Azemilcus and the chancellor came forward, surrounded by the priests of the temple. The two kings, one withered and shrunken and old, his brain cankered by the cynical knowledge of experience, and the other, in the fulness of his vigorous youth and generous enthusiasms, looked into each other's eyes. Alexander's face was grave and stern, but the mocking smile still hovered about the lips of the older man.
"What have you to say?" Alexander said at last.
"I have been a king," Azemilcus replied, "but I am a king no longer. What is your will?"
"You may live," Alexander replied coldly, "but you have never been a king. Where is your son?"
"He is dead," the old king answered, and his eyes wavered.
"I would rather be in his place than in thine," Alexander said shortly. "Follow me."
Azemilcus shrugged his shoulders and gathered his robe more closely around him. To all who had sought refuge in the temple Alexander granted safety, and then, having issued the necessary orders regarding the city, he turned back to the palace.
The streets were encumbered with the dead. The bodies lay in heaps behind the broken barricades or scattered between them, where the fugitives had been stricken as they fled before the fury of the Macedonian charge. A wounded Tyrian raised himself on his elbow while the two kings passed, cursed Azemilcus, and died.
In the council room of the palace Alexander demanded from the chancellor an accounting of the public treasure of Tyre, an enormous sum in gold and silver, and gave it into the custody of his own treasurer. There, too, he received the reports of his captains, and with marvellous quickness despatched the business that they brought before him. The greater part of the army he ordered back to the camp on the mainland.
When nothing more remained to be done, he turned to Leonidas.