The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen Read online

  “He wouldn’t,” I said.

  “And why not?”

  “He already has Sadiq’s loyalty.”

  Even then I held no illusions about my future. I would be married to some noble or another in a matter of years.

  But not Sadiq.

  “Hagarlat’s love of her brother is no secret,” she said, fiercely combing my hair. “And neither is her ability to secure favors from your father.”

  “He’s not even a tribal chief!”

  “He’s the queen’s brother. He’ll be master of waters by year’s end, mark me.”

  I looked at her, incredulous. The master of waters oversaw the distribution of flow from the great wadi dam, the sluices of which irrigated the oases on either side of Marib. It was a position of power over the capital’s most influential tribes. Only a fair and respected man could arbitrate the inevitable conflicts over the allocation of waters.

  Sadiq was neither.

  “He’ll do nothing but collect bribes.”

  “Bilqis!”

  “It’s true. Sadiq is a worm sucking the tit of his sister!”

  My nurse drew a sharp breath and was, I knew, on the verge of warning me to prudence. But before she got a word out, Shara dropped the bronze mirror that she had been polishing. It fell with a thud to the carpet.

  “Clumsy girl!” her mother snapped. Shara didn’t seem to hear; her wide eyes were fastened on the floor.

  My nurse hesitated and then gasped and dropped the handful of my hair she had begun to plait. She swept aside, her head bowed so low that I thought her neck would break.

  I slowly turned on my stool.

  There, in the arched doorway of our shared chamber, stood Hagarlat. The hem of her veil was pinned back from her face, a rainfall of gold fell from each ear. Two of her women stood in the antechamber beyond. I rose to my feet.

  For a moment, neither of us moved. Nor did I move even to bow when she walked quietly toward me. She stopped just before the mirror and bent to retrieve it as though it were a wayward toy. Appraising it once, she took the cloth from Shara’s startled hand, passed it over the surface, and then handed the mirror to me.

  “So you may see more clearly,” she said. And then she walked out, dropping the cloth behind her.

  The instant she was gone, my nurse and Shara turned toward me as one, their faces pale, nostrils flared with fear. I didn’t ask how the door to the outer chamber had come open. It didn’t matter.

  I was betrothed to Sadiq within a week.

  I threw myself at my father’s feet in the audience room of his private chamber—the place where he might be not a king but a man.

  “I beg you, do not give me to him,” I cried. I clasped the fine leather of his sandals, pushed up the hem of his robe to touch my forehead to the top of them.

  “Bilqis,” he said with a sigh. I raised my head even as he looked away. The lines around his eyes seemed more pronounced in the low lamplight of the chamber, the characteristic kohl missing from the rim of his lower lashes. “Can you not do this thing? For Saba—for Almaqah, over all?”

  “What do I care for any god?” I said. “The gods do what they will!”

  “Are you a goddess, that you, too, should do what you will?” he said softly.

  “She did this because she heard me speak ill of Sadiq. I repent of it!” I dropped my head, clutched at his feet. “I will apologize. I will serve in her chamber. But please do not do this!”

  He reached for me, to draw me up. “Hagarlat would see our tribal bonds strengthened. And why not? Your brother will be king. Do you really think the queen so petty?”

  I jerked away from him. “Do you not see that she hates me?” I stumbled back, away from the low dais and into the pool of lantern light before the throne. I opened my mouth to renew my appeal but stopped when I saw how he stared at me.

  For a moment his mouth worked, though no words came out. There was a pallor to his skin that hadn’t been there before.

  “Ismeni . . . ?” he said faintly. His hand lifted, fingers trembling in the air.

  “Father?”

  I went to him again but when I tried to clasp his knees, he flinched away.

  “Father, it is I, Bilqis!”

  “It is late,” he said, eyes turned toward the latticed window. Torchlight glowed up from the royal gardens below.

  “Please, my king. I was your daughter once. If you have any love for me—”

  “It is settled.” His voice was strained. The lamp flickered and I saw it then on his face: the grimace of the years since my mother’s death. Love eclipsed by the dark moon of pain.

  Sadiq seemed to be everywhere after that. He stood in the porticoes when I went out to the gardens. He loitered near the fountains as I went about my lessons. And though he did not approach me beneath the gaze of the ubiquitous guards, his eyes were as ever-present as the scorching sun.

  I quit attending meals in the hall. I began to avoid my lessons. The sight of him, from the way he wore his ornamental dagger high up in his belt as though it were his very manhood to the number of rings on his fingers, repulsed me. I would feel different in time, my nurse assured me. But my only comfort was that I would never be alone with him until we married in three years.

  Sadiq, however, was not a man of honor.

  I was twelve the first time he laid hands on me.

  The soft scrape of the door woke me. I was alone and at first glance by light of the waning lamp, I thought it was Baram, the eunuch. He, too, was paunched around the middle and soft-chinned, and the only man allowed in the women’s quarter.

  And then I saw the gleam of the dagger’s hilt.

  He crossed the room in three strides and I bolted up, screaming for Baram. Sadiq struck me hard across the face.

  I fought him as his weight fell on me, the scabbard of his dagger digging into my ribs, but he was twice my size. “Baram and the women are attending my sister, who is even now miscarrying your new brother,” he said hotly against my ear. He was putrid with perfume and wine. “And none of them will stand against the new master of waters.”

  His hand closed around my throat. His other tugged up my gown. I clawed at him until I nearly lost consciousness and then squeezed shut my eyes.

  I lay in bed the next three days.

  My nurse called for the physician, who could find no fever in me. Only the stupefied torpor of one who no longer wished to live in her own skin. Sadiq had managed to leave no mark on my neck or face—just the scrapes of his rings against my thighs.

  I wanted to rise only to walk into the desert waste until the sands consumed me, but had no will even for that. As night came on the fourth evening, I called for my nurse. I would ask for the deadly nightshade that Hagarlat used to dilate her pupils. Or for the honey of rhododendron nectar.

  But she just blinked at me and said, “Why, child? Why do you want these things? You are beautiful already and such honey will only make you ill.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to give voice to the words.

  She gave me qat to chew instead, but even the stimulant leaves would not rouse me from my bed.

  The second time Sadiq forced himself on me, I said, “My father will have you killed. I will accuse you before the entire council!”

  “Will he? They will ask you, ‘Did you cry out? Who heard you? Why did you not come immediately to your king father the first time?’ When I claim you tried to seduce me and voice concern about your honor, whom do you think they will believe?” And I knew he was right: he was brother to the queen and master of waters. I was the daughter of a woman born under a bad omen, too often alone.

  “When they send for the midwife and she finds you not intact, I will have no choice but to publicly set you aside for the sake of my honor, and the queen’s.”

  I should have been filled with righteous fury. I should have accused him before my father if only to escape him—and any other man, as no man would marry me without a hefty bribe after such a public scandal. Instead, I was o
vercome with shame like the rot of worms beneath the skin.

  I begged Shara not to leave my bed at night. But she could not deny the queen if called for. Sadiq raped me twice more in the months that followed, even as clouds gathered over the highland terraces and the first gusts of the coming season shook the trees on the hills.

  The rains came and I kept to my bed. The torrents swept down the hills through the afternoon, carrying trees and earth and any building in their way into the wadi ravines. At last I slept through the night, exhausted by my vigilance of the weeks prior. For now, at least, I was safe; the master of waters was away from the palace, monitoring the floods and the condition of the canals with a labor force ready to repair any breach in the sluices.

  Sometime before dawn, I rose and walked to the window. I was a wisp beneath my shift, having lost the young curves I had only begun to come into. Clasping the sill, I threw open the latticed shutter. The first servants were in the yard; I could make out their shadowed forms against the faint hue of dawn. As I had on so many nights since my mother’s passing, I sought out the Sister Stars. But that morning the moon obscured one of them. I stood at the window long after the sky had brightened and the stars began to fade, watching it pass before their company.

  For the first time in years, I prayed. Not to Shams, the sun, who had failed to protect my mother . . . but to Almaqah, the moon god who had received her.

  Save me or let me die.

  That was all. I slid the ruby bracelet, the most precious thing I owned, from my arm and laid it on the sill before the fading crescent.

  Later that day, men came rushing into the courtyard, their shouts rising to the open window of my chamber. Not long after, a great, singular wail went up from the hall of women, so loud that it carried to my chamber.

  My nurse brought the news an hour later: one of the sluice gates had buckled. Sadiq had been carried away in the flood.

  I raised my eyes heavenward.

  I am yours.

  Sadiq’s body was never found. A month after his death, Hagarlat accused me before my father. Her face was drawn, her clothing hanging on a frame turned gaunt. I had grown into my own gowns once more, as though I had acquired the lushness she had lost in her grief.

  “That girl is a curse to this house.” Her voice broke. “She cursed my brother as she has cursed me!”

  “My queen, you are overwrought,” my father said, sounding weary.

  “Am I? My brother—her betrothed—is dead and I have miscarried twice since coming into your household. Her own mother gave birth to only one girl and died with your son in her belly. I tell you that girl brings death to everyone near her!”

  When my father finally looked at me, I knew he saw the shadow of the woman he had married not for treaties but for love. And I understood at last why he had not sought me in my grief, or summoned me in the years of my withdrawal since her death.

  “Wife,” he said, lowering his head.

  “You will send her away or I will leave this court and take my son with me lest she kill him, too, as she did her own mother and unborn brother! My mother had seven children by the time she was my age, and my sister five sons. But not once in four years have I carried another to term. Would you cost us the lives of our other unborn children as well?”

  I turned on her with a hiss. I was like the branch, no longer green, that splinters beneath the weight of a single bird. I was prepared to be reckless, to curse her, her son, and every hoped-for issue of her womb, and every tenant of her tribe with their camels and goats down to the last rabid dog.

  But the breath I had drawn to curse her came out as a soft chuff of wonder instead. For one insane moment, I nearly laughed.

  There was nothing she could do to me, nothing that could be taken from me that had not already been taken or that I had not been willing to shed—down to my very life—myself.

  I, who had no power, did not need to utter a word. She had lost all supremacy over me. And in that moment, she knew it, too. I watched the color drain from her cheeks.

  “Yes,” I said to my father. “Send me away. Let me go across the narrow sea to the land of your mother’s mother before you. And give me priests and offerings for the temple of Almaqah there, and I will take them in your name.”

  Was that relief that flitted across his face?

  I could not begrudge him his quick agreement. Almaqah had been his salvation, too.

  That fall I boarded a ship with my tutor, a retinue of priests, new ministers for the growing colony, and a wealth of incense, offerings, and gifts for the temple in Punt. I was not allowed to bring my nurse or Shara with me—Hagarlat had seen to that—and so bid them both tearful goodbyes, kissing their necks and commending them to the gods.

  I was resolved that I would never return to the palace at Marib with its dark corridors and darker memories. That I would live my life in Punt—and in peace—all my days.

  But Almaqah, once summoned, had other plans for me.

  TWO

  I had been dreaming of the fog that descends over the highlands before the monsoon rains. Fog like milk stirred by the first gusts of the coming storm before the dull roar of the flood rushes down the mountain. A flood brimming with froth, capricious as its changeling color—first white, then yellow as it fills with silt. Waters deadly enough to carry away a camel or even a house as they rage into the wadis toward the sluices and the waiting fields below.

  “Makeda.”

  I opened my eyes, stared up through the fine gauze of my bed toward the ceiling. Serpents of lamplight played about its tiles, casting shadows through the canopy meant to keep out the relentless mosquitoes.

  The cicadas were singing. Even with the shutters closed I could hear their deafening chorus. In the place between the dream world and this one, they might even be taken for incessant sheets of rain, lulling one back to sleep . . .

  A kiss lit against my temple, soft as a moth. I reached up, eyes closed, to catch at a tendril of hair, twine it around my finger, hold it against my nose. A warm knee slid against me. The last of the incense on the burner had gone out, leaving only the sachet of sheets musted with desire spent hours ago in the spring heat.

  “Makeda.” Whispered now. It was the name given me by my grandmother’s family—a name I had embraced upon coming to Punt and leaving the ravaged Bilqis behind.

  I pulled him toward me, searched for that salty neck. He groaned, held for a moment as though he would speak, and then covered me.

  Even then I thought I heard rain, falling in drumming pulse and then in thundering flood. Until we fell still and I drowsed again.

  “Makeda.”

  I sighed, the deep breath of the contented.

  “You must wake.”

  I opened heavy eyes as he leaned upon his elbow and smoothed my damp forehead, the black fall of his hair framing his face. Maqar, whose noble father had served mine on royal council. Maqar, the warrior who had come two years ago bringing with him more Sabaean settlers to work the gold mine and bolster the garrison.

  Maqar, my love.

  I drew him down against me with a sleep-laden sigh, crossed my arms around his back. “It is still night.”

  “Yes,” he murmured against my cheek, the short hairs of his beard tickling me. This time when he pulled away, I couldn’t coax him back. “Come, Princess.”

  A rustle of bedsheets and I was alone on the mattress.

  “Where?”

  We had left the palace in the middle of the night countless times, sneaking away like children to bathe in the garden pools by starlight or make love in the orchards until the first light of dawn as curious hoopoe birds watched from the moringa trees.

  “A great new adventure.”

  “Can’t you see you’ve exhausted me?”

  He laughed softly. “I thought it was the other way around.”

  “You are the urn that never empties.”

  “And you are the well that never dries. But come now.”

  I lolled onto my s
ide. Standing like that he might have been a bronze statue in any temple alcove. By every known and unknown god, he was beautiful.

  “Tell me you love me.” But when the corner of my mouth turned up in a smile, he did not reciprocate.

  “You know I do.” But a strange shadow drifted through his eyes. Was it a trick of the lamp, sputtering in the last of its oil, or had the lines across his forehead deepened?

  The bed curtain fell behind him. He began to gather his clothes.

  I gave a quizzical laugh. “What adventure is this that will not wait until tomorrow night?”

  “You will see.”

  A soft scrape sounded outside my chamber. The eunuch given me by my great-aunt always slept outside my upper-story door. Why did he stir at this hour?

  I pushed up on my elbows, fully awake now.

  Maqar returned, my embroidered caftan in one hand, his other extended to me.

  I frowned and rose from bed.

  “Quickly,” he said, stepping out through the curtain again. I watched as he wrapped and belted his sarong over those lean hips.When he reached for his sword I knew we would not be bathing. I slipped into the gown.

  Maqar came and knelt with my slippers, sliding one and then the other onto my feet. Just before he rose, he looked up at me. Those were the same eyes that had followed me as though I was the sun itself when he first arrived to captain the garrison—and soon after, the palace guard. But tonight there was more, some strange hope within them.

  “My love, what is this?”

  “Come.” He stood, and handed me my veil.

  Outside, Yafush was not only awake but waiting, torch in hand, firelight glancing off his rich Nubian skin, the gold ring glowing in his ear. I glanced from him to Maqar. Since when did my lover act in concert with my bodyguard?

  Suddenly I wondered if Maqar had arranged to secretly marry me this night. How many times had we talked about that very thing in our garden bed beneath the stars?

  A princess did not choose her own husband. But neither had my father, in the six years of my exile, made any other arrangement. For all I knew, Sadiq had shared the secret of my ruin before his death. For all I knew, Hagarlat had orchestrated the entire thing. The thought had occurred to me.