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Updated: June 8, 2025
Grow strong and glad, and suffer us to teach you,” commanded Artazostra. “Where do I lie? We are not upon the rocky islet still?” The ladies laughed, not mockingly but so sweetly he wished that they would never cease. “This is Sardis,” spoke Roxana, bending over him; “you lie in the palace of the satrap.” “And Athens—” he said, wandering.
He heard Artazostra calling to the horse-boys and the eunuchs,—perhaps she bade them to pursue. Once he looked back, but never twice. He knew the watchwords, and all the sentries let him pass by freely. With a feverish stride he traced the avenues of sleeping tents.
“Ah, Mardonius! ah, Artazostra!” he was speaking in his heart, “noble and brave you are to your peers, but this is your rare handiwork,—and though you once called me friend, Zeus and Dikē still rule, there is a price for this and you shall tell it out.” Yet he bethought himself of the old man’s warning, and left the beaten way.
The pledge shall be fulfilled, but after that,”—Artazostra understood his sinister smile,—“there are many ways of removing an unwelcome vassal prince, if I be the satrap of Hellas.” “And you are that in the morning.”
We will talk of the Nile, not of the Cephissus,” Artazostra said, whenever he spoke of home. Then she would tell of Babylon and Persepolis, and Mardonius of forays beside the wide Caspian, and Roxana of her girlhood, while Gobryas was satrap of Egypt, spent beside the magic river, of the Pharaohs, the great pyramid, of Isis and Osiris and the world beyond the dead.
He was sorely beset, when Roxana drew near and laid her hand upon his shoulder. “Your Greeks will resist terribly,” she spoke. “We women dread the battle more than you. Yours is the fierce gladness of the combat, ours only the waiting, the heavy tidings, the sorrow. Therefore Artazostra and I could not sleep, but have been watching together. You will of course be near Mardonius my brother.
I am Artazostra, wife of Mardonius, and this is Roxana, his half-sister, whose mother was a princess in Egypt.” Glaucon passed his fingers before his face, beckoning back the past. “It is all far away and strange: the flight, the storm, the wreck, the tossing spar, the battling through the surges. My head is weak. I cannot picture it all.” “Do not try. Lie still.
Thousands of spearmen held back the crowds. The Athenian stood beside Roxana and Artazostra at the upper window of a Lydian merchant prince, and his eyes missed nothing. Never had the two women seemed lovelier than when their hearts ran out to their approaching king.
Mardonius sent him a silvered cuirass and a black horse from the steppes of Bactria,—fleet as the north wind. In his new armour he went to the chambers of Artazostra and Roxana. They had never seen him in panoply before. The brilliant mail became him rarely. The ladies were delighted.
It was well for the Athenian that Mardonius was a man of ready devices. He had not seen Glaucon at his familiar post beside the king, but had presumed the Hellene had remained at the tents with the women, unwilling to watch the destruction of his people. In the rush and roar of the battle the messenger Artazostra had sent her husband telling of “Prexaspes’s” flight had never reached him.
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