The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  You had to know she didn’t escape. Smart girl, very brave, became a beast. But this is not fantasy.

  Esther’s face is altered, too, though this has nothing to do with accidents of amateur magic or ravage by hormones. The minister’s scratching did it, striped her cheeks with vertical paths slightly lighter in color than her skin.

  She lives well, Esther. Like a queen! She is a queen. There are jewels and silks and velvet pheasant dinners and rare wines. Yet none of this has dulcified her. Last week, when she was invited to dine with the king, the king’s minister—the one who scratched her and held the knife to her throat and who has turned out to be the only minister who matters—informed her that the wine in her glass cost more than the diadem on her head, but to Esther it tasted like overdried fig. She knows her chambers are basically another harem, if the upstairs version. There are plenty of windows, and she is allowed outside, but only in the courtyards, and only within the boundaries of the palace walls. The king and his minister mistrust her, for obvious reasons.

  The walls of her chambers are so soft you could sleep on them if the world fell over, which it might have as far as Esther is concerned.

  Another girl would have relented by now. But Esther, possessed of an extraordinary self-regard that pitches her alternately toward survival or doom, is still at war. If she cannot save herself, she has determined, she will make good on Marduk’s ludicrous boast and save her people. They are still out there, she has learned, still being attacked, still leaving themselves attackable. It doesn’t matter what makes them stay, she has decided, whether it’s inertia, or stupidity, or some delusion Marduk managed to make them believe about Esther’s powers of persuasion. All that matters is that they go. All Esther does now is to make sure that happens.

  She tried Lara first, some weeks after the choosing, found her lying on her bed, as hairy as she was born to be, eyes closed. Esther’s old bed was empty, and in the light then streaming down from the slit of a window Esther could suddenly see the ghosts of the tally marks she’d once made. How long ago was that now? Something about the way Lara had arranged herself, her legs spread comfortably like a man’s, her palms resting on her breasts, gave Esther an understanding. “You were the one who erased them,” she said.

  Lara startled like a deer hit with a bow, opening her eyes and leaping up in one swift movement. She had grown fat, Esther saw. It suited her. Her sickly, stubbled skin was gone. Her eyebrows had grown together into one line that dipped slightly in the middle, like a great, gliding bird. Quickly, she took an inventory of Esther’s queenness, from her jewel-heavy diadem past her layers of silk to the gold fringe that swept the floor wherever she went. Then Lara smiled, her thin but glittering smile, full of mischief and warmth, and Esther’s throat went hot. She waited for Lara to embrace her. They were alone—the other girls had bowed absurdly low and fled when they’d seen Esther enter. She was not pregnant yet that day. She had known the king twice only, both times in blackness, encounters so brief and seemingly independent somehow of Esther herself that they made less of an impression on her than her first kiss with Nadav. She still felt at that time that she belonged more to the night station than she did to the royal chambers.

  But Lara stayed where she was. “It was so hopeless making,” she said. “One day, fifty days. What difference would it have made?”

  Esther fought off tears. Why had she started with an accusation? She did not want Lara to hate her. She didn’t want to go back to her chambers, alone, to sit upright through dinner, playing queen. What she wanted, she realized, what she wanted almost as much as she wanted Lara to help her bring a message to the camp, was for Lara to lie down with her like they used to, when they were still waiting. Lara’s smell was as it had been, eucalyptus and salt. Esther would lie behind Lara and scratch her back, and then Lara would lie behind Esther and do the same, and all the while they would trade stories, until one of them fell asleep or got called off to some useless task. Esther’s longing for this closeness was almost embarrassing in its intensity, as bodily as thirst or hunger. But what could she do? It was Lara who had spurned her, not the other way around. It would have to be Lara who came forward. In the absence of that, Esther would have to act as if she didn’t care.

  “So you tricked me twice,” she said.

  “Tricked you?”

  “My tally marks. Our plan, to go as ourselves.”

  “I meant to do it.”

  “Really.”

  “I did. I meant everything.”

  “So?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t what? What we were doing wasn’t hard. It was the opposite of hard.”

  Lara looked away. She shrugged. “I must not be as brave as your majesty.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “But you are. That.”

  Esther emitted an involuntary groan. Apart from her robes, there was nothing queenly about her. There had been no training. There had been a ritual with the crown, but the priest spoke in an ancient language no one but he seemed to understand; nothing about it resembled any marriage Esther had ever seen, and afterward the king’s minister breathed in her ear: Try a fleck of sorcery and I’ll have you impaled. Right here. He’d shoved her with genius stealth into a pillar, then called the king off to some business of some sort. Since then, Esther had been attended constantly. She had been fed like a queen, and bathed like a queen, which was to say she had been fed and bathed like a night station girl was fed and bathed, yet more indulgently and with more ceremony, no longer part of a herd but elevated, alone. She had been praised. But she did not feel like a queen. It was all a costume. Couldn’t Lara see that? She was squinting at Esther. She drew closer, examining, until her breath landed on Esther’s skin. “What happened to your face?”

  It was an opening. Esther felt an anticipatory unclenching, the confessional equivalent of salivating before a meal. She almost told. Later, she would return to the moment and wonder, if she had sat down in her queen’s robes and told Lara everything—the cold, pulsing vortex, the beast, the near-escape, the knife—might it have made the difference? How, since then, she had tested herself, in secret, and found her powers so sapped it took her three hours to move a ring an inch? Would Lara, allowed in, have taken pity on her and gone to the camp? But that day in the night station she was so hurt still by Lara’s defection, and so hungry for Lara’s touch, and so angry that she was being denied it, and so disgusted by herself that she needed it, and so determined to protect herself against any of these feelings, that she gave back to Lara what Lara had given her and asked, coolly, “What difference does it make?”

  Lara backed away. And that was how they stood for the rest of the negotiation, which is what it became, irrevocably, the second Esther said, “I came to ask a favor,” and began to try to sell Lara on privileges like access to the wives’ swimming pool and invites to an upper-tier banquet in exchange for Lara going to the camp. “And you’d get out of here for a while,” Esther added. “I’ll tell whichever eunuch brings you to take his time.”

  She was still innocent then—both of how a queen was supposed to talk to people and of how the people could just say no. Lara didn’t even apologize. She said, “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Lara, after a pause, said, “No one’s told you what’s happened with the camp.”

  “You mean the bandits?” Esther’s voice dove deep, mocking: “The king’s cleanse? They’ve been doing that for a long time.”

  “No. There’s a new edict. Any non-Hebrew communing with a Hebrew will be put to death.”

  Esther laughed. “That’s not possible. How would they buy or sell anything? How would they live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So the Persians must have stopped, then. Smashing the tents?”

  “No. That’s allowed.”

  “When was this?”

  “Right after you were chosen. What’s he like?”

  “Who?” But Esther was di
stracted. After you were chosen.

  “The king,” said Lara.

  “I hardly know him.”

  “But haven’t you known him?”

  “He’s harmless.”

  “Clearly he’s not.”

  Esther could have explained how the dangerous one wasn’t the king, but said instead, “I have to go.”

  And Lara didn’t protest. She said, to Esther’s back, as nonchalantly as if they would see each other again in a couple hours: “Those things you offered me? The pool, the banquets? Do you really think it’s up to you, to let me do those things?”

  * * *

  Esther went straight to the king. His guards scoffed—they had not been told of any permission granting the queen entry today. And the minister was away, in Persepolis.

  “I have no permission,” she said. She was shaking. “I won’t go away.”

  Time passed. Esther had to sit down on the floor with her head between her hands; she could hear her teeth rattling. At some point, her arms were grabbed; someone hoisted her onto a chair. The queen must not sit on the floor. By the time she was led into the chambers, her shaking had given way to a dense pain that circled her head as if tracing the line of her crown.

  The room where the king waited for her was not a room she had seen before. It was darker than his other rooms, without windows, lit only by torches and crude ones at that, the kind used in the palace’s passages and storage closets. Dominating the space was a large table strewn with tools and what looked like tiny stones, along with shelves—these, too, strewn with objects—that filled an entire wall, from floor to ceiling. The table was the only bright surface, its length lined with torches.

  Esther blinked, trying to bring something into focus. Even the king, seated at the table, appeared blurred at his edges. Without looking her in the eyes, he pointed at a long, low cushion.

  She sat.

  When he didn’t speak, she began, “I’m here—”

  “You’re bold.”

  “I—”

  He lifted a hand. “I understand.”

  Esther waited. Her head hurt. It took all her strength to hold it upright—her crown felt heavier than water. The king picked up a tool. It was made for him, clearly—small, for his hands. He looked at the tool, then he picked up one of the stones in his other hand and began to scrape the stone with the tool. Then he stopped.

  “You want something.”

  Esther nodded, though he wasn’t looking at her. She was struck by how tenderly he handled the tool and the stone. This moved her to speak more freely than she might have, to use the voice she had not dared use since she had told him she wanted to go home. “What have you done to my people?” she asked.

  “You’ll have to be more specific,” the king said. He brought the stone to eye level, lowered it, and began scraping again.

  “The edict. Why?”

  The king bent lower over his table. “There are differences,” he said, in a strange, singsong way, as if repeating something someone else had told him. “There are differences, and there are times when people must be reminded of these differences.”

  “I’m one of them. You know this.”

  He looked up and gave her a woeful smile. “I don’t know what you are.”

  “I’m a Hebrew.”

  “You were.”

  “I still am.”

  “You’re queen.”

  A fresh sharpness joined the pain encircling Esther’s head. “You’re punishing them because you despise me,” she said.

  The king set down his tool and stone and stood up from the table. Then he crossed the room to Esther and knelt in front of her. The torches sputtered behind him, throwing his beard and nose into shadow and making his eyes appear abnormally bright. He was quiet, examining her face. His eyes trying to get inside her eyes. This felt more threatening somehow than what he’d done with his sex the times he’d climbed atop her. Esther remembered his calm before he smashed the goblet. She worked not to flinch.

  “I don’t despise you,” he said finally. “I mistrust you. I always will.”

  Esther felt tears coming, but she did not cry. If she had not asked to go home, she thought, if she had not become the beast … the camp would likely have been forgotten, left alone. Right after you were chosen, Lara had said, and now Esther knew with certainty: what she had done was worse than merely failing to save them. She was driving them more quickly to destruction. She began again to shake.

  “Esther. Beautiful Esther.” The king ran a finger down her left cheek, then another down her right. He touched her with the same tenderness and deliberation with which he handled his tools. Esther could see that he wanted to love her. She had sensed this before, in the dark, as he found his position above her, as he moved, and then stopped moving. But now she knew. He ran his fingers across her brow, pushing hair out of her eyes, and she could see that he was desperate to go back to before the beast yet couldn’t, not fully, not just because of her changed toes and ears but because the beast had left an after shape, like the way the sun left imprints on your vision even after you’d closed your eyes. He could not unbeast her. He could not unshame himself. Knowing this made her feel weaker—a softness for him knotted in her breastbone—and also more powerful, because she understood that he was weak, too.

  She did not love him. But she touched his hand that was in her hair. “I want you to undo what you’ve done,” she said. “And I want to know things before the girls in the night station know them.”

  The king said nothing. He took off her crown—sweet relief—and laid her down. The cushion was long enough to be a bed. It was a bed, she realized. He took her breasts out of her robes and sucked them, and Esther, despite herself, or to save herself, allowed herself to feel a jolt of pleasure. But mostly she made herself like the ground. She closed her eyes. She endured.

  * * *

  Robes are timeless, convenient, easily opened, easily closed. When the king was done Esther closed hers and, without asking, went closer to his table. The objects weren’t stones, she saw, but bones. Tiny bones.

  “Birds,” she said.

  “How do you know that?”

  Behind her, on the cushion, the king lay atop his own robes, unclothed. She did not look at him.

  “I know a woman—” Esther stopped. It struck her that these bones were those bones, that the reason the palace kept commissioning more necklaces from Nadav’s mother was not to adorn the wives’ necks—Esther had never seen any of them wearing one, now that she thought of it—but to supply the king.

  “She’s very gifted,” the king said.

  “Why have her go to the trouble of separating all the pieces and making necklaces, only for you to take them apart again?”

  “It’s a puzzle. I like the puzzle.”

  On the shelves, Esther saw, the bones had been put back together again to form birds, or skeletons of birds. Some were complete, others partial. Some bones that could not take a wire through them, foot bones for instance, the king had fashioned out of silver. Esther lifted one skeleton to see how it could stand and was impressed by the intricate joints and loops, the melding of wire and bone. The thing weighed so close to nothing she had an urge to crush it in her palm. She picked up another, larger one—not a bird.

  “Fox,” the king said. “Be careful.”

  She touched a few more, letting him worry, feeling the beast’s hardness climb up her back. Then she picked up the largest one and set it on the flat underside of her forearm, as if it were running toward her hand. “So how do you get the bones now?” she asked, without looking at him.

  “What do you mean? Birds are always dying.”

  “I mean with the edict. She’s a Hebrew. No buying, no selling …”

  “I make an exception.”

  Esther set the fox skeleton back on its shelf. Then she picked it up again, twisted off its front feet, and returned it to the shelf on its back. She let the feet drop to the floor.

  “Esther!” The kin
g heaved himself off the cushion, tying on his underrobe as he went. He gathered the foot bones in his palm and held them under a torch.

  “I’m not done,” Esther said. “I want my people left alone. Send them into the desert if you want. But let them be.”

  He placed the bones on his table, out of her reach. “They can go into the desert whenever they want.”

  “But they won’t.”

  He began putting on his other robes.

  “Expel them,” Esther said.

  He worked slowly, meticulously. Black, purple, blue, red. He tied the knot as if constructing one of his skeletons, and she thought of Vashti. How could this man have been able to bear killing her?

  “It’s not up to you, is it,” she said. Lara’s words to her. “Expelling them, ending the cleanse. You’re not the one in control.”

  The king did not react.

  Esther picked up a bird skeleton. With her other hand she loosened her belt and formed a cradle of fabric in her robe, into which she tucked the bird. She moved slowly, in plain sight. But the king said nothing. He put on his crown, turned back to his table, and began to work.

  * * *

  That was the day the baby had been laid inside her. The following week, she found Baraz, to see if he would help her. He had been missing more often, others serving in his place. She had to search the palace twice before coming upon him in his room—lying on his long bed, eyes closed, as if asleep. She took off her robes. She was ready to let him rub his face all over her, to let him lick her and put his fingers inside her. It would not make her feel foul now, she thought. She was already fouled. It would be a mere transaction—this for that, her body in exchange for his body going to the camp. She laid out her terms. She assumed he would find the risk worth taking.