He stopped, and from a vase of wine that stood near the sacred fire, sprinkled a few drops to the four quarters of the sky. "I pour this drink-offering," he said, "to Ashtaroth, Queen of Heaven! Shall I tell the Queen of Earth a tale I read in those stars forming the symbol which, rightly interpreted, contains the name of Semiramis?"
The queen nodded assent, turning her beautiful face upward to the sky.
"Could it all be true?" was the wild thought that fleeted for an instant through his brain, "and had not Ashtaroth herself come down from heaven to look on her adoring votary?"
With a glance almost of awe into the queen's upturned countenance, Assarac proceeded: "I read there of a city in the South, a city beyond the desert, pleasant and beautiful in the waving of palms, the music of rushing waters, built on the margin of a lake, where leaping fish at sundown dot the glistening surface, countless as rain-drops in a shower. On its bank stands a temple to that goddess who, like Dagon, bears half a human form, terminating in the scales and body of a fish. Very fair is Derceta to the girdle, and, womanlike, fanciful as she is fair. Near her temple dwelt a young fisherman, comely, ruddy, of exceeding beauty and manhood, so that the goddess did not scorn to love him with all the ardour of her double nature, only too well.
"Yet it shamed her of her human attributes when she gave birth to a child, though the stars tell me, O queen, that never was seen so beautiful a babe, even amongst those borne by the daughters of men to the host of heaven.
"Nevertheless, a foul wound festers equally beneath silk and sackcloth; so that the goddess, in wrath and shame, carried her infant into the wilderness, and left it there to die.
"Behold how Ashtaroth glows and brightens in the darkening night. Surely it was the Queen of Heaven who sent fair doves to pity, succour, and preserve that child of light, tender as a flower, and beautiful as a star. Day by day the fond birds brought her fruits and sustenance, till certain peasants, observing their continual flight in the same direction, followed their guidance, and found by a rill of water the laughing infant, bearing even then a promise of beauty to be unequalled hereafter in the whole world."
There was pride and sorrow in the queen's deep eyes as she fixed them on the seer, and whispered,
"Ask, then, if it had not been better to have left the child there to die."
"The stars acknowledge no pity," was his answer. "It is the first of human weaknesses cast off by those who rule in earth or heaven. Had they not written the destiny of that babe by the desert spring in the same characters I read up there to-night? They tell me how, in her earliest womanhood, she was seen by Menon, governor of ten provinces under my lord the king. They tell me how Menon made her his wife. They tell me, too, of an amulet graven with a dove on the wing, which that maiden wore hidden in her bosom when she came veiled into the presence of her lord."