The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen

by Tosca Lee

  So few, precious days. Why, last night, had I been so dire—compelled as I had never been over the crimson bowl?

  Tonight I would tell only lovely stories. Our story, of the garden. Tomorrow. The day after. Every precious night until I left.

  I got up but then sat back.

  How could I leave this man for whom I had forgotten, if just for this while, this lifetime of a season, my entire kingdom?

  I closed my eyes in the solitude of the chamber and clasped the sheets in tight fistfuls to my face. They smelled of him.

  How right he had been, this man of obsessions. I had not come for ships or ports. Not truly.

  I stayed like that for a long time, telling myself I would secure his promise that I would return—not by caravan next time, but by ship. That one day, perhaps, he would journey to Marib and walk through my palace as he had the day in my apartment when he first asked to see me on my throne. Someday, when his kingdom was stable enough.

  Yes. That would be the last story I told him before I left.

  Eventually I put on my dressing gown and moved on numb feet into the outer room.

  A servant had brought in a ewer and I washed my face. There, too, was a pitcher of honeyed water, which I poured and took out to the garden. Beyond the gates I could see the pilgrims’ tents in vivid array from one horizon to the next. Even the trash outside the city seemed to burn more vigorously than ever, so that when I lifted the cup to my lips I drank only a little before the smell wafted up on the wind, sickening me.

  I spent the day in my own apartment, sleeping restlessly, the sounds of the city rising up so loudly to the terrace that I cried out for Shara to shut the doors.

  I dreamed strange dreams. The temple, in its early building, a mere pile of stone. But then I realized it was not the temple in progress at all, but that it had fallen in. And I could see that the edges of the stones were singed, some of the limestone burned completely away. And that the palace, when I glanced back at it, was no more even as bells, their timbre high and tinny, sounded in the distance.

  I woke some time later, dying of thirst. Someone had opened the doors to the terrace and the air smelled of rain. A short time later it came, the patter of it like so many stomping feet. Like an army in the streets. I slept again to the sound of marching, my head clouded as the sky.

  I woke later to a mighty shaking, to someone calling my name. “You have slept the entire day!” Shara said. “You are unwell. My queen, we are afraid!”

  “The king—”

  “Is with the captain of his guard. There has been mayhem everywhere, and fighting in the streets all day!” I got up but the room spun and I immediately retched into the chamber pot. But there was nothing in my stomach to vomit.

  “I tried to send Naamah’s girl for the physician but there are guards outside the door who will neither leave their posts nor allow anyone to pass,” Shara cried, clutching me. I looked up, not comprehending.

  “Where is Yafush?”

  “In the outer chamber. I have never seen him pray before. How afraid we have been for you, Bilqis—for us all!”

  I squinted at her, finally hearing the bells of my dream in the clang of swords.

  I closed my eyes and willed my leaden limbs to move.

  “Dress me,” I said.

  A ruckus sounded from the street directly below the palace. But these were not the hymns of pilgrims, or of drunken men. It was shouting, loud and furious, and the clash of weapons again. The city in riot.

  I walked on uncertain legs toward the terrace, but Shara grabbed me back, shouting over the sounds below that we must stay out of sight. A projectile hit the outer wall of my apartment and landed near my feet: a large, burnt stone.

  I stumbled toward the outer chamber, Yafush instantly at my side. I wrenched open the door to the apartment.

  No fewer than ten palace guards barred the way.

  “Take me to the king,” I said. My own guard was nowhere to be seen.

  “My queen,” one of them said, “you cannot leave.”

  “What is this, some sort of arrest? Send for him or allow me to pass. Now.”

  “I dare not, for your own protection, by the king’s orders.”

  “Is there not a contingent of guards stationed outside the palace?” I fairly shouted in his face. I was rewarded with a roll of light-headedness.

  Yafush seized my arm.

  “They will not protect you from those within it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s been a murder. A servant was found dead in the king’s apartment. You must stay here.”

  I opened my mouth, having been about to say that I was there just this morning. But I stopped in an immediate wave of dread.

  “Dead of what?” I said very quietly, as tremors began to shake their way up my shoulders.

  A booming ruckus sounded from somewhere within the palace courtyard, followed by shouts.

  I turned in shock toward Yafush. I touched my fingers to my lips.

  I, sleeping and dreaming as one drugged, the entire day.

  “I think,” I whispered, “that someone has tried to kill me.”

  Shara stared at me, white-faced, and then grabbed my hands.

  “What have you eaten? What did you drink, what did you touch?” she cried.

  I started to reply but the chamber went dark around me. The last thing I remembered was Yafush, charging through the guards.

  I die, I thought.

  THIRTY-ONE

  We never know the last time we will see someone. My mother, kissing me. Maqar, on the field. His face was before me, as it had not been since that day. He was squinting in the sun. Why had I not taken his face between my hands our last night in camp?

  Solomon, leaning over me. He was weeping again.

  Ah, my Solomon.

  Why hadn’t I stayed awake all night, memorizing his eyes? Why hadn’t we gone into the city and left our kingdoms behind? Why hadn’t we passed out through the gate, hand in hand, and never returned?

  Bilqis.

  How beautiful it was to hear him say my name.

  “My queen. Bilqis!”

  My mother and Maqar both vanished before me.

  Someone slapped at my cheek. Impossibly, I opened my eyes on the only one remaining: Solomon’s.

  Shofar horns in the distance. Hard blasts, crude to the ear and splintering to the brain. Shouts, rising in waves to the palace.

  “What did the physician say?” he said urgently to Shara.

  “That she survived the day, and will live. He gave her a draught.”

  “She will not die?” he demanded.

  “No, my lord. She is strong.” She hesitated. “As is the child within her.”

  The king turned astonished eyes to me and then clasped me hard against him. “A ruler of both our blood,” he whispered, fervent in my ear. “It will be a son. A son to rule and unite kingdoms. The ruler I never was.” He stroked my hair, my cheek, rocking back and forth. “How do I let you go?”

  “It is not time,” I whispered. No. Not yet. We were to have days . . .

  Another form filled the door and the king looked up. “My king, the way is clear.”

  The king lifted me to my feet and the floor threatened to give out beneath me. Swiftly, he took me in his arms. And then we were rushing through the corridors, the king’s guard before us, to the lower part of the palace. Down, to the subterranean hive of cellars and chambers. I had been this way before. There, the plain tunnel across from the vaulted treasury to the unmarked room. This time, the door was not locked but thrown open. Something gleamed in the passage.

  A golden chest, the poles in place, cherubim seeming to hover in flight.

  We were not alone. A host of robed figures stood aligned in the passage behind it illuminated by a single torch. Eight—no, ten—priests. I had seen the men in these garments, singing the day I visited the temple court. No, not priests. Broad-shouldered Levites.

  Eight of them surrounded th
e ark, two to a corner at the long poles. They bent and, at a quick command between them, hoisted the poles, faces straining, to their shoulders. Like the palanquin of God, I thought abstractly.

  I looked around me for Yafush, a shadow in the darkness. Shara, with ashen face.

  The Levites disappeared into the tunnel, the glow of torchlight in their wake. Solomon caught me up more tightly in his arms and we entered the hewn rock behind them.

  Hard jostle of every step. Echoed whispers.

  Where we were going?

  “Yafush—” I said, the sound too soft and loud at once.

  “He’s behind, with the king’s guard,” Shara said, breathlessly.

  Dank cold of bedrock, the rough incline. Once, Solomon stumbled, but bore up and surged forward.

  “Let me walk,” I said with growing difficulty, fighting the draught.

  “You cannot. I must do this. To save you. You, and our son. Let me save one nation.”

  I thought distantly: Why do men always think it is a son?

  It seemed that we passed an eternity in darkness, chill creeping over my skin like damp on stone, the king’s breath ragged in my ear, his arms iron around me. I thought I could hear his heart beating wildly in his chest—or was it my own?

  Shara fell forward with a cry, gasped as arms helped her up again.

  We began to ascend, the Levites ahead bending low in the tightening passage. The king grimaced, a sheen across his face.

  The realization came slowly as I fought to keep the numbing fog at bay, unable to escape its sticky tendrils completely.

  The temple.

  We emerged into a chamber filled with gold cauldrons and braziers, figures blocking the light beyond as they reached for us with arms on all sides. The damp echo of the tunnels that had amplified every breath was replaced almost immediately by the roar of full riot from the city below.

  We had come out of one of the side buildings into the inner court. Through the gate I could see a large company of mounted and foot soldiers assembled in the outer yard.

  “It is ready?” the king said.

  “It is ready.”

  I strained to look around me in sudden panic. Shara and Yafush had not emerged with us.

  “They’ve gone another way with my men,” Solomon said. “They are less recognizable and will meet us south of the city. But there is no way to take you out through the valley in safety. They riot even beyond the gates.”

  I had never been without Yafush since I was a girl of twelve.

  Four Levites had surrounded the ark and, after what seemed a moment’s hesitation, hefted the lid away.

  Solomon held me tight against him, his cheek pressed fiercely to mine. “Now, my love,” he whispered. “You entered Jerusalem as the rising sun, in majesty. You will not leave it without the finery of gold. All Israel will bow before you. All Israel will remember this day. And if they do not, then I will. Forever.” He kissed me softly. “Lady of the markab,” he whispered. “My best love.”

  What is love, but to hold dear without expectation?

  What is love, but first given devotion?

  What is love . . .

  But freedom.

  I meant to say all of this as he lifted me into the box. But the king was kissing my lips as my knees curled in against my chest. “I love you as the sun rises. I love you by the moon.” His face twisted. “How do I let you go knowing that in saving you, you may yet pass to the afterlife? How do I leave you in the hands of any god?”

  “Surrender,” I said, and did so.

  I remember the jostling of arms. The world closing in and going dark.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I saw them pull away like the fabled parting of the sea. How they fell away! Like the rains washing down two sides of a mountain.

  Impossibly, I saw them.

  There were so many of them, and so many armed men among them, enigma on their faces, and alarm, before they shielded their eyes.

  They ran, scattering like leaves before a gale.

  But all is well, I wanted to say. The sun rises, without our aid. And the moon will come in her wake. And there is one force that makes them rise and decline, and one that made them both.

  I knew this now.

  All the riddles were gone, only the husk of them remaining like the hard shells of locusts still clinging to the stem.

  And then the shells themselves blew away.

  Including mine.

  Who am I?

  There was no Bilqis and no Makeda or priestess. No daughter, princess, or queen. No lover, or unloved. There was only the name that I had always had, but forgotten. A name by which I was known to God, that is neither spoken or written. That annihilated self. A vessel that is full because it has first been emptied.

  Yes. Freedom. Yafush was right.

  The crescent was over the sun in the sky. Time and eternity, at once. How beautiful the world was. And heaven danced among us.

  I had sought love. I had talked of love, not knowing that it is one step beyond wisdom into the face of God. And this was the only salvation.

  The king was there when the lid was lifted away and the first gust of chill air roused me. It was he who pulled me from that golden box as though from a fist-tight womb.

  “Does she breathe? Is she dead?” Yafush cried.

  I had never heard that sound from him.

  “She lives!” the king cried, pulling me into his arms.

  Indeed. More than he knew.

  He kissed me—a thousand times, he kissed me. How I wanted to comfort him with a thousand proclamations, to tell him to remember all that I had said, as I would remember all that he said when he answered my riddles with answers beyond even him.

  And how I wanted to tell him that Yaweh had not forgotten him.

  Yes. That, most of all.

  Instead, I spoke one word, the one I saw now when I looked on his face—or that of Yafush, or Shara, or any man or woman known to me or not—as the draught, held at bay all this while, had its way at last.

  I forgot to tell him he must finish our story. Somehow I must remember to tell him that.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The sand had left the air in its typical greenish haze. And so they said, when we put in at the best port that we could make, that the storm had come with the ships.

  This is not true.

  It took us two weeks to find suitable landing on the coast, to unload the camels and tents and the fodder that would see us inland the rest of the way south, to Saba—including that most precious cargo, covered in heavy woolen blankets. The strange misshapen thing carried on the poles by the Levites who had brought it out from the city and accompanied us to the ships. And two weeks, also, for me to recover and reconstruct all that had happened in the space of hours with any semblance of clarity.

  They said I was incoherent when I boarded the ship. This, too, is untrue. I revived sometime beyond Jerusalem to hear the tale being told in camp of how I was smuggled out in plain sight as the people in and outside the city fell away from the ark in dread fear, the riot instantly quelled. Hadad, the king had claimed, was massing on the border in a show of force. So the king rode out with his men bearing the presence of Yaweh lest they attack during the feast.

  No one would question the king—not with the ark before them. And no one would ride out toward Edom to find out for himself, though this, in fact, turned out to be true, and it was only the presence of the king and ark so nearby that sent them in retreat a day after we had sailed. This was confirmed by my men who took the land route south with the caravan.

  They didn’t believe that I had seen it all. How could I, shut away?

  But a wise man once said that only a fool tries to defend vehemently what she knows is true.

  The Levites came with the false ark all the way down to Ezion-geber but once there would not turn back. I absolved them in good conscience; the true ark was in the temple. But they refused and said their fate lay in Saba, or wherever the box would go.

>   I took my leave of the king there, on the shores of his port to the sound of the workers, the prows of the remaining unfinished ships rising up against the sunrise on their majestic bows.

  “You must take this ark with you to Saba,” Solomon said.

  “But we have no more need of the ruse. And your people will notice if you do not return with it.”

  “Give me the markab with a covering. Let me retain this part of you as you hold dear the symbol of my god, who has chosen you, in exchange far greater than any vow we might have made. Set me as a seal on your heart. And someday, when our son is a man, you must send him north so that I might lay eyes on him. Make me this promise, so that I may see the two of us together in him, until the day I rise from sleep and see your face before me again.”

  He gathered my hands, and kissed them through tears. “Remember me by the sun. Remember me by the moon. Remember me to our son,” his voice broke, “and speak well . . . of this foolish king.”

  He was more lovely to me in that final moment than in a thousand before. We clung together before we parted and I stood, memorizing his face from the prow of the ship, until I could see it no more.

  During the weeks at sea, Shara asked often if I was well. I said that I was, though I had not known until then that a woman might survive with the remaining half of a heart. I gratefully entered the tents of those who came out to greet us, whom we greeted in turn with news as we made our way south. To Marib, and the palace.

  Wahabil welcomed me with joy and then surprise as I embraced him around my swelling belly.

  He would have the heir he had hoped for at last and never know that the name housed in three temples all this time had been his.

  “But where is the markab?” he asked me alone in my privy chamber.

  “In Israel,” I said, “in the palace of the king.”

  “But you have brought another in its place,” he said, bewildered.

  “I have exchanged a nation for God.”

  Three months later, a sandy plume wound its way down from the north. But when we went out to meet them, Asm was not among their number. His acolytes told me he wandered out of camp near the dead salt sea one night and never returned. I could only hope he had received his longed-for vision at last.