Mardonius frowned, but nodded his head.
“You know I desire it otherwise. But my word is given. And the word of a prince of the Aryans is not to be recalled. You know what to expect among your people—perhaps a foul death for a deed of another.”
“I know it. I also know that Hellas needs me.”
“To fight against us?” asked the bow-bearer, with a sigh. “Yet you shall go. Eran is not so weak that adding one more to her enemies will halt her triumph. To-morrow night a boat shall be ready on the strand. Take it. And after that may your gods guard you, for I can do no more.”
All the next day Glaucon sat in the tents and watched the smoke cloud above the Acropolis and the soldiers in the plain hewing down the sacred olives, Athena’s trees, which no Athenian might injure and thereafter live. But Glaucon was past cursing now,—endure a little longer and after that, what vengeance!
The gossiping eunuchs told readily what the king had determined. Xerxes was at Phaleron reviewing his fleet. The Hellenes’ ships confronted him at Salamis. The Persians had met in council, deliberating one night over their wine, reconsidering the next morning when sober. Their wisdom each time had been to force a battle. Let the king [pg 276]destroy the enemy at Salamis, and he could land troops at ease at the very doors of Sparta, defying the vain wall across the Isthmus. Was not victory certain? Had he not two ships to the Hellenes’ one? So the Phœnician vassal kings and all his admirals assured him. Only Artemisia, the martial queen of Halicarnassus, spoke otherwise, but none would hear her.
“To-morrow the war is ended,” a cup-bearer had told a butler in Glaucon’s hearing, and never noticed how the Athenian took a horseshoe in his slim fingers and straightened it, whilst looking on the scorched columns of the Acropolis.
At length the sun spread his last gold of the evening. The eunuchs called Glaucon to the pavilion of Artazostra, who came forth with Roxana for their farewell. They were in royal purple. The amethysts in their hair were worth a month’s revenues of Corinth. Roxana had never been lovelier. Glaucon was again in the simple Greek dress, but he knelt and kissed the robes of both the women. Then rising he spoke to them.
“To you, O princess, my benefactress, I wish all manner of blessing. May you be crowned with happy age, may your fame surpass Semiramis, the conqueror queen of the fables, let the gods refuse only one prayer—the conquest of Hellas. The rest of the world is yours, leave then to us our own.”
“And you, sister of Mardonius,” he turned to Roxana now, “do not think I despise your love or your beauty. That I have given you pain, is double pain to me. But I loved you only in a dream. My life is not for the rose valleys of Bactria, but for the stony hills by Athens. May Aphrodite give you another love, a brighter fortune than might ever come by linking your fate to mine.”