The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen

  He lowered his head to my knees.

  We stayed like that for a very long time. When he lifted his gaze at last, I reached for my veil and let it fall.

  He pulled me to the floor with trembling hands, fingers like the flutter of a bird’s wing against my cheek and over my lips, parting them gently. He traced the line of my jaw for an hour, the side of my neck, the curve of my shoulder. He hesitated and when I did not rebuff him, he touched me softly, as hesitant as a boy and then with the liberty of a lover, caressing me through my gown. His arm wound around my waist, my fingers all the while grazing the stubble of his beard, the arch of his brow, until I laid my lips against his. He sighed and I inhaled the soft sound of revelation.

  I left a short time after, broken and remade, a shattered king in my wake.

  The next day I sent only one message:

  I have slaughtered my animals. I have mixed my wine. I have set my table and sent out my servant girl.

  They were not my words, but his, lifted directly from his writings of Lady Wisdom.

  I sent my girls to the camp to observe the sacrifice. They took with them all of the women of my household; only Shara and Yafush remained behind.

  The king came late that night.

  He entered my apartment with a glance around as though it dwelled not in his palace, but in that of another, foreign world. The carpets of my tent and those he had gifted me were laid across the floor of the outer chamber, the most opulent of them beneath the replica of my throne, which was covered with the leopard skin I sat upon in my palace. Beside my throne on a broad stand sat my markab, symbol of my office.

  The king paused before the ark and then reached out to touch it.

  “This is the markab you rode into the battle for your throne,” he said with wonder, fingers brushing over gold leaf, the fringed end of an ostrich plume, much as mine had the first time I saw it.

  “The very one.” I had not worn my veil, or even all of my jewelry. Such weapons lay forgotten.

  “You told me earlier that your departure was secret. Have your advisors not noticed your ark missing?”

  “There is one similar to it held in my privy chamber, while the true one has traveled with me.”

  He considered this somberly as his hand twined with mine and his gaze drifted to my throne. I had received several visitors and resolved several arguments seated upon it—including that between the injured foreman and the owner of the camel that had kicked him. The foreman would limp forever, but Solomon’s physicians had proved adept; the man had neither died nor lost the leg.

  He guided me toward the alabaster seat. “I want to know what it is like, when you ascend your throne in Saba. I want to see it with my own eyes.”

  I gave a musing smile and walked past him to sit down, straight-backed, my arms on the rests. “The throne in my hall is larger than this one. There is a great silver moon behind it and three steps to the dais before it.” I gestured to the walls with a sweep of my arms. “There are twenty-eight alabaster discs set high into the walls. They shine white as a moon at night . . . and gold as the sun by day, morning to sunset.”

  He stepped back, and then, to my great surprise, knelt. He did not speak, but slowly leaned forward to kiss my toes, to chase the intricate flourish of henna to my ankles. I closed my eyes as his fingers slid inside my sandal to caress that sensitive arch.

  A little later we walked together past the idols of Almaqah, Asherah, Thoth, and Neith to the inner chamber. He paused inside, taking in the sofas with their silk throws and cushions, the ibex incense stand.

  “Where do you sit when you recline?” he said. “Here?” He went to one of two low sofas.

  “Yes. There.”

  “Then I will lay here.”

  “No,” I said. “Lay beside me.”

  We drank wine, his fingers roaming the slope of my shoulder like a gazelle. We sampled a parade of dishes that arrived from the kitchens with the food taster, Solomon eating from my hand, I from his.

  “And now I forget the rest of the world,” the king murmured, his face turned against my hair, inhaling the perfume of it. “Day becomes night. The ibex and lion feed together.”

  “There are no feasts, there is no gold . . . There is only a garden,” I said.

  “I am a shepherd, as my father was.” He tilted up my chin and kissed my ear.

  “And I a shepherdess.”

  “And your dark-skinned people come not from a world away,” he whispered, “but the Valley of Shunem. Do you know I have imagined your face for years, both wanting and not wanting to see it, in the case that it was not as I envisioned?”

  “And here I am. And my face is as it is.”

  He traced my cheek. “It is more lovely even than I imagined, and I feel I have known it always . . . and that it knows me.”

  He heaved a great sigh and lowered his head to my neck.

  He wept that night in my arms, and I, later as he slept.

  TWENTY-SIX

  This was my world: the smolder of those eyes, turned in my direction. Perfumed sheets, laid fresh upon my bed. The roses of that garden wafting to my window, saying, come.

  I no longer noticed the ever-present smell of burning meat; it was lost on me altogether as flowers flooded my chamber.

  By mid-morning, his latest poem was delivered to my door.

  You have captivated my heart with one glance of your eyes,

  With one jewel of your necklace.

  How much better is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your oils than any spice.

  Mine flew back to him in return:

  While the king was on his couch, my fragrance was nard.

  My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh that lies between my breasts.

  My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms.

  I sat beside him in his hall, where my throne had been transferred. I took dinner with his advisors, all of whom glanced between us, the king saying often in their presence, “But what does Sheba think of such-and-such a matter?” until the eyes of the most astute—and most careful—councilors began to look of their own accord to me.

  We sat as kings in his privy chamber and heard the case of Jeroboam, condemning the noxious fruit of rebellion’s seed. I was there when the boy’s poor mother, a widow, was brought before the king for questioning.

  We denounced Egypt together for the housing of his enemies—Jeroboam, and before that, Hadad, who reigned now in Aram and with whom Solomon had made peace by marrying his daughter.

  New reports arrived from Hazor about another skirmish, this time on the northern border with Rezon of Damascus. We debated what was to be done.

  But at night, we forgot it all.

  He came to my bed as supplicant. I came bearing tribute. He demanded and I pulled away. He whispered and I went into his arms.

  “My mother was a conqueror of kings. I disdained him for that, years after he was gone. But no more.”

  We spoke of gods and crops, of sea routes that would take a year and a half in the going out and again in the coming in. The conversations he would have with Baal-eser on my behalf. The ships that would sail to my ports. The way we would shape the world.

  I sang the songs of my mother, and he, the hymns of his father. He whispered stories of his eldest brother, whom he worshipped as a boy—Adonijah, whom he had been forced to kill.

  And for the first time in nearly five years, I spoke the name of Maqar, and wept.

  “I, too, love this Maqar, though I never knew him,” he said. “He died for my queen, and because of him, I am with her now. We will send a sacrifice to both our gods, in gratitude.” We sent agents to the market to buy animals the next day, and the smoke of them went up on our altars. And I could be grateful at last for something bitter in my mouth turned sweet after so long.

  I passed the afternoons in the heady languor of sleepiness, napping as larks sang outside my window, bathing as the sun canted toward the west.

  At night, I ascended the stair to the
terrace or sent for him to come to the bower of my apartment. Come to my garden and eat its choicest fruits.

  We were shameless as children, brazen as we dared. We bathed in the middle of the night on his terrace. We sent secret glances across the table at state dinners. We stole through the tunnels and out of the city to lay like divine consorts of antiquity.

  He came down to my camp on the next dark moon, bringing animals with the servants in his company. There he observed the ritual of Almaqah as a still-troubled Asm and I presided over it both. It would be my last ritual to the silent god.

  “How terrible and beautiful and magnificent you are,” he whispered in my tent that night, long after the drums had ceased. “And how you have enchanted me. What power do you wield, Daughter of the Moon?”

  “The power of wish,” I said.

  “Do you believe in such things?”

  “What is a wish, but a prayer? A man stole into my chamber when I was twelve. He took me by force. And again, on another occasion. And another.” He leaned up, face stark. “I prayed for deliverance. And the wadi flooded and washed him away. I dedicated myself to the god in gratitude. But I think I am barren.”

  He clasped me more tightly then than he ever had. “My poor love! Were that man alive, I would see him suffer. And to think I bid you come to me that first night alone. I curse myself that I ever dealt harshly with you. Forgive me. Forgive me,” he said, holding me to his chest.

  “You never laid a hand on me.”

  “I should have been gentle with you from the first pen stroke.”

  “I would never have responded.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “So you see, I do believe. I prayed to the moon to deliver me. I prayed for freedom, and my father sent me to Punt. I was happy for years. I lived in love. But I wonder if a part of me prayed to be queen. I wonder now, if our souls are all-seeing, and if mine saw that I would come here. And if it knew I would not come if Maqar still lived . . .” I drew away to look at him in the lamplight. “The first time I wrote to you, a part of me wished for you. And the first time I set eyes on you, I wanted you. And here you are. But the god I dedicated myself to did not dedicate himself to me. So which god is it that has given you to me . . . and will soon make us part?”

  “The same that will make us whole again,” he said softly. “We worship the same god, after all,” he said.

  “Which god is that?”

  “His name is love.”

  Solomon, my poet.

  After a time, I quit summoning him to my apartment, where my girls and the two lesser wives were, and had my things sent up to his.

  We lolled in bed late into the morning. He kissed my navel and I compared him to the smooth alabaster of a fertility statue. He laughed at that and pretended to dress in shame.

  And then we went away for a few hours to be king and queen, composing poetry in our heads.

  We did not talk about the coming winter, even as our days took on a frenetic pace and summer careened toward fall.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Khalkharib and Niman paid me a visit during the festival of trumpets, for which pilgrims had been swarming the city for days. The king had gone to the temple; I would not see him until tonight. The ram’s horns had sounded every morning by then for a month, jarring me awake from the king’s arms more than once, but having no such effect on the king, who snored softly through the loudest of them as the smell of baking bread wafted from every oven in the city.

  I received them in my apartment, the table set with quince and honey from the king’s kitchens. It was the first time I had been in the apartment in days, and the first time I had sat in council with them in many more.

  “My queen, we are troubled,” Niman said.

  “Why should you be?” I said lightly. But I had expected their censure and received them with reservation. I had attended the king’s hall and privy chamber for weeks. Obviously the king had agreed to the treaty. With ships in hand, there was no reason to loiter here. The tribesmen of the camp were restless, and still I commanded we stay.

  “There are . . . unkind rumors circulating about you and the king—circulating repeatedly and more fiercely among the pilgrims, who increase by the day.”

  “There are always rumors. There are rumors about me in Saba as well.”

  Niman shook his head. “My queen, this is a different place from Saba. Our ways are not their ways.”

  “I am well aware of that,” I snapped. “Is this what you have come to tell me?” I glanced at Khalkharib, who stared grimly at the place where my throne had stood before it was moved.

  “The king has many wives, who have many servants—servants who talk and spread their mistresses’ jealous gossip. And there are many priests and members of council who chafe at the presence of a foreign sovereign with more influence over the king than they. This is not a country given to foreign authority—least of all a queen’s. You have become the favorite target of threatening conversations. Though they may nod and smile in the council chamber, you have no friends in those chambers but the king himself.”

  “How would you know? You are not privy to the king’s council.”

  “We have gone into the city under guise and have heard it for ourselves,” Khalkharib said finally. “The people in the market speak against the Sabaean harlot, and call your guard ‘the whore’s men’ in the streets.”

  My face flushed even as cold prickled down my back.

  “They dare!”

  I got to my feet and paced away, smoothing back my hair. “Cowards will always speak crudely against women of power. Do you think this is the first time mouths have rattled about me? Do you think I give two nits what they say? They are not satisfied with the king’s marriages, though they receive every benefit of them. These are a people used to scandal, who seek it out and make morality tales of even the union that produced their beloved king, appointed by their god,” I said angrily. “Imbued, even, by their god with the wisdom of Yaweh!”

  “These people fear that same god will visit retribution on them for the actions of their king,” Niman pressed.

  “My queen, I am not certain that he is as well loved as you may hear from the sycophants in the palace,” Khalkharib said.

  “They dare not speak against him.”

  “Not publicly. But they grow bolder after Jeroboam.”

  “My queen, it is clear he favors you,” Niman said. “And Saba is the benefactor of such favor. He is obviously charmed by you. But of course he is—Saba is the richest nation in the world.”

  I laughed. “Just weeks ago neither one of you could say enough of this king. I saw the way you devoured with greedy eye the gift of his horses, and you, Niman, the gold of his chariots. Are you not the same kinsman who begged to arrange my marriage to this same king, who saw in him every opportunity?”

  “My queen, if you would marry him, then marry him,” Khalkharib said. “But you must silence this scandal. Not only for Saba’s sake, but for the safety of those in our camp.”

  I wheeled back. “What are you talking about?”

  “Rocks and garbage have been thrown at the camp under cover of dark for weeks now. And just last night a group of northern tribesmen tried to rouse our guard into a scuffle. They injured three of Tamrin’s men.”

  “What?”

  “If you would not marry him, then let us leave soon. Clearly you have in hand, or at least on promise, that for which we have come!”

  I had been avoiding thought of the coming rains, the days as they grew shorter, telling myself that the night merely came sooner with more hours to spend with the king. Of course it was a lie.

  “We will not leave until winter. There is business to be finished yet,” I said, chewing a nail.

  “There is talk that you have all but moved yourself to his rooms,” Khalkharib said. “And the entire court knows you sit beside him in his hall—not as though you are a visiting sovereign, but as though you were his queen!”

  I wanted to
shout “I am!”

  I was more queen to him than any of his treaty wives! Without marriage, without dowry, without the uniting of nations. More than any woman who had ever borne him a son, if only because I had not done any of these things.

  What would they think if they knew how we conspired late at night to shape the world? How we would draw Hidush and Babylonia to us in treaty even as we staked out our share of the road that winds to the far silk lands? How we would hamstring Edom between us for the sake of my caravans and his ships moored in the gulf . . .

  “Where have you been as I have been sitting in the king’s hall in negotiations and in council? And what care is it to you what transpires in these hallways? I make no account to you. I said we would come for ports and ships. And I accomplish so much more. You dare censure me?”

  “That is not all,” Niman said. “There is talk, too, that you have denounced Egypt together for harboring the king’s enemies.”

  “Of course!”

  “Do you know that the Egyptian queen has started a campaign of vile whispers against you in retaliation?”

  This startled me.

  “Since when do you harken—or stoop—to women’s gossip?” I said. “Or even market gossip for that matter? No doubt much the same is said of me in the markets of my own capital, and among my own nobles’ wives.” I looked pointedly at each of them. “Winter will come soon enough. Concern yourselves with provisioning the caravan, because it will be a long journey south.”

  I sent word to the king’s steward the moment I sent them away. I was shaken, worried for the safety of my camp, anxious at Solomon’s absence, and unwilling that the world enter these privy walls. For the moon to set or the sun to rise on another fleeting day.

  Within hours, additional guards had been posted outside the Sabaean camp. I was consoled, for the moment—until I arrived in the king’s apartment. He caught me up in his arms, but his expression was torn.

  “I cannot stay here tonight,” he said.

  “Then I will go where you go.”

  “I have not gone to Tashere in weeks. She is angry, and jealous.”