XX Pestilence
It was thus that, on the night of July 3d, in the year 538 B.C., Persian rule began in Babylon, and native rule in the Great City was ended forever.
Historically this was true. In actual fact, on the morning of July 4th—ay, and for many weeks thereafter—no man knew the real ruler of the city, and no man greatly cared to know him. Every soul within the walls was occupied with a far more terrible and more engrossing matter, and officer and priest alike obeyed orders of Cyrus that passed through the lips of Amraphel, without caring whence they were issued or why. Cyrus the king, his sons, and the most of his army remained encamped without the walls. Gobryas had returned to the governorship of Sippar. Amraphel, unable to find any loop-hole for escape, remained shut up in his palace, miserably afraid, not even venturing to sacrifice in the temple for dread of the curse that hung over the city. Every place of worship, indeed, was deserted. In the middle of the temple of Bel-Marduk the hideous pile of dead still lay behind their barricade, just as they had fallen on the night of the massacre. Men not cowards at other times fled that building and the square and all the neighborhood, as a place of the damned. The air around was thick with the stench of death; and no command of Cyrus could force one of his men near enough to the spot to wall up the open space between the shattered doors.
Plague reigned supreme in Babylon. The black death, that horror of horrors that occasionally swept upon the great nations of the East, like the scourge of God smiting every man in its path, leaving behind it a wake of dead, dying, and miserable bereft, had entered into the beleaguered city. It was for this that Amraphel stopped ears and eyes and remained a prisoner behind the thick, white walls of his palace, where the chorus of woe could not penetrate to him. And day by day Daniel the Jew interpreted, to those that would hear, the meaning of this further wrath of God against them that had so long allowed themselves to be governed by such a one as Nabonidus, descendant of Nebuchadrezzar. Indefatigably Daniel, plague-marked and immune long years ago, preached the wrathful word of his death-bearing Lord; and such was his success among these pagans that it became a not uncommon thing to behold some woman, swollen and spotted, inexpressibly repulsive and pitiable to look at, with the final frenzy upon her, kneeling in street or hovel before the wooden image of a demon, and frantically calling upon the god of the Jews to remove from her both the curse of life and the after-terrors of hell, and to plunge her into the longed-for peace of utter annihilation.
By the middle of the month bodies could not be buried, but lay piled in streets and houses, till Babylon became the true city of Mulge, Queen of the Dead. Those that knew, those that had gone through the visitation of thirty years before, felt their hearts fail them as they thought of what was still to come. Many, indeed, tried to leave the city; but Cyrus’ soldiers patrolled every gate, and any having about them the mark of death were not allowed to pass.
Charmides the Greek was not among those that attempted an escape. By every tie that he held sacred he was bound to his adopted city, and it was his one desire to do what little he might to help the sufferers of the plague.
At dawn on the fourth of Ab, the morning after the fall of the city, Ramûa and Beltani sat together in their tenement, waiting, watching, more than all wondering at the strange sounds that had come to them as faint echoes of the great happenings of the night. Neither of them had gone to celebrate the feast in any temple. Plead or storm as Beltani would, she found Charmides fixed in his wishes on this point, and in tears and bitterness of spirit she found it necessary to move forward for an entire year all her dreams of three days of unlimited wine and meat. The Greek, who had gone back to temple-service almost immediately after his meeting with Belshazzar on the day of Daniel’s attempted assassination of the king, knew enough of what was likely to happen in the first night of the feast to forbid his family to participate in it. And while Beltani had raged, and even Ramûa had shed a few submissive tears when Charmides departed for the temple of Sin, the two of them watched quietly through the night and eagerly awaited the promised early return of the master of the household.
Very early in the evening came vague mutterings of distant, gathering mobs. Much later were the still more indeterminate but more ominous sounds of battle, shouts and cries, with the underlying murmur grown more fierce. Afterwards fell the great silence—a silence in which no man could sleep, something more terrible than sound, something that foreboded direful things—carnage, murder, merciless death. At this time the name of Baba first passed the lips of the waiting women. Baba was in Ribâta’s train at the temple of Bel-Marduk. Baba, a slave, stood no chance of salvation if any were to be lost. Had she lived or had she died that night? Through the silence that lasted till dawn this unspoken question lay in the hearts of the watchers. And then, with the first streaks of day, their thoughts were turned again by something else, another cry more awful than any battle-shout, that rose like a mist from every hovel in the tenement quarter.
“The plague—the plague! Woe unto us! It is the plague!”
It was as if every soul in the city was become a leper, and each was crying his disease. At the first sound of it Ramûa’s heart turned sick within her, and Beltani became as white as the dawn. For Beltani could remember the last plague in Babylon.
“Charmides! Why does he stay?” whispered Ramûa to her mother, over and over again; and it was the only word that passed between them till, with the first beams of the sun, the Greek was seen coming into the square in front of the tenement. At sight of him Ramûa gave a little cry:
“He is not alone!”
“It is not Baba,” added Beltani, quickly.
Then the two of them watched in silence while Charmides advanced with his companion, a tall, slender woman covered with the silver-woven veil, who faltered as she moved, till Charmides was nearly carrying her. At the first glance Ramûa perceived that the Greek was weary, so weary that every step was an effort to him. Thus, when he finally reached the door of the dwelling, she ran quickly forward to give him aid.
“The night has been very long. Thou must rest,” she whispered, disregarding the stranger, who drooped as they halted at the door.
“Nay, Ramûa. Nay. I am not weary,” returned the Greek, monotonously. “Behold, I bring home to you Istar, the great lady of Babylon. In this night she, and all in the Great City, have terribly suffered. Babylon is fallen to Kurush the king, and Belshazzar, the mighty prince, and all that were with him in the temple of Bel, are slain.”
Istar gave a quick, convulsive shudder, but Ramûa hardly noticed her. “Baba!” she cried, in terror. “Baba was in the temple of Bel!”
Charmides turned very white, and Istar suddenly threw back the veil from her face. “And Baba—Baba, too!” she said, mournfully, her voice ringing like a knell.
But seeing the woman, Ramûa and her mother forgot what they said. The two of them stood transfixed by her undreamed-of, supernatural beauty. Her pallor was something incredible, and the unearthly purity of it, the light in the great eyes, the bluish shadows that lay on the skin, were enough for the moment to make one forget death itself. As she looked, Beltani perceived something that caused her to start. She took an impulsive step forward, and then halted again as Istar’s eyes came slowly to the level of hers.
“What seest thou?” asked the woman.
Beltani went forward again and laid a finger upon Istar’s neck, and as she draw it away Istar shuddered convulsively.
“What is it?” demanded Charmides, in a thick voice.
“The plague.”
There was a momentary silence as the four that stood there gave the words time to penetrate. Then Istar, quivering again, started suddenly towards the door. Charmides barred her way.
“Where goest thou?” he asked, gently.
“Out! Out into the Great City! Let me go, Charmides! Let me go!”
With what little strength she had Istar threw herself upon the Greek, that he might give way and let her escape from his house. But Charmides was firm, and his strength infinitely greater than hers. After a struggle of a few seconds Istar gave way and would have fallen upon the floor had not the young man caught her about the body, lifted her in his arms, and carried her, lifeless and unresisting, into the little-used inner room where, at this moment, Bazuzu lay asleep. The black slave was quickly roused and Istar was placed upon a hurriedly arranged bed. Then Charmides returned again to his wife and sternly commanded her to retire to her room up-stairs, forbidding her to enter the lower rooms of their dwelling while Istar should be there. Both Bazuzu and Beltani had had the plague, and were in no danger from it. But Charmides himself, like Ramûa, was relegated to the upper rooms and to the roof.
The moment that her body rested upon a bed, poor as it was, Istar fell asleep, and there, in the great weight of her sickness and her grief, lay for many hours insensible to all things. As the heat of the day came on, and the atmosphere of the small and ill-ventilated room became more and more stifling, Bazuzu took his place at her side, and minute by minute, hour by hour, fanned to her lips what air there was, while his own face streamed with perspiration and his breath came in gasps. His eyes, the eyes that had so tenderly watched the childlike slumbers of Ramûa and Baba, now looked upon her whose face had been the wonder of the East, whom he himself once had seen clothed in blinding radiance, seated upon her golden car in a procession of the great gods and who now lay here, alone and friendless, shorn of her divinity, stricken with disease, to die a pauper’s death or to live on to a hideous old age.
Istar suffered in her sleep. Whether it was the memory of the horror of the past night or the pain of disease racking her body could not be told. But Bazuzu heard her moans with heartfelt pity. Over and over again she spoke two names, one of which the slave could scarcely understand, the other that of the dead prince of Babylon. They were the names of her baby and of her husband, all that world of happiness that had gone, and that was calling to her out of the shadowy past.
Like every one in the clutch of the dread sickness, Istar thirsted continually, yet shrank, nauseated, at the mere sight of water or milk. Continually Beltani brought and held to her lips the refreshment that she craved, as often to have it thrust away with a gesture of pitiable repulsion. At length, seeing there was no other way, Bazuzu held the sick woman fast pinioned on the ground, while Beltani poured down her throat a pint of freshly cooled water. Over the first swallow Istar’s struggles were convulsive, but after that she drank eagerly all that was given her, and when the last in the cup was gone she opened her burning eyes in a mute appeal for more. This was refused, of necessity; but, in pity for the heat of her fever and the closeness of the room, Beltani had her carried out and laid down near the door-way of the living-room, where presently she sank into a sleep that changed gradually to a heavy stupor.
Noon passed and left the city streets quivering with heat. From the burning desert in the west came a faint breath of wind, that twinkled blue and white in the air till the eyes were blinded and the brain reeled under its intensity. Charmides and Ramûa were sitting together on the gallery outside their room in an upper story of the tenement, looking off to the shining strip of canal beyond which rose the patch of shrivelled green where, two months before, Ribâta’s garden had blossomed with many a fragrant rose and fragile lily. Charmides was mentally preparing himself for another journey across the desolate city to the temple of Bel, that vast tomb in which so many tangled bodies lay. He had not yet voiced his intention to Ramûa, though he knew that she would not oppose it.
Suddenly round the corner of the tenement, into the open square, came a strange thing: a human being, crawling upon hands and knees along the brick pavement, halting now and then in visible exhaustion, but displaying also a nervous eagerness in its movements; and all the way behind it as it came was left a deep, red trail. A mere heap of bloody rags at first it seemed; but presently, as he watched, Charmides could see a mop of long, black hair that fell to the ground upon one side.
“That is a woman, Ramûa,” he whispered.
Ramûa, white to the lips, grasped his arm. “Go! Go to her, Charmides!” she responded, a breathless fear coming on her.
“What is it, Ramûa? What is thy thought?” questioned the Greek.
“I do not know. Go thou, Charmides! Haste! Haste! She falls!”
Thereupon Charmides went, slowly at first, still staring in a half-puzzled way at the little heap of bruised flesh that now lay inert upon the bricks below. Then his pace quickened, for he realized the woman’s need. Along the gallery and down the stairs he ran, and then, at breakneck pace, crossed the space between the wounded creature and the door-way of the tenement. Ramûa, straining her eyes after him, saw him bend over the fallen one, and then thought that a cry came from his lips.
Hardly a cry, more a groan of utter horror it was. Charmides’ heart was in his throat. For a second the blue eyes closed to shut out the pitiable sight, and then opened again upon Baba. It was Baba that lay there before him: Baba who, mangled as she was, had, in the gray dawn, crawled out from the bodies among which she lay in the temple, and since then had come upon her hands and knees, inch by inch, foot by foot, all across the Great City, to her old home, to him that stood over her now. She had allowed herself the untold luxury of unconsciousness only when the journey’s end was reached, when at last she was at the door-way of the place of her early poverty, her great happiness, her life-sorrow.
Charmides knelt beside her, and, with a little quiver in which pity and fear for her were evenly mingled, lifted her in his arms. She stained his tunic with blood; but presently he perceived that this blood was not all Baba’s own. It was caked in clots upon her torn garments; it smeared her rich sandals; it matted her hair. Yet on her body there was, so far as he could yet determine, only one wound—a deep stab in the back of her left shoulder. From this the blood had almost ceased to flow, coming only in a little trickle when she drew a longer breath than usual.
Charmides bore the light form, face downward, towards the stairs of the tenement, thinking rapidly as he went. A horrible sight, truly, to lay before Ramûa. Yet Ramûa must see it. Carry her into those rooms where Istar lay in the delirium of the plague, he dared not. Nowhere else—yes, there was one other place. There was the home of Baba’s master. Should he take her there before Ramûa guessed her identity? Ribâta’s house would be open to her. And yet—and yet—it was here that Baba herself had chosen to come, as she might well believe, in death. That mute appeal could not be withstood. Here, because she had asked it, she must remain.
Step by step up the stairs to the gallery he bore the pathetic burden. At the top of the flight stood Ramûa, face colorless, eyes wide with a fear that she would not admit to herself. Charmides, looking up, met the look, answered it, and saw his wife’s hands go up to her head.
“Charmides! It is not—” she stopped.
“It is Baba, my beloved. Baba is alive. She has come home to us, Ramûa, to be cared for. Be thou brave, then. Go down and bring water wherewith to wash her, and a clean tunic of thine own to put upon her; and then together we will bind her wound.”
A little while and the sunset came, and Babylon was aureoled again in crimson. Not till then did Ribâta’s slave come back to consciousness in her sister’s arms. The horror of the past night had stamped itself as indelibly upon her mind as on her body. Between fits of trembling she poured out to Ramûa the story of the fight in the temple and the massacre of the women. Charmides, standing outside the door on the gallery, listened to the tale as he looked off across the quiet city.
“And Istar, Istar, our divine lady, I did not behold at the side of Belitsum the queen, nor with the women of the royal house who lie together now in the centre of the dead. May the great gods grant that she and her lord, Belshazzar, together escaped death and are free—somewhere—in the city.”
“Baba, the Lady Istar is here—below—sick of the plague; and our mother and Bazuzu are at her side.”
“The Lady Istar! Here!” Baba struggled to sit up, but Ramûa kept her firmly down while she told her the story of Istar’s coming; how Charmides brought her to them crazed with her grief and with her long wandering.
Baba listened closely, and at the end of the recital her tears flowed fast. “Belshazzar, then, is dead!” she whispered more than once. “The mighty prince is dead, and Istar is alone—alone—even as I.”
But now, while Ramûa wiped her tears away, Charmides came in to them, saying: “Across the square from the canal come two men in the livery of the house of Ribâta. I go forth to meet them. If it is for thee they come, Baba, what word shall I give to them?”
Baba gave a long sigh, and her eyes closed. “I am here. Seeks my lord for me? I am my lord’s. I will return to him when I may.”
And with this reply Charmides went forth to meet the messengers.
Ribâta’s men halted at the foot of the steps, waiting his descent; and the Greek found that he had guessed aright when he surmised the object of their coming. My Lord Ribâta, terribly wounded, stricken with great grief at the downfall of the city and the massacre of all his women, had despatched messengers to the only place where news of his favorite slave could be had, if mayhap she had by a miracle escaped the general carnage. Charmides dutifully gave them Baba’s message, saw their faces light up with amazement and pleasure, and bade them, if they would carry Baba to their lord, go fetch the easiest of litters, that she might not suffer more than necessary on the way.
This was done. In less than an hour two litters halted in front of the tenement of Ut, and in one of them was Ribâta himself, his head, breast, arms, and one limb wrapped in heavy bandages, so weak that his voice was but a whisper, yet a whisper of joy that one little creature out of all the multitude had escaped death in the temple. Baba was carried down to him, and their meeting had in it much of pathos. Ribâta’s career was ruined, his position gone, his lord dead, his house in disorder; yet one thing was left to him, and her, in great joy, he took to his heart. Charmides and Ramûa, side by side, stood listening as Ribâta whispered to his slave the two words that changed the lives of them all.
“Baba—my wife,” said he. And then presently, together, they were carried away into the evening.
While Charmides and Ramûa went back to their room to talk over the great thing that had come to Baba, Beltani, below, was preparing for the doleful night. She had kindled a little fire, cooked food for herself and Bazuzu, and was now on her knees offering up incantations to Namtar, the demon of the plague. Bazuzu, from his place beside Istar, joined at intervals in the prayers, which the sick woman, now in the violent delirium of fever, broke in upon continually with appeals for help and wails of grief over Belshazzar, who never left her thoughts.
In many a house and hovel in the Great City a similar scene was enacted to-night. Yet there could not be one more deplorable than this. She who raved upon the bed of straw in the heart of the most poverty-stricken quarter of Babylon—from what things was she descended? One by one she had lost everything that had made her life wonderful. Now the last, that attribute that she had left uncounted because it seemed to her indestructible, was going from her. In the next five days of this horrible sickness her beauty fled away, and she was left a thing dreadful for mankind to look upon.
By the second day of her attack, the mental disturbance had increased till the intervals of her sanity entirely disappeared. On the morning of the third day began those violent constrictions of the heart that caused unspeakable agony and brought her to the brink of the black abyss. By this time, also, the enlargement of glands, or buboes, the dominating symptom of the plague, had become frightful to see. Her eyes were suffused with a thick, white matter. Upon her body came forth great carbuncles. On the fourth day dark spots, patches like black bruises, and long, livid stripes, appeared upon her fair skin. The fever, now at its height, burned itself out in a day, and Istar fell into a cold and quiet stupor, the first stage of death. Her lips were black. Her eyes had closed. Her body had become something from which Beltani shrank at sight, and old Bazuzu touched only because of his great pity for the woman. Also at this time Istar’s veil of hair, which had been wont to conceal her under its silken meshes, fell out in great masses and was burned by Beltani as a sacrifice before the demon of the plague.
Beltani’s prayers to Namtar, however, had lost their sincerity, for the old woman could not in her heart wish Istar to live in her terrible disfigurement. Istar herself did not yet know what she had become. But unless, as seemed most probable, she died, there must soon come a time when she would discover, when she would see people shrink away from contact with her, yet turn to stare after in that fascination that a dreadful sight draws forth. Out of pure reverence for what Istar had been, Beltani attended her faithfully. Every herb and medicine and charm within her means and known to her she used to mitigate the sores, and to make the after-scars less terrible. Yet she, and Bazuzu also, felt that death were now the greatest boon for the woman.
Death did not come. In spite of her stupor and her low temperature, the fatal eighth day passed, and on the morning of the ninth Istar lived and was better. She regained a dim consciousness, and the strength to ask for food, which was given her in minute quantities, as also milk and wine. For forty-eight hours she hovered on the brink of reawakening; and then, finally, she found herself.
On the morning of the fifteenth of the month Istar opened her eyes in the early dawn. She was alone. On the other side of the room, upon her pallet, Beltani lay in a heavy sleep. Bazuzu was outside in the square. Istar moved her hand and sighed. She felt life coursing through her veins, and remembered the past week with only a vague, nightmarish sense of oppression. The air of the morning, hot as it was, had in it the gathered sweetness of the long, starry hours. She breathed it with joy; and for a moment forgot the sorrow that must be hers perpetually. Presently, with an old and habitual gesture, she lifted her hand to her head to push away her hair. And her hand touched the head. There was no hair upon it. Rather, two or three thin strands hung about her ears. Otherwise she was bald.
The heart of Istar gave a peculiar throb. She held up both hands before her eyes; and, as she saw them, she herself shrank. The hands, those fragile hands, the fair, white wrists, the arms, were spotted and streaked and swollen and hideously scabbed. She touched her cheek and found raw flesh upon it. She tore the covering from her neck. It was the same. Everywhere—everywhere, from head to foot, over her whole body—she was accursed. It was the plague—the plague! Istar tottered to her feet and uplifted her eyes. Poor, weak eyes! Yea, she was all but blind. With one low, wailing cry the afflicted one let herself slowly down, till she lay prone upon the kindly floor that did not hesitate to receive her. And there, through time and the day-dawn, she wept out the burden of her soul. But of the future and its inevitable suffering she could not think. As yet the way was too dark, too incomprehensible to her.
There upon the floor, motionless, Bazuzu found her two hours later. For long minutes he stood over her, helpless, pitying, knowing that there was no comfort to bring. But his heart was full as he felt the abandon of her attitude. Presently, kneeling at her side, he laid a horny hand gently upon one of her shoulders. And from his fingers a message of mute sympathy went forth to her. When she could bear that he should look upon her she lifted her head and opened her half-closed eyes to him. Then she spake, quietly, but with authority:
“Let my veil be brought, that I may put it upon me.”
From the corner where it had lain, carefully folded by Beltani, Bazuzu brought it to her—the soft, black, silver-shot covering of her happiness. In silence he watched the woman put it on, wrapping it about her so that her head, her face, her arms, her form, were completely shrouded. Then, from behind the veil, she spoke:
“Let no man evermore seek to behold me in my disfigurement. Behold, no longer am I Istar, but a wanderer over the face of the earth. I go forth from this house of friendliness. The voice of the great God bids me follow out my life in desert places, in the lands of my enemies.”
Bazuzu, from her words still believing her more than mortal, bent his head in silent acceptance of her desires. She took two or three quiet steps to the door, and then, when he had thought her gone, turned again, and softly said:
“Thou, Bazuzu, and thy mistress, and the young Greek whose house this is, take what thanks I have to give thee, and the blessing of All-Father for thy mercy to me, an outcast. Gold have I none, nor riches of any sort in payment for your labor. But from my heart I bless thee for thy compassion.”
Then, like a shadow, she glided out at the door, across the deserted square, down to the canal of the New Year, and along its bank, out into the city. Through the long morning she moved through the streets, accosting no one, stared at by the multitude, but unaddressed. Her miserable body burned and ached. The sun poured down its blue-hot rays upon her head. Muffled as she was in the veil, she was like to suffocate for air to breathe, yet she would not expose herself to the gaze of human beings. It was noon when she entered the square of the great gods and passed the door of the temple of Nergal, looking with weary eyes into its vast and cool interior. At some distance within was a group of priests, Sangû, Enû, and Barû, men of importance in their several stations. These the plague-stricken eyes of the woman failed in the dim light to see. But she was startled suddenly by the appearance in the door-way of one of them, who, catching a sight of her, had run quickly forward, and now stood eagerly staring at her form. She did not draw back from the look, and presently the priest spoke:
“Thou that standest shadow-like before me—art thou she whom they called Istar of Babylon?”
“I was Istar of Babylon,” came the gentle voice.
“Was! Comest thou from Ninkigal?” The priest started back from her, turning a little pale.
“Nay. Still I live; yet now am nameless.”
“Thou hast dwelt as a goddess in the temple of Istar? Thou hast lived in the palace of the king as the wife of Belshazzar?”
Istar bent her head.
“Enter, then, into the temple, that I may speak with the others here before you.” He motioned her to pass into the building, and, obediently, Istar entered it. She stood at a little distance, while he that had accosted her returned to the group of his companions and spoke with them. In a few moments they summoned Istar to their midst. She came quite close, and they eyed her in silence for a little while. Then one said:
“Ay. It is Istar of Babylon. I saw her thus from afar on the night of the feast of Tammuz.”
“She is well found. Istar, for eight days hast thou been sought throughout the Great City. Kurush, the conqueror, demands thy presence before him. He has heard of thee and thy beauty, and the strange things thou art said to know; and he would have beheld thee on the day after the taking of the city. But we have searched for thee in vain. Where hast thou hidden?”
“I fulfilled my days. I will go now, if he wills, before the great conqueror. Haste were best, for the time to the end is not now long.”
The priests looked at each other uncertainly. Her words had in them a ring of prophecy. They consulted for a little among themselves, till Istar herself made all things easy for them:
“Let a swift runner be sent to the camp of Cyrus, and let the great king be told that, one hour after the departure of the messenger, I come to him. In that hour I will rest here in the temple, for I am weak in body. Then ye may lead me out by the gate of Bel to the camp of the conqueror, and there shall ye leave me. From that camp let no man follow me forth. Now have I spoken.”
And the priests heard the words of Istar and found them to be good; and that which she had commanded was done.