Esther

by Rebecca Kanner

  After the sun had climbed to the top of the sky, Ruti came and stood next to me. This time I heard her approach. “Mistress, surely you will have to go to the baths again if you sit out here much longer. The perfumes of roses and almonds I massaged into your skin have probably been carried away by the breeze.” She dropped her voice to a whisper, “And I do not think being here is a good idea. If you are degraded or soiled in any way, we are ruined.”

  “I will not go now. I am relaxing in the fresh air.”

  “You do not seem very relaxed. I am worried for your neck because of how you keep craning it around this column.”

  “Ruti, please return to the doorway. After you refill my goblet.”

  “Very well. I will get you more meat and nuts as well. We must continue to bring forth a woman’s softness from your flesh. The king is not Greek. He does not want a little boy in his bed.”

  I knew that some Persian men lay with eunuchs or boys, but I had not heard this of Xerxes. I ate as much as I could. Despite Ruti’s constant complaining that I was too thin, my body had grown as soft and lush as those of the concubines. Perhaps the king had not yet made me a woman, but I looked like one. I felt the confidence that comes from taking up more space in the world.

  When the sun was almost directly overhead, Erez walked into the Women’s Courtyard from the inner courtyard. He looked to where I sat and nearly came to a halt.

  “Have you seen a ghost, Erez? One of the men you killed come to pull your intestines out your nostrils and feed them back to you?”

  Another said, “That is why all but the most foolish soldier will only kill from a great distance or by thrusting a dagger into a man’s back, so the man will not lurk in this world looking for the face of the soldier who killed him. But it is too late for you, Erez. You may as well start giving away your possessions. No, excuse me, I forgot. You have none.”

  While the men laughed, Erez and I stared at each other, neither of us smiling. There was a hardness in his eyes that scared me. He appeared to have fallen into a trance. Who was it he saw—an ally, an enemy? Me, or someone else?

  And then something did come across his eyes. Sadness. It is what the hardness had hidden.

  When the other Immortals caught up to Erez the hardness returned. He hurried to try to get in front of them as they continued on the path.

  Parsha paused to see what had caused Erez to slow his pace. His eyes fell upon me. “This is what brings you to a halt?” He came toward me, trampling the tulips, hyacinths, narcissuses, and crocuses that lay between us. Erez hurried after him but the other soldiers blocked him. I smelled the stale stench of Parsha’s unwashed skin as he bent to look at me. He came so close that his face was all I could see. His lips were chapped and he had pockmarks on his cheeks and jaw. His eyes were cold except for a cruel, playful glint.

  “Is it not hot in there, maiden? I think I can see your breath coming through the little slit in your sack. Take it off. We will tell no one.”

  Ruti came rushing up beside me. “This is your future queen, soldier.”

  He stood so that he towered over Ruti. “Or a girl who will have the honor of following in our train with the other concubines.”

  I was surprised to hear Bigthan yell, “Get away from her! I will tell the king!” He did not come near, though. This made Parsha laugh.

  He turned and went back along the path of trampled flowers. I saw that Erez had pushed through the other soldiers and that he was coming toward us. He stepped into Parsha’s path. Perhaps to preserve his dignity, Parsha did not avoid Erez completely as he stepped around him. He threw his shoulder into Erez’s. Instead of moving Erez from the path, this only caused Parsha himself to stumble. Erez watched without emotion as Parsha righted himself and continued walking away as though nothing had happened. He and the other soldiers walked toward the Western Gate and then disappeared through it, leaving Erez behind.

  Erez’s face was flushed and cords stood out in his neck. Still, I was going to ask him if he would find out all he could of Haman’s plans. And I wanted to ask him if he had missed me. But his dark eyes were not full of affection or even kindness. He narrowed them so severely at me that I saw only the blacks of his irises.

  “We need your hel—”

  “You should find a different place to spend your days,” he said.

  I could not have responded even if he had given me the chance. He didn’t. He turned and walked away. I watched his broad back get smaller and smaller and then disappear through the Western Gate.

  That night, as on so many others, I did not sleep. I had hoped there might be some way, besides making the king fall in love with me, to save my people. What if the king did not like me, much less love me? If Erez, the one man who I thought cared for me the way a man cares for a woman, did not wish to see me, how could I expect the king to choose me from among hundreds of girls?

  But perhaps Erez did care for me. Perhaps he was lying awake, or standing guard somewhere, thinking of me, and wishing he had spoken more gently. Perhaps he was even thinking of how he might learn more of Haman’s plot so he could tell me of it.

  The next day I went back to the courtyard and returned to the same spot behind the column that I had sat in the day before.

  My heart leapt when he came by himself, walking quickly from the inner courtyard. But as he continued without slowing his pace I knew he did not want to see me.

  “Is that the same sack as yesterday?” I heard Parsha call from where he must have just entered the courtyard. I did not look at him. I watched Erez approach with his eyes directly ahead of him.

  Do not ignore me. Did you not give me your Faravahar because you cared for me?

  He passed not more than ten cubits in front of me. I kept my eyes upon him, willing him to look back. He was almost to the Western Gate.

  “I promise I will try not to recoil if you take off your sack,” Parsha said from what sounded like not more than a few cubits away.

  My heart swelled as Erez turned around and began walking toward Parsha. Was he returning to make certain Parsha did not harm me? I did not get to find out.

  Parsha continued, “I have not seen anything truly interesting since Erez slaughtered a child and blood poured from the boy’s eyes.”

  Erez stopped.

  From the corner of the slit in my veil I saw that Parsha had begun walking again, and that the other Immortals followed. Erez remained as still as a stone as he waited for them to pass.

  My heart ached for him. I hoped that he would look at me again. I would use my eyes to tell him that surely God had forgiven him.

  But when the footsteps of the other Immortals could no longer be heard, he turned around and walked from the courtyard.

  Perhaps helping my people would free him from the shadows that have fallen over his face.

  I continued to wait for him each day, and watched as he walked past. He did not look at me, except every once in a while, so briefly I hardly saw into his eyes. I could not read the darkness there. He seemed to be flinching from something. Perhaps the memory of the boy. Perhaps from me.

  Though I knew that he would not stop to talk, and he would not acknowledge me, I could not keep from going to the courtyard each day and waiting for him to walk by, gaze trained like an arrow, unwavering, upon his destination.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  * * *

  UTANAH

  When only three weeks remained until my night with the king, the cut in my palm began to burn so hot that during the night I woke to my own screams. It had never been able to heal all the way, and I had reopened it a few days before. The golden plate that covered it now felt many times too small. I tried to tear it off, but this was a task too great for only one hand.

  “What goes on here?” Ruti said as she came near. “I thought surely someone was trying to slice your throat open.” She unlatched the chain and stepped back. “Oh.”

  I had never before seen her step away from any task. I looked at my palm in the low
light of the oil lamps. The bandage the physician had applied a few days earlier was stuck to my palm with blood and something else. Something sticky and yellow. I yanked the bandage off, as if to allow the pain to escape.

  “No,” Ruti cried. “Do not look!”

  I was stunned by the pain. My head burst into flames, and my body flew in all directions at once.

  Something was spilled down my chin and finally I heard Ruti telling me to drink. When I had finished the goblet of wine she held to my lips, she said, “I will get you a physician and some poppy tea, but first you must promise me you will not look at your hand.”

  It was too late. The cut and the skin around it were red, brown, and yellow, and raised up as though something was being birthed from my palm. Something that smelled both sour and sickly sweet.

  After what felt like many years Ruti returned with the tea and a physician. I drank the tea in two choking gulps while a salve was applied to my palm. It felt as though I had just pressed my hand into the center of the sun.

  “The wine will cover your pain until the physician has drained it away.”

  It was a poor cover. At that moment I did not care that I might lose my hand. If cutting it off would stop the pain, I would have welcomed the blade. I do not know if it was the wine or the tea or the pain that finally allowed me to pass into a deep sleep.

  The physician came to look at my palm twice a day. He said it could not be kept under the golden plate all the time. And so I had a reason to send my handmaidens away. I needed to let the ugliest piece of myself breathe, unseen, in my chambers.

  “You are lucky you did not lose your hand,” Ruti told me whenever I was about to complain of the pain. She had come to know my suffering too well. She kept refilling my goblet. “At least we are putting some flesh upon your bones.”

  One morning, during the brief time I allowed my handmaidens to be with me in my chamber, Opi looked at me. Her eyes, which were usually cold, filled with pity. “Mistress, do not forget you promised me that when you are queen, I will be able to sit by the pool all day and no one will glare at me as though he wants to spit upon my feet. Not unless he wishes to be made into a kitchen servant.” When I did not respond, Opi tilted her head a little and said, “I have noticed that I am no longer the thirstiest among us.”

  “Do not worry for me. I am merely tired. I have not paid attention to how many times my goblet has been refilled.” My palm itched and I wished to take off the golden plate. I gestured at the beaded curtain my handmaidens had recently come in through and told them, “You may return to the harem.”

  No one moved. The girl whose body had looked more like a boy’s than a woman’s when she first became a handmaiden said, “Mistress, we would rather not return to the harem room. The concubines tell us terrible stories of what awaits us during our night with the king.”

  Another girl, the one who’d had a broken lip when I made her a handmaiden, said, “It is true, mistress. They tell us of pain and humiliation. They say that any child conceived during such a night will be horribly deformed or even kill us as it is being birthed.”

  I too feared lying with the king, and what might come afterward for me and my people. But I was tired of being a girl. No matter how painful my night with the king was, at least afterward I would no longer be categorized by a tiny length of unbroken flesh. I would be a woman, free of the fear which overtook me whenever I heard a sound in the night—the fear that Halannah had come to take what she had not been able to the first time. Free to think of things that were truly important.

  “The concubines tell tales for their own amusement,” I said, grateful that I had managed not to run into Halannah for many months. “Do not listen. The king will not harm a girl of his own harem.”

  “We have heard stories of him. How he cut off the heads of his own men because the bridge they built was smashed by a storm,” the girl continued.

  “I have just told you not to listen to the concu—”

  “It is eunuchs who have told us this,” Opi said. “They have also told us of a man whose five sons went on the campaign with Xerxes to Sardis. He asked Xerxes to release one of his sons from service to take care of him in his old age. To punish the man for asking, Xerxes took the man’s oldest son, cut him in half, and put half on either side of the road so all his army could march between the man’s most beloved son.”

  I wished I could unhear this tale. I did not doubt that it was true. “Opi, do not speak to me without the proper form of address.”

  “And, mistress,” Opi continued, “we have noticed that Nabat never returned from her last night with the king.”

  “Perhaps the king was pleased with her and has given her chambers of her own.”

  “If so, he has not given her any handmaidens to serve her. No one else is missing.”

  “Not everyone can be as blessed as I am.”

  “No, mistress,” Opi said, “they cannot.”

  I forced a smile and I told them all would be well and that they were dismissed. “Except Utanah. You will stay here with me.”

  When the other girls had left I asked Utanah about a mark I had seen between the clicking bells that hung from her neck. She looked as though she had just been sentenced to a slow death upon the gallows.

  “It is nothing, mistress.”

  “Your lies have become less heroic. I am surprised you do not say that Opi gave it to you while you were trying to defend me.”

  Utanah pressed her lips together.

  I looked to Ruti. She inclined her head toward the beaded curtain. “Very well, Utanah,” I said, “you may go.”

  “I have seen her in the baths,” Ruti said after Utanah had left and the beads had stopped rustling. “It is not only her neck that is bruised.”

  “Tomorrow I will take my bath when she takes hers.”

  I woke the next morning to hands shaking my shoulders. “Mistress,” Ruti said, “it is time to observe your handmaiden.”

  As Ruti and I entered the baths, I saw the girls stealing glances at each other. Their gazes scurried over each other’s flesh like little mice looking to make off with something before they were caught. I was surprised at how plump they were. Over the past few moons I had only half-noticed them eating greater quantities of meat and sweets and drinking as much wine as they could without falling down or otherwise marring their bodies. Hegai had told us, “The king wishes to make the first mark upon each girl’s body. Each of you should go in to him as fair and unscathed as you were the moment you were born. As if the midwife took you from your mother, washed you, and put you high upon a shelf so you would go untouched by the world until you are put before the king.” Though the agony in my palm had lessened, there would always be a scar. I tried not to think of what the king would do with me if he saw it.

  Utanah did not glance openly at me but I knew she watched me. I too had perfected the palace skill of looking at something without seeming to, and so I could see that Utanah wore a cape of colorful bruises upon her back.

  “I have never seen anything like it,” Ruti whispered in my ear as she ran a cloth over my shoulder. “It is like a painting. The artist is cruel, but the painting he has produced is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen.”

  “Who is the artist? Does no one care?”

  “Who is there to care? Utanah has lost favor with Hegai, and even if she had not, his favor with the king is uncertain. Everyone is looking after their own interests. Few possess the courage to see someone else’s suffering.”

  “I hope I will never be so cowardly that I do not see a coat of bruises upon another woman’s skin.”

  “This is my hope for you too, though there is little you can do for anyone now. I only worry about the bruises upon Utanah because whoever put them there may wish to do even worse to you.”

  When I was done with my bath I went to stand, dripping, over Utanah.

  “It is not nothing,” I said.

  She seemed to shrink inside her skin. “It is nothing I c
an speak of, mistress.”

  “Come to my chambers when you are done bathing.”

  When Utanah arrived, I told Ruti to wait in the hall. Ruti started to protest, “Mis—”

  “Thank you, Ruti, for watching over me so diligently. But I am awake and not overfull with wine, so I will guard myself now.”

  Ruti gave me a look before she left. Do what you must to save yourself. Our people’s survival depends upon it. I was reclining on my mattress, surrounded by all the food Ruti was pushing upon me to “more fully bring forth the lush woman hiding behind the little girl.” My body had begun to feel like a weight too heavy to carry very far. My thighs rubbed against each other beneath my robe when I walked. The skin chafed, despite all the lotions and oils Ruti applied to my skin.

  I picked up a platter of dates and set them on the floor. “Utanah,” I said as warmly as I could with the memory of her standing over me grasping a cushion tightly in her hands still fresh in my mind. I gestured to the place I had just cleared upon my own mattress. “Join me.”

  Utanah sat uneasily beside me.

  “Does it pain you?” I asked her.

  “What, mistress?”

  “Does it pain you to walk and to sit and to breathe with the injury someone has done you?”

  She did not answer.

  “Does it pain y—”

  “No. I am in no pain, mistress.”

  “Perhaps I would admire your easy ability to lie more if I were not the one being lied to.”

  Utanah took a breath, as if to speak, but instead she pressed her lips together and dropped her gaze to the floor.

  “Who has done this to you?”

  “Please.”

  “Do you not jingle enough as you walk? I am certain we could find more bells.”

  I would not have known that she had heard me except for the lines that appeared in her forehead.

  “The skin beneath your jewelry must be growing quite strange. I wonder what color it will be when the jewelry is removed the night you go in to see the king.” I lowered my head to peer more closely at her. Her lips were trembling. I placed my left hand on her shoulder. “I promise to help you.”