Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/19



Seated in the glittering, chilly depth of the great peacock throne that spread above her tiny, oval face with a barbaric blaze of emeralds and pearls and rubies and star sapphires, with her narrow, diminutive hand nervously clutching a scepter topped by an immense blue diamond known as the “Sea of Light,” with that little soft vagueness about her cherry lips and her eyes like black wells beneath the hooded lids, she looked childish, appealing, rather pathetic. There is something sinister in the relentlessness in which inheritance may force people into a position they are not framed to fill, thrusting power into their hands and judgments into their mouths, whether they desire it or not.

Thus with Aziza Nurmahal.

The peacock throne and the autocratic power which it embodied were meant for men of crunching, clouting, merciless strength of mind and body; men like her father, who had ruled his turbulent subjects with an iron, rather saturnine hand and with the loyal help of his old prime minister, Hajji Akhbar Khan, Itizad el-Dowleh.

But the former was dead while the latter had left the country on a mysterious mission a day after Hakem Ali, the court physician, had decided that there was no hope for his master's life. And already intrigue was raising its flat head, was whispering, craftily, crookedly, in palace and bazaar and behind the curtains of the harems.

It had begun with the Master of Horse, Tagi Khan, openly accusing Gulabian, the Armenian treasurer, of