by Tosca Lee
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Praise for The Legend of Sheba
“Tosca Lee’s The Legend of Sheba is a tale of lush prose, rich setting, and meticulously researched historic detail. The queen of Sheba may be a figure obscured by the millennia, but Tosca Lee brings her to life—and she is strong, capable, and irresistibly seductive.”
—Allison Pataki, New York Times bestselling author of The Traitor’s Wife
“I didn’t think I could admire a novel more than I admired Iscariot, but Tosca Lee has outdone herself with The Legend of Sheba. As luscious as the ancient Arabian kingdom and as fascinating as the queen who ruled it, Sheba captivates with beauty, depth, intelligence, and cunning storytelling skill.”
—Erin Healy, bestselling author of Motherless and Stranger Things
“The Legend of Sheba is an enthralling, impeccably researched novel full of wisdom that will appeal to both religious and secular audiences. The vivid beauty of Lee’s prose is unsurpassed. I felt as though Sheba herself was speaking to me, and her struggles and triumphs were my own.”
—Rebecca Kanner, author of Sinners and the Sea
“The Legend of Sheba is no fairy-tale romance of a woman swooning for a king. Tosca Lee has once again proven to be a fearless, dare I say, reckless storyteller as she gives us an unbridled retelling of a queen strong in wisdom and heart. It will leave you reflecting far beyond the turn of the last page.”
—Pam Hogeweide, author of Unladylike: Resisting the Injustice of Inequality in the Church
“A wild camel ride through the desert full of twists, turns, and surprises . . . A luxurious royal feast of eloquence, imagery, and theme. It’s a beautiful story brilliantly told. Tosca Lee has the heart of a poet, the mind of a scholar, and the imagination of a storyteller.”
—Josh Olds, LifeIsStory.com
“As a meticulous researcher Lee consistently strives to make her stories not just believable but eye-popping with realism. The Legend of Sheba leaves no novel stone unturned—action, intrigue, romance, and even mysticism make this a novel that must be read in a single sitting. The verbal tapestry of a minor biblical narrative will have readers examining the story of Sheba and Solomon in a completely new light.”
—Dr. Joe Cathey, Professor of Old Testament at Dallas Baptist University
“If Cecil B. DeMille were still around, he’d want to make Tosca Lee’s The Legend of Sheba into a movie. It’s an epic masterpiece. A timeless tale that takes readers to heights of love and battle few have seen before. And, just like a favorite movie, you’ll want to experience the richness and depth of Sheba over and over again.”
—Michael Napoliello Jr., Radar Pictures
For those who rise up to the journey.
PROLOGUE
There is the tale that is told: A desert queen journeyed north with a caravan of riches to pay tribute to a king and his One God. The story of a queen conquered by a king before she returned to her own land laden with gifts.
That is the tale you are meant to believe.
Which means most of it is a lie.
The truth is far more than even the storytellers could conjure. The riches more priceless. The secrets more corrosive. The love and betrayal more passionate and devastating, both.
Love . . . The very word is a husk shriveled beneath the sun of the desert waste, its essence long lost to the sands. So will my tale be to those who traveled her barren routes, my footprints as though they never were. Nor will the mountains remember me or the waters of the Wadi Dhana speak of me as they swell the fertile floodplain. Far from the desert, the inexorable silt has its way in the end. It is a mercy.
Across the narrow sea, the pillars of the great temple once bore my name: Bilqis, Daughter of the Moon. Here, to the west, the palace columns bear another: Makeda, Woman of Fire. To those I served as priestess and unifier, I wore the name of my kingdom: Saba. To the Israelites, I was queen of the spice lands they called Sheba.
They also called me whore.
The history keepers will no doubt tell their own tale, and the priests another. It is the men’s accounts that seem to survive a world obsessed with conquest, our actions beyond bedchamber and hearth remembered only when we leave their obscurity. And so we become infamous because we were not invisible, the truth of our lives ephemeral as incense.
It is harder for queens, who have no luxury of meekness. History does not know how to reconcile our ambition or our power when we are strong enough to survive it. The priests have no tolerance for those of us driven by the divine madness of questions. And so our stories are blackened from the fire of righteous indignation by those who envy our imagined fornications. We become temptresses, harlots, and heretics.
I have been all and none of these, depending who tells the tale.
Across the sea in Saba, the mountain rains have ceased by now, the waters of the mighty Dhana turned to steam on the fields at dawn. In a few months the northern traders will sail in the quest for incense and gold . . . bringing with them news of the king who sends them.
I have not spoken his name in years.
Yes, there is indeed a tale. But if you would have the truth from me, it begins with this:
I never meant to become queen.
ONE
My mother, Ismeni, was born under the glimmer of the Dog Star, when men become disoriented by its light. They said she enchanted my father, that he made her his consort with a clouded mind. No king would choose a wife from his own tribe when he could strengthen alliance with another.
But I saw the way their gazes followed her whenever she appeared in the palace porticoes, their conversations drifting to suspended silence until she passed from sight. On the rare occasion that she took her seat beside Father’s in the Hall of Judgment, the chamber swelled like a tide drawn by the darkened moon. Bronze-skinned with brows like dove’s wings and lips for whispering prayers, my mother was the most exquisite thing in all of Saba. The trickle of rain over the highland terraces couldn’t match the music of her beaded hems nor the best frankincense of Hadramawt compete with her perfume.
Drowsing on her sofa in the hot afternoon, I would twine my fingers with hers and admire the turquoise of her rings. I hoped my hands and feet would be as slender as hers. It was all I hoped; it never occurred to me that any other aspect of her beauty might be granted a mortal twice on this earth.
Many days we received gifts from my father: rare citrus imported from the north, sweet within their bitter rinds. Songbirds and ivory combs from across the narrow sea. Bolts of fine Egyptian linen, which my mother had made into gowns for me to match her own.
But my greatest treasures were the songs she sang like lullabies murmured against my ear. The ritual prayers she taught me as we knelt before her idols, the sweet waft of incense perfuming her hair. Never once did she chide me for clinging to her when she donned the robes of the thing called “queen.” Never once when she went to my father at night was she not curled around me again by morning. Beyond the palace, Saba sprawled from the sheer edge of the coastal range to the foot of the desert waste. But I was content that my world stretched no farther than my mother’s chamber.
In the evenings I sat before her jewelry chest and adorned my ears with lapis, my shoulders weighed down with necklaces as she reclined by her table. It was covered in gold, a glowing thing in the low light of
the lamp that seemed to gild anything near it—the side of my mother’s face, the silver cup in her hand.
And then I would dance as she clapped her hands, bracelets chiming on my ankles—the dance of the monsoon rain running through the wadi ravines, and the gentle sprinkles of summer coaxing millet from the winter-brown earth. Of the highland ibex, my arms curved over my head like great crescent horns, and the lions that stalked them, which always made her laugh. And then she would leap to her feet and join me, the tiers of carnelian beads at her neck jingling with every stamp of her heels.
“You will be more beautiful than I,” she said one night after we had fallen onto the cushions.
“Never, Mamma!” The thought was impossible.
She held out her hand and I lay down against her.
“I was never so fair at your age,” she said, kissing the top of my head. “But beware, little Bilqis. Beauty is a weapon you can only wield once.”
Before I could ask what she meant she slid a heavy bangle off her wrist. It was as wide as my hand and crusted with rubies. “Do you see these stones? They are harder than quartz or emeralds. They do not break under pressure, or soften with age. Let this remind you, my dove, that wisdom is lasting and therefore more precious.” She slid the bracelet onto my arm.
“But—”
“Hush now. The Sister Stars are rising—a time for new things.” She touched the amulet at my throat, a bronze sun-face inscribed on the back for my protection. “How do you like the idea of a young prince brother?”
I nestled against her, toying with the bangle. My nurse made me burn incense before the alabaster idol of Shams, the sun goddess, every month since I could remember in prayer for this very thing.
“I would like that.”
I said it because I knew it would please her. What I did not say was that I would like it far better than a sister, who would vie with me for my mother’s attention. That I could share her with a boy knowing he would eventually leave us for my father’s side—and the throne.
I vowed to pray daily that my mother’s baby would indeed be a boy.
Ten days later my mother suffered a seizure and hit her head on the marble bench inside her bath. That night I was told she had abandoned me for the afterlife, taking my unborn brother with her.
I screamed until I collapsed against the edge of her table. I called them liars and begged to see her, flailing against anyone who tried to touch me. My mother would never leave me! When they took me to her at last, I threw myself over her, clutching her cold neck until they pried me away, strands of her long hair still tangled in my fingers.
After they closed up the royal mausoleum at the temple of the moon god, Almaqah, her face was before me constantly. Sometimes I could smell her, feel the softness of her cheek against mine as I slept. She had not deserted me. I stopped speaking for nearly a year after her death. Everyone thought I had gone mute with grief. But the truth is that I would speak only to her.
I whispered to her as I lay in bed every night until her voice faded the following summer, taking some vital part of me with it. I was six years old.
Hagarlat, my father’s second wife, was neither young nor beautiful. But her presence in the palace renewed ties with the tribes of Nashshan to the north, and control of the trade route through the immense Jawf valley. If the dams and canals that channeled the summer monsoons were the lifeblood of Saba, the incense route was her breath, every exhale of her roads profitably laden with frankincense, bdellium, balsam, and myrrh.
I was eight when my half-brother broke the peace of the women’s quarter with his angry wail just before the first rains of spring. Father offered gold figurines of Hagarlat and my brother at the temple feast that year, inscribed with the appropriate curses should anyone remove them. I felt betrayed by this blasphemy; my mother was interred on that sacred soil.
But even the appearance of an heir could not appease his council, for whom my father would never compare to his militant sire. My grandfather Agabos had been a killer of men. Thousands fell to the machine of his ambition as he campaigned to unite the four great kingdoms: Awsan, Qataban, Hadramawt, and Saba to rule them all. It was Agabos who had married the princess from across the narrow sea through whom his children received the royal darkness of their skin.
But my father, the only one of Agabos’ sons to survive his campaigns, was more interested in advancing the worship of the moon god Almaqah throughout the federated kingdom than the boundaries of Saba itself. That year, he appointed himself high priest and presided over temple banquets and ritual hunts until even my young ears could not help but hear the murmured discontent sweeping through the palace halls like a furtive swarm of bees.
I distrusted Hagarlat. Not because she encouraged his zeal, or because she had the face of a mottled camel—or even because she had brought the squalling thing that was my brother into the world—but because she had usurped my mother’s chamber along with her jewels and made the name Ismeni seem a distant thing in the minds of everyone but me.
The palace had become foreign to me with my stepmother’s servants and uncanny priests filling its halls with their rough tribal tongue. My new relatives and even their slaves looked through me when they weren’t ordering me about, and the children I had grown up with had long distanced themselves from me during my year of silence. “Stay away from me!” one of them, a boy named Luban, said when I tried to get him to sneak out to the stables. We had spent hours feeding the camels and hiding from my nurse the year before my mother’s death. He was by now several inches taller than I and the laughter in his eyes for me was gone. “Your mother is dead and Hagarlat is queen. You’re just a bastard now.”
I blinked in astonishment at the scorn on his round face.
And then I blackened his eye.
“I am the daughter of the king!” I shouted, standing over him until someone pulled me away.
I went that evening without supper, but I had no appetite. I had seen young friends of dead unions become the servants of the offspring who replaced them, before. I never thought it would happen to me.
“You are a princess. Do not forget who you are,” my nurse said to me that night. But I did not know who I was. Only that she and her daughter, Shara, were all that remained to me now.
Though no one else called me “bastard”—at least to my face—I did not miss the eyes that turned away, the dwindling choice of fabric for my gowns, the gifts from my father that grew more intermittent before they ceased altogether.
One day I strode boldly into Hagarlat’s chamber, where she was dictating the celebration to take place for my brother’s first birthday, bolts of dyed cloth and rare silk laid out across the settee. “Where are the things my father sends for me?” I demanded. I heard the intake of breath around me, saw from the corner of my eye the horrified expression of my nurse.
Hagarlat turned, astonishment scrawled as clearly across her face as the henna on her forehead. Green jasper dripped from her ears. A thick, gold girdle hung from her burgeoning waist. I thought she looked like a decorated donkey.
“Why, child, has he forgotten you? And he sends so many gifts here. Ah, what a mess your face is.” She reached toward my cheek. Just as my lower lip threatened to quiver, I saw it: the ruby bangle that once belonged to my mother—the same one given to me before her death.
“Where did you get that?” I said. My nurse pulled me away, hissing at me to shush. “That is mine!”
“What, this?” Hagarlat said. “Why, if it means so much to you, have it.” She took it off and tossed it at me. It fell on the floor at my feet.
“Forgive me, my queen!” my nurse said. I ducked the circle of her arms and snatched the bracelet from the floor. One of the rubies was missing, and I frantically began to search for it until my nurse hauled me from the chamber.
I avoided the palace as much as I could after that. I escaped to the gardens and lost myself by the pools, where I hummed my mother’s songs. Lost myself, too, in study with the tutor my fat
her assigned to me, ostensibly to keep me out of 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 of them 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.
