Istar turned her half-blinded eyes upon the defender, and smiled at him—the golden-haired, the silver-voiced, whom long ago she had sheltered in her shrine.
"I will keep to thy side—Char-mides. Or—I die here. Yet I fear not death. Life—only—is—terrible," she muttered, faintly.
The Greek did not answer her. Seeing an opening in the throng, he threw one arm around her, and, holding his right hand out in front of them both, hurried quickly forward. Istar never remembered how it happened. She saw her eunuchs all around her. She knew little of the angry people beyond. Presently she and her rescuer stood together beyond the mob on the edge of the platform steps.
"Thy eunuchs, I think, will keep the crowd from pursuit. They have been bravely true to thee. Now, canst reach my dwelling, lady? The way is far."
"To thy dwelling I cannot go. May the Almighty God make thee forever happy! Leave me now. I follow my path alone."
Charmides regarded her as slightly crazy. As she started quickly forward he kept close at her side. "Come with me—a little to the right," he suggested, gently.
She shook her head. "Nay, Charmides, I know the way. It is to the house of my lord that I go. Haste! Haste! They follow me!"
She started forward as she spoke, running in terror down the steps into the square, and turning unhesitatingly into the Â-Ibur-Sabû. Charmides kept to her and supported her as she went, knowing not what else to do, not daring to take the child, to which she clung with such a mother-clasp that none could have presumed to ask her to relinquish it. And in this wise they proceeded together up the great road, finally turning into the street of Palaces leading towards the river. As they passed, no man or woman failed to turn and stare at the couple, for surely such a sight as this had never before been seen in Babylon. How long the walk lasted, minutes, hours, or days, or how it was that Istar kept from losing consciousness after the terrible hour she had been through, Charmides never knew. Some of the agony, mental and physical, that the woman was enduring he could read in her face. The greater part of it no mortal could have known or borne, for it was the death of her immortal existence and the beginning of her real earth-life, her life as a human being, a woman without power, without strength, without knowledge of what was to come.
Noon glared over the city as the two of them reached the border of the hunting-park that surrounded Nabu-Nahid's palace. A little farther along was the palace gate-way, with its group of guards in their magnificent liveries. Charmides looked at them in despair, for surely the poor woman at his side would meet with no courtesy here. Such fears did not trouble Istar. Advancing to the first soldier, she said at once:
"Admit me, now, to"—she faltered over the name—"to my Lord Belshazzar."