The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (31 page)

“And you, my queen, how do you fare?” he said with double meaning when we had a moment alone in the corridor.

That was indeed the question, wasn’t it?

“Well enough.” I did not tell him or Niman about the war I waged privately, this challenge of wits and agendas.

“I think . . . ” Khalkharib pursed his lips, this most stoic and gruff of my councilmen so obviously choosing his words carefully for the first time in my memory. “Saba would do well to ally with this king now that I see for myself the traffic that flows upon his roads. He seems a man given to new venture.”

This, from my councilman so bent on war! “Who is this man wearing the face of Khalkharib?” I said, with only some mock amazement.

For a moment, I found myself actually disappointed in Khalkharib. Was there no one immune to the growing influence of this young kingdom—and the persuasive holdings of its king? Niman had frowned, and I recalled what the king had said upon his first appraisal of him.
He is ambitious.

“I would speak to the king on your behalf of this, cousin,” Niman said.

But of course he would; what ambitious man would not want to call the king “kin”? And with such a marriage unlikely to result in any heirs, no doubt Niman hoped I might name him yet.

“I will consider it,” I said, though I had no such intention.

In Megiddo, that important juncture along the coastal road and the king’s administrative center in the north, I toured the markets, giving opinions when the king solicited them as though there were no question of our future commercial dealings.

We visited the ruins of an ancient temple complex and then the king’s famous stables, of which I had heard so much. I had never seen so many horses as I did in the Jerusalem stables, but the sheer number of those in Megiddo overwhelmed me.

How sleek and beautiful these animals! I did not say that I saw these creatures as the future of Saba and was jealous for stock. Though the king played middleman in the Egyptian horse trade, there would be time enough for that—after the ships, which might bring them to us, had been acquired.

“I have a gift for each of you,” Solomon said with obvious delight. “Pick any horse, and it is yours. But let me show you the ones you should choose.”

“It is too much,” I demurred.

He led us to three stalls, all the while talking bloodlines and sires. I exclaimed over the black mare and proclaimed her beautiful, stroking the broad space between her eyes, and did not miss the swift glance my councilmen exchanged when they thought I wasn’t looking.

Wahabil would not have been bought so cheaply.

We toured the newly fortified walls and then the storeroom of chariots—thousands of them—that Niman took in with an all-too-
greedy eye, seeming to forget that such war machines weren’t practical for the terrain of Saba.

Twice the second morning after our arrival the king’s officers urgently called him away. He returned to me later with tightened jaw.

“Tell the story,” he said, as we lounged beneath a canopy in the palace garden the third day, “of the garden. I beg you.”

“I will do better,” I said, going to pluck several stems of flowers. I twined them together, fastening their ends. He bowed as I laid them on his head.

“Ah,” he said, and for a moment his face was rapt.

“The flowers appear on the earth, and the time of singing has come,” I said, then crooned one of Shara’s songs as he gazed, radiant, into my face.

“Though you wear a crown, you are not a king,” I said softly. “But a boy, gone down to the gardens to gather lilies.”

“You are a lily among brambles,” he whispered. But he was no longer smiling.

“What is it?” I said, when he fell silent.

“Who are you, lady, who are you really?” he whispered.

“Why,” I said, forcing levity into my voice, “a shepherdess. What else?”

“Turn away your eyes from me. They overwhelm me. But I beg you, let me see your face.”

I stood unmoving, even as one of his men came running toward us.

“My king!”

Even then it took a moment for him to break that gaze.

“My king—a messenger from Zemaraim. A skirmish has broken out.”

And then he was gone, striding away from me on legs as lean as a gazelle’s, the crown of flowers still on his head.

He had included me in many aspects of court life until that point, asking me to rule on several matters of lesser import as a visiting sovereign. But that day he went off with his advisors for hours. I instructed Shara to ready our things, expecting our hasty return to Jerusalem.

I had been well aware of the escalating tensions between Damascus and Israel, and the northern and southern tribes. Of the tension, too, between the wives’ foreign priests and the priests of Yaweh—including the madman of the street who I now knew to be the prophet Ahijah, a man the king actually valued if only because he had the courage to disagree with him. Tension, too, between the scholars and laborers, and the foreign and native Canaanite populations of Israel. Kingdom of conflicts!

And over them all, a king of contradictions. I knew the king now for a poet and merchant, philosopher and businessman. An Israelite who commemorated the exodus of his people from Egyptian forced labor . . . and conscripted his own tribesmen in turn. A king of nomadic blood who urbanized his people and built a house for his tent-dwelling god, who collected the wisdom of the world, then debunked it all with infallible logic. The wise man who pursued the sublime in luxury and craved mystery to match that which was known.

We did not return to Jerusalem that day, though I later learned he had dispatched one of his generals with a company of men.

We dined that night surrounded by courtiers who paid rapt attention to the questions he posed with the arrival of each dish. Some of them riddles. Some of them the seed of some philosophical debate. Every one intended to incite, amuse, or provoke.

Time and again he inverted the reason of his most vocal opposition, inflecting their every argument until they could do nothing but agree with him.

Only I saw the thing like desperation in his eye, as though he exorcised some demon in himself with every rebuttal.

“Tell me we will continue our story,” he said, as he bid me good night. “I command you. I beg you.”

“We will continue,” I said, lifting my hand to his head in blessing.

The next day Niman stopped me in the corridor.

“Let me speak to him,” he said urgently. “Let me approach him as your kinsman.”

“You will not,” I said. First my trader, turned jury against me at the king’s suggestion three years ago, and now my own councilmen, swayed to the king’s best interest in the name of Saba’s own! Niman no doubt imagined he had everything to gain were I to marry for ports, ships—even the horses I coveted. I had been right not to leave him in Saba in my absence but now I wished he had returned to camp.

“What have we come for if not for this? My queen, he will give you all that you ask!”

“No he won’t. Not yet.”

“My queen. Kinswoman. Do you not see the way he looks to you? As a man looks on the very idols he argued for and then against with equal veracity last night! His own men say he’s a man inspired since your arrival. Did you know you are the very reason he would not ride out to the skirmish, even though he sent two thousand men?”

I had no idea. Why did the thought warm and alarm me at once?

“There are too many ears in this place,” I hissed. “We will talk when we return to Jerusalem.”

“W
hy do you not marry, Bilqis?” Solomon asked me the night after we returned to Jerusalem.

Did the very air have ears?

I gazed out over the low wall of the terrace toward the eastern mount. Fires glowed from several altars and I thought I heard even from here the perceptible beat of a drum. “How is it that you married a Moabite, when your god has decreed against it?” I countered. “And not just a Moabite, but an Egyptian, a Sidonite, an Edomite, and I know not how many others restricted to you by your god?”

“My god declared against it not because of the women—and not even because of the gods they worship—but because there is no limit to what a man who loves a woman will do. My own father venerated my mother as though she were the queen of heaven herself. How much less is it for a man to worship his wife’s god with her when she plies him with soft promises?”

“I see. And so woman becomes the temptress of a man’s downfall?”

I could feel his gaze on me from the seat adjacent, considering me beneath the stars. “A weak man declares a woman a temptress and orders her to cover herself. A strong man covers himself and says nothing. I must have peace with my wives’ people though I do not worship their gods.”

“You must also have peace with your wives, and so you have built them high places to their gods.”

“My god does not call them to worship him. He knows that I am his.”

I did not say the thing I wanted to, which was: “And if your wife goes to the bed of another man, will you still know her heart is yours?”

Instead, I said, “Such a man who bends the law to his will is dangerous indeed.”

Solomon paused and finally said, “I do not bend the law. I understand it. It is far more dangerous to obey a law without understanding.
Do we wish our children to do as they are told forever, simply because we told them what they should do, or because they fear punishment? Or do we hope that they grow in understanding to discern for themselves and freely choose right? We are not children and neither can we afford to think like them. One day we allow a man to live in our kingdom. The next, we dare not. And so even though we spared him one day, we must call for his death the next, even though every law in the world says ‘Do not murder.’ ”

Always a clever answer with him. Always an answer that chipped away at the very idea of certainty in me.

Solomon fell silent after that, and captured my hand in his. This had grown common between us, the king taking my hand as though we were children, holding it sometimes tightly, sometimes reverently as he had that first night, like a thing that might take flight.

I waited for him to make his demand—for more of our garden story, to see my face, to escape the palace, for whatever unpredictable thing he would ask of me next.

“Who is this,” he said softly, touching one of my rings, “who looks down like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, bright as the sun?” He glanced up and lifted his fingers to my face. But when I thought he might tug at my veil, he only traced the line of my cheek through it with a fingertip.

“You run when I pursue,” he whispered. “I grow cold and you come near. And what you ask of me is not the thing you truly want.”

My breath was stifling beneath the fall of silk.

“Yes it is.”

I took my leave a moment later.

I
had not seen Tamrin except a handful of times since our arrival two months prior. How much a lifetime ago those nights together
in my palace seemed. But then, even my palace felt like a thing half remembered, as though from a dream.

He bowed low the day I saw him in the camp outside Jerusalem, the courtier in the body of the caravan master, at last.

“Tamrin! All this time I thought you beyond Damascus.”

“My queen is indeed an oracle,” he said. “I leave tomorrow.”

“And so your heart calls you on,” I said.

I had thought his gaze feral once. But now, even as he smiled, I saw it was merely tormented. “I suppose it does. But do not fear; I will return in time for winter.”

Winter.

“Ah, the life of the trader,” I murmured.

“How go my queen’s negotiations?”

“Let us not speak of them.”

“The king is a fool if he denies you anything,” Tamrin said quietly.

I looked away a moment, then said with a forced smile, “Will you come to the palace to dine on your return?”

“I will be famished for decent food and gentle manners even before I return,” he said, but his gaze had already drifted beyond camp. “Ah, but there is my foreman. I beg your leave and your blessing, lady.”

I gave both and watched him walk away.

T
hat night in the rooftop garden, the king gazed out toward the lower city. We were alone, as I had begun to send Yafush away early days ago.

“What will you give me?” he said finally, not looking at me.

“For what?”

“For what you want of me.”

He turned toward me then. I knew the astute face of that businessman well.

“I haven’t even said what I want of you.”

“You need my ships to stop in your ports. Your ports cannot accommodate them. My men have questioned yours at length about the architecture of your cities, your roads, your shores. You need men to expand your ports, and me to bolster your trade by sea.”

“As you say.”

“And so what will you give me?”

“What do you want?”

It was the wrong question, and I knew it the moment it left my lips.

“I will negotiate engineers for your ports and even labor if you will raise half the labor yourself. We will chart together the Red Sea route, and I will give you favorable terms. I have far designs for my ships, and you will share in them.”

“I will see that you have gold from Punt—enough to finish your palace and three more besides, and incense for your temple until the end of the age.”

He said, as though he had not heard me, “Egypt, Edom, and Damascus would like nothing more than to ally with Saba. Phoenicia, too, though they dare not go around me.” This was news to me.

“It would be in my best interest to keep that from happening,” Solomon said. “And the way to do it is to ally with you myself.”

“I agree. As allies, Egypt will never control interest over either one of us. They will not over me, in any case.”

“You don’t know that. The Pharaoh will not live forever, and the Libyans hold power already. There is something else you want, though,” he said.

Why had his demeanor turned so chilly in the stifling evening?
And why did I feel no joy in this negotiation, now that he had brought it before me at last?