Hadassah

by Tommy Tenney

  I was standing more than forty cubits from the base of the royal stairs as these words were spoken, so I could not hear all that was being said until the end, when his voice became a shout. Yet I was deeply cowed by the great silence that had once more fallen over the crowd. Instinctively I knew that something solemn and earth-shaking was taking place. Mordecai stood unusually still and sober, his eyes radiating a fearful alertness. He leaned toward me and whispered, “The man speaking is Memucan, the second most powerful man in the Empire. He is Master of the Audiences. He controls the King’s thousand bodyguards, called The Immortals, and decides who can enter into the King’s presence. Some say he is the ultimate power in the realm.”

  Above us, Memucan finished his oration. “If it pleases the King, let a royal edict be issued by His Majesty and let it be written in the laws of Persia and Media so that it cannot be rescinded, that Vashti should come no more into the presence of King Xerxes, and let the King give her royal position to another more worthy than herself.”

  The gasp that then rose from the royal platform was so loud and exaggerated that I thought some royal pantomime was being performed.

  Indeed, the assembled entourage was aghast then awed at the boldness and severity of Memucan’s pronouncement. For indeed, Vashti was Queen of Persia at that moment. Had she appeared, even this learned consort of the King would have been compelled to bow low and kiss her outreached hand.

  And in fact, I can tell you that Memucan had taken what to any other man was an intolerable risk, especially with a king as given to whims as Xerxes. But perhaps he had accurately read the King’s rage and merely given voice to what His Majesty felt unable to express. In either case, Xerxes swerved drunkenly around and bellowed, “Make it so!” Then he pointed to one of the satraps in the corner and spoke in a lower voice. “You. Haman! You’re a backstabbing murderer, forgive the slur, but come here!”

  And Haman the Amalekite, summoned months before with all the other satraps for the military portion of this banquet, rose warily. His girth unmistakable, he approached Xerxes, and the King draped one arm unceremoniously around the old raider’s shoulders. Xerxes leaned salaciously into Haman’s ear, as though he were about to anoint him with a kiss. Instead, he whispered, and while no one else but Haman heard the words, nearly everyone on the platform blanched at the hardened sneer that twisted the King’s features as he spoke them.

  Haman nodded, smiled slyly, bowed once before the King and bounded down the steps into the crowd.

  And, dear Candidate, what I will tell you next elicits nearly the same overwhelming fear and revulsion as happened the first time. As Haman rushed past where I was standing, his cloak flew up and revealed just a glimpse of something I thought I had wiped from my memory. My knees nearly gave way as I recognized that cruel emblem I had seen long ago after the murder of my family. The twisted cross! I clung to Mordecai’s arm, arguing silently but fervently that I must have been mistaken—it simply couldn’t be.

  I later learned that Vashti was dragged screaming from the Palace even as I stood there watching her husband squeeze the last dregs from his glorious party. She and her belongings were deposited outside the King’s Gate in the swiftest and most sudden reversal of fortune Persia ever had the occasion to witness. And as word of this spread through the Persian provinces, the message to women was indeed clear.

  What Haman would do next would result in my life being changed forever—again.

  Not long after, on a cold and moonless desert night, a group of eight horsemen rode quietly into the darkness of a wealthy Susa neighborhood not far from the King’s citadel. The men, all of whom wore identical twisted crosses permanently tattooed on their backs and on their tunics, tied their horses to a young tree and ran without a sound to a nearby home. The large, white dwelling was flanked like all the rest by a high mud wall. The men vaulted it without a moment’s hesitation.

  As though they were following some internal map, they ran without pause into the dwelling, padded quietly up the stairs and entered a large bedroom there. In the low bed slept the publicly banished and now privately undefended Vashti, former Queen of Persia.

  At once she sprang forward in her bed, her legendary raven hair tousling around her. A dark hand clamped over her mouth. Two more hands grabbed the sides of her heaving shoulders. And then a long blade began to stab—up, down, up, down, up, down. . . .

  The King’s whispered order had been carried out.

  All I could think, when I finally heard the rumor whispered to me by Rachel, was how silent killers in the night had slaughtered my own mother in a similar fashion.

  19

  THE ROYAL PALACE, SUSA—THREE DAYS LATER

  A mere dozen cubits away from the royal bedchamber, the Great Hall stood abandoned, its floors finally swept clean and scrubbed free of the stains and spills that the prolonged revelry had left behind. Even the Inner Court behind it stood empty, save for one lone sentry.

  In the King’s private chambers languished the reason why. The sovereign of all Persia lay prone upon his giant bed, where he had remained for three days without going any farther than his nearby bathroom. Just outside the room’s walls stood a phalanx of servants, courtiers and advisers at vigil, wringing their hands and whispering anxious phrases of bewilderment and frustration, some even daring to advise.

  At the end of the third afternoon, Master of the Audiences Memucan slowly pushed open the door and entered. The floor between him and the sleeping platform was strewn with golden food trays, broken dishes and scattered food. Memucan stepped gingerly around them and approached the bed.

  “Your Majesty—”

  “You, of all people, have some nerve coming in here,” interrupted Xerxes. “You’re the one responsible for all this.”

  “Responsible for what, your Majesty?”

  “For my banishing the Queen, what do you think? And, of course, for what came next.”

  “Your Majesty, may I remind you that I did not recommend for anyone to harm the Queen,” he said quickly, “merely banish her from her position.”

  Xerxes rose in his bed now, his hair tousled and his beard twisted in three directions. “And what does one do with a banished queen, you idiot? Let her go out and become a symbol of martyrdom? An icon for the very rebellious female spirit that earned her dismissal in the first place? No! I had no choice but to order her dispatched! It’s what any king would do in the circumstance!”

  “Yet now your Majesty seems quite dismayed at having done just that,” he dared say.

  “Being a king is hard, dirty business. You of all people should know that. Sometimes it calls for actions that turn the stomach. I did not invent the rules, you know.”

  “No, sir. You did not. But may I point out that the rules also require your Majesty to appear at court, fit and powerful, for all to gaze upon and blanch in fear and respect. Your dismay over Vashti seems to have impaired that capacity.”

  Xerxes now stepped from the bed, jumped down the small step to the bedroom’s enormous floor and fairly leaped upon Memucan.

  “You watch your tongue, do you hear? I’m still King, and with a snap of my fingers I can still have you ‘harmed,’ as you so delicately put it!”

  Memucan gently pried the King’s fingers loose from around his neck and shrank back toward the entrance.

  “What can I do to enhance the King’s state of happiness?” he finally asked.

  The answer came low, almost guttural in its tone. “Nothing!”

  “I could find His Majesty a new queen,” Memucan finally offered. “A new Vashti, only more beautiful and far wiser. First we would assemble a new batch of eunuchs, then the finest young virgins from across the land. When Hegai is through cleaning them up and making them presentable, I could bring them one by one to your bedchamber.”

  It took some time for the smile to become visible upon Xerxes’ face, but soon he was beaming. And nodding his agreement to the idea most forcefully. This would take the attention away from the whol
e sorry incident and get his people speculating on who the next Queen of Persia would be.

  STREETS OF SUSA—TWO DAYS LATER

  The army patrol was upon the boys before they even had a chance to bolt. Even had they been given the opportunity, the knot of Jewish youth would have probably stood their ground, for quite often soldiers turned out to be their childhood friends and the patrols rarely more than a passing spectacle.

  But this time, the orderly stomp of formation gave way to the wild clatter of booted steps upon the cobblestones. The soldiers sprinted up to Rachel’s grandson Jesse and his three companions and quickly encircled them with a bristling ring of spearpoints. The blunt end of an unseen spear beside Jesse swiftly knocked him behind the neck, hard, and sent him to the ground like a heavy sack of grain. Five pairs of rough hands reached down and seized him. Jesse shouted loudly and waved his arms like someone possessed of a wild spirit.

  He saw only whirling sky and thickly muscled arms and then the sides of an army chariot. The point of a spear, quivering in his face, made the outcome quite clear should he attempt an escape.

  His ensuing minutes were a jumble of terror and pain, along with a host of wild, tumbling questions: What have I done wrong? Were we breaking some law? Where are they taking me? Followed by the most mind-numbing, blood-curdling question of all: Are these my last moments on earth?

  After an eternity of this torment, he opened his eyes to the towering sight of stone walls on his right. Then came a sharp turn and a high wooden door tilting outward. A gate. He took in a breath, and the realization washed over his senses like a bath of icewater across his limbs.

  The Royal Palace.

  He was pulled from the chariot floor, and thick hands took his hands and feet. He was indoors now, being pulled through one long hallway, then down stairs. Then darkness. He fell hard.

  20

  I awoke at the same instant Mordecai did that morning, for it was still dark and our door sounded like it was being pounded off its hinges. A high, shrill voice wailed from the other side. It sounded vaguely familiar, but it was forming a sound somewhere between a hyena’s laughter and a widow’s funeral cry.

  Mordecai bounded from his room. By the time he reached the front door I was peering around my bedroom door, my heart pounding in alarm and fear.

  “Rachel?” he cried.

  “Yes!” came the hysterical voice from the other side.

  I gasped when Mordecai threw open the door and we were greeted by the sight of Rachel as neither of us had ever seen her. Her hair was tangled and askew, her eyes wild and red with tears, her back bent over as though she were misshapen. She appeared to have aged a decade in just a few hours. She shuffled in and resumed her weeping the instant she was inside.

  “It’s Jesse! It’s Jesse!”

  My blood ran cold as I heard this. Mordecai had come home late, bearing news from the royal barracks, news of a new kind of conscript that had made my heart sink even before this dire lament.

  “What happened?” he asked, almost shouting at her for coherence.

  “I don’t know! He’s gone! He’s been missing since the afternoon. His father and mother searched the streets. We only heard rumor of an army patrol taking away groups of boys—”

  Mordecai reared back with a deep, loud breath. I recognized the gesture; it was his reaction to very bad news—such as when I had told him about my excursion into town dressed as a boy.

  He sat down slowly, his face growing paler by the second, his breathing like that of a man trying to make himself remain alive. At the sight of his reaction, Rachel fell to her knees and began to shake. “What is it? What is it, Master Mordecai?”

  He only shook his head, his gaze an eternity away. Finally it came to rest on poor Rachel. He lowered his hands slowly onto her shoulders and took another deep breath.

  “Rachel. I don’t know. I’m so sorry—I can’t guarantee this is what happened, but someone has to tell you—”

  “Oh, my G-d! Oh, YHWH!” she began to pray and wail in anticipation, her eyes still fixed on Mordecai.

  “I heard a strong rumor today at the Palace that five hundred handsome young boys had been captured and taken to the citadel to be turned into eunuchs.”

  At that, Rachel’s eyes fluttered to the top of her eyelids, her head threw back and she fell heavily onto the floor.

  When Jesse came to his senses it was still dark. The room was lit only by a pair of candles somewhere above him. It was cold, and he was naked. He was lying on a flat, hard surface. Wood. A table. His head felt numb; his senses swam wildly. Dimly, as though through a layer of mud, he started to realize something. I feel drunk. Several years before he had sneaked several long pulls of the Shabbot wine and faintly remembered the sensation of it. He was sure someone had slipped him a foreign substance.

  And then, the most startling sensation of this whole event—large male fingers grasping his private parts. He heard the clicking of metal and the sound of a blade being sharpened.

  Then came a male voice from somewhere in the gloom, low and menacing, speaking to no one in particular.

  “Look at this: another Jew. They think they’re so different, even down there they have to do things their own way.”

  And another voice, from the opposite side. “They think it makes them special. Just get it over with.”

  Then Jesse felt a sensation between his legs which, had he been conscious in the moment that followed, would have made him pray for death.

  I was on the street before I knew it, before I even realized what I was doing. My legs were doing their own thinking, churning beneath me as fast as they could, my arms clawing the air, my bare feet flying above the ground without a care for whatever roughness lay beneath them. My lungs heaved, but not from the exertion; they were trying to stay inflated through sobs that threatened to tear every breath from my body. I felt like my mind was a passenger barely hanging on to some overheated stampede, for my limbs now had a will of their own.

  And I knew where my headlong run was taking me: northward, uphill, toward the Palace portico. He would be there, as young and innocent as he had been just a short while before, riding the gryphon. He just had to be.

  As the distance fell away before me, I inwardly began to shout at G-d, the vague Hebrew entity whom I had never fully trusted.

  So, is this your idea of caring for your own? Is this your gift for me upon reaching womanhood? For the supposed Creator of the Universe, you certainly have a strange way of showing your power. In fact, if this is your idea of sovereign watchcare, then opt me out! I’d rather be a Persian and worship their god!

  I was just beginning to feel the burning in my joints and legs when abruptly, sooner than I had expected, the portico square lurched into my sight.

  The plaza I had seen crowded so thick that its ground was invisible now stood empty. A patch of dirt, surprisingly small. A great silence now reigned where the clamor of people had once roared almost unbearably. The sun was just beginning to rise, and a wedge of yellow sunlight was starting to chase purple shadows down the Palace wall. The square’s only occupants were the Palace guards at the far end. I could feel them following me closely with their eyes.

  I raced up to the gryphon statue and circled it with desperate speed. Beneath it was a pile of donkey droppings. I started to run up the incline we’d taken for our jump. But clearly the space above was empty.

  Taking advantage of my pause from the exertion, fear and rage now began to well up inside of me to the point that I felt I would burst. My chest still heaved, not from a lack of air but from the effort of holding in my emotions. And then I held them in no longer: I threw back my head, took a deep breath and screamed at the top of my lungs.

  “Nooooooooooo!”

  How could they take a flawless young man, as new and perfect as nature could make him, and maim him like that? I’d barely had time to form a coherent picture of what made him distinctly male, and now that had been cut away and thrown aside like a bit of trash.
His manhood, part of his deepest core, now shorn and discarded—the sheer callousness of it was beyond belief. Beyond my ability to fathom. The uncaring power of the Empire now seemed to loom over me with an almost physical sense of ruthlessness.

  I fell to my knees and bowed my head. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that the guards had lowered their lances a notch and now stared at me openly. It had been a stupid, indulgent thing to do; I realized that at once. Yet even today, looking back from the calmer viewpoint of an older woman, I cannot say those feelings could have been restrained. My childhood cloud of foreboding had returned. Doom and tragedy seemed to have reasserted their control over my destiny. For someone that age, it was almost too much to bear.

  With as much slowness and reluctance as I could possibly convey, I stood. I turned toward the road home and let the downhill pull of gravity, more than my own effort, move me forward. I walked into full sunlight and felt warmed a bit, inwardly and outwardly. Doors were now starting to open and sleep-swollen faces beginning to peep outside. I passed an old woman tossing out her evening’s slop bucket from the safety of her doorway and swerved to avoid the splash. Another matron pulled out a canvas awning to shield her home’s window from the early sun. A man whose unclad belly hung down over his waist gazed up into the sky, assessing the weather.

  How can they act normally on a morning like this? I thought despairingly as I passed. Don’t they know? Do they not have a son, a nephew, a cousin taken in yesterday’s roundup? Mordecai had told me that five hundred young men had been herded through the Palace gates. Surely the city should be filled with wailing and every person’s countenance downcast and grieving at the dawn of a day like this.

  I was beginning to approach the turn onto our street when I saw Mordecai in his night-robe, running up the empty lane waving his arms wildly, shouting. I could barely tell who it was. I could not make out his words, but I stopped in my tracks. Then, struck by his hysterical appearance, I started toward him and home.