The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (15 page)

“And what will I say when he asks why your emissary does not present himself to his court and Saba does not pay homage?”

“Shall the mountains get up and go bow to the tree that boasts of its new roots? Saba has existed since the beginning of time. Her emissaries may no more be summoned than her mountains, which move only when they want and then woe to whom they fall upon. And so you will tell him he has greatly offended your queen. You will give him the gifts of our idols, the bull, and the ibex, so that he will know our gods and the god who calls Saba’s queen ‘daughter.’ And we send, too, the golden bowl for his new palace and welcome
his
emissaries, if they are hardy enough to make the journey. We promise to show them wonders and marvels to spawn tales befitting a king. That is, if they may be persuaded to return. No one, upon entering paradise, ever wishes to leave it. And so we invite them to loiter on Saba’s terraces as the very gods do, drawn by her perfume.”

I knew by Tamrin’s stilted bow that he already anticipated the king’s anger.

I smiled beneath my veil.

TEN

T
amrin returned in early spring before the rains. He was thinner this time, his expression worn. I noted in passing the gifts that streamed into my hall—the pearl and jasper jewelry, the beaded fabrics, cosmetics, and perfume in costly jars. The hyssop, licorice pods, cassia, and saffron. The ornately hooded peregrine falcon, the sleek Egyptian cat on the golden leash. I named her Bast on the spot, for the Egyptian goddess.

“You see—even the gods attend our halls,” I said, as my ministers chuckled their approval.

“My queen,” Tamrin said, bowing low to me later, in private. “I have taken the tale of your wisdom and learning to the king of Israel. And also of Saba’s self-sufficiency, so that we neither depend on others for food, as Phoenicia, or for skilled workers, as the Israelite king himself—though I did not say so quite as blatantly.” There, finally, was the rogue smile I had come to know.

“And the king says to you, ‘Fair queen, how you veil yourself in silence and then in words! How you mystify, to your own detriment. How can it be that you claim to need nothing, and that your ministers do not appear before me? I understand you were not schooled to become queen—may you grow in better wisdom. The perfume
of your palace comes to me over this great distance. It is indeed the breath of the divine. But if you are sovereign of a land set apart by the gods, then I am ten times so, for mine is given to my hand by the One who placed your god in the night sky.’ ”

“Is there no end to his vanity?” I sputtered.

Tamrin’s lips set as though carved of stone and I understood he had not looked forward to the delivery of this message, carried with him all these months.

“But that is no fault of yours. I hold you innocent of his conceit,” I said more gently.

“Truly, my queen, if you only knew the questions he asked of me, and those of the scholars who flock to his court. They are all curious, knowing little of Saba. They asked much about you and I answered them sincerely, saying that you are the most prized woman in the world so that men from the far corners of it seek your alliance and your bed—men as numerous as there are peoples.”

I shook my head and flicked my eyes heavenward. “And to think I feared you unwell, and yet I see you are right as rain after all.”

“These sages, when they return to their own courts and schools, will take with them tales of Saba’s queen. Soon the world will equate the name of Saba with beauty and wealth. This is as you wished, is it not?”

“It is.” I did not say that they would take also the account of how the king presumed to school me. “Have you no new writings for me?”

“None,” he said. “It is said the king writes less and less.”

“Is he so troubled?”

“He does not confide in me. But I hear tell of friction among his tribes, between the north, from which he raises levies, and the south, which he favors.”

“He conscripts labor from among his own tribes?”

First the ceding of territory to Hiram, and now the conscription of his own tribes?

“And he says
I
must grow in wisdom! How do his people not resent it? Did you not tell me the Egyptians did the same to his people?”

“Indeed, and they do resent it. But the conquered Canaanites, Hittites, and Amorites alone cannot provide the labor for his projects, which are many.”

This was the second crack I had noted in this king’s veneer.

“Come, sit, you look as though you weave on your feet.”

“If you will permit me, I will not stay, having left my camels and men and come these six days’ journey from them straightaway. How the king took me to task! Saying to me, ‘If she asks thus, tell her thus.’ Anything you may wish to know, he has told me, from the order of his birth to the fates of his brothers so that I may answer any question of yours about him. But for now I beg you, let me give you his response and return to you when I have seen my camels watered and rested. Our journey was not easy; we were set upon by bandits twice in our return.”

“Who dares?”

He shook his head, as though still warding off flies. “Bands in constant movement even as this kingdom of Israel expands. There are displaced peoples everywhere, many by the hand of Solomon’s father—those whom he did not exterminate. The world beyond Saba is a place of turmoil and hardship.” His gaze hardened. “But we took ten of them before it was through.”

“You will have more armed men when next you depart. Let me take up worry on this matter.”

“We lost little cargo and only a few camels. It might have been far worse. But you, my queen, may rest knowing you remain a mystery to the Israelite king. In my days there, I answered his many
questions of your grandfather, and your father the high priest before you. And of your mother and her famous beauty. And I told him that Saba is a world in itself from the narrow sea to the desert interior, where only the Wolves of the Desert survive. And that she has not one temple but many, and many gods, Almaqah chief among them. And yet after so many days of praising Saba and my queen to him, as I prepared to depart, he said as though we had only begun, ‘You have said all of this and yet, is not your queen sovereign only of some mountains and desert waste, and a grove of incense trees? Why then do you boast to me of her?’ ” He turned his palms up as he said this.

I stared at Tamrin for a moment. After all that! Was this king possibly mad? But then . . . I turned away with a shake of my head.

“My queen?”

“He is testing you,” I said, turning back to him, “to see if you indulge him or become defensive, if you open your mouth to speak, or close it with only a knowing smile. Because both will tell him something of how much you say is true.”

How easily I saw it now. The king was weary of flowery speech—at which Tamrin excelled. But this king grew tired of conversation sheathed in silk. And so he pretended to have forgotten days of prodigious propaganda and prodded with rude words. He was the child who, forced to behave and smile for hours, finally sticks out his tongue. I began to laugh at that thought, knowing the feeling well. He was tired, perhaps, even of flattery, restless for what he could not venture beyond his borders to learn as I could not venture beyond mine.

Now Tamrin was really staring at me.

“What is it?” I said to him.

“My queen, he said to me, ‘When you tell her this, after all the account of how you have praised her, watch her. If she is shrewd, she will wonder at my reason for saying it. If she is wise, she may laugh.
But if she is a fool, she will become enraged.’ And by Almaqah, I see now that he was right, and further, that my queen is as wise as I have thought all along.” He fell down low before me then.

Should I have been flattered that I proved wise? Or incensed that he had equipped my own man to put me to the test? I was not amused.

“And so he sends back my own man as jury,” I said dryly. “And did he tell you to say this, too? How inconvenient that it was not carried out before the entire court. Get up.”

He started to do so then froze, and fell down again onto his face.

“I have been toyed with. And now I show myself the fool.”

“Better you than me. How would you like to risk your caravans and life serving a foolish queen?”

“And how I will serve her always, because she is not foolish.”

“Yes. Because a foreign king told you so. Get up.” He got to his feet.

“Go. See to your camels. Eat, rest. I will relieve you of this burden of speaking for the both of us from opposite corners of your mouth. I can only imagine the conversations you must have had in your head.”

He exhaled, shaking his head slightly.

“Return to me in the fall.”

I
was incensed one moment at the king’s audacity . . . perplexed the next. Preoccupied all the while. If Solomon, sitting at the crossroads, held Egypt and Phoenicia in thrall, somehow I must hold him in mine.

Through the coming months, I began to draft a response in my head written a few words at a time, stopping and beginning again. That fall, I put it all to papyrus myself.

You ask how it can be that I need nothing. I ask you: how can it be that you are so dependent on everyone else? We have a custom in Saba among our tribespeople, that we humiliate ourselves and make light of our riches. “What a beautiful animal!” one man says of the rarest white camel. “Ah, this?” its owner says. “Why, this is but a goat, and one without milk.” And so you may be assured that the bird that flies to your borders from mine comes from a people whose virtues are understatement and hospitality, those same qualities that require us to give our best possessions and animals—even the very tent we sleep beneath—to anyone who merely compliments it, saying it is nothing and a trifle.

But these are not your customs, and so I will tell you without interference: Saba has no need for grain from any source but her oases. The scents of the gods grow in our own gardens because it gave the gods pleasure to plant them there. Grain and god—we have no need of anyone. The same sun that shrivels another nation’s harvest warms our soil and the moon causes seeds to germinate in the dark. Gold is less precious to us—it is as the sands of the desert, clinging to sandals and eyelids and hair. Our mines are inexhaustible, our date palms unrivaled, our herds countless.

We are impervious to attack; no army may march against us and survive the sands or scale the cliffs that border the salty sea. The gods have created this fortress around us, as insular as your vanished Eden, with only the smallest of gates by which we share our goods and receive tribute from the world. In my capital we have not one paradise but two. All has been given to us in double measure. The perfume of our myrrh is divine—spiriting souls of Pharaohs and kings to the netherworld, the scent of it so pervasive when it grows as to sustain the very poorest living upon its soil well into old age, and grant him immortality in death. And how can it not? The entire kingdom smells of god so that every man is a priest, and the very insects sing hymns. Here, earthly pleasure becomes divine and we dwell in knowledge of the sublime by the sheer act of breathing. The gods are indeed unjust, having given all good things to us in abundance. Even so, through the trade of our ships and caravans, we eat of the world’s table and wear her best silk and indigo and purple. We are so lost to luxury that the simplest grains and figs and linens are as novelties to us.

You ask how I can need nothing. Here is the answer. But your real question is not how a nation needs nothing, but how a woman does not. And the answer is this: I am the product of my land. I am Saba. Egypt has her Nile, but we have the monsoons, our dams and canals, the design of which was whispered to our ancestors by the gods. And so we persist since time immemorial, forever and blessed. Any war we make, or have ever made, is only and solely with ourselves, as no one may match us in vengeance or in passion.

Why, then, do you command me as some vassal, to send my emissaries to you? Did you summon my father thus—he who was chief priest to the god who rises over our mountains, which reach to the heavens themselves? I am High Priestess, the Daughter of Almaqah, who harkens to no mortal king.