Proof. Yes, the high priest is right.
Grudgingly, Ahijah admitted the truth of Zadok’s words; the concession left a sour taste upon his tongue.
Yahweh’s Law demands proof.
But such proof would not be easy to get. Even the princess’s visits to the temples of foreign gods would not be enough; many women visited those temples—too many. Well, that must stop. But men would not condemn the king’s daughter for doing what their wives and daughters also did, for that would be to condemn their own womenfolk as well.
As they should, as they should—
Ahijah forced himself to calmness. First cleanse the king’s house, and the others would follow. He must smash the serpent’s venomous head. The king.
So mere visits to the temples of strange gods would not suffice. But Prince Rehoboam had also admitted that his sister visited the Grove. And for that, Ahijah could demand her death.
A princess of the House of David wallowing wanton in the Grove, worshipping the Morning Star with her own body, opening herself to all comers!
Disgusted to nausea by the image sullying his mind, Ahijah shuddered and spat.
That was where she must be taken. She must be dragged from that foulness, dragged through the city streets and flung naked before her father’s throne. The Law was clear, clear as pure water: for wantonness, she must die. King Solomon would be forced to condemn his daughter or lose his throne.
Ahijah smiled. Let the vaunted wisdom of Solomon show the king a way out of that trap!
Later, it seemed to me that Ahijah’s secret plan to disgrace me must have been known to half the city. The fault lay in the prophet’s own iron virtue; to him, a word sworn was immutable. It did not occur to Ahijah that the men he bound to secrecy would not count it oath-breaking to whisper the matter to their wives as they lay together. Or that Rehoboam would work against his own good by boasting to his followers that his haughty sister would soon be dragged down lower than dust.
As a result, I heard of the plot to violate the Grove of the Morning Star well before the new moon showed in the evening sky. And I was not even the first to know of the matter, for word came to me from Ishvaalit, sister of one of Rehoboam’s friends. Her brother Athaniel had listened to Rehoboam’s boast, praised him for wisdom greater than Solomon’s, and gone straight to his own sister—not to warn me, for Athaniel cared nothing for me for either good or ill, but Athaniel was fond of his sister, and Ishvaalit worshipped in the Grove each full moon. Athaniel cared a great deal for what happened to Ishvaalit, and so he warned her to stay away from the Goddess’s Grove at the next bright moon. No fool, Ishvaalit soon extracted the whole tale from her brother, and then came straight to me.
“We must speak,” she told me.
“Very well,” I said, and invited her into my own courtyard.
But Ishvaalit shook her head. “Come sit with me by the fountain in the queens’ garden.” The great fountain there was a favored spot; what was spoken beside its falling waters could not be heard three steps away. So I knew what she wished to say was secret—there is no better place to trade secrets than in plain sight—and smiled, and wound my arm about her waist, and walked with her like a sister through the hallways and galleries until we reached the garden.
“Now,” I said when we sat beside the singing fountain, “tell me.”
“Your brother Prince Rehoboam plots against you,” Ishvaalit said, and I smiled.
“Always,” I said, “it is the only way he can be happy, by injuring others.”
“Do not laugh.” Ishvaalit smiled, as if we shared a mild jest. “This time he means your death.”
I sat like stone while Ishvaalit told me of Rehoboam’s boasts, and her brother’s warning. I knew Rehoboam hated me—but so greatly? What wrong had I done him? I was not even a rival for the throne, for, as he had so often jeered, I was only a girl.
Ishvaalit finished her tale, and I forced myself to laugh, shaking my head as if she spun jests too well. “I do not know what the prophet plans,” I said, “for you know I do not go to the Grove by moonlight.” I had visited the Grove of the Morning Star once, by day, and seen only a well-tended orchard, a vale of pomegranates and olives. The Grove’s moon did not call me; I had not gone again.
“I know only what my brother told me,” Ishvaalit said. “Now I have told you.” She leaned forward, then, and laid her hand over mine. “I do not know what the prophet plans—but until the full moon wanes, do not drink from any cup you do not share with others, and do not go aside with any you do not trust as you trust yourself.”
I promised I would not. I knew what Ahijah and Rehoboam thought, that since the wild princess roamed where she would, it would be simple to force a sleeping potion down her throat and carry her off to the Grove, to be found lying naked by scandalized louts—
Well, I knew better than that. “I will be careful,” I said. “Go now, and warn the priestesses who serve the Morning Star that this bright moon,
their goddess will be best served by chastity. And warn the Daughters of the Law not to go at all.”
If Ahijah could not snare me, he still would happily accuse any girl found there and demand she be delivered up for stoning. My father would refuse, I knew that, but it would be best to avoid an open clash between king and prophet.
“I will tell them,” Ishvaalit said. And then we remained beside the great fountain, chattering of this and that, until half-a-dozen of my father’s wives came to bask in the sun. Ishvaalit and I wove our way into other conversations, as if caught by their gossip, until at last I looked up from the new embroidery stitch Ahinoam was displaying and saw that Ishvaalit was gone. I smiled, and set to praising my stepmother’s needlework, and hoped that I was truly as clever as I had sometimes been told.
For Rehoboam’s scheme had kindled an answering plan in my own mind. A daring plan; a dangerous plan. But one that might, in the end, hold the key that would unlock the prison enclosing me.
My mother walked the corridors of the women’s palace as smoothly as if her feet already knew the path. “Daughters spin secrets,” say old wives—but nothing compared with those secrets cherished by mothers. The ivory-set ebony gate that led to Queen Michal’s courtyard stood open in silent welcome; my mother looked upon the gate and smiled.
Queen Michal sat beside the courtyard fountain, trailing her fingers in the cool water. I led my mother before Queen Michal and bowed. “O Queen, I bring before you my mother.”
Whereupon my mother bowed; despite her age, she was graceful as a willow in the wind. Smiling, she rose and said, “O Queen, live forever.”
Queen Michal stared at her, and for the space of an in-drawn breath, I thought she would not speak. “So it is you,” Queen Michal said at last. “And what are you called now?”
My mother laughed, and then the queen laughed too, and embraced her. “Oh, but I am glad to see you once again!” the queen said. “And this time I will not let you go.”
“This time I will not ask it.” My mother stepped back and regarded the queen critically, as if Queen Michal too were her daughter, and my mother must pass judgment upon her hair and gown and jewels. “You look well, Michal. Queenship suits you,”
“No,” said the queen, “but queenship is a gown I must wear, for my—for King Solomon’s sake.”
My mother stood silent for a moment, then said, “O Queen, shall I weigh my words or speak freely?”
“Had I heeded you when first we met, I would have saved myself a well of tears. Speak.”
“Then spare yourself more tears and bow to truth, Michal. Queenship suits you because you are at heart a queen. If you could set aside your crown now, you would not, King Solomon or no.”
Queen Michal seemed to turn to glass, hard and brittle; she stood tall and proud, and I thought she would order my mother from her. But she said only “Do you think so little of me?”
“I think so much of you, O Queen. You are the bones that support the kingdom, the heart that holds the crown. You are the goddess who breathes life into the land—Oh, I know you were born a daughter of Yahweh, and I know in what esteem you hold all gods. But truth is truth, Michal, and you now are what I say. Without you there would be no kingdom here, and owls and jackals would feast among the city’s broken stones.”
Silence stretched long and cold; my heartbeat echoed in my ears. All our futures had been cast before the queen’s jeweled feet. My mother and the queen remained motionless, as if time-locked in amber. Then the air seemed to melt and time to flow again.
“Would that be so bad a thing?” asked the queen, and my mother answered, “It would be a different thing,” and took the queen’s outstretched hands. As relief swept hot through my blood, Queen Michal embraced my mother once more, this time hugging her hard, as if she were a long-lost sister.
After that, the queen laughed and said, “I did not expect quite so much truth!”
“Queens hear it only rarely. Having heard, what now is your will, O Queen?” My mother’s words were said lightly, but a sober question lay behind them.
“Why, that you tell me what I should call you now!” said the queen, and my mother laughed once more and pulled off the modest blue veil that had always covered her hair.
“Call me what name you will, so long as you call me friend, and my daughter yours as well.” She glanced at the veil and tossed it to the floor as if it were a dirty rag. “Ah, but it is good to dwell once more among riches!”
“If only—”
“No.” My mother held up her hand, as if to hold back Queen Michal’s words. “Do not lash yourself with that. If is not a word a queen should use when speaking of the past. Only of the future.”
“Perhaps. Still, I was happier as a farmer’s wife.”
“Perhaps you were—but the kingdom is happier with you as a queen. Do not give yourself airs, Michal; all women—and all men too, although the creatures will deny it with their
dying breath—follow the path they must. The gods never meant you to live and die a farmer’s wife, or you would not be here in a queen’s scarlet and gold.”
“This from you? Did you not once say we all made our own fates?”
“We do—but only as the gods will it. The gods created you to shape a kingdom’s future, Michal—and you have. Do you think Solomon would sit upon the throne today had you not meddled in the fates of David and of Bathsheba? So do not speak foolishly; you are not a foolish woman.”
And when I asked, later, how it was that she and Queen Michal knew each other so well, my mother only smiled, and said that it was long ago—“So long ago it is another land, and all its people dead.”
Nor would she ever again speak of it, save to say, “The past is the past, Daughter. Now I am friend to one queen and mother to another, and if the gods are kind, I shall be grandmother to a third. I am content with that—and you should be content as well. Do not disturb the dead, Abishag. They will not thank you for rousing them.”
Only you can free yourself.
So the Queen of Sheba had told me, and now I knew that for truth. Sheba needed a queen to rule after Bilqis, not a girl bestowed upon the throne like a child bride upon an ancient husband. But until now, I had not seen a path to Sheba that I might tread with honor.
I could run away, follow the Shebans, and hope they would not hand me back when my father sent armed men after me.
Yes, start a war over you; that would be fine work indeed.
That was no way to repay my father for his love, or the queen for her teaching. Set two nations at each other’s throats, cut off the spice trade with the Morning Land—yes, fine work, if one wished to sing a great song of battles and deaths. Not such a fine thing if one wished to rule a land, tend it and nurture it, comfort it with peace.
It would be better to stay than to try, and fail, breaking many lives in the attempt. Mine among them, for my father would be deeply hurt, and it would be a hard thing for him ever to trust me again.
But if I stayed, I must marry, and my father would not marry me beyond his kingdom. He would give me to one of the great men of Jerusalem, to keep me near. That was all very well while he lived—but when King Solomon lay with his fathers, and King Rehoboam ruled in his turn?
Rehoboam hates me. As king, he will at last be able to act upon that hatred.
When my father died, my own life would be forfeit to my brother’s enmity. There
would be no safety for me then in all the kingdom—nor for any man who married me or for any sons and daughters I might bear.
So I must act now—and thanks to Rehoboam, a path lay before me that might lead me to my future.
How he would rage if he knew he himself provided me the key!
But I must walk this path with great care; one misstep and I would fall before the stones of the Law. I was setting my father’s love against Ahijah’s hate, and if I were wrong about which was stronger, I would die.
It was the first time in my life that I sat and thought long and hard, the first time I tried to think as a queen must.
As a woman must.
For it was as a woman that I was Ahijah’s foe, although he was not mine. I bore him no ill-will—or at least, I strove not to think hardly of him. Unjust, when I plotted to use him for my own purposes as coldheartedly as he himself conspired against me.
So I set myself against him, princess against prophet.
A man must know his enemy better than he knows his friend.
So said the king’s general; Benaiah won always, so I knew his advice sound. What did I know about Ahijah?
Who does he love? Who does he hate? Who does he trust?
I knew nothing of Ahijah’s love or trust. But of his hate—ah, that I knew full well. The prophet Ahijah hated all gods save the Lord Yahweh. And he loathed goddesses above all.
The prophet despised goddesses even more than he did women—and feared them too. No man could hate a thing so greatly without fearing it just as greatly. Ahijah raged as if men dragged him in chains to kiss the idols’ gilded feet, when all the priests and priestesses of the foreign gods housed in Jerusalem asked was to worship in peace.
So Ahijah hates and fears me, for I represent the goddess in the king’s court
. This at last was clear to me. I was the child of the king’s great love, whom he had set above all others. I was the daughter the king cherished above all his sons. To Ahijah, this stank of evil; to Ahijah, daughters were not a blessing but a curse.
If he only knew how truly I am a daughter of goddesses!
My mother’s mother had danced before Astarte’s altar—more, she had been a king’s pleasure, a bound
slave, a merchant’s wife, a daughter’s mother. And had not my father’s mother been Bathsheba, “daughter of the seven gods,” who had risen above shame to become mother of the king who succeeded Great David?
And then there had been Michal. A woman who wove life into her own pattern, who had raised my father to be a good man and a wise king.
I now knew what to name these women who had formed me: each a true phoenix, re-creating herself no matter how harsh the choice, how hot the fire. Now it was my turn to choose, and I chose to keep faith with my mothers.
Now I too must remold myself, rise from fire to fly again.
The path I chose for myself was not easy; never think I set my feet upon its stones without pain. For my success would hurt my father deeply. And it would cause a scandal, although the shame would be eased by my banishment from the kingdom. I must leave my home, never again set eyes upon Jerusalem, upon its rooftops burning golden under the summer sun … .
Every girl leaves her home,
I reminded myself. Change was woman’s life. And this change would be of my own choice. I must remember that, when the way grew hard.
So I began to shape Ahijah’s plan to my own purpose; that was my third error. The prophet sought to catch me in the Grove, expose me in the act of worshipping the Lady of Light. He wished to drag me before my father’s court and accuse me openly, giving my father no chance to shield me.
Well, and so I would let Ahijah find me—but not in the Grove. Outside its sacred ground would suit me better. Let the prophet meet me on my way to the Lady’s shrine. Yes, that would do; Ahijah would encounter me at a time and place of my choosing, not his.
Nor would I face him alone. He would have no chance to have men grasp me and force me into a more compromising position. I must have attendants—and they must be girls who could not be harmed by the success of my scheme. I could ask no one who would remain to face Ahijah’s wrath. So I could not use my own maids, or any of my friends, or even foreigners who dwelt in Jerusalem.
No, it must be girls immune to what may happen afterward
—And as I thought this, I knew already that I must ask help from the Shebans.
But not from the queen!
This I must do myself.
If I cannot persuade Khurrami and Irsiya to accompany me, then I do not deserve to succeed
.
Once my will had set the spindle of fortune whirling, cold doubts beset me.
This will be disaster
, my fears whispered. My scheme would fail and, failing, carry me down in sorrow and disgrace. And my father—what would this do to him?
He loves me so; how can I hurt him so deeply?
How could I condemn my father to certain pain?
But if I did not, I condemned myself to misery. And to danger; I must not forget that Rehoboam’s hatred would one day be a real power he would use against me.
And if I do not carry out my plan, I hurt the queen and all her people.
For without a true queen to follow her, Sheba’s land was condemned to strife. It was to prevent slaughter that the Sun of Sheba called me; who was I to deny a holy summons?
Yes, blame the gods for your own desires.
For I longed for the future Sheba promised as some girls yearn for a lover.
In the end, it did not matter if Bilqis’s sun goddess summoned me, or if another power commanded me. Whatever force drove me, god or goddess or both—or neither—I knew only that I must obey that call.
Seeking fire, I fly south, to the morning. To the desert, and beyond. Who knows? Perhaps someday a new truth will rise out of these ashes to sweep its wings across the wide world—
We dream hot dreams, when we are young.