“Have a care, Jew! have a care!” warned Belshazzar; “it ill becomes a leopard of your spots to teach the law to the king of Babylon.”
“I ask only justice, your Majesty.”
“And, by Bel, you shall have it!” swore the king. “Advance, Avil, and produce your witnesses!”
The high priest appeared before the throne, at his back three men and a woman, who bowed themselves most awkwardly in the presence of royalty.
“The wise Gudea,” muttered Khatin in his beard, “and Binit his dear wife have scarcely learned courtly graces at the beer-house of Nur-Samas.”
But, leaving his myrmidons to gape around the hall, Avil commenced a fiery invective. If his arguments were faulty, his epithets were strong. Daniel, the most impudent blasphemer of Bel in all Babylon, had, he explained, at last carried his impiety so far as to accomplish the death of the most excellent Saruch, simply because the latter forsook his impotent Jewish demon, Jehovah. If the king failed to punish the murderer, the outraged gods would haste to blast Babylon with fire and brimstone.
“Do you still deny the accusation?” questioned Belshazzar, when Avil concluded, and the Jew, all unmoved by the fierce harangue, answered steadily, “Utterly, my lord; my whole life lived in this city denies it.”
“Present, then, your witnesses,” commanded Belshazzar of Avil, who proceeded to hale Gudea to the front, with a muttered injunction in his ear to “tell a well-welded story, or the ‘Earth-Fiends’ would have him by night!”
Therefore the exorcist, with smooth countenance and glib tongue, rattled off the tale of the death of Saruch, adding that if the man did not meet his end by foul enchantment, he was willing to bare his back for a thousand stripes.
Khatin had rolled his eyes more than once during this recital, and did so again when Binit was thrust forward after her husband. The good woman’s examination was the more brief because the lardy ointment she had smeared on her hair was so pungent that even the king could hardly regard her steadily. She avowed that early on the day of the alleged murder she had sold a quantity of magic wood and magic wax to two men whom she identified as the remaining pair of witnesses. There was an audible titter when she ended.