“It is,” Mithredath agreed. He and Polydoros made their way back to the ramp up which they had come.

They walked north and east along the wall. Mithredath’s heart beat faster when he saw letters scratched onto a stone, but it was only another graffito extolling a youth’s beauty. Then, when they were about halfway along the northern reach of the wall, opposite the ruins of some many-columned building, Polydoros suddenly pointed and exclaimed, “There, by Zeus; that’s what we’re after!”

Mithredath’s eyes followed the Hellene’s finger. The slab Polydoros had spied was flatter and paler than the surrounding stones. As they hurried toward it, Mithredath saw the slab was covered with letters in the angular script the Hellenes used for their own language. If this was someone praising a pretty boy, he’d been very long-winded.

“What does it say?” the eunuch asked. He fought against excitement; for all he knew, the inscription had been ancient when Khsrish took Athens.

“Let me see.” Polydoros studied the letters. So, in his more ignorant way, did Mithredath. He could see that the stone carving here was more regular than the scratchings his servants and he and Polydoros had come upon before. That in itself, he suspected, marked an official document.

“Well?” he asked impatiently. He took out pen and ink and papyrus and got ready to transcribe the words Polydoros was presumably rendering into Aramaic.

“This is part of what you seek, I think,” the Hellene said at last.

“Tell me, then!” Had he been a whole man, Mithredath’s voice would have cracked; as he was what he was, it merely rose a little.

“I’m about to. Here: ‘It seemed good to the council and to the people’… boule and demos again, you see?”

“A plague on the council and people!” Mithredath broke in. “Who in Ahura Mazda’s name was the king?”

“I’m coming to that, I think. Let me go on: ‘With the tribe of Antiokhis presiding, Leostratos serving as chairman, Hypsikhides as secretary-’ “