Sarchedon Part 50

With fixed and rigid face, with hands clasped tight, with steps that seemed borne up and guided by some extraneous power, independent of and even dominating his own will, the eunuch followed through the darkness, as a sleep-walker follows the immaterial object of his dreams, never decreasing the s.p.a.ce that intervened, never turning aside from the footprints of those who led, pa.s.sing without heed over mailed corpse and broken chariot, through sand and s.h.i.+ngle and shallow pools of blood.

So the procession laboured gravely on, away from the battlefield, across the vineyards, up the rocky path that led to those mountain forests in which the dead king of Armenia might have found safety from his foes.

The bearers neither increased their speed nor halted, nor stinted for lack of breath, but moved calmly forward with even measured pace, symbol of a haughty reverence and respect, rather than of pity or distress; for he whom they bore feet foremost had been a warrior like themselves, and lay warlike in his riven harness, with a broken bow in his hand. He had fallen, as was meet for a stout champion, in the fore-front of battle, and though the hors.e.m.e.n of a.s.syria slashed it cruelly with their swords, his comely face had never turned one hair's-breadth from the foe.

Therefore the sons of Ashur thought no shame to carry him sternly and proudly to his rest, at the command of their mistress; therefore in their hearts they told themselves, how at Nisroch's appointed time, it would be well for them too that they should die in their armour, and that their last end should be like his.

The frogs clamoured in the marsh, the night wind moaned in the pines, filmy clouds swept over the crescent moon, and the corpse went ever upward into the mountain, while the queen followed after it, weeping, mute, unconscious, and a.s.sarac, giddy and bewildered, followed blindly after the queen.

CHAPTER LIV

COUNTING THE COST

Ever as their path grew steeper, and they penetrated farther into its recesses, the forest became more gloomy, while its trees a.s.sumed more hideous and fantastic shapes. The sky was dark and wild, the air loaded with those murmurs of the night that are to sounds of waking life as pa.s.sing shadows to real objects of flesh and blood; gigantic faces, grim, gray, and indistinct, blinked and peered from naked crag or gnarled and wrinkled trunk; while here, there, everywhere around, brooded a presence, no less awful because so vague and impalpable, that would have curdled and chilled the boldest human heart. It seemed to a.s.sarac, he was treading the border-land between here and hereafter; that at every step he might come face to face with some departed spirit, for which the universal experience was no longer a problem to be solved, which could tell him the secret all his life had been but an effort to inquire.

A white owl flitted noiselessly through the darkness, and the eunuch's heart stood still with something less debasing, yet far more horrible than fear. Nevertheless, as the shadowy train moved before him, mechanically he followed on.

In a gorge of the mountain, where night was blackest, a red light glowed suddenly across the sky. Wheeling round the stem of a rugged oak, the bearers halted with their burden, in an open s.p.a.ce where four glades met, converging on an indistinct ma.s.s, that seemed, in the fitful glare, some rough rude altar reared of unhewn stones.

Reverently they laid the dead hero down. Rising erect, when he touched the earth, a.s.sarac recognised in their lofty frames and costly armour four spearmen from the body-guard of the Great Queen.

Semiramis stood apart, peering eagerly into the gloom, only the outline of a white face visible in the deep folds of a mantle, that shrouded her head and figure.

Wild yells and piercing shrieks rose from the forest, while the flash of many torches danced fitfully among the trees. A score of hideous figures now came leaping into the open s.p.a.ce, and formed themselves in a circle round the queen, the spearmen and the dead warrior laid upon his s.h.i.+eld.

Interest and curiosity had somewhat mastered the eunuch's over-powering sense of horror, so that, waking, as it were, from the oppression of a trance, he seemed to resume his faculties of body and mind.

He knew the shapes at last, recognising them for those frantic votaries who, electing to wors.h.i.+p Abitur of the Mountains, disowned all human ties and interests, abjured all other creeds and professions, that they might serve the great principle of evil in the wilderness.

These men were naked to the waist, their hair and beards were matted and tangled in foul disorder, they tossed their lean arms aloft with frantic vehemence, and their eyes glared in the torchlight with the fierce cunning of insanity.

They might have been themselves the demons they adored, so strange and unearthly was their appearance, while dancing, gibbering, howling, they came and went, now opening out, now closing in, their circle, now retiring among the trees, now advancing towards the altar, but still, like vultures about a carrion, converging gradually round the corpse.

The queen held up her hand; immediately the torches gave a steadier light, the wavering shapes were still, and prostrated themselves before her with mute signs of submission, reverence, even abject fear.

She had protected the sect, respected their tenets, even joined in their wors.h.i.+p, from motives of policy long ago.

Now, in her great need, she clung to this desperate resource, and had come to wring from Abitur of the Mountains that which the host of heaven seemed unable to bestow.

With the increased light afforded by a score of torches, no longer whirled and brandished in the air, a.s.sarac observed that, in the rock over against him, was hewn an entrance to some vast cavernous temple, ornamented with rough symbols and grotesque representations of the demon wors.h.i.+pped within. This cavity seemed partly natural, partly hollowed out from the bowels of the earth, by the same rude labour that had erected the altar in its front.

Four of the wild men raised the burden recently laid down by the a.s.syrian warriors, and, preceded by two of their companions with torches, disappeared in the entrance of the temple or mouth of the cavern. While they lifted the corpse, Semiramis pa.s.sed her hand, with a gesture of exceeding tenderness, over the dead face, and followed close behind, succeeded by the rest of the torch-bearing troop, leaving the spearmen without, as if to guard the threshold.

An irresistible impulse drove the eunuch onward in his strange adventure, yet it seemed that he could not have uttered a word to save his life. With every faculty strained, every sense painfully sharpened, speech was alone denied him.

The sons of Ashur crossed their spears to bar his entrance; but throwing the cloak back from his face, though still without a word, he caused them to recognise him that stood at the right hand of the Great Queen, and thus pa.s.sed unimpeded into the temple of the fiend.

In a vaulted cavern, so lofty that the glare of twenty torches scarce illumined the shadowy ma.s.ses of its roof, stood four unhewn blocks of granite, supporting, at the height of a man's knee a rough slab of the same, on a flooring of rock, over which nature had spread a deep covering of sand. There was here no appearance of shrine or altar, none of those attempts at ornament, by which even the rudest of wors.h.i.+ppers do honour to their deity with hand and brain. The walls of this natural temple were of bare bulging stone, its roof was reared far into the bowels of the mountain; it had but one aperture, through which a dim thread of light might be seen at noon-day, and where, if he ever did visit them, the wors.h.i.+ppers of Abitur were taught to expect the appearance of their master.

Buried in the depths of the forest, beneath those wild s.h.a.ggy hills, this dwelling of the evil principle was as dark and shadowy compared with the temple of Baal, as that shrine of the a.s.syrian G.o.d, glowing in vermilion and gold, seemed poor and paltry to the starry dome above, of which it professed to be the type.

From behind a jutting boulder of rock, forming, as it were, a natural b.u.t.tress of the cavern, a.s.sarac watched in horror. The dew stood on his brow, damp and chill as the slime on the surface against which he leaned.

Semiramis s.n.a.t.c.hed a torch from one of the wild figures at her side, and with its unlighted end described a triangular figure, while keeping herself carefully within that mystic border, around the broad flat stone on which the dead man lay.

A wild unreasoning terror then seemed to take possession of the wors.h.i.+ppers, they trembled from head to foot, and cowered back as far as the limits of the cavern would allow. In the silence that succeeded this movement, even a.s.sarac expected some tangible horror to appear.

The Great Queen planted her torch firmly in the sand at the corpse's head, stripping off at the same time its enshrouding mantle, while her own cloak fell from her shoulder in the act, revealing at one stroke her matchless beauty and the glittering splendour of her attire.

It was a ghastly contrast--the same wavering light that played on the queen's jewels imparted a flicker of life and motion to the dead man's face, gashed and seamed with the sword, drawn and distorted with spasms of mortal pain. He seemed to gasp, to gibber, to be about to speak, as if the longing eyes that looked down on him were indeed able to draw his very soul back from those unknown regions to which it had taken flight, as if the force of a woman's will, the desire of a woman's love, must needs have power to bridge the gulf that parts the living and the dead.

Was it indeed Sarchedon who laid there disfigured into so maimed and unsightly an object? And did she love him so dearly, that now to-night, in the very hour of her triumph, she could forego her royal pomp and glory, could stoop her neck and bend her pride for such a thing as this?

Then a.s.sarac felt at his heart that keen and searching stab to which every other pain is but as a dull outward bruise to a serpent's venomed sting.

With dropped jaw, fixed eyes, and rigid limbs, he watched like a man turned to stone.

She plucked an amulet from her neck, gazing on it for an instant ere she laid it softly, tenderly, in the dead man's breast. Then she looked upward, moving lips and hands, like one who pleads hard for life, though not a sound came forth. This was the second time she had bartered away her mystic charm. Surely all her resources of peace and war must stand her in some stead! Surely the dove and the arrow would not fail her now!

When she turned her eyes again to the body, they gleamed with the light of hope. On her face was the smile that welcomes some dear one's home-coming, and she stretched her arms, as if to invite the wanderer back to her loving heart.

But while still he moved not, lying there stark and rigid, without word or sign, it seemed strange to a.s.sarac, that the Great Queen, whose nature was so imperious, manifested neither anger nor impatience at this protracted opposition to her will. Sorrow indeed came down over the beautiful face like a veil; but through it there shone the exceeding tenderness of a love that owns no limit of time or place, that acknowledges no barrier, even in the chasm of an open grave.

Once more her lips and eyes moved wildly, once more she looked around, as if to plead for that fiendish help she had come here to implore; then while her bosom heaved, and her throat swelled high, she burst into a strain of melody that rang through the remotest corners of the cavern, causing the wild men's senses to thrill with a strange intoxicating delight, and the eunuch's heart to quiver with a fierce intolerable pain.

It was the incantation by which, in sight of all the G.o.ds of her people, she protested against her loss, calling on the parted spirit to return from its place beyond the grave.

Laying her right hand on the dead man's forehead, her left upon his heart, she raised her head and sang:

"By the power of the Seven Great tokens of light; By the Judges of Heaven, The watchers of night; By the might of those forces That govern on high, The Stars in their courses, The hosts of the sky; By Ashur, grim pagan, Our father in mail; By Nebo and Dagon, By Nisroch and Baal; By pale Ishtar contrasting With Red Merodach, By the wings everlasting, I summon thee back!

From the ranks of a legion That files through the gloom Of a shadowy region Disclosed by the tomb; From the gulf of black sorrow Of silence and sleep, Where a night with no morrow Broods over the deep; By desire unavailing, And pleasure that's fled; By the living bewailing Her love for the dead; By the wish that endears thee, The kisses that burn, And the pa.s.sion that sears thee, I bid thee return!

Thou art cold, and thy face is So waxen at rest, In my fiery embraces Seek warmth on my breast.

Through the lips that caress thee Draw balm in my breath, And the arms that compress thee Shall wrench thee from Death.

Though he boasteth to spare not For ransom or fee, Yet he shall not, he dare not, Take tribute of me.

Then if love can restore thee, Though bound on the track, From the journey before thee, Beloved, come back!"

While the last syllables died on her lips in long pathetic tones, she sank across the dead body, brow to brow, breast to breast, and mouth to mouth. Surely, if but one spark of life had been left, that wild embrace must have drawn and kindled it into flame.

But a.s.sarac's brain reeled, and the cavern swam before his eyes.

Staggering, suffocated, he hastened from the place, pa.s.sing the men of war at the entrance as he rushed blindly out into the darkness. Said one spearman to his comrade, "Surely it is a spirit. Behold how it vanisheth in the night!" To which the other, leaning thoughtfully on his s.h.i.+eld, replied,

"It is the demon who hath entered, and taken possession of the man, and driven him forth, and fled with him into the wilderness."