by Tommy Tenney
There was never even a moment of conceding his death—I had felt it was coming, almost as a matter of fact, since catching sight of that sharpened sword. But now his terrible death felt like a vast, threatening fact into which I plunged whole. Inside my chest, I felt again the sensation of something coming apart.
Still lying upon the cold marble, I bent backward and gave my screaming full vent. As though I were trying to fill the cavernous room with my grief. I emptied my lungs, gulped for air, and started again. And again. I’m not sure the sounds that poured from my throat sounded sane, or even human. But I could not have stopped them to save my life.
Leah, you know as much as anyone how much I loved the King. Anyone else would be forgiven for suspecting that I loved being Queen more than I loved Xerxes himself.
But the truth turns out, as it so often does, to be far more complex and interesting than shallow conjecture. Xerxes and I had carved a special affection out of an insane and impossible existence. He loved me because I gave myself to him like no other woman he had ever known, or even imagined. And I loved him because he had opened himself to me in ways no King ever had with anyone, ways that made me feel incredibly close and needed.
He was a deeply flawed man, to an extent I am only now learning. I’m entirely unsure whether history will record him kindly. And I offer no defense for the many errant deeds attributed to him. But even though this sounds like the rationale of a foolish teenager, I have to insist that when he was with me, Xerxes was a different person. Often when we were together, nearby courtiers would turn around and stare, not sure if the man laughing so heartily and speaking in such a relaxed voice was the King they knew. They had simply never heard him laugh that freely, or speak with such a tone.
He was such a virile personality that I felt his presence like a stamp on nearly every memory of my adult life. And that is why the life drained from my veins when I realized he was gone from my world. I had never contemplated a future without him.
Finally, the strain of my screams drained the final measure of strength from me, and the world around me simply blinked away.
Chapter Thirty-two
I am unsure how long I lay like that. All I remember is snapping back upright at the sound of the doors being punched open and dozens of feet running in. Deep growling shouts rang out, even screams.
I looked up and saw that the five soldiers wore the gilded finery of the Immortals, the elite royal bodyguards. Their faces were wracked by anguish. And well they might, for rumor had it that if a king was murdered, the Immortals on the watch would be impaled within the hour.
I felt hands about my shoulders, bearing me up gently. And then I saw Mordecai’s face, and never have I been more relieved and grateful to see anyone. Although, for some reason, the sight of his anxious expression seemed to trigger even greater emotion. Sobs wracked my body, and in between the same phrase, over and over, burst through my lips from my soul. “He’s gone, Poppa. They killed him. . . . ”
How helpless and hopeless I felt at that moment! I repeated those words countless times before Mordecai found a pause in which to ask me if I was hurt. I shook my head through my sobs, and I remember feeling at that point, for just a moment, that I wish the killers had taken me with him.
Mordecai helped me to my shaky feet. With gravity beneath me, I felt like an old woman shuffling along in a century-old body. I know I moved like one.
“I’ll try to remember one of the attackers,” I told him hoarsely. “I might recall the man who held the sword.” And Mordecai, always on his “palace guard,” hushed me quickly, causing me to recall that on a night like this, one never knows who the plotters were. The soldiers around me could have been the killers, only feigning grief and shock. Anyone within earshot could be a conspirator who might interpret the least wayward utterance as a pretext for more murder.
And it was true. I could almost smell the madness in the air. There was a feeling about that all was unhinged, that bloodlust, like that ominous hint of sulfur in the nostrils, could explode at any moment.
We heard more loud voices, shouts of alarm, from the hallway outside. My blood went cold, for I remembered that the assassination of a king was often the occasion for whole strings of secondary murders, like the cascading aftershocks of an earthquake.
Finally, my feet rediscovered their rhythm and we emerged through the doorway. Guards and servants were running as one down the corridor, away from us.
“Who is it?” Mordecai cried at the top of his voice.
A palace servant, running past, glanced at him and yelled over his shoulder, “It’s Darius, sir! Darius!”
I remember stopping cold in the hall, surrounded by bleary-eyed, panicked palace staff, and feeling a new wave of vertigo overwhelm me, unaware whether the sensation came from events in the chamber behind me or the shock of what I had just heard.
Darius—of course. The crown prince, Xerxes’ oldest and most beloved son, namesake of Darius the Great. He would be next.
No . . . I heard myself groaning over and over, and then holding on to Mordecai’s hand, I too began to run and watch the hallway flow fitfully past me. In my haze of residual stupor and caustic grief, I could not remember the direction of Darius’ quarters. I looked around me, fought a cresting surge of nausea, and then realized the imbecilic truth—the best source was there right beside me: Mordecai, faithful, unquestioning, supportive. And he knew exactly where to go.
Three turns, two more hallways, and one covered veranda later, we rounded the final corner and rushed upon a scene that left me even more faint and closer to retching.
Sprawled in the open doorway to his own personal quarters lay the body of a broad-shouldered young man whose wristbands, headband, and boots were trimmed in gold. I could not see his face, which lay pressed into a puddle of blood, but I knew at once it was Prince Darius, once the future King of Persia. Less than five cubits away lay three more bodies clad in the attire of the Palace Guard.
I remember the gray look on Mordecai’s lined, hard-breathing face when he whirled around to look at me.
“What about Artaxerxes?” he asked in a voice I had never heard issued from his mouth before. I remember asking myself whether he had asked me a question or issued me a warning, for his tone was equal parts foreboding and outright fear.
Despite my haze, I realized instantly how correct he was. Artaxerxes was the next in line to the throne. He was also one member of the extended royal family whom I knew better than any other. In fact, few remember it now, but he was practically my adoptive son.
All at once my body remembered its old energy and speed. I leaped from the hallway, it seemed, with Mordecai in close pursuit, and we ran without hesitation to an apartment not far away. I began pounding on the door.
“Go away!” came a feeble shout from inside. It was that of Artaxerxes—tense and weak, but his.
I nearly fainted from relief at the mere sound of his voice, yet I persisted. “It’s me! Esther! You must open this door!”
A moment later the door swung open and the two of us swept into the room. Artaxerxes was fully dressed, alone in the light of a single candle. He had started walking back to his bed but suddenly turned, slumped against the entry wall and slid down to the ground. He looked so small and defenseless that it was only then I remembered the prince was merely sixteen years old. A strong, tall lad, but hardly a man—yet. Much older for one of his station than most; indeed, many of his forefathers had taken the throne at much younger ages. And yet, he was so young, and he looked so lost.
We closed the doors and huddled around him like conspirators of some sort.
“He did it!” Artaxerxes mumbled. “He was the one!”
“Who?” I asked.
“Darius. He killed our father because he was impatient to become King. Everyone knows how contemptuous he is of our father’s mistakes. And, of course, there’s—well, you know. He believed that Father seduced Princess Artaynte. His own wife; it was a terrible thing to believe, of c
ourse. Thank the gods, Artabanus and the rest of the palace guards came in to tell me and warn me of Darius’ plans to kill me next.”
“Artabanus told you that?” asked Mordecai.
“Yes, and I will be eternally grateful,” Artaxerxes replied.
“Do not be too hasty in that judgment. And what did you do on that information?”
“I bid Artabanus and his men to go stop Darius at once, detain him, and imprison him for trial.”
Then Artaxerxes saw our faces, and his own expression changed in an instant.
“What? What did he do?” I remember how he took Mordecai by the shoulders and shook him. He allowed Poppa’s whole upper body to sway in his hands, so loathe was Mordecai to tell him the truth. “What did he do?” Artaxerxes finally screamed.
“Darius is dead, and three palace guards beside him,” he said in a low, grim voice. “And, Artaxerxes, tell no one else what you just told us. At least for now. Just remember this, however. You were tricked. I would daresay that Artabanus was your father’s killer, not your brother. And in having enraged you within a fear of your life, he has arranged for you to look like the conspirator. Be very, very careful, Your Highness. Artabanus is your enemy. Never doubt it. He has made you the murderer of your brother, rather than the avenger of your father. You had better move fast against him.”
Artaxerxes’ face flattened into a mask of cold determination, and he stood to his full height.
“I will.”
So much happened during the ensuing forty-eight hours. Things grew maddeningly chaotic indeed. And young Artaxerxes definitely took things in hand for one so young.
Unwilling to return to the site of my husband’s murder, I spent the rest of the night in Mordecai’s quarters, not sleeping but pacing and listening for the various palace sounds around me. Sometime around dawn, more profoundly exhausted than perhaps ever before in my life, I fell asleep curled up on the floor next to the . . .
Chapter Thirty-three
JERUSALEM, IDF COMMAND CENTER, MINISTRY OF DEFENSE
Hadassah ben Yuda’s eyes were still fixed on the last words of Hadassah’s night of horror when the voice of an Israeli army general broke the silence.
“Forget it, everybody. I just reached the end. What we’re looking for isn’t there.”
“How did you finish so quickly?” Hadassah demanded.
The tall, middle-aged officer smiled gamely. “Occupational hazard, ma’am. Years of military reports. Speed reading becomes a survival mechanism.”
“And reading that quickly, you’re sure of what you saw?”
He nodded. “There’s fascinating stuff in there about Persian history and the lives of the principals—I’m sure scholars will have a field day. It’s clearly weighted toward Hadassah’s initial response to a plea from this Leah person. But nothing regarding a Mordecai bloodline or even an indication that he ever fathered a child.”
“I find that hard to believe,” she said slowly. “Granted, I haven’t read as far as you have, but the previous documents had all this talk about Mordecai’s love for someone, and Hadassah urging him to find a mate—”
“Sorry, ma’am. I read those, too, yet this new fragment doesn’t come any closer to giving us the actual outcome. It may hold clues about where to find the next installment, as it were. But it’s almost as if someone knew what we were looking for and decided to play games with us.”
“Great,” she sighed. “We’re going to have to find more scrolls.”
“Or think of a more conventional resolution to the crisis,” the general noted, looking at her from under lowered brows.
Taking that as a personal rebuke, she glared at the general, gathered her papers, and strode out of the room, her exasperation clear to all.
PRIME MINISTER’S RESIDENCE—LATER THAT NIGHT
Hadassah bolted upright from her covers, her eyes wide and her heart pounding rhythmically in her chest. She glanced around wildly but saw only the room before her swimming in its usual midnight palette of shadow and gloom. Everything seemed normal. Her husband snored lightly on the far side of the bed. From opposing night-stands, their respective clock radios glowed 2:34 A.M. Light from Rehavia Street shone faintly through the shuttered window, then splintered into pale shards beyond the ceiling fan’s spinning blades.
Nevertheless, something was wrong. As she examined her senses, she understood it was not an external threat—some frightening noise or shift in light. Whatever had woken her lay inside her. As soon as she realized this, she knew it was far worse than an external enemy. This distress lay poised to engulf her. She could feel that it was powerful and complex but was about to tell nothing else. She found this ignorance even more terrifying.
She breathed in and found that the very act of inhaling filled her with a claustrophobic terror. Not only could she not catch her breath, but she could not shake the sensation that there would be no satisfying her lungs.
She felt drained of all meaning, purpose, direction. Not as she had described to her husband at their surprise conference at his office, not in some abstract, intellectual sense, but in a loss more direct and gut-wrenching than anything she had ever experienced. As though hope and substance had been some sort of fluid, a liquid, and someone had drained it from her as cleanly and completely as the opening of a valve.
What is happening to me? The question whirled unchecked through her frantic mind. Was this a cruel mutation of the depression she had struggled against in the time since her father’s death? A byproduct of her unspoken fear that she had unwittingly caused her husband’s political demise? That her very identity was providing fodder for not only Jacob’s downfall as Prime Minister but also the unraveling of a year’s worth of intricate negotiations with the Palestinian leadership? Or was it the fact that she was now alone in the world, that her once-rich collection of relatives and friends had either died off or dwindled away in the face of her new fame and notoriety? Or even more basic—a growing awareness that she was a pathetic reduction of her younger self, that celebrity and power had failed to compensate for the barren person she had become. She could feel the new burden of childlessness gnawing at the corners of her heart like a festering reproach. You will never be a mother, and what else are you?
The lack of an answer left her with a hopelessness more desperate than the wildest hunger.
She stepped out of bed, in the odd hope that the mere motion of her limbs on the hardness of the floor beneath her feet might jar the despair loose, or at least distract her for a moment.
It didn’t help, and the knowledge deepened her panic. What would she do now? She glanced around for stronger distractions. Should she quietly go to the living room bar for a stiff drink? She shook her head slowly, for she certainly knew that was no solution. She could turn on the television for distraction, but she did not want to wake her husband and doubted that the early-morning lineup, heavy on news recaps—which meant reports of her husband’s political travails—would do anything to ease her anxiety.
She glanced around her. In younger days she would have gone out for a midnight run of five miles or more. She had once been a highly conditioned athlete in the days before her marriage and its attendant security precautions. She could feel her old muscles crying out for release, but tonight, on the spur of the moment, physical renewal would have to wait.
Something thick and shiny on her makeup table caught her eye. It was the cover of the Battaween Translations, the ancient documents unearthed, deciphered, and faxed to Jerusalem the day before. She still had only read the earliest pages—interrupted by the general’s sudden pronouncement that nothing further would be gained.
Of course. Esther. Maybe you have nothing to offer the generals, or even Jacob. But horrific as your account is, you might bring me through the next few minutes. . . . Even a distraction has appeal.
She walked over, picked up the pages of the document, and took a seat against the wall. The glow from an outer window just behind proved barely enough to read by. She t
urned to the first new page, looked upward in a silent plea for relief, and began where she had left off.
Something spiritual began soothing her the minute she picked up the ancient words.
“I remember awakening . . .”
Chapter Thirty-four
SUSA—CIRCA 464 B.C.
I remember awakening late from that blood-drenched night to the sounds of men shouting outside the window. I grimaced, for it was not the sound of mourning. Or of a funeral, though many were in the offing on that day. Fearing some sort of large-scale palace coup, I stole to the curtain and peered outside.
It took me several moments to see what was actually taking place in the early-morning light. But soon I made out a large assembly of soldiers at attention, in full uniform, upon the innermost terrace. Artabanus stood in the front row with his five surviving commanders of the top regiment of palace guards. Before them stood a figure in full battle armor, which I soon recognized as Artaxerxes himself. I could not help my gasp of concern, for despite his height he seemed like such a boy, standing alone before the murderous intentions of such grown, battle-hardened men. Yet behind him, in full armor and holding one of the largest swords I have ever seen a man grasp, I recognized Megabyzos, the famous general of his father’s and even grandfather’s wars against the Greeks. The silver glint on the sword matched the color of his hair and beard.
I remember thinking to myself, There before Artaxerxes stands assembled probably the whole gang of conspirators who murdered his father. And then it struck me—that surely was no coincidence. Artaxerxes had assembled them there for a purpose. I whispered a quick prayer of gratitude that Mordecai and I had been able to give him that information.