by Marc Graham
My heart felt a whisper, a soft voice that was now becoming familiar. The voice that had led me to defy Dhamar, the voice that had led me into the trackless desert. The same voice that had reminded me how to make pure water, had urged me onward until I reached Eram’s shelter.
I rose and followed the herd.
The camels made a circuit around the edge of the oasis before they led me to a broad clearing among the trees. Nestled within the grove lay a low stone enclosure, the interior flat and closely grazed. I was drawn toward one end of the corral, where one wall stood slightly higher than the rest.
The stones of the little stable failed to impress with their size, each a mere pebble beside the mighty works scattered around the oasis. The carvings that decorated the faces of the stones, however, stopped my breath.
Carved images showed human and camel figures in various poses. Camels being fed. Camels being made to kneel. Camels bearing packs and riders. Strange groupings of shapes accompanied each figure. I could make no sense of these, but the carvings and their meanings stood clearly enough.
The whisper spoke again, and the revelation of yet another mad scheme burst fully formed from my heart. I smiled despite the gravity of the choice before me. The gods had blessed my journey with success thus far. How could I do other than entrust them once more with my fate, and with that of my people?
Following the example of the images on the wall, I cut and stripped a palm frond, and gathered a handful of dates. Goad and reward in hand, I stepped into the camels’ enclosure.
The large cow was the first to notice me. While the others huddled along a far wall, the herd’s leader flattened her ears and raced toward me. My heart pounded, but I stood my ground. The beast thundered by, the breeze of her passing almost blowing me off my feet. Twice more the camel charged, but I remained still. Curiosity replaced alarm as the cow approached the fourth time, slowly now. I held out the dates, and the camel tentatively nibbled at the sweet fruit.
“Very good, Dhahbas,” I said softly.
Dhahbas—Honey—was the pet name my father had used for my half-sister Bilkis. The name suited the shade of the animal’s coat and, from what I remembered, sister and camel had similar personalities. Bitterness, spite, stubbornness, tempered by a protective nature.
“Now, let us begin.”
31
Makeda
The walls of Maryaba glowed red above the fields. My heart quickened, and I squeezed the camel’s neck with my knees. “Hurry, Dhahbas,” I squealed, and tapped the cow’s flank with the palm frond.
The camel brayed and shook her head in protest, but hurried her pace nonetheless.
It had taken days for me to win the animal’s trust, days of wandering among the herd to show them I meant no harm. Whether from instinct or bribes of dates, finally the herd accepted my presence.
Armed with the palm frond, I’d mimicked the poses of the drover from the rock carvings. After much frustration and several douses of camel spit, I at last succeeded. I had Dhahbas kneel, allow me upon her shoulders, and move under my command.
The thrill of that first ride dwindled to naught, replaced by the exhilaration of returning to Maryaba, to my home. I had tested the gods, had been tested by them, and now returned from my pilgrimage.
My caravan hadn’t reached the outermost fields when I heard the echo of drums from the city. Dhahbas checked her stride and flattened her ears, but I urged her on. As we followed the path through the fields and toward Maryaba, farmers peered out from the crops. Shouts of surprise and prayers of thanksgiving flew from their lips when they recognized me.
Brays of protest rose from the cows and bull that had followed Dhahbas from Eram’s oasis. The calves tucked in close to their mothers as the crowd grew thick on the narrow trail to the city. I patted Dhahbas’s neck and drove her onward, the camel’s gait made awkward as she stepped over the offerings of leaves and flowers strewn across the way.
The drums grew louder as we neared the walls, but they were drowned out by the songs of the people.
Honored is she who comes in the glory of the gods.
The harmony rose from a thousand voices, loud enough to reach the very dwelling place of Athtar. The sound thrummed against my chest, but my heart beat with even greater vigor when I saw the line of elders outside the gate.
“Atsar, Dhahbas,” I said. “Karah.”
The camel stopped and knelt at my commands. I swung down from the beast’s neck and gestured toward a drover who tended the donkeys and horses of visiting nobles.
“See to these animals,” I said to him.
“Yes, Shara,” he replied, his eyes cast upon his toes. “For slaughter?”
My throat tightened at the thought of Dhahbas and her calf turning on spits, but I kept my voice even. “For safekeeping. Feed them. Water them.”
“Yes, Shara,” the man replied, then signaled a pair of boys to help him.
“They like dates,” I whispered when the trio of drovers seemed at a loss for getting the beasts to move.
“Thank you, Shara.” The man sent one of the boys to fetch some fruit, while he and the other used water skins to coax the herd to follow them.
A shrill cry rose from the direction of the gates. A black-robed wraith flew from the city and charged toward me. The creature was nearly upon me before I recognized Shayma.
The old woman’s face was gaunt and deeply scratched. Her hair—where it wasn’t torn out—hung in matted, grey tangles. Shayma fell to the ground and clutched my ankles.
“My child, my child,” she cried, “returned from the Pit.”
My heart twisted at the woman’s torment, though her love and devotion brought a smile. I knelt and took her hands in mine.
“Rise,” I said. Her sobs continued, so in a softer voice I added, “Stand, old mother.”
Shayma looked up through sunken, tear-filled eyes.
“I am well,” I assured her. “Your prayers and the gods’ blessings have sustained me through my ordeal. Now rise, bathe, eat. Mourn no more.”
Shayma nodded, and I helped her stand. She wrapped me in a frail embrace before turning back toward the gates and shouting at the other servants who waited behind the walls.
“Sammara, Fazia, bring water. Latif, a fire. We’ve a feast to prepare.”
My eyes followed the old woman then drifted upward to the gate tower. There at his post, spear in hand, Yanuf stood tall and stoic. I flashed him a smile, and the slightest hint of a grin creased his lips.
“Hail the shara,” one of the elders exclaimed. “Hail the gods who have returned her to her people.”
“And hail the Bedou swine who aided her.” Dhamar staggered out from the crowd. He looked as disheveled as Shayma, his robes in disarray, his hair tangled, though I doubted these were from mourning.
I ignored him and stepped forward. He circled and sniffed at me as a dog around a dining table. “Revered elders,” I said. “In keeping with tradition, I have completed the Trial of the Wilderness. Athtar’s will has been tested and confirmed. The god has chosen me for his bride.”
“What did you trade the Bedou dogs for their camels?” Dhamar stopped in front of me, stooped until our noses were a mere finger’s breadth apart, and fixed his red-rimmed eyes on mine. His breath stank of stale beer and vomit. “I hope the god hasn’t lost the bounty of your maidenhead.”
My hand curled into a fist and struck out. Pain flowed up my arm as my knuckles connected with Dhamar’s throat.
His eyes went wide. He wheezed and clutched at his throat. With my other hand, I grasped him by the hair then swung my knee into his belly. Wheezes turned to heaves, and the contents of Dhamar’s stomach spilled onto the dirt. I swept my leg across his shins, and he collapsed facedown in his vomit.
Gasps issued from the crowd, and no little laughter. I shook out my throbbing fingers, then turned back to the slack-jawed elders.
“Athtar provided these camels from the oasis of Eram, as my dowry. I also offer this token as w
itness of my sojourn to the City of the Pillars.” I snapped the braided palm fronds that held the shell around my neck and offered the delicate trinket to Yatha, priest of Athtar, who stared dumbly at it.
“It is the token of Eram,” declared Walid the merchant. “She has fulfilled the challenge.”
“Athtar has fulfilled the challenge,” I corrected him. “It was his word that was disputed. It is his word that is confirmed. Does any yet deny it?”
The elders remained silent, though those closest to Watar sidled away from him. The Lord of Timnah looked sullenly from his son—still wallowing in his own filth and struggling to breathe—to me. Slowly, he stepped forward.
“I am sorry, Shara.” His voice thrummed with emotion. “I am sorry I did not make a better son for your husband. I am sorry I will not have the privilege to call you my daughter.”
My breath stuttered as Watar came forward, prostrated himself before me, then rose to his knees.
“But I have the joy to call you the wife of my god.” Watar’s proclamation was greeted with cheers from the elders and the people. “And I have the honor to kneel before you, Mukarrib of all Saba.”
32
Yetzer
They came for him in the night. Unseen hands bagged Yetzer’s head, chained his manacles, and carried him from the slaves’ pen. Heavy feet trod the slope from the quarry down to the bank of the Iteru, Yetzer dangling from the chains at ankle and wrist. His captors paused, swung him from his chains and sent him soaring through the air.
Yetzer sucked in a breath, for all the good it would do. If he landed in the Iteru, his bonds would carry him to the silty riverbed, fertilizer for next season’s crops. If a crocodile awaited him, his passage to Duat would be much swifter, and he would become much more refined fertilizer for next season’s crops.
The air fled his lungs as he landed on a pile of coarse sacks. The grain-stuffed bags were more welcome than river water or crocodile teeth, but still, it took several moments for his body to respond to his command to breathe.
“What is this? Where are you taking me?” His words came out in gasps, his breath ragged.
The only answer was a rocking of the sacks beneath him as they shifted to one side. A series of slaps sounded on the water, and the world lurched into motion. Yetzer tried to sit up, but a sharp jab to his ribs stopped him. Blinded and bound, there was nothing to do but lie back and settle in for the journey.
Days passed as the ship, under the power of sail and oar, made its way along the river. After Yetzer’s first taste of fish in more than a year, his captors left his hood off. The muddy shores drifted by them, a nearly endless ribbon of black silt and green wheat.
When at last the helmsman angled his steering oar toward shore, the guards again hooded Yetzer. The ship jolted to a stop with the muted thud of hull against pier and the groan of timbers. Strong hands grasped him under each arm and hefted him to his feet. Left to move under his own power, Yetzer took a step.
The chain at his ankles checked his stride, and Yetzer pitched forward. The thick fingers loosened their grips, freeing him to crash to the planks. Amid a string of curses—Yetzer’s—and laughter—theirs—the guards yanked him to his feet again and half-carried him across the deck. They lifted him over the rail and onto a walkway, then supported him as he learned to walk within the bounds of the chain’s reach.
Yetzer shuffled under the guards’ direction up a long slope then through a series of turns. The sounds of splashing water and clanging tools filled his ears, accompanied by grunts and curses and laughter. Yetzer’s nostrils twitched under the assault of lye baths, charcoal smoke, cesspits and other stenches of civilization.
From the clang of metal and the wheeze of a bellows, Yetzer knew he passed a forge. His escorts steered him around a corner, then another, and finally jerked him to a halt. They unchained his wrists and pulled the hood from his head. Yetzer blinked against daylight’s attack as the guards turned and walked silently away.
He thought to call after them, but knew he would get no answers. As the world came into focus, he found himself in a shaded courtyard. A single, narrow alley stretched back the way the guards had left, while bare walls faced him on four sides. The mudbrick beneath high, curtained windows was stained with night soil. Puddles of filth surrounded the courtyard and filled the air with a thick stench and the noise of flies.
Blocks of stone lay scattered amid the puddles, all roughly the same size. To one side lay a perfect ashlar, its faces smooth and square. The tools to turn the rough ashlars into copies of the finished one lay upon a reed mat beneath a tattered linen canopy.
Yetzer wandered about the yard as he considered his situation. Work the stones and fail, and he’d likely be sent back to the quarry. Work them and succeed? At the very least, he would have staved off boredom and learned a new skill. Might he even win his freedom?
Careful to avoid the fetid puddles, he shuffled to the canopy and examined the tools. Maul and chisel, to smooth the stones’ faces. Mason’s square to true the corners. Ruled staff to ensure uniformity. With no other option before him, he picked up chisel and maul and set to work.
The Iteru swelled and receded while Yetzer worked his stones. Once each week, a priest wearing the leather apron of a master mason came to inspect Yetzer’s work. A gang of slaves carried away baskets of rubble and the accepted stones, and delivered rough ashlars in their place.
It took time, but Yetzer learned the best angle of the chisel and force behind the maul. He learned to read the stones, which could be shaped and which would fracture under the slightest stress. By closing his eye and opening his inner sight to the cloudy images behind his empty left socket, he learned to see with his fingers. Over time, he could discern by touch the shape and irregularities of the stone in far greater detail than he could with his natural vision.
For each ashlar perfected, Yetzer received a day’s supply of beer, bread, and olive oil. For each flawed stone, a day’s allowance was taken away. He might have starved in his first month if not for the metalworker at the head of the alley.
The gruff old man had brought a basket of bread and roasted pork at sunset on the day of Yetzer’s arrival. It was the first meat Yetzer had tasted in two years.
He’d eaten greedily as the smith talked of bronze and gold and silver, as other men might speak of their families.
Each evening, the two shared bread and oil and beer. At the end of the week, if Yetzer had completed his stonework, he shuffled in his chains to the forge, where he learned the smith’s art. How much heat to work each type of metal. The proper mix of tin to make the best bronze. Even how to shape and cast a mold. Yetzer’s first execution—a bronze bull to honor Hapi-Ankh—had been a poor, misshapen thing, but his skill steadily grew.
“Have to talk to the priests about buying you,” the smith told Yetzer. “Make the price back in a month, I would. Free you after that, of course. Of course I would.”
Yetzer lay on his mat that night, musing on life as a freeman, an artisan no less. He might take a wife, have children. His dreams of Ameniye had been buried among the stones in the quarry. Here he might build a life from the rubble of his youthful hubris, and die young and unknown, common and complete.
And then they came again.
Black hood, strong hands, lumpy grain sacks, and a trip to another port. Each year they came to take Yetzer from his work just as he mastered it, just as he stood to make a place for himself. Just as he began to hope.
At Iunu he learned to shape round column stones and devised a means to raise them into place with half the effort and time as before. At Hut-Uaret he scraped the earth to lay the foundation for a temple to Sutah. At Sena, where the Iteru’s lowlands met the Great Green Sea, he worked the rough cedar timbers from his homeland of Kenahn, floated by sea to Kemet’s shores.
They came the last time early in Yetzer’s twenty-first year, five years into his enslavement. His captors spared him the hood, as the river journey took several days. They rowe
d past Iunu with its soaring columns, past Men-Nefer with its majestic pyramids, past the quarry at Zauty and the work-town of Iunet.
Upon reaching the southern capital of Uaset, the helmsman deftly brought the ship to rest at the pier belonging to the Temple of Amun. Yetzer’s heart raced, his breath came shallow as the guards led him through the bronze gates, past the Hall of the Postulants, and into the hierophant’s audience room.
Yetzer’s wait was short, as a jangle of bells announced the high priest’s approach. The cedar doors of the inner chamber swung open. The guards knelt, gesturing for Yetzer to do the same. His ankle chain made the motion difficult. Yetzer fell the last half-cubit onto his knees and bowed his head.
Incense cushioned under Yetzer’s nose, and the sound of shuffling sandals swept across the limestone floor. The sandals stopped directly in front of Yetzer.
“Rise, slave.”
The voice was harsh, cold, commanding. Yetzer stood and looked into the flat, grey eyes of Merisutah. Yetzer’s blood turned cold as the priest’s thin lips stretched into a hideous grin.
“Welcome back.”
33
Bilkis
Seven winters came and went, and Bilkis waited. Twice more, Keren delivered the queen’s sons, but neither survived to leave the birthing chamber. Twice more, Tadua mourned his children before the altar and tent of the gods upon the high place. Twice more, Bilkis bade the king to take comfort in his living son who had grown into a hale, round little prince, affectionate to his mother, obedient to the king.
In that same year, when the sun rose high enough to thaw the frozen waters of the northern countries, Eliam and Abram led a donkey train from the far-distant east. Rahab clung to her father and brother. She wept over them as they spread their finest merchandise before the king, who lay on a cot in the throne room. Bolts of silk in yellow and red and green. Baskets of spices, the scent of which made Bilkis’s eyes water. Bags of jewels and uncut gemstones.
