The Last King of Lydia by Tim Leach

of him to light the way, and began to descend. He made his way along the narrow corridor, the ceiling just high enough that he could walk without stooping. It had been
made specifically for him.
    The passage wound down, until glimmers of light began to appear in the distance. The air grew brighter, then too bright, as though he were heading towards the heart of the sun. The end of the
passage opened up into an enormous chamber, and the king entered the lower treasury.
    He had begun work on these chambers as soon as his father had died. It had taken years to plan and excavate, and he had kept the digging as close a secret as possible. The slaves who had
laboured there had been dispatched to work in the mines at the far corners of his empire immediately after the project had been completed. Croesus sometimes wondered to whom they might have told
their secrets in the few short years before rockfalls and rotten lungs had silenced them all, but this did not genuinely concern him. If the bandit kings and petty officials of the outer kingdoms
knew of the treasury, he did not fear them, but he wanted none within the palace to know the details of this chamber. The treasuries of the upper floors held hundreds of diverse and priceless
artefacts. This lower floor was devoted to a single form of treasure.
    Thousands of gold and silver coins were piled high throughout the room, forming towers and buttresses and fortresses. Elsewhere they were piled into hills and mountains of gold and silver.
Dozens of burning torches ringed the chamber, the polished stone walls and glittering coins reflecting and amplifying the light until it was intense, near blinding. But it did not trouble the king.
Croesus had grown used to staring into the sun of his riches.
    His father had long desired gold coins. Alyattes had known that gold and silver both hid within the electrum of the Pactolus river, but his alchemists were never able to discover the technique
of separating them. His dream had been to stamp the seal of Lydia on golden coins that would fill the markets of Sardis and the Hellenic cities on the far side of the sea. But he died
unsatisfied.
    Croesus’s metallurgists had finally perfected the art of turning electrum into gold and silver. They had tried every possible combination of heat and pressure that they could imagine, to
no effect. One day, in sheer desperation, they added salt to the molten metal, as though it were a gamey meat in need of seasoning, and once the fire was scorching hot, the silver separated to the
top, enabling it to be skimmed away like scum from a stew, and the bottom of the crucibles shone with pure gold.
    Croesus had kept finding reasons to postpone the day when the coins would enter circulation and replace the electrum coins that had so fascinated his father. Soon, every merchant and tradesmen
in Lydia would tally his life in these ovals of gold and silver, each one marked with the lion and bull. But, for now, the coins remained within this sealed chamber. They belonged to him alone.
    The room was still, near silent. He could hear the crackling of the torches, the occasional thud as a sack of coins arrived down one of the steep tunnels that led from the mints above ground.
Soft beneath these other sounds were the shuffling, hesitant footsteps of the money counters.
    They were all blind. These slaves lived within the treasury, in a small antechamber separate from the coins. Food and water reached them through the same shafts where the coins came from above.
They would never be permitted to leave. They would grow old and die in a world of gold.
    Croesus had no idea what they spoke about to pass the long days, what couplings occurred down here in the darkness, what half-remembered poems were recited, the imaginative journeys that they
went on together to escape their closed world, the petty fights and squabbles that broke out over the few luxuries they were allowed. He could only imagine what they did to