by Tosca Lee
Then it was true. I pulled away.
“I thought her too practical a wife for that.”
“It is no secret that you reside here with me. That your throne is on my dais. She has conceded much. But she is desperate to conceive another son, and she will not concede that.”
Jealousy flared up within me, hot and incendiary.
“Well, then. I will call another man to my chamber!”
He tore at his hair. “No. Do not. I beg you. Let me go as is my duty.”
“Duty? You are the king.”
“She is the Pharaoh’s daughter!” he said.
“Yes! And how many times have we said that Egypt is weak? It is the house of your enemies—we said so publicly. What duty do you owe her now?”
And then I realized: he loved her.
I felt it like an icy stab.
How many times had he written her poetry before he first penned words to me? How many letters had he sent, how many gifts?
He took my hands. “My love, please. Stay. Wait for me. I will return with the morning. Sleep late, and I will join you.”
“Fresh from another woman’s bed,” I said bitterly.
“And you, from another man’s before you came to mine.”
I gave a sharp laugh. “And you from hundreds. I make no pretense at virginity. Or will you call me ‘whore’ as your people do in your markets? If I am, their king makes me so!”
“Do you not see what I risk to be with you?” he said, as though at wit’s end.
“What you risk?”
“Yes! They call you ‘whore’—any woman not wedded to a man will be called that. But you know this better than I. Do you not see that I risk the disapproval of my priests, who say even now this is the very reason the north and Damascus and Jeroboam and a host of others conspire against me?”
“Do you not see how they point the finger at the women nearest at hand whenever a nation struggles—the same women who have had no power in it?” I said. “Even your Eve did not chew the fruit and spit it in your Adam’s mouth but he took and ate it himself. I have read your priests’ stories! Do they not see that they are painting the very portrait of their own weakness?”
“It is not just the priests, but my men, my people—and yet I lift you up before them. I put you in judgment over them. I risk scandal, I risk my kingdom, for you!”
“The priests you choose, the men you choose. Then choose others. You risk your kingdom by taking a nation as rich as Saba to your bed? By letting the world know our kingdoms must be dealt with as one great power? How is this any risk to you, O king? You who call yourself dangerous and then run at the beckon of your wife?”
“What do you want of me?” he said, and I laughed. Weeks ago I had asked that very thing.
“Shall I say as you did that my condition is marriage?”
“You have never wanted marriage.”
“I am a queen. I have seen you change your mind a dozen times. Am I not entitled to do the same?”
“I have married you in my heart, in body—”
“Your heart will not appease your people, who condemn me in the street. Or your mad prophet who stirs up your enemies against you. You marry the daughters of nations your god prohibits, but your god has said nothing of marriage to Saba—and you will not marry me?”
“We will talk. I will return. The night is short—”
“It is not short. It is growing longer! Have you looked out your window—do you not see the fading sun? It is autumn, and the time before us may be measured in hours. Spend a month with Tashere when I am gone. Never emerge from her bed if you like. But stay with me now.”
“Bilqis,” he said, his expression worn. “You do not know what it is to be husband to an angry wife, let alone many of them. You are my peace. Let me do what I must and return gratefully to you.”
There was nothing I could do. Throwing my anger about would not gain me a thing. What had I expected of a king with so many wives—of a king at all?
“Go then. Perhaps I shall be here when you return. Or not.”
He sighed, bent over my hands, and went out.
I woke late the next morning, alone. But the king did not arrive that morning. Nor in the afternoon after I sent for Shara to dine with me. We looked out at the streets filled with pilgrims. The rooftops were covered in bowers thatched with palm fronds; last night I had seen the lamps of their guests gleaming like a constellation of stars. All through the day pilgrims came in and out of the city as the hawkers’ cries soared from the markets to the palace.
The smell of the public ovens hung like a yeasty pall over the city, causing my stomach to grumble and me to eat off and on throughout the day. Shara did not seem to notice; she had brought the Senet set with her and soundly trounced me three times in a row.
Shara was a different woman. Her shoulders tilted back where they had canted forward all these years. Always so still, so timid in the past, she moved today as one who breathed. Even her movements were more expansive than before, no longer apologizing for the space her slender frame occupied, no longer bound by the past.
Right before dusk, a great wail tore through the palace.
I got to my feet, bumping the game board and sending pieces skittering to the floor as I strode through the king’s chamber to the door, Shara at my heels. Yafush put out an arm, staying me, and then stepped out into the corridor first.
There was a slamming of doors from the direction of Tashere’s apartment, raised voices—one, a woman’s, in an angry shriek. The other, a man’s. The king’s.
I questioned my guard in low tones but did not send for the steward. It would not do to lower myself to some marital dispute.
Late that night the king’s brother, Nathan, arrived at the king’s chamber, just as Shara and I prepared for bed. I saw the way he regarded me, his eyes veiled, the set of his mouth grim.
“A rider came early this morning,” he said. “The Egyptian Pharaoh is dead.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The king was shut up in council all the next day. When I sent for him, I was told only that he would come to me as soon as he could.
I was not invited this time to sit at his side.
I paced my apartment in agitation and finally sent for Asm, brought up from the camp with an armed escort of king’s men for his safety.
After he ate only a token amount of the food I had set before him, I said, “The Pharaoh has died. Have you received any omen?” But I knew what the answer would be.
“None. I have seen no portent or sign.” Did I imagine it, or had his face grown gaunt in a mere matter of weeks as though he had neither eaten nor slept?
“I want to know what you saw the day we left,” I said. I had forgotten about it all these months, but it had come back to me this morning before dawn, foreboding as the moon-dark sky.
He shook his head. “Only that the return was obscured.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It may mean that the return will be difficult—”
“The journey here was difficult enough!”
“It may mean we will take a different route back, in the least.”
“And at worst?”
He hesitated. “That you or someone else will not return.”
At that I sat very still.
“Yes, well,” I said eventually, “omens have been wrong before.”
Every time I claimed Almaqah had spoken, he had not. Every time I thought he had shown me some favor, disaster ensued. It was the reason I dared not think Abgair’s revelation of Jeroboam—the one that broke the king but mended all between us—a sign of our future, lest some calamity descend on us now.
Sometime that afternoon, cries flew up from the city below and a company of guards was dispatched from the palace. I watched from my terrace as the streets cleared before them, their breastplates catching the sun. A commotion of some kind had broken out near the market, though I could see only a portion of the flurry—people rushing from the
direction of the pavilions, shouts punctuating the air.
It made me nervous, this city so overfilled with pilgrims. They spilled out into the valley as far as the market mount so that I had requested more guards for the perimeter of my camp and our own men had doubled their watch. Even in Saba, conflicts and old rivalries exploded like dry tinder in summer with the spark of swift words and wine. I kept my girls and Shara close, forbidding them to go out in the city, appeasing them with delicacies ordered from the king’s kitchens and a surprise visit from Tamrin, whom they immediately taught to play Senet.
Solomon returned late that night.
“The Pharaoh is dead,” he said.
“I have heard.” I poured him wine.
“Shishak the Libyan has taken power in Egypt. And so Egypt goes from weak to strong, overnight.” I had not seen him look so haggard.
“Surely that is exaggeration,” I said. He shook his head.
“He has commanded the Pharaoh’s army for years. Egypt will be a military power again. And he will want Gezer back for Egypt.”
“Your first wife is Egyptian!”
“Does it matter to mercenary stock? These are not Egyptians, but Libyans who have taken over Egypt and will turn their eyes beyond their own borders. They already play host to Jeroboam, whom my prophet”—at this, his lips thinned—“has said will rule the northern tribes of Israel. And so he thinks he has in his grasp a future king. No. He will want Gezer. One day, if not today. And a share in the new fleet.”
“Well he can’t have it!”
“He can.”
“How is that possible?”
“Egypt provides men for the garrisons of Kadesh-barnea, Beersheba, and Gezer. Men who protect my interests there but are loyal to Egypt. There is something else.”
“What more?” I said, incredulous.
“He knows you are here. Jeroboam has told him exaggerated stories of our . . . friendship.”
Why did that simple statement drain the warmth from my fingers? Days ago I had claimed to my councilmen that I did not care what others said. But somehow, hearing that stories of my “friendship” with Solomon had reached Egypt, I felt as though the world itself suddenly peered into my bedchamber. More so, because such stories were not exaggeration.
“I must deal carefully with him,” Solomon was saying. “Egypt is friend to my old enemy, Hadad, as well. Do you see now what a predicament I am in? And so I must treat with him for both our interests. For as much as he may turn his sights to Gezer, he may also turn them south, to Punt.”
I blinked.
“But I will do all in my power,” he said. “Do you trust me?”
“I do.” I could think of no one I would put more faith in in any negotiation, ever. But to see him so grim, to hear from him only “I will do all in my power” when before I had heard him say “Watch this—I will win him,” shook me.
Hadad in Aram. Rezon in Damascus. Jeroboam in Egypt. His own tribes to the north, threatening to turn against him. The prophet of his god. His jealous wives.
Was this a man favored by God? The man they told stories of, given so much wisdom that he made such enemies of others? This man who must secure the tribes his militant father knit together, not with force this time, but with cunning and marriage—the very things that the priests felt threatened their nation’s cohesive identity?
I felt Solomon looking at me.
“What is it?”
“There is one thing more.”
“What now?” I cried.
“Shishak is related to Tashere by marriage.”
I turned away.
So then all of Egypt had been strengthened. There, and here.
“You dare not marry me now,” I said.
“I would not have,” he said quietly. “I would not make you one of hundreds, as you said, or set any wife over you in rank. It would never be fitting. You are a queen. My queen. And first in my heart.”
I sighed as he came to me and laid my head on his shoulder.
“Tashere must be pleased.”
“She lost a father.”
I thought of my own father, and the tears I had never shed for him. She had been here well over a decade. Did she shed any for him?
“I will go to her tomorrow,” he said quietly. “I know you will be angry. But I will.”
What could I do?
“I am leaving soon,” I said.
“I know.”
“And still you go.”
He laid his head over mine. “Tashere has threatened to send word to Egypt that she is unhappy and ill-treated if I do not come to her. If I do not openly show before the people my preference.”
I laughed, a short, stunted sound.
“I didn’t know she had the gall to command a king.”
“Shishak will look for any opportunity against me. Jeroboam is in his debt and will be made more so if he is set up here as king. A boy who is barely a man is far easier to control than a king years on the throne.”
“What will we do?”
“I will send my emissary with gifts. As it is always done. And I will win my way with him.” But instead of sounding confident, he sounded only tired. Where was the brash author of the letters now?
If Solomon’s kingdom failed, there would be no fleet of ships. Or the fleet would belong to another. And then what would I do? Whom must I journey to meet with next, and how much of this journey would have been in vain?
No. Not in vain.
“Of course you will,” I said.
The next day Tashere recalled Nebt from my service. The girl went with a tearful hug and then, head down, left my apartment forever, leaving the Senet set behind.
I had come to dread the day Tashere would confront me, to crow her fortified position in the king’s palace and bedchamber at me, as she surely would. But it was not Tashere who came to my apartment three days later, but Naamah.
She was a plain woman beside Tashere’s carefully staged beauty. Austere as a peasant and large-boned, her thick frame spoke the common language of childbearing, though I did not ask how many sons or daughters she had.
She ate only enough to appease custom before she sat forward.
“Tashere is threatened by you and has become your enemy. And so you are my friend,” she said. “She believes she has won because she is related to the new Pharaoh by marriage and has publicly taken up worship of Bast, the cat god, whom his priests favor. But Tashere is not the wisest woman. Shishak is a raider, not a conqueror, or a federator as my husband is and as I hear you are, and he is greedy to take back what was given. With a threat on the Egyptian throne, Solomon will never choose the son of an Egyptian princess to succeed him.”
“Which son will he favor?” I said.
“My son Rehoboam is a man after his father’s heart. A man who has studied his ways. He is too fervent in his blind belief in his father, perhaps, and less tolerant of the north. But Solomon will choose him. Unless, of course, you bear him a son and bring him here.”
“And so you ask me to go.”
“All the wives want you gone,” she said simply, and without malice. If I had thought Tashere frank, Naamah was nothing but stark!
“You need not worry about a son from me.”
“So say many new women the king turns his eye to who think only of love. And he has turned his eye toward many. He has loved many. You are not the first. You will not be the last. But I think he has loved you perhaps the best. And so you are in danger. The harem is full of more wars than men have ever waged. The Israelite wives look down on the foreign wives. The foreign wives think the Israelite wives coarse. The north feels misused by the south. The south scorns the north as less noble. And they vie for the attention of a king whom many of them resent in their hearts.”
“And you? Do you resent him?” I asked, as plainly as she.
“Yes. At times.”
Perhaps that, too, I understood.
“They are united in one thing: their jealousy of any new woman who captur
es the king’s interest—politically or romantically. But none wants you gone more than Tashere. Be wary, Sheba. She is not without her spies and lackeys. Keep your food taster close. Though her war is not with you, you are the one at which she will direct her arrows. You came for treaty. The king will give you the ports you want. But you will not be safe until you turn your face south.”
I had not realized she was privy to so much and regretted that I did not invite her to my apartment those first days.
“I understand,” I said, and thanked her.
“Israel is wealthy. But you have wealth. If you want peace, you will not find it here.”
She got up to go, but paused. “My girl has enjoyed your service. She will weep the day your woman, Shara, and the others go from her. I would consider it a kindness if you would take her with you. She has never been happy here. If you do, she will be my token of friendship. We will one day be mothers to the rulers of our nations. It is good that we should be friends.”
I unexpectedly found myself embracing her, this woman of severe but appreciated truth.
That day, my camp relocated south of Jerusalem halfway to the port of Ezion-geber and away from the increasingly volatile city. I bid farewell to my girls, keeping only Shara and Yafush with me, and said I would see them in a few weeks’ time when festival season was over.
I did not miss the unmistakable cheer that went up from the streets as my throne and markab were transported under armed guard out of the city. Nor the one that followed, sweeping all the way up to the palace: “Leave, Sheba!”
I spent the evening alone on my terrace and felt the first chill of winter.
TWENTY-NINE
The next night, Solomon and I dressed in plain clothing and, accompanied by a few of his men in simple garb, went out into the crowded city. I had been wary at first, fearful of these streets for my own people and tonight for myself even in the presence of the king, the echo of that refrain with me by the hour: Leave, Sheba! But I had been cooped up too long in a palace swirling with as much intrigue within its walls as without, and I would not be cowed.