by Tosca Lee
“Princess.”
I opened my eyes on the tents and camels of twelve hundred tribesmen sprawled near the edge of the great waste.
Overhead, the sky was churning. And yet, the heavens had held. It was a sign from Almaqah, they had said days ago on the southern coastal plain. There my priest, Asm, who had come with me from Punt, had sacrificed a camel—one we could not afford, and therefore one Almaqah must honor.
Maqar, mounted at my side, pointed. Riders, on the northern edge of the valley.
“Come,” I said, refastening my veil. I guided my camel down the ridge.
To leave or enter Saba was to risk all—through treacherous mountains after the hot hell of the coastal plain, only to be laughed at by baboons. Through an ocean of sand in the vast eastern waste, graveyard to innumerable would-be invaders. The only traversable way in was from the north through the oases of the Jawf, and then only if one had kin-ties to the tribes or riches to trade . . . or south from the seaport through the valleys, and then only if one had a ship. It was never the sea that safeguarded the cradle of Saba—along with her wealth—but always her mountains and sands.
I had wept on landing in the southern port. Not in relief that our company had made the crossing before the rains or that we had been met by the southern tribe of Urramar with much-needed supplies and camels. But because I had not thought I would ever be glad to see Saba’s high mountain ranges again.
Maqar was right. I had loved Saba once. And now, like a lover returned, I was broken at the sight of her.
But my return was not without cost. Sadiq came to me in nightmares for the first time in years as we entered the mountain passes of Qataban. I tossed in a sweat, shuddering beneath my woolen mantle in the late spring chill.
“Get out!” I said the night Maqar woke and tried to comfort me. I had followed him from the tent moments later, retching in the dirt.
Hagarlat haunted me through the high plateaus, and my father’s morose face down the descent to the great Baihan Valley. And though Maqar forgave me my outburst, neither did he touch me.
I was beside myself. Punt was a shadow land beyond the narrow sea and Saba had greeted me with demons. And so I plunged forward, the only direction available to me now: north, toward the capital.
Just as we reached the edge of camp, something sailed over the rim of the mountains against the brooding sky. I squinted at the languid flight of a vulture as clouds unfurled overhead.
In the camp, tribal accents punctuated the air, sharp and guttural as the thunder rolling beyond the horizon. Chieftains, in urgent conversation under the canopy of the command tent.
Lightning flashed, shocking the landscape. In the valley itself, the air was eerily still.
One by one, the nobles fell silent as I approached the tent. Among them, a new man perhaps a few years younger than my father, in rapid conversation with Khalkharib just an instant ago.
Twelve sets of kohl-rimmed eyes assessed me at once. Did I waver as I walked toward them, did my step falter? How did they perceive me, these men who knew nothing of me but my bloodline? Did any one of them see in me a queen—or only a means to their own power?
I looked at each of them in turn, the newcomer last of all.
“This is Wahabil,” Khalkharib said. “His tribe is kin-tribe to your own.” He had not needed to tell me; I recognized the old sunburst of the goddess Shams on his dagger’s scabbard immediately. I greeted him as kin, touching my veiled nose to his. He was stocky, no taller than I, with uncharacteristically light eyes and a wispy beard that did not disguise his jowls.
“My men wait in the next valley,” Wahabil said.
“Have you brought word of my kinsmen? I had thought to receive—”
“A rider has arrived from Marib,” Khalkharib interrupted.
I stared at him before slowly turning to Wahabil.
My heart became a cudgel.
“The king your father is dead,” Wahabil said. “Hagarlat has set her son on the alabaster throne. We refuse him allegiance. Your kinsmen gather at Sirwah even now.”
Silence.
Wahabil slowly leaned forward, hands on his knees. “Hail, Queen.”
Khalkharib perfunctorily followed suit, along with Nabat and the man from Aman. And then Yatha, and the chieftains of Urramar and Awsan, and another from eastern Hadramawt who had joined us on the coastal plain, and four others whose tribes I had suddenly forgotten. One by one, they fell forward, their murmurs filling the too still air.
Beyond the canopy, those near enough to see and hear shouted and came to fall forward in groups and then in waves, their murmurs rising to the ominous sky, seeding the clouds with my name.
Hail, Queen! Queen Bilqis.
I instinctively turned toward Maqar, but found him bent nearly to the dry wadi floor, the neck I had adored so many nights bowed low.
The gust came, sweeping through the valley, sending the canopy shuddering as the sky broke to the south.
“Gather the men,” Khalkharib said, over the oncoming storm. “We march on Marib.”
That night, the voice of my mother, lost so many years ago, returned. Just a croon at first, in my sleeping mind’s ear. A song like wind through the tent flap, the trill of rain against the rumble of a highland storm. It was the lullaby of Saba, of her mountains and ringed plateaus, the music of her terraces in the spring deluge trickling down to her fields and orchards.
It was my mother’s song. And it was mine.
In the Baihan Valley we gained men from the tribes of Kahar and Awsan. We moved swiftly, skirting oases already populated with water hens; Hagarlat had no doubt summoned her allies weeks ago and word of my arrival would soon reach her spies, if it had not already. Word had already traveled between outlying settlements, from which tribesmen came to eat at our fires or summon us to theirs for “fat and meat,” curious for news or a glimpse of the returning princess, the would-be queen. The richest of them slaughtered goat and lamb—sometimes up to a dozen animals to feed a portion of our number even as they ate nothing themselves—one of them sending his four sons to join us in the morning, yelling, “Remember your servant Ammiyatha! Remember Ammiyatha with favor!” Meanwhile, smaller wadis had become watercourses nearly overnight from the lowland rains, rivers running toward the waiting fields where workers labored to shore up breaches in canals.
We were followed by widows with naked children, old men with bent backs and one tooth left in their heads, boys wandering with young, hungry siblings, their loincloths no more than tatters. They, too, came to eat by our fires, these poorest and forgotten kinsmen of tribes afflicted by sickness or wells gone dry through winter. I assumed each time that they were given something to eat—a bowl of frothing camel’s milk, at the least—but when I saw several men turn away a young mother and her children, I was incensed.
“Saba is flowing with frankincense worth its weight in gold,” I fumed at Wahabil. “How is it possible that anyone living in the envy of nations goes hungry?” I went after the young woman and her children and brought them to my tent.
“The men turn them away as their supplies run thin,” Maqar said to me later, in low tones. “Already some of the men of Urramar have had to slaughter a camel.”
“Give her my portion if no one will feed her, and one of my blankets as well.”
Despite my words, I did not go hungry that night. I later learned Wahabil and Maqar both had given their food to the woman, who slipped away before dawn.
The initial trek inland had felt like one unending cycle of back strain from riding and stony beds within a snarling landscape of camels hobbled and couched for sleep. I failed to feel in those first, stunned days more than the mounting spring heat beneath the stifling clouds, the hardness of the saddle, the chill through my cloak at night. And the flies, which were relentless, biting camel and human alike.
But as the sky descended over the western highlands, heavy and pregnant with rain, I realized that I no longer fell into the sleep of the exhausted when I l
ay down, but lay awake listening for the cough of nearby cheetahs in the evening, the violent squawk of the peregrine at dawn.
And as the distance to Marib tightened like an invisible cord, I found myself strained not by the weeks of travel behind me, but the crucial days before me.
If we were defeated, I knew very well what would become of me. These kinsmen and allies staked their own lives in ready gamble for the benefits they might reap. But what of my priest, Asm, who had come with his acolytes at my request? Of my eunuch, Yafush, who slept outside my tent, and Maqar, who discreetly joined me within it? What end awaited them if we failed?
Almaqah deliver us all.
But it was not just the question of our fates afield. I had already been fighting, since the shores of Punt, a war of oppositions. Gone these six years from Saba, I was a queen who did not know her enemies or the true loyalty of her allies. A queen whose nobles meant to broker power in my council until one of them married me and I was queen in name only.
I had had to fight even to ride alongside them if only to be privy to their discussions—to ride at all, in fact, threatening to set fire to the litter brought for me. Clearly, I had been meant to accompany them like the sacred ark my grandfather’s army bore into battle—a symbol by which those who carried it proclaimed sovereignty . . . but a thing with no power of its own.
Almaqah had called me back to Saba. Almaqah must make me clever.
I spoke seldom but listened to everything. I learned quickly who was—and was not—among my expected list of allies. Who had the best spies. Which nobles the others looked to first. Whose men had the best camels, most kin-ties, deadliest feuds.
Thread by thread, I began to decipher the lacework of loyalties, ambition, and grudges that had knit me at its center years before my knowledge. With every company of tribesmen who joined us, I did the thing I had done now for years: I studied. I learned. Whom I must exercise the greatest influence over. Whose backing I required before all others. Whom I could trust. Whom I must not.
But knowledge did not lessen the nobles’ distinct forbearance whenever I approached or smooth their stilted answers even as they bowed their heads—except when it came to the fluent reminders of their contribution to my cause.
“The tribesmen of Kahar come to you with axe and spear and sword,” their chieftain said in his accented Sabaean. “Six hundred men I bring you. A hundred animals will we sacrifice to Almaqah for your health when we return to our territory and you are queen. And you must not forget us either.”
I felt by now that what had started as blood right had become a long list of bartered favors to the point that I had never felt so indebted in my life.
“Yafush,” I whispered, late one night, rolling up the corner of my black tent flap. In this sea of men sleeping by dying fires and couched camels, my tent was practically indistinguishable from nearly fifty others like it.
The eunuch, who faced always away, did not turn. “You are restless, Princess.”
I lay down, the broad slope of his shoulder like the western range against the stars. He never strayed far from my side, standing over me even when I squatted to relieve myself beneath the privacy of my cloak—the same way any Sabaean man did, which Yafush, the eunuch, never failed to call womanly.
“I see the way they look at me,” I said softly. “I am a thing—a crown to be worn on another head.”
“That is good.”
“Why?”
“They, too, will protect you with their lives. At least for now.”
A man murmured in his sleep from a neighboring fire, the sound cut short by a gruff complaint.
“Tell me about the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut.”
“You know already about this queen.”
I did—had read every account of the Egyptian monarch who sent the first expedition down the Red Sea to trade with my ancestors in Punt. The female Pharaoh who styled herself king. I had dreamed mottled dreams of her, of the false Pharaonic beard, delicate fingertips curled around the flail of her office, of the sun god Amun, her divine father.
“Tell me what your people say about her,” I whispered.
He rolled slightly onto his back at last without turning to look at me. “They say she made herself like a man. And that the Pharaoh after her erased her every image. You must not let that happen, Princess.”
“There’s little I can do about that if I am dead.”
“A woman cannot rule like a man, Princess.”
“And why not?”
“Because she is a woman.”
“You say this to me? Your own people have queens.”
“A queen must rule as a woman, Princess.”
I was silent for a moment, understanding the enigmatic Nubian at last.
“Tell me, is it true she was the daughter of Amun? How can a woman be the daughter of a god?”
“She is the Pharaoh. If Amun, rather than her father, puts her on the throne, whose daughter is she?” He smiled, his teeth white in the darkness.
I smiled, started to let the tent flap fall, but then caught it.
“Yafush . . .”
“Yes, Princess.”
“Will you not call me ‘queen’ now?”
“You are a woman of many names, Princess.”
I stared up at the darkness in my tent nearly until dawn, thinking of what Yafush had said. If I was discounted as a woman but must not be made masculine, then I must become something else entirely.
The next day I had Asm, my priest, proclaim me High Priestess and Daughter of Almaqah before our entire company. He had frowned when I first told him.
“Princess, why do you ask this thing?” he said.
“Who do you think will provide the gold for the temple when you are chief priest? I am not asking.”
For the first time since my arrival on the southern shore, I set aside my soiled tunic and donned my carnelian robe. I unwound my hair and hung my heavy crescent collar around my neck. I put on my rings, the weight of them foreign to fingers dried and cracked with travel, and set my gold headdress with the fall of delicate filigree on my brow.
All morning the sky had progressively darkened to the west. The moment Asm held the gilded horns over my head and proclaimed me High Priestess of the Moon, Daughter of the Bull, a rumble sounded from the far range as though the mountains had calved from the edge of the earth. At the time I thought nothing of this; it was the season, and the highlands had gathered clouds for days. Under the weight of so much cloth and gold, I would have counted the gale of any storm a blessing in the mid-morning swelter.
I was not prepared for the startled ripple that shuddered through the tribesmen. For the tens and then hundreds who sank to their knees. I saw from the corner of my eye how Khalkharib stared and Wahabil fell low . . . my priest, stark-faced, and Maqar, palm outstretched as though I were not the woman who had slept a hundred nights in his arms, but a god.
Afterward, Asm, who had wanted to wait to conduct the rite at the temple complex in Marib, proclaimed the moment a sign, and said he would never question me again.
“Tell me, Daughter of Almaqah, did you have a vision?”
I shook my head and he seemed to accept this with some disappointment. I did not tell him that I had not been looking for signs. That the rite, for me, had been claim and dread bargain, both. Daughter of Almaqah. Even my father, high priest before me, had not dared to identify himself as the son of the god. He had not needed to, using his throne as a vehicle for the cult, rather than the other way around.
Now my triumph or failure would be shared by the moon god himself—the name of Almaqah irrevocably burnished or tarnished by the outcome of this march for generations to come.
If I was the moon god’s thrall, he would also be mine.
I buried a precious jade necklace in the clearing before we broke camp.
See me to my throne.
That afternoon, the sky roiled and broke over the mountains.
At the eastern end of the Harib Valley we we
re met with nearly seven hundred tribesmen who pledged ready loyalty to me. Half that number were my kinsmen, the faces of those few I had once known—cousins, slaves, and uncles—grown unfamiliar. The kinsmen of Khalkharib and Maqar, led by his father, Salban, comprised the other half.
I saw the way they pretended not to search my face behind the veil. The way one of them stared into my eyes before he lifted his palm. So they had heard, by then, the story of my installment as High Priestess. And somehow I felt that we met as greater strangers because of it.
It was a relief to me when one of them said, “Cousin, do you remember how we used to play in the palace? You were four and I was five and I would catch lizards for you. Now, I will cut down north men for you!” I said that I did and embraced him, but part of my memory of those years had long burned away.
We were by now within the western fringe of the Sayhad, the desert that formed the southwest corner of the waste. There was fodder here, where the great wadi once ran into her thirsty sands—bindweed, salty tamarisk, and last year’s sedge.
From here, a man traveling north and east might ride for a month, losing himself among the dunes and calcified flats to exhaustion, dehydration, or madness before he ever encountered another soul. The vast sands had protected Saba’s eastern border from the beginning of days, legions of invaders buried beneath the swell of its granulated waves.
That night, as the tribesmen divided into feeding families, a handful of men came out of the desert, tossing sand in the air to signify peace. They were dwellers of the waste’s deadly refuge who might enter the sands for months at a time—the men they called Wolves of the Desert.
“They say there is a well near here, sweet from the rains this time of year,” the man of Aman said to me later. He nodded to the east, toward the desert beyond. “They have come to water their camels after months of brackish wells in there. But they are more thirsty for news and had not heard about the death of your father or your arrival here. If you offer those men camels or knives they will join you.”