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Updated: May 16, 2025
Now it was that Nehushta's fears were justified, for having a little leisure the Jews took a beam of wood and battered in the walled-up doorway of the tower. "Look!" said Nehushta, pointing down. "Oh, Nou!" Miriam answered, "I was wrong. I have run you into danger. But indeed I could not go. What shall we do now?"
Nehushta's face grew thin and very pale and her lips white in that time, and she let her heavy hair hang neglected about her. Many of the men shaved their heads and went barefooted, and the fortress and the palaces were filled with the sound of weeping and grief.
The king took her small white hand in his, as she stood beside him, and looked at it. "It is a beautiful hand," he said. "Nehushta's fingers are a trifle shorter than yours a little more pointed a little less grasping. Shall I marry Nehushta, or not?" He looked up as he asked the question, and he laughed. "No," answered Atossa, laughing too. "Shall I marry her to Zoroaster?"
To convince Nehushta that Zoroaster was deceiving her, and really loved herself, the queen; to force Zoroaster into some position where he must either silently let Nehushta believe that he was attached to Atossa, or, as an alternative, betray the king's secrets by speaking the truth; to let Nehushta's vanity be flattered by the king's admiration, nay, even to force her into a marriage with Darius, and then by suffering her again to fall into her first love for Zoroaster, bring her to a public disgrace by suddenly unmasking her to the king to accomplish these things surely and quickly, reserving for herself the final delight of scoffing at her worsted rival all this seemed to Atossa to constitute a plan at once worthy of her profound and scheming intelligence, and most sweetly satisfactory to her injured vanity and rejected love.
Nehushta's face flushed suddenly, and for a moment she trembled in every joint; then she fell on her knees, prostrate before the king's feet, all the wealth of her splendid hair falling loose about her. Darius sat still, as though watching the result of his speech.
Scarcely was this task accomplished to Nehushta's satisfaction when her quick ears caught a sound. "For your life, be silent," she whispered, and laid her face sideways to a crack in the cement floor and listened. Well might she listen, for below were three soldiers searching for her and her mistress.
The news that he was made high priest soon reached Nehushta's ears, and she wondered what change had come over him in three years that could have made a priest of such a man. She remembered him young and marvellously fair, a warrior at all points, though at the same time an accomplished courtier.
Contrary to the usual habit Zoroaster had not permitted the tent-pitchers and other slaves to pass on while he and his charges made their noonday halt; for he feared some uprising in the neighbourhood of the city in the absence of the king, and he wished to keep his whole company together as a measure of safety, even at the sacrifice of Nehushta's convenience.
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