"Here, take it," growled Zopyrus, tossing a heavy golden coin. "But that is all, do you understand?"
"I wist that my master would see reason. May the earth spirits aid us!"
Back in his own quarters, biting his fingers in anger over Zopyrus' arrogance, Ardigula went to his cabinet and got out writing materials. He penned a letter in tiny writing on a strip of papyrus smaller than his palm. The writing would have baffled any Persian, Elamite, or Babylonian into whose hands it fell. But Uni, the priest who ministered to the religious wants of the small Egyptian colony of Shushan, could have read it at once, for it was in Egyptian demotic.
Ardigula called his servant, saying: "Fetch one of Labashi's birds; a strong one."
Presently the servant appeared with a gray pigeon cradled in his hands. Ardigula rolled the strip of papyrus around the bird's leg, tied it fast with a length of thread, and secured it with a dab of gum. He went to the roof and tossed the bird into the air. The pigeon circled over the city three times and flew off to westward.
Ardigula went back to his cabinet and began mixing powders for a mighty incantation. This, he thought, should do the work without the pigeon; likewise the pigeon should do the work without the spell. But there was no point in taking chances.
Night, like a black cloak spangled with diamonds, lay across the vast Euphratean plain. The wind from the desert rustled the fronds of the date palms, which marched along the banks of the irrigation canals in endless rows, like King Xerxes' Immortals.
Along the royal road from Shusan, at a lively trot, came a two-mule chariot. The nailheads that studded its bronzen tires rumbled along the paving of brick. Ever and anon, the rumble was hushed as the vehicle crossed a patch of drifted sand.
Moonlight showed the towering form of Bessas at the reins, while the smaller Myron sat on a roll of baggage with his back against the side of the car. He chewed on a biscuit. Other sacks and rolls of gear, including a royal mailbag, heaped the floor behind the driver's wide-braced feet.
As the chariot neared the town of Kish, three leagues short of Babylon, cultivation became thicker and houses more frequent. Some houses clustered in hamlets.
As the car entered one of these villages, there was a stir in the darkness. From two houses facing each other across the highway, men darted out. Torches in the hands of two of them stabbed the dark with fluttering yellow beams.
The torchbearers dashed in front of the team, thrusting their torches into the animals' faces. The mules skidded and reared, snorting, squealing, and pawing.
Other men scurried in from the sides. Some reached for the animals' bridles, others for the men in the car.
"Mithra smite you!" roared Bessas. His right arm flew out. The long whip cracked like a thunderbolt. One of the torch-bearers dropped his stick and reeled off, screaming, with both hands clapped over one eye.
The others continued to close. They needed but a few steps to swarm over the chariot and its occupants.
Again the whip cracked. The other torch was snatched from its holder's hand and flew into the air with a shower of sparks.
A lariat hissed out of the darkness and settled over Bessas' shoulders. As the giant Bactrian clutched the fore-wall of the chariot, Myron, who had risen unsteadily, made a wild, half-blind swipe with the sword he had taken from the assassin in Shushan.
The lariat parted, and Myron shouted: "Iai!"
Bessas, recovering his balance, lashed his mules with frenzied force. They screamed and bounded forward. The jerk unbalanced Myron, who had to drop his sword to the floor of the car and clutch with both hands at the chariot's side to save himself. Several attackers, who had reached the vehicle and grasped its sides, were thrown to the road. One shrieked as a wheel crunched over his foot.
Bessas cried: "Yâ ahî!" and the mules broke away at a wild gallop. Behind, the two dropped torches dwindled to ruddy specks, while the shadowy forms of the waylayers faded into the darkness. Night resumed its rule.
On the east branch of the Euphrates, three leagues beyond Kish, rose mighty Babylon—Bâb-ilâni, the Gate of the Gods, the metropolis of the world, the center of the universe. To Myron, approaching it at night, it seemed an immense, angular black mass—mysterious, illimitable, overwhelming.
Although he had been here before, the sight of this city inspired in Myron a curious mixture of feelings, compounded of awe, repulsion, and fascination. It differed so utterly from his bright little Ionian cities with their theaters, their tight civic organization, and their intense political life.
Although laid out in more orderly fashion than any Greek city, Babylon had no true civic life and so was not, in the strict Greek sense of the word, a city at all. Here were hundreds of thousands of human beings, whose only concern with the government of their city was to avoid the police and cheat the tax gatherers. It reminded Myron of the swarming life sometimes found under a flat stone.
A few pinpoints of ruddy light winked from the towering walls, where Persian sentries paced with torches. These walls had been one of the world's wonders. Now they were partly demolished. As punishment for Babylon's revolt, King Xerxes had razed several sections. Thus the remaining stretches of wall, while still a mighty monument to the great Nebuchadrezzar, were useless for defense.
Before the chariot reached the outer wall of the city, a row of crosses loomed up in the moonlight beside the road. On these crosses hung the bodies of felons, in various stage of disrepair. Myron held his nose until they passed the place.
They entered the gate in the outer wall with no more than a wave from the guards. For ten furlongs they trotted along Zababa Street, through sprawling suburbs and across a canal. Betimes a little square of yellow light appeared amid the blackness of the buildings, where a small, high-set window of a lighted chamber fronted on the avenue. Otherwise the suburbs were dark, and Bessas guided his car by moonlight. Now and then the furtive figure of a prowler slunk out of sight as the chariot neared it.
Then the more massive inner wall loomed across the moat. The stench of stagnant water came to Myron's nostrils as the bridge timbers boomed beneath their wheels. At the Zababa Gate the guards halted them to peer by torchlight at the golden eagle on the end of the chariot pole and the golden winged disks on the sides of the car before waving them on. Myron said:
"I think the Post Office is in the citadels. Take a fork to the right; there's a diagonal street along the canal ..."
In the central city, lights were more frequent. They rumbled past late-closing wineshops and brothels. Apartment houses of three or four stories rose like black cliffs on either hand.
Half an hour after they passed the inner wall, they sat in the office of Earimut, chief clerk of the postmaster of Babylon. Earimut, wearing an old robe and with hair and beard uncombed, squinted sourly in the lamplight.
"We did not look for this car until the morrow," he said.
Bessas shrugged. "We had made such good time by sunset that I saw no reason not to continue on. Does not the motto of the service say we stop not for snow, rain, heat, or gloom of night?"
Earimut yawned. "And the mules are lathered. Even if you are but a substitute driver, you should know better than to race these costly governmental animals."
"Race, plague!" Bessas burst out. "We were attacked near Kish. What do you expect me to do, sit down to throw dice with the robbers?"
"Attacked!" cried Earimut. "Ari! This is serious. Tell me what befell."
When Bessas had told his tale, Earimut said: "Well then, we will excuse your haste. Did you know these rogues? We must get the soldiers out to search for them."
"It happened so fast that I do not think I should have known my own brother, even with a moon," said Bessas.