The Judgment

by D. J. Niko

  She stood and walked to the table. She regarded the array of objects for a long moment. “I suppose your love for the scribal arts fills that void in you.” She touched the droplets of black ink and withdrew her hand in surprise. “This ink is fresh.” She snapped her head at Irisi. “I don’t recall giving you a message to inscribe.”

  For a moment, the space between them was silent.

  “You did not, my lady,” Irisi said.

  Nicaule crossed her arms. “Then what have you been doing?”

  Irisi sighed. “The king called for me. He wanted to write an intricate message, and there was no one in his court with the skill to do it. I had no choice but to obey.”

  “A message . . . to whom?”

  “I cannot say. I have been sworn.”

  The image of Solomon handing Makeda the small alabaster box flashed in Nicaule’s mind. So that was the answer. Solomon had given the queen of Sheba a message, inscribed by Irisi, to guard “until he comes to claim it.” Nicaule found herself outside the circle of trust, cast there not only by her husband but also by her confidante.

  Rage bubbled like stew in a cauldron. “Was it a letter of love to that wretched queen? Answer me!”

  Irisi put her hands on her ears. Her face twisted into a look of pain. “Please, my lady . . . I cannot say. The king . . .”

  Nicaule’s heart galloped, and hot blood throbbed in her fingertips. It was the final indignity. “You answer to me, not to Solomon,” she shouted. “How can you betray me in this way?”

  Irisi steadied herself on the bench and stood. “Hear me now, my lady.” Her tone was calm, almost cold. “My oath to Solomon is not a betrayal to you. It is a matter of honor.”

  “You consider keeping a secret from your mistress honorable?” She spoke behind clenched teeth. “How little you know about honor.”

  Irisi stood taller. “No. It is not I who does know not honor. It is you. Asking me to betray one’s confidence is the highest offense. How can you speak of honor after all the schemes you have concocted to ruin one man in a desperate bid for the heart of another?”

  “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for Egypt.”

  The scribe shook her head. “No. All your spying and conniving have been for personal gain.”

  Nicaule leaned down and shouted into Irisi’s face. “May I remind you you have been an accomplice? By writing my missives to Tanis, you have helped betray the secrets of Solomon’s kingdom and have helped stage a rebellion against him.”

  “It is a shame I will take to my grave.” Irisi cast a look of pity upon her mistress. “You once were a noble lady of unspeakable beauty and grace . . . a princess destined for greatness. You have degraded into something I don’t even recognize.”

  “Silence!”

  Irisi was relentless. “Neither Solomon nor this foreign land on which we have been cast has stripped you of your dignity. With your own hands you have destroyed your life. You have been so consumed with revenge and self-pity that your heart has rotted like a pomegranate fallen from its tree.”

  Nicaule clenched her fists to steady her shaking hands. Irisi’s words sounded distorted, and her face was that of a stranger.

  “For years I have watched from afar, my lady,” the scribe continued, “and the time has come for me to speak the truth. It is not only your own life you have tainted but also Solomon’s. You have poisoned his mind with your potent brew of deception. With glee have you watched him decline. What wrong could be greater?” She pursed her lips and shook her head.

  Nicaule’s own breath, shallow and shaky, filled her ears. “How could you take up the cause of Solomon, after all I have given you? Where does your loyalty really lie?”

  “I can no longer defend you,” she whispered. “I will not.”

  Nicaule glanced at the objects on the table. She picked up the grinding stone and with a primal cry swung it toward Irisi’s head. Nicaule heard a crushing sound as the stone landed on the scribe’s temple.

  Irisi crumpled onto the floor. Blood gushed from her head like water from a spring, forming a crimson pool that grew wider and wider. Her eyes were bulging as she drew her last, labored breaths.

  Nicaule dropped the stone and lifted her hands to her mouth, stifling a scream. She was immobilized as she watched the woman who had been her lifelong friend and confidante expire.

  What had she done?

  Irisi clawed at Nicaule’s gown with bloodied hands, leaving a trail of bright red strokes on the white linen. Then her hands went limp and dropped to the stone floor, and she stopped breathing. Her eyes were still open, frozen in a caustic stare, convicting her executioner.

  Nicaule looked about her. The walls seemed to be moving toward her, closing her in. She began to hyperventilate. She had to get out.

  She threw the door open, not bothering to close it behind her, and ran. High in the sky, the sun assaulted her eyes so violently that tears streamed down her face. The kohl she used to enhance her beauty now stung her eyes. She could hardly see.

  She had no destination. She ran to escape the scene of her crime—and her conscience. She stumbled as she made her way down the hillside a little too fast and tumbled twice before regaining her footing. She stopped and, shielding her sore eyes, surveyed her surroundings. She was in the Kidron Valley. Farmers stopped what they were doing and looked at her, bewildered. She looked down and realized they were staring at her bloodied clothes.

  “Back to work!” she barked at them in Hebrew and continued down the hillside until she could run no more.

  Out of breath, she collapsed by the Gihon Spring. She splashed the cool water on her face and bosom, attempting to cleanse herself of what had just happened. But there was not enough water in Gihon, nor all of Siloam, to wash away her guilt.

  She regarded her reflection on the spring. An old woman with wet clumps of black hair clinging to her face and streaks of kohl running down her cheeks stared back at her. She cried with loud, violent sobs.

  What had she become? Nicaule Tashere, the daughter and wife of kings whose destiny was brighter than the evening star, died in that instant. Perhaps she had died long before. The recognition of her abomination made her bend at the waist and expel the contents of her stomach until there was nothing but bitter bile.

  Thoughts buzzed by without alighting, taunting her and driving her mad. She turned her eyes to the sun, searching for solace from Amun-Ra, king of all deities and keeper of the universe. The midday sun seared her cheeks with the red heat of a furnace, yet it could not evanesce her tears.

  She cried out to him: “Shoshenq!” It was more a screech than a yell. Desperation had crept into her voice and strangled it. She called his name again and again until her throat felt so dry that the words would no longer issue forth.

  He was not coming. A score and thirteen years had passed since he carried her to his bed and promised her that one day she would be his queen. She had devoted her life to being worthy of that promise: she’d categorically rejected her husband and denounced her new home, keeping her heart pure for the day he would come for her. But the days became years, and the dream grew ever distant.

  She could not point to the exact moment bitterness seeped into her soul, nor when it morphed into venom. But she would forever be haunted by the memory of this day: on the banks of Jerusalem’s most precious spring, with her hands stained with blood she had drawn, she let hope slip from her grasp and vanish like a leaf carried by the current into the dark heart of the sea.

  She no longer wanted Shoshenq to come. Perhaps it was better that her lover remembered her as a ravishing young woman with a heart of fire. Even if he were to ride into Jerusalem now, what he would find would not reward his journey.

  She collapsed onto the ground, feeling the warm soil against her cheek. Her tears watered the earth, becoming one with this strange land she could never claim as her own, the one that brought her to the brink of madness. Her gaze wandered across the expanse of red soil and stopped on a graveyard beyond the r
iverbank. Fresh sobs came as she considered her own mortality.

  “O Osiris, lord of the afterlife, do not let your daughter die here.” Her words were warped by emotion as she thought of her corpse being committed to the earth rather than embalmed and mummified. “Do not allow tainted soil to cover these bones.”

  If not for her fear of being buried without proper provisions, she would have drowned herself that day in the Israelites’ spring of life. But she was doomed to live and wait for salvation that might never come.

  20

  Jezreel Valley, 925 BCE

  A breeze hissed across the valley, stirring the folds of Basemath’s halub as she peered through the flaps of her prison tent. Somewhere near, a bulbul trilled in anticipation of the light that would soon crack open the darkness. She drew her arms to her chest to discourage the lingering chill of that awful night.

  She closed the flaps and retreated inside. Her pulse pounded in her gut as she awaited Jeroboam’s arrival. She reminded herself that the choice was hers, that she was the maker of her own fate.

  What would her father do? She ran her fingers over the chain hanging from her neck, and the memories came racing back. She pulled on the chain until the object dangling from it surfaced from beneath her halub.

  It was the last thing Solomon had given to her. Just days after he entrusted his daughter with his most precious possession, the ring that held the ultimate secret, the king had died. She touched the four stones embedded in a circle of iron on the ring’s crown. They symbolized the elements—ruby for fire, aquamarine for water, tiger’s eye for earth, and diamond for wind—and beguiled the observer, obscuring the ring’s true purpose.

  It was what lay beneath the stones that was worth hiding.

  Basemath ran her finger across the edge of the crown, searching for the tiny indentation that allowed the gem-encrusted top to open and, lifting it, revealed the ring’s golden heart. A layer of pure gold, brilliant even in the scant light of her prison, was inscribed with a five-pointed star.

  If her father had not revealed the significance of the symbol that day in the desert, she never would have known. It seemed innocent enough, yet it held the mystery of the ages. She cupped both hands around the ring and closed her eyes.

  Solomon had been sitting beneath the shade of a balsam tree, dressed in rags, when Basemath went to him in the wilderness of Judea. He had called for her. A messenger had arrived on horseback at her home in Shechem to summon her in accordance with the king’s wishes, and she’d gladly followed. There was nothing she would deny her father.

  When she was told she was to meet Solomon in the Judean desert, she was a little alarmed. It was out of character for him to be away from the city he had so painstakingly built. It had been forty days since his departure from Jerusalem, and without its leader, the city was on the verge of chaos.

  Basemath had passed through the holy city on her way to the wilderness, out of duty to her mother, who she’d heard was unwell. Before her eyes, one man toppled another and punched him unconscious so he could rip the purse tied to his waist sash. She was appalled at the heinous act, but more so at the indifference of passersby. As she dismounted her horse and went to the victim’s aid, wrapping her head veil around his wounds to stem the bleeding, she called for someone to stop the thief, but no one bothered. People scurried through the alleys, pretending not to hear.

  It was a small incident, but it was telling. Years ago, when Israelites cared for each other as they did for themselves, such apathy was unheard of. There was a wind change in Jerusalem, and soon it would extend to all of Israel. She could feel it.

  There was a change in her father, too. Though she lived in the north and did not see him every day, she could not ignore the gossip: the discontent of certain tribes over taxation, the double standard of religious tolerance for the king’s foreign wives, his prolonged absences from state affairs so he could tend to his romantic garden.

  Like dogs smelling fear, when the people sensed a weakening in their leader or his regime, they let themselves slip, then slide brazenly into moral oblivion. It had been that way throughout history.

  In the desert, Basemath tethered her horse and approached Solomon, her fears heightened. She had never seen her father, Israel’s most glorified king, so forlorn. His eyes were tired and bloodshot, his lips cracked from the late-summer sun. Saffron-colored sand coated the hair on his head and face. His feet, bound in worn sandals and peering beneath his faded gray halub, were covered with open, weeping sores. It looked as though he’d been walking for weeks.

  She stood before him, her gown billowing in the breeze. “Father?”

  He stretched out a hand, an invitation to sit beside him. “My dear daughter, how good of you to come.”

  “How could I not?” She inhaled the dry air laced with the sharp scent of balsam as she sat on the dusty ground. “Tell me, Father . . . why do you come here, in this hostile land of rocks and wild beasts, alone and dressed like a pauper?”

  A puff of wind blew Solomon’s snow-white hair, unwashed and unruly, away from his face. He squinted toward the horizon. The corners of his eyes were deeply lined, betraying the old age that had overtaken him. “One generation passes away, another generation comes, but the earth is forever. Everything is a cycle, a manifestation of God’s will.”

  He pointed to a stand of spindly bushes in the distance. “Behold the salt cedar. Even in a barren land it flourishes, blossoming every spring and painting the wilderness in the hues of the rising sun. Then winter’s frost comes and robs it of its leaves so that only branches remain, twisted fingers clawing at the sky, begging for mercy from the cold.

  “No matter how long and hard the winter, the salt cedar will bloom again. No snow nor fire nor an angry man’s axe can drive it from this land, for its roots run deep, and its tender shoots will, in time, break through the earth and reclaim what is rightfully theirs.”

  He drew a deep breath and shifted his gaze to the sky. Basemath could see his heart was heavy, and she let him talk. “I was king over Israel in Jerusalem. The Lord granted me more wisdom than he did any other man who walked upon the fertile ground of this land that was given to our forefathers. I knew the way of all things as they were, as they are, as they will be.”

  He shook his head. “But vanity got the better of me. I allowed my heart to know madness and folly, that I might increase my knowledge and train my spirit. I partook freely of wine and gave myself unto scores of women, for that was my portion for my labors. I built great fortresses and houses and a temple to the Lord, planted gardens and vineyards, gathered to me silver and gold. No joy did I withhold from my heart. Yet for all I have known and all I leave behind for those who come after me, I depart the Earth an impoverished man.”

  Basemath could not hold her tongue. “You are the greatest king who ever reigned in the lower heavens. The Lord has given you every privilege and every good thing under the sun. How can you talk this way now, in the sunset of your life, when you should feel gratitude and joy?”

  “I have faltered before the Lord, my daughter. I do not deserve his mercy. Yet it is not I but the descendants of my house who will be punished.” He sighed. “I have seen the future. I know what will come to pass. All that I have built and all the riches I have gathered shall wither like the salt cedars in winter. Jerusalem’s enemies are at her gates.”

  Her lower lip trembled. “Do not talk like this, Father.”

  “It is true. My son Rehoboam will see it in his lifetime. His reign will be shaken like the earth in a violent quake. He will pay for my trespasses, as I paid for my father’s. All the history of men is a circle.” He took her hand, releasing an object into it. “This must go to one who is pure of heart and spirit. You, and you alone, are worthy of it, my daughter. All others have failed in the eyes of the Lord.”

  She opened her hand and saw the king’s ring. She looked up at him with misty eyes. “What will you have me do with it?”

  “Keep it safe. Do not let it
fall into the hands of the wicked. Let it be possessed only by the worthy, that its secret may not be lost through the ages.”

  “I do not understand. What secret?”

  He reached for the ring in her hand and lifted the crown by inserting a fingernail into an indentation she had not noticed. The golden circle within shimmered in the afternoon sun.

  “This symbol is not as it appears,” he said, indicating the five-pointed star etched into the gold. “My father came to my dreams one night and revealed the mystery of the ring forged by divine hands: that which is five really is one. The five edges of the star unfold in a straight line, exposing the measuring unit for building the house of the Lord exactly as he commanded. It is not gold nor jewels but this that makes the temple sacred. Any other temple, however opulent, is but an artifice.”

  He replaced the crown and closed her hand around the ring. “This must survive at any pain. Promise me, Basemath.”

  “I promise, Father.” Her words were choked with emotion.

  A trembling sigh left his throat. “I fear the day will come when my heirs will see the Lord’s house destroyed by Jerusalem’s enemies. On that day the Lord will abandon our people and cast darkness upon their lands. All will be lost until the righteous rise up again and glorify his name.

  “I cannot prevent the Lord’s wrath, for it is upon us; I can only plan for the day the temple may be rebuilt. Listen carefully, my daughter. The secret of the ring must be brought together with the plans given to me by my father and drawn by the angels themselves.”

  A recollection from early childhood flashed in Basemath’s mind: her father, bent over a table where a pile of scrolls lay, studying them by the light of an oil lamp. She had not seen those scrolls since. “Where are these drawings? I shall defend them as I do this ring.”

  “No. It is too much to ask of you to carry both burdens. The plans will be hidden here”—he waved a hand toward the arid wasteland of caves and rock formations—“in the desert of Judea. I have made provisions with Benaiah and his men to inter this most precious of treasures.”