The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen

by Tosca Lee

  Nearly a hundred camels carried flour, dried meat, dates, water, sesame and other oils, and camel’s milk in goatskins where, by day’s end, the frothing cream would contain a lump of butter. Behind these, seventy more bore emergency fodder.

  Armed men rode the length of the train on either side of it, concentrated at the treasure in its middle and provisions near the dusty end. Four men dispersed throughout our length bore the ibex banner of Saba, distinguishable from the royal banner only by the absence of the silver crescent between the animal’s horns.

  Two short hours of numbing pain into the journey I remembered how sore I had been the last time I sat a camel saddle, so that I walked as an old woman the first night I dismounted. Shara and I had no choice but to wrap our middles tightly with spare head cloths the second morning, if only so we could bear to ride again.

  I had never seen Tamrin in such form. If he had struck me as obsequious once, he was a wholly different creature now. Gone was the flattering courtier. This was the Master of the Caravan, at one moment shouting commands, at another conferring with a foreman and then riding ahead to scout forage, tasting for himself the water of a nearby well that had had good water two years ago. On occasion he would break out in song to be joined swiftly by his foreman and the next of his men within earshot, all the way down the line.

  The first few days of the journey my mind had run like a breakaway colt, the frenetic pace of my last preparations finding no outlet in the tedium of the road. This was not the desperate march of a queen for her throne, stealing through valley and foothill and gathering men to her like the wadi waters, but a slow progression across the ground like a shadow lengthening through the course of the day.

  I came to understand why the Desert Wolves, who rode kneeling in their saddles, told so many stories and argued vehemently and pettily to pass the time. Barring the accidents of broken girths, lamed animals, or sick companions, there was nothing to break up the monotony of land before and behind without cease.

  Even surrounded by the chaos of hundreds, the caravan had an isolating effect; without privacy, one must make noise continuously or retreat into the solitude of thought. In three entire days I never heard a word come out of Yafush’s mouth, and even Khalkharib and Niman, though they spoke to one another and to their men, seemed strangely contemplative.

  Nearly every day a few people from the nearest settlement came to eat by our fires and ask for news and why there were so many more camels than usual. Was Saba going to war? What god or kingdom threatened, or had the queen finally made promise to marry, may Wadd, Sayin, Shams, and Almaqah make it so?

  “Why do you care so much that the queen marries?” I said through my veil one night to an older man wearing only a loincloth who had come to sit by the fire of my feeding family, which consisted of Khalkharib and his “slave,” Yafush, my women, Tamrin, and me.

  “The spirits of women wander if they are not married,” he said in his wizened voice. I could see by light of the fire that his one eye was rheumy. “And then they do not possess themselves but are open to other spirits. As they grow older it makes them insane.”

  I laughed out loud at this. “Truly, you think this?”

  “Of course. There is proof everywhere. They are changeling already because of the moon upon them. No, it is not good for a woman to be unmarried.”

  “And does it have the same effect on men?”

  “Oh no,” he said, shaking his head. “Not at all. Being unmarried makes a man ambitious and he may only become violent. But that is if he is young.”

  “And if he is old?”

  “If he is old and has no wife, it means he is hungry.” He smiled then, showing only three teeth in his mouth.

  Traveling unknown, I could watch, if only from a distance, how the tribesmen of the oases haggled with Tamrin over the price of fodder, the hire of slaves to water so many camels. How they laughed and clapped him on the back once the quibbling was over.

  Tamrin was careful all these days to avert his eyes from me, to seem to see me not at all. Only I noticed the way he came to check the girth of the palanquin my girls rode in before leaving in the morning, or sometimes at midday. The way he handed his bowl to one of the girls as though they were indeed the slaves Khalkharib attested they were, but never to me.

  At Nashshan, Tamrin’s men took a pack of incense and several gold items to the newly built temple. By law, no camel might turn off the road except after it had paid tithe to the oasis temple. These were the same tariffs used to fund Saba’s ritual feasts and her public works. The men returned hours later leading a line of goats tied nose to tail. We slaughtered them that night, which seemed to bring guests to our fires in droves—including the seller of the goats himself—where we were obligated to share bread, meat, and the soup cooked in the goat’s stomachs buried beneath the fires.

  If there was no privacy in a traveling caravan by sunlight there was even less in camp, where it was impossible not to hear intermittent conversations through the night—the continuation of a petty argument, the sudden curse of a scorpion in the blanket, the random memory of a kinsman spoken aloud to the air. Anything to fill the darkness, as though the vastness of the desolate terrain by day became unbearable beneath the endless stars.

  I was plagued by the opposite as night after night I lay awake staring up at only the black wool of my tent, pinpricks of the moon on its brightest night like stars in the obsidian weave until I felt the sky would smother me.

  When we reached Najran, the farthest north I had ever been in my life, I gave Khalkharib my simple message to send ahead with a company of men:

  King of contradictions! You are tortured and commanding. You beg and then require.

  I delight you. I anger you.

  You say if I am wise I will be cautious. The wise and cautious both speak little and yet you crave my words.

  You say if I am clever I will be simple. And yet you relish riddles.

  You say I must send words in quantities to feed a king, but not by my wisest or cleverest man.

  Very well. I grant them all. I shall send no man. As you cast your bread upon water, I shall cast mine upon the sands.

  Prepare a place for me.

  The first weeks of the journey I had felt liberated, interested in every detail, invigorated the day the entire caravan covered itself against a rolling cloud of sand from the desert and awed by the mystical shroud that hung over us after. And by even the sand itself, ever in the ears and hair and food, as messy as bread and lovemaking.

  But now, after dispatching my men, I was restless. I could no longer fall into the meditative stupor of the saddle, nor be lulled by the tinkling of the amulets and ornaments dancing from bridles. I felt worn down by the endless stretch of the world before me. And I was weary especially of the smell of burning camel dung.

  Even the tribespeople who came to sit by our fires failed to fascinate me, one of them most recently raising my hackles when he pointed at me and asked loudly if I were a gift for Solomon’s Egyptian queen. Many of these people, upon seeing the presence of such good bulls, left quickly and came back leading a she-camel in estrus to have her serviced. Sometimes it was not camels that were brought to our caravan, but women, by their seedless husbands or even their mothers. I never watched to see whose fire they went to, though I did wonder if Tamrin had serviced such women himself.

  The terrain grew dryer, the acacia and junipers more stunted as we skirted a bizarre landscape of lava fields. By the time we entered the fertile plain south of Bakkah with its pale, yellow soil, only the Desert Wolves could ease my stiff ennui. On more than one occasion I watched them break suddenly away from the caravan, disappearing at times for an entire day before returning to their feeding fire at night with a gazelle. At night, I listened to the peculiar ceremony with which they divided the meat among them, drawing lots for each portion as it was served, while in other camps men argued endlessly that they had received far too much until their meat went cold.

  “T
his is for the smelliest man,” the lot drawer would say and pluck a reed with a man’s mark upon it from his fist. Laughter and shoulder slapping ensued.

  “This is for the most virile man.” Another lot. “This is for the one with the tented tunic that makes the goats run in fear.” The men around their fire howled.

  I had never seen the matter resolved so effectively or hilariously.

  They always sent a portion to our fire, I assumed because we shared it with Tamrin, whose status here far outweighed that of any noble.

  Three nights north of Bakkah one of the Desert Wolves—my favorite of them, a young man named Abgair with an uncanny knack for identifying the tribe of any camel—came to our fire with a clutch of jerboas and sat down to skin them right there.

  “That is a fine knife,” I said, watching him.

  “The king gave it to me,” he said, obviously happy with it, but not holding it so sacred that he would not dirty it in practical use.

  “Which king?” I said through my veil. At this, he stopped and squinted at me as though I had lost my mind.

  “The one you sent me to.”

  I sighed and unwound my head scarf at last. Across the fire, Shara did the same, with a half smile that I had not seen by light now in nearly two months.

  “How did you know it was me?” I said, at which Abgair tilted his head as though to say was I really asking that? I laughed then, the sound ringing out over the fire, grateful at least that he had not given me up—even to myself—until now.

  “And do the other Wolves know that I am here?”

  “Of course,” he said, tossing the first jerboa down onto the sand, carefully setting the tiny hide aside. “But I knew first.”

  “Of course.” I smiled.

  That night when Tamrin returned to the fire with a swift second glance at sight of my face, he dropped to his knees, saying clearly, “My queen, you honor my humble caravan!”

  This caused a violent ripple through our number. Armed men and foremen flocked to our fire first to stare and then to bow before me, the foremen asking how it was that I had shown up here as though I had walked out of the very lava fields, others asking if they had known—if Tamrin himself had known—that the queen was with them.

  The next morning, the bearers replaced the banner of Saba with the royal standard and I changed out of my plain tunic and veil but only for cleaner versions in simple browns and reds.

  In Yathrib we were welcomed beneath the date palms by the tribesmen of the oases. I had not, by now, seen a brick house in over a month, nor so many tent dwellers gathered in such number.

  “Welcome, welcome a hundred times, in the name of the god that brought you!” the local chieftain, a man named Sabahumu, said. “Please, great queen, come eat by my fire or I will divorce my first wife.” I relented only because he would be obligated to do it if I refused and I assumed he might be fond of her.

  We stayed in Yathrib five days. On the last day, my men arrived from the north.

  “My queen,” the captain of the small cohort said, “all that the king said was true! How he taxed us with questions when he read Khalkharib’s message, asking how your travel fared even as we explained it was the royal caravan but that you were not among it. Three times he questioned us, and we swore by his god that you were not among us. When the king questioned us a fourth time about the slaves and musicians in our number, and we said that the noble Khalkharib had with him five slave women, the king began to laugh. What fools we have appeared!”

  “Be at peace,” I said, as he delivered the king’s message into my hand. I tried not to clutch the scroll too tightly.

  The sun rises under guise of dark, the horizon is her veil.

  The sleepless king with no hope of dawn has gathered the light of his lamps. He is as a beggar huddled before their flame against the endless night.

  The watchman shouts but none believe him: the light of a thousand flames rises to the south!

  My men will go to her, to the very border of our land, to usher in the day.

  Twice in the barren days of sparse grazing and silted wells beyond Yathrib, alarm rose at the back of the train. We lost two men, but killed ten bandits and left their heads on poles in the ground, curses carved across their foreheads. At night we circled in unending spiral, a galaxy upon the earth, our fires as stars, the black tent of my women in the center of it all. Bandits managed to coax off two camels as they foraged at dusk, but at least their packs—one with a quantity of gold—had already been removed.

  By the time we reached the oasis of Dedan we had been five months on the journey and I wanted nothing but to drink cool water by day and eat hot stew by night—anything but dried meat and pressed date cakes, sandy bread or moldy cheese—and to sleep for a week. After feasting at the tent of the local chieftain and giving gifts of incense and knives for his sons and bangles for his wives, I all but collapsed in my tent, grateful to lie down without fear of viper or jackal, wary only of scorpions and the ever-present spiders that had caused Shara and my girls to scream regularly since the day we left.

  Only the Desert Wolves seemed unfazed by these months of hardship—these men who told stories of causing camels to vomit in order to drink the contents of their stomachs or mixing salty camel milk with brackish water to make it drinkable. Whose women washed their hair in the urine of camels, which they claimed was sweet as herbs—and which I could attest smelled nothing of the sort.

  The day after we left Dedan, a camel kicked one of Tamrin’s foremen, splintering the bone. Tamrin cursed the camel over the man’s screams, and then set to the grim business of binding the man’s leg once he had passed out. I told his men to put him in the palanquin, where he groaned and fell into delirium for days, aided only by the herbs Asm gave him that made him stare wildly and swat at the air. We had by then seen many injuries and snake bites and cured most of them with salves, aloe and incense. But this . . . there would be no good help for him until we reached Jerusalem, if he survived so long.

  A few days later, one of the camels carrying a load of gold went lame. We slaughtered it that night as its owner openly wept. Despite the fact that he knew he would be compensated, the man was inconsolable over the she-camel he called Anemone and carried her harness around his neck for days.

  “I have seen this before,” Abgair said, shaking his head. “It is very bad.”

  I grew quiet for days. I could not explain this change in me when Shara asked in a whisper, and Yafush with silent gazes. Something had happened to me along the journey, like the peeling away of veils. I had gone from queen in my own land to queen of a neighboring land, to an exotic queen of a distant land that worshipped the moon by a foreign name. As we emerged from the oases of Hegra and Tabuk, I felt I had molted my skin like a lizard until I looked about me and recognized the faces around me better than my own.

  As we entered the final stage of our trek, I searched the sky for the face of Almaqah. But even the moon seemed different, a cousin of the one I knew, whom the tribespeople of the Hisma called Sinn.

  On the day that we emerged from the desert into the arms of the Ramm oasis, Saba’s mountains seemed a lifetime, a dream away. That evening, strange lightning lit up the sky in white veins, and I belatedly noticed that the nights were no longer as cold. As the first drops of the storm shower fell, I realized that it was spring.

  That night I witnessed a miracle. One of the families that came to our fire had a young girl with them whom they called “Heaven” in their language. I had never heard a name like this and thought how beautiful it was with a wistful longing that I had been given such a name, or might have given it to a daughter had I not been barren.

  When Heaven came into our midst, one of my musicians took out his drum and began to beat it. And then I noticed that the little girl—she must have been three or four years old—was dancing by the fire.

  She was oblivious to all of us, who fell off in our conversation to watch, caught up in an ecstasy without aid of datura or wine or th
e things that remind us how to be as children again. She swayed and stomped and leapt to the drum—to instruments, I imagined, unheard to us, our ears too long closed to the celestial realm from which children come and some remember even to that age.

  I had seen so much of fear in its many guises: prevention, caution, safeguarding, self-consciousness. Heaven was the antithesis of them all. Dancing with closed eyes, she was seductive in her innocence, looking neither to god or tribesman or moon or air. How I envied her!

  We stayed in the oasis for three nights. And though I looked for Heaven each evening, I never saw her again. The last night, it stormed again, and I went out and turned my face up into the rain.

  “My queen!” Niman said, but his voice was as distant to me as Saba itself. There was only the sand beneath my feet, the rain falling on my face in spattering baptism, the rivulets of water running along my scalp and plastering the linen of my tunic to my body as it washed away the dust of nearly six months.

  That night, I was neither queen, nor Bilqis, nor Makeda, nor lover, nor High Priestess of the Moon but something more and less at once.

  I entered Edom in a new state, Heaven in mind.

  I was ready to meet this king.

  EIGHTEEN

  I had forgotten the glimmer of gold and gleam of silver, the brittle color of gems. They had become paltry to me in our passage through the sands, trifles that could not be eaten or used for shelter or healing.

  But they could be traded for ships and ports to sustain a nation.

  My girls dressed my hair. They took out the beaded gowns. Shara burned incense down to ashes and, after mixing them with oil, lined my eyes. The night before she had decorated my hands with henna, my feet in ornate lacework to my calves.

  My armed men donned jewel-encrusted scabbards, my bare-chested eunuch enough gold to put a prince to shame. My musicians transformed once again into the celestial spirits they had been the night of my banquet.

  Had I ever seen a more majestic sight? Nobles in their tribal finery, girls dripping gold as carelessly as rain, priests in their somber robes and silver collars, the handles of their sickled knives glowing in the faint morning light. Even the camels had been fitted in cabochon halters, tassels swinging from their saddles.