by Tosca Lee
“Surely this king is bound for a fall!” I chuckled. “Does he not know how well this was done in Egypt, when Akhenaten proclaimed worship of Aten alone—a god with at least a name—and how miserably it failed? Akhenaten, who is ‘the enemy’ in their own archive!” I had read the account years ago of the temples neglected for years after Akhenaten’s death and the plague that ripped through the population. No wonder history hated him for angering the gods.
“What is this unspeakable god’s symbol? Have you brought back an idol with you?”
He hesitated. “The god has no symbol. It has no idol.”
I broke out in truer laughter than before. “A god who cannot be spoken or seen.”
“Their law forbids the graven image of any god—including their own.”
“What atheism is this, that they annihilate the name and face of the divine?”
“I assure you his priests are devout,” he said somberly, “though the king’s wives practice their cults in the high places he has built for them outside the city.”
I shrugged. “He will not be long for this world.”
“As you say.” Tamrin bowed his head. “But while he is still in it, what gifts shall I prepare to bring with my caravan when we depart?”
I looked at him squarely. “None.”
His brows lifted.
“Take your usual quantities for distribution, of the best quality.”
“Are you certain, my queen?”
“Saba has the monopoly on the spice trade. If he wants commodities from Punt or Hidush or even the east beyond, he has to deal with us. If he wants the highest quality frankincense, he has to deal with us. I am the new queen with whom he must deal. He may send gifts . . . to us.”
He hesitated. “As you say. And what message shall I take to the Merchant Prince?”
“Only your stories . . . and prices.”
“And when I go to Jerusalem and tell tales of Saba and her magnificent queen to this king hungry for peaceful and profitable alliances . . . what am I to say when he proposes a marriage alliance with Saba?”
“That I have no daughter for him.”
“I meant, my queen, with you.”
I leveled a look at him. “I am the ruler of my country. Not a princess to be sent to his harem.”
“May you reign a hundred years,” he said, bowing his head.
When he had taken his leave, I removed my veil and drank long from my cup.
I did not miss Shara’s sideways glance.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said later, as she undressed me in my chamber after the nobles’ daughters who tended my rooms had been sent to their beds.
“Tell me you didn’t notice how handsome he is . . . and how he looked at you.”
“I might have noticed.”
She laughed, and I was grateful for the sound.
That night, as Shara slept, the rhythm of her breath like the rolling tide in and out to sea, I thought again of those slender fingers and corded forearms, the way the bow of that upper lip broadened when he smiled.
But I didn’t need a lover so much as a skilled ally. A mouthpiece to the world.
A beautiful mouth, granted.
Tamrin returned three weeks later to take his leave of me at the temple on the first day of the waxing moon—a time for new beginnings and journeys. This time he wore a bronze amulet inscribed for protection, the amulet of traders. A priestess—that female incarnation of Almaqah’s lunar cycle—intoned a hymn as Asm’s acolyte caught the blood of an ibex in the bowl before the sacred well. The young virgin installed at the temple by my bidding swayed where she knelt, no doubt under the influence of Asm’s datura tea.
“The lion will roar,” she said, and repeated herself. Asm did not interpret. The omen was for the trader alone; he alone must discern its meaning, if indeed there was one.
When I raised my arms over the trader in benediction, the girl looked up at me and screamed, shielding her eyes. I ignored her, knowing she was half out of her mind, my focus solely on Tamrin, this man in whom I must place so much trust and whose journey I realized I strangely envied.
He, too, looked up at me, as though I were not a woman or a queen but something other.
And I felt the space between us stretch as keenly as I had the night I had burdened Asm with my questions, when my circular ruminations and terrible search for answers had not been mirrored in his eyes.
I dipped my fingers in the bowl. “Return safely and swiftly to me next year,” I said, drawing the upturned crescent on his forehead.
He fell forward and kissed the strap of my sandal.
He left moments later, riding off to join the caravan of three hundred camels and as many men.
Winter came, and I forgot the Israelite king.
EIGHT
I gave blessings to marriages. I pardoned the persecuted seeking sanctuary at the temple and pronounced the oaths they should swear on the graves of dead relatives in penance. I sat in judgment of a tribe known for raiding its neighbor’s camels, and of a woman who married two brothers and divorced one of them but had not received back half her dowry. And again, of a man who could not give his wife children and so took in a traveler and left them alone, and the traveler, who claimed right to the child when he visited the following year.
“Under whose tent was the child conceived?” I said.
“Mine,” said the husband.
“Then it is your child, and as often as this man returns you will welcome him as a brother.”
I was twenty years old, and well aware of the council’s constant obsession with the question of my heir. I had received marriage proposals from every powerful clan in Saba, including my cousin, Niman. I refused them all.
Wahabil hounded me by the month, as regular as my menses.
“If you will not marry for treaty,” he said urgently one evening, “take a man from among the priests. Better yet, two or more of them. Let the child be gotten by Almaqah himself. So it was done in days past, that queens bore children to the gods. For the sake of your kingdom, I beg you, or upon your death there will be war.”
Though there were priests and priestesses aplenty who performed such services, I did not know how to tell him that in the two years I had lain with Maqar, I had not once conceived. That it was possible Sadiq’s rough use of me a year before my courses began might have damaged me for childbearing. I did not know this for certain but could not bear the humiliation of bringing myself to speak of it—to him or anyone.
“I will think on it,” was all I said, wishing I could give him some promise, if only to put him at ease.
“Is this what it is to be a eunuch?” I said that night to Yafush as he walked a step behind me in the garden. “That I do not even remember the touch of a man to crave it at all?”
“To be a eunuch, Princess, is not to lose the longing,” he said quietly, “only the means to satisfy it.”
I waited for him and took his arm. “I am sorry it was done to you. I think it may be sin—against the body, if not the gods.”
“I think you are more of a eunuch than me, Princess.”
“You are ever the comfort, Yafush.”
“One day, you will remember your woman’s body again. And it will remember you.”
I presided over ritual feasts. I looked into the bowl once more . . . and saw only the life of the animal given to an indifferent god, if the god even existed at all. Perhaps that was the function of gods, that they were created to unite a people under one auspice greater than a throne, even if it was only an agreed-upon fiction. This thought depressed me greatly as winter came, the sun cool and flat, devoid of mystery.
The first clouds had gathered over the western highlands the day Wahabil came to say that a messenger had arrived from the northern Jawf.
Tamrin, the trader, had returned.
I received him in the alabaster hall six days later.
“My queen,” he said, bowing with his retinue before my court. His skin had darkene
d and he wore a new gold ring on his finger.
“I trust your journey was profitable?” I said, laying my arms on the rests of my throne.
He straightened. “Indeed. Please allow me to present these small gifts from the best of my caravan.”
Wahabil, standing on the dais near me, gestured Tamrin’s men to approach as I leaned forward where I sat.
“My queen, from Phoenicia.” Two men came forward with several bolts of cloth, that prized Tyrian purple so coveted by royals. “Cloth dyed with the sea snails found only off Phoenician shores. The precious color of kings—and queens—worth its weight in silver.”
I gestured for the cloth to be brought closer, so that I could rub it between my fingers. It grew finer by the year.
“From shores across the great inland sea,” he said, as a man brought forward a chest of gold pieces. Wahabil selected several items to bring to me: jewelry inlaid with precious stones, some with an odd spiral filigree more delicate than I had seen before.
“From Egypt,” Tamrin said, of an array of Egyptian wigs. Upon closer inspection I could see that some of the wool had been braided with tiny gold beads.
There was a ruckus at the end of the hall. The guards stood back, several of them skittering to one side as startled cries flew up from the courtiers.
I laughed and got to my feet, hands clasped together as a man led a horse through the hall’s great doors. The horse, gold in color, whipped its head to the side, red and blue tassels dancing from its bridle as the man holding her reins struggled to keep his grasp.
“Caution, my queen,” Wahabil said, an arm carefully held out.
I lifted the long hem of my gown and stepped past him to see the animal for myself. We had so few horses in Saba.
“How did you possibly journey with this creature?” I said, enrapt. “Truly, if you say you were spirited here by a jinn, I will believe you.”
A caravan might go for days without sight of water—no particular hardship for a camel, especially if it found fodder. But a horse was another matter altogether. Those in my stables had been brought by boat to Punt, and then to Saba across the narrow sea.
“The oases are verdant, my queen. Two camels carried nothing but grain for the feeding of it in between.” Tamrin smiled, seeming to relax just perceptibly. No, the feat and sheer expense of bringing this animal back to Saba had not been lost on me.
I walked around to the side, admiring the animal, and then sucked in a breath.
“But—this is a stallion!” I exclaimed.
“Indeed. So that the queen may grow her stables.”
I lifted a hand very slowly to touch that proud equine head. “Truly, Tamrin, you have worked a wonder.”
“Ah, but I am not yet finished,” he said, as several more men came forward bearing jars.
I walked among them as the trader indicated their contents: cardamom, coriander, fennel. A box of rare and priceless saffron. An amphora of purest olive oil.
“Nineteen more have been delivered already to your storerooms,” he said. The creases around his eyes were more pronounced, light against the darker shade of his skin as one who squints hours beneath the sun. He was different, so freshly come from the caravan road, though I couldn’t tell exactly what in his manner had changed.
“You will join me for dinner and tell me of your travels,” I said.
He bowed low as the horse was led from the hall.
“Your journey was indeed profitable,” I said that evening in the garden, leaning back against the cushions. Gone was any semblance of spectacle, an elegant but simple meal laid before us. I had heard that it was difficult for traders to adjust to their mud-brick dwellings after so many nights sleeping in the open by the fire—so much so that they might stay in the tents of their kin-tribe beyond city walls or in the company of their camels for weeks after their return. It was the second time I had received him privately—except for the attendance of Shara and Yafush, who were as ever-present as my own arms.
“Indeed.” Tamrin leaned forward with a smile, a honeyed date in his cheek. He chewed it thoughtfully, as though choosing the beginning of his tale, took a long sip of palm wine from his cup, and said, “The world is hungry for the best of Saba. But they are most enamored of my newest rare export . . .”
I tilted my head. Only the quantities of spices and perfumes, of balsam and incense, and the patterns of the textiles, ever varied. Every item Saba exported was expensive, from the gold of Punt to the frankincense of Hadramawt, which must travel so many miles overland with a retinue to protect it that it rivaled the value of gold itself by the time it reached market.
“That new export is the eyewitness tale of Saba’s new queen,” he said, grinning.
I laughed then, the sound rising to the fig trees.
“In the oases, tribesmen of every kind come not only to gawk at our wares and eat by our fires, but foremost to receive news.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know something of that.”
“We have not left them wanting. Soon, the tale of your beauty and wealth will reach the very edge of the world.”
“You flatter.”
Tamrin gave a dramatic sigh. “You say I flatter, and they say I exaggerate when I boast that the very stars descended to your hall, that incense burns day and night within it so the scent of the gods is in the nostrils of even the lowliest palace slave day and night. That ivory is as marble and alabaster as limestone, and cinnamon bark as firewood in Marib. That the queen’s maidservant is so finely dressed as to be mistaken for the queen. But there is no mistaking the queen when one sets eyes upon her at last . . .” His gaze turned languid. Wine glistened on his lower lip. “No. There is no mistaking a beauty that, once seen, sears itself into the mind of the observer as the face of a fiery goddess. That such great and terrible loveliness is memorized in exquisite detail after only a single glance.”
I sighed and shook my head as though he were hopeless, and he shrugged with a chuckle.
“And so it is true what they say of Sabaean traders,” I said, “that they may spin whatever tales they wish about Saba, as no one but the traders will ever make the journey to test their veracity.”
“I would be dubbed a liar and a fraud were it not all true,” he said with a quiet smile.
This, from a man who had never seen my face.
“But I, too, crave news,” I said. “Tell me of the world beyond Saba, as you saw and heard of it.”
“Ah, yes. There is a new king in Athens, the city across the western sea, with whom the Phoenicians trade. The Phoenicians are fond of these people. They, too, are merchants after a sort.”
“And the Phoenicians?”
“They sail across the sea, farther each year. Their navigators are unmatched. That has not changed.”
Tamrin’s mind seemed to be roaming as he said this, as though he were formulating other thoughts entirely. His face had grown leaner over the year of his travels, lending the blue of his eyes a glitter less hard than simply feral.
“Your gifts are too exquisite. I must reimburse you, for the horse especially and its fodder. Camels, goats, gold—name it and it is yours.”
“That is not necessary,” he said, picking carelessly at the plate of dates, and then from another of oiled almonds.
“I insist.”
“It is not necessary . . . because it has already been done. I brought the purple cloth and spices as tribute. The gold and jewels, the oil and stallion—and the provisioning of the animal and the two extra camels to carry its fodder—are gifts from the Israelite king, Solomon.”
I gave him a queer look.
“I did not know if you would have it publicly known, so I did not announce it in your hall. Forgive me. I thought it would do no harm for your courtiers to think such bounty the return of your ventures.”
He was clever.
“Were such rich displays common when you returned to my father’s court?”
He shook his head. “No. Your gambit has paid handsomely.
You are a savvy statesman already, my queen, to open a conversation with silence.”
“My gambit . . .”
“To send no message, to send no gifts. The king was greatly perplexed.”
“Well then, I must hear this tale.”
“I carried to him news of your father’s death . . .”
“You had words face-to-face with him?”
He nodded. “Indeed. I stood before his entire court as he took me to such task that I did not know at first how to respond.”
“Took you to task? You are my subject. Your manners are as honed and burnished as a blade. What you mean to say is that he has taken me to task.”
Tamrin lifted his gaze, his expression serious.
“Tell me all of it, then, and plainly.”
“I carried news of your father’s death,” he began again. “Of the allies who were prepared to back your claim and your march on the throne. Of the utter conquest of your enemies and garrisoning of their lands and the building of new temples to the moon god. ‘Does she not send word, or gift or petition for alliance?’ the king said.”
I barked a laugh. Petition an upstart king?
“The king was intrigued to the point, I think, of offense. Truly, my queen, you do not know the position I was in. Here is a man accustomed to all that he demands. To the best offerings of every kingdom beneath him, neighboring him, and as far away as Tarshish. It was all I could do not to offer up my entire cargo and claim it a royal gift though it might mean the loss of all my worldly possessions and those of half my tribe.” His forehead wrinkled slightly. “Instead, I told him you were a queen who spoke not with gestures or words, but commanded an army with her eyes. The queen of Saba is a mystery no man may unravel.” He paused and then gave a small smile, as though in spite of himself.
“Now, finally, I have caught you in a blatant untruth.”
“No.” Tamrin shook his head. “It is the truth, though I did not say that you speak as eloquently as the wisest kings. And so he bade me speak of you more, as you bade me a year ago tell you about him. And I sang the same song of your beauty and of Saba’s wealth such that silver has no value in a land filled with so much gold and precious commodities—both here, and in the colony across the sea. ‘For Saba spans the sea to the gold mines and temples and fields of Punt,’ I said. And he bade me stay with him at court for many days.”