“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!” “Out of my sight, woman!” thundered Belshazzar; and he had spurned her. The eunuchs took her away. The king drank alone, draining goblet after goblet of the most heady “Elamite”; but though he wished it, he could not grow drunken. His body eunuchs put him to bed. He tossed long on the India-web pillows and the Sidonian purple. They had bathed his feet in perfumed water at last, and very late he fell asleep. The little group of servants had gathered outside the door of the chamber, squatting in silence on the tiles, each inwardly blessing some god that he had been spared the royal wrath that day....