Harvest of Gold (44 page)

“Sarah. Sarah … I love you.”

“
What did you say
?”

“I love you, sweetheart.”

A heavy silence met his hard-won declaration. For a moment his heart sank. Would she reject him? Would she walk away now that he had bared his soul?

Her voice sounded brittle when at last she spoke. “Say it again.”

With sudden insight he recognized that it was not coldness that drove her, but doubt. After hammering her month after month with his dispassionate assurance that he would never love her, she could not take in his declaration. He was not a poetic man. But for her sake, he tried.

“I want to grow old with you. I want your face to be the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night. I want to feel my children growing inside you. Sarah, my love. I want to worship the Lord with you, and hear your laughter until the day I die.”

“What changed?” she asked, her voice unsteady. “You said yourself that you could not feel that way toward me. Are you driven by duty to say these things now? You called me sweetheart before, but didn’t mean it. Is your new faith the source of this pretty speech?”

“Of course not! Could I lie to please the Lord? You should ignore everything I said before. I was an idiot. I meant it when I called you sweetheart. I meant that and more.”

Her smile was sad. “I know I’m not pretty enough for you. You would have chosen someone like Roxanna as your wife if you had been free to make your own decision. Someone athletic and stunning. Someone highborn, like you.”

Darius wrapped his hand around her forearm and pulled her toward him. His face contorted with frustration. “I could have married Roxanna years ago if I had wanted. Which I didn’t.”

“But you didn’t want me either.”

“I wanted you almost from the start. I think I fell in love with you before we arrived at Ecbatana. I was just too dense to admit it to myself. Sarah, my darling, I have not desired another woman but you since then.”

He saw doubt in her eyes, and beyond it, the lack of confidence that drove it. He had caused some of that insecurity. He ached when he thought that his own behavior had diminished her ability to receive his love. To trust it.

He pulled her against his chest, his movements laced with tenderness. He kissed her forehead, her chin, her neck, her cheeks. Desire washed over him in powerful waves. He had always wanted her with an intensity that seemed to grow regardless of their circumstances. But now, he tried to instill into her the reality of his feelings. It wasn’t just her body that he wanted. It was all of her.

“God gave me the desire of my heart when I married you, Sarah, and I did not know it. He gave me a marriage of love. The Lord made my most cherished dream come to pass, and I was too ornery to notice. I don’t deserve such lovingkindness from the Lord. You are my gift from Him. And I aim to keep you, my darling. And to cherish you until you believe me.”

He moved away from her and examined her expression. She was smiling, her face illuminated with an inner light that made his heart pound. “You really love me, don’t you?” she whispered.

“With all my soul.” He kissed her until he felt dizzy with wanting.

“I love you, Darius.”

As he drew her hard against him, their child poked him with such a firm thrust of a little limb that he felt it through his clothing. Sarah made a short sound of protest.

“Are you all right? That must have hurt.”

“He was just making his approval known.” She laid her head against his chest. And then she called him
sweetheart
, which she had never done before. Darius decided that he would not grow tired of hearing that particular endearment until the day he died.

How could one small woman bear so much pain? Darius wondered. If he saw her swallow one more scream, he would become unhinged. He had suffered numerous injuries in battle—knife stabs, dislocated shoulders, head wounds, broken ribs. Weathering them had been easy. But he found Sarah’s suffering unbearable. She had been in labor over one whole day and night. And still she pushed and heaved. And still the child would not come.

In between the ravages of pain, sometimes she lost consciousness, a mercy for which he was grateful. At other times, she vomited with a violence that made him wince.

Lysander had found an experienced midwife who came with glowing recommendations from the lords of Judah, and they both attended Sarah. Neither seemed particularly worried. To judge by their expressions, watching a woman being torn asunder by contractions was the most prosaic thing the world had to offer. Darius had learned to keep his mouth shut in the early stages of the birthing process. Lysander had threatened to expel him from the room if he did not stop making annoying comments. As it was, he had had to argue his way into being allowed to stay for the labor.

His fingers had long since lost feeling as Sarah pressed them when the pains came upon her, which were closer and closer together.

“Good one, Sarah,” the midwife cried. “One more like that and his head will be out.”

Darius snapped into focus. He no longer cared about the birth of the child. He only wanted Sarah to be free of this infernal anguish. Sarah screamed. It wasn’t a human sound. Darius felt his whole body go rigid. Perspiration drenched every orifice. He realized that he was praying with the desperation of a petrified man. Darius Pasargadae, scion of the great king Cyrus, was shaking with fear.

“His head is out!” Lysander shouted. “The hardest part is over. One more push now, Sarah.”

Sarah groaned, her voice hoarse. She had been kneeling on the mattress, Pari behind her to support her back. Her body bent over, and she pushed. The midwife had her hands on her belly, helping the body’s natural contractions. Darius’s eyes grew large as he saw a bluish grey creature emerge from his wife’s body. Half his mind was captured by the image of the child, which lay as still as a wooden statue in Lysander’s large hands, and the other half grappled horrified with the large gush of fresh blood which suddenly soaked the sheets beneath Sarah. She collapsed backward into Pari’s arms. With exquisite care, the handmaiden laid her mistress on the pillows behind her.

Sarah’s lips had turned a purplish hue. She was as still as the child she had birthed. “Sarah!” Darius cried, and laid a desperate hand against the side of her neck to ensure she lived. He felt the thud of her pulse. It was weaker than it should have been.

He could tell that it took all her strength to open her eyes. “My baby,” she whispered. “Why isn’t he crying?”

Darius looked over to where Lysander held the child by the ankles, upside down. He slapped its back once. Then again. Nothing. Darius’s heart sank. The child was dead. Lord have mercy! After all this, the child was dead.

And then suddenly, without warning, the baby took a breath—its first upon the earth.

“It’s all right, Sarah. He breathes. He lives! We have a boy. A son!”

As soon as he had taken that initial breath, their son began to wail, making his displeasure known to everyone in the room. Darius didn’t begrudge his vociferous objections. He would not have enjoyed the indignity of being held upside down, and the additional insult of a none-too-gentle slap, either.

Darius spent a short moment thanking God for that miracle before returning his gaze to the midwife who had been tending Sarah. Once the entire afterbirth had been pushed out, the midwife did what she could to stop the unnatural flow of blood. She caught his distraught gaze and gave him a reassuring smile.

“She’s fine now. The bleeding has slowed. We’ll have to watch over her for the next few days. She’s bound to be frail at first. But the immediate danger has passed, and with proper care, your wife should recover and give you many more children.”

Darius leaned against the wall, too weak to stand without help.

“You want to hold your son? He’s a noisy little Persian,” Lysander said.

Darius saw the longing look in Sarah’s eyes. “Give him to his mother, first.”

Lysander had washed the babe with warm water and salt and rubbed olive oil into his skin after cutting and knotting the umbilical cord. He placed the wriggling bundle, cleaned now and pink, covered in soft cotton swaddling, onto Sarah’s chest. Her arms went around him weakly. Tears streamed down her face as she beheld him. “He’s your very image, Darius,” she murmured.

Darius studied the wrinkled face surrounded by the thick shock of dark hair and kept his remark to himself. The babe stopped his wailing as soon as his mother’s arms wrapped around him. His son had good taste.

Pari, who was quietly cleaning away the bloody sheets, whispered, “The Lord be praised!” She had come to believe in the Lord as the true living God the day Ezra had read the Law. Darius smiled at her and nodded agreement.

He drew a gentle finger down the side of his son’s face. The tiny mouth gathered and made a suckling motion. He felt a powerful tug on his heart. His soul rose up with the desire to protect this helpless creature against every danger.

“Your boy is hungry,” the midwife said. She arranged him against Sarah’s breast. Darius looked at the unfamiliar scene, fascinated. His wife held on to the baby with an emotional strength that overcame her physical weakness. Pride washed through Darius. Pride that this woman and this child belonged to him. And then he was humbled by the thought that God had chosen to gift him with both.

He bent over and kissed Sarah on the crown of her head. “I love you,” he whispered. “I love you more than I can say.” For the first time since he was a child, a sense of completeness filled him. He felt utterly at peace. In spite of not knowing how to meet the challenges the future would offer him and his family, he felt bathed in the assurance of the Lord.

He thought of the walls of Jerusalem, and how they had been rebuilt in spite of incessant danger and threat. How the ravages of the past had been overcome by the persistent faithfulness of one man. It occurred to him at that moment, when exhaustion still had ahold of him, that God had restored his own life no less than He had Jerusalem. Nehemiah had once called the walls around Jerusalem a harvest of gold.

Darius looked at his little son, eating his fill at his wife’s breast, and acknowledged that God had given him a harvest, as well.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

According to some archaeologists, during the time of Nehemiah the population of Jerusalem might have been as low as several hundred inhabitants. Other scholars estimate as many as three or four thousand. Certainly, the city had shrunk substantially since the days of Solomon, and I try to capture that tragic loss in the plot.

We are unable to fully reconstruct the location of the walls in Nehemiah’s day or even to know what the walls would have looked like. Many of the landmarks mentioned in Nehemiah’s letter were destroyed during Herod the Great’s renovations four hundred years later. My description of the walls is based on a combination of archaeological discoveries from that period, biblical narrative, and of course, literary license.

According to the lunar calendar, in the year 445 BC the month of Nisan occurred between April and May, which was unusually late. This means that Nehemiah must have accomplished the arrangements for travel from Susa in an astonishingly rapid manner and arrived in Jerusalem earlier than the average caravan would have.

As always, where possible, I have tried to remain faithful to history. The plot on Artaxerxes’ life is inspired by two unrelated stories from the Achaemenid period as reported by Greek historians. In one case, Histiaeus, planning insurrection against the Persians, sends a secret message to his nephew, tattooing the words on his slave’s shaved head to prevent discovery. In another, the plot to kill the king involves a knife that is poisoned only on one side. I combined the two stories in order to create the fictional plot against Artaxerxes. Pyrus is also a figment of my imagination.

The description of Megabyzus’s rebellion against Artaxerxes, and the king’s benevolent response, is historical and based loosely on Ctesias’s account. It seems likely that Megabyzus really was the satrap of the Trans-Euphrates at the time of this novel.

The education of aristocratic Persian boys, as well as the role of magi in their instruction, has been captured by a number of ancient writers. According to one Greek historian, boys did not live in palace dormitories until the age of sixteen or seventeen. Others don’t distinguish the age the boys were sent to live in the palace, only the fact that their education started between the ages of five and seven, and that they lived in the palace while being educated. The plot makes use of both these details. I found it fascinating that the magi were not only the astrologers, philosophers, teachers, and scientists of their age, but also the seekers of highest truth. To several such men, the Truth they sought with such passion would one day be revealed in a simple manger.

A number of early rabbinic scholars claim that Nehemiah was a eunuch. Most historians find no evidence of this assertion. I have portrayed him as a single man, because the Bible mentions no wife. That he was an extraordinary man—at once courtier, project manager, politician, and military leader—one cannot doubt. Few in history equal his perseverance and faith. I chose to loosely base one of his proclamations on a speech given by Winston Churchill in the early days of WWII, because I think the two men would have understood the concept of working against great odds while holding on to the hope of victory.