Sarchedon: A Legend of the Great Queen

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

At every summons the boat rose higher in the water. When Sataspes was called, she swung to the flow and wash of the sluggish wave against her sides; at the name of Ninus, the Great King, she floated free and unencumbered as before she put out on her mysterious voyage.

With a heart lightened as was the boat that bore him, he pushed her off to return; for something warned him that now his task was done. He would fain have spoken with Assarac; but the surrounding gloom seemed so to oppress his lungs and chest, that the words formed by his tongue could not find vent through his lips.

Once more he was bending to the oar, when, as it were out of his own heart, came a voice whispering his name, "Sarchedon! Sarchedon!" in low sweet tones, which yet he knew vibrated with the sentence of his doom.

An unseen power raised him to his feet, and would have lifted him to shore, but that the priest held him back by his coarse fisher's garment, which dragged on chest and throat till he was fairly choked. Then, in extremity of fear and agony, he found his voice to call on Assarac for help at the moment when his vesture, yielding to the strain laid on it, parted asunder to let the cold night air in on his naked breast.

So he awoke, scared, trembling, panting for breath, and even in his waking seemed still wrapped in the gloom of that Isle of Shadows—seemed still to catch the tread of muffled footsteps, the breath of airy whispers, faint echoes from another world.

In that age, and amongst a people ever striving after a mystic ideal, yearning for communion with a higher world, dreams, and the interpretations thereof, were held of no small account.

Sarchedon, warrior though he was, and, like his great chief, little imbued with the superstitions of his time and country, could not yet pass over such a scene as his imagination had even now pictured without much cogitation and concern. He sat up and considered it in no small perplexity, inclining to regard the vision now as an omen of fortune, anon as a warning of fate. In his suffocating struggles to wake, his hands had been pressed close against his breast; a few moments elapsed ere he became conscious that he held in them a jewel he had never seen before. Rising from his couch at the foot of the tower, he hastened to examine it by starlight under the open sky. It consisted of an emerald, on which was cut the figure of a dove with outspread wings, following, as it seemed, the course of an arrow flying upward through the air. That it had come to him by supernatural influences during his sleep, he never doubted, and interpreted it, as men always do interpret the inexplicable, in the manner most agreeable to his own wishes. This dove, he said to himself, must mean the girl he had so lately seen at the Well of Palms; for what could be more dove-like than the maiden sweetness and innocent bearing of Ishtar? The arrow doubtless signified, in its upward flight, his own future career. He would become illustrious as a warrior, and Ishtar would follow him in his brilliant course to fame. Was it an arrow, or the initial of a name? He was forced to confess, from its shape and direction, that it seemed intended to represent the weapon itself, and not the letter of which he would fain consider it a symbol. Nevertheless, it must be a sign that the gods intended him for great things, and it should be no fault of his if the only woman who had yet touched his heart did not share with him the good fortune thus promised by the stars.

Meantime it wanted many hours of dawn; so he returned to his cushions and mantle for the remainder of his night's rest, stopping by the table at which he had sat with Assarac in the evening for a pull at the golden flagon, not yet emptied of its good Damascus wine.

Nevertheless, long before sunrise, he awoke refreshed, invigorated, happy; feeling the amulet resting on his breast, he accepted its presence for a fortunate omen; and ere daylight paled the beacon-fire on the tower of Belus, was galloping Merodach through the desert on his way to the Well of Palms.

"Surely," thought this dreamer, "she will be watching there for the first glitter of spears that shall give token of her father's return? Then will I tell her when to expect the host, and how to distinguish between its vanguard and the spearmen of its strength, having Arbaces at their head, who march with the chariot of the Great King. She will give me to drink, and I will say unto her, Maiden, as this draught of water to one athirst and stifled with the desert sand, so is a whisper from the lips and a glance from the eyes of the fairest damsel in all the land of Shinar to him who has ridden from the great city only to look on her face ere he departs to see her no more. Then she cannot but lift her veil, and speak kindly to me, bidding me tarry but a few moments, while she draws water for my horse. So will I tell her the whole tale; and hereafter, when my lord the king has rewarded his warriors for service done with bow and spear, I will take to Arbaces a score of camels, a hundred sheep, and a talent of gold, together with the armour I won of that swarthy giant beyond the sweet river; and how shall he say me nay? So will I lead her home to my tent, and then shall I have attained full happiness, and need ask for nothing more on earth."