The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen

by Tosca Lee

  That night I fled to the orchards, my feet churning beneath me. Faster, faster, so that even Yafush could not keep up. When I was far beyond sight of the nearest palace guard, I spun back and shouted at the sky.

  “What do you want of me?” I raged. “Where are you, that you turn your back like the most faithless of lovers? What blood do you require that I have not given you—what hope of mine have you not seized at whim? What more do you want? Speak! Speak it and let us be done!” But the moon was silent, the naked branches of the fruit trees stark as black lightning before its face.

  Those months were the longest of my life. I paced the halls of the palace and then the ruined hedges of the garden by day, standing at the window for long hours at night, the clamor of a hundred letters written and received only in my head.

  Spring came with heavy rains, and the farmers double-tilled the fields. I retrieved the scroll I had steadfastly avoided all this while, as though I had not reread it in my mind a thousand times.

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

  How you keep me waiting . . .

  My words to him had been filled with haughty challenge and invitation, and though he claimed both outrage and anger at them, I knew the thing he would not abide: silence. It did not matter that the swelter of summer was a bare month away; this was not a man who would stomach rebuff. He would never excuse that he had humbled himself in asking for word from me and received nothing and I could not afford to let the correspondence by which I had piqued the king grow cold.

  I took out parchment and ink and sat down at last. But after so long, and so many conversations within myself as though we had spoken for months, I was out of cleverness.

  Lady Riddle says: I devour with a million mouths. I am devoured in a single bite. I have no king but march in rank. Who am I?

  I am alone. There is no one to hear these words. That is the woman, speaking to herself.

  The queen says to the king: Is it my god who has conspired to hoard Saba’s fruits . . . or yours who has jealously closed the corridor between us? Some way or another we must let them treat so that I may send you the emissary with the many words you long for. Speak sweetly to your god then, as to a lover, even as I cannot. Let him soften his immortal heart along with his invidious resolve.

  I said, “I will send Saba to you.” But the sun will not rise from the south for another year. And so the gods make me a liar unless we decide together that these months are but days, that they pass as a dream so that when you rise from sleep at last, Saba will be within the walls of your city like the moon before the face of the sun. Not like the eclipse that stole Hiram from Phoenicia, but one that heralds the suspension of the world when time forgets herself so that the ibex feeds at night and the lion hunts by day.

  You tire of music and gold and feasting. Then we will pretend that there are no feasts, there is no gold. But there must be music. You play a flute made from a reed and I clap my hands. You are no king, and I, no queen. There is no palace. There is only a garden and our heads are adorned with only crowns of flowers . . .

  Until the day you must take up the mantle of the wise once more, and I the veil of fire.

  I am Bilqis.

  I lowered my head to my arms and wept. After a while, I sealed the scroll. No clever gifts this time, only these words as simple as a virgin sheathed in linen.

  The fields flourished beneath the hot sun that summer. But I was distracted and tense, searching the road with rising frequency for my small band of Desert Wolves, those enigmatic dwellers of the harsh sands who drifted into my service long enough to earn a camel or a few pots before disappearing into the dunes again. I had sent them with my scroll by way of Gabaan, there to be joined by two of Tamrin’s men to guide them.

  By the time the harvest proved plentiful—more even than years past—I had already journeyed north and back again with them in my mind ten, twelve, twenty times.

  “My queen, are you listening?” Wahabil said. He had come to talk about locusts and the ground burned for the vast repository of their eggs. “I worry for you, for your distraction over this king who agitates you so.”

  Shara had already expressed her own concerns about my waning weight, the color that had left my cheeks. But what else could happen to me, cooped up inside the palace with reports of crops and whether the locusts had emerged and in what quantity, and how many had been seen coupling on the millet stems!

  That autumn, Tamrin arrived at the palace.

  “My Wolves?” I said.

  He rose from his bow, brows lifted. Without the arduous journey that seemed to define the very cords of his arms and neck each time he returned, he seemed a thing more cultivated than ever. But the unrest in his eyes belied him. I, who had thought this year torture—how much more so had it been for him, this nomad among nomads?

  “I greet you as my queen, and you say to me ‘My Wolves?’ ” His voice was like warmed honey when he chuckled, though I knew the sound was forced.

  “Forgive me. Welcome. And now, have you seen my Wolves?” I smiled sweetly.

  “Alas, no.” He shook his head, staring toward the windows, the shutters thrown wide in the cool of early evening. He, too, was impatient for word from his men—or from the king himself. “It is too soon for their return. Who knows how long the king might have kept them, or if he even received them at all?”

  I had not thought of that possibility. Renewed anxiety surged up inside me.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t escort them yourself,” I said.

  He paced away, digging his fingers into the unbound hair at his nape. “How I nearly bolted after them!” he said through gritted teeth. “And I would have, had I no camels to negotiate fodder for, doing business cooped up in the city like one of the queen’s ministers!” He went still. “Forgive me.”

  I waved it away.

  I, too, was tired of waiting. I was tired of many things. I had told myself that I would not waste time here, even as the words of Solomon’s letters trailed me like the hem of my own gown. How had I allowed a king on the other side of the world such power over my every waking thought? How had he worked such effect over us both?

  “Why have you come, if not with news?” I said, squinting at him.

  “I don’t know why I came,” he said quietly. “This last year has dealt all my tribe such a blow, as for all of Saba. I thought that if the queen would receive me that I would at least not stare at the same camels and faces of my foremen and slaves, all looking at me, the same question in their eyes.” He shook his head. “But my memory is deficient.”

  “How so?”

  He glanced up. “I forget that when the queen receives me in private, she no longer wears her veil. And that I always leave more distracted than before.”

  Outside the moon had risen large and orange over the sill of the window.

  “Have you no wife, Tamrin?” In all this time, I had never known, and though I had refused a proposal from his tribe, it had not been for him.

  “No.” He sat down with a rueful smile. “Nor will I. No woman wants to be loved second most.”

  “Marriage is not about love,” I said.

  “No. But every woman—even a queen, I think—wants to be loved and loved before all others. I could make a wife content, I think. But I would not make her happy. And I would come to hate her duty, if only because I knew it mirrored my own.”

  I had never heard him speak with such baldness.

  “Your first love is given then—to whom?” I asked.

  “Not given, but taken from me.”

  I looked away.

  “Ah,” he said softly. “You think I mean my queen, whom yes, I love. But that is not what I meant.”

  Now I could look at him. “Who has seized this love from you?”

  He shook his head as one lost. “The gods of air and sun,” he said with a helpless laugh. “Of the road, the sands, oases . . . who chase me away to Isr
ael, Damascus, and Tyre. To the courts of kings and then home again to Gabaan, which I crave to the point of tears, and then despise the moment I return. It is the same with the sands, or the tents of the oases, which I long for and cannot wait to leave. There is no place, but that one in between, where I am at peace.”

  He lifted his eyes to me then.

  “And yet I come back to you, unable to help myself, knowing I will leave. Trusting you will tell me ‘go.’ Knowing you could command me to stay and that I would obey, but only because you compelled me.”

  Impossibly, his anguish made those feral eyes even more beautiful.

  “Yafush,” I said, never looking away from Tamrin.

  Without a word, the eunuch left, quietly closing the door behind him.

  Tamrin sat very still.

  I hesitated a moment, thinking of the king’s letters. Of the gravity of them, so like an unbroken spell. And of the king, certainly not lying alone all these nights even as he claimed himself tortured.

  “I will not command you stay,” I whispered.

  In an instant he had crossed the short space between us, a bare arm pulling me to him as his mouth descended on mine.

  I had forgotten the scent of skin, the warm musk of it. He smelled of sandalwood and oil.

  Tamrin returned to Marib twice more before the autumn rains ended.

  And then, the Wolves of the Desert returned.

  You send not emissaries, but Wolves, and I opened my gates to them. Such gifts I would have given them for the journey they made beneath the merciless sun had they only the animals to carry them. And so I know now you command the curious hoopoe bird your trader, and the wolves of the very desert, and the jinns to spirit all of them here. But do not think you can command a king.

  I hid my tears from them. How do you cut to the heart with a simple tale of a garden and not draw blood? These are not my tears, but yours, for if you are my Riddle, I am your Mirror.

  And yet I am the one devoured in a single bite and you are Locust, the plague of Israel’s enemies. Are you my enemy, then? Only demons treat with succulent words. Only demons may so distract, using the secret longings of a man against him. How you have swarmed my thoughts, and consumed them.

  But even as I say “I will not be confounded” because I find you haughty, you turn gentle and melancholy. And I must be gentle in return even as you bring me to tears for your loneliness, which is my own.

  Now you are angry, for I have found you out. Do you delight in my distraction? Of course you do. You are Woman.

  Take care, Bilqis—how many times have I whispered your name?—many women have played at the emotions of kings, few to good fortune.

  But play at them, even as I command your caution. I beg you. Let me pretend a little longer.

  Send your emissary with words like a swarm that I may be devoured.

  “Send word to Tamrin,” I said to Wahabil later that day. “It’s time to leave.”

  SEVENTEEN

  The day we departed, the priests sacrificed a bull in the courtyard of the Marib temple at dawn. It was cold; even wrapped in a heavy woolen shawl I shivered in the pale light. Reading the steaming liver, Asm hesitated before declaring our journey profitable, his forehead drawn.

  I drew him aside afterward. “What is it?”

  “The return, my queen. It will be . . . more difficult.”

  It was an omen I could live with.

  I took my leave of Wahabil there in the temple and to all eyes it must have appeared as though he brushed noses with a slave girl. I had exchanged my purple gowns and carmine silks for a simple tunic, my head cloth and veil obscuring all but the barest part of my eyes so that I was indistinguishable from Shara or my slaves.

  “Care for my kingdom,” I whispered.

  “I shall do so as though your eyes are upon me always. Return safely next year, my queen. Almaqah speed you. Almaqah grant you favor. Blessings on the camel that carries you.”

  He had grown precious to me, my stalwart councilor, my friend. I embraced him then and kissed him as a father.

  Before I left the temple complex, I stopped at the mausoleum to stand before the limestone plate of my mother’s grave and the alabaster face of the funerary mask set within it. I sighed and touched the vacant eyes. They were cold.

  At twenty-four I was now the same age she had been when she died. Did she know that I was queen? I stroked her carved cheek.

  I lingered a moment more, wishing—hoping—that her voice might come to me. But there was only the wind and the snarling of camels in the distance. At last, I drew away and followed the others across the causeway where the men and camels waited. Four hundred camels. Seven hundred men, including twenty Wolves of the Desert. Half the caravan, prepared to journey north to Tamrin’s tribal lands where we would meet up with nearly three hundred camels and as many men more.

  As we crossed the oasis through which I had marched just six years ago, I looked back at the tiny procession of Wahabil and his slaves wending their way back to the capital. Morning had broken, infusing the brick buildings of Marib with golden warmth, turning the alabaster windows of the palace ruddy as fifty new suns. Willing the sight of them to memory, I turned my face north.

  Tamrin had taken pains to hide my presence, and to find excuse to install Shara and me, and the five girls I had brought with me toward the front of the caravan where there would be less dust.

  “They are not hardy for the ride,” I overheard him sigh loudly to one of his foremen, who shook his head at the litter that carried two of them. And so we were well within earshot of Niman and Khalkharib, who had brought with them ten men and fifteen camels each of their own.

  The eunuch was the most difficult aspect to disguise, as it was well known the Nubian was ever at my side. He wore a head scarf and Khalkharib claimed he was his slave and took pains to call him Manakhum, though I heard him slip once on the second day of our journey.

  We could not keep up the charade forever, but I hoped at least to conceal my departure until the Jawf lay several days behind us. At the palace, Wahabil had taken pains to select a slave my height and secure her in a secluded apartment of the women’s quarter. Once every day, she was to walk through the portico covered by one of my veils and wearing one of my gowns. She was even to sit on my throne in the Hall of Judgment, leaning toward Wahabil in conference as he pronounced judgment as though it were my own. It was not a foolproof ploy, but it might at least stave off public knowledge of my absence for a little while.

  I had never seen Tamrin’s caravan, which was normally three hundred and fifty camels large with nearly as many men. Those first days our sheer size, which was only half of what it would be—astounded me.

  Such noise! There was the constant talk of men, of the foremen calling orders to those at the head of each section and riders crooning to their camels in tones as cajoling as a lover. Camels seemed to gurgle and roar day and night, protesting when they were hobbled to forage or coaxed to let down their milk and then when couched at night, and again as they were mounted with packsaddle and bags.

  Nearly one hundred and fifty camels carried gifts of gold, textiles, and spices—all of Saba’s usual fare, but in such quantities that even I had never seen. One camel bore an entire load of ivory. Another, ebony. Another, rhinoceros horn and ostrich feathers and delicately packed ostrich eggs painted and adorned with jewels. Another, a pharmaceutical chest of aloe and unguents, salves and balms of myrtle and oliban, and another of kohl and cosmetics. Three more bore jewelry, cups, and gold boxes encrusted with precious stones as well as wool, hemp, and linen fabrics dyed in a variety of colors. Enough gifts for nearly three hundred wives and concubines, if indeed the tales were true.

  The litter that carried my girls was in fact my own palanquin, made more lavish than it had been before, but ingeniously so that it could be removed in parts, its gold struts and feathered canopy wrapped in woolen blankets on a camel farther back. My own wardrobe and jewelry chest required five camels, and tha
t of Shara, Yafush, and my girls, eight more.

  Twenty camels strung together by a rope carried gold and silver tassels, saddle ornaments and elaborate tack, tents, rugs, blankets, and incense burners. Asm had eight camels for his own use and that of his acolytes, laden with idols and the objects of his mystical office.

  Thirty musicians traveled with us, Mazor among them. I had vacillated about bringing him if only because I could not afford to have him inform on the activities of my palace. Just weeks ago, I determined to bring him under sword oath. The musician had wept, creeping forward to kiss the top of my foot when I asked him how he would like to see his homeland again.

  “You have made the arduous journey once in coming here. Do you feel fit enough to make it there and back again?”

  “And there and back a thousand times, to see Israel again,” he said, his cheeks wet with tears, his nose running like a child’s. And then such songs he sang that night, well past the time I slept so that by morning I woke to find him still softly playing the lyre.

  At the center of our caravan traveled Saja, my prized white camel. And behind her, on another she-camel, the markab, wrapped in linen and woolen blankets so that it looked by its shape like only a spare litter. It was unthinkable that I not take it with me—the capture of the acacia ark in my absence would all but constitute a seizing of the throne. Wahabil had publicly removed it for placement in my private reception chamber over a year ago in the name of its safekeeping. Today a simple imposter lay in its place, covered with a gold embroidered cloth.

  One other item of my office followed behind the markab wrapped in cloth and strapped to a large bull camel: the duplicate throne that had stood in my garden the night of my now infamous banquet. This had not been a part of my original inventory, but a woman can decide to pack many things in the extra space of a year.

  Animals followed in wicker cages: sand cats, songbirds, peacocks, pelicans, and yellow-head parrots. Two camels bore between them a cage with a hissing black panther, and another two monkeys from Punt.