by C. L. Donley
“Something you need, my queen?” he frantically bowed. His tone was that of someone who would rather jump in front of a bus then be the one who let the queen leave that tent alone.
“Um, I need to get back to the palace.”
“Thana is at your service, my queen.”
“Thana is asleep, and I do not wish to wake her,” Kim said.
Bitch! She laughed inwardly at the sound of her own altered speech. But she couldn’t help it, with everyone around her speaking English like that. Besides, what’s the point of being a queen in a foreign land if you can’t bring up your wishes to people?
“I will have one of your other attendants called, my queen.”
“No need. Just give them a message. Can you do that?”
“Yes, my queen.”
“Tell Aisha to track down my Medela; she’ll know what that means.”
“Yes, my queen.”
“What’s your name?”
“Nasir, my queen.”
So she had a bodyguard named Nas. Yeah, Bel definitely did that one on purpose.
“The Medela is my breast pump, Nasir,” she said, having a bit of fun. He’d likely already heard the king and queen bring each other to orgasm, and now she wanted to see his face while she brought up breast pumps. Predictably, he was stone-faced.
“Yes, my queen.”
“Nasir, can I call you Nas?”
“I prefer Nasir, my queen.”
“Very well,” she sighed, sounding a bit disappointed. He did seem to have some of his own agency about him, which she liked.
“Nasir, how many queens have you served?”
“You’re the first, my queen.”
“Not really what you envisioned when you signed up for the military was it?”
“It never is, my queen.”
“Well Nasir, I’m gonna be a cool queen. I like to have fun. Do you like to have fun, Nasir?”
“Not if I can help it, my queen.”
“I see. Well, I’ll have to take that into account.”
“Thank you, my queen.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing, Nasir. Do you think you could help me out with that?”
“I’m afraid not, my queen.”
“Damn.”
“You’re doing very well, so far, my queen. If I may say.”
“You may,” she smiled. “Well, anyway, do send the message. Do you remember it?”
“Send Aisha to track down your Medela. Which is a breast pump. My queen.”
“Do you have a family, Nasir?”
“No, my queen.”
“Anyone you want me to put a good word in for you, Nasir?”
“The queen’s attendants serve for life and are not allowed to marry, my queen.”
Kim drew her neck back and made a face as if puzzled.
“Is that so? What about you?”
“All military personnel, male or female, are allowed to marry. I brought up your attendants only because I assumed that’s who you were referring to, my queen,” Nasir volunteered freely.
“Well I meant in general but… the queen finds it interesting that you brought up her attendants,” Kim answered, trying not to smile. Nasir did not respond.
“Use all your military knowhow to get me my breast pump, Nasir,” Kim reminded him as she retreated back into her tent.
“Yes, my queen,” he dutifully replied.
When she re-entered the tent, Thana was sitting straight up near the bed, folding her bottom lip over with her thumb and forefinger looking a bit starry-eyed and lost in thought. Had she been the object of that peculiar shift in the conversation with Nasir?
Well, well. That was quick, Kim thought. Thana was new to royal service, yet already had found an admirer. And it looked as though Thana was keen to return that admiration. It was simply too adorable. Kim was already formulating the proposition to Bel. She’d found her first duty as queen.
“I’ll talk to the king,” Kim quietly assured her.
“Please don’t,” Thana shook her head weepily.
Fifty
Chapter 50
Kim had barely been in the country a week, but she’d seen enough to understand. They’d embraced many modern things in Ghassan, but tradition still reigned supreme. And it was beautiful, most of the time. Until it wasn’t. And when it wasn’t, it was never just a little bad; it was positively unbearable. The tradition could never be changed, only undermined. And even then, only by a man.
Thana didn’t want to be bothered with even the hope.
But Bel, she was confident, was different. Not just based on the man she saw in America, but the man he was here at home. He was practical. Fair. Consumed with being a good king but not with the opinions of lesser men. She was confident she could get through to him.
“So… Nasir has the hots for Thana,” Kim casually brought up to him during dinner.
They dined in the original palace with Bel’s mother the next evening.
“Nasir?” Bel smiled.
“You know I tried to get him to let me call him Nas. He wasn’t havin’ it.”
“Oh, he wasn’t?” Bel asked intrigued.
“Well, you know. In his way.”
“Which one is Thana?”
“Um, the only one that speaks English? Young, beautiful, educated at Oxford?”
“And let me guess: you want me to use all authority given to me by God to allow these two to knock boots.”
“Babe… you read my whole mind.”
“Kim, I can’t.”
“Why not,” Kim whined.
“Because I just got here and changed a buncha shit. You’re an American, you’re not even remotely Ghassani, we had a child out of wedlock, and then got married before my father the king was put into the ground.”
“Yes, and everybody was here for that!”
“And now you want me to alienate them all by changing millennia-old rules.”
“What do the common people care about how those in the palace conduct themselves?” Kim posited, cutting a bite of her food.
“The kingdom is held in high esteem, almost mythical esteem. It’s the one thing that hasn’t changed, the one thing that’s consistently worked. People become suspicious when things change too fast.”
“Really, babe? One bodyguard and one attendant?”
“Which will rapidly become all the bodyguards and all the attendants.”
“And that’s bad because…”
“No one’s gonna take a bullet for me if everyone’s in love,” he said, chewing. “Thana knows what she signed up for.”
“So they’re just supposed to writhe around with longing every night, and spend the afternoons five feet apart, pretending like they’re not hot for each other? Out of a warped sense of duty? How’d that work out for you, boo?”
“Kim, my mom is also at the table,” Bel said.
“Bel, your mom is a woman, if you haven’t noticed. Guarantee you your mom was getting her back blown out long before you ever even thought about it.”
Bel’s eyes were shut and his eyebrows raised as Kim spoke.
“Okay…what is happening,” Bel said.
“Queen Alya, did you or did you not get your back blown out, on your wedding night, in a tent, in front of strangers?”
“Not strangers. Family.”
Kim gave Bel an exaggerated look of “the defense rests.”
“Okay,” Bel put his silverware down, “as thrilled as I am that the two of you are getting along, I gotta put a stop to this little gang-up thing that I can already feel brewing, because I’m not about to sit here and just do whatever you two want, and also be subjected to conversations about my mom’s sex life.”
“I’m just saying, if that was you and me, what would you do?”
Bel sighed. For the first time he was beginning to lose patience with Kim. Semih and Adela were ghosts that no one could find. They’d goaded him at the wedding and though he felt as though he’d won that exchange in the end, they were
still a step ahead of him. He had no idea what their motivations even were to plan what to do next. The French had reached out to him to congratulate him on his coronation, expressing hope that they could form alliances. Keep your enemies close, his father had said, so they could tell you what they wanted. But so far, they weren’t talking. He had the crown firmly in his grasp, but there was nothing in him that felt assured he was safe. They had managed to poison the king when they were nobodies, after all. The love story between Kim’s bodyguard and her attendant were the last thing he needed taking up space in his brain.
“Look. When things die down a little bit, we can discuss this further. I promise.”
“You want me to look Thana in the eye tonight, and tell her that I failed to get her a simple thing as permission to love someone,” Kim spoke up after a moment.
“She’s free to love whomever she wants,” Bel replied somewhat coldly, “but she’s devoted herself to the crown. You had no idea what you were promising. She knows that better than you do.”
Kim was silent for a moment as she attempted to eat in silence. But she could no longer bear it, and she excused herself from the table.
It wasn’t the first time Kim had been mad at him, but it was the first time he wasn’t sure he’d be able to fix it so easily.
“You never struck me as one to honor worthless traditions,” his mother began in Farsi.
“Mother, please,” Bel’s brow furrowed as he rubbed his forehead.
His mother laughed her wise old laugh, thinking about the way his father was nearly driven to an early grave by her lofty ideas and schemes to make the people love her, early in her reign. She’d known a bit of marriage but nothing of a crown. She was drunk off the power, her new husband drunk off her.
“You’re so much like your father it frightens me,” she said.
“Please don’t say that.”
“It’s not a bad thing. Your father was a good man.”
“Mother please, I just ate.”
“Belkacem, I will not have you dishonor the king’s memory in his own house.”
“He was a great king, mother. I don’t dispute that. But that’s not what you said.”
“My father beat me like a dog. And I don’t hate him; he made me strong. He made me strong enough to catch your father’s eye. When all that was in store for me was death, I became a queen.”
“You honor them like they knew what their actions would do. They were just a couple of assholes.”
“Belkacem!”
“I understand that I am luckier than most. But my father divvied up his time between all his whores and their offspring. Lucky for all of us he was brilliant enough to run the country in his spare time.”
“A bit like the CEO of a prosperous American company? Tell me, Belkacem, how many women shared your bed after Leilani died?”
His mother’s words had incensed him. He was faithful to Leilani, and now only had eyes for his queen. He’d committed no adultery. Was his mother really comparing his grief to a lifetime of that man’s whoring?
“How could you defend a man, even after death, that treated you the way that man treated you?”
Queen Alya didn’t raise her voice or even look up from her plate as she abruptly answered him before he could finish.
“Your father had seven brothers who despised him, a mother with no love in her, and lived haunted by the face of every man he killed, by either his own hand or by his decisions. What is your excuse?”
Bel didn’t speak. He felt his mother’s regret, the words his ignorance had driven her to utter, not only against her son but against her king. It dawned on him that he had no idea what his mother’s true opinion of him was. He’d just gotten a glimpse. He consoled himself with the knowledge that he’d at least had the sense to marry his own ride or die chick. Perhaps he too had a similar chance of becoming great.
“Let me talk to Kimberly before you leave. I will handle this problem for you,” Queen Alya sighed.
“Thank you, mother.”
“But this will be the last one.”
“Yes, mother.”
* * *
That evening, Kim did everything the queen mother had instructed her.
When they returned home, she washed her face, nursed her baby and pleasured her husband. She apologized to him for bringing up matters of the kingdom at their home, which he accepted.
The next morning the queen slept in. When she got up, her attendants dressed her in one of the finest gowns she owned— a floor-length, cream-colored hoop skirt that flared out dramatically. It hung rather low on her hips and had a black embroidered flowery embellishment across it with a black velvet cropped top. The top had a square military-inspired sleeve and collar. Gold and white trim at the edges and button met the top in the middle, just covering her substantial milk-producing assets. Over that was a golden sash of heavy fabric, and the queen’s royal covering adorned her hair, which was swooped across the side of her forehead just above her brows, and pulled back into a severe bun.
The queen mother didn’t necessarily lay out the strategy behind all this to Kim, but she could guess it had something to do with master-level king seduction and manipulation. Kim hadn’t even thought to ask. As soon as she heard the wise old woman say, “Here’s what you do,” Kim was all ears.
Kim assumed that requesting an audience with the king would be relatively simple, but when she arrived at the main palace with Nasir and two of her attendants in tow, the king’s attendants didn’t budge.
“The queen would like to request an audience with the king,” she said.
The one in the middle— was she really expected to remember all their names?— nodded to the one nearest to the impossibly high door to the throne room. She felt a bit overdressed as she waited, but this part of the strategy she knew. Her lawyer days that were slowly melting away now taught her the value of a business suit in the office or dressing smartly in the courtroom. She had a hard time thinking of Bel as a judge, though he technically had far more authority. Her guts shifted at the thought. She’d seen him in the role of king before, but when they were together, he was more of a political figure, a public figure. At the wedding, he was dashing with a side of dangerous. But she’d never seen him on a throne. In fact, as long as she was in this country, he had her life in his hands. Not that she was worried but, she did start to feel a bit nervous.
“The queen may enter,” she heard a loud voice reverberate. Immediately the giant doors began opening, and she looked over at Nasir. She must’ve looked nervous because he said, “You are the second highest authority here, my queen.”
“Thank you, Nasir,” Kim said.
The sentiment was helping until she went inside.
She’d been inside some pretty distinguished old buildings, but she was breathless in the presence of such an ancient place of authority and wealth. Bel was on his throne, slightly elevated by a few steps, with two slightly smaller chairs on either side of him at the foot of the stair, Fahid in one and the former king’s elderly advisor in the other. A gold-trimmed strip of royal purple carpet lined the middle of the room and led directly to the top stair where it covered the throne floor. She was instantly in the shoes of every commoner in the country including her mother-in-law, the former hoodrat.
“You must ask permission to approach the throne once you enter,” she’d told her. “Do not forget this. It is very embarrassing.”
The queen asked permission, and she, Nasir, and her attendants made the long trek to the throne. She suddenly worried that this was a very dumb idea. She just wanted her attendants to be allowed to get busy. But if this was the proper channel she had to use, then so be it. On each side of the carpet were several rows of seats like jurors’ benches. Was Bel actually in charge of settling legal matters?
“To what does the king owe the pleasure of the Queen’s visit?” the king’s voice boomed around the room, surprisingly clearly.
“The queen was in the neighborhood. Your majesty,”
Kim dared to charm the room. If the king was amused, he did not let it show.
“State your case, my love.”
Oh shit. Her knees weakened, her royal crop top tightened against her chest. She was probably turning colors. Had he done that on purpose? She had no choice but to bring it, the last of her mother-in-law’s instruction.
“I need you to change a law.”
The men around Bel shifted in their chairs.
“And what law is that?”
“The law that disallows my attendants to marry.”
Nasir remained stoic, but she could feel Thana’s energy behind her. They hadn’t known why the queen had requested an audience.
“Your attendants’ loyalties are to their country. They volunteer to sacrifice of their own households to serve the Queen’s.”
“A reasonable and noble cause to be sure,” she began respectfully, “but a sacrifice which modernity has made obsolete.”
The king studied her silently.
“Your Highness,” the king’s advisor began, “to serve in the queen’s palace is a distinguished honor, highly esteemed among the people of Ghassan.”
“As is birthing and raising Ghassani children, sir,” Kim countered.
Bel stifled a grin.
“What do you propose?”
“Let the queen’s servants both serve the queen and raise their families in the palace, not unlike the king’s own upbringing.”
“My king, the palace will be overrun,” his advisor protested.
“It already is,” the king bitterly answered.
“Not every attendant will take advantage, my king,” Kim appealed, “only those of marrying age and they will still come to the queen unmarried. Therefore, they would have to be chosen by a suitor within the king’s service.”
“And if they become pregnant or otherwise…incapacitated? A child is ill? How will they fulfill their duties?”
“I believe we will manage, my king. Seven attendants is a redundancy as it is. One of my attendants can be appointed as chief to manage the rest.”
“My king, this rule predates your family’s reign.”
“Which is precisely why I have no attachment to it,” the king curtly answered his advisor. He turned his attention back to the queen.
