The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (19 page)

FOURTEEN

I
was not prepared for the assault of their outrage.

“My queen!” Wahabil dropped his hands to the table. “You cannot!”

“And who says what a queen may or may not do?”

“It is too dangerous,” Niman said. Beside him, Abyada shook his head.

“Your throne will not be safe,” Wahabil said. “What is to keep another from conspiring in your absence?”

In the face of their objection, trepidation flooded me for the first time since I had entered the room.

What had I done? What had I spoken and now committed? Such bravado, once voiced, could not be taken back.

I must be clever. I must be swift.

“No one may do what I am about to do. And who has done it before?”

Even Hatshepsut, the matriarch Pharaoh, had not gone in person to Punt.

“Yes, and who has eaten a poisonous snake while it is still alive? But why would anyone want to?” Wahabil said. “If you would arrange a marriage treaty, my queen, I beg you, let your kinsmen arrange it. It is the way it is done.”

Marriage again.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or to scream at him.

“It is
not
such a treaty. I go as a sovereign. As one king to another. No one, even you, Khalkharib, will make our argument as vehemently as I, in the way of kings. And yet you will accompany me. You and Niman.”

More protests, but even in the uproar, the pieces came to me, swiftly, without premeditation. I felt it all with a sense of elation.

Wahabil sat back, arms in the air.

“Come now, councilors,” I said, standing before them. “Do you not know that you are saying this to the princess who journeyed with you from Punt’s shores? Who lay down beneath the stars with you, never knowing one night until the next if we would be set upon by north men? Not knowing if the wadis would fill and wash us away as we slept? Did we not march together from the coastal plain of Hadramawt and through the valleys of Qataban to the very edge of the desert?”

Niman shook his head. “That is different.”

“Yes. This journey is a stretching of the legs by comparison. A chance for me to see the northern route for myself. Of course, if you are saying that you do not feel up to the long days of travel . . .”

“I will gladly go on your behalf, as your cousin and kinsman,” Niman said.

“Then as kinsmen, we will go together.” I sat down again. “We are protected in Saba. But we are isolated. We depend on the accounts of our traders to bring news of this foreign court of which they seem so enamored, and to speak on our behalf. Let us see and assess this power—this threat—for ourselves. We have turned our eyes to our mountains and our wadis and mastered the rains. We have turned our eyes to the heavens and built temples to our gods. Now let us turn our gazes to the world. Let us not, in our isolation,
find ourselves years from now an antiquated paradise, set apart like the lands of myth. One day, though it may be centuries from now, armies will come to our borders. And we cannot afford to be as innocent as children kept too long in the cradle.”

“My queen, this is not a stretching of the legs but an arduous journey of half a year!” Wahabil said. “Tamrin will attest to its sandstorms and bandits—”

“Do we not have those things here?” I said. “We are a caravan nation. When did we forget that the nomad is in our blood? We live in cities, but we are hardy and not softened by luxury. Well. Perhaps a little.” I smiled. A couple of uncomfortable chuckles issued around the table.

“Our ancestors made no allowance for weakness, and neither do we,” I continued. “And so this is less a journey to some distant land than a quest of remembering who we are. Lesser men make war and invade foreign borders for want or fear. We neither fear nor want, and we shall prove it. Let the chieftains of Edom and the Amalakites and the Pharaoh of Egypt and the kings of Phoenicia and yes, of Israel, be surprised. Would Solomon himself make this journey? He dare not! His northern tribes conspire against his south. What does it say of our kingdom, and of its queen, that she may leave with the full confidence of returning to find it intact? That the journey of a year is nothing to her? I dare any sovereign to do the same!”

I raised my palm before they could protest again.

“This is a campaign more clever than any war. We will make many arrangements. We will journey with such spectacle that he will know he has no choice but to treat with us. We will awe him not with our weapons, but with our wealth. Our incense will be as spears. Our gold as fire, and our ivory like arrows. Egypt has given him land and garrisons. Phoenicia, the materials for his temple, palace, and ships and artisans to build them all. But Saba will offer him the foreign
exotic he so craves in quantities he could never imagine, and the possibility of touching the far reaches of the world . . . without leaving his throne.”

Wahabil was shaking his head. “It is too dangerous. My queen, you are without an heir. Anything could happen and Saba would be at the very war you speak against—not outside her borders, but within them.”

“I will make provision of an heir . . . by adoption,” I said, thinking quickly.

They all looked at me then in such shock!

“I will adopt an heir before Almaqah in the auspices of the temple. But I will do it in secret. Even you will not know whom I have chosen. I will seal the name in the safekeeping of the priests—of three priests in three temples. And neither you nor anyone will know which ones, so that only after confirmation of my death will they journey to Marib and break open the seal to announce that name,” I said, deciding it all even as the words flowed from my mouth.

“That—is not done,” Wahabil stammered.

“Nor is it done that a queen gets up and journeys half a world away. And yet, I will do it.”

“Adoption of an heir is not unknown. There is precedent in the adoption of a kinsman,” Niman said.

“And what great relief for you, that you need not know who and find yourself harassed by chieftains taking up sides, but only keep my throne safe in my absence, or my person safe as we journey together.” I glanced from Niman to Khalkharib.

I saw the way Wahabil considered me then, a slight smile playing about his mouth.

“But the tribes—what is to keep them from rising up in your absence?” Yatha said. “Hadramawt stands much to gain if you fail.”

I lifted my hand.

“You. Or do you not think you can control them?” I glanced around the table. “I tell you this, a mighty curse will be upon any tribe who dares in my absence. I will enact it at the temple on the day that I set out upon that road.”

My heart was soaring in my chest as I said all of this. Certainly I had no intention of dying in this venture, and a part of me now felt something I had not felt in years.

Freedom.

“But now I task you all with silence,” I said. “If word of my plan should pass beyond this chamber, I will ferret out the one who betrayed me. And for such treason, he will pay with his life. This journey will be many months, a year, in the planning. No one must know my intention to depart, or even that I have until well after I am gone.”

Now they stared at me and I knew I must be either mad or inspired.

“How is that possible?” Yatha blurted.

“We make it possible,” I said, very quietly. “And if Saba’s throne should be overrun in my absence, you will be cursed along with the tribes that rise up against me. Almaqah himself will deny you your place in the shadow land beyond death. I will inform the priests, and the curse will be put in place before my departure.”

Niman was openly searching around the room and Kalkharib looked frankly scandalized.

“But as Saba prospers,” I continued, “so will you and your tribes. When the Phoenician ships sail, the first choice of every season’s best goods will fall to you in turn. The best bull in my stables will be sent to service your she-camels and the children of your children will study in the far courts of kings. Your lowliest slave will be held in the esteem of other tribes’ chieftains, and your sons will be confidants and council to the federator of our kingdoms after me.
You will want for nothing except the answers to questions that those hungry, landless, and afraid never have luxury to lay before the gods. And so your greatest problem will be that of what to do with so many offspring and how to distribute your great wealth upon the journey to your forefathers. But now . . .”

I gestured to Yafush and my eunuch came closer. It was early evening. To think I might even now have been crossing the causeway to the temple to marry the god. But the new moon had brought its own agenda.

“You will give me your vow beneath the blade of my eunuch before leaving this chamber.”

Yafush unsheathed his sword and raised it, tip pointed downward over Wahabil’s nape.

“My queen,” Wahabil said, head bowed. “If I have ever given you cause to doubt—”

“You have not, my friend. And so give me your vow, as you live before Almaqah’s Daughter and in the presence of the reborn god himself.”

“Almaqah himself strike me dead if I ever betray you,” Wahabil said.

Yafush moved to Yatha, who stared through his lashes, head bent, at me.

“I vow,” he said.

One by one, they swore their oath to me. Of course they did. I knew this only for grand gesture; any one of them could break it in my absence a year from now. But my spirit was already traveling that incense road, journeying north toward the oases of Yathrib and Dedan, toward Israel. Not for the sake of the king, but because I could no longer contain it here.

When they were done and Yafush stood back once more, Wahabil fairly shouted, “My queen, how will no one know you are gone?”

“I will make my plan known to you. Soon, we will give this king a spectacle that will bring him to his knees.”

B
y every god, what had I done?

I could not sleep but paced to the window and back. I would not take out the scroll and read it again—a tenth, an eleventh time—by light of the lamp even as Shara slept.

I told myself this audacious plan was for the sake of my kingdom. But the truth was Solomon’s letter had sent my nerves to jangling beneath my skin. Without it, I might have entertained the wooing of his enemies. Now, instead, I must woo—and turn—the ambitions of a king.

Perhaps tomorrow I would berate myself for having fallen reactive prey to the king’s machinations. I had threatened my council and made grandiose promises that even I did not know if I could keep. I had abandoned the bedchamber of my god in order to scheme a journey to the land of a nameless other. For all I knew, rash action was exactly what Solomon had hoped to ignite in me. Well then, I would not disappoint but far exceed his expectation.

Time enough for doubt later. Tonight, I was excited as I had not been since the day I left Saba for the shores of Punt. Every great turn in my life had been marked by a journey. It was time to begin a new one. A greater one.

That night, in the hours just before dawn, I sent for the Israelite slave, Mazor. If he had been roused from sleep—and he certainly had—he did not show it, but bowed low in my outer chamber, his hair drawn back neatly at his nape, only the gray in his beard belying his age on a face that was round as a boy’s.

“Are you not exhausted from your journey and hard ride here?”

“I have been well fed and rested. But even had I not, the praise of my god revives me.”

How I envied him his sure devotion, even to a nameless god.

“Then play and sing for me,” I said, reclining.

“In the common tongue, or that of my people?” he said.

“In your own.”

He bowed low and began to play and as he sang his voice was filled with beautiful melancholy. I closed my eyes and absorbed it like oil.

He played through the first rays of dawn and long into morning, singing song after song in his strange language until I slept at last, lulled by the repetitive “yah,” the long vowels from the palate softened by the tongue.

That morning, I dreamed of puzzles. Of foreign kings who both commanded and cajoled and thrones that must be left to be fortified. Of faceless gods with unpronounceable names.

For the first time in years, I slept assured of the path before me. For the first time in years, I looked forward to the future.

But now all my cunning of the past must be as nothing compared to what I would do next.