It was not easy to roll the three corpses from their feebly stirring comrade. When this was done, the stricken man [pg 246]was still encased in his cuirass and helmet. They saw only that his hands were slim and white.
“With care,” ordered the humane bow-bearer, “he is a young man. I heard Leonidas took only older men on his desperate venture. Here, rascals, do you not see he is smothered in that helmet? Lift him up, unbuckle the cuirass. By Mithra, he has a strong and noble form! Now the helmet—uncover the face.”
But as the Egyptian did so, his master uttered a shout of mingled wonderment and terror.
“Glaucon—Prexaspes, and in Spartan armour!”
What had befallen Glaucon was in no wise miraculous. He had borne his part in the battle until the Hellenes fell back to the fatal hillock. Then in one of the fierce onsets which the Barbarians attempted before they had recourse to the simpler and less glorious method of crushing their foes by arrow fire, a Babylonian’s war club had dashed upon his helmet. The stout bronze had saved him from wound, but under the stroke strength and consciousness had left him in a flash. The moment after he fell, the soldier beside him had perished by a javelin, and falling above the Athenian made his body a ghastly shield against the surge and trampling of the battle. Glaucon lay scathless but senseless through the final catastrophe. Now consciousness was returning, but he would have died of suffocation save for Snofru’s timely aid.
It was well for the Athenian that Mardonius was a man of ready devices. He had not seen Glaucon at his familiar post beside the king, but had presumed the Hellene had remained at the tents with the women, unwilling to watch the destruction of his people. In the rush and roar of the battle the messenger Artazostra had sent her husband telling of “Prexaspes’s” flight had never reached him. But Mar[pg 247]donius could divine what had happened. The swallow must fly south in the autumn. The Athenian had returned to his own. The bow-bearer’s wrath at his protégé’s desertion was overmastered by the consuming fear that tidings of Prexaspes’s disloyalty would get to the king. Xerxes’s wrath would be boundless. Had he not proffered his new subject all the good things of his empire? And to be rewarded thus! Glaucon’s recompense would be to be sawn asunder or flung into a serpent’s cage.
Fortunately Mardonius had only his own personal followers around him. He could count on their discreet loyalty. Vouchsafing no explanations, but bidding them say not a word of their discovery on their heads, he ordered Snofru and his companions to make a litter of cloaks and lances, to throw away Glaucon’s tell-tale Spartan armour, and bear him speedily to Artazostra’s tents. The stricken man was groaning feebly, moving his limbs, muttering incoherently. The sight of Xerxes driving in person to inspect the battle-field made Mardonius hasten the litter away, while he remained to parley with the king.
“So only a few are alive?” asked Xerxes, leaning over the silver rail of the chariot, and peering on the upturned faces of the dead which were nearly trampled by his horses. “Are any sound enough to set before me?”
“None, your Eternity; even the handful that live are desperately wounded. We have laid them yonder.”
“Let them wait, then; all around here seem dead. Ugly hounds!” muttered the monarch, still peering down; “even in death they seem to grit their teeth and defy me. Faugh! The stench is already terrible. It is just as well they are dead. Angra-Mainyu surely possessed them to fight so! It cannot be there are many more who can fight like this left in Hellas, though Demaratus, the Spartan outlaw, says [pg 248]there are. Drive away, Pitiramphes—and you, Mardonius, ride beside me. I cannot abide those corpses. Where is my handkerchief? The one with the Sabæan nard on it. I will hold it to my nose. Most refreshing! And I had a question to ask—I have forgotten what.”