Yet Glaucon still looked on her boldly.
“You have your mighty gods, but we have ours. Pray to your Mazda and Mithra, but we will still trust Zeus of the Thunders and Athena of the Gray Eyes, the bulwarks of our fathers. And Fate must answer which can help the best.”
The Persians shook their heads. It was time to return to the palace. All that Glaucon had seen of the Barbarian’s might, since awakening in Sardis, told him Xerxes was indeed destined to go forth conquering and to conquer. Then the vision of the Acropolis, the temples, the Guardian Goddess, returned. He banished all disloyal thoughts for the instant. The Prince walked with his wife, Glaucon with Roxana. He had always thought her beautiful; she had never seemed so beautiful as now. Did he imagine whither Mardonius perhaps was leading him?
CHAPTER XVI
THE COMING OF XERXES THE GOD-KING
At last the lotus-eating ended. Repeated messengers told how Xerxes was quitting Babylon, was holding a muster in Cappadocia, and now was crossing Asia Minor toward Sardis. Mardonius and his companions had returned to that capital. Daily the soldiery poured into Sardis by tens of thousands. Glaucon knew now it was not a vain boast that for ten years the East had been arming against Hellas, that the whole power of the twenty satrapies would be flung as one thunderbolt upon devoted Greece.
In the plain about Sardis a second city was rising, of wicker booths and gay pavilions. The host grew hourly. Now a band of ebony archers in leopard skins entered from far Ethiopia, now Bactrian battle-axemen, now yellow-faced Tartars from the northeast, now bright-turbaned Arabs upon their swaying camels,—Syrians, Cilicians, black-bearded Assyrians and Babylonians, thick-lipped Egyptians, came, and many a strange race more.
But the core of the army were the serried files of Aryan horse and foot,—blond-headed, blue-eyed men, Persians and Medes, veterans of twenty victories. Their muscles were tempered steel. Their unwearying feet had tramped many a long parasang. Some were light infantry with wicker shields and powerful bows, but as many more horsemen in gold-scaled armour and with desert steeds that flew like Pegasus.