The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (21 page)

T
wo weeks after I received word from Solomon, a veil covered the sun.

I had been walking in the garden with Wahabil where we might not be overheard as we spoke in low tones, the breeze masking our whispers with the rustle of palm fronds as I reviewed the last of the matters he must attend to in my absence. In five days I would begin the journey north at last, to Israel.

We were so engrossed that I never noticed the opaque cast of the sky.

“Princess,” Yafush said, “you had best look up.”

His voice startled me; my Nubian shadow rarely spoke in the presence of others.

I glanced from him to the sun dimming before my eyes and pulled the veil more securely over my face. Once or twice a year the cooler air stirred up the desert, shrouding the plain and foothills in a greenish pall for days.

Beside me, Wahabil squinted, his head tilted as though listening to the strain of a tune he could not place.

And then I heard it: the faint vibration, the distant buzz.

The sky began to fall in winged hail.

Locusts.

That day I stood by the lattice of my window for hours, the palace grounds obscured by a cloud of scissored wings.

By morning the tender shoots of the winter crop were gone as though the fields had never been planted. They left in their wake a bare stubble of stalks, skeletal brush, and branches. Some trees had been left entirely intact but the fields lay bare, the pastures shorn free of grasses and brush as hungry camels lapped up the wingless hoppers left to march in pursuit of the swarm.

“What does it mean?” I asked Asm, staring out at the ruin of the garden.

“They came after good rains. Some enemy threatens your best interest, my queen. But your interests may also be multiplied. What is eaten will return more lush,” he said.

I found that hard to believe.

The city turned out in droves to collect the insects. The smell of locusts cooking in sesame oil and coriander filled the palace kitchens. And though Yafush pronounced them especially delicious—thanks, no doubt, to the rich crop they had all but obliterated—I could not bring myself to eat them even in retaliation.

I sent riders to survey the devastation, gave orders for the camels to be fed grain from the storehouse and dried fish. They could not afford to go hungry now!

Tamrin arrived at the palace several days later, his gaze as shifting as the desert dunes, keeping mine with seeming effort. I had seen the same look in a caged predator, once.

“The locusts came from the north,” he said, drinking more palm wine than I had ever seen him consume at once. “They crossed the narrow sea into Bakkah and came down from there after eating the oasis dry. The oases between here and there are barren. There isn’t enough fodder to support a herd of camels, let alone a caravan.”

He did not voice what we already knew between us:

No one would journey north that year.

Behind the door of my privy council all my arguments of before unraveled. Even my peaceful advisor Abyada wondered aloud if we were not to journey to Israel and treat with this king but go to him in war.

“Do you not see,” Khalkharib hissed, “it is a sign that we must go not as emissaries but like an army of locusts?”

“Are you a priest now that you interpret signs?” I said, peevishly. “The locusts came south, invading our land, not the other way around. And if there is no forage for a caravan from here to Bakkah there is even less for an army. Meanwhile, the king, too, has lost revenue and tariffs. And so as we suffer, he suffers. If anything, the gods show us our need for water routes more than ever. With ships we might trade frankincense for the seed we lost to replanting, because Almaqah knows we cannot sow incense!”

Worse yet, I could send no message north. A few riders might find fodder enough for their number. But bandits would soon be out in droves searching for food and animals to replace those they must now slaughter. Saba’s few ships, meant only for hugging coastlines, had already set sail for ports in Hidush and Punt. By the time they returned, the Red Sea winds would have shifted from the northerly flow of winter to the southern current of summer, and we were no Phoenicians able to harness the winds.

What would the king make of my silence after his demand for more words from me? And how weak would Saba appear to have fallen prey to such mundane plague, and how ill-favored by the gods? This, after I claimed that they doted on Saba as no nation on earth!

And what might he make of not only my silence but the absence of my trader in spring? The new Phoenician king had had time by now to renew ties with Israel, and for all I knew Solomon’s fleet
neared completion and prepared to set out for the ends of the world. And I, unable to leave or send anyone at all!

I had promised so much, fired by vision—not just for me, but for my people.

I had dared to hope, which was my greatest sin of all.

Tell me: Do you think your gods know you as well as I, whose face you have never seen?

That night I fled to the orchards, my feet churning beneath me. Faster, faster, so that even Yafush could not keep up. When I was far beyond sight of the nearest palace guard, I spun back and shouted at the sky.

“What do you want of me?” I raged. “Where are you, that you turn your back like the most faithless of lovers? What blood do you require that I have not given you—what hope of mine have you not seized at whim? What more do you want? Speak! Speak it and let us be done!” But the moon was silent, the naked branches of the fruit trees stark as black lightning before its face.

Those months were the longest of my life. I paced the halls of the palace and then the ruined hedges of the garden by day, standing at the window for long hours at night, the clamor of a hundred letters written and received only in my head.

Spring came with heavy rains, and the farmers double-tilled the fields. I retrieved the scroll I had steadfastly avoided all this while, as though I had not reread it in my mind a thousand times.

How you torture me with your words as with your silence. How you test me. How you delight and anger me at once!

How you keep me waiting . . .

My words to him had been filled with haughty challenge and invitation, and though he claimed both outrage and anger at them, I knew the thing he would not abide: silence. It did not matter that the swelter of summer was a bare month away; this was not a man
who would stomach rebuff. He would never excuse that he had humbled himself in asking for word from me and received nothing and I could not afford to let the correspondence by which I had piqued the king grow cold.

I took out parchment and ink and sat down at last. But after so long, and so many conversations within myself as though we had spoken for months, I was out of cleverness.

Lady Riddle says: I devour with a million mouths. I am devoured in a single bite. I have no king but march in rank. Who am I?

I am alone. There is no one to hear these words. That is the woman, speaking to herself.

The queen says to the king: Is it my god who has conspired to hoard Saba’s fruits . . . or yours who has jealously closed the corridor between us? Some way or another we must let them treat so that I may send you the emissary with the many words you long for. Speak sweetly to your god then, as to a lover, even as I cannot. Let him soften his immortal heart along with his invidious resolve.

I said, “I will send Saba to you.” But the sun will not rise from the south for another year. And so the gods make me a liar unless we decide together that these months are but days, that they pass as a dream so that when you rise from sleep at last, Saba will be within the walls of your city like the moon before the face of the sun. Not like the eclipse that stole Hiram from Phoenicia, but one that heralds the suspension of the world when time forgets herself so that the ibex feeds at night and the lion hunts by day.

You tire of music and gold and feasting. Then we will pretend that there are no feasts, there is no gold. But there must be music. You play a flute made from a reed and I clap my hands. You are no king, and I, no queen. There is no palace. There is only a garden and our heads are adorned with only crowns of flowers . . .

Until the day you must take up the mantle of the wise once more, and I the veil of fire.

I am Bilqis.

I lowered my head to my arms and wept. After a while, I sealed the scroll. No clever gifts this time, only these words as simple as a virgin sheathed in linen.

The fields flourished beneath the hot sun that summer. But I was distracted and tense, searching the road with rising frequency for my small band of Desert Wolves, those enigmatic dwellers of the harsh sands who drifted into my service long enough to earn a camel or a few pots before disappearing into the dunes again. I had sent them with my scroll by way of Gabaan, there to be joined by two of Tamrin’s men to guide them.

By the time the harvest proved plentiful—more even than years past—I had already journeyed north and back again with them in my mind ten, twelve, twenty times.

“My queen, are you listening?” Wahabil said. He had come to talk about locusts and the ground burned for the vast repository of their eggs. “I worry for you, for your distraction over this king who agitates you so.”

Shara had already expressed her own concerns about my waning weight, the color that had left my cheeks. But what else could happen to me, cooped up inside the palace with reports of crops and whether the locusts had emerged and in what quantity, and how many had been seen coupling on the millet stems!

That autumn, Tamrin arrived at the palace.

“My Wolves?” I said.

He rose from his bow, brows lifted. Without the arduous journey that seemed to define the very cords of his arms and neck each time he returned, he seemed a thing more cultivated than ever. But the unrest in his eyes belied him. I, who had thought this year torture—how much more so had it been for him, this nomad among nomads?

“I greet you as my queen, and you say to me ‘My Wolves?’ ” His voice was like warmed honey when he chuckled, though I knew the sound was forced.

“Forgive me. Welcome. And now, have you seen my Wolves?” I smiled sweetly.

“Alas, no.” He shook his head, staring toward the windows, the shutters thrown wide in the cool of early evening. He, too, was impatient for word from his men—or from the king himself. “It is too soon for their return. Who knows how long the king might have kept them, or if he even received them at all?”

I had not thought of that possibility. Renewed anxiety surged up inside me.

“I’m surprised you didn’t escort them yourself,” I said.

He paced away, digging his fingers into the unbound hair at his nape. “How I nearly bolted after them!” he said through gritted teeth. “And I would have, had I no camels to negotiate fodder for, doing business cooped up in the city like one of the queen’s ministers!” He went still. “Forgive me.”

I waved it away.

I, too, was tired of waiting. I was tired of many things. I had told myself that I would not waste time here, even as the words of Solomon’s letters trailed me like the hem of my own gown. How had I allowed a king on the other side of the world such power over my every waking thought? How had he worked such effect over us both?

“Why have you come, if not with news?” I said, squinting at him.

“I don’t know why I came,” he said quietly. “This last year has dealt all my tribe such a blow, as for all of Saba. I thought that if the queen would receive me that I would at least not stare at the same camels and faces of my foremen and slaves, all looking at me, the same question in their eyes.” He shook his head. “But my memory is deficient.”

“How so?”

He glanced up. “I forget that when the queen receives me in private, she no longer wears her veil. And that I always leave more distracted than before.”

Outside the moon had risen large and orange over the sill of the window.

“Have you no wife, Tamrin?” In all this time, I had never known, and though I had refused a proposal from his tribe, it had not been for him.

“No.” He sat down with a rueful smile. “Nor will I. No woman wants to be loved second most.”

“Marriage is not about love,” I said.

“No. But every woman—even a queen, I think—wants to be loved and loved before all others. I could make a wife content, I think. But I would not make her happy. And I would come to hate her duty, if only because I knew it mirrored my own.”

I had never heard him speak with such baldness.

“Your first love is given then—to whom?” I asked.

“Not given, but taken from me.”

I looked away.

“Ah,” he said softly. “You think I mean my queen, whom yes, I love. But that is not what I meant.”

Now I could look at him. “Who has seized this love from you?”

He shook his head as one lost. “The gods of air and sun,” he said with a helpless laugh. “Of the road, the sands, oases . . . who chase me away to Israel, Damascus, and Tyre. To the courts of kings and
then home again to Gabaan, which I crave to the point of tears, and then despise the moment I return. It is the same with the sands, or the tents of the oases, which I long for and cannot wait to leave. There is no place, but that one in between, where I am at peace.”

He lifted his eyes to me then.

“And yet I come back to you, unable to help myself, knowing I will leave. Trusting you will tell me ‘go.’ Knowing you could command me to stay and that I would obey, but only because you compelled me.”

Impossibly, his anguish made those feral eyes even more beautiful.

“Yafush,” I said, never looking away from Tamrin.

Without a word, the eunuch left, quietly closing the door behind him.

Tamrin sat very still.

I hesitated a moment, thinking of the king’s letters. Of the gravity of them, so like an unbroken spell. And of the king, certainly not lying alone all these nights even as he claimed himself tortured.