By the middle of the month bodies could not be buried, but lay piled in streets and houses, till Babylon became the true city of Mulge, Queen of the Dead. Those that knew, those that had gone through the visitation of thirty years before, felt their hearts fail them as they thought of what was still to come. Many, indeed, tried to leave the city; but Cyrus' soldiers patrolled every gate, and any having about them the mark of death were not allowed to pass.
Charmides the Greek was not among those that attempted an escape. By every tie that he held sacred he was bound to his adopted city, and it was his one desire to do what little he might to help the sufferers of the plague.
At dawn on the fourth of Ab, the morning after the fall of the city, Ramûa and Beltani sat together in their tenement, waiting, watching, more than all wondering at the strange sounds that had come to them as faint echoes of the great happenings of the night. Neither of them had gone to celebrate the feast in any temple. Plead or storm as Beltani would, she found Charmides fixed in his wishes on this point, and in tears and bitterness of spirit she found it necessary to move forward for an entire year all her dreams of three days of unlimited wine and meat. The Greek, who had gone back to temple-service almost immediately after his meeting with Belshazzar on the day of Daniel's attempted assassination of the king, knew enough of what was likely to happen in the first night of the feast to forbid his family to participate in it. And while Beltani had raged, and even Ramûa had shed a few submissive tears when Charmides departed for the temple of Sin, the two of them watched quietly through the night and eagerly awaited the promised early return of the master of the household.
Very early in the evening came vague mutterings of distant, gathering mobs. Much later were the still more indeterminate but more ominous sounds of battle, shouts and cries, with the underlying murmur grown more fierce. Afterwards fell the great silence—a silence in which no man could sleep, something more terrible than sound, something that foreboded direful things—carnage, murder, merciless death. At this time the name of Baba first passed the lips of the waiting women. Baba was in Ribâta's train at the temple of Bel-Marduk. Baba, a slave, stood no chance of salvation if any were to be lost. Had she lived or had she died that night? Through the silence that lasted till dawn this unspoken question lay in the hearts of the watchers. And then, with the first streaks of day, their thoughts were turned again by something else, another cry more awful than any battle-shout, that rose like a mist from every hovel in the tenement quarter.
"The plague—the plague! Woe unto us! It is the plague!"
It was as if every soul in the city was become a leper, and each was crying his disease. At the first sound of it Ramûa's heart turned sick within her, and Beltani became as white as the dawn. For Beltani could remember the last plague in Babylon.
"Charmides! Why does he stay?" whispered Ramûa to her mother, over and over again; and it was the only word that passed between them till, with the first beams of the sun, the Greek was seen coming into the square in front of the tenement. At sight of him Ramûa gave a little cry:
"He is not alone!"
"It is not Baba," added Beltani, quickly.