The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen

by Tosca Lee

  Perhaps tomorrow I would berate myself for having fallen reactive prey to the king’s machinations. I had threatened my council and made grandiose promises that even I did not know if I could keep. I had abandoned the bedchamber of my god in order to scheme a journey to the land of a nameless other. For all I knew, rash action was exactly what Solomon had hoped to ignite in me. Well then, I would not disappoint but far exceed his expectation.

  Time enough for doubt later. Tonight, I was excited as I had not been since the day I left Saba for the shores of Punt. Every great turn in my life had been marked by a journey. It was time to begin a new one. A greater one.

  That night, in the hours just before dawn, I sent for the Israelite slave, Mazor. If he had been roused from sleep—and he certainly had—he did not show it, but bowed low in my outer chamber, his hair drawn back neatly at his nape, only the gray in his beard belying his age on a face that was round as a boy’s.

  “Are you not exhausted from your journey and hard ride here?”

  “I have been well fed and rested. But even had I not, the praise of my god revives me.”

  How I envied him his sure devotion, even to a nameless god.

  “Then play and sing for me,” I said, reclining.

  “In the common tongue, or that of my people?” he said.

  “In your own.”

  He bowed low and began to play and as he sang his voice was filled with beautiful melancholy. I closed my eyes and absorbed it like oil.

  He played through the first rays of dawn and long into morning, singing song after song in his strange language until I slept at last, lulled by the repetitive “yah,” the long vowels from the palate softened by the tongue.

  That morning, I dreamed of puzzles. Of foreign kings who both commanded and cajoled and thrones that must be left to be fortified. Of faceless gods with unpronounceable names.

  For the first time in years, I slept assured of the path before me. For the first time in years, I looked forward to the future.

  But now all my cunning of the past must be as nothing compared to what I would do next.

  FIFTEEN

  That winter, the trader of Tamrin’s off year, a wiry man of the Awsan tribe of Sharah, came to the palace at my summons. It was not his normal route to travel as far as Israel, but only as far as the oasis of Tema, south of Edom.

  “I am sending a company of fifty armed men to safeguard your caravan,” I said. “But when you reach Tema, you must send twenty of them on to the court of the Israelite king and wait for their return to escort you south again in safety.” To the captain of the cohort, I entrusted a golden ewer I had specially commissioned with two ibex head spouts facing away from one another, their graceful horns curved up and adjoined as a double handle. Beneath the one was engraved the name “Fearless.” Beneath the other, “Reckless.” I had the ewer filled, the mouth of “Reckless” plugged with wax, the other with a scroll upon which I had written only this:

  Your questions are but a mirror; only a man who asks them of himself would pose them to another.

  Am I fearless or reckless? They are two sides of one vessel. To pour from one is to draw from the other.

  My emissary will depart with my royal trader in a year’s time. They weep to leave paradise. But as you cannot go out into the world, I will send Saba to you. On that day the sun will rise from the south.

  Who am I? I am a girl whose hair has been pulled by a boy, if only to get her attention. Well, you have it. Now what will the girl do?

  My name is Riddle. My questions are as many as the sand.

  I woke early to finish the business of court. I met with my council, and by the hour with Wahabil, who must have the running of my kingdom in my absence.

  Shara immediately noticed the change in me.

  “How different you are!” she exclaimed, clasping my face between her hands. “The color in your cheeks rivals that of your jewels!” But if it did, it was infectious; the childhood friend who had wept in fear when I told her my plan and then wept again when I said she would accompany me seemed like one who wakes from a long sleep. Her step had lightened and her movements quickened. Twice I even heard her singing in my chamber as she laid out bolts of fabric brought up from the coffers.

  For that sound alone, I would have journeyed to the end of the earth.

  That spring, when the rains had ceased, I sent for Tamrin. He was quieter than I had come to expect of him, his gaze restless.

  “I promise you that the king will receive you when next you set foot in his city,” I said. “They will tell tales of this coming trip for generations. But you must make many arrangements now. You will have more treasure to transport and more camels to carry it. You will have, too, many more armed men.” He studied me closely then, the broad bow of his lip widening.

  “This in response to the king’s new port?”

  I nodded. “We will engage him in negotiation and persuade him with such gifts that he will give us all that we desire.”

  “You will send your emissary then?” New life seemed to flood his face.

  “I have put you in the most difficult position with this king. This time will be different. I am going with you.”

  And with that, the color was gone.

  “My queen . . .”

  “Surely you have thought very long about what those ships mean—not just for Saba, but for your own caravans.”

  He nodded, and I saw the new lines around his eyes. “Indeed, my father has never wrung his hands so often or hard in his life.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “Neither have I, for that matter.”

  I knew it was not for the wealth of the trek—no. This was a man who basked in the attention of king and queen alike but held nothing so earthly as gold precious. It was not the loss of wealth that he feared, but the hard freedom of the road.

  “I will make right. For you, and for Saba.”

  I looked up to feel the weight of that lapis gaze. “I have never doubted you.”

  “But you must say only that the queen is sending an envoy to negotiate with the king. And you must prepare to carry wealth that has never been moved without an entire army.”

  “My queen, I cannot lessen the journey’s hardship for you. And with more men and camels it will indeed take an army to move.”

  “As it so happens . . . I have one.”

  He went away a different man than he had come to me. We were all of us different, galvanized by this venture, the air of secret between us. Even Wahabil seemed driven by purpose more than worry, the creases gone from his head as he spoke sharply with the chamberlain and barked at the steward.

  Only in moments did anxiety seize me. So many promises. So many grand claims. I could not fail. I must not fail. I lifted my chin in my meetings with Wahabil and the council. But taking to the garden when the palace threatened to close in around me, I knew I might fail in a hundred ways. In the journey itself, before ever reaching Israel. In my composure with this king, this devourer of the world. What if Saba’s wealth fell short? I had never doubted it before, but for the first time, I found myself taking stock of stable and gold mine, of field and vineyard, of the gnarled trees that produced the pearls of our frankincense. What if I failed to engage this purported wise man, this king who so embraced riddles? Was I clever, or did he seek only to marry Saba’s wealth out from under her to suit his own insatiable coffers?

  I sought the moon through the pomegranate branches, past the vivid fray of red trumpet flowers. But the moon in its cold day walk only stared back.

  I commissioned a great alabaster statue of myself with wide, obsidian, and all-seeing eyes for the day that my absence was unavoidably made known. I conscripted camels and armed men from every tribe. I would not travel with the palace guard, those most trusted by Nabat, but with the men who might otherwise be enlisted to march on Marib by those ambitious in my absence. In this way, they and their kin must pray for the success of the queen’s caravan.

  The rains came at the end of summer, long
and generous. Promise loomed everywhere—for a good winter crop, for Saba.

  More travelers than ever flooded the temple that year during the summer pilgrimage. Presiding over the ritual feast, I pronounced good omen, and the prediction of unprecedented wealth to the nation. A day when those sacred guests of the feast—the poor, the forgotten, and the wayfarer—would be so few as to become celebrated elite.

  More claims. More promises. What had started with the air of festivity—and continued around me in the persons of Wahabil and even Khalkharib and Shara so that her skin glowed like a girl’s—became a quiet gnawing in my gut.

  I called for Mazor every night. I had learned by then a great deal of the Israelite language with its soft consonants born back in the throat. Knew by now the words to myriad songs written by this poet king. I had studied them eagerly, and then frenetically. Two months before my departure, I bid him play his lyre as my chamber girl rubbed oil into my hands and hair and feet. Soon they would be cracked with travel.

  It was on such an evening that my cohort returned from Israel.

  “Such news, my queen,” he said as I received him in my private chamber. “The king himself received us and insisted we stay several days. Such strange and exotic foods, such feasting I have never experienced—”

  “Yes, yes,” I waved him on, impatient, my heart stuttering in my chest.

  “We presented him with your gift and what care he took in turning it over in his own hands! He cried out when he found the scroll, as triumphant as a boy. But his brow furrowed before the entire court as he read it and when he tipped the ewer a fine stream of sand spilled out onto the floor. I thought he might weep, he seemed so moved at the sight of it. ‘So many questions,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ And then, ‘She knows.’ When he set the ewer aside he looked at it often as he inquired about our journey.

  “The next night he brought us in to feast. He asked which of your emissary you meant to send to him, and the names of their tribes. We were none the wiser and said so, and he ate very little. On the third day after we arrived, there was an eclipse and an outcry in the city. The king disappeared into his chambers and did not call for us, but neither would he let us go. And so we stayed two more days until he summoned us to wish us good journey. He gave us many gifts of knives and leather and to me a fine Hittite bow. For you, he gave this.”

  He pulled a wrapped scroll from his belt.

  Did my heart drum its way out of my chest? I indicated for Yafush to receive it, though I wanted nothing more than to snatch it from his hands.

  I started to thank him—I meant to dismiss him immediately—but then he said, “My queen, there is one thing more. As we were leaving, Phoenician messengers came into the city. And so we loitered another day, asking all over the king’s court after them. My queen, Hiram of Phoenicia is dead.”

  I let out an incredulous breath. I could not have received this news at a more auspicious time.

  Now the king must renew ties with the new Phoenician king. Perhaps their prior agreements might even be in jeopardy.

  Alone in my chamber, I broke the seal on the scroll and unrolled it with clumsy fingers.

  Lady Riddle.

  How you torture me with your words as with your silence. How you test me. How you delight and anger me at once!

  Do you not know that your commercial interests are at stake? But of course you do. And so you punish me with the briefness of your reply and the cleverness of your gift, knowing the one will pique, the other delight. Do you not know I could hobble your kingdom? Do not mistake this king for a boy, but only a man with boyish thoughts. I have pulled your hair. You kick me in the shin. Take care you do not spit in my eye.

  I am eager for your emissary, but I know already I will be disappointed. Do not send me your wisest man, or your cleverest, or your most skilled. I am tired of flattery and posturing and simpering. But Saba’s emissaries do not simper, you say. I am tired of agreements laid out like logic, as precisely as foundation stones for a palace. I tire even of music and gold and feasting. I go away hungry from my own table.

  But you know this, because you tire of it as well. My words are a mirror. But you know this, too. Of course you do. And so once again, I make my arguments, knowing I am speaking only to myself.

  Tell me: Do you think your gods know you as well as I, whose face you have never seen?

  How you keep me waiting. You have pegged me well and yet you do not know me. It is a dangerous game you play. Fearless and reckless is ultimately foolish. Are you a fool, my queen?

  If you are wise, you will be cautious. If you are clever, you will be simple.

  But if you have mercy, you will send each of your emissaries with a separate word from you of such length that they may not be devoured at once by this hungry king.

  ~Solomon

  I read it, enraged, and then again in triumph. Let him presume to know me even as he called himself unknowable, this king who was said to discern the hearts of men.

  Well, I was no man. And soon we would have words at great length indeed.

  SIXTEEN

  Two weeks after I received word from Solomon, a veil covered the sun.

  I had been walking in the garden with Wahabil where we might not be overheard as we spoke in low tones, the breeze masking our whispers with the rustle of palm fronds as I reviewed the last of the matters he must attend to in my absence. In five days I would begin the journey north at last, to Israel.

  We were so engrossed that I never noticed the opaque cast of the sky.

  “Princess,” Yafush said, “you had best look up.”

  His voice startled me; my Nubian shadow rarely spoke in the presence of others.

  I glanced from him to the sun dimming before my eyes and pulled the veil more securely over my face. Once or twice a year the cooler air stirred up the desert, shrouding the plain and foothills in a greenish pall for days.

  Beside me, Wahabil squinted, his head tilted as though listening to the strain of a tune he could not place.

  And then I heard it: the faint vibration, the distant buzz.

  The sky began to fall in winged hail.

  Locusts.

  That day I stood by the lattice of my window for hours, the palace grounds obscured by a cloud of scissored wings.

  By morning the tender shoots of the winter crop were gone as though the fields had never been planted. They left in their wake a bare stubble of stalks, skeletal brush, and branches. Some trees had been left entirely intact but the fields lay bare, the pastures shorn free of grasses and brush as hungry camels lapped up the wingless hoppers left to march in pursuit of the swarm.

  “What does it mean?” I asked Asm, staring out at the ruin of the garden.

  “They came after good rains. Some enemy threatens your best interest, my queen. But your interests may also be multiplied. What is eaten will return more lush,” he said.

  I found that hard to believe.

  The city turned out in droves to collect the insects. The smell of locusts cooking in sesame oil and coriander filled the palace kitchens. And though Yafush pronounced them especially delicious—thanks, no doubt, to the rich crop they had all but obliterated—I could not bring myself to eat them even in retaliation.

  I sent riders to survey the devastation, gave orders for the camels to be fed grain from the storehouse and dried fish. They could not afford to go hungry now!

  Tamrin arrived at the palace several days later, his gaze as shifting as the desert dunes, keeping mine with seeming effort. I had seen the same look in a caged predator, once.

  “The locusts came from the north,” he said, drinking more palm wine than I had ever seen him consume at once. “They crossed the narrow sea into Bakkah and came down from there after eating the oasis dry. The oases between here and there are barren. There isn’t enough fodder to support a herd of camels, let alone a caravan.”

  He did not voice what we already knew between us:

  No one would journey north that year.

&nb
sp; Behind the door of my privy council all my arguments of before unraveled. Even my peaceful advisor Abyada wondered aloud if we were not to journey to Israel and treat with this king but go to him in war.

  “Do you not see,” Khalkharib hissed, “it is a sign that we must go not as emissaries but like an army of locusts?”

  “Are you a priest now that you interpret signs?” I said, peevishly. “The locusts came south, invading our land, not the other way around. And if there is no forage for a caravan from here to Bakkah there is even less for an army. Meanwhile, the king, too, has lost revenue and tariffs. And so as we suffer, he suffers. If anything, the gods show us our need for water routes more than ever. With ships we might trade frankincense for the seed we lost to replanting, because Almaqah knows we cannot sow incense!”

  Worse yet, I could send no message north. A few riders might find fodder enough for their number. But bandits would soon be out in droves searching for food and animals to replace those they must now slaughter. Saba’s few ships, meant only for hugging coastlines, had already set sail for ports in Hidush and Punt. By the time they returned, the Red Sea winds would have shifted from the northerly flow of winter to the southern current of summer, and we were no Phoenicians able to harness the winds.

  What would the king make of my silence after his demand for more words from me? And how weak would Saba appear to have fallen prey to such mundane plague, and how ill-favored by the gods? This, after I claimed that they doted on Saba as no nation on earth!

  And what might he make of not only my silence but the absence of my trader in spring? The new Phoenician king had had time by now to renew ties with Israel, and for all I knew Solomon’s fleet neared completion and prepared to set out for the ends of the world. And I, unable to leave or send anyone at all!

  I had promised so much, fired by vision—not just for me, but for my people.

  I had dared to hope, which was my greatest sin of all.

  Tell me: Do you think your gods know you as well as I, whose face you have never seen?