by Tosca Lee
“Indeed, and they do resent it. But the conquered Canaanites, Hittites, and Amorites alone cannot provide the labor for his projects, which are many.”
This was the second crack I had noted in this king’s veneer.
“Come, sit, you look as though you weave on your feet.”
“If you will permit me, I will not stay, having left my camels and men and come these six days’ journey from them straightaway. How the king took me to task! Saying to me, ‘If she asks thus, tell her thus.’ Anything you may wish to know, he has told me, from the order of his birth to the fates of his brothers so that I may answer any question of yours about him. But for now I beg you, let me give you his response and return to you when I have seen my camels watered and rested. Our journey was not easy; we were set upon by bandits twice in our return.”
“Who dares?”
He shook his head, as though still warding off flies. “Bands in constant movement even as this kingdom of Israel expands. There are displaced peoples everywhere, many by the hand of Solomon’s father—those whom he did not exterminate. The world beyond Saba is a place of turmoil and hardship.” His gaze hardened. “But we took ten of them before it was through.”
“You will have more armed men when next you depart. Let me take up worry on this matter.”
“We lost little cargo and only a few camels. It might have been far worse. But you, my queen, may rest knowing you remain a mystery to the Israelite king. In my days there, I answered his many questions of your grandfather, and your father the high priest before you. And of your mother and her famous beauty. And I told him that Saba is a world in itself from the narrow sea to the desert interior, where only the Wolves of the Desert survive. And that she has not one temple but many, and many gods, Almaqah chief among them. And yet after so many days of praising Saba and my queen to him, as I prepared to depart, he said as though we had only begun, ‘You have said all of this and yet, is not your queen sovereign only of some mountains and desert waste, and a grove of incense trees? Why then do you boast to me of her?’ ” He turned his palms up as he said this.
I stared at Tamrin for a moment. After all that! Was this king possibly mad? But then . . . I turned away with a shake of my head.
“My queen?”
“He is testing you,” I said, turning back to him, “to see if you indulge him or become defensive, if you open your mouth to speak, or close it with only a knowing smile. Because both will tell him something of how much you say is true.”
How easily I saw it now. The king was weary of flowery speech—at which Tamrin excelled. But this king grew tired of conversation sheathed in silk. And so he pretended to have forgotten days of prodigious propaganda and prodded with rude words. He was the child who, forced to behave and smile for hours, finally sticks out his tongue. I began to laugh at that thought, knowing the feeling well. He was tired, perhaps, even of flattery, restless for what he could not venture beyond his borders to learn as I could not venture beyond mine.
Now Tamrin was really staring at me.
“What is it?” I said to him.
“My queen, he said to me, ‘When you tell her this, after all the account of how you have praised her, watch her. If she is shrewd, she will wonder at my reason for saying it. If she is wise, she may laugh. But if she is a fool, she will become enraged.’ And by Almaqah, I see now that he was right, and further, that my queen is as wise as I have thought all along.” He fell down low before me then.
Should I have been flattered that I proved wise? Or incensed that he had equipped my own man to put me to the test? I was not amused.
“And so he sends back my own man as jury,” I said dryly. “And did he tell you to say this, too? How inconvenient that it was not carried out before the entire court. Get up.”
He started to do so then froze, and fell down again onto his face.
“I have been toyed with. And now I show myself the fool.”
“Better you than me. How would you like to risk your caravans and life serving a foolish queen?”
“And how I will serve her always, because she is not foolish.”
“Yes. Because a foreign king told you so. Get up.” He got to his feet.
“Go. See to your camels. Eat, rest. I will relieve you of this burden of speaking for the both of us from opposite corners of your mouth. I can only imagine the conversations you must have had in your head.”
He exhaled, shaking his head slightly.
“Return to me in the fall.”
I was incensed one moment at the king’s audacity . . . perplexed the next. Preoccupied all the while. If Solomon, sitting at the crossroads, held Egypt and Phoenicia in thrall, somehow I must hold him in mine.
Through the coming months, I began to draft a response in my head written a few words at a time, stopping and beginning again. That fall, I put it all to papyrus myself.
You ask how it can be that I need nothing. I ask you: how can it be that you are so dependent on everyone else? We have a custom in Saba among our tribespeople, that we humiliate ourselves and make light of our riches. “What a beautiful animal!” one man says of the rarest white camel. “Ah, this?” its owner says. “Why, this is but a goat, and one without milk.” And so you may be assured that the bird that flies to your borders from mine comes from a people whose virtues are understatement and hospitality, those same qualities that require us to give our best possessions and animals—even the very tent we sleep beneath—to anyone who merely compliments it, saying it is nothing and a trifle.
But these are not your customs, and so I will tell you without interference: Saba has no need for grain from any source but her oases. The scents of the gods grow in our own gardens because it gave the gods pleasure to plant them there. Grain and god—we have no need of anyone. The same sun that shrivels another nation’s harvest warms our soil and the moon causes seeds to germinate in the dark. Gold is less precious to us—it is as the sands of the desert, clinging to sandals and eyelids and hair. Our mines are inexhaustible, our date palms unrivaled, our herds countless.
We are impervious to attack; no army may march against us and survive the sands or scale the cliffs that border the salty sea. The gods have created this fortress around us, as insular as your vanished Eden, with only the smallest of gates by which we share our goods and receive tribute from the world. In my capital we have not one paradise but two. All has been given to us in double measure. The perfume of our myrrh is divine—spiriting souls of Pharaohs and kings to the netherworld, the scent of it so pervasive when it grows as to sustain the very poorest living upon its soil well into old age, and grant him immortality in death. And how can it not? The entire kingdom smells of god so that every man is a priest, and the very insects sing hymns. Here, earthly pleasure becomes divine and we dwell in knowledge of the sublime by the sheer act of breathing. The gods are indeed unjust, having given all good things to us in abundance. Even so, through the trade of our ships and caravans, we eat of the world’s table and wear her best silk and indigo and purple. We are so lost to luxury that the simplest grains and figs and linens are as novelties to us.
You ask how I can need nothing. Here is the answer. But your real question is not how a nation needs nothing, but how a woman does not. And the answer is this: I am the product of my land. I am Saba. Egypt has her Nile, but we have the monsoons, our dams and canals, the design of which was whispered to our ancestors by the gods. And so we persist since time immemorial, forever and blessed. Any war we make, or have ever made, is only and solely with ourselves, as no one may match us in vengeance or in passion.
Why, then, do you command me as some vassal, to send my emissaries to you? Did you summon my father thus—he who was chief priest to the god who rises over our mountains, which reach to the heavens themselves? I am High Priestess, the Daughter of Almaqah, who harkens to no mortal king.
And so I write to you not as a queen or priestess. And I ask of you: how do you worship one god before all others, a god without name
or face? Why does a wise man call upon one god and risk angering the jealous ears of others—and why does your god ask of you such a thing? And how does one worship in a temple closed off to the heavens by a roof?
There should not be mysteries between us. I hear from my trader, Tamrin, that we are cousins who both trace our ancestors to that man of the flood, Noah, whose sons dispersed to the ends of the earth. And so surely you understand all that I have written, and know all of these things already. And so I pen these words to the wind, hoping only for their echo. Even the gods wish to be known.
I don’t know why I added this last, whether the gods or my heart commanded it stand.
ELEVEN
I watched the girls who kept my chamber. The way they tittered over petty obsessions: the best-looking of the male palace slaves. The minor officials who took them to their beds. The gifts that came for me, many of which I sloughed off on them, and where and whom they had come from.
I observed my counselors. The vendettas that drove them, their agendas in the chamber, the way they argued over the table as though the moon itself might fall from the sky if they did not have their way.
The acolytes of my new priestly school, filled with such zeal. It dictated their every waking moment in hope for—what? My priests, who clung to their mystical identity in an echelon separate and therefore superior to the secular world. How did they know their god looked down on them at all?
I saw it all with a too-clear eye: the way farmers and merchants chased abundance as though it were the very sun, and as vainly. The wives who flaunted their pregnant bellies, the barren women who covered their heads, the lovers who worshipped the idol of their romance.
Wahabil, lost to the uncertainty of the future. Shara, to the prison of her past. Tamrin, ever restless. Only my enigmatic eunuch seemed to dwell in a place of I know not what—peace? The present?—like an island among us.
Impossibly, four years had passed. I was twenty-two.
“All right,” I said at last to Wahabil. It was autumn, and the last rains had gone, taking with them the scent of almond and apricot trees in full fruit. “Go to Asm. Tell him I will make the marriage to the god.”
I thought my minister would fall down in relief.
“I will make arrangements for the new moon,” he said.
I did not know how to tell him that he might as well make them for the dark moon when Almaqah hid his face from the earth. That it would not matter. But I only nodded and said that yes, he must do that, and no, it was not too soon. There was no point in waiting, as I was no longer young.
The night of the new moon, I sat in vigil till dawn. I did this for seven nights, resting during the day, breaking my fast only at sundown with boiled quail eggs and pomegranate. I sent gifts of bronze statues and alabaster incense burners to the temple, jars of rare nard for the priests, and gold jewelry for the priestesses in service to the god.
On the eighth night, I crossed the oasis adorned in neither veil nor jewels. I left Yafush and my women at the causeway and gave Shara my sandals that I might enter the temple grounds barefoot and unescorted as any supplicant, a bowl of oil in my hands. Before the silent priests of the forecourt, I poured the oil on the altar and drank from the sacred well. And then I shed my robe and entered the open sanctuary in only my linen shift.
I knelt in shivering prayer until the next morning. And then I returned to the palace and closed myself away, seeing no one but Shara and drinking only water until the first day of the waxing moon.
On the last night, as the moon hid its face and I burned incense on the bronze burner with the leaping ibex handle, I realized Shara was staring at me.
“Are you afraid?” she whispered.
I watched the white smoke. A wisp of life, and then no more. A moment, too fleeting and gone.
Tomorrow I would let my women paint my eyes with kohl and my face and hands with henna. I would eat honey cakes and fruit and fat. At sunset, I would don the heavy bridal veil and enter the temple. I would stay in the room prepared for me, attended by the priestesses for a week as the god came in the guise of a shrouded priest each night. All beneath the half-lidded eye of Almaqah, shining through the window of my stony wedding bower, as the god rose over me in my bed.
The incense sputtered and the smoke thickened, cloying in my nostrils, too strong. I opened the shutter, but the walls were closing around me.
I crossed the chamber, unable to breathe, and shoved open the door. Shara was after me, my shawl in her hands, calling out, “My queen!” and then “Bilqis!” But I was running down the hallway and then the stair, out toward the portico, pushing past the guards. The heavy step of Yafush sounded behind me as I tore toward the garden.
I ran past beds of oleander and long-stemmed anemone, asters like purple stars fallen from the night, heaving breath into lungs that had constricted over the course of the last four years. Ahead, on the lantern-lit way, the fronds of tall palms swayed over the garden pool. In my mind, I plunged in, falling down among the lilies to my knees until I could lie back in the water, submerged. But even I could not rouse me from my torpor and I stopped before the edge of the water to stare, breathless, into its moonless night.
Running steps—Yafush, and the guards. I wrapped my arms around myself and vaguely heard Yafush tell the guards to go back to their posts. And then Shara was there, wrapping the woolen shawl around my shoulders.
“I’m fine,” I heard myself say. “I only needed some air.”
I staggered then, nearly going into the pool after all, and Yafush caught me up in his arms.
I turned my cheek against his oiled chest and closed my eyes.
Back in my chamber, I took the draught Shara gave me.
“The priests need not know,” she said, her face pale in the lamplight. “You won’t have broken your fast, at any rate.”
I nodded, no longer caring, and fell into mercifully dreamless sleep.
Someone was calling me. I heard my name again, more urgently, and stirred, my limbs like lead.
Voices. A commotion outside my door.
“My queen.” Shara, shaking me.
Whom is she speaking to? I thought distantly, even as I said, “What is it?” the words formed with difficulty, slurred even to my ear.
“Tamrin. The trader. He came barging into the courtyard with his men, shouting for an audience, their camels nearly dead on their feet.”
I blinked at her, trying to make sense of what she was saying.
“Tamrin?” I got up from the bed and Shara wrapped my robe around me. But it was two months too early for his return. Had his caravan been attacked? I had sent fifty armed men with him eleven months ago.
“He started a mighty argument when Wahabil said you could not see him or any man today. The hall was full of shouting. He went nearly mad, saying that he must speak with the queen—today, now.”
I looked toward the window and then the water clock, shocked to realize it was nearly mid-afternoon.
I swiftly pinned back my hair. The moment Shara realized what I meant to do, she said, “Bilqis, you cannot!”
But I was yanking open the chamber door and there was Yafush, standing outside, my girls startled as birds by my appearance in the outer room.
“I think you had best come, Princess,” Yafush said.
Both men’s heads swiveled the moment I entered my council chamber.
“My queen!” Wahabil exclaimed even as Tamrin strode urgently forward.
“My queen,” Tamrin said, falling low before me. The dust of his journey clung to his tunic and hair. When he straightened, I could see that his face had been wiped hastily clean. Behind him on the table a plate of food lay untouched.
“They said you would not see me, that you were sequestered—” He faltered and stared, and I realized that in my groggy haste I had forgotten to don my veil.
Wahabil’s hands had gone to his head.
“How have you returned so soon?” I demanded, alarmed at the look of him—never had
I seen him so unsettled. “Were you harassed upon the route?”
He shook his head. “Yes, but we are safe. I came ahead with a small company—your armed men are with my caravan weeks behind.”
“This might have waited—” Wahabil said, throwing up his hands.
“I fear to wait!” Tamrin said.
“The gods will accomplish what they will without our machinations,” I said. “There will be another cycle. I am not so old yet.”
“My queen, we dare not wait for the gods but act now,” Tamrin said, clearly thinking I had spoken to him, as a positively queer look crossed Wahabil’s face.
I might have laughed at the looks on both their faces had I not been impatient to hear why Tamrin was in such a state.
“My queen, my men and I have ridden hard for days to come to you—” He was staring again and I wanted to shake him.
“What has happened?” I demanded. No trader ever left his caravan.
“The king would not receive me.”
“What do you mean?”
“His chamberlain received your gifts from us, explaining that the king had urgent business and could not meet us. But when I said I had a message for the king and that I must deliver it personally, I was kept waiting. Five days in a row I returned with your scroll, waiting with those who had come to petition the king, waiting as though I were one of the two prostitutes of the story!”
My scroll. The one by which I had meant to rouse his indignation but that ended with my baring, if even in code, my great isolation. I felt a flush of heat rush to my cheeks.
“When at last he received me before his court, I said, ‘My lord, you receive Saba’s gifts by way of your chamberlain, but you have not received her greatest treasure—these words penned by the Jewel of Saba herself, which I may deliver to no hand but your own!’ And he said, ‘What I have asked I have not received. Where is the queen’s emissary?’ ”
“And when I told him your message, that his emissaries were welcome in Saba, he said, ‘Does your queen think I tell her “Send your emissaries” out of vanity?’ ”