smiled.

‘No man can say I am without honour, Xerxes. Can you accept that? If I give my word, I keep it, though the world falls around me. If I forgive an enemy, if I welcome him as a child into my house, he knows there will be no more anger from me. Even the Greeks know this. Oh, they may shout and struggle, but for those who are men, who are willing to put aside their pride and offer me tokens of earth and water, I will be always a forgiving god.’

‘But why? Why would you forgive the men who did this, who burned Sardis?’

Darius leaned closer to his son. Though a hundred servants and slaves waited on his slightest whim, though two naked and kohl-eyed women peeped from the curtained litter that adorned his elephant, he was alone still, with his heir.

‘I speak now as a king, Xerxes. Hear me. My word is unbroken because when a man takes the field against my armies, I want him to look in fear on his allies, to wonder if they will desert him, even in the heat of battle. I want him to know, as he knows his own name, that if he surrenders to me, if he takes the taste of dust onto his lips and offers me water from his cupped hands, I will honour him as an ally to the end of the world, without rancour, without vengeance. Because he will be a living example of my mercy. Do you understand?’

Xerxes shook his head a touch, closing his eyes as the wind picked up, easing the great heat of the day. In that moment of silence and peace, he suddenly saw it. His eyes opened and his father smiled to see the gleam in them.

‘Trusting you weakens them all …’ Xerxes said, in something like wonder. ‘It means brother will turn on brother as we approach, friend against friend. But the cost, father? To your honour? You lose vengeance – is it not too high a price to pay?’

‘No. There are forty nations in my empire – Media, Assyria, Lydia, India – by the god that binds, men like silver fish in the ocean, all subject to my throne, my crown. If I were a trickster, a liar, they would have fought much harder to keep me away. Instead, their leaders are given palaces and lands. In their quiet times, they might wonder if they have been conquered at all.’

‘But they have,’ Xerxes said.

His father nodded.

‘Yes. So it is with these cities, this “league of Ionia”. They look to their forefathers the Greeks instead of us. Perhaps they thought I was too far away to care what they did on the very borders of the western seas. They called to Athens for help in their betrayal – and those Greek whores sent ships from Eretria and their hoplite soldiers to roam this coast, to murder and terrorise peoples that are mine. They talk now of throwing off the yoke I have placed on them, of the “outrage” of our rule.’

The king laughed, though there was little humour in it and his eyes remained black and shadowed by his brows.

‘In the destruction of my garrison, the Greeks set the reed roofs of Sardis aflame. It spread like the wind itself until all was consumed, even the temple to Cybele, Great Mother of the World. That is hard to forgive.’

The king stood looking into the distance for a time. His son did not dare interrupt his thoughts. Nor did he resist when his father placed a hand on his shoulder again.