uage remains
still to come to me. My inwards speak; indeed they are full of speech;
but I cannot translate into bald cold words what they say."

And here, surely the High Gods took pity on my tied tongue and my
misery, and made an opportunity for bringing the ceremony to an end. A
man ran into the square shouting, and showing a wound that dripped,
and presently all that vast crowd which stood on the pavements, and the
sides of the pyramids, and the roofs of the temples, took up the cry,
and began to feel for their weapons.

"The rebels are in!" "They have burrowed a path into the city!" "They
have killed the cave-tigers and taken a gate!" "They are putting the
whole place to the storm!" "They will presently leave no poor soul of us
here alive!"

There then was a termination of our marriage cooings. With rebels merely
biting at the walls, it was fine to put strong trust in the defences,
and easy to affect contempt for the besiegers' powers, and to keep
the business of pageants and state craft and marryings turning on easy
wheels. But with rebel soldiers already inside the city (and hordes of
others doubtless pressing on their heels), the affairs took a different
light. It was no moment for further delay, and Phorenice was the first
to admit it. The glow that had been in her eyes changed to the glare of
the fighter, as the fellow who had run up squalled out his tidings.

I stood and stretched my chest. I seemed in need of air. "Here," I said,
"is work that I can understand more clearly. I will go and sweep this
rabble back to their burrows, Phorenice."

"But not alone, sir. I come too. It is my city still. Nay, sir, we are
too newly wed to be parted yet."

"Have your will," I said, and together we went down the steps of the
throne to the pavement below. Under my breath I said a farewell to Nais.

Our armour-bearers met us with weapons, and we stepped into litters, and
the slaves took us off hot foot. The wounded man who had first brought
the news had fallen in a faint, and no more tidings was to be got from
him, but the growing din of the fight gave us the general direction, and
presently we began to meet knots of people who dwelt near the place of
irruption, running away in wild panic, loaded down with their household
goods.

It was useless to stop these, as fight they could not, and if they had
stayed they would merely have been slaughtered like flies, and would
in all likelihood have impeded our own soldiery.