The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (14 page)

“What can a king like Hiram of Phoenicia possibly gain from a fledgling kingdom that he sends so many men and builds ships and a temple for this king?” I said, incredulous. It gnawed at me. The Phoenician king would not give so generously to one obviously green—and doomed to failure, now that I remembered his nameless, faceless god. Why did so many, if the tales were true at all,
seek ties to this king that they would send their daughters to him in droves?

“Solomon has ceded a territory to Hiram in payment, as the Israelite kingdom lies entirely along the eastern border of Phoenicia. And he sends great sums of wheat, barley, and olive oil to Hiram’s table, as the Phoenicians cannot feed themselves.” He shook his head. “He has also added forty new wives to his harem since last I set foot in Jerusalem.”

“
Forty?
”

“Indeed. And now that the temple is finished, he has begun work on a great palace for himself, and another for the Pharaoh’s daughter.”

I stared at him, wondering if it was possible that the trader could embellish so much.

“My queen, on my oath, all I say is true.”

“Come now. Let us be frank. How is it even possible for one man to lie with so many women? Forgive me, but now your tale stretches even the limit of exaggeration.”

“I do not doubt they see him little, his chief wives receiving the majority of his, ah, attentions. These brides are given—and received—with dowries that specifically expand his reach and the security of his highways, or in exchange for men to build his outlying cities, or to cement the peace of neighboring tribes. He is not obsessed with the getting of sons, this king, but with the expansion of his wealth and trade. He has an enemy in Damascus who stands against him, harassing his northern frontier—”

“You said his northern border stretched as far as the Euphrates.”

“Yes, well, that is now in dispute, it seems. His territory seems to stretch far northeast of Damascus, but the city itself has been taken by Rezon, the new Syrian king. And so he has fortified his chief cities even more and begun the building of one even in the desert.”

So. All was not so perfect in this infant kingdom. I leaned back again as Tamrin paused, my mind in a roil.

Egypt bordered this Israelite kingdom to the south, Phoenicia to the north and west. As allies, what could the three of them not accomplish? Such nations had formed brotherhoods before—Egypt chief among them—for the exchange of gifts and envoys and marriage, and the defense of one another. Saba had her own ties with Egypt and markets in Jerusalem and Tyre, but here was a king who called the Pharaoh “father” and put the food on Hiram’s table! Even a weakened Egypt had found a way to marry into power, and a king to secure her trade routes.

I pursed my lips. Here I was, pressured at every turn to marry a single man. Would that I could make as many treaties by marriage and never give up a portion of my throne! Yafush had been right all those months ago: a woman could not rule like a man.

No, we must be far more clever.

“The short of it, my queen, is this: He is a king who knows no other outcome but that he gets his way—not by war, as with his father—but by commerce.”

“What are you saying?”

“My queen, he quizzed me at length about you and your court and your judgments over your people.” Tamrin hesitated then, shifting uncomfortably where he sat.

“And so?”

“Then he all but commanded the appearance of your emissary in court, along with Saba’s homage.”

I locked him in a gaze then of such frost that he fell forward onto his knees, bowing his forehead to the ground.

“Oh,
did he
?”

NINE

A
woman can stew a great length in the space of a year. A queen, even more—especially when she bears a grudge.

And the fact that I did bothered me. Because it lent all the tales of this king, the Israelite, credence.

If even the remotest part of the account was true, particularly the tight alliances with Phoenicia and Egypt—with whom he was literally in bed—I knew I could not afford to stand by silently. One twitch by any one of these nations might affect the security of Saba’s routes or her markets.

I called Tamrin to my court six times in the next eight months. It was his off year, when other, smaller caravans carried many of the same goods north without the prestige of the queen’s chief trader, who ventured farther and stayed longer in each stop along the way. One winter to depart on the long journey of months. Months spent in the oases en route, in Jerusalem, Damascus, perhaps. And the return journey of months again. And then, after almost a year of rest, the departure in winter again.

The first time I summoned him, he presented me with a new scroll. “The latest writings of the king,” he said. He gave me also a small wonder: a statue of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, seated on
a throne and holding a bowl.

“Is this she, whom the Phoenicians venerate?” I said.

“Yes, the goddess of fertility, sex, and war.” Tamrin paused. “I suppose it is all the same thing.”

I laughed.

“But you did not go as far as Phoenicia . . . ?”

He shook his head. “I acquired this in Jerusalem, where she is also known.”

“By the people of the God That Is?” I said, with mock scandal.

“There are more gods in that city than temples in Saba,” he said.

“But what is she doing? Is she divining?” I had never looked at a bowl the same since that day in the clearing.

“No. You will see. In this hollow you pour warm milk. Try it, and there will be a wonder.”

That night I read the latest proverbs of the Israelite. Of Lady Wisdom and her counterpart, Folly. How he vexed me.

Idly, I considered the statue of Astarte and asked Shara to fetch warmed milk. She hovered over me as I poured it within the idol and set it back on the table. We stared at it together for long minutes, looking as stupid as goats, until first one drop and then another appeared on her breasts and dribbled into the bowl.

We laughed together as I inspected the idol, seeing now two holes where her nipples had been.

“Why, they were plugged with wax,” I said, “and the warm milk melted it!”

Shara laughed intermittently into the night long after I had added it to the shelf of my household idols.

“Tell me the story of the paradise,” I said when I summoned Tamrin next. And so he related again the tale of the first man made from the earth and the woman from the rib of the man. Of the snake that told the woman she would not die if she ate the sacred fruit.

“Is this not the same tale as Gilgamesh of Babylonia, who finds the goddess of life and wisdom in the garden—the ‘keeper of the fruit of life’? Is this not the same goddess that this king writes of when he says ‘Lady Wisdom’? And yet you say he worships only one god, and that not a goddess at all!”

“Their stories are strange to me,” Tamrin said, shaking his head. “Yet I know this: I have seen this king judge impossible cases. And he himself told me that on the night he made sacrifice of a thousand burnt offerings his god came to him in a dream and asked the king what he should give him. And the king asked for wisdom and discernment to rule his people, and the god said it would give that as well as the wealth and power that he might have asked for besides. So it is said that the king can see the heart of a man as only a god can. That he understands nature and animals in a way no man ever could—even the ways of spiders and locusts and harvesting ants. Some of the simple folk say he can talk also to trees, birds, and fish.”

I scoffed. “What are these impossible cases?” I thought of the blood feuds brought to my hall when the high councils of their own tribes and those of neighboring kin-tribes had failed.

“Two prostitutes, my queen. A scandalous story.”

“Then I must hear it.”

“Both have infants, but one of them dies in the middle of the night. They appear in the king’s court, the surviving infant between them. ‘She rolled over on her child in the night and killed it,’ the first prostitute says. ‘No, she is the one who killed her child and took mine as her own,’ the second one says. And how is the king to know who is the liar?”

“The king could claim the child for the temple,” I said. “The lying mother then has no child. And the proper mother has the comfort of knowing he is dedicated to divine service and that she will
receive her reward.”

The trader inclined his head. “As you say. But this king ordered a guard to take out his sword and divide the infant—half to each woman, as though it were a loaf of bread.”

“Ahh . . . !”

“The one woman said that this was just, but the second fell forward, begging that the child be given to the other.”

“And so the mother was revealed.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me. Does a wise man truly take hundreds of wives?” I said, brow arched.

Tamrin grinned. “Apparently.”

With each summons, I grew increasingly demanding.

“Tell me again the story of his father and mother.” And he told me, as patiently as though it were the first time, how the king’s father spied one of his men’s wives bathing on the roof. How he sent for her and made her pregnant, and how when her husband returned from war, he commanded him to go lie with her, but the man would not while his own men were still in the field. And so the king had him put on the front line of the battle, where he died.

“He disobeyed a direct command,” I said that afternoon. “Is anything said of that? Subjects have died for lesser disobediences to kings before. You said yourself this king was a killer of men.”

“Yes,” Tamrin said. “And no, nothing is said of that. Because the king’s god took offense and the king, by his own admission, said such a man should die.”

I made him tell me again of Abraham, the man promised a son and then told by his god to sacrifice him, and how circumcision was required of him and his men.

“What does this god care for the foreskins of his worshippers?” I said, thinking back to my conversation with Yafush. “This god who
creates the foreskin, but then says, ‘Cut it off!’ Nor do I understand the god who says one moment, ‘I will give you heirs like the stars’ and then says, ‘Sacrifice your son!’ ”

Tamrin shrugged. “Nor do I. But that is the story, and the moral is that one does not question the God That Is.”

“Are you certain? I know of this city, Ur, where you say this patriarch of the Israelites was born. It was the largest city in the world. If this Abraham left Ur and his children settled in Canaan, where this Israelite kingdom is today, I think there is a different moral.”

“And what is that?”

I paused and mused aloud: “This tale is a lesson to Abraham’s children. That his sons should not be like his new neighbors, who worship gods to which they sacrifice their children, but that they should serve their god in the way he has said. But it seems to me that this man was testing his god as much as his god was testing him.”

Tamrin looked as one struck. “Surely you are the wisest of women!”

“Only a woman who pays attention. Who is the god to whom the Canaanites sacrificed their children?”

“Molech. The god of nearby Ammon.” He tapped his chin then. “The king has a wife from among that people.”

“I wonder,” I said thoughtfully, “what his god may think of that?”

T
he months passed like this. Spring. Summer. The rains of autumn. At last, Tamrin came to court to take his leave.

“My camels are fed and fattened. I have gathered the best of Saba to me and you have financed me well. What now should I take to this king by way of your answer?”

I spread my hands. “Do any of my councilmen appear prepared to travel?”

“What gift or message would you have me take?” he said, and I
saw something like desperation in him.

“Tell him that the queen of Saba and Daughter of Almaqah greets him in the unpronounceable name of his god,” I said with a wry smile. Chuckles from the gallery of my court. “You will tell him in private that every king has enemies who wear the smiles of allies. That every ally outside his borders fashions himself a friend for as long as friendship suits. We have no alliance and I pretend no friendship, but offer dealing to mutual advantage. You will take with you the gifts I have prepared for his temple, and sapphires for his queen.”