Creation (87 page)

We took a walk in the Agora. It was midsummer; and very hot. The sky was like metal gone blue with heat, and the bone-white mud city looked to be abandoned. The Athenians were at home, having their dinner—or in die gymnasiums, escaping the heat. This was the time of day my uncle most liked to walk about the city. “No Athenians!” he would say. “No noise. No shouting!” Due to all the clothes that he wore, he was never hot. Years later, when I came to travel in Persia, I dressed as Persians do and found that light clothes that do not touch the skin will keep one cool on the hottest day.

At the porch to the Odeon, Cyrus decided to sit in the shade. He always knew exactly where he was in the Agora or anywhere else that he had been taken to once. We made ourselves comfortable on a step of the Odeon. Opposite us, Mount Lycabettus looked more than ever odd, like a jagged rock dropped by some ancient titan. Irrationally, the rational Athenians dislike the mountain. They say it is because wolves live there, but I think it is because the mountain does not fit the rest of the countryside.

“From the time I came home from Cathay, I knew that there would be a bloody end to the matter. That’s why I distanced myself—from the court. I could never distance myself from Xerxes. He was more than a brother to me. He was a twin to me, my other self. With him gone, I am only half what I was.”

“While he ... is what?”

“The Great King is at the bridge of the redeemer.” Cyrus said no more—and there was nothing more to say because if Zoroaster is right, Xerxes is currently bubbling away in a sea of molten metal.

“Suppose,” I said, “there is no bridge, no Wise Lord ...”

“How can
I
suppose that?” But since the. old man did suppose that a good deal of the time, he was interested in my answer.

“Zoroaster says that there was a time when the Wise Lord did not exist. Well, isn’t it possible that when we die, we go to wherever it is that the Wise Lord came from?”

Cyrus whistled a strange little tune that must have had some religious significance, since he always whistled it whenever faced with a contradiction or gap in the Zoroastrian theory. He had, by the way, nearly all his teeth; he could eat anything. “There is no way,” he said at last, “to answer that question.”

“Then perhaps the easterners are right, and the question of creation is not to be answered.” Actually, I now know the answer to the question, but in those days I was ignorant. I was at the start of a lifelong quest—at whose sad end Cyrus had arrived. Sad because the only important question was still unanswered—for him.

The old man whistled for a moment, his eyes shut; one pale hand made a tight whorl of a tuft of his beard, always a sign that he was deep in thought. “They are wrong,” he said at last. “Everything that we perceive starts somewhere and stops somewhere. Like a line drawn in the sand. Like a ... piece of string. Like a human life. What they try to do in the east is to close the line. To make a circle. With no start. With no stop. But ask them who drew the circle. And they have no answer. They shrug. ‘It is
there
,’
they say. Around and around they think they go. Forever and ever. Endless. Hopeless!” He shouted the last word; and shuddered with horror at the thought of no terminus to things. “We see a definite beginning. A definite end. We see good and evil as necessary, warring principles. The one to be rewarded after death; the other to be punished. The whole to be achieved only at the end of the end.”

“Which is the start of ... what?”

“Perfection. Deity. A state unknown to us.”

“But there is a flaw in this conception. Zoroaster does not know for what purpose the Wise Lord was created.”

“Nevertheless, he was created. He is. He will be. But ...” The old man opened wide his blind eyes. “There is something missing. Something I could not find anywhere on this earth in the course of a long life.” Thus, by his own admission, Cyrus’ quest had failed. Yet by relating to me in such detail his failure, he made it possible for me to understand what he could not—the nature of the universe.

I am not sure to what extent the old man believed in his grandfather’s primitive theology. Certainly any deity that had created life in order to torture it must be, by definition, entirely evil. Put another way, the Wise Lord did not create Ahriman. The Wise Lord is Ahriman, if one is to follow through to the end the logic—if that’s the word!—of Zoroaster’s message.

To my uncle’s credit, he was deeply shaken by what he had heard in the east. Although he continued to go through the motions of being a dualist, he tended—in dark moments—to sound as if he thought that the circle might not be, after all, a better symbol of our estate than the straight line which starts and stops.

Ultimately, there is neither straight line nor circle. But to understand how things are, one must advance beyond the present childlike phase of human existence. Cods and devils must be abandoned along with those notions of good and evil which have relevance to day-today life but mean nothing to that material unity which contains all things and makes them one. Matter is all. All is matter.

I ATTENDED THE CORONATION OF ARTAXERXES at holy Pasargada. Although I was graciously reinstated as king’s friend, I did not press this advantage. Young sovereigns do not enjoy relics of previous reigns, and so I prepared to retire to my estates south of Halicarnassus. My public life was at an end. Or so I thought.

Shortly before I left Persepolis, I was sent for by the Great King. Naturally, I was terrified. Who had made trouble for me? That is the question one always asks oneself whenever the usher raises the staff of office and intones: “The master has summoned his slave. Come with me.”

Artaxerxes was seated in a small office at the winter palace. I don’t recall why he was not living in Xerxes’ new palace. I suppose that, as usual, construction was going on.

At eighteen, Artaxerxes was a handsome if fragile youth. Since the beard was not yet full-grown, the face had a somewhat girlish look. In childhood he had suffered from an illness that had stunted his left arm and leg. In consequence, the right hand was considerably larger than the left. That is why when we want to speak of the Great King without actually using his name, we call him the long-handed one.

Standing to the right of the Great King’s chair was the new guards commander, Roxanes, a formidable figure who had distinguished himself in the Greek wars. To the left of the chair was the beautiful physician Apollonides; he was much in favor for having recently saved the Great King’s life from a wasting fever.

As always, Artaxerxes was amiable with me and, as always in his presence, I was disconcerted to see Xerxes’ eyes now set in an entirely different face. It was as if my dearest friend were looking at me out of his son’s face. “We have need of you, King’s Friend.” The boy’s voice was still weak from his bout with the fever.

I announced my readiness to give my life for my new master.

Artaxerxes came straight to the point. “The widow of Artabanus is a Greek woman. Thanks to her, Artabanus was harboring a Greek exile. Since you were close to my father the Great King and since you are also half-Greek, I want you to translate for me what this man has to say, and then I want you to give me your opinion of him.”

With that, Artaxerxes clapped his short left hand into the palm of his long right hand. The cedar doors opened, and two ushers escorted a short stocky man into the presence. There was a long moment as the man and the Great King looked at each other, quite against protocol. Then, slowly, the man dropped to his knees and again, slowly, did obeisance.

“Who are you, Greek?” asked Artaxerxes.

From the floor came the answer, “I am Themistocles, son of Neocles. I am that general of Athens who destroyed the fleet of the Great King Xerxes.”

Artaxerxes looked at me. Somewhat shakily, I translated this astonishing speech. But to my surprise, Artaxerxes smiled. ‘Tell him to stand up. It is not every day we receive so famous an enemy.”

Themistocles got to his feet. Thick gray hair grew to within three fingers of straight dark brows that shadowed black, luminous, watchful eyes. Plainly, he was in no awe of the Great King—or anyone else. But he was tactful, quick, prescient.

“Why didn’t Artabanus present you to my father?”

“He was afraid, Lord.”

“But you are not?”

Themistocles shook his head. “Why should I be? On two occasions, I served your father well.”

“My father did not regard the loss of a third of his fleet at Salamis as a useful service.” Artaxerxes was amusing himself.

“No, Lord. But just before that engagement, I sent the Great King a message. I told him that the Greek fleet was preparing to escape. I told him that this was his chance to strike ...”

“He struck,” said Artaxerxes. “To no good purpose.”

“He struck, Lord, and would have won the battle had it not been for the treachery of his own Phoenician captains.”

This was both true and untrue. Needless to say, I was not about to get above my humble station as translator. Artaxerxes listened carefully to my literal translation; then he nodded. “What,” he asked, “was the second service you rendered my father?”

“I sent him a warning that part of the Greek fleet intended to destroy the bridge between Asia and Europe.”

“That is true,” said Artaxerxes. Again, the story was true and untrue at the same time, and highly typical of this cunning Greek. Since Themistocles wanted the Greeks to stand fast and defeat the Persians, he forced Xerxes to attack them; thus, he obliged the Greeks to fight for their lives—which they did. Then the Phoenicians deserted and the Greeks won the battle or, to be precise, the Persians lost it. This was as much a surprise to the Greeks as it was to the Persians. The warning that the bridge across the Hellespont would be destroyed was Themistocles’ master stroke. He wanted Xerxes out of Europe. As he told his cronies here at Athens, “Under no circumstances, destroy the bridge. If we don’t let Xerxes go home to Persia, we’re going to have a lion loose in Greece. Cut off the Great King’s retreat, and he’ll come out from under that gold parasol with a sword in his hand and the most powerful army in the world at his back.”

Thus, Themistocles managed to serve both Greece and Persia at the same time. But since gratitude is unknown to the Greeks, Themistocles was ostracized. Later, when Pausanias tried to interest him in subverting Greece, he refused to join the conspiracy. This was un-Greek of him, to say the least. Or, perhaps, he did not trust Pausanias. Unfortunately, ambiguous letters from Themistocles to Pausanias were produced at the latter’s trial, and the Athenians ordered Themistocles to come home so that they could execute him for treason. He fled to Persia, to the household of Artabanus, whose wife was related to Themistocles’ mother—a lady from Halicarnassus, by the way.

In the light of General Pericles’ recent and highly peculiar law that no one can be a citizen of Athens unless both parents were native to the city, it should be noted that Athens’ two greatest commanders, Themistocles and Cimon, would not have qualified as Athenian citizens. The mother of each was an outlander.

“Tell us,” said the Great King, “of this annoying Greek who has taken to piracy in our waters.”

“Piracy, Lord?” Themistocles was not yet adept at interpreting the oblique style of our Great Kings; they affect never to know anyone’s name or place of origin. To the end of her life, Queen Atossa maintained that Athens was located in Africa and that its inhabitants were pitchblack dwarfs.

“Eurymedon,” said Artaxerxes with grim precision. The Great King knew that place. All Persians do. The Greeks who boast of Marathon and Salamis and Plataea as marvelous victories do not realize that none of these engagements was of the slightest significance to Persia. The fact that the Greeks were able to hold their own in the burned-out cities of Attica is hardly the stuff of military glory. But Persia was hugely shaken by Cimon’s victory at the mouth of the Eurymedon River. In fact, I have often thought that the completeness of Cimon’s victory on Persian soil was the beginning of the end of Xerxes. From that moment on, the politics of the harem and the politics of the army began to converge, and the Great King was thrown down.

“Cimon, son of Miltiades—” Themistocles began.

“Our treacherous satrap.” The Persians will never forget that Miltiades was for so many years a loyal slave of the Great King, enjoying vast estates on the Black Sea.

“—the victor of Marathon.”

“Where is that?” Artaxerxes blinked his father’s eyes.

“A place of no importance.” As translator, I was able to observe Themistocles’ nimble mind in action. As he got the range of the Great King, he adjusted his own style accordingly. “In any case, Lord, this pirate is my enemy, too.”

“Who can approve of piracy?” Artaxerxes glanced at Roxanes, who was rigid with dislike of the man whom he always referred to as the Greek serpent.

“At Athens, Lord, there are two factions. One would very much want peace with the king of kings. I am of that party. On our side, we have the common people. Against us are the landowners, who overthrew the tyrants. Today Cimon is what I was yesterday, the general of Athens, and the cause of the common people was damaged when I was ostracized.”

“But surely, if you were ostracized, that means a majority of the common people voted against you.” Artaxerxes was torn between continuing to pretend ignorance of this unimportant African city and the usual passion of a very young man to win a point and be thought clever. Xerxes never made that mistake. Perhaps he should have.

“Yes, Lord. But they had been inflamed against me by the anti-Persian conservatives. It was said that I was plotting with Pausanias to overthrow the Greek states. In any event, as you may have heard, Lord, Greeks tire very quickly of their leaders. Because I was leader of the people did not mean that the people liked or appreciated my leadership.”

“Now you are an exile and the pirate attacks the mainland of our empire. What shall we do?”