After Abel and Other Stories

by Michal Lemberger

  It was a distraction, this complaint of her sister’s. They both knew why Zeresh was there, and it wasn’t to talk about palace intrigue. Zeresh had stopped caring how many virgins her king took to his bed long ago.

  “This time could be different,” Zeresh said.

  “It could, I suppose.”

  “Will you speak for us, if it is?”

  Interest flashed in Vashti’s eyes, so brief a stranger would have missed it, but the queen had finally heard what she had been waiting for. “Dear sister,” she said, the very tips of her lips lifting, “you are too focused on getting ahead. Why not be happy with your wealth, your children, your gardens? Surely, you wouldn’t rather have all this.”

  She gave a weak wave, taking in the deep couches and lavish fabrics that, to an untrained eye, could hide the fact that there were no windows facing out into the palace grounds. All Vashti, the most powerful woman in Persia, could see were the king’s many concubines bathing in the courtyard pool. “You have your freedom, Zeresh. Freedom and industry. You do not live at the whim of an intemperate man-child whose greatest talents are killing and drinking.”

  “That’s easy for someone with a crown on her head to say.”

  Vashti considered this for a moment. It looked to Zeresh as if she was thinking about a detail that had never crossed her mind before. Finally, she said, “I see that nothing I say will make you understand. Very well. You will get what you want. The eunuchs have been attending the nightly feasts. They say he has spent more on wine than would feed the city of Tyre. They sprinkle opals from the east on their meat. He has hired troops of dusky women to dance naked before them, two to every man present.”

  This was news to Zeresh, whose husband hadn’t shared any of the details of the previous nights with her.

  “Are they here, then,” she asked, “swelling your ranks?”

  “Now, sister, you can’t think he’d bring barbarian women in here. They are taken to the brothels at daybreak. Then he brings in new girls at night. Each morning, the commoners of Susa line up to lie with women the king has touched. The Creator only knows how he will top it tonight.”

  Here was more news to Zeresh. But Vashti was still talking.

  “So you’ll have your chance. Let him sleep off his excesses for a few days, then send your man, tell him to offer the moon. He is the king. He will take it.”

  That was her dismissal. Vashti was finished with her. As she left, she saw her sister summoning a girl to bring wine and cheese. That new eunuch can only do so much, Zeresh thought, if my sister will look for solace in the bottom of a goblet.

  When she woke the next morning, the house was quiet. Too quiet. She didn’t hear her sons shouting as they exercised outside before starting their studies. The servants attended to her silently but wouldn’t look her in the eye. They tried to guess what she’d want before she could even name it. Something must have happened. But she couldn’t figure out what it could have been.

  It took her hours to track down her husband. Even he had been afraid to face her, but he finally confessed to having seen it all happen.

  “The king tired of the dancing girls, their flesh warm in the firelight, heavy in his hands,” her husband reported. “He wanted to show us, all the nobles he’d gathered there, how strong his decree was. He was drunk. I’ve never seen a man take in so much wine in one night.”

  Zeresh began to grow impatient. Her husband could go on when he got going, his language getting more flowery the closer he came to the heart of a matter. What she wanted was to get to the point.

  He went on. “‘Bring in my wife,’ he declared. We all froze. It was as if time stopped. ‘Prepare my wife for an audience and bring her in,’ he said again. ‘You will all see what beauty accrues to a king.’”

  Zeresh could imagine it; the masses of embarrassed and horrified men, each avoiding the eyes of his neighbor, as the king finally stepped over the bounds of decency.

  “No one knew what to do,” he continued. “But we were all thinking the same thing. Even he couldn’t ask a high-born woman—the queen!—to be exposed to such a scene. Spilled wine and a naked woman on each man’s lap. But not mine,” he quickly added, “I would not touch them.”

  “Oh, shut up and get on with it.” Zeresh had no patience for his simpering devotion. What man didn’t take an occasional interest in some girl? That had nothing to do with marriage.

  “But he’s the king. He will have his way,” her husband said. “One of the ministers went to the harem, spoke to the chief eunuch, and quickly returned. We got back to eating and drinking, as if nothing had happened. It could be hours before she’d be ready. In the meantime, maybe the king would doze off, or take one of the young girls back to his rooms for the night, and we would all be spared the spectacle of the queen, your sister’s humiliation.

  “But it was not to be. Within minutes, the chief eunuch himself came into the room, his face as gray as the well of the firepit. ‘She will not come,’ I heard him whisper to the chief minister.

  “The king was incensed. For seven days, he had eaten and drunk and fucked as if he were not just a son of the Creator, but a god himself. When word got to him, he turned as if suddenly sober. His whole body stretched and reddened with rage. He stalked out of the hall, the ministers tripping over themselves to follow, like lapdogs beneath his heels.

  “By daylight, she was gone. We were all sleeping off our drinks when they took her. No one knows where she’s been sent. Somewhere in Susa, so far as I know. But that’s all I know.”

  Zeresh fell onto a couch. Her husband watched as anger and fear played across her face. It took a few moments, but anger won out.

  “What has she done? Couldn’t she have averted her eyes? It’s a woman’s lot to face embarrassment at her husband’s hand. That’s a truth all wives know. Even the king’s. Especially the king’s.”

  “Surely, my dear, I do not shame you.” His feelings were really wounded, his peacock pride punctured that easily.

  “You will not last a week as chief advisor if you take offense so easily,” she snapped.

  She stood up, paced back and forth over the length of the carpet. Her sister’s advice of the day before was no longer useful to her. One thing was clear. She couldn’t give the king a few days to sleep off his hangover and come back to his senses. He’d discarded those along with her sister sometime during the night.

  “You have to go him now. Today,” she told her husband. “Our whole family will be under a cloud of suspicion because of her little show of independence. We’ve been forced to wait this long. Now we can save ourselves and take what’s due to us all at once.”

  She looked her husband over, took a final accounting of his abilities. They would have to do. There were two possible outcomes of the day ahead of them: complete ruin or great power. He was their only hope.

  “Offer him everything,” she said. “Tell him you’ll refill the treasury up to twice what the last minister gave him. Tell him you’ll personally bankroll his personal guard for the next six months.”

  He blanched. “That much? It will ruin us.”

  She brushed off his concern. “I’ll earn it back. This is the only way to save ourselves.”

  “And your sister?”

  “Don’t say a word about her. I’ll look into it. But I won’t see the other side of the palace threshold again.”

  “But I’ll be vizier. You will go where you please.”

  Zeresh finally felt like she understood Vashti, who knew the mind of the king better than anyone. “He won’t forgive that easily. Our money will buy you inside the gates. My blood will keep me out. He’s been king for years. Have you learned nothing of him yet?”

  “Only that he’s a fool in love with wine and war.”

  “He may indeed love wine and war, but he’s no fool. That’s why you must go now. Immediately. There’s no time to waste. His men may be marshalling to come round us all up at this moment.”

  Zeresh didn’t dare leav
e the grounds of her own home. All of Susa would have heard about her sister’s fate by now. She would be jeered and hissed at by everyone, even those she had counted as her friends since childhood. No one could afford to be seen taking her side, even out of pity. Besides, she wouldn’t give them the pleasure of seeing her brought down.

  Bitterness at her own lot kept her from showing it, but she worried for her sister. A queen cannot simply disappear as if she never existed. She must have left a trail. Why, though, couldn’t she wait to show her stubbornness? She knew, Zeresh thought. She knew how important this week is for us, and yet she would make her stand now.

  As had often happened since childhood, Zeresh felt herself struggling to lift off the shade that her sister had thrown onto her. Never out of malice. She was sure of that. Vashti just never had to think things through. The accident of beauty had given her the privilege to act first and consider the consequences later.

  It had finally been her destruction, and for that Zeresh wept. Her beautiful, headstrong sister, trapped in a story written by their father and her husband, the king, so long ago, now banished who knows where because she had dared try to write one line.

  Zeresh allowed herself another minute’s sorrow and then set to work. She may not have been able to go to the palace, to walk through its immaculate gardens, watch the fish swim golden beneath the surface of the ponds as the sun set across them, but she could bring the palace to her home.

  Hours later, Hegai, the harem’s chief eunuch, was led into her private office, his face a closed mask of sly wit.

  She offered him her finest date wine, almonds picked from her own trees, cakes bursting with pistachios and cinnamon. She knew his weaknesses. His manhood may have been taken from him. His hunger never was.

  “The king is most gracious and magnanimous,” he answered, when she asked after his wellbeing.

  “Because you’re not dead or exiled, too, I suppose.”

  “My king sees fit to keep me in service.”

  “No one could have expected her to react that way. Not even so capable a head eunuch as you are. Surely our king, in his wisdom, has seen that.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “I am glad to see you, then, still in your proper place.”

  They danced around each other. But they were old hands at this kind of thing: sweets for the belly and the ear, and only then the truth.

  “And have you lost any workers of late?” she asked

  “Only one. Artakama, poor boy, has been assigned to a new task and moved away from the palace to serve my lord, the king, elsewhere.”

  They were getting to the meat of the issue.

  “Has he had to travel far?”

  “Happily for him, no. He gets the travel sickness, so it is his luck that he is to remain in Susa, although he is young and ambitious and will struggle at the restraints placed upon him.”

  “Surely, he must realize that his ambitions should be more modest now.”

  “He will have excellent guidance in that area, I’m sure.”

  “So, a teacher has been provided for him? One who understands the ways of the king and his kingdom?”

  “The best I have ever seen. One so wise you would almost suspect any transgression would have been on purpose.”

  Zeresh could breathe freely now. For the first time since waking, she reached for nourishment and took a bite of one of the cakes set before them. Hegai was a good man and had always been an ally to her sister, but there was only so much he could say, even here in the privacy of her rooms. He had taken a risk coming to see her. That alone showed how little his love for her sister had dimmed.

  She knew that his life depended on his allegiance to the king. She could ask for no more information than he had just given her. Vashti was alive. She was in Susa. The king had not abandoned her completely. That was enough to know for now. Even if her personal eunuch had been punished along with her, she had him, and with him, no doubt, a full household. Zeresh thought of the prison that would be her sister’s life from now on, but she knew how Vashti felt about living in the palace harem. She imagined her sister, resplendent as always, laughing at Zeresh’s naiveté for thinking her situation had changed one bit.

  They talked of other matters. Hegai had already heard that her husband had gone to see the king, although the two men were still together when he slipped away to visit her. But the hour grew long, and he had to return. The women’s building was no place to go missing from for too long. “They are too beautiful and too idle, and so they look for stories to tell each other and themselves,” he said.

  “Someone I know always said a woman’s beauty was her curse.”

  “There is wisdom in that.”

  Which was the last they spoke of her sister, except as he passed her doorway to leave. They both knew that this would be the last they would see of one another. It’s too bad, Zeresh thought. She liked Hegai. He knew how to have a conversation. He must have been thinking the same thing, because as he passed her in the doorway, he bent close and embraced her, the mask of aloofness briefly gone. “I will miss her,” he whispered, which was, she knew, the truest thing he had said yet.

  By evening she knew that the king had taken her husband’s money, that it had bought him the position of chief advisor. Within days, the king’s anger passed, too, although she had no way of telling whether that was because of her husband’s influence, or if it was the product of his new obsession. Women were being brought in from all over the empire to audition for the position of new queen. Not all were noble-born, as Vashti had been. Any girl young and plump with a round ass was welcome. Anyone who could catch the king’s eye.

  She took to calling her husband, “Your Excellency,” at first in loving jest and then in earnest. He seemed to grow even rounder with power, his chest and stomach like a drum proclaiming his importance. Hangers-on scurried around her property whenever he was home. She had tables and couches set up in the courtyard once they had trampled the grass to powder.

  She had been right about another thing: her husband’s new position didn’t buy her entry back onto the palace grounds. Her friends flocked back to her, now that she was married to the king’s right-hand man, but she couldn’t pass the palace’s outer gate. She still had ways of getting the information she needed, though. She had been part of the grapevine for too long to be kept out now.

  Here it was, a year later, and very little had changed. They had traveled away from Susa and now back again. The good soil sprang beneath her feet. Her horse had traveled the road between her home and the palace so often in the past that it took her there almost without guidance. But she dismounted well away from the back gate, where Shaashgaz, too full of cynical mirth to care whether he was seen with her or not, came out to meet her.

  He may not have been in charge of the harem, but he was obsequious enough to have wormed his way into the position of second in command. She was grateful for his time. She still had her properties—tenants, orchards, fields—to look after, and there were always her sons’ needs. This one needed a new tutor, that one to be put in his place. But she missed court life, its glitter and secrets. She had no secrets now. His Excellency, her husband, kept his to himself.

  And then there was the new queen. Shaashgaz told her himself. “Hegai took a liking to her, but between you and me, I can’t tell why. Mousy little thing. Her cunt must be lined with hammered gold, though, because the king can’t get enough of her. Calls her in three nights out of the week. Which I’ll admit has put a glow in her cheeks that we had to work for months to get there with paints.”

  “Do I detect some jealousy? Did you have another favorite?”

  “Goodness, no. That’s Hegai’s business. I just take care of them after the king has used them up. But she’s so common. No noble blood at all.”

  They had wound their way around the palace walls, which were as brilliantly white as ever. Thick ropes of ivy had been trained up the columns at even intervals. As always, people congregated ar
ound the main entrance to the outer court. Some waited for an audience with the king, others came to buy and sell from the ones with official business. Zeresh and Shaashgaz ignored them all, but she enjoyed seeing the mix of people from all over the empire—Babylonians, Egyptians, Macedonians—with their different styles of dress and hair, all mingling here at the center of it all.

  “Perhaps he thinks she’ll be more malleable than an aristocratic girl, who would come trailing a father and brothers who’d have ideas of their own,” Zeresh suggested.

  “Or maybe he just doesn’t care about tradition. The empire is secure. There are no deposed kings’ daughters to be fucked into submission.”

  “And will she?”

  “Will she what?” He had lost track of the conversation, which often happened when he got going about the women he oversaw.

  “She will be more malleable,” Zeresh said, sure it was true. “More than my sister ever was. She’ll have to be. She knows nothing of how the palace works.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. She’s quiet. Keeps her thoughts to herself. Like your sister. Those are often the ones to watch out for. She’s been helped along, of course.”

  This was news to Zeresh. Who was this girl who seemed to rise out of the soil?

  “Someone’s bought Hegai’s preference?

  “Oh, come. You of all people know how things work in the palace. We all have to get by.”

  “Everyone except the king.”

  “Perhaps that’s why he’s the only one who doesn’t know.”

  “Doesn’t know what?” Zeresh thrilled at moments like these, when she felt a curtain was being pulled back, and she was allowed to see past into the dim corners.

  Shaashgaz pointed to a man standing just inside the outer gate. He was taller than most of the men there, and saber-thin.

  “She’s Mordechai’s little ‘ward’.”

  “That’s Mordechai? The spy?”