COUNTING THE COST
Ever as their path grew steeper, and they penetrated farther into its
recesses, the forest became more gloomy, while its trees assumed more
hideous and fantastic shapes. The sky was dark and wild, the air loaded
with those murmurs of the night that are to sounds of waking life as
passing shadows to real objects of flesh and blood; gigantic faces,
grim, gray, and indistinct, blinked and peered from naked crag or
gnarled and wrinkled trunk; while here, there, everywhere around,
brooded a presence, no less awful because so vague and impalpable, that
would have curdled and chilled the boldest human heart. It seemed to
Assarac, he was treading the border-land between here and hereafter;
that at every step he might come face to face with some departed spirit,
for which the universal experience was no longer a problem to be solved,
which could tell him the secret all his life had been but an effort to
inquire.
A white owl flitted noiselessly through the darkness, and the eunuch's
heart stood still with something less debasing, yet far more horrible
than fear. Nevertheless, as the shadowy train moved before him,
mechanically he followed on.
In a gorge of the mountain, where night was blackest, a red light glowed
suddenly across the sky. Wheeling round the stem of a rugged oak, the
bearers halted with their burden, in an open space where four glades
met, converging on an indistinct mass, that seemed, in the fitful
glare, some rough rude altar reared of unhewn stones.
Reverently they laid the dead hero down. Rising erect, when he touched
the earth, Assarac recognised in their lofty frames and costly armour
four spearmen from the body-guard of the Great Queen.
Semiramis stood apart, peering eagerly into the gloom, only the outline
of a white face visible in the deep folds of a mantle, that shrouded her
head and figure.
Wild yells and piercing shrieks rose from the forest, while the flash of
many torches danced fitfully among the trees. A score of hideous figures
now came leaping into the open space, and formed themselves in a circle
round the queen, the spearmen and the dead warrior laid upon his shield.
Interest and curiosity had somewhat mastered the eunuch's over-powering
sense of horror, so that, waking, as it were, from the oppression of a
trance, he seemed to resume his faculties of body and mind.
He knew the shapes at last, recognising them for those frantic votaries
who, electing to worship Abitur of the Mountains, disowned all human
ties and interests, abjured all other creeds and professions, that they
might serve the great principle of evil in the wilderness.
These men were naked to the waist, their hair and beards were matted and
tangled in foul disorder, they tossed their lean arms aloft with frantic
vehemence, and their eyes glared in the torchlight with the fierce
cunning of insanity.
They might have been themselves the demons they adored, so strange and
unearthly was their appearance, while dancing, gibbering, howling, they
came and went, now opening out, now closing in, their circle, now
retiring among the trees, now advancing towards the altar, but still,
like vultures about a carrion, converging gradually round the corpse.
The queen held up her hand; immediately the torches gave a steadier
light, the wavering shapes were still, and prostrated themselves before
her with mute signs of submission, reverence, even abject fear.
She had protected the sect, respected their tenets, even joined in
their worship, from motives of policy long ago.
Now, in her great need, she clung to this desperate resource, and had
come to wring from Abitur of the Mountains that which the host of heaven
seemed unable to bestow.
With the increased light afforded by a score of torches, no longer
whirled and brandished in the air, Assarac observed that, in the rock
over against him, was hewn an entrance to some vast cavernous temple,
ornamented with rough symbols and grotesque representations of the demon
worshipped within. This cavity seemed partly natural, partly hollowed
out from the bowels of the earth, by the same rude labour that had
erected the altar in its front.
Four of the wild men raised the burden recently laid down by the
Assyrian warriors, and, preceded by two of their companions with
torches, disappeared in the entrance of the temple or mouth of the
cavern. While they lifted the corpse, Semiramis passed her hand, with a
gesture of exceeding tenderness, over the dead face, and followed close
behind, succeeded by the rest of the torch-bearing troop, leaving the
spearmen without, as if to guard the threshold.
An irresistible impulse drove the eunuch onward in his strange
adventure, yet it seemed that he could not have uttered a word to save
his life. With every faculty strained, every sense painfully sharpened,
speech was alone denied him.
The sons of Ashur crossed their spears to bar his entrance; but throwing
the cloak back from his face, though still without a word, he caused
them to recognise him that stood at the right hand of the Great Queen,
and thus passed unimpeded into the temple of the fiend.
In a vaulted cavern, so lofty that the glare of twenty torches scarce
illumined the shadowy masses of its roof, stood four unhewn blocks of
granite, supporting, at the height of a man's knee a rough slab of the
same, on a flooring of rock, over which nature had spread a deep
covering of sand. There was here no appearance of shrine or altar, none
of those attempts at ornament, by which even the rudest of worshippers
do honour to their deity with hand and brain. The walls of this natural
temple were of bare bulging stone, its roof was reared far into the
bowels of the mountain; it had but one aperture, through which a dim
thread of light might be seen at noon-day, and where, if he ever did
visit them, the worshippers of Abitur were taught to expect the
appearance of their master.
Buried in the depths of the forest, beneath those wild shaggy hills,
this dwelling of the evil principle was as dark and shadowy compared
with the temple of Baal, as that shrine of the Assyrian god, glowing in
vermilion and gold, seemed poor and paltry to the starry dome above, of
which it professed to be the type.
From behind a jutting boulder of rock, forming, as it were, a natural
buttress of the cavern, Assarac watched in horror. The dew stood on his
brow, damp and chill as the slime on the surface against which he
leaned.
Semiramis snatched a torch from one of the wild figures at her side, and
with its unlighted end described a triangular figure, while keeping
herself carefully within that mystic border, around the broad flat stone
on which the dead man lay.
A wild unreasoning terror then seemed to take possession of the
worshippers, they trembled from head to foot, and cowered back as far as
the limits of the cavern would allow. In the silence that succeeded this
movement, even Assarac expected some tangible horror to appear.
The Great Queen planted her torch firmly in the sand at the corpse's
head, stripping off at the same time its enshrouding mantle, while her
own cloak fell from her shoulder in the act, revealing at one stroke her
matchless beauty and the glittering splendour of her attire.
It was a ghastly contrast--the same wavering light that played on the
queen's jewels imparted a flicker of life and motion to the dead man's
face, gashed and seamed with the sword, drawn and distorted with spasms
of mortal pain. He seemed to gasp, to gibber, to be about to speak, as
if the longing eyes that looked down on him were indeed able to draw his
very soul back from those unknown regions to which it had taken flight,
as if the force of a woman's will, the desire of a woman's love, must
needs have power to bridge the gulf that parts the living and the dead.
Was it indeed Sarchedon who laid there disfigured into so maimed and
unsightly an object? And did she love him so dearly, that now to-night,
in the very hour of her triumph, she could forego her royal pomp and
glory, could stoop her neck and bend her pride for such a thing as this?
Then Assarac felt at his heart that keen and searching stab to which
every other pain is but as a dull outward bruise to a serpent's venomed
sting.
With dropped jaw, fixed eyes, and rigid limbs, he watched like a man
turned to stone.
She plucked an amulet from her neck, gazing on it for an instant ere she
laid it softly, tenderly, in the dead man's breast. Then she looked
upward, moving lips and hands, like one who pleads hard for life, though
not a sound came forth. This was the second time she had bartered away
her mystic charm. Surely all her resources of peace and war must stand
her in some stead! Surely the dove and the arrow would not fail her now!
When she turned her eyes again to the body, they gleamed with the light
of hope. On her face was the smile that welcomes some dear one's
home-coming, and she stretched her arms, as if to invite the wanderer
back to her loving heart.
But while still he moved not, lying there stark and rigid, without word
or sign, it seemed strange to Assarac, that the Great Queen, whose
nature was so imperious, manifested neither anger nor impatience at this
protracted opposition to her will. Sorrow indeed came down over the
beautiful face like a veil; but through it there shone the exceeding
tenderness of a love that owns no limit of time or place, that
acknowledges no barrier, even in the chasm of an open grave.
Once more her lips and eyes moved wildly, once more she looked around,
as if to plead for that fiendish help she had come here to implore; then
while her bosom heaved, and her throat swelled high, she burst into a
strain of melody that rang through the remotest corners of the cavern,
causing the wild men's senses to thrill with a strange intoxicating
delight, and the eunuch's heart to quiver with a fierce intolerable
pain.
It was the incantation by which, in sight of all the gods of her people,
she protested against her loss, calling on the parted spirit to return
from its place beyond the grave.
Laying her right hand on the dead man's forehead, her left upon his
heart, she raised her head and sang:
"By the power of the Seven
Great tokens of light;
By the Judges of Heaven,
The watchers of night;
By the might of those forces
That govern on high,
The Stars in their courses,
The hosts of the sky;
By Ashur, grim pagan,
Our father in mail;
By Nebo and Dagon,
By Nisroch and Baal;
By pale Ishtar contrasting
With Red Merodach,
By the wings everlasting,
I summon thee back!
From the ranks of a legion
That files through the gloom
Of a shadowy region
Disclosed by the tomb;
From the gulf of black sorrow
Of silence and sleep,
Where a night with no morrow
Broods over the deep;
By desire unavailing,
And pleasure that's fled;
By the living bewailing
Her love for the dead;
By the wish that endears thee,
The kisses that burn,
And the passion that sears thee,
I bid thee return!
Thou art cold, and thy face is
So waxen at rest,
In my fiery embraces
Seek warmth on my breast.
Through the lips that caress thee
Draw balm in my breath,
And the arms that compress thee
Shall wrench thee from Death.
Though he boasteth to spare not
For ransom or fee,
Yet he shall not, he dare not,
Take tribute of me.
Then if love can restore thee,
Though bound on the track,
From the journey before thee,
Beloved, come back!"
While the last syllables died on her lips in long pathetic tones, she
sank across the dead body, brow to brow, breast to breast, and mouth to
mouth. Surely, if but one spark of life had been left, that wild embrace
must have drawn and kindled it into flame.
But Assarac's brain reeled, and the cavern swam before his eyes.
Staggering, suffocated, he hastened from the place, passing the men of
war at the entrance as he rushed blindly out into the darkness. Said one
spearman to his comrade, "Surely it is a spirit. Behold how it vanisheth
in the night!" To which the other, leaning thoughtfully on his shield,
replied,
"It is the demon who hath entered, and taken possession of the man, and
driven him forth, and fled with him into the wilderness."