Tamrin had warned me against the ibex headpiece, saying such images were repugnant to the Israelites, as was any idol’s image. He did not know I had already chosen the crescent crown, the sun disc eclipsed by the slivered moon. I said it told the story of the tribal goddess Shams eclipsed by Almaqah, over all. But the king alone would know it as a riddle, a secret disguised in full sight.
Shara laid the heavy crescent collar I had commissioned for this occasion on my shoulders. It shimmered with a waterfall of quartz to my waist—the moon and its cascading beams. She belted my gold girdle over my gown, fastened my veil and kissed me through it.
“You are the queen of queens, the queen of kings. Truly, you are the Daughter of the Moon,” she said, bowing low before me then.
Khalkharib himself assisted me to my palanquin as the censers were lit and white smoke began to waft into the air.
In plain sight for the first time since leaving Saba, was the markab, its acacia wood covered in fresh gold leaf. Only my palanquin rivaled it, with its inlaid posters and golden finials, one for each phase of the moon: waxing, full, waning, and dark, the last an obsidian disc. I had never seen Saja, my she-camel, so beautiful, silver tassels swaying from her sides, her harness sparkling with jasper.
The stars paled with the first tinge of peach. The moment the sun breached the horizon, its rays shot out across the sky, a hot, glowing disc incinerating the east.
We had entered Israel yesterday and traveled in the dark to a shallow valley near a town called Etam, directly south of Jerusalem. The small party of men who met us near Hebron said this place was the source of water for the king’s pleasure-grounds and gardens. I could not think of a more fitting site to appear with the morning.
Tamrin whistled and threw his arm forward. Twelve men surrounded my palanquin as the caravan began its slow undulation forward, emerging from the shaded eastern slope into the light. I looked back and shielded my eyes against the gilded serpent unfurling behind me, knowing I would never see this sight again.
We rose up from the valley, the sun growing more intense on our every gleaming surface. I was grateful for the spatter of last night’s rain; today the only thing to rise in our wake would be a plume of incense where the column of mortal dust had marked our progress the months before. Lyre and oud broke the stillness of early morning. A beautiful voice soared over it all, singing praise to a god who had no name. Mazor.
In the distance before us I could just make out a large escort of what looked like a hundred men come out to meet us on as many horses—and then the rise of the capital beyond, which had been nothing but the starry flicker of lanterns against the northern sky as we arrived last night.
“That is Benaiah, the king’s commander . . . and his axe-man,” Tamrin said, riding alongside me. Color was high in his cheeks, light glinting in his eyes. He was enjoying this.
“Why does he not come to greet me?” I said as the escort turned to lead us into the city.
“The king has ordered that he be the first to greet you. And in so doing, all must embrace you.”
“You say it as though there are those who would not,” I said, leaning back onto my elbow with the swaying of the palanquin.
“The Israelites are accustomed to foreigners in their courts,” he said with a shrug, but I sensed he chose his words carefully. “They have seen many foreign women enter Jerusalem’s walls, never to leave. But never a queen like you . . . and never an entrance like this.”
There could not have been a more perfect day for my arrival in Jerusalem. The sun rose into a pocket of cloud for nearly an hour, sparing us the heat. But then, just before we descended through the valley to the city gate, it broke, the full force of its glare blazing off gemstones, tack and tassel, and every polished surface in my company.
The king’s capital sprawled from the mount, surrounded to the south and east by valleys filled with olive trees and cultivated plants green with the new rain and trickle of gutters from the city walls.
From here I had a clear view of the palace rising to the northeast, the verdant rooftop gardens. And above even them, a paved courtyard like a platform to the heavens, the temple thrust up to the sky behind a veil of smoke. Did my eyes play me, or had a purple-clad figure just moved on the roof of that palace?
A large crowd had gathered along the road, the curious coming as close as they dared to my guards, the poorest with hands outstretched. They received the last of our date cakes and bread as children darted from the protective arms of parents to grab sweets from the hands of my girls.
Another company of men waited just before the city gates, clad in leather armor and linen. Tamrin barked an order and my noble company broke forward from the rest of the caravan, fragrant white smoke rising from the censers as Mazor’s voice rang out over his lyre with a beautiful, bell-like clarity I had not heard from him before. Fifty of Tamrin’s men followed, bearing wooden chests and the cages of animals between them on poles.
We passed through the double gate behind this smaller escort and filled the narrow street. All of Jerusalem could easily fit within Marib’s walls, I noted with some satisfaction. But I had not expected the crowding of the houses, the people gathered on the rooftops. The palace complex, larger than my own. I had not expected a temple within the walls of the city, clad in so much gold it glittered in the sun. Even from here I could see the quality of the dressed stone, and envied it. The Phoenicians had served Solomon well.
Men greeted Tamrin as we traveled through the upper city. I realized fully now the kind of alliances he had made here as their faces lit up at sight of him, their eyes shifting invariably back to my men and to me.
I had been curiously observant all this while, listening for words I knew in the language I had practiced with Mazor, wondering where the girls with their earthen jars went to draw their water. But as we entered the royal complex, my heart began to batter my ribs.
Fearless or reckless . . .
In the outer court, palace slaves rushed to couch our camels. I waited as my men shouldered the poles on either side of my palanquin, and Tamrin himself unfastened the mighty girths that attached the litter to Saja’s custom saddle. The palanquin lurched and I clutched its edges—oh, wouldn’t it be fine if Saba’s queen spilled to the ground before she reached the palace steps!
An instant later the entire litter lifted up and I was carried forward. Now I noticed the columns all around the open yard, the fruit trees ready to bloom, the peacock that watched our commotion from between two flowering shrubs. I glanced up at the terraces raining down tendrils of greenery over the walls. Truly, the king had built for himself a paradise, though now I could see where it was unfinished, the western portion farthest from the temple falling off in a ziggurat of stone.
A man more finely dressed than the others came to greet us and, after brief words with Tamrin, led our procession through the inner gate. We filled the stone archway with music, Mazor singing hymns to his god, and entered the palace with incense.
The outer chamber was full of people gathered in knots—rough peasants and well-dressed merchants, scribes and robed priests. All around us, conversations drifted to silence. Ahead of me, the great doors to the king’s hall lay open. Was it there that he had proclaimed the famous judgment over the prostitutes—who were, I was certain, not prostitutes at all, but unmarried women? Countless nights on our journey I had bade Mazor speak of his people’s stories, rituals, and exacting laws, and Tamrin had warned me to never be seen alone in the company of a man—including him. I did not understand this people’s ways, but neither would I give offense.
I had barely registered the open curiosity and widened eyes of those in the outer chamber, hardly begun to assess the Israelite from the foreigner—to determine if here, so close to me, were the astronomers and engineers I so coveted—before we passed through the great doorway.
The hall bloomed to life before me. It was filled with a forest of great cedar pillars. Lamps and incense burners as tall as men stoo
d sentry between them. The floor was inlaid in a zodiac of sunbursts, flowers, and date palms. Perhaps a hundred courtiers crowded the gallery. Military men. Finely dressed nobles. Scholars. I knew the look of a scholar anywhere if only by the frayed hems of his tunic and eyes squinted from too many hours spent peering at scrolls. They all leaned this way and that, craning to see our procession emerging into the hall.
I took this all in with a cursory glance, aware of every opulence, but my eye was fixed at the hall’s apex. There, six broad steps flanked on either side by sentinel lions ascended toward a throne with high, rounded back not unlike the sun disc that had adorned my father’s before he had it changed to the silver moon. And there, seated unmistakably upon it: the man himself.
How strange to lay eyes on him at last!
Perhaps ten years my senior, he wore the same neatly trimmed beard as my musician, Mazor. His eyes glittered from beneath well-formed brows. He was wide across the shoulder, a warrior’s son indeed, and many rings were on his fingers.
The men lowered my palanquin.
Khalkharib and Niman went before me, but only a little ways—why did they not walk directly to the dais? They bowed low, and when they straightened, Niman said, “Solomon, King of Israel, we greet you in the name of your god. We have heard tales of your greatness and have come from the edge of the world to see with our own eyes.”
The king rose. From what I could make out from this vantage, he was tall. His voice, when he spoke, carried easily. “Welcome to Israel, and to Jerusalem, the holy city. In the name of Yaweh, the One That Is, we greet you in peace. Our eyes are glad.”
His voice surprised me. It was not the booming baritone I had expected, but a voice for singing, much like Mazor’s, smooth in timbre.
“I stood atop the roof of my palace this morning,” he said, looking now to his right and then to his left. “And what a marvel I saw! For the first time since the beginning of the world, the sun rose not in the east, but from the south.” He descended a step. “But then I looked again, and it was not the sun, but the moon, risen in the day. I have not in my life seen such a marvel. But tell me, Niman of Sheba, what is the treasure borne on this litter that so graces my hall?”
My heart thrashed in my chest.
Niman bowed low again. “I present to you my kinswoman, the queen and jewel of Saba and the glory of Punt. Bilqis, Daughter of the Moon.”
We had agreed that he would not announce me as the Daughter or High Priestess of Almaqah. We must be politic. Nor was I certain Almaqah had followed me all this way, if he had ever looked upon me at all, though of course I had not said this to Niman.
The king descended the dais. But when he came no farther, Niman hesitated. For a long, awful moment, I waited. Why did the king not come forward to greet me, to extend his hand? But he stood fixed upon the last step of the dais. Though it was cool within the stone court, sweat snaked between my breasts. For once, I praised whoever had first drawn the veil across the face of woman.
A queen adept at pronouncing judgment must be expert at many things, but foremost among them is swift appraisal of any man. I noticed immediately how every face in the hall, which was larger than the Hall of Judgment at Marib, returned to Solomon if only to see what he would do next. In what thrall he held them! In an instant I understood why Tamrin had been devastated to the point of gauntness when the king would not receive him.
Niman finally moved as though having waited precisely for this moment. He came around to the side of the litter where Shara stood frozen. She fairly skittered aside as he held out his hand to assist me. Stepping out, I ducked below the canopy and slowly straightened, the crystals on my chest making music like the trickle of water. Niman moved aside, and as he did I noticed two things at once. The first was that the floor directly before the king, different from the mosaicked rest, was not polished marble as I had thought, but a shallow, square pool filled with water.
The second was that several broad steps down from the king’s throne perched a second, simpler seat. In it sat a woman so quiet and unmoving as to appear a painted statue. She wore linen white to rival my own, and on her head an elaborate black wig.
The Pharaoh’s daughter. His queen.
I stepped forward and the court bowed low, and in the moment that their eyes were not upon me—but the king’s undoubtedly were—I confronted the shallow pool. Such an unfamiliar position, to approach a dais like a supplicant, and not the one seated on the throne!
I thought of Heaven, dancing by light of the fire. I lifted my hems. I heard behind me the swift intake of breath from one of my girls.
The king’s eyes dropped to my toes as I slid out of my slippers. On silent feet I walked forward, the marble floor cool beneath them. Without hesitation, I stepped into the pool. Water engulfed my ankles. My hems trailed, sodden behind me. I never took my eyes off the king even as I noted the quirk at the corner of his mouth, the way his eyes, so carefully fixed upon me for the sake of the others, began to dance. Ten steps. Fifteen.
I stepped from the pool onto the floor directly before the king, my hems trailing me into the water.
He was nearly a head taller than I. His lips, which were generous, turned up in a smile.
“Welcome, Lady Riddle,” he said quietly, for me alone. “The moon and the sun share the sky at last.”
NINETEEN
I praised the luxurious apartment appointed for my use to the king’s steward, Ahishar—how strange these names were to me!—but not overly much. I thanked him for the pitchers of wine and Nubian millet beer, the platters of bread and olives, cheese and boiled eggs of all sizes and colors, the bowl of figs, pomegranates, winter melons, and grapes, thankful to see not a date among them. How tired I was of dates!
I nodded in silent appreciation at the roses on the terrace, the tapestries, and imported linens. I discussed quantities of flour and oil, portions of oxen, goat, honey, wine, and fowl to be delivered to the enormous camp of my caravan outside the city walls. I inquired about the comfort of my nobles and was assured that their apartments were nearby, and was shown which corridors might take me there, and which colonnades led to the hall, the kitchens, and the office of the steward himself.
I instructed Ahishar to speak with Tamrin on the delivery of my gifts for the king’s wives, and the others for his concubines.
“Your door is well guarded, my queen. You must fear no harm while you are here,” he said, glancing at Yafush.
“Thank you. And my eunuch,” I said, emphasizing the word, “will guard me also, as he always does. Meanwhile, a man in my company is in swift need of a physician.” The steward said Tamrin had spoken to him already about his man with the crushed leg and that the physician was with him now.
When at last the arrangements were done and Ahishar left, I gestured for Shara to send the Israelite slaves away.
Outside my apartment, the sounds of Jerusalem wafted up to the terrace: a market in the lower city, dogs barking in the distance, the grinding of a press. The smell of baking bread mingled with roses as the drapes billowed in with the breeze, their hems brushing soundlessly over fine, woolen rugs.
I threw myself down on a sofa, already exhausted though my mission had only just begun.
The girls flitted about the chamber, touching everything, exclaiming over the furs across the bed and the couches, the pillows and silk cushions, the lanterns with their many wicks as though they had never seen such a thing as a lantern before, the ninnies.
Meanwhile, my thoughts were stirred to a froth.
I recalled the ceremony of the hall, the brief procession as the king and I walked together around the pool to sample my gifts. As I stated the full quantity to be transported to his treasury, cellars, kitchens, and temple or into the keeping of his steward, I had treated each as a trifle. And I had taken pleasure in the way Solomon had repeated, as though I had erred, the amount of gold I had brought with me. The way he crouched down in front of the panther to see it like a boy, accepting the dried meat from
its tender—ah, that was clever of Tamrin—to feed it to him, and then nuts for the fickle monkeys. One of them was famous for flinging scat throughout our journey. Luckily that did not happen.
In fact, nothing happened. There was no indication other than the king’s quiet words to me that here stood the same man of the letters I had read so many times. I had expected strange tension between us—of shared secret and unsettled dispute written these years with such poetic wrath. But no. We were two sovereigns surveying the goods of the world, one of us on a diplomatic mission, the other diplomatically receiving his guest. And then he had said that surely after such a journey we must have time to recover and enjoy the best his kingdom had to offer.
“You have come on the perfect day. Tomorrow at sundown the Sabbath begins, a time of contemplation and rest commanded by the I Am, Yaweh. We will see your camp well provisioned and your servants given all that they require to tend you. And we will meet again soon.”
I refused to be so summarily dismissed before his court.
“We require a full five days to tend matters of our own,” I said, “and make sacrifice to our god for our safe journey. I assume there is a place my priest may set up the house of the moon outside your city.”
And so it had begun.
My demand was simple hauteur, though part of it was true; the dark moon would arrive in three days, during which Asm must make his sacrifice for its renewal. Almaqah required it, the fields of the earth required it, and Asm was nothing if not pious.
I told myself five days was nothing; I had six months to win the matter of ships, ports, and terms as well as to prepare and provision the return trip south.
Still, I brooded.
I left my girls to shake out my clothing and went to the terrace bathed in setting sun.