Hadassah Covenant, The (33 page)

The ovation this time was even more powerful than the first. It seemed that a god had stepped down to embody the essence of the ceremony rather than a sixteen-year-old palace lad caught up in the gravity of the moment.

And then, just as suddenly, the vast crowd stopped cheering and a strange disturbance, like a rustling of ghostly wind, swept through the midst.

Leah, I wish you could have seen the full effect of this moment for yourself.

It started, of course, with the Immortals, as everyone now knows. These royal palace guards should have been in place along the ceremony’s perimeter, but they suddenly appeared, carving a swath through the crowd. The warriors’ procession was such an ominous and awesome sight, blazing their dense path through the crush of bodies, perhaps a dozen men on each side forcing the adoring mob to step aside through the mere weight of their presence. I remember that one or two people, unsure what the sight meant, began to clap senselessly.

But the overwhelming majority of the crowd remained silent, reserving judgment. Clearly this was not part of the ritual. Coronations were notoriously fraught with danger and consequence, so no one knew quite what would come next.

The columns lined up ramrod straight before the new King. The crowd itself moved ever so slightly behind it.

Then they seemed to open a bit, to widen the path their bodies had created.

And I saw someone walking through the ranks. I saw the bottom of a robe and realized it was a woman. One dressed as beautifully as any Queen in the history of the palace, I must say.

She stepped away from the columns’ protection, and in the moment she did, each Immortal drew his sword and held it flat side upward in a gesture of supreme allegiance and warning.
Do not harm this woman. We will trade our lives for hers
. I focused on the lead Immortal and recognized their commander, Otanes. I noticed that his lip was quivering, that tears were flowing freely down his tanned and
timeworn face. Now he alone had left the ranks and was closely following the woman up the steps, ready to catch her at any awkward moment.

And then I saw her clearly. The truth struck me, and I almost fell down at the mere realization.

But it couldn’t be. It was impossible
.

I stepped out, not caring now who saw my advance toward the inner circle of ceremony leaders, and steadied myself against Mordecai’s arm. For his part, he was watching with a deep frown upon his face, still having not realized the answer to the great mystery approaching us all.

She reached the top dais, and I saw again that she still had her beauty, although with age it had definitely acquired a most ferocious gleam. Immediately upon her arrival she knelt with an exaggerated flourish, and behind her Otanes did the same.

Artaxerxes stood there, staring, narrowing his eyelids, his fingers reflexively grasping and releasing his sword handle.

Otanes spoke first, his deep, usually authoritative voice now filled with fear.

“Your Majesty, may I introduce one who has waited long for this day, to proclaim her adoration and gratitude for your royal grace.”

The next voice I heard made me nearly jump with surprise, for it was Mordecai’s.

“Commander,” he said in a tone of both shock and anger. “This is a coronation. It is no time for introductions, no matter how . . .”

Whether foolishly or not, I became overwhelmed with a belief that while he was ceremonially correct, Mordecai was committing a grave, strategic misstep. I gripped his forearm and whispered into his ear, “Please, Poppa. You are making a mistake.”

Without turning to face me, Mordecai relented; he took a deep breath and stepped backward.

A long pause followed. The next move was up to the King.

“Who is this?” Artaxerxes finally asked in an impatient voice that betrayed his first attempt at royal imperiousness.

She answered for herself. “I am Amestris, O great King. The widow of your father, the dearly beloved Xerxes, and Queen Mother of the Empire of Persia. I am your mother!”

Artaxerxes sank onto a seat. Not abjectly, out of some sort of surrender or subservience, but so abruptly and swiftly that it seemed his lower limbs had simply lost their ability to bear him up. Like a puppet whose string is snipped without warning.

Coming near to him in his role as Prime Minister, Mordecai struggled to help the young king to his feet—yet he himself seemed to sway in utter shock.

It was a surprise worthy of true astonishment. The woman who had done this, climbed the stairs toward Artaxerxes and shown the audacity to interrupt his coronation for this display of revelation and allegiance, was his long-grieved, supposedly murdered mother, Vashti.

Chapter Thirty-seven

I could not catch my breath—Mordecai, beside me, was in even worse condition; his cheeks went ashen, he stumbled backward as though struck in the face, and I seriously believed he was about to suffer some kind of fatal spell. Whereas he had been holding my hand and giving me support throughout the day, now I, despite my own severe shock, was compelled to seek a small stool and help him sit.

Vashti’s coronation appearance was remarkable. As I now approach my fourth decade, having availed myself of all the beauty secrets taught me by Hegai over the years, I have few complaints about the harshness of age upon my countenance. But time had been far kinder to Vashti—she would have been at least a decade older than I but looked a decade younger. Her only concession to time was a distant hardness in her eyes, which it seemed she could soften at will with a faint smile.

As you might imagine, I went all at once from feeling like the forgotten stepparent to someone with a very keen stake in what was taking place. It had been almost sixteen years since Vashti had been Queen of Persia, lauded the greatest beauty in all womanhood, and had boldly refused Xerxes’ order to parade that beauty before his war
banquet. Drunk and provoked, Xerxes had promptly banished her as Queen and exiled her from the palace. Mordecai and I had stood in the audience as those events took place; it was actually my very first official trip outside of the house, which had sequestered me every day of my youth.

That event was the reason why Xerxes first sought a new Queen and ordered young virgins from throughout the empire brought to the palace. A group which would come to include a frightened young Jewish girl from Susa named Hadassah.

My point? Not to recount well-known history. But to say that all of a sudden I realized how my own place in the world had begun with this woman’s demise. I had never given it much thought, for reliable rumor had it that Vashti had been murdered by a squad of assassins shortly after leaving the palace.

I had reason to believe the rumor was true, for shortly after that time a new addition had been quietly carried by the great general Otanes into the royal nursery—a newborn baby prince, presumably orphaned like myself, who would turn out to be Otanes’ grandson. An infant we would call Artaxerxes. Surely no living mother, I reasoned, would simply give up her son like that, especially to the custody of the same ruler who had ordered her banished.

So was I unreasonable to fear that a former queen who had sat in some sort of hiding place all these years, watching me assume her place at the palace and raising her son nearly as my own, would harbor ill feelings toward me?

As I pondered these things, I felt a pair of eyes upon me and looked back toward the center of the terrace.

And as I feared, the eyes in question belonged to Vashti. Her hand on her son’s shoulder, she glanced at me with a dark, piercing stare.

My mind thrashed under a storm of realizations and calculations. As much as my status had changed in the days leading up to this moment, now I knew it had been turned on its head. In fact, it struck me that my very survival could depend upon what I did in the next few seconds. No matter how beloved I might have once been to him, this woman was the mother of the King and would naturally assume the title of Queen Mother—a role I had been gradually acquiring by
default. Furthermore, she was likely to be quite angry after all these years of exile. I might well prove the very first political purge of such a woman, if I gave her the provocation.

“O YHWH,” I whispered. “Give me wisdom. Guide my steps. . . . ”

And as soon as I said those words, they became my solution.
Steps
.

I stepped forward, toward her. Again, then again.

Mordecai breathed inward with a sound of shock. Courtiers on every side of me gasped. The sound emboldened me and I continued walking, concentrating on breathing, on not fainting, and on maintaining the warm smile upon my face—the countenance of one who was encountering an old friend for the first time after a long absence.

Finally, I reached her. Out of the side of my vision I could see Artaxerxes standing beside her with an expression of shock and wary anticipation.

I stood before her, straight and silent and matching her gaze for gaze for the briefest of moments, to show that I was not coming to her in a state of weakness.

Then I sank to my knees, just as Artaxerxes had, and held out my hand to hers.

“My Queen,” I said in my most reverential tone.

I had no idea what would happen next, but even my wildest imagining would not have shown me what actually took place.

First, a sound that was actually a strangled sob tore from Vashti’s throat, and she stumbled forward. Any distant spectator might have been forgiven for assuming that she had thought I was falling and had reached out to break my fall. But the truth was, my downward motion had caught her totally by surprise. She was expecting nothing less than a confrontation and was steeling herself for some sort of insult when I had knelt.

Vashti’s startled motion actually provoked Artaxerxes to reach out and keep her from toppling into me. Others in attendance would later tell me that the new King had reacted even more emotionally than his mother, that his eyes had filled with tears at the unexpected conciliation of the moment.

But at the same instant the entire terrace, and even the foremost
rows of spectators outside, murmured their own surprised responses. It seemed my impulsive gesture had defied the expectations of even the most jaded and self-important courtiers.

Vashti then did something almost as shocking.

She gave me her hand and suffered me to bring it against my lips. I looked up, and despite my calculated role in what was happening, I felt a surge of sincere emotion flood through me.

“My Queen Mother, let me add my welcome to your return. And please call me Hadassah, for upon the passing of our beloved sovereign, I am Queen Esther no more.”

I will never forget Vashti’s gaze down toward me in that moment. For one thing, she was incapable of speech. Her eyes were moistened to the point that her elaborate face-paint seemed in peril of melting away. Her thin, almost bony hands jerked in mine with some involuntary contraction, as though she was having trouble maintaining control over her muscles. But it was her eyes that seared an image into my memory forever. They were brimming with a shocked sort of gratitude and even love—but also tinged with an edge of surprise that told me she was hardly acquainted with these emotions, nor knew how to manage them. It was as though she was experiencing unreserved goodwill for the first time in her life. The awareness pierced me with a sense of how impoverished the woman’s inner world must be.