1Many lifetimes passed. The herders of the high plains became peoples, and the peoples took names. In the western mountains were the Medes, who had horses and a king. South of them, in a poor hot country of rock and thorn, lived their cousins the Persians, who wore leather and paid the Medes tribute.
2The king of the Medes in that day was Astyages. He had ruled for thirty-five years from the high city of Ecbatana, and he had grown hard in it. He trusted no one, and so he was told nothing true. A king can live a long time that way, if no one tests him.
3The one who tested him was a Persian named Cyrus, son of Cambyses, of the small kingdom of Anshan. Some say Cyrus was Astyages' own grandson, born of his daughter. The old tales disagree and this book does not choose among them. What is known is this: Cyrus stopped paying tribute, and the Medes marched against him, and the war went on for three years.
4Now hear of a spearman in the army of the Medes. He is imagined. His name was Farnak, he was nineteen, and he came from a village of forty houses where his mother kept the hearth.
5She was a woman of few words, and she had brought him up on three of them. Think well. Speak well. Do well. She had them from her own mother, who had them from a wandering singer long ago. Farnak did not know where the words came from. He thought all mothers said them.
6He had been taken for the army in the spring levy, with every man of his village who could hold a spear. They were given no reason, and they did not ask for one. But in the camp, around the fires, the captains told them things.
7They told them the Persians were not men as the Medes were men. They told them that Cyrus took no prisoners; that any Mede who fell into his hands was flayed and hung on a pole. They told them that if the Persians won, they would come north and burn every village and carry the women off to the hot country. "So do not think of yielding," the captains said. "There is no yielding. It is win, or the pole."
8Farnak believed it. Why would he not? He had never seen a Persian. Everyone he knew said the same, and the men who said it loudest wore the king's badge.
9In the third summer the whole host of the Medes came down into the plain before the Persian hills. It was the greatest army Farnak had ever dreamed of. Across the plain, on the first slopes, were the fires of the Persians, and there were not half so many.
10Two days before the battle, Farnak's company caught three Persians at a water hole. They were scouts, or stragglers. They were brought in roped, and Farnak and an older man named Vidarna were set to guard them in a hollow behind the horse lines.
11He looked at them with great curiosity. They were small, sunburned men in leather trousers, very dirty, and plainly frightened. One was a boy younger than himself. One had grey in his beard and a hurt foot. They looked like the charcoal burners from the hills above his village.
12On the first night the greybeard asked for water in bad Median, and Farnak gave it. The man thanked him and asked where he was from. Farnak told him. It was dull, guarding.
13"And what will be done with us?" the Persian asked.
14"I do not know. What do you do with ours?"
15The man looked puzzled. "With your what?"
16"Our men that you take. Before you flay them."
17The three Persians looked at one another. Then the boy laughed, a high scared laugh, and the greybeard hushed him.
18"Friend," the greybeard said, "I was at the fight by the river last year. We took two hundred of yours. The king gave them bread and sent them north without their spears. He said he had no quarrel with ploughmen. I saw it. I carried some of the bread. Did none of them come home?"
19Farnak said nothing. He remembered that two men of the next valley had come home last autumn, and had been taken away by the king's officers within a day, and not seen since. He had been told they were deserters.
20"He is lying," said Vidarna. "They all lie. It is known."
21"Maybe," said the greybeard. "You have not much reason to believe a man on a rope. But think of this. We are fewer than you and poorer than you. Why would our king wish to make you fight to the death? A man who knows he will be spared may put down his spear. A man who has been told he will be flayed fights like a cornered boar. Who gains, if you believe in the pole? Is it our king who gains?"
22Farnak turned that over all the next day. He did not like it. It was like finding a stone in his bread.
23On the night before the battle, in the last watch, the captain of his company came down into the hollow. He was a hard, careful man with the king's badge. He looked at the three on their rope.
24"These are to be dead by sunrise," he said. "And put on poles at the front of the line, where the Persians can see. The order is from the king's tent, to all companies with prisoners."
25"Why?" said Farnak. It came out before he could stop it.
26The captain could have struck him. Instead he answered, low, for he was not a stupid man and perhaps he did not love the order. "Because when the Persians see their own on poles, they will do the same to ours, the next they take. Then what we have told the men will be so. And men who know it is so will not waver. Now do it. Vidarna, see that he does it. I will come back at first light."
27He went up out of the hollow.
28Listen to what had been said. The king had told his army a thing that was false. And because it was false, and might be found out, he now needed to make it true, with three men's lives and then with many. That is the way with such a thing. It is never finished. It must be fed.
29Vidarna drew his knife. He did not look glad. "You heard," he said.
30The Persian boy had begun to cry without sound. The greybeard had understood enough, and he was looking at Farnak. He did not beg. He only looked, as one man looks at another to see what he is.
31Farnak found that he was standing between the knife and the rope. He had not decided to. His legs had done it.
32"No," he said.
33"It is an order."
34"I heard the order. I heard the reason for the order. He told us the reason, Vidarna. He said: so that it will be so. Then it was not so before. Then everything they told us by the fires was not so. And I am to kill a man with a hurt foot to mend it for them."
35"They will kill you for this," said Vidarna. "At first light. In front of the company. Not him; you. And then they will kill these three anyway. You change nothing. You only add yourself."
36"I know."
37"Then why?"
38Farnak did not have a good answer. He was nineteen. He said, "My mother will ask me what I did in the war."
39Vidarna stared at him. Then he swore, long and bitterly, and put up his knife. "I will not do it for you," he said. "And I will not stop him doing it to you. I have children." He sat down with his back to all of them.
40So Farnak stood through the last of that night with his spear, between three roped men and the camp, waiting for the light and the captain. He was more afraid than he had ever been. He thought of running and did not, for there was nowhere a man could run from that plain. He thought it very likely that he would be dead by the time the sun cleared the hills. He kept seeing his mother's hearth.
41The sky greyed. The horns blew for the line. He heard the whole great host getting to its feet, a sound like a river. The captain did not come.
42The sun rose. Still no one came. Then Farnak heard a thing he could not understand. He heard the horns blow for the advance. And after the horns he heard nothing.
43He climbed to the lip of the hollow.
44The army of the Medes stood drawn up on the plain in its thousands, and it was not moving. The horns blew again. A captain rode down the front shouting, and his voice was small and thin. No one stepped forward. The spears stayed upright, like a field of reeds on a day without wind.
45Understand what he was seeing. It was not one thing. An army does not decide. In that line stood thousands of men, and each one alone had to choose whether to lift his foot. Each one was afraid that the man on his left would walk forward and leave him standing there to be cut down for a traitor. Each waited, with his heart knocking, to see. And no foot lifted. Men who had not said one word to each other found out, in that long terrible quiet, that they all thought the same.
46For Farnak was not the only one who had talked to a prisoner. He was not the only one from a valley where spared men had come home and been made to vanish. The king's tale had been leaking at a hundred seams for a year. The army had been held by a tale and by fear, and that morning the tale was gone, and fear by itself could not move them.
47It is told that a great lord of the Medes named Harpagus, whom Astyages had cruelly wronged, went over to Cyrus with his men. It is written on the clay of Babylon that the army of Astyages rose against him and took him and gave him up in fetters. Both may be so. Farnak, from the edge of the hollow, saw only the end of it: a knot of horsemen breaking from the king's tent, and others closing round them, and a tall old man in a purple coat pulled down from his horse by his own guard.
48He went back down and cut the rope. His hands were shaking so much that the greybeard had to help him.
49The Persians came down from their hills before noon. They came carefully, not believing it. Farnak saw their king ride along the front of the silent host, a man in his middle years, not large, on a plain horse, looking at the faces. The Medes looked back. All those thousands waited to learn whether they had been fools.
50They brought Astyages before him on foot, with his hands chained. The old king held his head up. He had done to others what he now expected, all his life, and he knew what came next.
51No one knows what Cyrus said to him. What he did is told by those who had no reason to flatter him. He had the fetters struck off. He did the old man no harm. He took him into his own household and kept him there in honour until he died.
52The army watched it done. A sound went along the line, not a cheer, more like a breath let go.
53This book will not make Cyrus better than he was. He went up to Ecbatana afterward and took the silver and gold of the Medes away to his own country, as conquerors do. He meant to be king of them, and he was. But he did not burn the villages, and no women were carried south. The men of the spring levy were told to go home; it was nearly harvest.
54Farnak walked north with the men of his valley. The greybeard had found him before he left, limping through the crowd, and pushed a piece of flat Persian bread into his hand. They had not enough words in common for more.
55He never saw his captain again. He did not know whether the man had been killed by his own company in the first moments, or had only thrown his badge in a ditch and gone home like the rest. He thought about him sometimes. He thought the captain had told him the reason for the order because he could not carry it alone.
56His mother was at the hearth when he came in. She looked him over for wounds and found none, and set food before him. When he had eaten, she asked what he had done in the war.
57"I did not do a thing I was told to do," he said.
58She waited for the rest, and he gave it to her, plainly, the rope and the knife and the long night. When he had finished she put more wood on the fire.
59"And the others?" she said. "The ones in the line?"
60"They did not do it either. None of us knew about the rest until the horns."
61"No," said his mother. "You would not. That is why each one has to." And she said no more about it, then or after; she was a woman of few words. But she told it to the hearth, the way she told everything, and it was known in that village for a long time.