Little rea.s.sured by the alternative, Arbaces hastened at least to take hold of the royal sceptre, and thus secure himself against the worst consequences of his indiscretion; for pardon was invariably accorded to him for whom the king extended that emblem of sovereignty with his own hand; but he dreaded the old warrior's disappointment to learn there seemed no excuse for a recommencement of the game he loved so well, and it was only because he was a brave man to the core that he looked his lord steadily in the face while he said firmly, but respectfully, "O king, live for ever! I speak not as the lowest of slaves to the highest of masters; I speak as warrior to warrior, as man to man. Arbaces asks Ninus if he has ever deceived him in council, or failed him in the field."

"Never!" exclaimed the king, on whose kindred spirit the other's manly bearing produced such an effect as might have been expected. "Never," he repeated, sitting down again, while the weary look crept over his gray old face. "You have been true to me as the buckle of my belt, the handle of my blade. Old servant, old friend, old comrade, something tells me I shall never tighten one nor draw the other again."

Arbaces burst into tears. The practised warrior, who had seen towns sacked, foes slain, and captives flayed alive without a quiver of sympathy, a throb of pity, was not proof against this unaccustomed mood in his stern old master. Slave as he really was, slave in presence of a fierce and irresponsible despot, his heart filled with a painful, piteous sympathy that unmanned him, and he wept.

The king's harsh laugh, covering, it may be, some kinder sentiment than derision, and hoa.r.s.e with other weakness besides the cough of age, recalled him to himself.

"Go, get a spindle!" exclaimed Ninus. "Surely, but for that rugged face and grizzled beard, I had believed it was an old woman standing at my footstool with wet eyes to pray for her son's release out of the clutches of Arbaces, rather than the Tartan himself, whom I have seen many a time in haste, anger, and perplexity, but never in sorrow nor in fear."

The other's face brightened with joy and pride; but he had a duty to perform, and neither exultation in his lord's approval, nor dread of his displeasure, would prevent his carrying it out to the end.

a.s.suming the usual att.i.tude of respect, and thus dropping, as it were, to his proper level of humility, the chief captain demanded meekly,

"Is it the king's pleasure to hearken, while the lowest of his servants makes report concerning the ordering of the host, and setting of the night-watches as in the day of battle?"

"What have I to do with the day of battle?" answered the king testily.

"This is the day of priests and prophets, sacrifice and drink-offering, waste of time, treasure, and good wine. May Nisroch consume them all to ashes! Day of battle!--by the beard of Nimrod, day of folly rather, and weariness and shame! Thou too must needs come prating about it. Well, say on."

"The whole army of Egypt has been commanded to encamp without the walls," observed the other curtly. "Is this the pleasure of my lord the king?"

"Without the walls!" repeated his angry master. "Who dared give such a fool's order at such a time? And you too: have you thus disposed the host, scattered from their centre, and incapable of concentration or movement? By the belt of Ashur, you are a bolder man than I thought, to come and tell me this!"

"I took my orders from the Great Queen," answered Arbaces, "and she delivered them with the royal signet in her hand."

Ninus calmed down at once, while on his face came the smile that was never seen there, but in the presence of Semiramis, or at the mention of her name.

"It is well," he said. "Had it been any other man in the host but yourself, who came here unbidden to question such an authority, his face had been covered and his place should have known him no more. The king hath spoken."

His old heart thrilled while he thought how this unmilitary disposition of his army was but another instance of the queen's love and care; another proof of her confidence and affection. She would spare him all incitement to exertion by thus withdrawing for a time his favourite occupation, would exact a proof of his trust in thus confiding his personal safety and his kingdom to those who were avowedly at her own disposal. Well, he might not have many more opportunities to please her.

Let the queen's fancy be indulged unquestioned, and her commands obeyed.

While he dismissed Arbaces, rudely enough it may be, according to his wont, there was yet a rough kindliness underlying the haughty manner and fierce peremptory tones, that caused the chief captain's heart to sink with a sense of depression, a vague foreshadowing of evil he had never felt before. As the subject raised his head, after the usual prostration on leaving his king's presence, the eyes of master and servant met. At the same moment, the same thought seemed to fall like ice on the heart of each, that henceforth neither should look in the other's face again.

Wearily and slowly the chief captain paced back towards his home, the good horse under him partaking, as it seemed, in his rider's discomfiture. It was a sore and saddened heart, contrasting painfully with his elation on the day of triumph, when he rode so proudly beneath its walls, that he now carried through the lofty portals of his palace.

He had, however, one consolation left in the presence of his daughter.

So long as she remained under his roof, it seemed to her father there was still peace and rest and tranquil happiness at home.

"The girl," said he, with his Oriental turn of thought and expression, "is like a light in the dwelling, a lily in the garden, a fountain in the court."

But his apprehensions were not destined to be relieved by the return of those whom he had sent to summon the princ.i.p.al captains of the host.

With the first who prostrated himself before the Tartan while he dismounted came evil tidings, which each successive messenger arrived only to aggravate and confirm.

Ispabara, chief of the spearmen, a tried warrior and leader of repute, had been removed from his command, and cast into prison. Even now the force that hitherto acknowledged his authority was defiling through the great gate to quit the town under another captain. Scarcely was this startling announcement digested when a second breathless runner appeared to say that Sabacon, the captain of the chariots, had been summoned hastily to the presence of the Great Queen, and had not since been heard of. Meantime, the whole strength of the chariots of iron were already ma.s.sed in the plain by the Well of Palms.

"What of Belasys and his trusty bowmen?" exclaimed Arbaces in deep concern and perplexity, while a third light-footed youth laid his forehead to the ground ere he made his ill-omened report.

"Let not my lord be wroth," was the deprecating reply. "Belasys cannot be found. The bowmen are in confusion, but Taracus has received orders to command them under the signet of my lord the king, and has marched them out by companies through the different gates of the city. The men of Nineveh refused to move, and were scattered like chaff before the wind by the hors.e.m.e.n of the Great Queen. Dagon! how the blue mantles rode through and through their ranks, piercing, hewing, trampling them down and sparing none! Men say their bowstrings had been cut when they encamped last night by the temple of Baal. The women of Nineveh shall look from their walls in vain, for by the Thirteen G.o.ds I think not a score of that northern band can have escaped alive!"

"And all this on the feast-day," muttered Arbaces, turning into his house with a heavy heart.

It was obvious that some deadly plot had been contrived--some fearful catastrophe was imminent. It needed but little of his warlike experience to remind him that an army thus scattered, while disorganised by a change of leaders, would be useless for all purposes of resistance or offence.

Of the queen's object he could form but vague speculations; for the means she had employed to carry it out, he could not repress a sentiment of admiration, considerably dashed with fear. That the authority which devolved on her with the royal signet had been employed to place the city of Babylon, and with it the great a.s.syrian empire, at her mercy was too apparent; but he hesitated to believe she would use the power she thus owed to his affection, for the destruction of her husband and her king.

Arbaces was a man of energy and action, accustomed to sudden peril, fertile in the resources by which it should be met. But he was also superst.i.tious and a fatalist. It is possible that he might have organised some scheme for the defence of his old master, made some effort to avert the storm that was gathering over the royal head, had it not been for one of those trifling events on which the fate of an empire has sometimes been known to turn.

Exhausted and perplexed, he called for wine almost as he left the saddle. Ishtar, who had been watching for her father's arrival, sprang joyfully forward and ministered to his wants, bringing him the restoring draught in a golden cup, beautifully carved, chased, and set with precious stones.

The girl's step was free and buoyant; her bearing joyous, her sweet face radiant in the light that once in a lifetime glorifies every child of earth with a ray direct from heaven.

The sun was setting, and a stream of crimson from its level beams crossed the shining floor beneath her feet. Suddenly she stopped, and looking wildly into the cup, turned pale--pale even in that rich glow of evening, tinging hands and robe and hair with red.

"O, father!" she said, "do not drink. It looks like blood!"

He set the wine down untasted, and covered his eyes with his hands.

"Enough!" he muttered. "Who shall strive against Nisroch, or flee from him who hath the four winds of heaven for his wings? The Seven Stars have spoken, and it is well!"

Then there came on him a great trembling and fear; for he looked on his daughter, and wondered who should protect her when he was gone. His own head, the life of the Great King, the fate of the empire, seemed as nothing compared to the safety of that beloved being--the child of his bosom--the one ewe lamb of his fold!

It was the divining cup of his race from which Ishtar had unwittingly been about to give him to drink, and he would have been as loath to defile his father's tomb, or question his father's honour, as to doubt its gift of prophecy, or make light of the warning it proclaimed.

He believed firmly enough that a pure maiden, looking into this mysterious vessel at any crisis of her fate, would there behold reflected, as in a mirror, a presentiment of that good or evil which the future held for her in store. And what had she seen now? By her own confession, to her obvious dismay, a hideous sea of blood!

He dismissed her from his presence gently, kindly, yet with a stern sorrow that forbade her to remonstrate or disobey. Then, alone at last, in the hall of his stately palace, he rent his mantle from hem to hem with a great cry of anguish, and sat down on the bare floor, unnerved, unmanned, in a paroxysm of horror and despair.

Above him, grand and imposing in the shadows of coming night, loomed his own sculptured image on the wall--proud, erect, triumphant--driving at speed in his war-chariot over a field of slain.

So darkness gathered round original and likeness: the fierce conqueror helmed and plated, bow in hand--the prostrate figure, with rent garments, bowed in misery to the dust. And the stars came out in golden l.u.s.tre--mellow, benignant, radiant--smiling down, as it would seem, in peace and good-will on the sleep of Babylon the Great.

CHAPTER XVIII

A LYING SPIRIT

In the meantime, not only to his temple had been confined the preparations of his servants for celebrating the festival of the great a.s.syrian G.o.d. Throughout the city, wherever shrine was sculptured or altar reared, garlands had been woven, drink-offerings prepared, droves of animals made ready for sacrifice, and trenches even dug to carry off the blood that was to flow like water with the fall of night. The priests of Baal swarmed in every open s.p.a.ce, singing, shouting, gesticulating with frantic leaps, and bare knives brandished to threaten their own naked b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Nothing was left undone that could excite the fanaticism of the mult.i.tude, and their hot a.s.syrian blood soon rose to boiling pitch under the wild excitement of the hour. Men's eyes flashed, their cheeks glowed, while they rent the air with cries in honour of their deity, and troops of women, with dishevelled hair and unveiled faces, might be seen beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, waving their arms, even dancing in grotesque unison with the mystic transports of the priests.

The prophets of the grove, too, had taken possession of every eminence that might boast a leaf of verdure, every green and wooded spot, both within and without the walls, for their comprehensive worship of the host of heaven, figured as it would seem by the countless blossoms and perennial vitality of their sacred tree--typical, it may be, of that which long ago in Eden "stood in the midst of the garden, good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise;" or that of which he must eat who would live for ever, and which seemed to have promised, far back in the buried ages, yet another tree of expiation and suffering, on which the Great Sacrifice was to be offered--the Great Sacrifice of immeasurable love and pity, that the sense of man cannot fathom, nor his words describe, nor his narrow heart conceive.

In all idolatry, in the darkness of every superst.i.tion, however foul and debasing, is there not some faint reflection of that true dawn which shall hereafter brighten into perfect day?

Amongst the crowds that surged and swayed in the main streets of the city, carried away by present enthusiasm, and agape for fresh excitement, might be seen many a proud dark face, with black curled beard and hair, looking calmly, triumphantly, it may be even scornfully, on the seething shifting throng. These faces all bore the same impress of quiet daring and prompt resolve, satisfied to bide the right time patiently, yet ready at any moment to strike the fatal blow. Their haughty looks and stern self-confidence disclosed the temper of that army which, having been left at home to protect the empire during the last campaign, had a.s.sumed to itself the t.i.tle of the Great Queen's host, affecting to take its orders directly from Semiramis, to be at her especial service, and devoted primarily to her interest or person, rather than to the empire or the king.

It needed less knowledge of human nature than was possessed by a.s.sarac to foresee that such a distinction between two such forces, as had now ent.i.tled themselves respectively the armies of Egypt and a.s.syria, was likely to produce feelings of jealousy and rancour, ready at any moment to break out in open hostility. The eunuch, despite attentive study of the stars, had not failed to read that book diligently which closes every page with every pa.s.sing day, sealed to the curiosity that is fain to antic.i.p.ate its coming chapters, but standing fairly open for those who would learn the probabilities of the future from the records of the past. He judged men's thoughts less by their deeds than their inclinations, and calculated their future conduct rather from their pa.s.sions than their interests. It was through his advice that the army of Egypt had been scattered over the surrounding country, and that of a.s.syria, or the queen's host, concentrated in the city, by timely use of the Great King's signet. With military decision, unexpected perhaps in one whose avocations seemed unwarlike, as his character might have been thought unmanly, he had seized, and caused to be securely guarded, the princ.i.p.al gates of the city, the sluices that dammed its stream, even the tunnel under the great river, which afforded communication between the palaces of the king and queen. He had neglected no precaution; had provided for every emergency; had corrupted one army, disorganised another, maddened the priests, inflamed the mult.i.tude, set his snares in the very path of the n.o.ble prey he had determined to destroy; and calmly awaited the result.

Beladon looked on his chief with the admiration of a neophyte for some grand professor of his art. It seemed strange to see one on whom the fate of an empire depended, whose slightest hesitation might involve with his own the ruin of all his supporters, so calm, so confident, so unmoved. Not the careless, pleasure-seeking Sethos, whose only business in life was to fill the king's cup, as his chief recreation was to sun himself in Kalmim's eyes, could have seemed less interested in the mighty preparations going forward than was the prime mover and origin of all. Nay, that thoughtless youth _did_ wear some slight air of perplexity on his brow while he crossed the open s.p.a.ce between the temple and the royal palace, on his way from the apartments of the prince.