“I must wear the blade when I am most likely to need it. I wanted a weapon that someone who would come to kill me in the night would not think to look for, one he would not know of until it was too late.”
“Well if I cannot dissuade you from wearing it, perhaps I can advise you to have happier dreams, ones that do not toss you about so violently. What did you dream last night, Your Majesty?”
“I cannot remember.”
Sometimes I dreamed that instead of Erez breaking into the hut to kidnap me, the kidnapper was a shadow whose face I could not see. As it bent over me, something warm dripped onto my face and its bitter smell choked me. The drip became a stream. The shadow was gushing blood. “Your flinch is not enough, Hadassah,” it whispered. “You will flinch with your whole body when I tell everyone who you truly are. The king himself will wrench his seed from your womb.” And then I saw the shadow’s eye. It was Parsha’s, and it leered down at me with all the hatred I had seen in it as he was dragged from the throne room. I knew that this time, if I did not escape, I would not be taken to a palace, I would not drink wine. I would not see a kind face ever again. I knew I must make certain to die in the struggle. I knew also that Ruti had lied when she told me “Death is the only true harm.” It was preferable to whatever Parsha would do to me.
“You cannot remember at all?” Ruti asked. She lowered her voice. “Your sheets are ripped apart as though you have lain with a demon.”
I also dreamed of Erez. In one dream he was riding away from me on a horse. I tried to run after him but my legs were no better than they had been over a year and a half ago when I first heard the Immortals riding closer through the night. Please do not run away from me, Erez. I cannot chase you.
I was not sure which of these dreams I’d had.
I could see by her eyes that she was frowning. “You are taking years off my life. That blade is doing little good—the only one it is hurting is me.” She looked at my stomach. “I fear one day it will also hurt you.”
The next morning I awoke to feel something warm and wet upon my arm. When I touched it my fingers came away bloody. I sat up and started screaming.
Erez rushed into my bedchambers. He took a cloth from the table near my bed and pressed it to my arm. I hit his hand away.
“Hurry!” I cried. “There is an intruder.”
“I stood guard all night. No one entered your chambers.”
Erez lifted my right hand and gently pulled torn pieces of silk from the blade. The tip was covered in fresh blood. He kept it cradled between us, as though there was something he wanted me to see. I was sitting up in the robe I wore to bed, my face naked of cosmetics. This did not make me feel ugly the way it would have with the king.
“How am I to guard you from yourself, my queen? You have cut your left shoulder.”
“The blade is so sharp I did not feel it.”
“It is a shallow wound. You are lucky.”
“If the wound I made is shallow, how will this blade protect me from my enemies?” I took my hand from his. “It was your idea for me to have a blade fixed to the plate. Did you want me to get a weapon that could not really hurt someone?”
“Something I have learned, Your Majesty: you cannot be dangerous to someone else without also being dangerous to yourself.” He stared pointedly at my shoulder. “Especially in the dark. Yours is not the least nor the most dangerous blade.”
“You do not think I can be trusted with a real weapon?”
For a moment I was so angry I could not even gather together the words with which to reprimand him. He gazed at the wound.
“I forbid you to look any more at my arm,” I cried. “I have not forgotten I cut myself, you do not need to remind me by continually looking at it. A man should not resort to arguing with his gaze the way women and eunuchs do.”
I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth. They were not words I would have spoken, and yet I had. Where had they come from?
“Forgive me,” Erez said. “I will be more particular about how I tell you what you must know.”
“Do not mock me.”
“Darkness obscures everything a man puts between himself and his soul. It makes some men cowards, some men foolish, and others brave. But it makes all men more dangerous.”
“Then it is good I am not a man.”
“If you want to become truly willing to take a life, you will have to leave parts of yourself behind. I would not wish this upon anybody I care for. I watch over you so you do not have to become someone else.”
My anger wavered. I tried not to show it. I wanted to look deeper into his eyes to reassure myself that he really did not want me to be anyone other than who I was already.
“But, Your Majesty, do not mistake the blade you carry for a toy. You can harm and even kill someone if you must.”
He took my left hand. I tried to keep my breathing even as he placed two of my fingers at the back of my jaw below my ear. Our faces were so near I could see all the little lines in his skin and smell the saltiness of his sweat. He did not look into my eyes and so I felt comfortable looking into his. He gazed intently at the place where he pressed my fingers. “Do you feel that?” he said. His breath was warm against my cheek.
“Yes.” I winced. “It does not like pressure. This is the place upon an attacker where I should aim my blade?”
He took his hand from mine. “Cut straight across it. You will know you have been successful when a river of blood gushes from your attacker’s flesh. There are other places that are good—his eyes, or above his eyes so blood runs down and blinds him. The front of the throat will make it hard for him to breathe. But the place where your fingers are is the best, and even a short blade will work. Your blade is small enough that your attacker might not see it coming and even when he does he will have trouble turning it against you.” Now he did look into my eyes. “Unless he comes from inside your dream again and gets you to do his work for him.”
The concern in his gaze made me tell him the truth. “I have nightmares. I fear I might lose those things that are most valuable to me.” I felt heat rise into my cheeks but I continued. “Even when I am asleep I am fighting for them.”
“You are only fighting yourself for them, and for that you do not need a blade. I told you I would watch over you at night. If there were blood on my dagger in the morning it would not be yours.”
I felt my blush deepen. I turned away and noticed Ruti standing only a short distance away. From the expression on her face I was certain she had heard too much.
“My queen,” she said, “what are you doing keeping a blade you cannot control so near to your child?”
Ruti gave me a cloth to wrap around my hand at night. When I argued that the blade would do me little good if it were covered, Erez suggested that I could leave the blade uncovered and instead cover those places on my body where the blade might cut. I was not sure if he mocked me.
“Do you have a better idea?” I asked him.
“Yes, Your Majesty. Hide the blade before you go to sleep. If someone comes for you, run.”
“Where is it I will run in my bed chambers?”
“Away. Did I not tell you, Majesty, that the best defense is to never allow yourself to be cornered?”
I thought about this after he returned to his post and Ruti came to lie upon a pallet beside my bed. “If you so much as turn in your sleep, Majesty, I will wake you,” she said.
In the morning I summoned Hathach and told him I wanted a great long screen fixed to the floor of my bedchamber, one end pointed to where Ruti would put down her pallet each night beside my bed and the other pointed toward the entrance. I did not tell him why I wanted the screen, only that it must be secret. If only one attacker made it into my chamber, I stood a chance of getting away. I could flee my bedchamber on whatever side of the screen he was not on.
As I gave Hathach his orders I carefully considered him. The king had as much as told me that Hathach would report to him. The eunuch kept his gaze respectful
ly low, and it looked as though his whole body ached to join his gaze upon the floor. He was developing a hump.
I told him to go at once and stared at the hump as he walked away. I must not forget that most of that hump is from prostrating himself before the king, not me. And perhaps it is, above all, a disguise. He makes himself appear smaller than he is. But I am not fooled.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
* * *
THE KICK
“Your Majesty, this is beneath you,” Ruti said. She did not like the way I had begun to spend my days since the king had gone to Persepolis two months before. I was writing. She thought writing a task for low-ranking officials.
“Atossa herself taught Xerxes and her other children to read and write,” I replied from where I sat at a table in my reception hall. Ruti stood back from it, as though she could not bear to associate herself with a queen stooping to a servant’s task. “Perhaps that is what she is doing now, and why my husband cannot return to the palace.”
“Bitterness does not suit you, Your Majesty,” Ruti said, and then lowered her voice so the servants nearby would not hear her, “and it will make your child’s bones brittle.”
I smiled at Ruti. “I am not unhappy. I have the king’s son or daughter in my belly, and I have you.”
“His son, Your Majesty.”
I hoped the life in my belly was a son, but I had to prepare myself for the possibility that I might have a girl. I would not love her any less. I would love her with my whole heart, as my mother had loved me. “His child. His and ours. I cannot wait to gaze upon the child’s face.”
“Then you should not be bent over straining to put down words that may get us killed. You should be resting.”
Perhaps that was Ruti’s true qualm with my writing. Ruti could not read and was afraid of what I was revealing upon the scroll I had sent to Egypt for. I had no choice. I knew I could not trust the men who write history to write my story. I had to write it myself.
“I have not recorded anything that might put us in danger,” I said, even though this was only true if none of my servants could read Aramaic—not even their own names. And if I could keep the scroll from being stolen. I had to guard it as carefully as a mother guards a child. During the day this was easy because I was poring over it. Night was where danger always seemed to lay. Three times I had been attacked in the night, and I knew this was also when the scroll was most vulnerable.
I considered keeping it in one of the gowns in my wardrobe, but even at night an attendant was often present to keep dust from settling and to kill any beetles or moths that tried to make a home for themselves.
I ended up allowing Ruti to sleep with her arms around it, as though she cherished it or was waiting until no one was looking so she could strangle it. I insisted she keep a blanket over her so nobody could see it.
One night as I lay in bed looking down at Ruti and the lump where she clutched the scroll beneath the blanket, I was suddenly terrified. I was not thinking of Halannah, Haman, or the soldiers they might send to kill me. I was terrified of myself and my urge to tell my story. I was endangering Ruti, Erez, myself, my unborn child, and worst of all, my people, who Mordecai and Ruti said I would one day have to save. Why did it hurt me that people did not know who I was, and why did I think I could lessen the pain by leaving a scroll so that someone else might know what the king never could?
Three months after we had first realized I carried the king’s child, I felt a tiny kick. The next day there were two more kicks. When I told Ruti she rushed over and put her palm upon my belly, next to my own. Then she knelt and gently pressed her ear to me. I moved my hand out of her way. “Your Majesty, were they happy kicks?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Are these kicks the reason you have kept one hand on your belly even while you write?”
I looked down at my belly and smiled. “I had not realized I was doing this, but yes, I am certain it is.”
After a moment I stepped back and Ruti rose to her feet. “This is wonderful news. Should you not call upon musicians to celebrate?”
Since the episode with the jugglers I rarely had company. “I cannot allow people who might be under the influence of my enemies to come near me and my child.”
“Yes, but perhaps you could summon just a couple of your handmaidens, and a single juggler or musician?”
“I do not need to celebrate with anything other than what I already have. You and my child bring me more joy than anything in the world. I cannot wait to hold him in my arms.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
* * *
A CRIME ONE WOMAN COMMITS AGAINST ANOTHER
The desire to hold my child in my arms grew along with the churning in my belly. The mint tea no longer calmed my stomach. I could not keep the food I ate from rising back up. I tried drinking more of the tea, but this only seemed to make it worse. I could not imagine my child finding any peace in such a storm. I wanted him to be free of my body.
“How long will this last?” I asked Ruti between bouts of coughing and spitting into the bowl she held.
I did not need to look up at her eyes to know she was frowning. “It usually does not get worse in a woman’s fifth month, Majesty.”
“It feels as though there is a great hand clenching within me.”
Ruti brooded throughout the day, and when I woke in the night she was pacing back and forth on one side of the screen.
The next morning, after the eunuch who tasted my food took a sip of the mint tea and retreated to the corner of my receiving hall, Ruti suddenly came rushing toward me.
I knew, as soon as she knocked the cup away from my lips, that I would likely lose my child. She could not knock away all the tea I had already poured into my belly over the last few months. She could not suck it from my veins or wring it from my flesh the way you wring dirty water from a soiled cloth. Though I knew it was too late, I put my whole hand in my mouth and pressed down until my stomach rose into my throat. I doubled over and heaved onto the marble tiles. Then I stuffed a fistful of bread into my mouth. Perhaps it could absorb any poison that remained. But the bread too ended up on the tiles. I tried again, forcing myself to chew this time, clenching and unclenching my jaw, all the while thinking of my child and the terror he must have felt. I wanted, more than anything, to be able to reach my hand all the way down to my belly and lift him from my body, wash him off, look at his face, and, most of all, to hold him safely in my arms.
I looked to the eunuch who tasted my food. His eyes were wide with terror, but he did not seem to be feeling his belly clench. He stood perfectly rigid. “You,” Ruti yelled at him. “Come! Drink the rest of this.”
“No,” I whispered. “No one is to drink the tea now.”
“Should not we send for a physician?” one of the servants asked.
“No!” Ruti cried. She looked as though she might attack the girl. She bent to my ear. “Send for Hegai and then dismiss all but your taster.” I nodded weakly. “Her Majesty wishes for you to fetch Hegai,” Ruti told the girl.
I waved away all the servants from my chambers except the taster. I even waved away the Immortals who stood guard inside the doors. Surely Erez, who stood guard outside, would know something was wrong when he saw the parade of servants exiting my chambers. Worse, Hathach, and therefore the king, would know.
“Rest, Your Majesty,” Ruti said when all the other servants were gone. “We will wait for Hegai. It is your own life that is important now. Hegai will know how to bring a physician here in secret.”
“Surely there’s still something we can do.”
“Yes. We can wait for Hegai.”
“Why did you knock the cup from my hands?”
“To preserve your life.”
“But what of my child’s life?”
“The child, Majesty, may survive, but not as you would like him to. He will be deformed, or slow, or both. The palace and then the entire city of Shushan and then every part of the empire will know you ha
ve given birth to a child who no god watched over. It would be better for you to never have any child at all than to have this one who will cause the king to send you away.”
“Surely something can be done! We must save him, however damaged he might be.” I began rocking back and forth. “Do something,” I cried. “I order you.”
Ruti tried to wrap her arms around me, but I pushed her away.
“You have given up too easily. I can see that already your thoughts have turned to how we will make it seem as though this never happened. I am not surprised you had me call upon Hegai. You are not unlike him.” Immediately I was filled with shame. “Forgive me, Ruti. It is myself I am angry with. I was not as smart as I needed to be. Neither the blade nor the screen in my bedchamber protected my child.”
“Your Majesty, you are still queen,” Ruti said slowly, as though to make certain I did not miss a single word. “Do not ask forgiveness from anyone but the king.”
Not asking for forgiveness was the hardest task I had ever been given. I wanted Ruti’s forgiveness, Mordecai’s forgiveness, even my escort’s. I had jeopardized all of our positions. I thought of my people—what if I no longer held enough sway with the king to save them as Mordecai had said that one day I must? But most of all I wanted my child’s forgiveness.
I ran into my bedchamber and began ripping down the ridiculous screen I had ordered Hathach to get for me. From the corner of my eye I saw Ruti watching. She did not interrupt as I tore through the layers of cloth with not only the blade between my fingers but also with my own flesh, until I was scratched and tangled in the tattered screen.
Ruti began to rub my back. After a moment, by the slight tremble in her touch, I knew that she too was crying.
Hegai was only shocked for half a breath. He gathered himself together so quickly I would have missed it if I had not been watching closely. “Pennyroyal,” he said. He looked at me and spoke with even more firmness than usual. “It is time now to think of the girls you wish to save. Think of Utanah. Think of Ruti. You can no longer save the child, but you can still save many more.”
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