Esther

by Rebecca Kanner

  One of the little men looked at me. When he walked on I took a deep breath. I could no longer tell what was greater—my fear, my anger, or my despair. What sort of man would have so many girls torn from their homes for what little time he could spend with them? I easily answered my question: a king. Already I hated him.

  I desperately wanted to see a kind face. I turned back, hoping to see Erez. There were several soldiers, but none of them was him. Where had he gone? I reached my hand up and pressed the winged man Erez had given me hard against my chest. I was trying to make an imprint in case, like everything else, it was about to be taken from me.

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  THE HAREM

  We were herded south through the palace, and then down a long hall with no windows. I peeked over my shoulder at the slaves who followed us. They pushed towels over the floor with their backsides high in the air, wiping away the dust, sweat, and blood we left behind. We were led right and left and left and right and right and . . . I lost track. I will never be able to find my way out.

  I put my hand over my nose to keep out the stomach-churning blend of scents—roses, cloves, mimosa mixed with essence of musk, sandalwood, myrrh, and balsam. We had come to the door of the harem court.

  The soldiers turned and started to walk back in the direction we had come, and the little men took their places. These men looked us over differently than the soldiers had—carefully, without seeming to want to get any closer. They wore robes of fine linen richly dyed with emerald green, deep blue, and crimson. Robes with perfectly groomed fringes. None had even the slightest hint of a mustache or beard, and no hair poked out from beneath their tall white turbans. They were bejeweled like the daughters of wealthy men. Chains and rings of silver and gold gleamed in the lamplight.

  A small, chubby one in a crimson robe saw me staring. His head was too big for his body, and his belly pressed against his robe with the immovable hardness of a boulder. I was surprised when he came toward me, and even more surprised when he lifted his hand and I realized he was going to touch me. I did not know if I should let him. Am I permitted to stop him? Before I could decide he continued past.

  Then I felt a slap upon my rear. “Time to wash the filth off!”

  His voice was as high as a girl’s. Eunuchs, I thought with no small amount of relief. I no longer cared about the smell wafting under the door from the harem. We are safe now.

  The eunuchs waited until the soldiers had disappeared down the hall. Then two of the less richly adorned eunuchs—eunuchs who wore only white—labored to open the heavy doors. I could not see inside. The smoke from the incense burning within was too thick.

  The eunuch in the crimson robe who had slapped my rear strode to the entrance and cleared his throat as he turned to face us. “I am Bigthan, second in command to the head eunuch, Hegai.” He said Hegai as though choking on a piece of tough meat. “When we reach the harem court, do not move from the entrance until you are taken to the baths. If you set foot inside, the whole room will have to be purified and the pool drained. And you will be sent to the soldiers.

  “When you return from the baths you will be assigned to a section of the harem. Once you have gone in to the king you will be in the concubines’ section of this room. Until then, the most beautiful virgins will be hidden in the back to keep them from sight. The least pleasing will be in front, closest to the entrance. Now come.”

  I wondered which section I would be assigned to. My hair was beautiful, but it was covered. Was it the pieces that fell out of my head scarf that often caused people to stare when I walked past? Or was it the way I walked? Be careful, my mother had said. Your hips move as though melted honey were sloshing back and forth inside you. Wherever you go, men’s eyes follow.

  We were herded down a wide staircase that led to a huge square room with a sunken pool in the center. The incense was not so thick here. Rugs even more elaborate than those upon Mordecai’s walls circled the pool.

  I became aware that scattered upon the rugs and on pillows along the perimeter of the room women sat staring out at us. Their eyes, hundreds of them, raked over us.

  One of the women stood. She had skin as white as ivory and huge brown eyes heavily lined with kohl. I felt the other women’s eyes slide off of us in order to follow her as she walked toward us.

  The closer she came the more colors I saw in the braids piled on top of her head. Crimson and royal purple streaks. I did not know if her hair had been dyed with henna or if lengths of silk were woven in. She was tall already, and the braids added as much to her height as a second head. She wore just a thin gauze robe and through it I could see a small waist and breasts that bounced heavily against her chest. All the women wore similar robes. I had been both happy and embarrassed when my own breasts began to push up against my tunic two years before. I could see that whatever embarrassment this woman might’ve once had was long gone. She looked like she was of noble blood, born in the palace or one like it. How else could she have skin even whiter than the eunuchs’?

  She smiled at us. “Girls always come to the harem with big eyes. They make you beautiful despite the matted hair poking from your head scarves and the masks of dust over your features. But Egypt’s gifts of opium will make your eyes small. The bigger and more terror-filled your eyes are now, the smaller they will become.” She turned to Bigthan. “Right, girl?”

  He remained still, like an animal who knows that if he moves he will be pounced upon.

  “I am the king’s favorite and you will answer me or I will have the rest of your appendages cut off. Right, girl?”

  When the eunuch still did not reply, she tossed her wine at him. Her goblet clattered to the floor. I watched the eunuch’s face, willing him to defy her in some way, however small. A raised eyebrow, a sidelong look.

  “Your big head must contain only a small brain if you think I cannot make you regret that there is still life in your fat little body,” she said.

  Bigthan did not reach down to clean his robe where the wine had hit him. His face was nearly the same crimson as his robe. “Yes, Mistress Halannah.”

  My stomach tightened. Halannah, Parsha’s cousin.

  She returned her gaze to us. “The more afraid you are,” she said, “the more you will like the opium.” The virgins were starting to shift away from her. She narrowed her eyes at a girl directly in front her. “You do not back away like the others. Do you think you are brave?” The girl did not answer. Halannah raised a henna-tipped finger high into the air, sending thick gold bracelets clanking from her wrist all the way to the meaty flesh of her upper arm. Then she brought her nail plunging down to stab at the girl’s forehead. The girl screamed and stumbled backward. I expected a eunuch to rush to her aid, but none came forth.

  “Already this one can hardly stand upon her own feet,” Halannah said of the girl. “What will she be like after a goblet of wine?” She turned to Bigthan. “This batch of girls is even uglier and more useless than the last. Why have you not sent more of them to the soldiers? I will have to do this myself.” She looked at us once again. “Who volunteers?”

  Silence.

  “Soon you will volunteer each other. You have no friends.”

  Though she spoke to all the girls, it was me she looked at. She came closer. “Hegai will be here shortly to soften your flesh, perfume your skin, and most important, to rid your bodies of souls. Platters of dates, honey, Haoma wine, opium. You will go numb and be glad for it. You will feel only hatred for each other. You will gladly kill the girl beside you for a golden goblet full of wine, a jewel from the king, or for no reason at all. Of this I am as certain as I am that the sun will rise in the East, and that we will not see it.”

  I did not allow myself to cower as she came to stand only a few cubits from me. She smelled of wine. Her eyes moved over my body. You create a hundred moments in the first one, my mother had told me after some girls had teased me one day at the well. Do not let them see that their words have any eff
ect on you and they will stop wasting them.

  “Your feet have lost their prettiness to the road,” she said. “And your hands are even more worn.” She hit her rings against my fingers. I jerked my hand away but then let it fall back against my side as though it did not hurt. “You have washed bowls in boiling water and have probably lost most of the feeling in your hands.” She looked to my legs. “How unfortunate. The blood upon your knees does not mask their roughness. You have spent a great part of your life kneeling.” Her gaze returned to my face. “Are there no trees where you are from? Are you kept outside with the goats, beneath the sun?”

  My goat. A loss I had not yet thought of.

  “Your skin is not fair like mine or any of the girls the king calls to his bed more than once. He does not like dark flesh.”

  Then Halannah yanked off my head scarf, the one Erez gave me, and went silent. I let her search for something cruel to say, something to undo the beauty of my hair. But she said nothing and this gave me courage.

  “I have been told that my hair is the richest brown in all the world,” I said. “Even the shyest boy will gaze upon it and forget his shyness for a moment.”

  A great hot breath gushed from Halannah’s nostrils and she grabbed at my chest with her fingers. It was modest compared to hers, but still there was plenty to grab onto. I did not allow myself to flinch. Instead I hit her hand away. She laughed and pinched my hip, then reached around to grab my backside. “This tiny morsel is not enough to sate a man’s appetite. The king will only want you once, or perhaps less.”

  Once. A fate worse than death, to spend my days growing old in this room as an unwanted woman. Except that I had seen no old women other than servants.

  Halannah took her hand from my backside and looked over her shoulder at Bigthan. “Girl,” she called to him. I stepped away from her, relieved. I just wanted her to go back the way she had come, getting smaller and smaller until I could tell myself she was not so huge as she seemed.

  Instead she turned back and reached for my face. To keep her from grabbing my chin I lowered my head to my chest. Her reach was so great she did not even have to step toward me to press her nail against my chin. “This insolent peasant gazes down but stands upright. She is fearful but stubborn. It is your job to break her,” Halannah told Bigthan. Then she took a deep breath and sighed loudly. “Yet I will be a little disappointed when you do.” She was so much like her cousin Parsha that it seemed I had not escaped him after all.

  With that Halannah pushed me. I fell hard upon my tailbone and a jolt went up my spine.

  “Clumsy,” Halannah said. She turned and began to walk back to the pool. As though I could be discarded as easily as a piece of trash. I felt my face flush.

  “It is your breath I stumbled away from,” I called, rising to my feet. “I have never smelled a rotting vineyard before.”

  Halannah turned back. Instead of lashing out at me, she gently asked, “How old are you?”

  I thought I should lie to her, not just about my age but about everything. Give her nothing to use against me. But for some reason I told the truth.

  “Fourteen.”

  “So old.” She shook her head sadly. “None have wanted you for a wife and now it is too late.”

  “There was no man worthy of me in Shushan, Babylon, or anywhere in between,” I said. In truth I did not know why Mordecai had not found a husband for me.

  “Let us see,” Halannah said, coming toward me, “how pretty you are with lines of blood across your peasant face.” She raised her hand over my head and her bracelets jangled down her arm. As her nails descended toward my face I caught her wrist, squeezed, and turned her arm out to the side so that she stumbled sideways, screaming. I let go and she fell to the floor, her goblet clattering across the marble.

  Her braid was so heavy she could not pick her head up. She remained on her hands and knees with her head pointed straight at the floor. She reached blindly for the frayed hem of my tunic.

  She bunched it in her hands and pulled with all her weight.

  I felt my tunic cut into the back of my neck. I hurried to hold on to it but still I heard a tear and then I was standing half-naked in front of the whole harem. The women broke into laughter. As I tried to pull my torn tunic around me, I felt Halannah’s nails and then the warmth of my own blood on my stomach. Her neck was still bent by the weight of her braid and it seemed a demon was upon me as she clawed her way up my body. Her braid was so tight that winding snake-shaped lines of scalp were visible, fringed by tiny flakes of skin. She was about to tower over me and perhaps rake my face.

  “Forgive me,” I said, and drove my knee into her stomach.

  She fell sideways and let out a garbled scream. I backed away, remembering what my mother had told me. A wounded animal is the most dangerous. You may wish to help, but do not be foolish enough to do so.

  “No one but the king is allowed to touch me,” Halannah said, though she allowed a eunuch to hold her braid and help her rise to her feet. “Especially not some low-born vermin-ridden girl.” She pointed a finger with my blood under the nail at me. “Once the servants have tended to my flesh I will tend to yours. The only difficulty will be watching to make sure you do not take your own life. It is mine.”

  I held my torn tunic tightly around me and lifted my chin. “I am not here by accident. When God wants me He will take me Himself.”

  At that Halannah threw a goblet at me. I was impressed by her strength if not her aim. The goblet struck one of the girls in the chest, but by then it was empty. Only a girl beside Halannah had been hit with the wine—her and the pool.

  “Ahura Mazda,” Bigthan cried. He called to the other eunuchs, “Drain the pool and refill it quickly, before Hegai arrives.”

  As soon as the words left the eunuch’s mouth, a rotund man in royal purple with a tall white turban entered. He towered above the four other eunuchs who attended him. They stayed back as he came to stand before us.

  A lioness in a jewelled collar and gold anklets walked beside him. She was unchained.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  HEGAI

  Though I clutched my tunic tightly around me, as I stared into the lioness’s eyes I felt as naked as a cut of lamb hanging in the butcher’s stall. Her eyes were shiny black rocks, unreadable. She yawned, revealing four long fangs.

  Hegai smiled, almost sadly, as girls shuffled backward. “Do not panic, it will excite her. She had only a small portion of the wildebeest she killed yesterday and has not eaten since. She will soon be hungry again.”

  “Feed her as much as you like,” Halannah said. “One day she will still crave the abundant flesh of a fat man. Or whatever is left of a man inside that gaudy robe.”

  Hegai raised his palm up and the lioness sat back upon her haunches. She yawned again, perhaps enjoying the effect upon us. She seemed more regal than any human queen.

  A serving woman walked into the room with a pitcher. She passed close enough to the four eunuchs behind Hegai for me to see that she was at least a head taller than all of them. Hegai was not tall, he had just surrounded himself with smaller eunuchs.

  He gazed at us one by one. “As you may have heard, I am Hegai.” His tone suggested that he was recognized and spoken of over all the provinces. “I will teach you to please the king.”

  “You will teach them to please the king?” Halannah cried. “That is like a man with no hands teaching a child to be a great swordsman.”

  Without looking at Halannah, Hegai said, “Any who disobey me will not stay here.”

  He did not threaten that we would go to the soldiers. Perhaps too much relief shone in my face. Hegai’s gaze fell upon me. I did not know if it would be disrespectful to meet his eyes, or not to. I remembered what Erez had told me about hiding my wildness. I dropped my eyes to the marble floor and bowed slightly—just enough that no one could argue that I hadn’t, or that I had.

  Hegai laughed, delighted. “You may mistake me for the
king, but Halannah has spoken true. I cannot enjoy you as he will. Yet you will find I am far more demanding. You are wise to show me respect.” His gaze moved over the girls. “Almost all of you will spend one night with the king, and the rest of your days with women and eunuchs.”

  The lioness yawned again, this time roaring loudly as she did so. A golden vase sitting along the edge of the room trembled slightly.

  “Take off your clothes and follow the servants to the baths,” Hegai said. When we did not immediately do as he had commanded, he continued, “Do not flatter yourselves that you have anything worthy of even the slightest crumb of modesty. The king has many palaces and you are in the greatest of them—the greatest palace the world has ever known. You are filthy and underfed. You have lice or you had them once, perhaps ‘once’ for your whole lives. You have stepped on floors covered in filth, dust, dung, and the footprints of diseased children who have since died. If the king saw you now he would ask the soldiers to gather another batch.”

  Servants began prodding us and pulling at our clothes. The gray of the tiles was quickly covered by a sea of blue, purple, green, and yellow as scarves and tunics fell to the floor. The girls were now a mass of flesh, some of it sand colored, some of it the color of clay, and some the color of soft wet earth. They looked like one shifting, trembling throng.

  I let everything I wore fall to the floor, except the necklace Erez had given me, which I hid in my mouth. I needed one thing in the world that was mine. It tasted of the road, something I thought I would never walk upon again.

  Hegai ordered the servants to bring wine. “This will ease what is to come,” he said. “You are going to be in a beauty contest, one that will take a year of preparation and will determine your fate.”

  Do I want to win? And if so, who will tell me how? I did not know what kings were like. Other than what Mordecai had told me, all I knew of Xerxes were the exaggerations spread at the market square: He was the tallest man in the world, the most beautiful, the strongest. Few people ever actually saw him. He sat behind a screen whenever he dined with his officials, and he invited only a handful of people a year to come closer. To go in to see him without being invited was a crime punishable by death.