As the good horse rolled over a maimed Armenian, the dying mountain man shortened the sword he grasped fiercely even then, and buried it in the animal's bowels.
Agile as a panther, Semiramis extricated herself, and was up like lightning; but when she saw the beast she prized so dearly dead at her very feet, her heart burned, and her eyes blazed with a fury wilder, fiercer, madder, than the rage of any beast of prey.
Baffled, stunned, bewildered, she only knew that Merodach lay slain beneath her; that an armed enemy stood above with shielded face and javelin raised to strike; that here across the body of her horse was the turning-point of battle, and that she held a bow and arrow in her hand. Unconsciously, she fitted the one to the string, and drew the other at a venture, as it were, in self-defence.
It was the Armenian arrow, cut in Armenian forests, tipped with Armenian steel. It had travelled to Babylon and back as a symbol of dignified remonstrance and royal self-respect; now the white cruel arm impelled it straight and true, to find its home in the heart of an Armenian king.
Stricken below the buckler, he felt his life-blood oozing down to wet its feathers, drop by drop.
"Turn thy hand out of the battle," murmured Aryas to his charioteer, "since I am hurt even unto death!"
But he never spoke again; for the Great Queen's men of war, making in to aid their leader, hurled him from his chariot, gashing with pitiless sword-strokes the comely face so fair even in death, crushing under trampling hoofs the stately form that, maimed, bruised, and mangled, was grand and kingly still.
So the horsemen of Assyria triumphed; her spears made victory secure, her chariots rolled over the slain. The blue mantles smote and spared not; the Anakim extricating themselves, not without considerable loss, departed in good order; and the pursuit rolled on till the sons of Ashur sacked the town of Ardesh—to burn, pillage, and destroy, even unto the going down of the day.
But men looked in vain for her who had led the attack and achieved the victory, asking each other with eager looks and anxious faces,
"What tidings of the Great Queen?"