“There’s always the garden, I suppose,” suggested Tamar.
A pebble landed on the ground beside them, and all three women looked up into the dusk. Dragon was standing on the roof, in her horse form, and had kicked it down.
“We could sleep up there,” Shulamit suggested. “Then we wouldn’t be disturbing all the holy women.”
“An excellent solution,” said Tamar. “Come, I’ll show you the way to the staircase and bring you bedding.”
The roof of the temple was a flat surface dominated in the front by a large shallow basin. “Holy water,” Tamar indicated.
“Rainwater pools here,” Shulamit explained under her breath, no doubt noting Rivka’s confused expression, “and the sisters come and bless it. It’s a cache that protects the temple.”
“Don’t drink from it,” Tamar warned them. “Now, good night, my son, Your Majesty.” She nodded to both of them and walked slowly and carefully back down the staircase to her cell.
“Why didn’t she ask how the horse got up on the roof?”
Rivka shrugged. “Age? Or maybe she’s so enlightened that she’s learned that the world is a much stranger place than most of us realize.”
She unpacked some of their bedding, then noticed Dragon had transformed into her reptilian form. “You know what, Shula? You can use as much of the bedding as you want. I’m going to sleep against Dragon.”
“Really? That doesn’t look very comfortable.”
“It’s what I’m used to when fighting’s on the agenda. It’ll help me to wake up as a warrior.”
Shulamit nodded. “But won’t staying a dragon sap her strength?”
“It’s the flying that does that,” said Rivka, “not the form. Sometimes I think she prefers this form, but we attract too much attention with a grounded dragon, and she doesn’t like that.”
“How can you tell what she’s thinking?”
Rivka smiled sadly from one side of her mouth. “When you spend three years with one single creature as your only constant friend, you pick up on things.”
***
Shulamit lay on the bedding and wrapped her silk wrap around her shoulders as she gazed up at the stars. She was just about to lose herself in reverie, possibly about the young woman down there in the courtyard, when she heard Rivka singing. Her strong voice was now gentle, and she sent the melody placidly out into the night. “Jeweled stars, pearl stars, silver coins in olive jars... glittering deep within the dark, see them flicker, see them spark...”
Blood rushed into the queen’s cheeks. She joined in, tears spilling down her face. Her voice was choked and sounded like hell, but she sang anyway.
They made it through three verses in duet, during which Shulamit held herself together. Then the earthquakes of sobbing began, the type of crying during which nobody is beautiful. She hugged herself and curled up.
“Aba sang that to me to put me to sleep when I was a child,” she whispered into her silk wrap, which was now slimy with tears and saliva.
“May his memory be blessed,” said Rivka very quietly.
“I still can’t believe it, even though I’m queen and there’s a shrine and it’s been months. It doesn’t feel real. He was supposed to get old. His old nursemaid -- she was the one who told me he’d fallen off the elephant. I went to him, and he barely woke; they had him under such strong elixirs to ease his pain. But I knew he could sense me, and when I sang that song back to him, I could see tears in his eyes.”
Rivka took Shulamit into her arms and folded the little queen’s tear-sodden face against the muscled curve of her shoulder.
Shulamit continued. “The sun was so bright that last day -- just completely pouring into the room. The servants tried putting up curtains because he was too hot, but they wouldn’t stay up. It just glowed whiter and whiter until we had to squint to see, even though we were inside. The light got stronger, and he got weaker -- almost like he was becoming part of the sun.”
The queen was silent, reliving the moment after the incredible glaring whiteness relaxed its grip on the room, and everyone could see distinct shapes again. Curled up in a tight knot on the floor beside her father’s bed, her arms clasped firmly around her knees, she felt someone put a crown on her head. She tipped her head forward and let it slide down into her lap, where she hugged it while sobbing.
Rivka’s voice brought her back to the present. “You’re a smart young woman. He would be proud of you. I’m sure he was proud of you in life too.”
The corners of Shulamit’s mouth turned up in a heartbroken little smile. “Yeah, he was... he used to tease me about all the books I was reading and facts I’d rattle off from my lessons, but he meant it in a good way. He’d call me his little Princess Brainy.”
“That’s cute!” said Rivka. “What was he like? I never met him in person, only saw him from a distance.”
“He was so full of energy,” said Shulamit, pepping up a little as she went back to a happier past. “So many interests. Did you know he knew how to climb up the side of a sheer rock face?”
“No, I didn’t,” said Rivka, wide-eyed. “I’m impressed.”
“And he could speak four languages, and he’d been everywhere,” Shulamit continued. “He didn’t sleep as much as the rest of us. Sometimes he’d be busy late at night working on laws or listening to arguments in court cases, and have an entire meal in the middle of the night. If I was still up, I’d keep him company.”
“It’s good that you could spend so much time together.”
Shulamit nodded, shifting positions within Rivka’s embrace so she could wipe her face clean. “Everyone around me, when they were mourning him, it was so wonderful to be surrounded by people who were sad about the same thing I was because I wasn’t alone, but it was also jarring because they were all talking about him as king, not as a father. When we put his kippah into the museum, everyone was talking about how much money it was worth and the embroidery by some famous artist and how it was a national relic, and all this -- but I was just thinking of Shabbat, and seders, and -- and it didn’t mean any of those things to me. It meant lighting candles. It meant he’d hid the afikomen in the palace for me and joking with his advisors as he waited around for me to find it so he could give me a new book. National treasure? I--” She blinked away new tears, but this time the look on her face was one of indignation.
“Do you have anything of his that you carry around as a memento?” Rivka’s hand fidgeted with something beneath her helmet.
Shulamit grinned, that bizarre grin of hers that looked more like a grimace than a real smile. “Well, myself! I look like him. Everybody says so. Especially my eyebrows.”
“That’s perfect. I know you’ll carry on his legacy.”
Shulamit leaned her head back down against Rivka’s chest. “It hurts so much. When does this get better?”
“I wish it did,” said Rivka. “Instead, we get used to it. We live around it.” She paused. “The olive song’s special to me too. The man I loved is with me again when I sing it. Thoughts of him still bring me joy, even though they hurt too. I know that if I’m to live my life with a man at my side, it won’t be him. I’ve met many men as I fought in battles and guarded the rich -- valiant men, smart men, good, kind men. But I just never looked on them as a woman looks at a man -- I mean, as an ordinary woman who likes men -- even though I could see their good qualities. I don’t think I’m the type who falls in love very often. A man can be a good match, but that’s not enough to make him special to me that way...”
“I know the feeling you’re talking about,” said Shulamit, her face crinkling as she thought about the way Aviva had filled her with exhilaration just by being in the room. “He must have been wonderful, for a woman as amazing as you to have cared for him so deeply.” She pulled away from their hug and stretched her arms.
Rivka nestled against the dragon’s thick hide and closed her eyes. “We have a long way to go tomorrow. Maybe I’ll tell you all about him.”
&nbs
p; Nearby, Shulamit pulled her lilac wrap more tightly around herself, sliding a small patch of the slippery fabric back and forth between her thumb and fingers. The repetitive motion comforted her, and she forced herself to concentrate on something other than the people she missed. The first thing that came to mind was Dragon, so she pretended that she was an artist and quantified each interesting feature, from her clawed and grasping hands to the horns on top of her head. Once distracted from her grief, she fell asleep quickly, for she was genuinely very tired.
***
The next morning, after eating breakfast and bidding Sister Tamar goodbye, the two women set out for the sorcerer’s hold. Dragon, who had been waiting outside the temple gates still in her reptile form, soared into a brilliant blue sky that promised better weather than their last day of travels. They sailed over the tropical landscape, banana thickets and palm trees clustered together, bathed in early sunlight.
“Want to try something fun?” Rivka asked.
“Okay,” said Shulamit, a little hesitantly.
“Trust me.” Rivka, confident in her strength and years of practice, tightened her thighs around the dragon’s torso and let go of her with her hands. She grabbed Shulamit’s hips, holding her firmly down to the animal’s backbone. “Hold your hands out into the air while we fly.”
Shulamit let out a raucous peal of pure joy. “It feels like it’s me who’s flying -- my arms are wings!” They passed by a noisy white waterfall, and its mist lightly kissed their cheeks in greeting. “Woooooo!”
Eventually, Shulamit put her arms down, and they relaxed into a more conventional riding posture. “Thank you so much. I don’t think I’ve ever been this awake.” She craned her head around slightly to look at Rivka, and her grin was broad and sparkling under the bright sun.
“Would you like to hear about the man I loved?” Rivka’s voice was gentle and intimate. She was pleased with herself for having made Shulamit so happy after last night’s tears. Empathy for their shared affliction had opened up her heart, and she had realized just before going to sleep that Shulamit was the first person in three years with whom she felt the impulse to share her story.
“Yes, I would.”
And as they sailed over the rocks and the trees, Rivka unfolded her life before her friend.
Chapter 7: The Brat from the Beet-garden
In a valley of the northern lands, there lived a baron who spent half his time wishing he wasn’t at war with the family who ruled over Apple Valley, to their immediate west, and the other half of his time cooking up new ways to start trouble with them. He never noticed the hypocrisy of this because he was the least self-aware person in the valley over which he held title. Or they held title -- depending on whose side you were on.
Rivka was on his side, although she had little choice in the matter because she had been born there. She wouldn’t have been his first choice either -- her very existence was an embarrassment and a burden. Even had she been conventionally beautiful, delicate and demure, and talented in all the noblewomanly tasks of listening and textile art, she still would remain a living, breathing reminder that his foolish younger sister had allowed herself to be, well, harvested by one of the workers who grew the castle’s beets and potatoes.
Of course, once the pregnancy was discovered, the worker was quickly dismissed from his position and sent away. The other choice was almost certainly death, for the baron valued nothing so much as his reputation, and if he couldn’t keep the women in his own family safe, well, then the Apple Valley folks would attack at once, thinking him weak!
He wanted the people in his valley to respect him too, so having the daughter of a nobody running around the castle was already embarrassing enough. On top of that, though, she was also nothing like his own sweet daughters. She was a large and ungraceful thing, rough in her manners, too obviously the child of a field hand, but, unfortunately, also too obviously the child of his sister. She was an inconvenience and a source of aggravation. Her childhood efforts to mimic the soldiers, whose presence was a constant at the castle, filled him with dread of what she would be like as an adult.
Marrying her off became his private obsession, with what little brain he had left over after plotting the demise of the Apple Valley ruling house once and for all. Then she would be gone, and perhaps her shallow, uninteresting mother with her, if he could deftly manage it.
But none of the men who would have been appropriate for a relation of his house ever showed interest in his tall, outspoken, physical niece. And certainly he would have rather hidden her away in a tower forever than let her run off with somebody else. Too much damage had been done already by his dolt of a sister, Miriam -- known by her intimate family as Mitzi.
Not to mention the Apple Valley ruling house and their persistent raids! True, he sent his own men into their valley on occasion, to show them he still had the might to defend his keep. And yet, they sent wave after wave of troublemakers, determined to ruin the peace.
It was so difficult to be the baron of the valley.
One year, after a particularly bloody set of squabbles between the two valleys, a group of wizards who lived in the surrounding mountains decided to take matters into their own hands. Between their magic and the level of respect their Order commanded with everyone in the nation, they were much more powerful than either the baron or the heads of the other family. They were able to use that power to place one of their own in the court of each valley, to oversee matters there and attempt to subdue the feud at its source. They were not an unwarlike brotherhood, but it insulted their very dignity to see wars being fought over a dispute as old and petty as this one. Let each valley to itself in peace, they thought, and if there were wars to be fought, let them be heroic ones.
Rivka, at this point alarmingly too old to have no marriage prospects, was sitting with her mother in the Great Hall watching the newly arrived wizard verbally spar with her uncle. It was rare for anyone else in the castle to contradict the baron, but even without him opening his mouth, his appearance set him apart and marked him a definite outsider. In a household where the men’s hair was grown long and usually tied back, his was cropped short. Their beards were full; his beard and mustache were trimmed down nearly to the point where they looked as if they’d been inked with a brush onto his unusually round face. And, most outlandish of all, he wore a black cassock embroidered with strange dark-green-and-purple designs. The wizard was in his late thirties, close to Rivka’s mother’s age but certainly younger than her uncle -- which did him no favors earning the baron’s respect.
“This is never going to work,” Mitzi observed under her breath. She was knitting on a piece of fancywork, but her eyes never left the two men arguing in the center of the room. “He already hates being told what to do.”
“No man could ever win a battle that way!” the baron exclaimed, slamming his fist upon a nearby table.
“Clearly you don’t read,” said the wizard, sounding more irritated and insulted than angry. “Some already have, in this century and the last.”
The calmer the wizard’s tone, the more the baron turned red. “I have no use for your folktales. Why should I believe something just because it’s been inked onto a parchment by some fool in a cassock? Over what my vast experience can tell me? I’ve been fighting these wars since I was ten years old. You were drinking your mother’s milk when I first held a sword!”
“I’ve held a sword as well, in case nobody told you,” said the wizard in a quiet, steely tone. He pushed back the right sleeve of his cassock to show the grisly, twisted snake of a scar that slashed across his palm and curled up the length of his forearm. “When the Marantz blade fell, I didn’t stop fighting -- I learned to brandish my sword in my left hand. So don’t assume wizards know nothing of fighting -- or of bravery.”
“He also hates wizards,” Rivka murmured to her mother. “A wizard telling him what to do--”
“Well, it’s just that he disagrees with so many things about them,” Mitzi expl
ained indulgently, her tone making it clear that she sympathized with her older brother. “He thinks their devotion to histories and parchments, and their vows of celibacy and service, are all unnatural and self-important. He always says the service makes them look weak, and I agree with him that the celibacy’s a bit self-centered -- like he says, any woman wooed by a wizard would fall asleep of sheer boredom or die of exasperation.”
Rivka had heard these words come out of her uncle’s mouth before and indeed was mimicking them along as her mother spoke. “He just doesn’t like the fact that their power is so much greater than his,” she pointed out.
“Can you blame him?” Her mother was not a complicated creature; she liked living in a castle and having someone else clean her room and feed her, and since it was her brother’s power that kept her there, she didn’t mind his power-hungry stance at all.
Rivka sighed. “He’s going to be exceptionally hard on me while he gets used to this, isn’t he?”
“Oh, Rivkeleh! He just wants what’s going to make you a happy woman someday. He doesn’t want you to end up like your old mammeh, hanging around being useless and having even the lowest scullery maid in the castle know her most intimate business.” Mitzi smiled sadly.
“Don’t worry, Mammeh, I won’t embarrass you that way.” Rivka smiled. “If I must marry, I’ll marry a warrior, so I can go off and fight at his side.”
“Rivka, you can’t run around holding sticks as swords anymore. You’re a grown woman, and it’s going to scare away husbands, not attract them.”
“We’re at war. We’re always at war. Why can’t I help fight it?”
“Because it’s unwomanly, and you wouldn’t be any good at it. Here. Work on this.” Her mother stood up and placed the unfinished piece of lace in her daughter’s lap. “It’ll help calm your mind and drive away those unsettling thoughts. Don’t worry about defending the hold. The men have it under control.”
The Second Mango (The Mangoverse Book 1) Page 5
