Istar of Babylon: A Phantasy

by Margaret Horton Potter

"The plague."

There was a momentary silence as the four that stood there gave the words time to penetrate. Then Istar, quivering again, started suddenly towards the door. Charmides barred her way.

"Where goest thou?" he asked, gently.

"Out! Out into the Great City! Let me go, Charmides! Let me go!"

With what little strength she had Istar threw herself upon the Greek, that he might give way and let her escape from his house. But Charmides was firm, and his strength infinitely greater than hers. After a struggle of a few seconds Istar gave way and would have fallen upon the floor had not the young man caught her about the body, lifted her in his arms, and carried her, lifeless and unresisting, into the little-used inner room where, at this moment, Bazuzu lay asleep. The black slave was quickly roused and Istar was placed upon a hurriedly arranged bed. Then Charmides returned again to his wife and sternly commanded her to retire to her room up-stairs, forbidding her to enter the lower rooms of their dwelling while Istar should be there. Both Bazuzu and Beltani had had the plague, and were in no danger from it. But Charmides himself, like Ramûa, was relegated to the upper rooms and to the roof.

The moment that her body rested upon a bed, poor as it was, Istar fell asleep, and there, in the great weight of her sickness and her grief, lay for many hours insensible to all things. As the heat of the day came on, and the atmosphere of the small and ill-ventilated room became more and more stifling, Bazuzu took his place at her side, and minute by minute, hour by hour, fanned to her lips what air there was, while his own face streamed with perspiration and his breath came in gasps. His eyes, the eyes that had so tenderly watched the childlike slumbers of Ramûa and Baba, now looked upon her whose face had been the wonder of the East, whom he himself once had seen clothed in blinding radiance, seated upon her golden car in a procession of the great gods and who now lay here, alone and friendless, shorn of her divinity, stricken with disease, to die a pauper's death or to live on to a hideous old age.

Istar suffered in her sleep. Whether it was the memory of the horror of the past night or the pain of disease racking her body could not be told. But Bazuzu heard her moans with heartfelt pity. Over and over again she spoke two names, one of which the slave could scarcely understand, the other that of the dead prince of Babylon. They were the names of her baby and of her husband, all that world of happiness that had gone, and that was calling to her out of the shadowy past.

Like every one in the clutch of the dread sickness, Istar thirsted continually, yet shrank, nauseated, at the mere sight of water or milk. Continually Beltani brought and held to her lips the refreshment that she craved, as often to have it thrust away with a gesture of pitiable repulsion. At length, seeing there was no other way, Bazuzu held the sick woman fast pinioned on the ground, while Beltani poured down her throat a pint of freshly cooled water. Over the first swallow Istar's struggles were convulsive, but after that she drank eagerly all that was given her, and when the last in the cup was gone she opened her burning eyes in a mute appeal for more. This was refused, of necessity; but, in pity for the heat of her fever and the closeness of the room, Beltani had her carried out and laid down near the door-way of the living-room, where presently she sank into a sleep that changed gradually to a heavy stupor.

Noon passed and left the city streets quivering with heat. From the burning desert in the west came a faint breath of wind, that twinkled blue and white in the air till the eyes were blinded and the brain reeled under its intensity. Charmides and Ramûa were sitting together on the gallery outside their room in an upper story of the tenement, looking off to the shining strip of canal beyond which rose the patch of shrivelled green where, two months before, Ribâta's garden had blossomed with many a fragrant rose and fragile lily. Charmides was mentally preparing himself for another journey across the desolate city to the temple of Bel, that vast tomb in which so many tangled bodies lay. He had not yet voiced his intention to Ramûa, though he knew that she would not oppose it.

Suddenly round the corner of the tenement, into the open square, came a strange thing: a human being, crawling upon hands and knees along the brick pavement, halting now and then in visible exhaustion, but displaying also a nervous eagerness in its movements; and all the way behind it as it came was left a deep, red trail. A mere heap of bloody rags at first it seemed; but presently, as he watched, Charmides could see a mop of long, black hair that fell to the ground upon one side.