The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (35 page)

We lolled in bed late into the morning. He kissed my navel and
I compared him to the smooth alabaster of a fertility statue. He laughed at that and pretended to dress in shame.

And then we went away for a few hours to be king and queen, composing poetry in our heads.

We did not talk about the coming winter, even as our days took on a frenetic pace and summer careened toward fall.

TWENTY-SEVEN

K
halkharib and Niman paid me a visit during the festival of trumpets, for which pilgrims had been swarming the city for days. The king had gone to the temple; I would not see him until tonight. The ram’s horns had sounded every morning by then for a month, jarring me awake from the king’s arms more than once, but having no such effect on the king, who snored softly through the loudest of them as the smell of baking bread wafted from every oven in the city.

I received them in my apartment, the table set with quince and honey from the king’s kitchens. It was the first time I had been in the apartment in days, and the first time I had sat in council with them in many more.

“My queen, we are troubled,” Niman said.

“Why should you be?” I said lightly. But I had expected their censure and received them with reservation. I had attended the king’s hall and privy chamber for weeks. Obviously the king had agreed to the treaty. With ships in hand, there was no reason to loiter here. The tribesmen of the camp were restless, and still I commanded we stay.

“There are . . . unkind rumors circulating about you and the
king—circulating repeatedly and more fiercely among the pilgrims, who increase by the day.”

“There are always rumors. There are rumors about me in Saba as well.”

Niman shook his head. “My queen, this is a different place from Saba. Our ways are not their ways.”

“I am well aware of that,” I snapped. “Is this what you have come to tell me?” I glanced at Khalkharib, who stared grimly at the place where my throne had stood before it was moved.

“The king has many wives, who have many servants—servants who talk and spread their mistresses’ jealous gossip. And there are many priests and members of council who chafe at the presence of a foreign sovereign with more influence over the king than they. This is not a country given to foreign authority—least of all a queen’s. You have become the favorite target of threatening conversations. Though they may nod and smile in the council chamber, you have no friends in those chambers but the king himself.”

“How would you know? You are not privy to the king’s council.”

“We have gone into the city under guise and have heard it for ourselves,” Khalkharib said finally. “The people in the market speak against the Sabaean harlot, and call your guard ‘the whore’s men’ in the streets.”

My face flushed even as cold prickled down my back.

“They dare!”

I got to my feet and paced away, smoothing back my hair. “Cowards will always speak crudely against women of power. Do you think this is the first time mouths have rattled about me? Do you think I give two nits what they say? They are not satisfied with the king’s marriages, though they receive every benefit of them. These are a people used to scandal, who seek it out and make morality tales of even the union that produced their beloved king, appointed by their
god,” I said angrily. “Imbued, even, by their god with the wisdom of Yaweh!”

“These people fear that same god will visit retribution on them for the actions of their king,” Niman pressed.

“My queen, I am not certain that he is as well loved as you may hear from the sycophants in the palace,” Khalkharib said.

“They dare not speak against him.”

“Not publicly. But they grow bolder after Jeroboam.”

“My queen, it is clear he favors you,” Niman said. “And Saba is the benefactor of such favor. He is obviously charmed by you. But of course he is—Saba is the richest nation in the world.”

I laughed. “Just weeks ago neither one of you could say enough of this king. I saw the way you devoured with greedy eye the gift of his horses, and you, Niman, the gold of his chariots. Are you not the same kinsman who begged to arrange my marriage to this same king, who saw in him every opportunity?”

“My queen, if you would marry him, then marry him,” Khalkharib said. “But you must silence this scandal. Not only for Saba’s sake, but for the safety of those in our camp.”

I wheeled back. “What are you talking about?”

“Rocks and garbage have been thrown at the camp under cover of dark for weeks now. And just last night a group of northern tribesmen tried to rouse our guard into a scuffle. They injured three of Tamrin’s men.”

“
What?
”

“If you would not marry him, then let us leave soon. Clearly you have in hand, or at least on promise, that for which we have come!”

I had been avoiding thought of the coming rains, the days as they grew shorter, telling myself that the night merely came sooner with more hours to spend with the king. Of course it was a lie.

“We will not leave until winter. There is business to be finished yet,” I said, chewing a nail.

“There is talk that you have all but moved yourself to his rooms,” Khalkharib said. “And the entire court knows you sit beside him in his hall—not as though you are a visiting sovereign, but as though you were his queen!”

I wanted to shout “I am!”

I was more queen to him than any of his treaty wives! Without marriage, without dowry, without the uniting of nations. More than any woman who had ever borne him a son, if only because I had not done any of these things.

What would they think if they knew how we conspired late at night to shape the world? How we would draw Hidush and Babylonia to us in treaty even as we staked out our share of the road that winds to the far silk lands? How we would hamstring Edom between us for the sake of my caravans and his ships moored in the gulf . . .

“Where have you been as I have been sitting in the king’s hall in negotiations and in council? And what care is it to you what transpires in these hallways? I make no account to you. I said we would come for ports and ships. And I accomplish so much more. You dare censure me?”

“That is not all,” Niman said. “There is talk, too, that you have denounced Egypt together for harboring the king’s enemies.”

“Of course!”

“Do you know that the Egyptian queen has started a campaign of vile whispers against you in retaliation?”

This startled me.

“Since when do you harken—or stoop—to women’s gossip?” I said. “Or even market gossip for that matter? No doubt much the same is said of me in the markets of my own capital, and among my own nobles’ wives.” I looked pointedly at each of them. “Winter will
come soon enough. Concern yourselves with provisioning the caravan, because it will be a long journey south.”

I sent word to the king’s steward the moment I sent them away. I was shaken, worried for the safety of my camp, anxious at Solomon’s absence, and unwilling that the world enter these privy walls. For the moon to set or the sun to rise on another fleeting day.

Within hours, additional guards had been posted outside the Sabaean camp. I was consoled, for the moment—until I arrived in the king’s apartment. He caught me up in his arms, but his expression was torn.

“I cannot stay here tonight,” he said.

“Then I will go where you go.”

“I have not gone to Tashere in weeks. She is angry, and jealous.”

Then it was true. I pulled away.

“I thought her too practical a wife for that.”

“It is no secret that you reside here with me. That your throne is on my dais. She has conceded much. But she is desperate to conceive another son, and she will not concede that.”

Jealousy flared up within me, hot and incendiary.

“Well, then. I will call another man to my chamber!”

He tore at his hair. “No. Do not. I beg you. Let me go as is my duty.”

“Duty? You are the king.”

“She is the Pharaoh’s daughter!” he said.

“Yes! And how many times have we said that Egypt is weak? It is the house of your enemies—we said so publicly. What duty do you owe her now?”

And then I realized: he loved her.

I felt it like an icy stab.

How many times had he written her poetry before he first penned words to me? How many letters had he sent, how many gifts?

He took my hands. “My love, please. Stay. Wait for me. I will return with the morning. Sleep late, and I will join you.”

“Fresh from another woman’s bed,” I said bitterly.

“And you, from another man’s before you came to mine.”

I gave a sharp laugh. “And you from hundreds. I make no pretense at virginity. Or will you call me ‘whore’ as your people do in your markets? If I am, their king makes me so!”

“Do you not see what I risk to be with you?” he said, as though at wit’s end.

“What
you
risk?”

“Yes! They call you ‘whore’—any woman not wedded to a man will be called that. But you know this better than I. Do you not see that I risk the disapproval of my priests, who say even now this is the very reason the north and Damascus and Jeroboam and a host of others conspire against me?”

“Do you not see how they point the finger at the women nearest at hand whenever a nation struggles—the same women who have had no power in it?” I said. “Even your Eve did not chew the fruit and spit it in your Adam’s mouth but he took and ate it himself. I have read your priests’ stories! Do they not see that they are painting the very portrait of their own weakness?”

“It is not just the priests, but my men, my people—and yet I lift you up before them. I put you in judgment over them. I risk scandal, I risk my kingdom, for you!”

“The priests you choose, the men you choose. Then choose others. You risk your kingdom by taking a nation as rich as Saba to your bed? By letting the world know our kingdoms must be dealt with as one great power? How is this any risk to you, O king? You who call yourself dangerous and then run at the beckon of your wife?”

“What do you want of me?” he said, and I laughed. Weeks ago I had asked that very thing.

“Shall I say as you did that my condition is marriage?”

“You have never wanted marriage.”

“I am a queen. I have seen you change your mind a dozen times. Am I not entitled to do the same?”

“I have married you in my heart, in body—”

“Your heart will not appease your people, who condemn me in the street. Or your mad prophet who stirs up your enemies against you. You marry the daughters of nations your god prohibits, but your god has said nothing of marriage to Saba—and you will not marry me?”

“We will talk. I will return. The night is short—”

“It is not short. It is growing longer! Have you looked out your window—do you not see the fading sun? It is autumn, and the time before us may be measured in hours. Spend a month with Tashere when I am gone. Never emerge from her bed if you like. But stay with me now.”

“Bilqis,” he said, his expression worn. “You do not know what it is to be husband to an angry wife, let alone many of them. You are my peace. Let me do what I must and return gratefully to you.”

There was nothing I could do. Throwing my anger about would not gain me a thing. What had I expected of a king with so many wives—of a king at all?

“Go then. Perhaps I shall be here when you return. Or not.”

He sighed, bent over my hands, and went out.

I
woke late the next morning, alone. But the king did not arrive that morning. Nor in the afternoon after I sent for Shara to dine with me. We looked out at the streets filled with pilgrims. The rooftops were covered in bowers thatched with palm fronds; last night I had seen
the lamps of their guests gleaming like a constellation of stars. All through the day pilgrims came in and out of the city as the hawkers’ cries soared from the markets to the palace.

The smell of the public ovens hung like a yeasty pall over the city, causing my stomach to grumble and me to eat off and on throughout the day. Shara did not seem to notice; she had brought the Senet set with her and soundly trounced me three times in a row.

Shara was a different woman. Her shoulders tilted back where they had canted forward all these years. Always so still, so timid in the past, she moved today as one who breathed. Even her movements were more expansive than before, no longer apologizing for the space her slender frame occupied, no longer bound by the past.