“In the Lord God’s keeping,” was the solemn answer; no time for more. “Save yourselves, for all Babylon will ring with this, and rigorous search be made.”
“Farewell!” The strange forms vanished in the darkness. A cry was rising from the gate: “Treason! Escaped! The guards are drugged! Pursue!” Darius had leaped, and felt betwixt his knees a blooded Assyrian horse. The Jews had mounted. The three together felt the good steeds spring under them. Down the brick-paved way they flew, whirlwind-swift, the reins lying slack on the manes. The portal of Nimitti-Bel, closed and guarded only in actual siege, stood wide before them. They saw it come and saw it vanish. Shouts behind, and a raging gallop also; but Darius knew a horse by a touch, and he knew the best in Belshazzar’s stables might run long before breasting the Assyrian that was speeding beneath him. Before the three spread the Chaldean plain-country, lulled by the moon into that last hush before the bursting dawn. They heard the pursuers follow a little way, then deeper silence. The Babylonians had found their chase was vain. The three rode for a long time without speech. Once Darius glanced across his shoulder—walls, palaces, temple-towers, had sunk to a shapeless haze. He had left “The Lady of Kingdoms,” “The Beauty of the Chaldees.” Stars and moon above, a soft west wind, and the sleeping country—that was all. But a strange exhilaration possessed the prince. He was saved; he was free; he had still the might of his good right arm, the keenness of his unerring eye.
“Hebrews!” he cried, tossing his head proudly, “behold the man you have plucked back from death unto life. Hereafter you shall learn how the son of Hystaspes can reward his preservers and their people. But now—” he flung his voice to the arching heavens—“to Cyrus! to Cyrus, the avenger of all the wronged! And then war—for the abasing of ‘The Lie,’ and the love and the joy of Atossa!”
There had come a Tartar cavalryman into Babylon, a small wiry man on a bay horse fleet as Bel’s lightning bolt. When he cantered up Ai-Bur-Schabu Street and turned the head of his Scythian toward the king’s house, a great crowd had gaped at him. “This,” ran the whisper, “was the bearer of the last message from Cyrus before the bursting of war!” He had ridden straight up to the palace gate, and flung his lance against the bronze-faced doors, turned the head of his steed, and galloped headlong from the city, no man molesting. Thrust on the head of the lance was a leaf of papyrus, and they had brought the letter to Belshazzar, after which he and his ministers wagged their heads in long debate.
“Thus says Cyrus, King of Nations, to Belshazzar his perjured and unfaithful slave. Your guile and your plot is known unto me. Would you live and not die? Disband then your armies; throw down your walls; send me your treasure, and your choicest harem women; likewise restore unharmed my daughter and the Prince Darius, my servant. But if you do otherwise, behold! I will make Babylon as Nineveh, a dwelling for starving wolves; and as for you, I will cut off your ears and nose, and chain you forty days at my palace door, that other perjurers may see and tremble, and after that you shall be crucified. Farewell.”
When this was read Avil cried out to burn the last bridge and cast Darius’s head into the Persian camp. So would Babylon be goaded on to resistance to the end. But the king had shaken his head. “The prince was a hostage,”—he repeated the word often,—“Cyrus would never dare to pass beyond threats.” Therefore the ministers departed and Belshazzar sought to drown his fears in wine. He had called for Atossa to come and drink with him. He told her brutally, as if she had not heard it before, how the game stood betwixt him and her father. When the colour mounted her white cheek he brayed with laughter; when it fled he had new jeers. To save the life of Darius, he asked her, would she not write in her own hand to Cyrus, and warn him to postpone the war? But Belshazzar, who had known only the simpering women of his seraglio, was cowed at the burst of womanly passion he had raised. Under his blows the sparks flew from the anvil, and that anvil was Atossa.
“I am Persian, O ‘Fiend-lover,’” and Atossa stood before him raised to queenly height; “kings were my ancestors, men beloved and prospered of Ahura. When the Assyrian oppressed my people, he sank back smitten. Where now is Crœsus the Lydian, or Astyages the Mede, who defied Cyrus my father? Sooner let your lions growl above my bones, than a daughter of Cyrus make herself wax to such as you!”
“But you have loved Darius,” the king protested, sorely abashed; “I saw you in his arms in the Gardens.”
“Yes,”—Atossa’s anger was becoming terrible,—“I have loved him. But I do not love his poor body more than his Aryan honour. To us death and life may be a very little thing; but outrage, insult, oath-breaking—Ahura may forgive such things, not we!”