Wisdom's Daughter: A Novel of Solomon and Sheba

by Edghill, India

  Once past the Hill of Olive Trees, she would no longer be able to see King Solomon’s palace. Bilqis reined Shams to a halt and gazed back across the Kidron Valley. But she saw nothing—nothing save Jerusalem burning golden beneath the heavy sun. Already she was too far away ever to see Solomon again.

  She stared until the sun-bright city filled her eyes even when she closed them against the glare. Then, blinded by the light, she turned away. The road south stretched before her, and at the end of it, Sheba waited. She touched her heels to Shams’s sides, and began the long ride home.

  Abishag

  The smooth running of the women’s palace was my task, and its peace my gift to my beloved. It was not easy for me to greet the king’s new wives fondly, to smile upon them and call them “sister.” At least Pharaoh’s Daughter knew how to veil her feelings, as did those of Solomon’s wives who were the daughters of kings. But as more women, and still more, entered the women’s palace, each bringing her own servants and slaves, her own customs and beliefs, my task grew ever harder.

  Those wives who clung to their status as good Daughters of the Law moved as a pious flock; set against their tight-woven virtue, the alien ways of the king’s foreign wives flared like bright banners. At first there were clashes between the two sisterhoods, and I found myself powerless to force even a truce, let alone peace.

  It would have been a simple thing for Queen Michal to intervene, but I understood why she did not. She waited to see if I owned the strength and skill to govern those in my care.

  I thought, and watched, and listened, and then took the matter to Solomon. When he heard of the warfare in the women’s palace, he summoned all his wives into the queens’ court and commanded peace.

  “No woman here stands higher in my sight than any other, and no woman here is to disparage any other. Within these walls you are all as sisters.”

  I waited until he had gone and then laid another decree beside the king’s. “You have heard the king’s wishes. Now hear mine. I will not have the king troubled. If I must, I will go to Queen Michal and ask her aid in teaching a queen’s proper behavior to her king—and a wife’s to her husband. Remember that, and act wisely.”

  Not one woman there wished to involve Queen Michal in their quarrels; invoking her was as chancy as rousing a quiet leopard. Queen Michal’s only care was for King Solomon’s peace, and she would stop at nothing to achieve that goal. So the women’s squabbles remained hidden among themselves, low bitter whispers beneath the smooth hours of their days.

  No one dared risk the summoning of Queen Michal to restore peace. To unwary eyes, the women’s palace ran smoothly, placid as a tranquil pool.

  The tranquillity was an illusion, and I knew it. And I dreaded the day Queen Michal would be gone, and I would stand alone, without her shadow to strengthen me.

  Solomon

  He had sworn he would not watch her ride away, and he had lied. Solomon stood upon the highest rooftop of his palace, and there, in the sky garden that had cherished their love, he watched as the Queen of Sheba paused where the road crested the Hill of Olive Trees. Distance and heat-shimmered air turned the queen into an illusion, unreal as a mirage.

  One last look, queen of my heart. One last look.

  And then, between one indrawn breath and the next, she was gone. Gone forever. I could have kept you here. I should have kept you here. That is what a great king should have done.

  He stared hard at the empty road, but saw only the haze of dust that marked the passage of a great body of men and beasts. Soon that dust would settle back onto the road, and no sign would remain that the Queen of the South had ever passed that way.

  A man would have kept her with him, no matter what he had to do to claim her forever. Just once, I wish I could act as a man rather than as a king.

  But he knew he never would. Solomon the Wise could not afford such a luxury.

  What would Great David have done, had it been King David who looked upon the Queen of Sheba with desire? Troubled though he was, Solomon smiled. The last and least son, he had been favored by the queen rather than by the king, had seen his glorious father only rarely. It had been the older princes—Amnon, Absalom, Adonijah—who had been granted their father’s attention and love.

  Always remember that your father is a king, Solomon. Kings do not love. That was what Queen Michal had said. At least not as men and women know love. A king loves what he needs, and only for so long as he needs. Remember that, Solomon. Carve it upon your heart.

  A harsh judgment—but then, Queen Michal had hated King David. Even as a child, Solomon had known that. What he had never known was why she looked upon the king with cool unyielding eyes. Nor would she tell him, when he once dared to ask. Past is past, Solomon; those years do not matter. What matters is the future you will build.

  And although when she looked upon David hate lay coiled like a dark serpent behind her eyes, Queen Michal had never once spoken a word against the king. Not to me. To me, she always spoke in riddles when she spoke of him. Did she think I did not know what she truly felt?

  Past is past—Yet if the past did not matter, why did those forgotten years still poison Michal’s heart?

  As he grew, he gleaned knowledge of his father—or rather, knowledge of what others saw when they gazed upon King David in love or in hate. And that vision, bright or dark, changed with each man and each woman.

  If King David has a fault, Solomon, it is that he is too softhearted. Even patience must have an end. He should never have forgiven Prince Absalom—of course I am only a woman and do not know all the king knows—but still, I would not have pardoned Absalom thrice over.

  Those had been the harshest words Solomon had ever heard his blood-mother, Bathsheba, utter. For Bathsheba’s nature was so sweet that the Lord might have formed her of honey fresh from the comb. Never did she see darkness, only light.

  But there was no honey in his foster-mother, Michal, who saw neither light nor dark, but shadows.

  She loved my mother, and she loved me. And—

  And for all her cold hate, the night Great David died it was Queen Michal who wept long and would not be comforted. Her tears still fell, slow and hard, long after those whose grief flowed easily had dried their eyes. Solomon had not understood then, and still did not, what had lain between David and Michal. All that remained now of King David were his songs, and of Queen Michal—

  All that remains of her is bounded by my crown. Solomon himself was Queen Michal’s legacy. Sometimes he wondered if she had known what she had truly done when she raised him up to be king in her image.

  For she had sought to create a paragon among men, a miracle of human fire and royal ice, of soft love and stern judgment. An impossible union and a heavy burden to place upon any man’s heart. Solomon did not blame her; Queen Michal had sought only to summon a brilliant future.

  But did it never occur to her that I saw what she did to make me king? Saw how she gathered up each incautious word, each unwary glance, as if they were threads for her loom? Just as King David carved the world to his desire, so Queen Michal wove it to her own pattern.

  In the end, they were very much alike. King or Queen, all must bow to need. Love, honor, duty—even wisdom, in the end, must yield to that.

  For what was wisdom, after all, but the grace to bow before the inevitable?

  So this is the wisdom of Solomon. The wisest king in the world. So men called him; perhaps it was how history would remember him. If I am remembered. Yet what profit will my kingdom have from my vaunted wisdom if an unwise king follows me? Perhaps it is time to have done with kings, to return to the ways of our fathers.

  At the wistful thought, Solomon found himself smiling; from the royal road there was no peaceful return. Long ago, before he became king, before Great David became king, before even Saul became king, a man had foretold what treasure a king would bring as gift to the Lord’s people.

  Taxation and conscription; regimentation and slavery. The worst slavery
of all, its chains formed by men’s own lusts for riches, for power, for peace.

  Perhaps the price of kingship is too high.

  He stared south; dust still hung rich and golden in the air, sign of the Queen of Sheba’s passage. Her coming had shattered his hard-won serenity, tested his wisdom. And in the end, what was left?

  Honor, Solomon. Honor and duty.

  He knew Bilqis was right; for a king, those two virtues came before all others. Honor demanded he do what was best for his kingdom and its people. That is a king’s duty. But what is best?

  For all his life, he had thought peace the highest good. For all the years he had reigned as king, he had labored towards that goal. And he had sought to raise up a son who would follow the path he had laid out: the path to peace and tranquillity.

  And he had been deliberately blind.

  “My eldest son will be king after me.” So he had sworn, to keep peace in the king’s house and the crown passing easily from his head to his heir’s. When he had made it, that vow had seemed wisdom.

  But his eldest son was not fit to be king. At last Solomon faced that fact squarely. Truth is truth. The admission hurt; Rehoboam was his child, after all.

  Rehoboam would be a bad king—and would that be so ill a thing? A startling thought, but kings were new to Israel and Judah; Solomon himself was only the third to be crowned and to sit on a golden throne. And none of those three had been eldest son of the king who came before him.

  Watching the dust settle slowly in the south, Solomon silently set futures in the scales.

  If Rehoboam becomes king, he will not sit long upon the throne. He will breed quarrels; quarrels will breed battles. Rehoboam will not speak soft when he must, tread gently when prudence demands it. He will sow resentment, and his harvest will be rebellion. King Rehoboam would shatter the kingdom.

  So where did wisdom lie now? In a peace dearly bought and easy lost? I cannot now declare another of my sons heir in Rehoboam’s stead; he would not survive from new moon to full. Naamah would see to that, even if her son did not.

  So I will give the kingdom what I have already sworn to give: Prince Rehoboam as next king. I will do so knowing he will bring down the crown—and I will do so because I think it best for the land and the people that it be so. Because I wish it.

  Why not? Was it not what his own foster-mother had done, after all? I was the youngest, yet it was I who became king—because Queen Michal wished it.

  Michal had acted in the great tradition of the matriarchs; often in the past a woman had grasped the succession in her own hands, had spun a new future into being. Rebekah deceiving her husband Isaac to gain his blessing for Jacob, her favorite son; widowed Tamar tricking her father-in-law Judah into lying with her to conceive the child he had unlawfully denied her—they had lifted up sons they chose.

  Solomon would do the same. The throne would not last; Rehoboam would shatter it.

  We are not a people for kings. Royalty rots us. I will create a truth, and that truth will set the kingdom free—Ah, once again I grow pompous. Well, no matter. Like any other man, I strive to do the best I can. No man can do more, unless he be a hero.

  A hero, like his father, King David. David the warrior, David the harper, David the golden king, the lodestone for all who would follow after. David the hero.

  But this time, the bitterness that always followed that dazzling image of his father did not come. Solomon summoned up his father’s memory, and felt only a wistful admiration for a man who could so easily win all hearts and minds save those of his own queen and the prince she raised up in Great David’s shadow.

  Now I know why Ahijah burns; what is the prophet Ahijah weighed against the great prophet Samuel? As I am shadowed by King David, so Ahijah is by Samuel.

  He waited for the welling of the familiar resentment at the constant comparison between himself and his shining father, but that corrosive passion no longer burned. He is dead and I alive. He is the past, I the present—and the future too. It is time to free my father’s ghost.

  And it was time for other things as well. If I am to summon any future at all, I must make amends to my wives.

  Bilqis had spread his own well-meant folly before him; Baalit had struck him in the face with that folly, a blow to—To my pride. To his pride, when it should have been a blow to his heart. And long ago, Abishag had tried to warn him.

  “Solomon, you must promise me something.” As another pain rippled through her, Abishag gripped his hand; he felt his bones press together.

  “Anything, my dove. You have only to ask.”

  “Should I die—”

  “You will not die, Abishag. All women think so, when their time comes—”

  “And many are right. No, do not shake your head, and do not say again that I shall not.” She gasped as another pain gripped her, then managed to smile. “Were you king of all the world, Solomon, that you still could not promise me.”

  “You must not think such things. Abishag, you are my rose, my lily, my only beloved. You will live and our son also.” He had spoken strongly, willing her belief; Abishag had only smiled.

  “Perhaps, and perhaps not. And I must think such things, king of my heart, for you are only a man and close your eyes to darkness as well as light.” Another gasp, and again, to his amazement, she smiled once more. “Ah, soon. And soon, king or no, my mother will order you from the room. And you will go, because you are only a man, and this is woman’s work.” She gazed at him with eyes dark as a shadowed well. “Promise me, Solomon, that should I die bearing our child, you will set another in my place. Either Nefret or Naamah—either or another—your heart is not so weak you can love once and once only—”

  She had spoken the last words in panting gasps, and then her mother came into the room and ordered Solomon out of it. “Go, fight some man’s battle. This battle is Abishag’s, and she must wage it without you.”

  Already Abishag seemed to forget he was there; she clung to her mother and cried out for her handmaiden Rivkah. Suddenly women crowded the room, and Solomon realized that in the face of this enemy, he was helpless. “But how can I help? What can I do? There must be something!”

  “There is.” Queen Michal’s cool voice cut through the heat and fuss like a keen blade. Of course she had come; adept at midwifery, Queen Michal had aided many king’s sons into the world—and long ago had delivered Solomon himself, claiming him from death by her skill.

  “What may I do? Tell me”

  “Go away and drink a great deal of wine,” Queen Michal said, “and do not return to Abishag’s door until I send for you.”

  And as Solomon gaped at her, Queen Michal and Abishag’s mother Zhurleen exchanged glances of utter understanding … .

  He had not drunk wine, but he had been sent for—suddenly and urgently, reaching Abishag only to hold her hand as her skin grew cold and she left him to journey alone into endless night … .

  And as he stared into her lightless eyes, all he could think was that he had not sworn to do as she had asked, in those last moments that had been theirs to cherish—and that he was glad he had not bound himself to that promise. For he knew he could not do it. No other woman can take your place, beloved. No one, no one but you, ever.

  It had taken the Queen of the South to show him he had been wrong. And right, too, for it is true no other woman can supplant Abishag in my heart. But another woman could hold her own place there. “Hearts are not so small, Solomon, that they hold room for only one.”

  Are all women wiser than men? I never promised Abishag what she asked—but it is not too late. While still we live, it is never too late.

  He had laid Abishag to rest in a funeral cave smoothed by expert hands, its walls painted with swallows and roses; the stone that rolled before it carved with the image of a branching pomegranate tree by the finest stonemason in the kingdom. A fine tribute to a beloved wife—so Abishag’s tomb was called. Now Solomon knew it was time to do true honor to Abishag’s memory.
/>   It was time, at last, to keep his unsworn vow to his beloved wife.

  Makeda

  Prince David lay naked upon a new-washed sheepskin, kicking his legs and waving his arms fiercely, grabbing for the bright rattle his mother shook over him. The gilded walnut shells strung upon a leather thong clattered as Makeda dangled the toy before her child’s sun-bright eyes; she held the rattle just far enough from his grasp that his seeking fingers could not quite touch it.

  “That is right, little king, reach for what you want.” She smiled, and David kicked harder, his face crumpling up as he began to wail. Makeda laid her hand over his mouth. “Hush, heart of my heart. Silence and strength, little lion, silence and strength.”

  Already he knew crying would gain him nothing; he bit at her hand, and she lifted it and laughed. “Yes, my son, yes. A fierce heart and a clever mind, my king of all the world. Yes.”

  She dipped the rattle low enough for him to seize in his small plump hands, and his chortle of delight warmed her blood like venom. “Little lion-heart.” Makeda stroked her son’s cheek. His skin was soft as a dove’s breast, darker than ruddy amber; his hair curls of coals at midnight, shadow and fire.

  “You are altogether beautiful, you are clear-skinned and ruddy; you are wiser than the serpent,” she sang. “You are king of ten thousand thousand kings—”

  She broke off, sensing another presence. One of her slaves stood in the doorway; she knelt as Makeda turned her gaze upon the girl.

  “Speak.” Makeda neither smiled nor frowned, waiting calmly to hear what would be said. Her servants knew better than to intrude upon her without reason.

  “My lady, the king comes.”

  Of all the words she might have heard, these were the least expected. Makeda stared unblinking at the slave girl.

  “The king? Here?” Makeda’s thoughts darted, snake-swift, striking at possibilities. It is not my night, so why does he come to me? Does he think to take David from me—No, he is still but a babe sucking at my breast—Nothing tasted right; so great a change in the king’s routine was unprecedented. Wait, the serpent coiled behind her mind commanded. Wait, and listen, and trust in me to lead you safely home … .