The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (39 page)

THIRTY-ONE

W
e never know the last time we will see someone. My mother, kissing me. Maqar, on the field. His face was before me, as it had not been since that day. He was squinting in the sun. Why had I not taken his face between my hands our last night in camp?

Solomon, leaning over me. He was weeping again.

Ah, my Solomon.

Why hadn’t I stayed awake all night, memorizing his eyes? Why hadn’t we gone into the city and left our kingdoms behind? Why hadn’t we passed out through the gate, hand in hand, and never returned?

Bilqis.

How beautiful it was to hear him say my name.

“My queen. Bilqis!”

My mother and Maqar both vanished before me.

Someone slapped at my cheek. Impossibly, I opened my eyes on the only one remaining: Solomon’s.

Shofar horns in the distance. Hard blasts, crude to the ear and splintering to the brain. Shouts, rising in waves to the palace.

“What did the physician say?” he said urgently to Shara.

“That she survived the day, and will live. He gave her a draught.”

“She will not die?” he demanded.

“No, my lord. She is strong.” She hesitated. “As is the child within her.”

The king turned astonished eyes to me and then clasped me hard against him. “A ruler of both our blood,” he whispered, fervent in my ear. “It will be a son. A son to rule and unite kingdoms. The ruler I never was.” He stroked my hair, my cheek, rocking back and forth. “How do I let you go?”

“It is not time,” I whispered. No. Not yet. We were to have days . . .

Another form filled the door and the king looked up. “My king, the way is clear.”

The king lifted me to my feet and the floor threatened to give out beneath me. Swiftly, he took me in his arms. And then we were rushing through the corridors, the king’s guard before us, to the lower part of the palace. Down, to the subterranean hive of cellars and chambers. I had been this way before. There, the plain tunnel across from the vaulted treasury to the unmarked room. This time, the door was not locked but thrown open. Something gleamed in the passage.

A golden chest, the poles in place, cherubim seeming to hover in flight.

We were not alone. A host of robed figures stood aligned in the passage behind it illuminated by a single torch. Eight—no, ten—priests. I had seen the men in these garments, singing the day I visited the temple court. No, not priests. Broad-shouldered Levites.

Eight of them surrounded the ark, two to a corner at the long poles. They bent and, at a quick command between them, hoisted the poles, faces straining, to their shoulders. Like the palanquin of God, I thought abstractly.

I looked around me for Yafush, a shadow in the darkness. Shara, with ashen face.

The Levites disappeared into the tunnel, the glow of torchlight in their wake. Solomon caught me up more tightly in his arms and we entered the hewn rock behind them.

Hard jostle of every step. Echoed whispers.

Where we were going?

“Yafush—” I said, the sound too soft and loud at once.

“He’s behind, with the king’s guard,” Shara said, breathlessly.

Dank cold of bedrock, the rough incline. Once, Solomon stumbled, but bore up and surged forward.

“Let me walk,” I said with growing difficulty, fighting the draught.

“You cannot. I must do this. To save you. You, and our son. Let me save one nation.”

I thought distantly:
Why do men always think it is a son?

It seemed that we passed an eternity in darkness, chill creeping over my skin like damp on stone, the king’s breath ragged in my ear, his arms iron around me. I thought I could hear his heart beating wildly in his chest—or was it my own?

Shara fell forward with a cry, gasped as arms helped her up again.

We began to ascend, the Levites ahead bending low in the tightening passage. The king grimaced, a sheen across his face.

The realization came slowly as I fought to keep the numbing fog at bay, unable to escape its sticky tendrils completely.

The temple
.

We emerged into a chamber filled with gold cauldrons and braziers, figures blocking the light beyond as they reached for us with arms on all sides. The damp echo of the tunnels that had amplified every breath was replaced almost immediately by the roar of full riot from the city below.

We had come out of one of the side buildings into the inner court. Through the gate I could see a large company of mounted and foot soldiers assembled in the outer yard.

“It is ready?” the king said.

“It is ready.”

I strained to look around me in sudden panic. Shara and Yafush had not emerged with us.

“They’ve gone another way with my men,” Solomon said. “They are less recognizable and will meet us south of the city. But there is no way to take you out through the valley in safety. They riot even beyond the gates.”

I had never been without Yafush since I was a girl of twelve.

Four Levites had surrounded the ark and, after what seemed a moment’s hesitation, hefted the lid away.

Solomon held me tight against him, his cheek pressed fiercely to mine. “Now, my love,” he whispered. “You entered Jerusalem as the rising sun, in majesty. You will not leave it without the finery of gold. All Israel will bow before you. All Israel will remember this day. And if they do not, then I will. Forever.” He kissed me softly. “Lady of the
markab
,” he whispered. “My best love.”

What is love, but to hold dear without expectation?

What is love, but first given devotion?

What is love . . .

But freedom.

I meant to say all of this as he lifted me into the box. But the king was kissing my lips as my knees curled in against my chest. “I love you as the sun rises. I love you by the moon.” His face twisted. “How do I let you go knowing that in saving you, you may yet pass to the afterlife? How do I leave you in the hands of any god?”

“Surrender,” I said, and did so.

I remember the jostling of arms. The world closing in and going dark.

THIRTY-TWO

I
saw them pull away like the fabled parting of the sea. How they fell away! Like the rains washing down two sides of a mountain.

Impossibly, I saw them.

There were so many of them, and so many armed men among them, enigma on their faces, and alarm, before they shielded their eyes.

They ran, scattering like leaves before a gale.

But all is well
, I wanted to say. The sun rises, without our aid. And the moon will come in her wake. And there is one force that makes them rise and decline, and one that made them both.

I knew this now.

All the riddles were gone, only the husk of them remaining like the hard shells of locusts still clinging to the stem.

And then the shells themselves blew away.

Including mine.

Who am I?

There was no Bilqis and no Makeda or priestess. No daughter, princess, or queen. No lover, or unloved. There was only the name that I had always had, but forgotten. A name by which I was known to God, that is neither spoken or written. That annihilated self. A vessel that is full because it has first been emptied.

Yes. Freedom. Yafush was right.

The crescent was over the sun in the sky. Time and eternity, at once. How beautiful the world was. And heaven danced among us.

I had sought love. I had talked of love, not knowing that it is one step beyond wisdom into the face of God. And this was the only salvation.

The king was there when the lid was lifted away and the first gust of chill air roused me. It was he who pulled me from that golden box as though from a fist-tight womb.

“Does she breathe? Is she dead?” Yafush cried.

I had never heard that sound from him.

“She lives!” the king cried, pulling me into his arms.

Indeed. More than he knew.

He kissed me—a thousand times, he kissed me. How I wanted to comfort him with a thousand proclamations, to tell him to remember all that I had said, as I would remember all that he said when he answered my riddles with answers beyond even him.

And how I wanted to tell him that Yaweh had not forgotten him.

Yes. That, most of all.

Instead, I spoke one word, the one I saw now when I looked on his face—or that of Yafush, or Shara, or any man or woman known to me or not—as the draught, held at bay all this while, had its way at last.

I forgot to tell him he must finish our story. Somehow I must remember to tell him that.

THIRTY-THREE

T
he sand had left the air in its typical greenish haze. And so they said, when we put in at the best port that we could make, that the storm had come with the ships.

This is not true.

It took us two weeks to find suitable landing on the coast, to unload the camels and tents and the fodder that would see us inland the rest of the way south, to Saba—including that most precious cargo, covered in heavy woolen blankets. The strange misshapen thing carried on the poles by the Levites who had brought it out from the city and accompanied us to the ships. And two weeks, also, for me to recover and reconstruct all that had happened in the space of hours with any semblance of clarity.