“What is the serpent that you see?”
“Ah, I know not, though I seem to see a face!” Nitetis raised herself to her knees, lifted her head and laid it upon the satrap’s arm. “And Sadyattes keeps the city—Sadyattes who came from Aryenis’s country.”
Smerdis, playing in the middle court with Alyattes said, “My father and my mother play together.” After a while Alyattes, leaving the court and going to his mother where she lay in the room of the fountain, said, “Mother, the lady Nitetis and my father play together! Smerdis told me.”
At sunset the gardens filled with the inmates of the seraglio. Through the day they had stayed for coolness in jalousied rooms, or upon the violet side of pillared courts. Now they came out under sky, though yet, all around them, ran the wall that could not be scaled, that could not be pierced. Mist rose from the water tanks, hung between the trees; heavy white flowers opened disk and cup, heavy sweet odours drifted and clung, moths appeared, and all the life of the dusk. Women moved or sat or lay under the spice trees, the fig trees, the palms, the tamarisks and cedars. Those who were young and beautiful were richly dressed. Those who were old or ill-shaped or ill-favoured were work-slaves only and as such marked by a mean and fantastic garb. Eunuchs moved through the gardens, and they, too, were made into grotesques.
Aryenis, attended, with her Alyattes that was to be the satrap’s heir, entered a walk that was loved by Nitetis and given over to her by the etiquette of the place. Here was the Egyptian, Smerdis beside her. The two lay beside a stone basin where stood a rose-and-white flamingo, where upon a mound of earth a tortoise crawled.
Said Aryenis, “All mud of the Nile.”
Nitetis lifted herself. “Meranes, that is master, has not yet departed.—Pearl of the Deep, who, between the first and now, has known every merchant’s stall!”
Said Aryenis: “Ah, god to whom mounts the fire! Have I known many markets? Then did I learn in them more than your one land could teach!”
“Yet it gives me hold on Meranes!” Nitetis raised herself from the rock, the tortoise, the flamingo basin. She smiled. “Have you noted that Smerdis grows as tall as Alyattes?”
Aryenis drew her veil around her. Only her eyes showed.