Sarchedon: A Legend of the Great Queen

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

"And for a light offence," answered the other. "Sataspes did but lift her veil to look on the face of a virgin in a drove of captives who had not yet defiled by the Great King's chariot. She cried out, half in wrath, half in fear; and ere the veil fell back on her bosom, the offender was a dead man."

"Did the Great King look favourably on the virgin?" asked Assarac. "A woman must needs be fair to warrant the taking of a brave man's life."

"I scarce heeded her," answered Sarchedon. "She came of a captive race, whom the Egyptians hold in bondage down yonder, imposing on them servile offices and many hard tasks—a race that seem to mix neither with their conquerors nor with strangers. They have peculiar laws and customs in their houses and families, giving their daughters in marriage only to their kindred, and arraying their whole people like an army, in hosts and companies. I used to see them at work for their task-masters, moving with as much order and precision as the archers and spearmen of the Great King."

"I have heard of them," said Assarac; "I have heard too that their increasing numbers gave no small disquiet to the last Pharaoh, who was wiser than his successor. Will they not rise at some future time, and cast off the Egyptian yoke?"

"Never!" answered the warrior scornfully. "It presses hard and heavy, but this people will never strike a blow in self-defence: they are a nation of slaves, of shepherds and herdsmen. Not a man have I seen amongst them who could draw a bow, nor so much as sling a stone. Where are they to find a leader? If such a one rose up, how are they to follow him? They are utterly unwarlike and weak of heart; they have no arms, no horses, and scarcely any gods."

Assarac smiled with the good-humoured superiority of an adept condescending to the crude intelligence of a neophyte. Did he not believe that through the very exercise of his profession he had sounded the depths of all faith, here and hereafter—in the earth, in the skies, in the infinite—above all, in himself and his own destiny?

"Their worship is not so unlike our own as you, who are outside the temple, might believe," said he, pointing upwards to the glowing spark on the summit of the tower of Belus, which was never extinguished night or day. "I have learned in our traditions, handed down, word for word, from priest to priest, since the first family of man peopled the earth after the subsiding of the waters, that they too worship the sacred element which constitutes the essence and spirit of the universe. If they have no images, nor outward symbols of their faith, it is because their deity is impalpable, invisible, as the principle of heat which generates flame. If they turn from the Seven Stars with scorn, if they pour out no drink-offering, make no obeisance to the Queen of Heaven, it is because they look yet higher, to that mystic property from which Baalim and Ashtaroth draw light and life and dominion over us poor children of darkness down here below. Their great patriarch and leader came out of this very land; and there is Assyrian blood, though I think shame to confess it, in the veins of that captive people subject now to our hereditary enemies in the South."

"The men are well enough to look on," answered Sarchedon, "but, to my thinking, their women are not so fair as the women of the plain between the rivers; not to be spoken of with the Great Queen's retinue here, nor the mountain maids who come down from the north to gladden old Nineveh like sweet herbs and wild flowers growing in the crevices of a ruined wall. If this people are of our lineage, they have fallen away sadly from the parent stock."

"What I tell you is truth," replied Assarac; "and I, sitting by you here to-night, have spoken with men whose fathers remembered those that in their boyhood had seen the great founder of our nation—old, wrinkled, with a white beard descending to his feet, but lofty still, and mighty as the tower of defiance he reared to heaven, though suffering daily from torment unendurable; and why? Because of the patriarch and chief of the nation you despise."

Through all the Assyrian people, but especially amongst the hosts of the Great King, to believe in Nimrod was to believe in Baal, in Ashur, in their religion, their national existence, their very identity.