The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen Read Free

trouble.
    Within three years I had devoured the poetry of Sumer, the wisdom writings of Egypt, and the creation stories of Babylonia. I called on the palace scribes and read court documents over their shoulders when they would humor me, my father’s chief scribe allowing me to admire the proud lines of his script and even producing the battle accounts of my grandfather when I plied him with a jug of wine pilfered from the cellar. I waited anxiously for the traders to return with new treasures of parchment scrolls, tablets, and vellum—even palm stalks etched with their commercial receipts.
    For the first time since my mother’s passing to the shadow world, I found joy. My toddling brother, Dhamar, would become king. And I would slip past the palace halls with their political squabbles and private intrigues to the stories of others come alive from far-flung places. To escape all . . .
    But the gaze of Hagarlat’s brother.
    Sadiq was a serpent—a fat man with a languid gaze that missed nothing and a knack for convincing my father’s advisors of his usefulness. The maidservants and slaves gossiped often about him, saying he had been born under a strong omen—which really meant he had come into considerable wealth with his sister’s marriage to my father. It seemed half the palace was taken with him, though I couldn’t fathom why.
    But Sadiq was taken with only one person: me.
    His eyes followed me through the porticoes. I felt the slither ofthem on my back and shoulders, felt them bore into me anytime I appeared in the alabaster hall.
    I wasn’t the only one to notice.
    “I wouldn’t be surprised if Hagarlat asked your father to give you to Sadiq,” my nurse said one evening after tut-tutting over my unkempt hair. Shara, the closest thing I ever had to a sister, stared at her mother and then at me. She had grown to resent Hagarlat’s family since their arrival in the palace, if only out of loyalty to me.
    “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 vergeof 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,