"So," growled Ninus, nursing the knuckles of his great brown fist, "the dog, at last, hath a mouth that bleeds." He turned to the Babylonian's friends and spoke again, calmly, but as a master speaks: "Because he is born a fool, I spare him--the next of his like shall hang!"
A silence fell within the council tent, save for the shifting of uneasy feet, and the creak of harness as the fallen man breathed fast and hard; then, in the hush, a sentry entered, bowing low before the King.
"Lord," said he, "a messenger is without, demanding an audience of Ninus and of his chiefs."
The lips of the monarch parted for an oath, and yet no sound came forth; instead his mouth stretched wider still in wonderment, for before him stepped a woman warrior, the like of whom his eyes had never lit upon. Her shapely limbs were encased in linen, bound with thongs, as were the leathern sandals on her feet; she wore her tunic, washed white in a mountain stream, and across her breast was flung a leopard's skin, caught with a clasp behind and forming a quiver for her shafts. She carried a bow and hunting spear, and on her shoulders, brown and bare, her red locks rippled from a brazen helm.
The chieftains stared; and yet it was not the splendor of her raiment which held them in amaze, but her beauty, strange and devilish--her eyes, deep pools of ever changing light wherein the sons of men grew foolish and were consumed.
"Shammuramat!" breathed the King. "Whence comest thou?"
"Shammuramat no more," the Syrian answered, "but a merchant from the west with wares for sale."
"By Bêlit," grunted Gazil, a hairy chieftain from the uplands of the river Hit, "did the merchant sell herself, I'd buy, though the bargain stripped me to the bone."
"Hush!" a nudging neighbor whispered. "Be sparing of thy tongue, lest Ninus serve thee as he served yon Babylonian fool."
So Gazil held his peace, and Ninus looked in silence on Semiramis. In the mind of the King two spirits warred for mastery; the one in anger at this prisoner who escaped from Nineveh to defy his will, the other unwilling admiration of her recklessness.
"And why," he asked, as he combed his beard, "doth the merchant risk her head in a journey unto Zariaspa?"