Harvest of Rubies (32 page)

At the mention of hunting I blanched. I had hoped not to come near a horse for many days yet. Of course I could not say so to the Queen. “I’m at your service, Majesty.”

“One part of the story I left out,” Darius said, “was that Sarah had never been on a horse until our journey to Ecbatana. She made it in ten days, but I doubt she’ll be much good at a hunt by tomorrow.”

I had not expected him to intercede for me. He could have let Damaspia have her way. He could have saved himself the trouble of intervening with a person of higher rank and possibly earning her ire. Instead he chose to inconvenience himself in order to protect me. I thought of how in the whole of my life I could count on my fingers the number of times anyone had spoken up in order to shield me.

Damaspia whisked her beautiful head in my direction. “You kept up with the men without ever having ridden before? How did you manage that?”

Forcing a lightness I did not feel into my voice, I said, “I was so grateful to have escaped death by poisoning that a little
saddle sore hardly seemed worth mentioning.”

“You haven’t lost your sense of humor, I see. Well, we certainly wouldn’t wish to put you back in a saddle so soon. Come and visit me before supper, then.”

I bowed my head. “It would be an honor.”

There was no time for more conversation. We stood before the carved gates of Ecbatana’s great hall. The trumpet was blown to announce the royal couple’s entrance and every guest stood. Darius and I followed in the wake of Artaxerxes and Damaspia, keeping a respectful distance. To my horror, I found myself the focus of more stares than even the king and queen.

The last time I had entered a gathering of royals and courtiers, I had been the oddity whose appearance had prompted endless laughter. Tonight, the crowd was thirsty for more entertainment. Their curious stares sought me out, bore into me, examined me with minute interest until I felt my heart pound with panic.

The shame of that evening had never left me. Not all the beauty treatments in Persia, nor the most stunning garments in the world could have made me feel like I was acceptable amongst these people. With sudden force my mind returned to my wedding night. I
was
an oddity. I
was
unacceptable. I was ugly. I came to a halt and could not make my feet take one more step. In the middle of the great hall, I stopped, soaked in shame, helpless with fear.

I
was shocked out of my paralyzed state when Darius wrapped his fingers around my shaking hand. He smiled at me, ignoring the fact that I had broken etiquette by freezing in the middle of our public procession. “I should have told you earlier this evening,” he said as if we were conversing in the privacy of our own chamber and not in the presence of every important head of state, “how lovely you look tonight.” He nodded his head once with a kind of gravity, as if assuring me that he spoke truth. Then he pulled on my hand and I followed him blindly to a couch near the head of the hall.

I hung my head low to avoid the weight of so much curiosity directed my way. Darius put a gentle finger under my chin and lifted my head up. “You have nothing to be ashamed of before these people.”

“You of all people know why I can’t face them. I feel so stupid. They will always think of me as an object of scorn. And they are right.”

He crossed his arms and leaned back. “What happened that night concerns you and me. Your account is with me. To them, you owe nothing.”

I bowed my head. He leaned toward me and lifted my chin again. This time, he held me firmly until he had my attention. “You are my wife. You are here with me. That’s all they need to know. Now stiffen your resolve and win back the ground you lost. This time, I am with you.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, my voice wobbly.

“What was the first thing I taught you about Kidaris?”

“The
horse?”

“Your mare, yes. What did I teach you about her?”

“That I shouldn’t be afraid of her even though she’s bigger than me?”

“Exactly. There isn’t that much difference between the people here and your horse.”

I couldn’t help cracking a smile at that. I was a bit scandalized by his easy scorn of the cream of Persia.

“That’s better,” he said. “You have a lovely smile.”

This was the second time he had called me lovely tonight. In spite of the fact that I knew that he abhorred lying, I could not swallow such a statement from him. I heard his words, but I couldn’t bring my heart to believe them.

“You’ve been very gracious. I am beholden to you. Thank you also for getting me out of the hunt tomorrow. I can’t imagine sitting astride a horse come sunrise. Holding my eyes open at the moment is about all I can manage.”

Darius leaned over and picked up the bejeweled knife laid at our table, and with it cut a piece of the stuffed quince we had just been served and offered it to me. “I know you’re tired. It’s been an exhausting week for you. Unfortunately, though I am certain you wish nothing more than to retire, we will be
one of the last to leave this evening. We shall feast the night away and show everyone that we are in accord, and that there is no substance to the empty gossip circulating about us.”

As he had foreseen, it was late by the time Darius and I retired to our diminutive apartment. As soon as we entered, I headed for the nook where one of the royal servants had delivered a bedroll upon my request. There was no way that I could go to sleep in my heirloom garments. I sat on the mattress and tried to think of a way to undress with Darius in plain view on the other side of the room.

“What are you doing?” he asked, coming toward me.

“Making ready for bed.”

“You’re not going to sleep here.” He tilted his head toward the large ornate bed in the corner of the room. “Get in there.”

I’m sure I must have turned scarlet.

He took a step back. “I didn’t mean … I meant I shall sleep on the floor and you will have the bed. I am not going to drag a woman halfway through the length of Persia and then make her sleep on the floor.”

“I am accustomed to sleeping on the ground.”

“I don’t care.”

I was too tired to argue. Without a word I rose and dragged myself to the bed. I sat down and once again tried to work out how to undress in the same room as my husband.

“Sarah? I forgot to tell you; I had word from the men I sent to find Teispes’s brother. They will come tomorrow and bring his accounts as well as Mandana’s receipts. We will need to go through them and get them in order. Can you help?”

My face fell. The Sabbath had begun hours before. The daylight hours belonged to the Lord. I had broken the Sabbath more than once, but I hadn’t fully surrendered my life to God then. I had promised myself that I would not give in to easy
compromises anymore. “My lord, I … cannot.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Of course. I shouldn’t have expected that you’d wish to work as a scribe now that you are in an elevated position.”

“It isn’t that!” I stood up and took a step toward him. “It isn’t that at all!” I thought of the irony that prevented me from helping him when at long last I had an opportunity. I could not understand the timing of God. Why would He close this door when He knew it was my only chance at making my husband value me? “It is the Sabbath you see—the Jewish day of rest. The Lord demands that we keep the Sabbath holy. And I … want so much to honor Him better than I have done in the past.”

To my relief, the tight line of his mouth softened. “The Sabbath. I know what that is. My mother kept it.” He turned around. Over his shoulder he said, “It would harm none if we dealt with the accounts one day later, I suppose.”

I let my breath out with relief. “I will enjoy seeing what kind of accounts Teispes’s brother keeps. I wonder if they are as outrageous as his brother’s.”

Darius yawned. “The mere mention of accounts puts me to sleep, I own. I’m off to my bed.” He blew out the lamps and drenched the room in darkness, thereby solving my problem of how to prepare for bed in his presence.

In spite of my exhaustion, I found myself wakeful, my thoughts awhirl. Once again Darius had stood up for me. He had championed me before the whole court. I thought of his words,
your account is with me
. To be fair, they weren’t entirely accurate. My actions had hurt his father also. They had cast a bad reflection upon the queen, upon Nehemiah, upon my own father. I had harmed more than Darius on the eve of my wedding.

But it was the judgment of strangers that had weighed so
heavily on me this night. In their eyes I was an outcast. I felt their sentence of rejection and believed it just. This was my problem: I agreed with them. On the strength of that agreement, I could not be freed from the condemnation I felt.

O Lord, help me!
I felt so small and lonely. Darius, for all his help, had rejected me himself.

Your account is with
Me. The words echoed in my mind like a whisper, but it wasn’t Darius’s voice that whispered them.

Your account is with
Me. I sensed the words repeated once more in my heart, with more force this time.

“Lord?”
As soon as I said His name, I began to remember the stories of our people. I thought of other men and women, outcast and hopeless, whom the Lord had accepted, watched over, loved: Jacob, Moses, Rahab, Ruth, David. These were imperfect men and women, each one an outsider in his or her own way, whom He had transformed, wanted, changed. Those who against all reason belonged to Him, not because they were free of faults, but because He had chosen them. This was the truth of God. This was His nature, His heart revealed.

I thought how much greater
this
reality weighed in the balance of my soul than the judgment of courtiers I barely knew.
Your account is with Me
. My sins and failures sat in the palm of God’s hand; they lay in the balance of His holiness. To Him, I owed my greatest accounting. Could I make my heart dwell only on the Lord’s opinion of me, and thereby, be able to ignore the judgments of others, be they good or bad? Could I exchange God’s reality for the one that awaited me in the halls of the king’s palace?

If my account was with God, then I had more repenting to do. I recalled how hard my heart had been toward Him on the eve of my wedding. How I had discounted God’s will and insisted on mine.

That night, my whole soul had been wrapped around
my
pain and fear. I hadn’t given a thought to how Darius felt or how my actions might affect our fathers. I had thought only of myself because I had thought so little of God. If I had trusted Him, I would have found the strength to think of the pain of others as well as my own. I would have avoided choices that caused so much damage.

My account with God was in a worse state than any other. But surely the One who had accepted David even after he had committed murder and adultery could find acceptance enough for me? In King David’s words I cried out to God:

I spent the rest of my wakeful hours asking the Lord’s forgiveness. The more I prayed, the greater the measure of His unfailing love seemed to grow, and the smaller the measure of my rebellion. It was as though bit by bit, His goodness swallowed up my sin. When I finally fell into sleep that night, my dreams were sweet.

The next evening Damaspia dismissed her attendants in order to meet with me alone. She bid me to sit on a golden stool near her and offered me fruit from a bowl overflowing with apples and pears and figs and mulberries and a few fruits I could not name. My new rank had earned me this honor; in the old days, I would have stood at attention in her presence. Without preamble she said, “You’ve had a hard summer.”

I thought she spoke of Teispes. “Yes, Your Majesty,” I said. “Though it feels good to be rid of him.”

“Him, you got rid of. What about your heart?”

“My heart?” I asked faintly.