The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (32 page)

“Yes. I want scholars and astronomers and mathematicians and priests at my court. The sages and scribes who congregate now in yours—I want a twin capital of learning in Saba.”

“I will treat with you on all of these things. But I have one condition.”

“What is that?”

“Marriage.”

I felt the word like a slap.

“You yourself said you wanted no more wives!”

“I said, what need did I have for another wife.”

“All the same!”

“And yet that is my condition.”

“I am a queen, not a princess to be given in treaty,” I snapped. “And the Sabaeans will never accept a foreign king.”

“You are the queen. They will accept that which you tell them makes sense.”

“It does not make sense to me!”

“Bilqis.” He came to me and seized my hand. “Do you think me a conqueror? I, who have never even seen your face!”

“What else should I think? You expect me to take a husband who will share my bed but once? Or would you simply add me to your collection like a doll?”

“I will give you an heir.”

I could not help the bitter laugh that escaped me then. I did not tell him that no man—let alone a circumcised king—could do that.

“I will not be one of four hundred. And make no mistake: I will not spend my life sleeping alone.”

“Have I seen even one of my wives in the last month since spending all these days and nights at your side?”

“I don’t know. Have you? I certainly haven’t asked it of you.”

“No! Though they send messages and entreaties and though I know they are angry. Do you not think I am well aware that they are jealous? And I forsake them all to spend time with you!”

“How generous you are!” I pulled my hand away. “And what will your mad prophet say of that? Already he says your god is angry with you. Every day he parades through the streets and renounces your wives as worshippers of demons. Already your people look to me with suspicion, except those whom you receive to your table and hall, forced to pay obeisance. Do you think marriage to me will endear you to them? No.”

“I see,” he said coldly. “You say you will not be just another woman to me, but I see I am just another king to you.”

I sighed. “And now you require reassurances from me?”

“Do you think any other king will offer you what I do? Saba’s future is lost without alliance to me. Are you so selfish that you will not marry for the sake of your people?”

“And you are so selfless that you marry again and again and again!”

“Yes!” he roared. “I dole myself out in pieces for the sake of the kingdom—this unified and spiritual kingdom—for the sake of peace and for my god!”

“Well, you are not the only sovereign of a unified and spiritual kingdom. And yet somehow I manage to do it without selling pieces of myself away!” I hissed.

What was I doing? But now the floodgates, once opened, would not staunch their tide. All the tension of the last weeks and months of this limbo, this two-sided dance, flooded my veins at once, bringing me to my feet.

“You say your god is supreme over all. And yet my god is far more forgiving than yours! Yaweh would not approve of your marriage to
me, High Priestess of another god. Mine gives me free rein to marry or not, to lie with any man I wish. You, though, must marry again and again to legitimize your unending lust for wealth. But even then, the divine author of your laws does not condone it. And so you explain it away. You think you expand your kingdom, but you are like an animal in a trap, unable to turn one way or the other without some retribution, divine or otherwise. Your prophet treats your wives as harlots. Well, who is the harlot here?”

For a moment, I actually thought he might strike me, he trembled so violently. The look on his face was terrible.

“I thought you wise. I see now that I was wrong,” he said and walked inside.

He left me there, standing on the roof.

It was ruined. Saba was ruined. And I had been her undoing.

TWENTY-FOUR

I
had failed. I had lost, all.

On the second day after I roused myself from my torpor, I sent the women given to me out on contrived errands—one to the kitchens with instructions for a Sabaean dish I claimed to crave, one for fresh flowers for the apartment, and the rest to the market for news.

“The wives are jealous,” my eldest girl said, when they were gone and I was alone with her and Shara. “None of them have spent a night with the king in well over a month, except at the dark moon. I heard the Edomite and the wife from Hamath talking. But Naamah and the Pharaoh’s daughter are not worried for that—only for the favor he shows you. If you are to marry him, they worry that any son by you will have more favor than their own. Twice now, Naamah’s girl has asked when we are leaving. She does it under the pretense of wanting to stay with us for as long as she can. But we know the question comes from her mistress, who calls her back under the guise of sending gifts for us and for you.”

“Well, of course, what did you think?” I said.

“I’m afraid, my queen,” Shara said to me when we were alone. “Nebt says that it is not unknown for one of the new favorites to turn ill from poison, and to expel a child before it has come to term.”

“Well, there is no chance of that,” I said. Nonetheless, I had requested my own food taster some time ago.

Now I must decide what to do. I had been rash—reckless. I had been clever, but not clever enough.

I could make my peace with Solomon. But I did not think I could bring myself to ascend that garden stair now even if it wasn’t barred against me already. Nor did I know if he would even receive me.

I could leave. But to do so now and have it come out later that I had failed utterly after all my promises . . . I couldn’t stomach the thought. Not yet, while there was still time.

Neither could I bear these few months until winter dwindling to days.

Worst of all: I missed the king. No, not the king, but the man who captured and revered my hands. The poet who begged for the story of the garden, of the shepherd and shepherdess. The boy who took me stealing from the palace. The soul who drifted inexorably closer the more I shed the mantle of queen to expose the raw vein of my own loneliness.

Yes. He was a mirror. And I was his.

I told myself I could begin again and ply him with the stories and riddles he so craved . . . but my riddles were exhausted, and the words I had spoken could not be undone.

Or I could consent to his terms.

“I think that I have lost,” I said faintly, when Shara and I were alone. “Even though he offered me everything I wanted. He proposed marriage. And I wanted to accept.”

Despite all that I had said.

I laid my arm around Shara’s shoulders and wondered why I had not confided in her more. I had done her a disservice in protecting her that way, leaving her only to comfort me in silence.

“It is a difficult thing, to keep the favor of a king,” she said, in a stilted whisper.

“No. Only to keep it without losing all.” I sighed, and got to my feet.

Shara sat like a stone, staring at her hands. Her breath began to come in short gasps and she threw her arm out to the edge of a nearby table.

“Shara! What’s this?” I took her by the shoulders.

I had never seen Shara so concerned about any matter of state. What made her panic now?

“This is the business of kings and queens, that is all.” I pulled her against me, looking for my girl to bring wine. “Soon, we will go home.”

“At least you choose and were chosen.” Her hands went to her face and her voice tightened and rose in pitch. “And were never given.”

She trembled violently in the circle of my arms.

“Shara. Shara! What ails you?” I pulled her hands away.

But she would not answer with anything but the pleading in her eyes, some awful need. The look of a person who cannot speak, but must have it spoken for her—or of a woman who has carried a secret one day too long.

Something niggled, a memory of years.

The night of the banquet, when I announced she must not be invisible, and dressed her in my own gown.
You will not give me away.
And I had sworn that I would not.

Chosen and not given. Given to whom?

All those days of plain dress. Her hatred of Hagarlat, who ingratiated herself to my father and his fruitless spiritual pursuits . . . who never begrudged him even his concubines if only to placate him for the securing of favors. Hagarlat, who did not flinch at the ruin of
others if it furthered her own purposes . . . who first turned, I knew in my heart, the eyes of her degenerate brother my way.

“You cannot mean Sadiq . . .”

She shook her head, near to hyperventilating. “Forgive me. Forgive me.”

If not Sadiq, then for whom did she ask forgiveness? The only other man in my life at all had been my father.

My arms fell away.

Shara slid from the sofa and fell at my feet. She clutched my hems with a terrible wail. My stomach turned and threatened to empty.

My own milk sister . . .

My father’s
concubine
?

But even I had not known or heard the names of those women—either in Saba or across the sea. Hagarlat was far too proud, far too ambitious to share the king’s favor, especially after a queen who shared it not at all. But Shara was not one to make herself seen. And Hagarlat knew it.

“All this time,” I whispered. “Why did you not tell me!”

“How was I to tell you?” She hitched a breath. “Every day I have known—the hour would come when you would despise me. Every morning . . . I wake and wonder if this is the one and how I will bear it one hour more. Do not hate me—Bilqis, my sister, my queen, whom I love! I dared not tell you—how could I tell you, knowing you would cast me away?”

Her words jarred me from revulsion.

I knew that feeling. I knew it well.

How long had I carried the secret of Sadiq, speaking it to not a single soul . . . wondering every night as I lay with Maqar how he might recoil from me if he knew, and wanting only to be known—and loved—in full?

I grabbed her fiercely then, not knowing until that moment that I would. I clasped her to me and she fell into my arms.

I was horrified, overwhelmed with I knew not what—aversion. Compassion. The urge to protect her against another, years dead, and a past I could never erase even as she shuddered in my arms.

Shara, too, longed to be fully known.

She was laboring to breathe, her lungs refusing to expand. “She gave me to him to spite you. And I—what could I do but take my life, and I—without the courage even for that!”

Her eyes rolled back and I shouted for my girl as she slumped in my arms.

I sat out on my terrace that evening, listening to the night sounds of the city. The bark of a dog. The cry of a child. A group of men singing as they ambled down the street. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the gardens of Saba as they had been before the locusts came. They would be lush again by now if there had been a good spring rain, the mimosa trees sending yellow stems of flowers to the ground. Overhead, the moon drifted against an inky sky, a waning crescent hung by invisible threads.

Had Shara gone willingly, I wondered? Had a small part of her hoped to find favor, to elevate herself above her station—to get back at Hagarlat, perhaps, or to steal something from her for herself or even in retaliation for her cruelty to me? Had my father been cruel to her to make her cringe the way she did, or kind enough to drown her in guilt all these years?

I had thought to ask every question. Later. Tomorrow. On the journey home, perhaps, if only so that I could reconcile it all—if indeed I could. But as I stood on my terrace that night, I realized that Shara’s answers would change nothing.

She was not my enemy. She was not my competitor. She was not mine . . . to give or take. If anything, she had suffered for her loyalty
to me. When she woke, I would shower her with love. I would erase the face of Hagarlat—and even that of my father—from my mind, and in so doing, abolish it from hers.

A step sounded behind me.

“Yafush.”

“I am here, Princess.”