The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (5 page)

“I have dreamed of nothing else.”

“Even now, how sincere your declarations ring,” I said bitterly.

“Because they are true! But how could I marry you, knowing that this day would come—even as I wished it never would?” His hands fell away from me. “How could I?”

“You’ve lied to me all this time!”

“No. Almaqah knows I would marry you this instant if you would have me.”

“How convenient that you then would become king. Tell me, was that the intent of your noble father all this while? Did he instruct you in the way you should seduce me as well?”

“Makeda.” His expression was anguished. “Please . . .”

“Tell me that wasn’t his design the entire time, as he plotted with the others to see me to the throne.”

“The allies had long made a pact that there would be no offer of marriage treaty, lest their motives come under suspicion by Hagarlat. Not until—”

I slapped him. After a stunned instant, I slapped him again.

“How clever everyone has been! And I thought myself forgotten all these years until tonight. And without even an hour’s warning from you. For all the nights I gave myself to you, you might have at least done me that service in return.”

He turned on me, voice raised. “How should I have told you? Can you not see that I have been torn? How should I make you believe me? Tell me, and I will do it!”

“It’s too late. And now those men come to collect me and I am to go obediently at their summons? Well I won’t do it!”

I yelled at Zabib to stop her packing, to put my things away.

All around me, the sanctuary of this chamber—a place of refuge, study, and peace, and later, of evenings laden with the discovery of love—felt laid bare. Here, I had wept in Maqar’s arms the first time he had come to me, not as a thief, but as one to heal with word and caress and sigh. Here, I had hoped to spend the rest of my life in languid contentment poring over my ever-expanding library of scrolls, away from the specters of my past.

And now here it all was, disassembling before my eyes as the mountains of Saba loomed in the distance.

Humiliating tears slipped down my cheeks, hot and salty as the long Red Sea.

“Makeda . . .” He took me by the wrists. “My love.”

“Don’t speak to me of love. I beg you. Give me that mercy.”

He pulled me toward him with desperate strength. “Tell me what you would have me do!”

I wanted to tell him to go—to go and return across the sea with them and leave me in peace. But even then I couldn’t bear the thought of these walls without him. I had welcomed exile because it was safe. But it had been beautiful because of him.

“Send these men away,” I said. “Live with me here, as we did before. Let it all be as it was. If you are true, stay with me though I will never be queen.”

“How long will I be able to keep you safe when another is on the throne—another whose first priority will be to hunt down any competitor for it? Did you truly think your life would be safe if your brother wore the crown?”

“Then let us steal into the countryside and forget that we ever slept within the walls of any palace! We’ll grow an orchard and plant fields. We will live our days in peace . . .” But even as I said it, I knew my conviction was as false as the illusion of my freedom all these years. That I pleaded not with him, but with the god who had freed me once from Saba and now cruelly called me back.

“I can’t return. I cannot. I cannot . . .” I covered my eyes with shaking hands, not knowing if I said it to him, or to the god.

He took me by the shoulders. “If you wanted, I would run away into the countryside and live out my days with you in hiding. Say the word, and I will do it. But you would never be safe. We would never be in peace. We would live our lives looking always over our shoulders and you would grow to resent me.”

“Never.”

“Yes. Because the only place you will ever be safe is on the throne. And a day will come when you will wonder if your true place was where the gods had pointed. Do you think it is a mistake that you are firstborn to a king? That your parents came from the same royal clan? Do you not see you were meant for more? So you
will not be a pawn. Then don’t let them make you one! You are smarter than they are, more learned than any sage. And you loved Saba once.”

Yes. I had. Before my mother left me for the afterlife and I gave up my voice. Before Sadiq poisoned my chambers and Punt became my sanctuary if only because it was not the Saba I had come to know.

This morning I had dreamed of her rains. In days to come, I would wonder if it had been an omen. I had never been able to banish the past but had lived always in fear of its tendrils, even as I invited traders from the ports to dine with me in exchange for their stories. From the safety of Punt’s halls, I had followed the exploits of the council, the shifting politics of the tribes, and news of the growing cult of Almaqah and the temples my father built in his name. Almaqah, the god of the thundering bull and lunar cycle to whom I had sworn myself so many years ago.

Saba had found me in my dreams. Saba had found me here. I might have left Saba, but it had never left me. And now I saw that a part of me, more wise and seeing than my waking mind, had prepared for this future all along.

Somewhere outside the shrill song of a flycatcher caught the air. I closed my eyes.

“You asked what I would have you do.”

“Yes. Name it!”

“If I become queen, I will never marry you. To marry you would be to wonder all my days. I want something of certainty in this world. And so you will not be my husband, and never my king. Now what is your answer?”

“That you will be a better queen than the kings before you.”

I dropped my head to Maqar’s shoulder. His arms closed around me more gently than before. At last, he exhaled a long and shaky breath as though he had held it all this time.

“Stay with me,” I said.

“I will serve you all my life.”

An hour later I walked out of that chamber, I thought, forever. I was not a queen. Not yet. But I was no longer the princess I had been. That morning I boarded a ship on the edge of the narrow sea and assumed again the name by which Saba knew me: Bilqis.

And so my days of obscurity came to an end. I was eighteen years old.

THREE

W
hen I closed my eyes, I thought I could smell the frankincense weeping from the trees. It was said the perfume of Saba wafted out to sailors on the Red Sea and throughout the southern gulf. Here, in the Markha Valley, one could almost believe it.

“Princess.”

I opened my eyes on the tents and camels of twelve hundred tribesmen sprawled near the edge of the great waste.

Overhead, the sky was churning. And yet, the heavens had held. It was a sign from Almaqah, they had said days ago on the southern coastal plain. There my priest, Asm, who had come with me from Punt, had sacrificed a camel—one we could not afford, and therefore one Almaqah must honor.

Maqar, mounted at my side, pointed. Riders, on the northern edge of the valley.

“Come,” I said, refastening my veil. I guided my camel down the ridge.

To leave or enter Saba was to risk all—through treacherous mountains after the hot hell of the coastal plain, only to be laughed at by baboons. Through an ocean of sand in the vast eastern waste, graveyard to innumerable would-be invaders. The only traversable
way in was from the north through the oases of the Jawf, and then only if one had kin-ties to the tribes or riches to trade . . . or south from the seaport through the valleys, and then only if one had a ship. It was never the sea that safeguarded the cradle of Saba—along with her wealth—but always her mountains and sands.

I had wept on landing in the southern port. Not in relief that our company had made the crossing before the rains or that we had been met by the southern tribe of Urramar with much-needed supplies and camels. But because I had not thought I would ever be glad to see Saba’s high mountain ranges again.

Maqar was right. I had loved Saba once. And now, like a lover returned, I was broken at the sight of her.

But my return was not without cost. Sadiq came to me in nightmares for the first time in years as we entered the mountain passes of Qataban. I tossed in a sweat, shuddering beneath my woolen mantle in the late spring chill.

“Get out!” I said the night Maqar woke and tried to comfort me. I had followed him from the tent moments later, retching in the dirt.

Hagarlat haunted me through the high plateaus, and my father’s morose face down the descent to the great Baihan Valley. And though Maqar forgave me my outburst, neither did he touch me.

I was beside myself. Punt was a shadow land beyond the narrow sea and Saba had greeted me with demons. And so I plunged forward, the only direction available to me now: north, toward the capital.

Just as we reached the edge of camp, something sailed over the rim of the mountains against the brooding sky. I squinted at the languid flight of a vulture as clouds unfurled overhead.

In the camp, tribal accents punctuated the air, sharp and guttural as the thunder rolling beyond the horizon. Chieftains, in urgent conversation under the canopy of the command tent.

Lightning flashed, shocking the landscape. In the valley itself, the air was eerily still.

One by one, the nobles fell silent as I approached the tent. Among them, a new man perhaps a few years younger than my father, in rapid conversation with Khalkharib just an instant ago.

Twelve sets of kohl-rimmed eyes assessed me at once. Did I waver as I walked toward them, did my step falter? How did they perceive me, these men who knew nothing of me but my bloodline? Did any one of them see in me a queen—or only a means to their own power?

I looked at each of them in turn, the newcomer last of all.

“This is Wahabil,” Khalkharib said. “His tribe is kin-tribe to your own.” He had not needed to tell me; I recognized the old sunburst of the goddess Shams on his dagger’s scabbard immediately. I greeted him as kin, touching my veiled nose to his. He was stocky, no taller than I, with uncharacteristically light eyes and a wispy beard that did not disguise his jowls.

“My men wait in the next valley,” Wahabil said.

“Have you brought word of my kinsmen? I had thought to receive—”

“A rider has arrived from Marib,” Khalkharib interrupted.

I stared at him before slowly turning to Wahabil.

My heart became a cudgel.

“The king your father is dead,” Wahabil said. “Hagarlat has set her son on the alabaster throne. We refuse him allegiance. Your kinsmen gather at Sirwah even now.”

Silence.

Wahabil slowly leaned forward, hands on his knees. “Hail, Queen.”

Khalkharib perfunctorily followed suit, along with Nabat and the man from Aman. And then Yatha, and the chieftains of Urramar
and Awsan, and another from eastern Hadramawt who had joined us on the coastal plain, and four others whose tribes I had suddenly forgotten. One by one, they fell forward, their murmurs filling the too still air.

Beyond the canopy, those near enough to see and hear shouted and came to fall forward in groups and then in waves, their murmurs rising to the ominous sky, seeding the clouds with my name.

Hail, Queen! Queen Bilqis.

I instinctively turned toward Maqar, but found him bent nearly to the dry wadi floor, the neck I had adored so many nights bowed low.

The gust came, sweeping through the valley, sending the canopy shuddering as the sky broke to the south.

“Gather the men,” Khalkharib said, over the oncoming storm. “We march on Marib.”

That night, the voice of my mother, lost so many years ago, returned. Just a croon at first, in my sleeping mind’s ear. A song like wind through the tent flap, the trill of rain against the rumble of a highland storm. It was the lullaby of Saba, of her mountains and ringed plateaus, the music of her terraces in the spring deluge trickling down to her fields and orchards.

It was my mother’s song. And it was mine.

I
n the Baihan Valley we gained men from the tribes of Kahar and Awsan. We moved swiftly, skirting oases already populated with water hens; Hagarlat had no doubt summoned her allies weeks ago and word of my arrival would soon reach her spies, if it had not already. Word had already traveled between outlying settlements, from which tribesmen came to eat at our fires or summon us to theirs for “fat and meat,” curious for news or a glimpse of the returning
princess, the would-be queen. The richest of them slaughtered goat and lamb—sometimes up to a dozen animals to feed a portion of our number even as they ate nothing themselves—one of them sending his four sons to join us in the morning, yelling, “Remember your servant Ammiyatha! Remember Ammiyatha with favor!” Meanwhile, smaller wadis had become watercourses nearly overnight from the lowland rains, rivers running toward the waiting fields where workers labored to shore up breaches in canals.