“Did you come to me?—I would, at last, have come to you!”
“I came.... Will you go home with me?”
“I did not wholly mean unkindness.... I am not truly man the wolf.”
“Will you come? Perhaps I am only woman the snake.”
Glaucon went with her. They went together from the Acropolis into the narrow ways.
CHAPTER X
THE PEARL OF THE DEEP
Meranes, the turbaned satrap, had a palace that to the west sent its gardens to the sea-edge, and on the east opened sheer upon the ever-humming hive that was his satrapy’s chief town. The palace owned a great, middle body with arm-like processes, jointed tentacles that strayed afar into odorous and flower-spangled wildernesses, and all was at once fantastically and strongly built. There were gilding and mosaic and fretwork that treated stone like flax. The palace spread, many-courted, myriad-roomed, multi-coloured. On the dusky garden side it was mingled with trees and bloom and fruit: it knew deep alleys and shadowy rings, and stone water tanks where lilies were planted and fish swam. But on the town side it rose blank and clear from the hot and clanging place. Here was the official palace—the palace of the audience, of the satrap’s government, of officials, soldiers, magi, principal men and the horde that was not principal, spies, confidants, merchants of sorts, ministers and attendants of pleasure, of orders given and received, of complaint, pleading, demand, grievances and clamour, reward and punishment, strife open and concealed, jealousy, rivalry, lies, greed, fanatic hate and fanatic devotion, and always a brew of conspiracies, great and small, very many small, and on hand perpetually one or two great. Such a cloud hung always over it, hung garden side and city side, for influences were subtle and stole between. Breathing that musk and sandal, hearing always that whispering, governed Meranes, satrap of a deep province, slave only to the namer of the satraps, the eastern king who was despot of a dozen despots.
Under Meranes, the governor of the chief city was Sadyattes. The magus of most power was Artaxias.
In the middle palace, whence he might move through any arm, Meranes had his rooms for dwelling. To the right, he went to the front upon the clanging town, and the business of the satrapy. When he entered again that middle part he drew with him confidants and favourites and made for himself now counsel, now revelry and relaxation. Or, alone here, he spent much consideration upon how to keep life, honour, and satrapy, seeing that to do so he must ever please that more richly turbaned despot who herded satraps, and about whose ears ever buzzed the maligners. Or he drew to him certain of the magi and talked with them, for he was a man who trembled at times on the edge of seeing the unseen and touching the untouched, and the magi were held to be free of the king’s road to knowledge. To the left, past guarded doors, movement brought Meranes where the palace ran, many-fronded, into shadows of groves, into the realm of slippered footfall and treble voices. Here were squandered wealth, and heavy odours, and the nightingale’s song. Here the life of Meranes stayed among women. Here lay the filled seraglio, and here for soldiers stood the files of eunuchs. And for all the soldiers and the slaves, for all the blank walls and guarded doors, word-bearing winds blew through the palace from the right to the left and the left to the right. Any part of the palace might conspire with any other part against any third part.
The favourite wife of the satrap was Aryenis, with just below her, creeping at times very nigh her, a woman of Egypt named Nitetis. Each had a son.