The Falcon of Sparta by Conn Iggulden

Author:Conn Iggulden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Limited
Published: 2018-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

17

In the morning, Cyrus woke in some pain, turning aside from the bucket that had been placed by his head with a sound of disgust. He had spent much of the night drinking himself to insensibility with Clearchus. He remembered declaiming a poem in court Persian and moaned in horror. The Spartan would not sing, he recalled. Clearchus said his people only sang when a new king was raised up, or when they believed they were going to die. The general had not been as drunk as he was, Cyrus realised, wincing as flashes came back to him. Had he really given his childhood impression of a donkey, braying at the older man and falling over laughing? He prayed that part was just a fevered dream.

Flipping back a rug, Cyrus urinated into the sand in a corner of the tent, his eyes tight shut. The air was hot and foetid there, with slow flies knocking against him as they looped past. For a moment, he thought he might vomit again and cursed himself for a fool. He knew he would not feel fully right until the evening. A whole day ruined by his excesses of the night before. He needed to eat and drink water and then ride hard for a few hours to settle his stomach. There was no shelter in the desert and he didn’t want to have his tent assembled each time he needed a little hole dug in the sand. Loose bowels were an embarrassing feature of a long march, one that was not often mentioned in training. Cyrus prayed he would not humiliate himself. His father had told him once that the men would forgive all but two things in those who led them. The other was cowardice.

He stood in a wide bucket to be washed down by his servants, then allowed himself to be wrapped in cool cloth while he was shaved and his hair brushed and tied back. He lay down on a folding table to be massaged, then sat naked on a bench while his undergarments and armour were brought. He waved away fat dates and white cheese. The sun was some way above the horizon by the time he emerged from his tent. As he’d finished dressing, he’d heard voices calling the camp to order, urging the men along. The uproar was growing, so that Cyrus put aside his own distress as he came out, squinting into the distance.

The deserts stretched as far as the eye could see ahead of them, but the hills and dunes hid valleys, rock spires, rivers with green banks and even villages. For all they seemed alone, the horizon told a different story.

Thin black threads rose into the sky ahead. Cyrus had been taking the men east, always east, heading for his father’s capital. He’d known no hostile army could approach Persepolis without being seen, and had accepted their presence would eventually be reported back to Artaxerxes. Yet the imperial forces were vast, too large to assemble in just a day or even a month.

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