Free Persian Fire by Tom Holland Page A

killed and replaced by a double, had brushed the side of her husband's head one evening while he slept, and uncovered the appalling truth. Telling her father of her discovery, she had thereby set in train the dramatic sequence of events which had culminated in the murder of the impostor. Such, at any rate, was the story which years later would be told across the empire. And there was nobody, by then, left to dispute it.
    Even on the night of the assassination, if there had been anyone in Nisaea to query the conspirators' self-justification, or to point out some of its more glaring implausibilities, or to ask why the corpse of the supposed impostor had been disposed of with such speed, he would have known better than to speak his mind. With blood still being washed from the fittings of Sikyavautish, it was hardly the time for quibbles. The conspirators were in no mood to tolerate dissent. The warning given by Darius could not have been more stentorian: 'Thou who shalt be king hereafter, protect thyself vigorously from the Lie; the man who shall be a follower of the Lie, him do thou punish well!' 48 Here, from a master political strategist, was a dazzling sleight-of-hand. It would serve to place not the assassins but their accusers on the defensive. Sceptics were to be anathematised as the enemies of truth.
    And this, for any Persian, was a feared and dreadful fate. It was an article of faith to Darius' countrymen that they were the most honest people in the world. Three things were taught them, it was said: 'to ride, to fire a bow and to tell the truth'. 49 Darius, by threatening those who might doubt his story of the Magus' crimes, was not just shoring up a rickety case; his claims were altogether more soaring. Only a Persian could have made them - for only a Persian could understand what truth really meant. He knew, as more benighted peoples did not, that the universe without truth would be undone and lost to perpetual night. More than an abstraction, more even than an ideal, it formed instead the very fabric of existence.
    This was why, in the beginning, when Ahura Mazda, greatest of the gods, had summoned time and creation into being, he had engendered Arta, who was Truth, to give order to the universe. Without Arta, it would have lacked form or beauty, and the great cycles of existence set in motion by Lord Mazda could not have brought life into the world. Even so, the work of Truth was never done. Just as fire, when it rises to the heavens, is accompanied by black smoke, so Arta, the Persians knew, was shadowed by Drauga, the Lie. Two orders - one of perfection, the other of falsehood, each the image of the other — were coiled in a conflict as ancient as time. What should mortals do, then, but take the side of Arta against Drauga, Truth against the Lie, lest the universe itself should totter and fail? The wretch who weaves deceit will bring death into his country': 50 so it had been anciently proclaimed. How much more deadly the peril, then, if a 'wretch' had somehow seized his country's throne. The Magus, by taking on the image of Bardiya, and impersonating the rightful king, had handed to Drauga the sceptre of the world. Darius and his fellows, by riding to Sikyavautish, had toppled an evil infinitely more threatening than a mere imposter. Far from staging a squalid putsch, they had been engaged in nothing less than the redemption of the cosmos.
    And now, with Gaumata justly toppled and dispatched, the throne which he had tainted stood empty. The insignia of royal power — a robe, a bow and a shield — waited in Sikyavautish for the rightful claimant. Who that might be, however, and how he was to be recognised, remained, on the evening of the assassination, a mystery. Only the most garbled account of what followed has survived. The conspirators, it was said, rode out by night into the open plain. At an agreed point, they reined in their horses and awaited the coming of dawn. When the sun's first rays appeared above