by Tosca Lee
“And what is that?”
I shrugged. “We do not ask about the hearts of gods, whether they care to be known. We spill blood in their names, which we make fearsome. But we do not seek to know them. We do not offer love. Not truly. I understand something of that now,” I said, gazing dispassionately at the alabaster burner on the table, the thin tendrils of incense disappearing before my eyes, going nowhere.
“And I think they must be the loneliest of beings,” I said softly. “Or perhaps, being gods, they have no desire to be known, and mine is an entirely human affliction.” Outside, the rain had stopped.
When he said nothing, I glanced at the priest and found him staring at me with strange amazement.
“How is it that you ponder such thoughts, that you enter the mind of the gods?” he said.
I blinked. “I think them always! These thoughts are with me day and night! But surely you have thought these things yourself and can speak to this. Speak then. Tell me how the gods rid themselves of the desire to be known and accept our transactions instead—how I may go one hour without crying out to them: Why? Why did Almaqah take Maqar from me? Why, when I might bear it that no one truly knows me as long as he does!”
Though my affection for Maqar had been no secret to him, I was mortified hearing the echo of those words from my lips. “And yet I know what you will say—that then I would love Almaqah only because he gave me what I wanted. And that is true. And that is no love. I am as guilty as anyone in bemoaning the lack of what I will not myself give!”
Asm said nothing as my heart thudded between us in the silence.
“Isn’t it true?” I demanded.
He gave a faint shake of his head. “The gods are unknowable. As intercessors, we are tasked only with predicting and placating the whim of Almaqah—”
“Yes, with statues and feasts and blood on the altar. Yes, yes, I know,” I said, setting down my wine, untouched all this time. “But why? What need do they have for all our striving? Is it arrogance that demands our dread adoration? Or is it fear that if we do not sing and praise and build countless temples in their names, they will cease to exist? Whatever the reason, I wonder now if they take from us that which we love so we must seek them, if only to scavenge for meaning in this existence. Why? Why? I ask it day and night!”
He was looking at me then as though at an oracle, a strange mixture of bafflement and reverence tattooed across his face. And though we sat only two arms’ breadths apart, I felt the distance between us as a league.
“For the first time,” he said, very softly, “I envy you the office you carry like a weight, that you may understand the minds of gods better than any of us.”
And that was the worst of all. Where was I to turn if not to him?
“Don’t you understand? I know nothing! I ask and hear only silence. For all I know, Almaqah has abandoned me. I, who build temples in his name. What have I done to cause such offense that he would take Maqar?”
Or what had Maqar? Had he deceived me and Almaqah killed him for his duplicity? But I had seen the last look on his face. He had thrown himself into the melee. Why? For atonement? For love?
And the worst of it was this: there was no oracle or sacrificial liver, no star or rising constellation from which I could extract the truth. And the priest before me could no more decipher the mind of Almaqah than I.
“It is the story I told myself after I abandoned worship of Shams,” I said, wiping hot tears from my cheek. “That any living thing could wither beneath the same heat with which the sun gave life. But the moon arrived in the cool of night to preside over lovers and dreams, to give life to seeds as they slumber in the soil. Now I know that seeds molder in the dark, and the moon falls on peasant and queen alike. Just as the sun. In which case no man is favored at all, and the gods do as they will and we are the ones who assign meaning to their actions. Either that . . . or they exist not at all.”
He was silent.
“Will you not say I am speaking sacrilege? I say this to my own priest! You, who have not even a platitude for me. Do you not condemn me?”
“I will not patronize you with platitudes,” he said at last, very quietly. “You are the Daughter of Almaqah. You wear his favor. If he will not speak to you, to whom will he speak?”
He left me soon after that, clearly disturbed, and I could not help but feel that I had somehow infected him with my turmoil. And I did not know if that was a good thing that he might seek answers for both our sakes . . . or if such answers were unknowable and he went away troubled when I might have let him go in peace.
That night, I expected my every question, fully realized now that they had been heretically voiced, to torture me until dawn. Instead, I lay down to my first full evening of sleep in months. It was as though having spoken them I had exorcised their poison, if not their barbs, for a time.
SIX
Perhaps in a gesture of conciliation, Wahabil offered to oversee the royal banquet for my chief traders. It was fall, and soon the caravans would turn north carrying Saba’s famous incense along with textiles, spices, and precious stones imported from Ophir to the west and Hidush to the east.
I set my steward and treasury at his disposal for the event. When I described my vision, however, his eyes widened.
“My queen, the cost of this banquet alone—”
“This is no banquet,” I said, drawing him aside. “It is a message—one that must travel to the corners of the world.”
The Libyans had grown for years now to military prominence in Egypt. The kings of Assyria and Babylonia—a true Babylonian, after the Elamite king before him—had had fifteen years to establish their policies. The king of Phoenicia had been trading cedar and artisans for grain and oil even longer than that. If I had learned one thing of kingship in all the accounts I had read, it was this: there was nothing so appealing as alliance and trade with a sovereign whose reputation was known after years on a stable throne—and nothing so uncertain as one recently come to reign.
Especially if she was a queen.
It was crucial that I meet these traders whose names I had only heard or read about in the records, who carried Saba to the world. I would gather them to court to feast them with meat and fat before their journey. Or so I said.
But the truth, which Wahabil understood, was that I meant to wage a cunning campaign—not with swords and axes, but luxury. And not on a field, but from a palace.
I had made an inadvertent promise in the name of Almaqah that day in the clearing, and now I meant to ensure the prophecy of the bowl—with or without the god’s participation. Sabaean frankincense would perfume the temples of a thousand nameless gods and myrrh embalm the bodies of Egypt’s dead immortals in return for textiles, wine, iron, horses.
But I would add to Saba’s wealth in new ways.
I would send our best goods across seas of water and sand and receive in turn not just the wealth of nations, but scholars and artisans from far-flung lands, come to experience Saba’s fabled kingdom. The day would come that poets and astronomers adorned my court as brightly as gold and silver did now. We would exchange knowledge with the farmers of Egypt’s famous wheat fields, the mathematicians of Babylonia, masons of Phoenicia, and textile makers of Hidush. Unification had been the hallmark of my grandfather, and worship of Almaqah the legacy of my father. Knowledge and learning would be mine.
“You must make me beautiful,” I said to Shara that night.
She laughed, and the brittle sound surprised me; I had not heard it once since my return. The years of my absence had not been gentle with her, but left an austere creature in their wake. Fine lines spidered out from her eyes like canals scratched into dry earth. Her narrow hands, when they were not occupied, fluttered together like two birds. I never asked what had befallen her after her mother’s death, nor would she tell me except to say that she had briefly been the concubine of some man. I did not doubt Hagarlat had had some hand in that—the stories of her cruelties were many. Twice Shara’
s prayers of gratitude had drifted into my dreams those first nightmarish weeks of my return. When I had recovered, I offered her any life she chose, and she had chosen to stay with me.
“Shall I make the sun brighter as well?”
She lingered at my jewelry chest, collecting bracelets, earrings, and rings until her arms were glinting with gems.
“And you—I will not have you in the plain clothes you favor. That is not the Shara I remember. No, you will wear a gown from my wardrobe, and I will choose your sandals and jewels. Saba’s lowest slaves will wear the finest linen before the eyes of emissaries and traders. And you will be as a queen in any other country. They will carry tales about you to the courts of kings!”
The color left her face and she dropped several of the pieces she had been holding. I went to her and took her by the shoulders. She was trembling.
“Shara, what’s this?”
She glanced up, gaze stark.
“Swear something to me,” she said. “As my milk sister if not my queen.”
I blinked. “Anything.”
“Do not give me away.”
“Give you away?”
For the first time I almost demanded to know what Hagarlat had done to her. What the man she had been given to had done to her—and where he was now so I could repay him for the thing that made her look at me like this.
But instead, I took the things from her arms and laid them aside. Parting the two hands that had flown together, I clasped them tightly. “I will not give you away. I swear it. You are all I have in this world.” I kissed her then and drew her against me. And as I laid my hand against her hair, something serrated and fierce sliced through me that I had not felt even for Maqar. I had wanted comfort, security for Shara since my return. But that night, I saw now in her the woman used and cast away. The widow. The orphan. The arthritic man. She was the farmer, toiling in the field beneath an unforgiving sun. The woman confronting death in childbed. The priest, looking heavenward for signs from an impassive god.
I could not cool the sun or make the ground yield. I could not ward off death or make the gods speak.
But I was her queen, and I could protect her. No . . . more than that.
Now the kernel already within me took root: I would elevate Saba in learning—not only for my legacy as queen, but because in so doing I would raise up even her humblest people. One day women like Shara would feel nothing but pride in the company of any foreign emissary and count herself his superior because she dwelled in a kingdom flowing with wisdom to match its wealth.
I let go of her, startled by this thought. Shara, too, seemed like a different creature when she allowed me to lay an embroidered mantle over her gown, and slip amethyst bracelets on her arm and jasper rings on her fingers.
“You are all I have as well,” she said, and I thought she looked like a queen.
That night, as the doors opened before me and the music of flute and tambourine filled my ears, I stepped into a hall brimming with the richest merchants and traders of Saba come to impress the new queen with their faraway dealings in exotic commodities. But I had turned the tables. I did not miss the way their necks craned. The way they glanced this way and that as though following a flock of birds from one wonder to the next.
I tried to see the spectacle before me as they might: The lanterns imported from the faraway silk lands glowing from the ceiling like a hundred distant suns . . . The alabaster luminaries like so many miniature houses on the steps to the dais throwing light from their carved windows onto the giant silver disc behind my throne until it shone like the orange harvest moon.
In the middle of the hall sprawled a long, low table inlaid with precious lapis lazuli and laden with silver pitchers of wine and cups crusted with turquoise. Jasmine and white roses flocked the great columns of the hall, pillars of fragrant white clouds.
Along the far wall, musicians of every kind shone like gods, everything about them gilded from their tunics to their skin. Even the long hair of the man playing the lyre shimmered in the light.
White smoke of purest frankincense wafted from great bronze burners wrought in the shape of ibex and bull. It curled out of their nostrils like breath, Almaqah’s idols come to life.
I lifted my gaze to the lanterns above, arranged into the constellations of the evening sky, the Sister Stars suspended in timeless night. There, the hunter. And there, the Dog Star, larger than the others.
Truly, the alabaster hall had become a wonder.
Nor did I miss the stark-eyed marvel of the courtiers as I entered, silver dripping from my ears in filigree so fine it glistened like rain, gold scales trailing from my girdle to my knees as the eyes of two hundred peacock feathers stared from the hem of my gown. I had left my crescent crown behind in favor of a more magnificent headpiece: a silver ibex, eyes glowing with giant rubies, the crescent against the sun disc suspended between its graceful horns.
The veiled Shara elicited deferential half bows from those uncertain whether she was a visiting royal. Even the women who tended my chambers were arrayed in costly dyed gowns, jasper and Egyptian faience around their necks and wrists. And no courtier had ever seen a eunuch more exotic than Yafush, thick gold bands around his arms.
Twenty guards flanked the dais in indigo vests, the silver crescent of Almaqah hanging low over their chests and gleaming from the hilts of their swords.
Beyond the hall, the lattice into the outer court teemed with the eyes of hundreds come to witness the pageantry and be fed—dates and lamb, yes, but more important, the fodder of tales they would take back to their tribal kin. From my vantage I could already see servants poised among them with great platters of bread, figs, cakes.
When I had ascended the dais, a girl draped in silver, a star diadem gleaming on her forehead, brought me a drinking bowl.
“My honored guests,” I said, my voice carrying to the corners of a hall gone silent. “Tonight is a night of journeys. We embark with the caravans to the far corners of the world. But ours is no ordinary passage. We are the children of Almaqah! We descend not from the earth as the people of inferior gods, but from the loins of the moon and the sun, his consort. And so we begin our journey in the heavens, in the bosom of Almaqah, where we feast in the celestial realm!” I lifted the bowl to cheers and the music began again.
Servants poured water into silver hand basins as my chamberlain personally oversaw the seating of the guests—my full council of twenty-four in the middle of the table, closest to the throne, ministers of trade to the right and left of them in colorful head scarves. There were several men after that in ornately embroidered wool, their dagger hilts crusted with cabochon gemstones and citrine sunbursts. My traders. And myriad merchants along the great expanse of sky-blue table, to either end.
“My queen,” Wahabil said, coming to stand before me where I had taken my seat on the throne. I opened my mouth to congratulate him but then saw that he was accompanied by a man in a simple sarong and vest. The silver handle of the dagger peering up through his belt was obviously old, the sigil of a long and proud clan lineage.
“I present you Tamrin of Gabaan. Son of Shahr of Gabaan. Your chief trader, and your father’s chief trader before you, as Tamrin’s father was before him.”
The man bowed low. When he straightened, I took my time noticing the elegant line of his mustache and beard, the dark kohl of his eyelids, the surprising color of his skin, which I expected to be sun-blackened as a farmer’s, but was instead a warm burnished bronze. He wore no rings—no jewelry at all except for a broad golden cuff on his wrist.
“My queen,” he said. “Please allow me to echo what have no doubt been the words of my kinsman, Councilor Ilyafa, and condemn the shameful actions of Aman. And to praise your just dealings with them. May Almaqah bless your reign and make your name great.”
I considered him for a moment without word. He was perhaps only a few years older than I.
“Tell me, how is your father?” I said at last.
“He i
s like the camel released to pasture after years of toil. Fat and content,” he chuckled.
“Such a powerful tribe, Gabaan,” I said, thoughtfully stroking the ibex head carved at the end of my armrest. “And how . . . neutral.” I did not need to state the obvious: that they had sent no men to aid my march on Marib. It had been a conversation of some length between Wahabil and me.
Tamrin inclined his head. “My queen?”
“A shrewd policy, given Gabaan’s reliance on politic relations with the tribes of the oases.” I glanced up at him. “And yet, how difficult for one to discern loyalty once neutrality is no longer necessary.”
“My queen is wise. I defer to her agreements with Councilor Ilyafa as to how Gabaan’s loyalty might best be expressed. As for me, I am only a trader, a nomad among nomads.”
He neither flushed nor stuttered in his response. He was either practiced at conducting himself at court or a fool.
I did not think him a fool.
“What do you think of our banquet, Tamrin of Gabaan?”
Throughout the hall, my guests spoke tersely between bites of sweet bread rolled and dipped in sauces of cardamom and fennel. They did not loiter; to eat too slowly was to tempt malevolent spirits to the table.
He gestured toward the constellation of lanterns. “It is a marvel. I will tell the tale of it for a lifetime and be accused of exaggeration. But now, if you will permit, I have brought you a gift.”
A younger man handed him a long, rectangular box, which Tamrin presented to me with two hands.
“It is a humble gesture, but it comes from a very great distance. Your love of learning was known to my father.”
Shara accepted the box and opened it, holding it for me to see. Inside, a double scroll of fine vellum.
“Whose writings are these?” I said.
“The northern king of Israel’s, translated by my father. They say the king has been taught secret knowledge from his god.”
I had read some sparse accounts of this kingdom only half a century old, this tribal federation still in its urban infancy.