1Cyrus died in a war on the northern plains, and was laid in a plain stone tomb in his own country, which stands yet. After him came his son, and then a time of killing and confusion, and out of it a new king named Darius.
2Darius had a mountain carved. On the road from Babylon up to Ecbatana there is a cliff called Behistun, and high on its face, higher than sixty men standing on one another's shoulders, he had his own likeness cut, with nine roped kings before him, and a long writing in three tongues. The writing told how those nine had risen against him, and it said of each one: he lied. It said that the Lie had made the lands rebel. It warned the kings who should come after to guard themselves against the Lie.
3Now Farnak the Mede, who once stood all night between a knife and a rope, lived to be a grandfather. In his fiftieth year or near it he took his grandson, a boy named Artan, to see the king's cliff. They stood on the road with their heads tipped back.
4"What does it say?" the boy asked.
5"I am told it says that the king's enemies were liars and the king speaks true."
6The boy squinted up. The writing was a grey patch, far above, no bigger than his hand. "It is too high to read."
7"It is."
8"Then how does anyone know what it says? And those nine. Was anyone there, to see whether it was so?"
9The old man laughed until he coughed. "I asked a captain a question like that once. It nearly had me killed." He looked up at the cliff a while. "The king says he hates the Lie. That is a good thing for a king to say. Whether he tells the truth about those nine, I cannot tell you. I was not there. I know what I saw myself, in one hollow, on one night. For the rest, boy, a thing is not truer for being carved a long way up."
10Artan remembered that all his life. He grew up, as the Persian and the Mede boys did, on the three lessons: to ride, to draw the bow, and to say what is so. He was better at the first than the second. So he became a rider of the king's road.
11Hear what that road was. It ran from Susa in the east to Sardis by the western sea. Along it stood more than a hundred post-houses, a day's ride apart, each with fresh horses and a keeper and a fire that was never let out. A letter was handed from rider to rider, and neither snow nor dark stopped it, and it crossed the world in nine days. The kings ruled by it.
12Artan rode one stage of that road for twenty-six years, through the hill country, between the post-house of the Two Springs and the next one west. He could not read. He carried sealed pouches, and at each end the keeper cut a notch in a tally stick for the day and the hour, and that was all he knew of what he carried.
13In his forty-sixth year the king was Xerxes, son of Darius, and that king was gathering the greatest army ever seen, to march against the Greeks beyond the western sea. All that autumn the road was thick with men.
14At the Two Springs in those months there was a gang of stonecutters, mending the bridge. Their master was a Greek named Lykon. He had been carried off from the city of Miletus as a youth, when the Persians burned it after its revolt, and set to cut stone for the kings; first at Susa, then wherever he was sent. He had served fourteen years. He was a silent, exact man, who checked every block with a cord, and Artan liked him.
15There was also a steward of that district, named Gaubar, who held the stores. It was his task to give out the stonecutters' wages in silver and grain.
16One evening, when the first snow was on the pass, Artan rode in from the east with a pouch under the red seal of the treasury. He gave it to the keeper. The keeper cut his notch: the fourth day of the month, at dusk. It was a pouch for the steward. A boy ran with it up to the steward's house.
17Three days later the steward's man came to him in the stable.
18"My master has a word for you," the man said. "A pouch came for him under the red seal. It reached his hand on the seventh. If anyone should ask you, it was the seventh when you brought it. There was snow in the pass, and you were held two days at the far post-house. That is likely enough. No one will doubt it."
19"I brought it on the fourth," said Artan. "The snow did not hold me. The tally is cut."
20"The keeper has been spoken to. He has a new tally." The man held out a little bag. "This is for your trouble. My master is generous to his friends. He is also a kinsman of the governor, and riders are easily found. You have a wife in the village, and a boy who hopes for a place on the road."
21Artan looked at the bag. He was an ordinary man, and he was not rich.
22"What was in the pouch?" he said.
23"That is no concern of yours. You carry. You do not read. You do not know what it was, and you will never know. It is only a day. What is a day to you? The fourth, the seventh. Who is hurt?"
24And that was true. He did not know who was hurt. That was the whole of his trouble. If he had known that a man's life hung on it, he would have had something to weigh.
25He thought: why does a steward pay silver to move a day? No one pays for a thing that is worth nothing. If the fourth were as good to him as the seventh, he would not be in my stable. So someone needs it to be the fourth. I cannot see who. I do not have to see who.
26"Tell your master," he said, "that I do not know what was in his pouch and I do not ask. But I know what day I rode. If I am asked, I will say the fourth, at dusk."
27The man put the bag away. "Then you are a fool, and you will not ride this road next year."
28That same night Artan learned what the day was for, though not by reading.
29The steward's guards had taken Lykon the Greek that afternoon and locked him in the grain store. It was said that silver was missing from the stonecutters' wages, a great deal of it, over many months, and that the Greek master had been falsifying the count of his men. The penalty for a slave of the king who stole the king's silver was known. It was to be carried out at sunrise.
30Artan sat by the fire with that for some time. A Greek stonecutter. A red-sealed pouch from the treasury. Three days. He could not read, but he could put two things side by side.
31There was a trader lodging in the post-house that night, a man of the far east, from the land of the Indus, on his way home from selling cotton at Sardis. His name was Datta. He could read four scripts. Artan had no one else to ask.
32"If a pouch came from the treasury to a steward," Artan said to him, "and the steward wished it to have come three days later than it came. What might be in such a pouch?"
33The trader thought. "An order he did not wish to obey until something else was done first," he said. "A demand for his accounts. Or a pardon for someone he wished to be rid of. Then he may say: alas, it came too late."
34Artan got up. He went out into the snow, and saddled his own horse, not the king's. It was a stage and a half back east to the inspector of the road, who answered to the king's eye and to no steward.
35He rode it in the dark, in the snow, on the one road in the world he knew well enough to ride blind. He reached the inspector's house in the black hour before dawn and beat on the door, and when they let him in he could hardly speak for cold.
36He said what he knew. "I carried a red-sealed pouch to the steward at the Two Springs on the fourth, at dusk. I am told I must say the seventh. A man is to die at sunrise for stealing silver. I do not know that the two things touch. I do not know what the pouch held. I only know the day, and that someone paid to have it changed."
37The inspector was an old soldier. He had fast horses and the right to break any seal on the road. They were back at the Two Springs an hour after sunrise.
38They were in time, by not very much. The Greek was already in the yard.
39The pouch was found in the steward's house. The letter in it was from the treasury at the king's new city. It said that the accounts of the Two Springs had been examined, and that the silver was short at the steward's own hand, not the stonecutters'. It ordered the steward to come and answer for it. It named Lykon the Milesian as the one whose careful count of his men had shown the theft. And it added a thing the steward had liked least of all: that the Greek had served his term, and was to be given his wages and a pass for the road, to go where he would.
40That night three men sat at the fire of the Two Springs: the rider, the Greek, and the trader from the Indus. The Greek had his pass in his coat.
41"You did not know it was for me," Lykon said. "The trader told me. You did not even know anyone would die."
42"No."
43"Then why ride all night?"
44Artan rubbed his knees, which ached. "My grandfather told me something once, under a cliff. It was about a king's writing, cut too high to read. I thought of it in the stable. I am a small man. I do not know what is in the pouches. I cannot see where the road goes at either end. But a day is a thing I can know, and they were asking me to give it up. I thought, if I let go of the piece I can see, what will I have left?"
45The Greek was quiet. Then he said, "In my city, before it was burned, there were men who asked questions. I was a boy; I only heard of them. One, long dead, was said to have told the day the sun would go dark, before it did. He asked what all things are made of. When men told him a god had done this or that, he asked how they knew. They argued, and measured, and each one tried to catch the other out." He turned his cord over in his hands. "I thought it was a game for rich men. I think now it is the same thing you did with your day. I mean to go home and find whether any of them are left."
46"There are such men in my country also," said Datta the trader. "Not the same. Ours leave their houses and their fathers' gods, and sit in the forests, and ask why men suffer, and whether a man makes himself by what he does. There are a great many of them now. My brother has become one, and my mother weeps." "I had thought it was a sickness of our own. It seems to be in the air of the whole earth."
47Outside, on the road, a column of the king's spearmen was going by in the dark, westward, toward the sea and the Greek lands. They had been passing for two months. The three at the fire listened to the tramp of them. Not one of the three thought it would matter as much as the king believed. They could not have said why they thought so.
48In the morning the Greek and the trader each made ready to go. It was a custom of that road that a traveller took fire from the post-house hearth, for the next night's camp. The keeper had taken the steward's bag, and was in chains. So Artan lit two small clay lamps at the hearth himself, and packed each in a pot with ash, as it had been done on that plateau since before there were kings.
49He did not know where that fire had come from. No one did. It had been carried west with the songs of the Wise Lord, by a girl whose name is lost. Before that it had come up a road of blue stone from the river cities in a trader's pot. Before that, the other books have told.
50He gave one pot to the Greek, who was going west, down to the sea where the cities of his people stood, and beyond them to others. He gave one to the man of the Indus, who was going east, across the plateau and over the high passes to the great plains, and beyond them lay other rivers and other teachers still.
51"Go well," said Artan. "And when someone tells you a thing is so—"
52"Go and look," said the Greek. He had learned that much of the road-speech.
53They went out by the two doors of the post-house, one to the sunrise and one to the sunset. Artan stood in the road between them and watched until both were small.
54The king's great army went west and came back smaller. The road outlasted it.
55And the two small fires went on, one each way, toward lands where men and women were beginning to turn from the sky and the king and the priest, and to look for the truth in a nearer place. The ember passed. One fire, many hands.