BETRAYED
Pacing to and fro in the familiar cedar gallery, vexed, troubled, and
impatient, Assarac shot glances of anger and defiance at the four-winged
image of Nisroch, as though reproaching the god in whom he did _not_
believe for withholding aid he would have considered it childish folly
to implore. Though he had dispatched a messenger in eager haste to seek
out the tents of the Anakim, and renew the offer of promotion he made to
Sarchedon, so preoccupied was he, that Beladon had already prostrated
himself more than once, ere his superior seemed conscious of his
presence. The younger priest wondered to see the resolute and subtle
eunuch so changed, so worn, so saddened. He marked the restless step,
the sullen gesture, the moody unquiet eye, remembering, not without
pity, a caged wild beast that had been trapped and brought into Babylon,
long ago by certain hunters of the mountain, as a gift to the Great
Queen.
Though a faithful servant enough, while a keener intellect and firmer
spirit held him in subjection, he bethought him somewhat remorsefully it
was time to leave his master now.
Assarac's eyes wandered over the other's figure with the unconscious
stare of a sleep-walker ere they lighted into recognition, then he
started and exclaimed, "How now, Beladon? Returned so soon? What tidings
of Semiramis--I mean of Sarchedon, and the children of Anak with whom he
dwells?"
"Let not my lord be wroth," was the answer. "Though his servant fled
through the waste like an ostrich, yet was he wiser than that foolish
bird, which plies her long legs and helpless wings to meet the storm of
thunder and lightning she dreads. I have heard the thunder of the
queen's chariots; I have seen the lightning of her spears. Instead of
scouring the desert to seek the Anakim, lo, I turned bridle, and
hastened back that I might warn my lord of her approach."
Though something seemed to tell him the information was tantamount to a
death-warrant, his heart leaped up with a wild unreasoning joy.
"The queen!" he exclaimed, while the blood flew to his wan heavy cheek.
"Is she then so near?"
"She will encamp to-night beneath the city walls," answered Beladon
imperturbably. "She marches with the vanguard of her army; but the
conquerors of Armenia cannot be many furlongs in her rear; and when the
sun goes down to-morrow, the hosts of Ninyas will be increased fourfold,
while the Great Queen lays her trophies and her sceptre at the feet of
her son. May the king live for ever!"
Something in the cold sneering tones seemed to recall the eunuch's
energies and wake him, as it were, from a dream.
"Never!" he muttered between his teeth; and seizing the other's arm in a
gripe that caused him to wince with pain, he hurried out of the
corridor, past the golden image of Baal, across the court of the
temple, and so, through leafy thicket and level lawn, threaded its cool
green paradise to the palace of the Great King.
Here Beladon, notwithstanding a sufficiently good opinion of his own
merits, would have excused himself from entering; but Assarac's grasp
was never relaxed, and ere the younger priest could realise the
imprudence of such an intrusion, he found himself in the presence of one
for whom he had been alternately spy and gaoler, yet who held over him
irresponsible power of life and death.
Ninyas was seated in the shade on a chair of state, ornamented and
embossed with the symbols of Assyrian sovereignty, under a trellis-work
whereon had been trained the luxuriant tendrils of a vine, already
bending and blushing in clusters of ripening grapes. A fountain
scattered its silver spray in the sunshine, while female forms, with
jetty locks, transparent veils, and glancing eyes, flitted through the
shade. Soft airs murmured among the flowers, birds carolled from the
thicket, and the king held a half-emptied goblet in his hand. With a
hasty inclination of head and body, far short of the usual ceremony
observed on entering the royal presence, Assarac placed himself in front
of his lord, and looking him full in the face, arrested the cup that
Ninyas was raising to his lips.
"Is this a time," said he, in grave sonorous accents, "for bubble of
wine and sound of timbrel--for dance and song and careless revel--the
mirth that goes before destruction--the folly that is a sure fore-runner
of death? Rouse you, my lord, rouse you! Take bow in hand, gird you
sword upon your thigh; for the watchman cries out on the wall, and even
now your enemy is at the gate!"
The king's eyes, once so bright, looked dim and dull, the handsome
features were flushed and sodden with excess; but he set his goblet down
untasted, while there seemed something of interest, even apprehension,
in the tone with which he asked, "What enemy, and whence? I have but one
in all the kingdoms of the earth, and she is sick unto death beyond the
mountains of the north."
Again, while he smiled in scorn, came a glow of triumph on the eunuch's
weary face. "Semiramis," he answered, "is encamped within bowshot of the
wall--Semiramis, the mother of my lord the king--Semiramis, who never
cast a bank against a city but she razed it to the ground--who never
drew bow but she shot her arrow home--who never took account of an
injury but she requited it with death! O my queen, my queen!" he added
in a broken murmur, "even now the lord of earth trembles and cowers at
the very whisper of your name!"
Ninyas turned pale. "Counsel me, Assarac!" he exclaimed, while his eye
roved helplessly over all the splendour and luxury that surrounded him.
"If my mother enters the city, I am undone."
"Not so," answered the eunuch. "Let my lord the king go out to meet her
as a son should welcome the mother of his affections bringing home the
wife of his desire. Let the gates be thrown open, and the people give
her greeting as she passes by. The hosts of the Great Queen are yet many
a league off in the desert. Her vanguard, few in number, must be wearied
sore with travel. When she enters her own city, who so fitting to
provide for her safety as the son of her vows? Let him guard her like
the apple of his eye, and relieve her of all care in the government of
the people whom he rules."
"You know her not!" exclaimed Ninyas, much disturbed. "Where is the
prison-house in Babylon that could hold her for a single day? Where is
the son of Ashur who would not leap to the saddle with bow and spear at
the first wave of the Great Queen's hand?"
The eunuch's answer came in firm and measured accents, though his face
was distorted as with a hidden agony of pain.
"There is a prison-house from which not Ashtaroth herself could break
out--from which old Nimrod might not be delivered by all the horsemen of
Assyria. When my lord's servants shall surround and hew her in pieces,
then may every son of Ashur bind on his headpiece a shred of the Great
Queen's garments, whom he loved so well."
Ninyas laughed aloud, and, seizing his discarded goblet, drained it to
the dregs.
"Enough!" he exclaimed. "She sinned against Nisroch and Baal, when she
took the sceptre of Nimrod from the hand of his descendant. What am I,
that I should interfere to avert her doom? And yet, I would it might be
done without shedding of blood. Can we not lead her forth from the city
into some desert place, and so dispose of her in safety, where she shall
disturb the king no more?"
"Will my lord trust his servant?" asked the eunuch.
"I will remain here at the banquet in my palace until it is over,"
answered Ninyas brutally. "Let Baal be his own avenger, and let Assarac
see to vindicating the honour of his god. I have spoken." Then, clapping
his hands, Ninyas summoned back the women who usually surrounded him at
his revels, to dismiss the whole matter from his mind in a deep and
stupefying carouse.
Leaving the royal presence, Beladon felt his arm seized once more in the
eunuch's painful gripe, while Assarac muttered, half-unconsciously, such
broken sentences as served to disclose the plot he had constructed, and
the means by which it was to be carried out. Presently, in a few simple
directions, he imparted to his subordinate the outline of his purpose,
commanding him to muster all the priests and prophets in the city at the
great northern gate by which the queen should enter, with knife and
lotus-flower in hand; to surround these with so strong a force of
spearmen as it would be impossible for the populace to break through;
and then, at a given signal, to fall on Semiramis with his followers,
bind her in fetters of iron, and so bring her a helpless captive into
the temple of Baal. It would be a fine revenge, thought Assarac, to keep
her there till the arrival of Sarchedon from the desert, and then to
slay them, in each other's sight, before the altar of his god. Better
still, perhaps, and worthier of his fierce mad love, to strike his own
knife into her heart at the first halt of her chariot within the gate.
"I can trust you," said he, when they parted, and Beladon proposed to
attest his fidelity in a great oath by the everlasting wings, "because
the queen's first act, when she reënters the city, will be to take
vengeance on him who kept the door of her son's prison-house, and
suffered the captive to escape."
But the wariest of mankind may leave one weak point undefended--the
keenest judges of human nature will omit from their calculation some
vice, prejudice, or folly, such as dominates the very self-interest of
their tools. That Beladon should have disclosed a plot, on the success
of which his own personal safety, his very life depended, would have
been unaccountable, but for the joyous, pleasure-loving disposition
which, priest of Baal though he was, could not keep his secret from a
woman.
Kalmim had beguiled him out of every particular before sundown,
affecting, the better to deceive him, an irreconcilable enmity to the
Great Queen, and entire devotion in the service of her son.
If a woman makes up her mind to duplicity, a little more or a little
less counts as nothing to her conscience. She finds it as easy to
profess an affection she does not feel, and a candour of which she is
incapable, as to push another bodkin into her hair, lay another coat of
red or white on the cheek she is not ashamed to paint. When Kalmim had
resolved she would take him into captivity, it was no more possible for
Beladon to resist than for the bird to escape out of the snare of the
fowler. And, although the latter was exceedingly lavish of smiles and
liberal of promises, the prey found itself captured, plumed, and
despoiled, with no material equivalent for utter discomfiture and
disgrace.
More than a match for a score of priests, she could indeed have
outwitted the whole male population of Babylon, but that she too had
found her master, and was but a weak foolish woman in presence of the
man she loved.
To him she betook herself in her distress, imploring him to interfere at
such a juncture, and prevent a crime which, with all his loyalty to his
prince, seemed to Sethos too foul and unnatural to contemplate.
"There is danger also for _you_," she exclaimed, wringing her hands and
sobbing in real perplexity. "No son of Ashur must leave the city
to-night on pain of death; and yet, if the queen be not forewarned,
nothing can save her from the vengeance of these blood-thirsty priests.
O Sethos, Sethos, did I not love you dearly, I had never trusted you
with such a mission; yet how can I bear to send you out into the very
jaws of death?"
But the cup-bearer's equanimity was proof even against so formidable a
consideration. Accepting her confession of attachment with a
good-humoured carelessness that at any other time would have cut her to
the quick, he professed his readiness to incur any amount of peril so
that he might preserve Semiramis from the threatened assault, and her
son from the commission of so hideous an outrage. It was agreed,
therefore, that he should escape from the city at all hazards, and make
his way to the tent of the Great Queen, under cover of night. To leave
Babylon through any one of her gates was impracticable, so closely were
they guarded by the spearmen of Ninyas under Assarac's orders; and it
was only by watching a favourable opportunity during the darkest hours
before the moon had risen, that Kalmim succeeded in letting her lover
down from the wall by a rope, to dispatch him on his errand of life and
death.
With characteristic coolness the cup-bearer received his instructions
and embarked on his perilous enterprise; but Kalmim, though not a nerve
failed her while, swinging in mid-air, his life depended on her
steadiness of hand, had over-taxed her strength; for no sooner was the
tension of the rope relaxed, and the form of Sethos lost in darkness as
he sped from beneath the wall, than brain and sense gave way, leaving
her pale, prostrate, and helpless on the ground.