The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (16 page)

And so I write to you not as a queen or priestess. And I ask of you: how do you worship one god before all others, a god without name or face? Why does a wise man call upon one god and risk angering the jealous ears of others—and why does your god ask of you such a thing? And how does one worship in a temple closed off to the heavens by a roof?

There should not be mysteries between us. I hear from my trader, Tamrin, that we are cousins who both trace our ancestors to that man of the flood, Noah, whose sons dispersed to the ends of the earth. And so surely you understand all that I have written, and know all of these things already. And so I pen these words to the wind, hoping only for their echo. Even the gods wish to be known.

I don’t know why I added this last, whether the gods or my heart commanded it stand.

ELEVEN

I
watched the girls who kept my chamber. The way they tittered over petty obsessions: the best-looking of the male palace slaves. The minor officials who took them to their beds. The gifts that came for me, many of which I sloughed off on them, and where and whom they had come from.

I observed my counselors. The vendettas that drove them, their agendas in the chamber, the way they argued over the table as though the moon itself might fall from the sky if they did not have their way.

The acolytes of my new priestly school, filled with such zeal. It dictated their every waking moment in hope for—what? My priests, who clung to their mystical identity in an echelon separate and therefore superior to the secular world. How did they know their god looked down on them at all?

I saw it all with a too-clear eye: the way farmers and merchants chased abundance as though it were the very sun, and as vainly. The wives who flaunted their pregnant bellies, the barren women who covered their heads, the lovers who worshipped the idol of their romance.

Wahabil, lost to the uncertainty of the future. Shara, to the
prison of her past. Tamrin, ever restless. Only my enigmatic eunuch seemed to dwell in a place of I know not what—peace? The present?—like an island among us.

Impossibly, four years had passed. I was twenty-two.

“All right,” I said at last to Wahabil. It was autumn, and the last rains had gone, taking with them the scent of almond and apricot trees in full fruit. “Go to Asm. Tell him I will make the marriage to the god.”

I thought my minister would fall down in relief.

“I will make arrangements for the new moon,” he said.

I did not know how to tell him that he might as well make them for the dark moon when Almaqah hid his face from the earth. That it would not matter. But I only nodded and said that yes, he must do that, and no, it was not too soon. There was no point in waiting, as I was no longer young.

The night of the new moon, I sat in vigil till dawn. I did this for seven nights, resting during the day, breaking my fast only at sundown with boiled quail eggs and pomegranate. I sent gifts of bronze statues and alabaster incense burners to the temple, jars of rare nard for the priests, and gold jewelry for the priestesses in service to the god.

On the eighth night, I crossed the oasis adorned in neither veil nor jewels. I left Yafush and my women at the causeway and gave Shara my sandals that I might enter the temple grounds barefoot and unescorted as any supplicant, a bowl of oil in my hands. Before the silent priests of the forecourt, I poured the oil on the altar and drank from the sacred well. And then I shed my robe and entered the open sanctuary in only my linen shift.

I knelt in shivering prayer until the next morning. And then I returned to the palace and closed myself away, seeing no one but Shara and drinking only water until the first day of the waxing moon.

On the last night, as the moon hid its face and I burned incense on the bronze burner with the leaping ibex handle, I realized Shara was staring at me.

“Are you afraid?” she whispered.

I watched the white smoke. A wisp of life, and then no more. A moment, too fleeting and gone.

Tomorrow I would let my women paint my eyes with kohl and my face and hands with henna. I would eat honey cakes and fruit and fat. At sunset, I would don the heavy bridal veil and enter the temple. I would stay in the room prepared for me, attended by the priestesses for a week as the god came in the guise of a shrouded priest each night. All beneath the half-lidded eye of Almaqah, shining through the window of my stony wedding bower, as the god rose over me in my bed.

The incense sputtered and the smoke thickened, cloying in my nostrils, too strong. I opened the shutter, but the walls were closing around me.

I crossed the chamber, unable to breathe, and shoved open the door. Shara was after me, my shawl in her hands, calling out, “My queen!” and then “Bilqis!” But I was running down the hallway and then the stair, out toward the portico, pushing past the guards. The heavy step of Yafush sounded behind me as I tore toward the garden.

I ran past beds of oleander and long-stemmed anemone, asters like purple stars fallen from the night, heaving breath into lungs that had constricted over the course of the last four years. Ahead, on the lantern-lit way, the fronds of tall palms swayed over the garden pool. In my mind, I plunged in, falling down among the lilies to my knees until I could lie back in the water, submerged. But even I could not rouse me from my torpor and I stopped before the edge of the water to stare, breathless, into its moonless night.

Running steps—Yafush, and the guards. I wrapped my arms around myself and vaguely heard Yafush tell the guards to go back to their posts. And then Shara was there, wrapping the woolen shawl around my shoulders.

“I’m fine,” I heard myself say. “I only needed some air.”

I staggered then, nearly going into the pool after all, and Yafush caught me up in his arms.

I turned my cheek against his oiled chest and closed my eyes.

Back in my chamber, I took the draught Shara gave me.

“The priests need not know,” she said, her face pale in the lamplight. “You won’t have broken your fast, at any rate.”

I nodded, no longer caring, and fell into mercifully dreamless sleep.

S
omeone was calling me. I heard my name again, more urgently, and stirred, my limbs like lead.

Voices. A commotion outside my door.

“My queen.” Shara, shaking me.

Whom is she speaking to?
I thought distantly, even as I said, “What is it?” the words formed with difficulty, slurred even to my ear.

“Tamrin. The trader. He came barging into the courtyard with his men, shouting for an audience, their camels nearly dead on their feet.”

I blinked at her, trying to make sense of what she was saying.

“Tamrin?” I got up from the bed and Shara wrapped my robe around me. But it was two months too early for his return. Had his caravan been attacked? I had sent fifty armed men with him eleven months ago.

“He started a mighty argument when Wahabil said you could not see him or any man today. The hall was full of shouting. He
went nearly mad, saying that he must speak with the queen—today, now.”

I looked toward the window and then the water clock, shocked to realize it was nearly mid-afternoon.

I swiftly pinned back my hair. The moment Shara realized what I meant to do, she said, “Bilqis, you cannot!”

But I was yanking open the chamber door and there was Yafush, standing outside, my girls startled as birds by my appearance in the outer room.

“I think you had best come, Princess,” Yafush said.

B
oth men’s heads swiveled the moment I entered my council chamber.

“My queen!” Wahabil exclaimed even as Tamrin strode urgently forward.

“My queen,” Tamrin said, falling low before me. The dust of his journey clung to his tunic and hair. When he straightened, I could see that his face had been wiped hastily clean. Behind him on the table a plate of food lay untouched.

“They said you would not see me, that you were sequestered—” He faltered and stared, and I realized that in my groggy haste I had forgotten to don my veil.

Wahabil’s hands had gone to his head.

“How have you returned so soon?” I demanded, alarmed at the look of him—never had I seen him so unsettled. “Were you harassed upon the route?”

He shook his head. “Yes, but we are safe. I came ahead with a small company—your armed men are with my caravan weeks behind.”

“This might have waited—” Wahabil said, throwing up his hands.

“I fear to wait!” Tamrin said.

“The gods will accomplish what they will without our machinations,” I said. “There will be another cycle. I am not so old yet.”

“My queen, we dare not wait for the gods but act now,” Tamrin said, clearly thinking I had spoken to him, as a positively queer look crossed Wahabil’s face.

I might have laughed at the looks on both their faces had I not been impatient to hear why Tamrin was in such a state.

“My queen, my men and I have ridden hard for days to come to you—” He was staring again and I wanted to shake him.

“What has happened?” I demanded. No trader ever left his caravan.

“The king would not receive me.”

“What do you mean?”

“His chamberlain received your gifts from us, explaining that the king had urgent business and could not meet us. But when I said I had a message for the king and that I must deliver it personally, I was kept waiting. Five days in a row I returned with your scroll, waiting with those who had come to petition the king, waiting as though I were one of the two prostitutes of the story!”

My scroll. The one by which I had meant to rouse his indignation but that ended with my baring, if even in code, my great isolation. I felt a flush of heat rush to my cheeks.

“When at last he received me before his court, I said, ‘My lord, you receive Saba’s gifts by way of your chamberlain, but you have not received her greatest treasure—these words penned by the Jewel of Saba herself, which I may deliver to no hand but your own!’ And he said, ‘What I have asked I have not received. Where is the queen’s emissary?’ ”

“And when I told him your message, that his emissaries were welcome in Saba, he said, ‘Does your queen think I tell her “Send your emissaries” out of vanity?’ ”

I felt my eyes narrow. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“I begged the same question, but he would not answer.”

“ ‘Is it true,’ he asked me then before his court, ‘that your queen has the feet of a goat?’ ”

“What?”

“I was flabbergasted. ‘My lord, who could say such a thing of the most beautiful woman in the world?’ I said. ‘I am here as eyewitness to say she is perfect in every way. Why do you insult the Daughter of the Moon?’ ‘You are neither her advisor nor her councilman,’ the king said, to which I replied, ‘No, but I am the voice of the queen to your court, that bids your men return with me to paradise, and even I come only for the glory of Saba and her gods, with tears each time I depart and songs of thanksgiving each time I return. But judge her words for yourself, as all that she says is wise and true.’ ”

“And?” I said.

“And then he dismissed me.”

I blinked.

“What of the scroll?”

“I gave it over to his attendant and my men and I went away stunned.”

A public snubbing. I thought back to the message I had sent him. I knew it by rote, having revised it a thousand times, speaking parts of it aloud, even, as though in conversation with the man himself. Was it possible I had missed the mark so completely?

“Does he expect me to send Wahabil himself to grovel at his feet?” I said. “We will find new markets for our goods. We will cut him off completely. If I have to ferry incense to Punt and carry it north by camel to Egypt, we will cut him out!” I would deal with his enemy in Damascus and create our own roads across the mountains into Phoenicia. We would add our wealth to Egypt’s. Perhaps, in time, I would even marry a Pharaoh . . .

“There is more,” Wahabil said, apparently resigned.

“What more could there be?”

“The king’s court was full of Phoenicians,” Tamrin said, “and the king busy with entertaining them, shut away with them often, and then gone from the city for days.”