As she sat apart, her great eyes lifted to the glow of Ishtar's trail, a man-at-arms came clanking down the garden path, bearing report that a stranger waited beyond the wall with a message for the Queen alone. His name was Dagas, a Bactrian warrior, and, as surety of faith and good intent, he sent a jeweled ring, declaring that Assyria's Queen once wore it on her hand.
Semiramis took the jewel, which in truth had been her own, and, remembering, laughed aloud. This Dagas was the same whom her wits befooled in the foot-hills of Hindu-Kush, when she claimed a sisterhood to Oxyartes and sent the Bactrian seeking for an army of phantom warriors. So, laughing again, she dismissed her maidens and suffered Dagas to approach alone.
He knelt before her, pressing her sandal to his lips, then at her bidding rose, and gave her smile for smile; no longer the beardless youth, but a grizzled man of war, on whom the heel of years had trod and set its mark. She looked upon him now, remembering how her charms had dazzled him in the day of long ago, so she smiled again and spoke in gentleness:
"Ah, Dagas, thou has come at last to reproach me for deceiving thee. In exchange for Zariaspa I gave thee a jewel and a lie. For thee an evil bartering, my Dagas; yet ask of my bounty, and receive. What wouldst thou?"
"Naught," returned the Bactrian, with a sigh, "naught save thy memory of one who hath loved Shammuramat, and who loveth still."
To the eyes of the woman leaped the fires of wrath, for how should a slave presume to babble of his love?—for her—the Queen of all Assyria! She would have clapped her hands in summons of her guard to slay the dog, yet Dagas restrained her gently, smiling as he shook his head.
"Nay, Mistress of the World, I speak not of myself, albeit of myself the same is true; for while I wore thy ring I took no wife unto my breast, no hope unto my heart. For another I plead—for one who shall grope in darkness all his days—yet in his hell of everlasting night, one cry hath rung through the empty hall of years—one heart-cry beating at the doors of life—Shammuramat!"
The Bactrian ceased. The Queen, in wonder, was silent, too, for the words of the man seemed strange and meaningless. Yet why should the dead arise to life? Why should the thread of memory become a chain and drag her back to her lord of other days?—to Menon the Beautiful—he who had torn the veil of Ishtar, and bade her look on the naked glory of a heart!
"Speak," she whispered, watching Dagas, as before she watched in the shadow of Zariaspa's wall, waiting, listening, for tidings of the lost; and Dagas spoke.
He told her of a pestilence which had run through his city's streets, knocking at the doors of beggar and of prince till those who might took refuge in the hills, while others remained because of poverty or lack of fear, and died. Among the stricken were two Egyptian eunuchs, Neb and Ura, who guarded a certain prisoner by command of Tiglath-Shul; yet when these eunuchs died, the Governor set Dagas and a brother warrior as keepers of the man. They had ministered to this prisoner, whose eyes were blind and whose hands and feet were useless by reason of his being nailed against the wall.