Not long after our first meal, I heard Bigthan shout, “Opi! Get back.” Out of the corner of my eye I watched a tall Nubian girl walk toward the pool. “Return to the rear of the harem before Hegai sees you here.”
Instead the girl sat by the pool, not far from me. She dangled her toe over the water.
“None are to touch it,” Bigthan said.
Opi did not lower her foot to touch the water. But neither did she take it back.
The eunuch said, “I will get someone larger than myself to put you where you belong.”
She appeared not to hear his threat, but I suspected that she stayed close to the pool to torment him. My heart expanded in my chest. Her. The cruelty we had been subjected to had not shamed or broken her. Just the opposite, it seemed.
Before I could approach her, the girl yawned and returned to the back of the harem.
It was painful to eat all that the eunuchs insisted upon. I had never before wondered at the skin of my stomach, how thick it was and how far it could be stretched before it tore. I could not help imagining the food piling higher and higher inside me, dates and pastries and salted meats filling my lungs, my throat. Suffocating me. After the third meal, I ran behind the screen to the chamber pot and vomited. The relief was so great I began to cry.
After the fifth meal, the concubines began talking amongst themselves, but loudly enough for everyone to hear.
A woman with a voice as high-pitched as a eunuch’s said, “Halannah has not returned. Perhaps someone else will be called in to the king tonight.” I rose up on my cushion to look at her. Her face was almost perfectly round. She looked like a large child.
“Someone, yes. But the king never bothered to learn your name—Nabat, is it?—so how could he call for you?”
“You think he remembered yours?” Nabat said.
“He called for me twice.”
“Perhaps he told Hegai ‘My councils tire me and I have not laughed for many days. Bring me the old woman with two different breasts.’ ”
More women’s voices joined these, yelling out similar insults, until it seemed all the women must have misshapen, tiny, or otherwise hideous breasts along with hips too small or large for the king’s pleasure.
The eunuchs did not stop the arguing. A few barely stifled their smiles or laughter. To a plump woman deriding another woman for her thinness, a eunuch said, “But, Armaiti, look how much flesh this little bird has added to her bones since she first flitted into the harem.”
“It does not matter how much she eats now,” Armaiti said, “the king will never know. He will only know the twisted vine he found beneath him once, which was one time too many for his taste.”
The woman retorted, “You were as fat as you are now when you went in to him. So what is your excuse for not being called back, Armaiti?”
“I am sure my name is on his tongue, and my body shall soon follow.”
A third woman laughed so wildly the bracelets on her arms jangled. “He will need more than his tongue to hold you up.”
I remembered what I had heard in the market after going to live with Mordecai in Shushan. Each woman in the king’s harem got to pick out jewelry from the harem collection to wear when she went in to the king. If he liked her he would let her keep one piece. I now saw the cruelty of this. Every woman was reminded day and night that the king did not love her as much as he loved another woman. Every woman except Halannah. The day before I had marveled at how much jewelry she wore. She was so heavily weighted with the king’s affection for her that she would not be able to jump if a mouse ran through the harem.
There was only one adornment that I truly longed to feel against my skin, and the king could not give it to me. Only Ruti could.
“His big chest must contain a huge heart. He calls you in to him out of pity,” Armaiti, the large woman, said to the woman with many bracelets on her arm.
The once-thin woman cried out, “And is that why you grope my breasts at night—pity?”
“Oh, was that you? I only meant to search near my mattress for some grapes I dropped. When my hand felt how they had turned to raisins I did not want them anymore.”
It was a relief when Hegai came in to announce who the king wanted that night, or would have been if the she-lion had not been with him. The women went silent as he stepped into the harem entrance, his purple robe more lustrous and splendid than anything the women wore, his tall white turban towering over the four smaller eunuchs who attended him. The lioness also wore a purple robe. It was draped over her back like a cape, and it fell around her as she sat upon the floor. She waited patiently while Hegai’s eyes sifted through us as carefully as if it were he and not the king who chose a woman for the evening. I do not know why he looked at virgins too, when we were not going to see the king until we had completed a year of beauty treatments. He frowned at the crying girl and sniffed as if he could smell her from where he stood more than twenty cubits away.
Then he looked at me. “My eyes are tired little flower, come closer.”
Slowly, I rose and walked toward him. My legs grew weak as I came within ten cubits of the she-beast.
“Stop. If you come any closer I will not be able to see all of you at once.” His voice was high but his eyes moving over me made me wonder if he truly was without his manhood. “I have seen enough women to know when I am not seeing as much of one as usual. You are wearing too many robes.”
I grabbed the third robe I wore and started to pull it over my head.
“No. At least there is one girl in the harem who is still a mystery.”
“You are kind to let me keep my robes, my lord.”
“I do not allow you to keep it for your pleasure, but for mine. Return to your place.”
Bigthan mumbled, “Before he changes his mind.”
As I returned to my cushion a few of the women looked at me with eyes so narrow they were smaller than the thick lines of kohl with which they were lined.
“Now what did I come here for? Oh yes, a vessel for the king.” Hegai sighed, as if the king’s choice seemed unfortunate to him. “Nabat.”
Some of the women jeered. More than one began to cry.
Nabat called attention to her many bracelets by reaching up to touch her nose ring so that they jangled as she walked toward Hegai. When she came near her gaze flittered over me and then she batted her eyelashes at Hegai. She was unfazed by the lioness. “To the Jewelry Box!” she cried.
No one imagined that she would never return to the harem.
That night as Ruti pressed a damp cloth to my skin she told me that someone like Halannah had ruined her for the king. “When I went in to Darius he would not have me. He sent me instead to the soldiers. That was twenty-nine years ago.”
I tried not to show my surprise. Ruti looked old enough to be a great-grandmother.
“Halannah comes to each pretty new virgin. Few make it to the king unbroken. And so the king believes there are no beautiful virgins left in his empire. He thinks only plain girls are pure.”
She squeezed my arm with her bony fingers. “If you do not show him he is wrong, he will seek younger and younger girls, until he finds the purity he desires.”
“How old were you?”
She let go of my arm. “Too young to imagine what was to come and too old not to have known better: fourteen. My family tried to discourage the soldiers from taking me by telling them I was even younger. Surely they regret this. It sealed my fate.”
“Soldiers are the most ruthless of all creatures,” I said. “I wish God had never made them.”
“No, Halannah is worse than a soldier. It did not take war to make her cruel.”
“And the king?”
“He does not know anything his advisers do not tell him. He looks like a strong man, but at his core he is weak. You must rescue yourself. Do not be fooled by the treatments you receive and delicacies at your fingertips: you and the other virgins are not truly being taken care of. You are the most endangered creatures wi
thin these walls. You have something of great value and no way to protect it. But if you band together perhaps you can—”
“I have many things of great value.” I could not help but think of Erez. Did he also believe a tiny piece of flesh was a girl’s greatest attribute? If I mattered to him at all, would I still after my night with the king?
“Your purity and your strong spirit are more important than anything else, and you must spend this year before you go in to the king preserving them. You will find that in the harem you have to hide anything you wish to keep.”
“A tiny bit of flesh is not more important than my face or my words or my thoughts.”
“Look at me, girl.”
The anger building inside me turned on her as I looked at her heavily lined face and tired eyes. Why had she allowed so many bad things to happen to her? But her eyes upon mine were so full of concern for me that I could not maintain my anger. It drained out of me, leaving me weak. “Ruti, there is one thing that will give me the strength for all that is to come.”
Before I could ask for my Faravahar, she said, “You will have to earn the return of your necklace. Now, you had best get back to the harem. I would tell you to get some rest, but you will have to earn that as well.”
I lay awake in the virgin sleeping quarters all night, clutching a narrow vase with all my strength, switching it from hand to hand whenever my fingers grew tired.
By morning my eyes burned and my hands ached. I was exhausted. I had to make friends before night if I wished to sleep.
When I entered the harem room I saw the Nubian girl sitting by the pool. As I approached her, I tried to recall the Nubian words that the ivory, ebony, and gold merchants had spoken amongst themselves in the marketplace.
“I speak Persian,” the girl said in Persian, “and Aramaic,” she said in Aramaic. “But if you are going to ask me to move away from the pool then I do not understand any language.”
“I had not planned to ask for anything but your friendship.”
“My mother told me never to befriend the first person who approaches you in a room. That person is desperate.”
“We are all desperate right now but not all of us know it.”
The girl looked at me for the first time. “If I do not know I am desperate, then I am not.”
“We are in danger. But less if we band together.”
She was not moved by my words. She returned her gaze to the pool.
I tried again, “You speak beautifully. But surely these are not your native languages.”
“My father was an archer in the king’s army and my mother and I followed him across the empire, from battle to battle.” She had lit up a little when she said “my father.”
“Was he brave?” I asked.
“The bravest. He spilled so much blood upon the earth that at sunset you can see the pink glow of the path we took through the empire, where the sand is red beneath the top layer. He was more accurate with a bow and arrow than most men are with a dagger. But one of his fellow archers was not.”
I sat down to comfort her. She leaned away until I retreated a couple of cubits.
“When he died my mother and I were taken here to be servants. She was overjoyed that I was chosen for the harem. That was only a few months ago.”
Speaking of her mother had caused Opi’s chin to jut like a sword held in front of something fragile. “Do you sit by the pool to think of her?” I asked.
“No. I sit by the pool because I have been parched my whole life and here is all the water I have not been able to drink. I come from deserts no girl of Shushan”—she looked briefly at me—“could survive. Not even the toughest Persian soldiers can live in the land where I was born. Have you never heard that when Cambyses was king he marched a large army toward Nubia to punish our king for insurrection? His men ran out of supplies in the barren deserts of Nubia and got so hungry that they started to eat one another.”
Opi seemed to like my discomfort. She continued, “Cambyses hurried what was left of his army home.”
“Still I do not understand why you sit by the pool. We cannot drink this water.”
“I know.” Opi tipped her goblet up and drained it, then held it out for a servant to refill. But no servant came; they would not serve a girl outside her place.
She did not lean away as I came closer in order to pour what was left in my goblet into hers. “You should not be kept in the back of the harem,” I said.
She ignored my flattery and instead examined my face. “You did not sleep last night.”
“I am afraid Halannah will harm me if I cannot see her coming.”
“And if you can?” Opi asked, but did not wait for an answer. “She thinks I am no threat and will not bother me.”
“So you can sleep, despite the spirits wandering through the harem?” I asked.
“I only know of one spirit wandering through the harem. Queen Vashti’s slaves were dismissed along with her. But my mother was not among them. Xerxes had a fondness for her.”
“Why?”
“You think the king does not enjoy dark flesh as much as any other?”
My cheeks flushed. Halannah had criticized my skin for not being fair enough for the king, and I had taken her words to heart. “Forgive me. It was a foolish question.”
“The king is not swayed by anyone else’s tastes.”
Though this is not what I had heard of the king, I said, “You speak true.”
Opi was not deceived. “Unlike you.” She tilted her head a little to one side, as if considering whether or not to continue. I tried not to appear eager. I feigned interest in my newly cleaned nails until finally she spoke again, this time more quietly than before. “My mother told me that Vashti disappeared before the soldiers came for her. No one could find her. The eunuchs and servants secretly searched, afraid that the king would kill them for not watching over her more carefully. When they could not find her they decided to tell the king she had gone to Chaldea.
“My mother was certain that Vashti never left the palace. She believed Vashti stayed here, so she could be near her son. After taking her own life.”
I reached up to touch the Faravahar around my neck. When I found it was not there, still I did not drop my hand. “What part of the palace is your mother in?” I asked.
“The dakhma. Vashti or her spirit murdered my mother out of jealousy. She was found with no face. There were no cuts, no sign of injury. Yet she had no mouth, no nose, no eyes.”
“You saw her?”
“I see her often, in dreams. She warns me to cover myself at night, so when Vashti’s spirit flies over the harem, she will not see the daughter of the servant whom the king loved.”
“What do you cover yourself with?”
“I curl my body into a fist and cover myself with a pillow.”
“Tonight you can put your head on top of a pillow instead. I will watch over you if you will watch over me tomorrow night.”
Opi did not answer and I did not want to appear too desperate. I returned to my cushion to let her consider my offer. When my goblet was refilled with wine I did not object. I tipped it to my lips and thought suddenly of Erez holding the animal skin of water out to me and refusing to take it back until I had drunk from it.
I continued to think of Erez through the morning. Thoughts of him, combined with the wine, were like tiny windows letting sunlight into a dungeon. The sounds of the harem—women laughing and talking, and underneath it whispering and crying—faded. I was once again seeing Erez’s dark eyes and then the chain bouncing against his neck as he rode away and then I myself was on the back of his horse with my arms wrapped around him.
I was awakened from my daydreaming not by a noise but by a sudden silence. I raised my right hand in front of my face and caught a blade in my palm. The pain was so great that I thought it could not be real.
Halannah let go of the blade, grabbed my hair and yanked my head back. Her other hand drew into a claw. I could see that her nails we
re filed into sharp points and that she was going to rake them over my face.
I slammed my left fist into her stomach.
She screamed and doubled over. The eunuchs surrounded her, all except one, who brought me more pain than Halannah had: he pulled the knife from my palm. Another pressed cotton to my skin to hold back the blood that was rushing toward the new opening.
It seemed my childhood was leaving me through that cut, that Halannah had opened me to what I could become. I felt strong. Even with my eyes closed, I had somehow known my enemy was coming as clearly as if I had seen her. Though I was bleeding, she was the one hurt. I could hear it in her cries, which were jagged and high.
I could be queen, I thought.
“Do not touch me,” Halannah yelled at the eunuchs. “Xerxes cares nothing for this peasant, he cares only for me and I could make him hang all of you.”
“You do not make him do anything.” It was Hegai, and he had come without his she-beast. “You are not one of his advisers, you are not his mother, and you are not a woman he will make queen.” He turned to some servants and gestured at Halannah and me. “Tend these two,” he said irritably. “Do not spare our best wine. Go to the kitchens and tell them I have ordered it.”
His eyes caught on mine and he studied me carefully for a moment. Then he looked away, toward two of his servants, and waved his hand back at me. “Do not bring this one back here.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
* * *
MY NEW CHAMBERS
As eunuchs prodded and then pushed me from the room, I thought I heard cheers. Do the women cheer because I am being cast out? I did not cry. If I were going to the soldiers I hoped I would shut my eyes against my tears and only let them out in the dark.
Someone forced me down upon a table piled with thick cushions. I did not know where I was. It was a simple tiled room with about ten tables. The table beside me was full of towels, bottles, and silver instruments.
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