A Reluctant Queen (39 page)
There was nothing she could find to say in the face of &7 such blind optimism.
Mordecai squeezed her hand. “Ahasuerus will not stand in the way of your religious practices, Esther. I’m sure of it. He may not be a Jew, but he is a good man. He has impressed me.”
Esther regarded her uncle’s face and a flicker of humor curled her lips at his unconscious arrogance. She thought of how Ahasuerus would look if she told him that he, the Great King of Persia, should feel deeply honored that he had made a good impression on his Jewish underling. She said, “Thank you, Uncle Mordecai.”
“He is a good king.” Mordecai added an additional approbation.
“I think so too,” Esther said.
“So, then. You will be restored to your proper identity, and we will have gotten rid of Haman, who would always have been a threat to Jewish interests. Things could not have worked out better.” Mordecai beamed at her. “You have been the means by which the Lord worked His will, Esther. I am so proud of you.”
She said, “Uncle Mordecai, has it ever occurred to you that if you had not provoked Haman by refusing to bow to him, he would never have done this terrible thing?”
The smile left Mordecai’s face, leaving it grave. “Esther, it is just not in me to bow to an Edomite.”
She shook her head at the hopelessness of men. “And of course it was not in Haman to ignore your taunt.”
“They want a seaport, Esther, and they will not be content until they have pushed us out of the way to get one. If we regard them as anything less than enemies, we will be making a grave mistake.”
Esther sighed. “It seems to me such a pity that we cannot all live together in peace.” She looked at her uncle’s hawk-like face. “But I suppose that is a woman’s dream.”
His expression softened. “It is a splendid dream, chicken. Keep it always in your heart.”
Unfortunately, that is where it will stay
, she thought sadly.
“Don’t look so downcast! Smile and be glad! You are a heroine, Esther.” Mordecai grinned at her, a light-hearted, youthful grin, and she found herself smiling back. She was happy that her uncle was safe.
“Have you heard that Grandfather was ready to come to your rescue?” she asked.
“No. What do you mean?”
Esther told him what Arses had done.
Mordecai looked a little chagrined. “I have never liked Arses, but I always thought him an honorable man.”
“He said much the same about you,” Esther returned with amusement.
“Hmm.” Mordecai ran his finger up and down his nose.
“Grandfather probably still does not realize that he missed Ahasuerus. We have sent messengers to bring him back. When he does return to Susa, Uncle Mordecai, I think you must go to thank him.”
Mordecai looked gloomy. “I suppose I must.”
“He was outraged at the proclamation. He said it would be a blot forever on the name of Persia if such a massacre were allowed to occur.”
“Any honorable man would feel thus,” Mordecai said, but he looked more cheerful. “Certainly I will go to see him, chicken. Now that your whole heritage is known, it would be foolish of us to continue to be at odds with each other.”
Esther smiled. “It would make me happy if you and Grandfather could become friends.”
“Friends might be a little too much to ask, Esther,” Mordecai replied cautiously.
“Not even to please your heroine?”
He laughed and leaned down to kiss her on the forehead. “To please my heroine, I will even try to become friends with Arses.”
She reached out and gave him a brief, fierce hug. “I am so glad to see you, Uncle Mordecai!”
He looked down at her, his expression suddenly concerned. “You look exhausted, Esther. I want you to get some rest.”
“I will try,” she said.
“Don’t worry about Ahasuerus. Blame everything on me. It doesn’t matter if I lose my position as Head Treasurer. You are the one who is important now.”
She smiled mistily. “Thank you, Uncle Mordecai.”
He nodded, kissed her again on the forehead, and left the room.
They had offered to allow Haman to see his wife and children, and he had refused. He knew they would be all right. Ahasuerus was not one to seek revenge upon the innocent. And there was nothing he wished to say to them.
He was already dead. His life had ended in the queen’s room some five hours earlier. Deprived of the light of Ahasuerus’ regard, he was destroyed as surely as a plant would be destroyed without the life-giving warmth of the sun. Not even the sight of the enormous scaffold caused his heart to hurry its heavy rhythm. It plodded dutifully onward—
thump, thump, thump
—not realizing yet that the organism it sought to sustain was already dead.
There was a crowd gathered around the scaffold and it fell oddly silent as the execution procession approached from the palace. Haman walked in the midst of his guards as if he saw and heard nothing.
Coes himself had taken charge of this duty, and he signaled now that the prisoner should be brought ahead. Haman scarcely felt the guards’ hands upon his shoulders as he walked forward steadily and climbed the high ladder to the top of the scaffold.
When they put the rope about his neck, he did not close his eyes, but stared unblinkingly toward the Eastern Gate of the palace, clearly visible to him from his high perch. Then the trap door beneath him gave way, and he fell to his death.
T
hat night Esther lay alone in bed, her hands folded over her rounded stomach. She was exhausted, but she could not sleep. She had been waiting for hours, but still he had not come.
The easy tears filled her eyes. What was going to happen to them? Ahasuerus might put her away, as he had Vashti. He could also let her stay but erect a barrier between them, the same protective barrier that kept him safely separated from everyone else. And that she could not bear. The loneliness of living with him and being shut out from him would be almost as terrible as not seeing him at all.
She had heard the courtiers who undressed the king leave long ago and so she knew he was there in his bedroom. Her heart had been bleeding for him ever since Mordecai had told her of Haman’s execution.
Father in Heaven
, she prayed.
He has just executed his closest friend. I do not want him to bear this alone. Please. He cannot be left to bear this alone. Send him to me. I beg You, send him to me
.
With every particle of her being, she longed to cross that hallway and go to him, but she knew that she could not. Because of her deception, she could not be the one to go to him. It was he who must come to her, and he had not done so.
The small oil lamp that she had told Luara to keep lit was still burning. Esther blinked her tears away and stared at it. The minutes went by and the lamp began to flicker. Was this how their love was going to end? Was it going to flicker out, like the lamp? She shut her eyes so she wouldn’t see it happen.
There was the murmur of voices in the corridor outside her room and Esther’s eyes flew open. She stared at the door, almost forgetting to breathe, she was willing so hard for it to open. Finally it did, and Ahasuerus came quietly in. He closed the door behind him, glanced at the flickering lamp and then at the bed. He said softly, “Esther? Are you awake?”
“Yes.” She pushed some pillows behind her back and sat up. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Nor could I.” He did not come over to the bed, however, but went to sit upon the stool in front of her dressing table, putting the whole width of the room between them.
“He is dead,” he said in a curiously flat voice. “I killed him.”
“I know, Ahasuerus,” she said softly.
“I didn’t even give him a trial.”
“It wasn’t necessary. He admitted his guilt.”
“I liked him so much.” He was still speaking in that same flat voice. He clasped his hands between his knees and stared down at them. “When I was newly appointed king in Babylon—I was so young, Esther, only eighteen!—Haman made himself my friend. He helped me, guided me through the intrigues the satrap set to catch me out. It was largely because of him that I was able to be successful there.”
“He revered you,” Esther said.
“I thought he did.” The note in his voice wrenched her heart. “Obviously I was wrong.”
“You weren’t wrong, Ahasuerus,” she said gently. “I remember the expression on his face when you drank the medicine that Xerxes told you Haman had poisoned. Love shone out of his eyes when he looked at you that day, my lord.”
“It wasn’t love.” His voice hardened slightly. “How can you say he loved me when he did such a terrible thing to me?”
She was quiet for a moment, thinking of how she should frame her reply. Finally she said slowly, “I think he was jealous, Ahasuerus. And jealousy can make a person do terrible things, things they would not normally dream of doing.”
“He had no possible cause for jealousy.” Ahasuerus raised his face so that the lamplight flickered off his hair and skin. “I made him my Grand Vizier, Esther! I gave him the highest post in the empire. Whom could he have been jealous of?”
“I have been thinking about this ever since I learned of his plan, my lord.” She rested her arms on her up-drawn knees and leaned toward him. “He was jealous of me, for one. I never understood why he disliked me, but now I think it was because he saw that you cared for me, and he was jealous. I think he came to be so jealous of Uncle Mordecai that he was pushed into doing this dreadful thing.”
She could see his puzzlement from all the way across the room. “Why would he be jealous of Mordecai? Because I made him my Head Treasurer? But Haman was still his superior, Esther.”
“I don’t think Haman was interested in political power, my lord. It was Ahasuerus the man he cared about. He saw that you liked Uncle Mordecai, whom he considered his enemy, and he was jealous.”
“By all the devils in the underworld, was I to like no one but Haman?”
She sighed. “I think that is exactly what he wanted, my lord. He wanted to be the sun in your life, the only one you trusted. And Uncle Mordecai’s being a Jew made it that much worse. There is no trust between the Jews and the Edomites.”
“But to send out such a decree! He must have been mad.”
“I think he probably was, my lord,” she said somberly.
For a long moment he said nothing. Then, abruptly, he put his face in his hands. His aching voice came from behind his cramped fingers. “He was the last person I would have ever thought would betray me.”
The pain in his voice broke her heart. She got out of bed and crossed the distance between them to stand close before him as he sat there on her dressing table stool. She didn’t touch him but searched for words that might bring him some measure of comfort. “He wouldn’t have seen it as a betrayal, my lord. He would have thought he was protecting you. I think right and wrong were all twisted up in his mind.” She looked down at his bowed, burnished head and said quietly, “Ahasuerus, none of this was your fault.”
He reached for her blindly, wrapping his arms around her waist and pressing his face into the hollow of her neck. “I killed him, Esther,” he groaned. “I killed him.”
He was shivering. She held him close and rested her cheek against his smooth hair. She felt his anguish and his sorrow resonate in her own being, but all the while a part of her rejoiced. He had not turned away from her in his hour of need, and that knowledge was ineffably sweet.
She felt something hot and wet soak into her nightgown and gathered him even closer. “There was nothing else you could have done. He had committed an unpardonable crime.”
“That doesn’t make it feel any better.”
“I know, my love. I know.”
The baby kicked. He felt it and lifted his head, heedless of the tears streaming down his face. “What was that?”
There were tears in her own eyes, but she smiled through them. “Your son. Or daughter, as the case may be.”
He reached up a hand and laid it gently on her stomach. The baby kicked again, and Ahasuerus smiled. “Life,” he said.
She put her hand over his. “Yes.”
“Esther . . .” He looked up into her face.