The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen

by Tosca Lee

  “Such an ark is the very emblem of my office. You have seen it, the day I entered the city.”

  “And in Egypt, too, there are such boxes,” he said. “But none like this.”

  Of course.

  “Because it is the very seat not of a sovereign,” he said, “but of the sovereign god. And so the god resides here, in the temple, and not even the priests may enter that most holy room except once a year, and then with trembling in a cloud of incense, as no one may look upon the One.”

  “Have you no priestesses in the temple?” I asked queerly.

  Solomon shook his head. “It is not permitted.”

  No wonder his wives worshipped other gods.

  We returned to the palace, to tour the portion in progress, the king pointing out the three tiers of stone and the cedar beams placed before the fourth, filled in with gravel—a Phoenician ingenuity designed to withstand earthquakes.

  I took interest in each of these things, but grinding, always, like a mill within me was the question of what the king wanted, and how I must wage this war of intellects.

  The king prized conundrum. He disputed logic, craved praise, and revered the touch of my hands. He was a puzzle—one I must swiftly assemble.

  The next night I attended the banquet within his hall. My advisors and trader were still conveniently gone from the city, but the young up-and-comer he had joked with earlier in the day, Jeroboam, who served beneath the chief of labor, as well as the son of his brother Nathan and the sons of Tashere and Namaanh, were all present. I noticed the two wives did not sit together.

  “This young man,” Solomon said, laying his hand on Jeroboam’s nape, “is like a son to me. My pride, if not one to add to my joy,” he said with a chuckle.

  Jeroboam opened his mouth in mock offense.

  “He is overly pious and listens too well to the ranting of my prophet, and takes me often to task over many matters. He has not learned that it is not healthy to challenge a king, but he is young and I will win him in the end! He keeps me sharp, this one.” He patted him on the shoulder. Despite his words, the king’s fondness was obvious.

  “The king prizes his prophet, if only because he disagrees with him,” Jeroboam said.

  “Indeed.” The king nodded. “Anyone who agrees too readily is never telling the truth.”

  I did not say that in my court open dissenters risked strangulation.

  I publicly admired the dancers of his court, his musicians. But the king, I noticed, grew withdrawn and quiet.

  We lounged after, complaining of our full bellies and, in so doing, complimented his kitchens and the exotic foods of his table. And then his chief scribe, Elihoreph, came to entertain with tales of Jacob and other patriarchs of Yaweh’s cult.

  “I had not known that scribes could be so animated, being lovers of the spoken word as well as the written letter,” I exclaimed. Of course, this was only half true; in my father’s household the scribe I used to bribe for access to his library of tablets and scrolls had been a great storyteller, even if I had been his only audience.

  I found the king gazing at the fabric of my veil as though trying to assemble my face, much as one does a mosaic with missing tiles.

  “The stories are alive to them in ways lost on us,” the king said. “I find great worth in stories. They are the mortar of our identity. They remind us of our coalescing into a nation. And so I encourage all art, music, poetry . . . as you well know. How else may we chase the mind of the divine . . . or the demons that taunt us?” His gaze drifted to my eyes, and then again to my veil.

  With a flash of clarity I realized that the mystery of my face intrigued him more than the reality of it ever could.

  How you torture and delight me . . .

  He was not a man who wanted plain negotiations. Or a god with a graven image or a woman without mystery.

  Now I began to understand.

  Late that evening after I had begged off on behalf of my party that we were full to drowsing where we reclined—“See, my girls are all but asleep,” I said—I slipped out of the apartment with Yafush and ascended again the garden stair.

  The king was waiting and I did not mistake the relief that washed over his face at the sight of me.

  “I thought never to see you in this garden again,” he said, coming toward me. “I was melancholy all throughout dinner, thinking it.”

  “And yet, here I am,” I said. “As you say, there is no privacy elsewhere. Forgive me my perceived insult.”

  “You were not well yesterday,” he said, his head bent slightly as he looked into my eyes.

  “You are not so all-wise as to know that.”

  “Did you forget I grew up in the harem? I understand the silent language of women far better than most men. Better than some women, I daresay.”

  “Almaqah knows you’ve wives enough to speak it fluently.”

  He laughed, and the sound rolled out through the garden like a breeze.

  “And you feign interest well in my building projects.”

  “I did not feign it. Or do you forget that mine is the country of the great dam, and not one, but many temples?”

  “I did not forget.”

  We sat down. Where there had been one seat the first night I had come here, there were now two—not facing one another adversarially or side by side, as intimates, but at an angle to one another. Clever.

  “Tell me, at which temple does your god reside?” Solomon said.

  “Why, in all of them,” I said with some surprise. “Anyplace the moon touches, there the god is, as with the sun. It is why the sanctum is open to the air.”

  “And without your sacrifices to the moon god your father, he will not return renewed?”

  I sighed and sat back. “Of course he will. You know as well as I that we make sacrifice not for the sake of the god, but for ourselves. What need have the gods for meat or blood or gold? We make gods in our image as much as you say Yaweh made you in his.”

  I felt his eyes upon me, but I had drifted back to my conversation with Asm in the early days of my queenship.

  “In that way I see the wisdom of your unseen Yaweh,” I said, “who defies graven image or name and will only be the ‘I Am’ of your stories. A god who must be seen in the faces of others. I have thought on that all day.”

  His face had changed in the flickering of the torch, the melancholy of moments ago gone, having fallen away like a cocoon.

  “I have heard the story of you,” he said quietly. “And of the ark you call the markab. Is it true?”

  “It depends what story you heard.”

  “That you leapt into the acacia ship and shouted your men to victory. I admit, I half expected a wild woman of the hills with a painted face when you came to Jerusalem. By the light, you did not lie when you said the sun would rise to the south! The people in the city say that your caravan glowed like a trail of sunfire—and then they said it was more like a serpent. Because of course, you are unwashed.”

  “Of course.”

  “Yet, as I stood here in the garden, I could smell the perfume of your coming.”

  “And that must make me a demon of some sort, I suppose.”

  He waved his hand. “That myth is long dispelled. You showed your feet, which were rumored to be those of a goat.”

  “Did you have the pool installed only for that?” I blanched.

  “I did. It was unfinished until the day before you arrived. I wanted to refute that story of you.”

  “How did you know it was not true?”

  He gave me a droll look.

  I chuckled.

  “Why did you not walk around it?”

  “Because. After such a long journey through the sands, I thought it would be the most delicious feeling.”

  He laughed then.

  I did not add what I had wanted to say: to show that nothing could stop me.

  “If your people thought that I was a demon with goat feet, did they also realize your patriarch Moses was a magician?
Did he not turn a staff into a snake and produce water from a rock and all manner of wonders in Egypt—even as an Egyptian magician?”

  We laughed together, and he asked me many questions about my father, and of my mother, and how it was that they had come from the same tribe.

  “I was the product of love,” I said simply.

  “As was I.” Something like sadness crossed his face. “I am not even the first son of my father. Or the second or third . . . or the fifth, but the tenth. But I was the one who was to be king. Who dreamed the dream of my god.”

  Something niggled at the back of my mind. And again, there was the image of the bulls, pulling away from one another. Why did it not leave me in peace?

  “Are your wives not angry that you are not with one of them tonight?” I said after a time.

  He shrugged.

  “Surely they keep track in the harem of the women who go and come back. Surely Tashere and Naamah keep count.”

  He sighed and rubbed at his face. “Yes, and they come to ply me for favors with their fingers and the softness of their lips.”

  So. Every moment I asked for nothing was a moment he would cherish with me. But how was I to accomplish that? Again I found myself in the impossible situation of negotiating without negotiating, of asking without saying so!

  “Of course they do. It is the only audience they may have with their husband, if not their king, for a long while.”

  I reclined against the cushion. “In Saba, my palace is covered in ivory and gemstones. High alabaster discs let in the light like moons. There is gold everywhere. And eyes, everywhere. And courtiers . . . everywhere. I am petitioned by the day by one tribe or another wanting treaty with me . . . I told my priest, Asm, that I thought I knew what it must be to be a god—not out of arrogance, but if only because it is hard to know when one is loved, or when one is merely the bestower of favors.”

  He gazed at me in silence.

  “Surely any king would say the same,” I went on. “But—I have spoken this to no one—I have begun to despair that even love is like this. That it is all and only the transaction of agreement. ‘I will love you if you please me.’ ‘I will love you if you desire no other.’ ‘I will love you if . . .’ and so on and so on.”

  I said it, because it was true. And because it seemed to be the kind of conversation he craved. But also because I knew he would understand. Perhaps I hoped he would shed the insight that had so confounded me yesterday on it like a lamp. But instead, he lowered his head and covered his face.

  He sat like that for a very long time.

  “How you cut me,” he said, his voice thick. “How you wound me, to speak these words.”

  “How do I wound? These are only vain musings. Forget them if they injure you.”

  “I cannot forget them. Because I know them to be true. And here we sit, the product of love, with such grim thoughts! Have you ever known a love that was not this way?”

  “My mother’s.”

  “Other than that.”

  “Shara, my woman.”

  “Of a man.”

  I sat very still.

  “Ah,” he said softly. “Then you are to be envied, to possess something few sovereigns do.”

  “I possess it no more,” I said, then got up to take my leave.

  He caught at my hand.

  “Do not go. Not yet.”

  “I will stay if you answer my question.”

  “What question is that?”

  “What is the thing you want more than love?”

  He released me then.

  “Pray rest well, Sheba.”

  That night after I returned to my chambers, long after the rest of my household had gone to sleep, I sat up scouring his letters by light of the lamp and reconstructing my own, line by line, written to him.

  I landed, just before dawn, on a single line.

  Even the gods wish to be known.

  The words that had moved him from the start, penned in a raw moment by me.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Sweat ran in rivulets inside my gown, and even beneath the canopy of the king’s litter I felt that all I did was swat at flies. It had been like this all the way to Gezer until, after trekking to the city’s ancient standing stones, a breeze off the western sea relieved us at last.

  There, in Gezer, we met up with Khalkharib and Niman, Solomon laughing at the surprise on their faces when we seemed to magically appear at the table of the king’s hall that night.

  It was the Israelite month of Tammuz. Except for the Feast of Weeks—during which I paced the halls of the palace and then the Sabaean camp for seven restless days—and the two occasions of the dark moon since my arrival, the king and I had spent time together every day. We went out of the city to survey olive trees and into the hills to play with the year’s new lambs. We snuck out the cellars and into the myriad tunnels beneath the city like children, Yafush and his bodyguards following after us with torches, ducked low in the dank darkness.

  I had agreed to every outing, banquet, state function, and errant adventure to date, after which we invariably continued the debates or discussions of dinner alone in his rooftop garden.

  All the while, I felt the passing of days since my arrival with growing alarm. I was no closer to an agreement—to even broaching the conversation again—than the day I first arrived.

  Even as I admitted this I forced myself to push the thought aside. That was not the way with this king who had already denied me once. It was only summer. There was time.

  The king had by now neglected his harem to the point that the second time Tashere feasted me she made mention of it with a suggestive lift of her brows.

  Well, there was nothing I could do for that, or for the rumors that were no doubt circulating within those harem chambers.

  Khalkharib talked enthusiastically about Gezer’s new fortifications and chambered gates the evening we joined them, seemingly reanimated by all he had seen.

  “And you, my queen, how do you fare?” he said with double meaning when we had a moment alone in the corridor.

  That was indeed the question, wasn’t it?

  “Well enough.” I did not tell him or Niman about the war I waged privately, this challenge of wits and agendas.

  “I think . . . ” Khalkharib pursed his lips, this most stoic and gruff of my councilmen so obviously choosing his words carefully for the first time in my memory. “Saba would do well to ally with this king now that I see for myself the traffic that flows upon his roads. He seems a man given to new venture.”

  This, from my councilman so bent on war! “Who is this man wearing the face of Khalkharib?” I said, with only some mock amazement.

  For a moment, I found myself actually disappointed in Khalkharib. Was there no one immune to the growing influence of this young kingdom—and the persuasive holdings of its king? Niman had frowned, and I recalled what the king had said upon his first appraisal of him. He is ambitious.

  “I would speak to the king on your behalf of this, cousin,” Niman said.

  But of course he would; what ambitious man would not want to call the king “kin”? And with such a marriage unlikely to result in any heirs, no doubt Niman hoped I might name him yet.

  “I will consider it,” I said, though I had no such intention.

  In Megiddo, that important juncture along the coastal road and the king’s administrative center in the north, I toured the markets, giving opinions when the king solicited them as though there were no question of our future commercial dealings.

  We visited the ruins of an ancient temple complex and then the king’s famous stables, of which I had heard so much. I had never seen so many horses as I did in the Jerusalem stables, but the sheer number of those in Megiddo overwhelmed me.

  How sleek and beautiful these animals! I did not say that I saw these creatures as the future of Saba and was jealous for stock. Though the king played middleman in the Egyptian horse trade, there would be time enough for that—after the ship
s, which might bring them to us, had been acquired.

  “I have a gift for each of you,” Solomon said with obvious delight. “Pick any horse, and it is yours. But let me show you the ones you should choose.”

  “It is too much,” I demurred.

  He led us to three stalls, all the while talking bloodlines and sires. I exclaimed over the black mare and proclaimed her beautiful, stroking the broad space between her eyes, and did not miss the swift glance my councilmen exchanged when they thought I wasn’t looking.

  Wahabil would not have been bought so cheaply.

  We toured the newly fortified walls and then the storeroom of chariots—thousands of them—that Niman took in with an all-too-greedy eye, seeming to forget that such war machines weren’t practical for the terrain of Saba.

  Twice the second morning after our arrival the king’s officers urgently called him away. He returned to me later with tightened jaw.

  “Tell the story,” he said, as we lounged beneath a canopy in the palace garden the third day, “of the garden. I beg you.”

  “I will do better,” I said, going to pluck several stems of flowers. I twined them together, fastening their ends. He bowed as I laid them on his head.

  “Ah,” he said, and for a moment his face was rapt.

  “The flowers appear on the earth, and the time of singing has come,” I said, then crooned one of Shara’s songs as he gazed, radiant, into my face.

  “Though you wear a crown, you are not a king,” I said softly. “But a boy, gone down to the gardens to gather lilies.”

  “You are a lily among brambles,” he whispered. But he was no longer smiling.

  “What is it?” I said, when he fell silent.

  “Who are you, lady, who are you really?” he whispered.

  “Why,” I said, forcing levity into my voice, “a shepherdess. What else?”

  “Turn away your eyes from me. They overwhelm me. But I beg you, let me see your face.”

  I stood unmoving, even as one of his men came running toward us.

  “My king!”

  Even then it took a moment for him to break that gaze.

  “My king—a messenger from Zemaraim. A skirmish has broken out.”