The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen (6 page)

We were followed by widows with naked children, old men with bent backs and one tooth left in their heads, boys wandering with young, hungry siblings, their loincloths no more than tatters. They, too, came to eat by our fires, these poorest and forgotten kinsmen of tribes afflicted by sickness or wells gone dry through winter. I assumed each time that they were given something to eat—a bowl of frothing camel’s milk, at the least—but when I saw several men turn away a young mother and her children, I was incensed.

“Saba is flowing with frankincense worth its weight in gold,” I fumed at Wahabil. “How is it possible that anyone living in the envy of nations goes hungry?” I went after the young woman and her children and brought them to my tent.

“The men turn them away as their supplies run thin,” Maqar said to me later, in low tones. “Already some of the men of Urramar have had to slaughter a camel.”

“Give her my portion if no one will feed her, and one of my blankets as well.”

Despite my words, I did not go hungry that night. I later learned Wahabil and Maqar both had given their food to the woman, who slipped away before dawn.

The initial trek inland had felt like one unending cycle of back strain from riding and stony beds within a snarling landscape of camels hobbled and couched for sleep. I failed to feel in those first,
stunned days more than the mounting spring heat beneath the stifling clouds, the hardness of the saddle, the chill through my cloak at night. And the flies, which were relentless, biting camel and human alike.

But as the sky descended over the western highlands, heavy and pregnant with rain, I realized that I no longer fell into the sleep of the exhausted when I lay down, but lay awake listening for the cough of nearby cheetahs in the evening, the violent squawk of the peregrine at dawn.

And as the distance to Marib tightened like an invisible cord, I found myself strained not by the weeks of travel behind me, but the crucial days before me.

If we were defeated, I knew very well what would become of me. These kinsmen and allies staked their own lives in ready gamble for the benefits they might reap. But what of my priest, Asm, who had come with his acolytes at my request? Of my eunuch, Yafush, who slept outside my tent, and Maqar, who discreetly joined me within it? What end awaited them if we failed?

Almaqah deliver us all.

But it was not just the question of our fates afield. I had already been fighting, since the shores of Punt, a war of oppositions. Gone these six years from Saba, I was a queen who did not know her enemies or the true loyalty of her allies. A queen whose nobles meant to broker power in my council until one of them married me and I was queen in name only.

I had had to fight even to ride alongside them if only to be privy to their discussions—to ride at all, in fact, threatening to set fire to the litter brought for me. Clearly, I had been meant to accompany them like the sacred ark my grandfather’s army bore into battle—a symbol by which those who carried it proclaimed sovereignty . . . but a thing with no power of its own.

Almaqah had called me back to Saba. Almaqah must make me clever.

I spoke seldom but listened to everything. I learned quickly who was—and was not—among my expected list of allies. Who had the best spies. Which nobles the others looked to first. Whose men had the best camels, most kin-ties, deadliest feuds.

Thread by thread, I began to decipher the lacework of loyalties, ambition, and grudges that had knit me at its center years before my knowledge. With every company of tribesmen who joined us, I did the thing I had done now for years: I studied. I learned. Whom I must exercise the greatest influence over. Whose backing I required before all others. Whom I could trust. Whom I must not.

But knowledge did not lessen the nobles’ distinct forbearance whenever I approached or smooth their stilted answers even as they bowed their heads—except when it came to the fluent reminders of their contribution to my cause.

“The tribesmen of Kahar come to you with axe and spear and sword,” their chieftain said in his accented Sabaean. “Six hundred men I bring you. A hundred animals will we sacrifice to Almaqah for your health when we return to our territory and you are queen. And you must not forget us either.”

I felt by now that what had started as blood right had become a long list of bartered favors to the point that I had never felt so indebted in my life.

“Yafush,” I whispered, late one night, rolling up the corner of my black tent flap. In this sea of men sleeping by dying fires and couched camels, my tent was practically indistinguishable from nearly fifty others like it.

The eunuch, who faced always away, did not turn. “You are restless, Princess.”

I lay down, the broad slope of his shoulder like the western
range against the stars. He never strayed far from my side, standing over me even when I squatted to relieve myself beneath the privacy of my cloak—the same way any Sabaean man did, which Yafush, the eunuch, never failed to call womanly.

“I see the way they look at me,” I said softly. “I am a thing—a crown to be worn on another head.”

“That is good.”

“Why?”

“They, too, will protect you with their lives. At least for now.”

A man murmured in his sleep from a neighboring fire, the sound cut short by a gruff complaint.

“Tell me about the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut.”

“You know already about this queen.”

I did—had read every account of the Egyptian monarch who sent the first expedition down the Red Sea to trade with my ancestors in Punt. The female Pharaoh who styled herself king. I had dreamed mottled dreams of her, of the false Pharaonic beard, delicate fingertips curled around the flail of her office, of the sun god Amun, her divine father.

“Tell me what your people say about her,” I whispered.

He rolled slightly onto his back at last without turning to look at me. “They say she made herself like a man. And that the Pharaoh after her erased her every image. You must not let that happen, Princess.”

“There’s little I can do about that if I am dead.”

“A woman cannot rule like a man, Princess.”

“And why not?”

“Because she is a woman.”

“You say this to me? Your own people have queens.”

“A queen must rule as a woman, Princess.”

I was silent for a moment, understanding the enigmatic Nubian at last.

“Tell me, is it true she was the daughter of Amun? How can a woman be the daughter of a god?”

“She is the Pharaoh. If Amun, rather than her father, puts her on the throne, whose daughter is she?” He smiled, his teeth white in the darkness.

I smiled, started to let the tent flap fall, but then caught it.

“Yafush . . .”

“Yes, Princess.”

“Will you not call me ‘queen’ now?”

“You are a woman of many names, Princess.”

I stared up at the darkness in my tent nearly until dawn, thinking of what Yafush had said. If I was discounted as a woman but must not be made masculine, then I must become something else entirely.

The next day I had Asm, my priest, proclaim me High Priestess and Daughter of Almaqah before our entire company. He had frowned when I first told him.

“Princess, why do you ask this thing?” he said.

“Who do you think will provide the gold for the temple when you are chief priest? I am not asking.”

For the first time since my arrival on the southern shore, I set aside my soiled tunic and donned my carnelian robe. I unwound my hair and hung my heavy crescent collar around my neck. I put on my rings, the weight of them foreign to fingers dried and cracked with travel, and set my gold headdress with the fall of delicate filigree on my brow.

All morning the sky had progressively darkened to the west. The moment Asm held the gilded horns over my head and proclaimed me High Priestess of the Moon, Daughter of the Bull, a rumble sounded from the far range as though the mountains had calved from the edge of the earth. At the time I thought nothing
of this; it was the season, and the highlands had gathered clouds for days. Under the weight of so much cloth and gold, I would have counted the gale of any storm a blessing in the mid-morning swelter.

I was not prepared for the startled ripple that shuddered through the tribesmen. For the tens and then hundreds who sank to their knees. I saw from the corner of my eye how Khalkharib stared and Wahabil fell low . . . my priest, stark-faced, and Maqar, palm outstretched as though I were not the woman who had slept a hundred nights in his arms, but a god.

Afterward, Asm, who had wanted to wait to conduct the rite at the temple complex in Marib, proclaimed the moment a sign, and said he would never question me again.

“Tell me, Daughter of Almaqah, did you have a vision?”

I shook my head and he seemed to accept this with some disappointment. I did not tell him that I had not been looking for signs. That the rite, for me, had been claim and dread bargain, both. Daughter of Almaqah. Even my father, high priest before me, had not dared to identify himself as the son of the god. He had not needed to, using his throne as a vehicle for the cult, rather than the other way around.

Now my triumph or failure would be shared by the moon god himself—the name of Almaqah irrevocably burnished or tarnished by the outcome of this march for generations to come.

If I was the moon god’s thrall, he would also be mine.

I buried a precious jade necklace in the clearing before we broke camp.

See me to my throne.

That afternoon, the sky roiled and broke over the mountains.

A
t the eastern end of the Harib Valley we were met with nearly seven hundred tribesmen who pledged ready loyalty to me. Half that number were my kinsmen, the faces of those few I had once known—cousins, slaves, and uncles—grown unfamiliar. The kinsmen of Khalkharib and Maqar, led by his father, Salban, comprised the other half.

I saw the way they pretended not to search my face behind the veil. The way one of them stared into my eyes before he lifted his palm. So they had heard, by then, the story of my installment as High Priestess. And somehow I felt that we met as greater strangers because of it.

It was a relief to me when one of them said, “Cousin, do you remember how we used to play in the palace? You were four and I was five and I would catch lizards for you. Now, I will cut down north men for you!” I said that I did and embraced him, but part of my memory of those years had long burned away.

We were by now within the western fringe of the Sayhad, the desert that formed the southwest corner of the waste. There was fodder here, where the great wadi once ran into her thirsty sands—bindweed, salty tamarisk, and last year’s sedge.

From here, a man traveling north and east might ride for a month, losing himself among the dunes and calcified flats to exhaustion, dehydration, or madness before he ever encountered another soul. The vast sands had protected Saba’s eastern border from the beginning of days, legions of invaders buried beneath the swell of its granulated waves.

That night, as the tribesmen divided into feeding families, a handful of men came out of the desert, tossing sand in the air to signify peace. They were dwellers of the waste’s deadly refuge who might enter the sands for months at a time—the men they called Wolves of the Desert.

“They say there is a well near here, sweet from the rains this time of year,” the man of Aman said to me later. He nodded to the east, toward the desert beyond. “They have come to water their camels after months of brackish wells in there. But they are more thirsty for news and had not heard about the death of your father or your arrival here. If you offer those men camels or knives they will join you.”

“I will send someone to talk to them. And where are my allies your kinsmen?” I said. My cousin—my father’s nephew—had reported that Hagarlat’s allies might number five, even seven thousand or more.

“They will come,” he said, pushing a bundle of qat into his mouth before he left my fire.

“I no longer trust him,” Maqar said after slipping into my tent. The moon was dark—a fine night for an ambush. But so far, the scouts had seen nothing.

“Because he is a north man?” I said, as we reclined against a pile of saddlebags. I smoothed the hair from his face. It was the first time I had touched him in days.

“No. Because he does not look at you as the others do.”

I laughed. “How should he look at me?” The tribesmen were hard and weathered men. Maqar, too, was a warrior, and a maker of warriors, but at twenty-five still untouched by the flint that so quickly struck war in other men’s hearts.

“You don’t even realize it, do you? You are otherworldly. I have never seen you like this, as you were on that day. Do I dare touch you, Daughter of Almaqah?”

“You must.” I leaned back against him and his fingers lit like a breath against my cheek. Outside, it had begun to rain.

“Makeda . . .”

“It is Bilqis now,” I murmured, capturing his thumb with my lips.

“And yet, I will always think of you as Makeda, even when you
are my queen, long after you’ve married some noble or even the Pharaoh in Egypt. Long after you’ve forgotten Punt, and me.”

I bit him, if not hard. “Never say that. Besides, have you not heard the rumors? I cursed my betrothed and so he died. And do you think Khalkharib and the others have not seen you coming into or leaving my tent? They know I am no virgin, if they did not know it before.”

“They will quickly forgive both when you are queen.”

“It doesn’t matter. If not you, then no one.” I did not say that I had begun to rethink my vow that I would never marry him. Time enough for that.

His laugh was soft and, I thought, sad. “So you say now. But the day will come when your councilmen will advise you to make alliance with someone far more powerful. And if they do not, I will.”

“You swore to stay by me.”

“And so I will, even if not in your bed.”

“Why do you say these things?” Had I wounded him so much those first nights after our return? “There are other ways to make alliance. You said yourself, I am clever. Do you think I could give myself so easily—or at all—to another, knowing you are near? No. I will not let you go.”