Harvest of Rubies (8 page)

She took a step back and placed her hand on her chest. “What do you want?”

I stepped forward. “May we come in?”

She looked around for a minute and stepped aside, allowing Pari and me to enter. After the brightness of the day, it was too dark to see well inside. I waited to be invited to sit as was polite. The invitation never came.

“I am looking for Gaspar,” I said without preamble. “I have some questions I need to ask him.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know where he is.”

I felt sure she lied. “It would be to his benefit to speak to me,” I pressed.

She shrugged a thin shoulder again. My eyes had finally adjusted to the dim light inside and I looked around me. The dirt floor was bare, the mud walls unpainted. The flies outside had many cousins, most of which seemed to live here. Against one wall, I spied a tunic woven in rich wool, with purple and
green embroidery at the edge. Not a garment belonging to a poor household.

“Who does that belong to?” I pointed.

The old woman blanched. “My husband.”

“Very fine.”

“Our son sent it to him to keep him warm in his old age.”

“Tell your son, should you happen to see him, to look for me at the palace. He is in trouble, you must know. I will try to render him what service I can and spare him the worst.”

She glared at me with defiance. I suddenly felt sorry for this woman who was trying so hard to protect the child of her womb. Hanging my head, I thanked her for her hospitality before getting out, Pari behind me.

“You didn’t believe her, did you, mistress?”

“No.” I was squirming inside my mind. What good would come from this crazy chase? Someone was bound to be hurt. Damaspia, Amestris, Frada, Gaspar, that sad old woman whose crime was to love a dishonest son. Me.

We made it to the palace in time to have dinner with the rest of the servants. Afterward, Pari made her threat good and forced me into a bath. Although I was clean, I was no closer to the answers I sought.

T
he next morning marked the final day allotted to me by the queen. I rose up with sore legs, realizing that I had walked more in two days than I normally managed in two weeks. My routine responsibilities, neglected for too long, had piled up, awaiting my attention. Distracted, I found myself making slow progress, half my mind on what Frada’s letter might illuminate.

The courier arrived long after evening had fallen. Still covered with the dust of the road, he handed me a leather cylinder. I knew he had neither slept nor enjoyed a respite since starting his journey many hours ago. Expressing my thanks I dismissed him to his rest, knowing I would have none that night.

Inside the leather cover I found a roll of parchment. First, I examined the seal to ensure it was intact. Breaking it, I sat down in my deserted office to work through Frada’s response.

He told me how shocked he was at the allegations raised
against him and assured me of his innocence. Regarding his cloak, he said that it had been stolen several months ago, and included the testimony of one of the king’s men as to the veracity of this claim.

He had heard about the theft at the queen mother’s orchard the previous autumn, but knew nothing about it. At the time it had occurred, he had increased the watch over Queen Damaspia’s lands in case other robberies should be attempted. He had thought no more of it after that.

He wrote that two weeks before, Gaspar had left his employ abruptly, without giving prior notice. In the short time he had had to respond to my missive, Frada had searched for clues of Gaspar’s activities before his departure, but had found little worth remark. These few details he described in the hope that they would be of help to me.

Several weeks ago, a young servant boy had been asked by a royal courier to fetch Gaspar. Before leaving the scribe in the company of the messenger, the boy heard the courier announce that he had come from Alogune of Babylon.

I leaned away from my desk.
Alogune!
She was one of Artaxerxes’ concubines, I knew, and the mother of his son Sogdianus. What had she to do with the queen’s servant? Why would she send him a message?

I returned to Frada’s letter. He explained that the young boy had thought the courier’s visit irregular; village officials were not in the habit of receiving missives from royal households other than the queen’s, and then the letters always came directly to Frada, not to the assistant scribes. Afraid to bear tales against his betters, the boy had maintained his silence, however, until Frada had begun questioning everyone. Unfortunately, he could provide no other details regarding this odd occurrence, such as the reason for the messenger’s visit. He only knew the
name of the one who had commissioned the message.

One final oddity: a missing parchment regarding the purchase of a piece of land, originally sent by the queen and bearing her seal. Frada had discovered its disappearance by accident some days ago when he had needed to refer to it.

I could recall the exact document to which he referred. Damaspia had been in a hurry the day she commissioned it and less patient than usual. She did not wish to wait for us to fill the parchment with other instructions and send it the following day, but urged us to send it immediately to protect the land purchase. This made it an uncommonly short missive, with a wide margin of unused parchment. She had been turned around at the time I placed the document under her hand for her seal. Distractedly, she brought the seal down low on the parchment; with perfect clarity I now remembered the blank space between her seal and the Aramaic text.

I offered God cursory thanks for the exacting Persian procedure of making every document in triplicate form, and the fact that somewhere in the queen’s own records we could find a replica of the original letter that had gone missing. At least we had a minor piece of real evidence.

With painstaking precision, I read the letter twice more, slowly working through the different pieces of the puzzle. Alogune was at the root of everything; Gaspar was an insignificant tool in her hands. With cold calculation, she had set Amestris against Damaspia, and worse, planned to ruin the queen’s reputation. Did she hope to supplant the queen? To turn the king’s affections against the wife he loved so well by making her out to be a common thief and liar? Did she plot to place her own son, Sogdianus, in line to the throne instead of Damaspia’s son? Was that the instigation for all this evil: the dissatisfied ambitions of a woman who already had so much?

I sighed, rolled up the parchment, and began to prepare an oral report for my audience with the queen on the morrow. My only companions for the night were a large platter of meat and chickpea patties, and my own troubled thoughts.

Early the next morning I found Pari had washed and pressed my best robe. I would not submit to her desire to curl my hair, but I conceded to let her gather it into a neat knot at the base of my neck. I knew I failed her high standards and felt guilty for letting her down.

Anxiety made me ravenous that morning, but I dared not eat much under Pari’s worried scrutiny lest I spill anything on my clean garments. After a long wait, the queen called me to her chamber. She was dressed in full royal attire, her green and purple garments richly embroidered with dark purple thread. Upon her brow she wore a fluted gold crown that must have weighed as much as the head of a man. Jewels the size of goose eggs sparkled upon her chest and arms and fingers. She must have just returned from a formal reception with the king, I realized.

“Have you found any validity to your wild suspicions, scribe?” she asked without preamble.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

She eyed me with her wide blue stare and dismissed her attendants once again. I told her everything I had discovered. When I described the letter bearing her seal, and explained Gaspar’s likely use of it, Damaspia sprang from her gilded chair.

“That slanderous dog! He falsified my letter?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. Although I have not seen it, I suspect
he added a few instructions of his own at the end of the parchment, instructions that implicated both you and Frada. This would have been the source of the delay between the robbery, which occurred last autumn, and the queen mother’s lawsuit. After arranging for the theft, Gaspar had to wait to lay his hands on a letter that would suit his purpose. He then showed that letter with the forged addition to Queen Amestris as proof of your guilt. I don’t believe he would have dared move forward with the scheme without the evidence of your royal seal. That is why Queen Amestris did not lodge a complaint until three days ago.”

Damaspia paced with restless steps about her chamber. I watched her silently, giving her time to absorb the enormity of the plot that had been woven around her. “You have done me a good turn, Sarah,” she said with sudden good humor, coming to a stop.

Caught off guard, my jaw fell open. In three years, she had never called me anything but
scribe
. I was not even aware that she knew my name. Snapping my mouth shut, I bowed.

“I see Pari has even managed to keep you clean. Well, you can hang on to her a little longer, and take your clean self to Queen Amestris and explain the truth to her.”

“My lady?” I squeaked.

“Someone has to speak to her. She still assumes I am the villain who robbed her.”

“But … Your Majesty, surely … If perhaps you were to—”

She began to laugh, her shoulders shaking with mirth. “You will have need of more eloquence than that when you speak to Amestris or …” she made a garroting gesture against her long neck.

I stared at her wide-eyed.

She laughed harder. “You should see your face. Be at your
ease. She will not dare touch you. Not right away in any case.”

I collected my tattered dignity about me as best I could. “But Your Majesty, would it not prove more effective if you were to speak to the queen mother?”

“I have not spoken to that woman in ten years and I don’t intend to start now.”

“Consider, Your Majesty, I am a mere”—I almost said
girl who can read and write
, but feared she might not appreciate my sarcasm and emended my words to “mere scribe. The queen mother will not even deign to see me.”

“
Senior
scribe. And she will see you because she knows I will have sent you. Her curiosity will get the better of her pride. I cannot risk sending another. You know the details of the matter, and will have the best chance of convincing her. Our trouble is that we have very little hard proof, and she is not an easy woman to sway. You must tread carefully with her, Sarah.

“In the meantime, I will send for Frada and the boy who witnessed the arrival of Alogune’s courier. Their lives are in grave danger. Alogune would have counted on the queen mother and me falling into her trap and blaming one another over this theft. Which we would have, were it not for your sharp eyes. But now that we have unearthed the connection to her, she will need to cover her tracks.

“If Alogune has spies other than Gaspar planted in my household, she will know that her only safety is in destroying the witnesses that can point to her involvement.”

Appalled, I lifted a hand to my mouth. Would my letter to Frada bring about the servant boy’s death?

“Fear not; Frada is an old campaigner. He will have thought of the danger and hidden the child somewhere in safety. Still, I will rest better when I have them under my guard here in Persepolis.

“I will also send in search of this Gaspar. You did well to find his hiding place. His testimony would have cleared Frada, but I doubt I shall recover much more than a body now.”

Alogune could not let him survive, I realized. He held too many of her secrets. It dawned on me that my naïve desire to pursue the truth had placed the innocent and guilty alike in the path of danger. I prayed that I had not acted out of arrogance; that I had not violated the will of God in pursuing so single-minded a path. I should have prayed
before
undertaking this assignment, I thought, with a bitter taste in my mouth.