The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (7 page)

He was quiet as I lay back against him, but it didn’t matter. I would prove my words with time. I could not imagine life—here or in Punt, or anywhere—without him.

But then . . . a pit twisted in my stomach.

“Surely you considered this possibility,” I said slowly. “That I would hold to you, even if I became queen as you meant me to.”

“Can you really ask that now?”

For a moment there was only the thickening patter of rain. When I said nothing, he sat up abruptly.

“You said you would never make me king and I accepted it. And it has cost me more than you know. Do you not see the way they look at me? The way your nobles go silent whenever I approach? They are too cautious to show their disdain, but it is there because I have your favor.”

“They are jealous!”

“Even so, I say you must marry for treaty out of love for you, when I want only to possess you! What more will convince you? I give you my pride, my body, my life!”

I leaned up and clasped his shoulders. His words shamed me. “Forgive me,” I said. And then, in a whisper: “Forgive me.” After a long moment the stiffness slowly left his frame.

“The politics of these tribes is infecting us both,” I said. “And you and I . . . have slept too long apart.”

I smoothed back the fall of hair from his neck. He turned his head and even in the darkness I knew the question in that gaze. And then I was in his arms and clasped tightly, the patter of rain drowning out his sighs.

FOUR

I
gathered with my tribal leaders at dawn in a broad patch of scrub on the desert’s edge. Six cairns in crude imitation of Marib’s temple pillars marked its use as an open air sanctuary by nomads and travelers.

Niman, my cousin, had provided the ibex kid bound before us. Niman himself might have been king, had his father survived Agabos’ campaigns. But none of Agabos’ sons had survived except for my father, and so the throne had passed to him. The kid bleated intermittently, the young starts of its horns curving slightly toward one another, forming a perfect crescent atop its head.

Niman had also brought another item I thought never to lay eyes on: the
markab
.

I had seen the
markab
only in depictions of my grandfather’s victories on the bronze temple door. But now here it was, as though lifted from the frieze of legend itself.

An open-frame ark of acacia wood decorated with gold and ostrich plumes, the
markab
was both battle standard and war trophy. Gold horns rose up from the base on either side of it—their exaggerated crescents evoking the moon god’s familiar, the bull. My grandfather’s army had carried the ship, as its name meant, into battle, a
bare-breasted virgin riding within it, and no tribal force had ever captured it. But the
markab
had become lost in the last years of his reign, or so I had heard.

A hush fell in camp at sight of it as ten men carried it overhead and twenty more jogged alongside, reminiscent of the day when warriors shackled themselves to its frame so that they might defend it and the virgin battle queen to their last breaths. When they brought it to the clearing, I saw the fittings by which it could be mounted atop a camel.

I was guided into the clearing by an acolyte at each arm; an hour earlier Asm had given me the bitter datura, the root of the moonflower, to drink. I had retched immediately and refused the rest, then vomited twice more.

I knelt before the
markab
, mouth acrid, my unbound hair falling to the earth and coiling atop my thighs. A robed figure towered above me, blotting out the sky. Asm. The gilded skull of Almaqah’s bull seemed to hover atop his head, its eyes black and endless holes, the nasal cavity like a toothed grimace so that I almost screamed at first sight of it.

He spoke, and though I knew the gravel of his voice well, it seemed the skull formed the words with phantom bovine lips as the mountain rumbled to the west.

“We make the gift of blood—water, salt, and ocher of life—that you hear the petition of your daughter. Almaqah, god of moon and thunder, hear your servant and answer!” His hand lashed out. Five runes hovered, impossibly, in the air before they skittered to the ground. Two of them lay upturned: the liver rune, and the blood rune.

“Almaqah, hear and answer,” murmured the tribesmen surrounding the clearing, worshippers of Amm and Sayin, Athtar and Wadd—gods of sun, moon, and morning star, of field and rain and thunder—the gods of their territories and ancestors and clans. Every tribesman swore by the gods of the lands they visited, as I had sworn
by Sayin on the coastal plain and by Amm in Qataban. But we were in Saba’s sovereign territory now.

Saba and Almaqah, over all.

The priest turned to the east, where the pale sliver of the waxing moon had begun its day-rise over the desert. The crescent knife shimmered in his hand, twin to the sickle in the sky.

“Almaqah, grant victory to your daughter and swiftness to the swords of these, her kinsmen and allies. Reveal whether they march on Marib this day! Grant clear omen and be remembered for your favor to your people. Grant victory, that you may be worshipped forever. Saba and Almaqah, over all!”

The tribes strike their own deals with the gods
, I thought abstractedly.
As all men must.
But my bargain, struck days ago, had been between the god and me alone.

Asm was kneeling over the kid, holding it by the head. I didn’t remember seeing him move. The knife flashed downward, impossibly fast, and curved slowly upward again. For a suspended moment, blood brimmed in a macabre smile across that creamy throat before spurting a red arc into the air.

An acolyte fell to his knees to catch the blood in a golden basin and I watched it fill until my vision dotted like the crimson splatter on the bowl’s edge. There was no wind; the metallic tang of it was in my nostrils until I could taste it.

I stared, transfixed as the life of the animal grotesquely failed before me, the bound legs lifted so stiffly from the ground falling limply to the dust at last.

When Asm moved to carve open the belly, I told myself to look away and thought that I had, even as I watched the acolyte pull on the edge of that gaping wound.

Reek of bowel . . . rend of flesh like the ripping of so many threads . . . Asm, bloodied up to his forearms, cutting free the liver . . .

With dread amazement I watched him examine and then delicately slice it open, peeling it apart like a fruit.

“The omen is favorable,” he announced. “We march on Marib today!”

A shout went up from the tribesmen, shocking the pulse that drummed too quickly, too loudly in my ears.

“What of the outcome?” one man called out.

The priest passed the red mass to the one acolyte and accepted the bowl of blood from the other. I realized, belatedly, he had come to kneel before me.

“Daughter of Almaqah, look into the bowl and tell me what you see.”

I tore my eyes from the black sockets of the skull.

There, the bowl. So much blood. I leaned forward, peered into that red well, the welter of life and death. And for a moment it seemed that I was not in this clearing, or even here, on the edge of the desert, but in the palace. That I was a girl clinging to her dead mother, strands of her hair caught in my fingers. That I was twelve again, and desperate for salvation, the rubies of my mother’s bracelet as deeply crimson as the flecks of blood against that golden rim . . .

My vision shrouded, closing over me. A sharp ringing deafened my ears.

“My queen, what do you see?” Asm, from very far away.

“Incense. Frankincense,” I heard myself say.

I reached for him, but he had gotten to his feet. I fell forward, flailing for purchase. My hands landed on the edge of the bowl, sending it over.

“The spice road,” I heard him say as though from a distance. “The spice road!” he roared. “Almaqah grants prosperous reign!” The tribesmen erupted in shouts—all except Maqar, who seized me by the shoulders, my hands outstretched between us, fingers dripping blood.

He caught me up in his arms, calling for water, something for the queen to eat. When he looked down at me next, his face was clouded as the western sky. I touched his face.

We had mended things silently, if desperately, in our nomadic bed through the night and again, just before dawn. And I had sworn to myself in the quiet moment of sunrise that we would be married by summer’s end. I did not care what his father’s intent had been. He could have the satisfaction of thinking he had contrived it. It did not matter; the gain was mine.

A man came running from camp. I struggled to stand, only then seeing the blood I had smeared across Maqar’s cheek and chest. “Tribesmen, coming in from the north!” the man shouted. “Hundreds!”

All around us, hands instinctively went to swords, but the man from Aman loudly announced, “You see, my queen!” He jutted his chin toward the large company on the horizon. “My men have come.”

A
s the men made ready, I paused near the
markab
to slide a finger over the gilded horns. I plucked idly at an ostrich feather. The gold leaf was very fine, very smooth, without even a nick. As was the acacia wood, as far as I could tell. The feathers were pristine—too pristine and new to have ever entered the field of battle so long ago . . .

Very clever
.

W
e rode west out to meet the tribesmen of Aman on the plain of Marib. The man had been right; there were hundreds. They joined our number, filling our right flank. It was by now almost noon and rain had begun to fall, matting hair to head and veil to face. More men had come from nearby villages throughout the morning and we
were by now nearly four thousand in number, a unified royal escort, a show of militant accord.

Ahead of us, across the Wadi Dhana, which ran parallel us to our left, the edge of Marib’s southern oasis lay green against the encroaching sands of the desert. My heart began a steady drum.

I had not thought to see these fields again or to ever count it a blessing if I did. But now my spirit surged at sight of the raging wadi, that watercourse of dreams come to life once more. And there—the temple within the southern oasis, connected to the capital by a narrow causeway over the waters.

When we broached the eastern edge of the smaller north oases, Niman abruptly turned in his saddle. Raising his spear, he shouted, “Saba and Almaqah, over all!”

Those nearest us took up the refrain, and within minutes it became a cry four thousand strong, drowning out rain and waterway both.

But just when we should have seen the walls of Marib rising up from the western horizon, the horizon itself seemed to waver, like heat waves over a dusty road. For a moment, I thought it the aftereffect of Asm’s tea—what few drops I had actually retained of it. And then I saw.

Lines of north men. Lines and lines of them.

Nabat signaled a stop. A short blast from a horn issued midway back, carrying the order.

Maqar drew close and said, low, “Have your priest usher you across the causeway to the temple. Now.” And then, to Yafush: “Keep her safe.”

I stayed Yafush with a hand. “No.”

Maqar leaned in urgently. “You cannot safely watch the outcome of this. Not against so many men!”

“I will not run for walls as others fight in my name.”

“Go now, while there is time,” he hissed.

“And what—wait for some report? A messenger, to say whether I am queen or not?”

“This is meaningless if you are killed! I will come for you myself when it is over. You will enter the city in triumph. But until then you at least will have sanctuary there.”

He did not need to finish his sentence for me to hear the rest of it:
If we fail.

“And what would I do with sanctuary? Live out my life as a priestess, never to set foot outside those walls again?” I shook my head. “I will not leave my
markab.
And I will not leave you.”

“Forget me! I must be nothing to you now! For the sake of Saba—”

But something—something too long latent, and too long forgotten rose up in me. Righteous, furious indignation. A refusal to renounce my birth name or birthright again out of shame or fear . . . or to ever cower again. Every thought of disgrace, every dread terror of the past, fell away from me like a shell all at once.