By its light Marsyas examined Agrippa. Between the prince's shoulders, his hand touched chilling blood.
"Ambushed!" he said grimly. "Stabbed in the back!"
Marsyas looked at the prince's right hand. It was still clenched, and the flesh on the knuckles was abraded, the second joints swelling fast.
Vasti, with suspicion in her olive eyes, carried the torch over to the contorted shape. Then she made a sign to Marsyas. He looked. It was an Egyptian wearing the livery of Flaccus. The prince's Arabic dagger was neatly buried to the hilt in the servitor's breast. Vasti examined the second prostrate form. By her torch Marsyas saw that it was Eutychus, conscious but benumbed. His left ear, cheek and eye were swollen and black.
"It seems," said Marsyas, stanching Agrippa's wound, "that the prince disabled his own support!"
But Vasti, by deft twitches of ear and hair and threats in Hindu, significant in tone if not in speech to the charioteer, finally got Eutychus upon his feet.
"Take up the prince," she said to Marsyas. "The slave may follow or lie as he chooses. I shall attend my mistress."
Marsyas lifted the Herod and, following Vasti, hurried on again into the darkness. The bayadere made toward the sea-front, not many yards distant, sped across the wharf and over the edge apparently into the water. Marsyas, by this time ready to follow the brown woman into any extreme, plunged after her. He landed abruptly in the bottom of a punt. Lydia followed, and Eutychus, with an alacrity not expected of one who groaned so helplessly.
Vasti severed the rope that tied up the boat, and, with a strong thrust of her hands against the piling, pushed the boat away from the wharf. But she did not take up the oars. She left them to Marsyas, trained on the blue waters of Galilee.
In a moment he had pulled out into the black expanse of the bay, and, with the prince's ship in mind, rowed among the sleeping shipping.