But Meriamun looked down the hall with cold eyes, for she feared neither Death nor Life, nor God nor man.
And while she looked and while the Wanderer counted, there rose a faint murmuring sound from the city without, a sound that grew and grew, the thunder of myriad feet that run before the death of kings. Then the doors burst asunder and a woman sped through them in her night robes, and in her arms she bore the naked body of a boy.
“Pharaoh!” she cried, “Pharaoh, and thou, O Queen, look upon thy son—thy firstborn son—dead is thy son, O Pharaoh! Dead is thy son, O Queen! In my arms he died suddenly as I lulled him to his rest,” and she laid the body of the child down on the board among the vessels of gold, among the garlands of lotus flowers and the beakers of rose-red wine.
Then Pharaoh rose and rent his purple robes and wept aloud. Meriamun rose too, and lifting the body of her son clasped it to her breast, and her eyes were terrible with wrath and grief, but she wept not.
“See now the curse that this evil woman, this False Hathor, hath brought upon us,” she said.
But the very guests sprang up crying, “It is not the Hathor whom we worship, it is not the Holy Hathor, it is the Gods of those dark Apura whom thou, O Queen, wilt not let go. On thy head and the head of Pharaoh be it,” and even as they cried the murmur without grew to a shriek of woe, a shriek so wild and terrible that the Palace walls rang. Again that shriek rose, and yet a third time, never was such a cry heard in Egypt. And now for the first time in all his days the face of the Wanderer grew white with fear, and in fear of heart he prayed for succour to his Goddess—to Aphrodite, the daughter of Dione.
Again the doors behind them burst open and the Guards flocked in—mighty men of many foreign lands; but now their faces were wan, their eyes stared wide, and their jaws hung down. But at the sound of the clanging of their harness the strength of the Wanderer came back to him again, for the Gods and their vengeance he feared, but not the sword of man. And now once more the bow sang aloud. He grasped it, he bent it with his mighty knee, and strung it, crying:
“Awake, Pharaoh, awake! Foes draw on. Say, be these all the men?”
Then the Captain answered, “These be all of the Guard who are left living in the Palace. The rest are stark, smitten by the angry Gods.”
Now as the Captain spake, one came running up the hall, heeding neither the dead nor the living. It was the old priest Rei, the Commander of the Legion of Amen, who had been the Wanderer’s guide, and his looks were wild with fear.