Hadassah Covenant, The (51 page)

Strangely, the news did not reach the deepest core of my being. My body recoiled, as though I had been struck across the back. But my emotions remained untouched. And even more oddly, it was at that moment that I realized something was profoundly different in the innermost parts of my body.

“Would Your Majesty be willing to grant me pardon?” I was surprised at the absence of fear in my tone.

“Yes, I would. For I have never stopped caring about you, since the night we spent together. The greatest night of my life. However, I cannot. There are laws even the King himself cannot alter.”

“Would you, then, grant me one other request?”

“Anything.”

“I am with child.”

I allowed the words to simply hang in the air between us. My head felt dizzy from just hearing them spoken. I remained otherwise silent, for their implication was too clear to require explanation.

He nodded sadly.

“I will postpone your execution until ten months from today.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty. You grant me a great gift.”

“It seems a bitter one to me, yet I am glad to give it.”

“What about Hadassah and Jesse?”

“I have great compassion for them, you know. For all of you. Despite all the rumors, you have remained faithful to the throne, and loyal subjects of Persia.”

“That is true, Your Majesty.”

“That is why I have shown all the mercy my discretion affords me. Hadassah, the once-queen and the eunuch Jesse, my chamberlain, will be exiled from the palace forever. They will be banished with nothing but a royal grant of monies with which to provide for themselves.”

“Thank you, Artaxerxes,” I said, in the intimate tone we had both adopted during the early-morning hours of our last time together.

“It is all I can do. Farewell, my dear Leah.”

He stepped forward, kissed me gently on the forehead, then turned and left the cell abruptly.

A numbness gripped me, as though the world had fallen behind a thick veil. And yet I also smiled with the strange happiness of a mother who knows she has saved her child’s life, even at the expense of her own.

And so, my dear Ben, this ends—or perhaps begins—the solemn tale that preceded your coming into my life. Which you did precisely seven months later, in a back room of the royal palace, attended by the King’s own physician and under armed guard.

Even as I write these words with one hand, I hold you in the other. You are the most beautiful and lovely baby boy I am sure I have ever seen. You are asleep at this moment, yet your tiny eyelids flutter ever so often as though animated by some strange, fitful awareness of what is about to take place.

I have no regrets, my dear Benjamin bar Mordecai, great-great-grandson of Jeconiah, King of Judah and, G-d willing, the next Exilarch. You embody the purpose and peace which G-d granted the last days of my life. I know that He will work great things through you. You will be raised by two wonderful, godly people. Hadassah and Jesse love you as they loved me, and each other. You will have a
fascinating existence in the lands outside of Persia and her stifling palace hothouses.

This is a good day. I will be reunited with my beloved Mordecai and be back in his arms by nightfall. That is the most precious anniversary gift I could ever receive, for ironically, we were wed one year ago today.

The soldiers have come for me. Please know that I die happy, fulfilled, having beheld my purpose and cradled it in my arms, and eager to meet my Creator. Be happy, my son, and care for our precious people as your family has been blessed to do.

Your loving mother,

Leah

Chapter Fifty-four

K
IRKUK, NORTHERN
I
RAQ
, P
ROVINCE OF
K
URDISTAN

D
amineh Shavoz wrinkled
her face into a scowl, leaned on the balls of her hands, and glanced out from the perch she had occupied half of her sixty-eight years: a fabric stall wedged deep in the last row of the Karkuk Bazaar.

During pauses like these, when nobody was trying to haggle her out of her priceless silks and Egyptian cottons, Damineh would grow completely still, narrow her eyes, and read the flow of passersby like an old fisherman gauging a river current. In the decades she had stood there, the old shopkeeper had learned to interpret the tiniest aspects of the day by the pacing of footsteps, voices echoing from vaulted ceilings, even the expressions on the faces streaming past her day after day.

To be clear, she had acquired this skill for a deeper purpose than merely a shopkeeper’s amassing of street smarts. Damineh had closely held motives for being wary, and these she harbored deep inside her to fuel an unrelenting, hair-trigger vigilance. Her hidden reasons had paid off. Even for a creature of the bazaar, her instincts were acute. In fact, during the short years since the Americans’ coming, she had actually learned to anticipate the arrival of a coalition patrol, even the passage of an armed convoy, full minutes before it could be heard or seen.

And now she sensed one again.

It came as a faint disruption in the flow. A vague disturbance with a source somewhere behind her consciousness. She resented its elusiveness, for it gave her no time to nail down its nature—whether ordinary street punks, a suicide bomber in a bulging vest, or soldiers of some sort, like the Baathist thugs from Hussein’s day known to punish the least wayward glance with a truncheon blow across the neck.

Within seconds, the thinning stream of people dried up to a trickle. An eerie quiet fell over the bazaar corridor; less than ten people now occupied her field of view. She tensed her muscles. This had never happened at noontime on a Friday or any other day.

Then the quiet dropped into utter silence. An unnatural lull, like the gap preceding the plunge of the executioner’s blade. She wanted to freeze into invisibility, to stop breathing and just disappear.

A helmet peered over the edge of the bazaar’s rooftop, flanked by the thin barrel of a rifle. Then another, just ten yards beside it.

Her insides wrenched with fear.

Then she saw him, walking alone toward her along the empty corridor. He was swathed in a typical Arab robe, yet she did not buy it for a moment—she spotted immediately its brand-new creases, its unwashed, just-out-of-the-box sheen, its broad, beige stripes that crudely mimicked, yet did not match, the region’s tribal
kaffiyehs
. It was the sort of attempt a big-city intruder would make, not the garb of a bazaar regular.

Then his face: his cheeks were smooth-shaven and his skin glowed with the radiant health of a foreigner spared two decades of sanctions and rationed food. But most telling of all were his eyes, which did not sweep across the goods like those of a shopper, but bore into the faces of the shopkeepers like a man searching intently for a particular individual.
Someone
.

This was some kind of spy, she just knew.

He eventually looked her way and approached the stall with an unerring, purposeful gait. Her pulse launched into a gallop. Two American soldiers stepped into a watchful posture just ten yards behind him, keeping their gaze neutral in an obvious attempt to remain unobtrusive.

Her left hand crept under a square of damask quilting and
gripped her emergency cell phone. Hard. She tried to look around the oncomer and appear casual, but her senses were inflamed, and she feared she might faint.
It can happen that fast
, she had always told her younger relatives, trying to impress on them the precarious nature of their lives—despite the decades-long success of their hiding place.
A soldier swerves toward you. A mob turns your way. A tank cannon clacks past your head, then stops and turns back. And your life is over . . .
.

The man was now standing before her. She tried to avoid meeting his eye by feigning an interest in a fallen stack of swatches beside her right hand. But she could tell he was being deliberate, ducking and leaning forward to catch her gaze.

So she spoke first. It was her way.

“You looking for the finest silks anywhere?” It was her usual opening, and despite her alarm she saw no reason to abandon it.

“Maybe,” the man answered in a voice that impressed her with a note of kindness and strength. “It depends on the quality, of course.”

“None better, right here.” She patted the now-straightened stack at hand.

“It’s so hard to find good fabric,” he said in a voice that seemed to quaver a bit. An instinct she hardly dared to trust told her that his speech contained deep emotion. He continued. “My father used to tell me about the beautiful fabrics that would abound in these parts, before the war. For instance, there was this company named al-Khalid. Did you ever hear of it?”

At the sound of that name she nodded faintly, felt her knees buckle, and the sides of the store launched into a slow spin. The very world before her began to narrow into a rotating gray cone, and she grabbed at the table in front of her.

“Are you all right?” His voice seemed to come from a hollow distance.

She swallowed hard, took the deepest breath of her life, and struggled to find words.

“What do you want?” she said in a weak hiss.

The man leaned forward.

“I am looking for my aunt. The sister of my father. Her maiden name—her childhood name—was Hana al-Khalid.”

It was her turn to lean forward now, gripping the counter so hard
that she feared the wood would break. “Whose sister? Whose sister did you speak of?”

“My father, Anek al-Khalid.”

She gasped, and her breath now stuttered in short, raspy pants. The man turned back to his escorts and motioned anxiously with his head. The soldiers trotted over to her side just as the man squeezed by the front table and made his way over to her.

He held her up just as she slumped over, and the main thing she noticed with her first close look was that his own eyes shined with tears.

“I’m your nephew, Aunt Hana,” he said in a cracking voice. “My father Anek sent me to find you and the family. I apologize for doing it this way. But we had to make sure. Now, I know that I’ve given you quite a fright. But I’m here to take you away. And I need you to bring me to the others.”

Through a storm of panic at her body’s rebellion, she tried to process his words. On one hand, it was a wondrous relief to hear him say what he’d said—but what if it wasn’t true? A ruse? She felt her head swim even more furiously at the thought. Some man out of nowhere walked up to her at the market stall, and she was supposed to let him turn her life upside down?

“Why should I trust you? Why should I believe you’re my nephew?”

He turned to her, and she saw his Adam’s apple bob as he started to attempt a reply. The light caught his cheeks, and she saw that they were soaked with tears. Then he reached out and engulfed her in his arms.

That is how she realized her question had been unnecessary. Her next one was hardly audible.

“Is he alive? Is my brother still alive?”

G
OLDA
M
EIR
H
OSPITAL
, J
ERUSALEM—THE NEXT DAY

Anek al-Khalid awoke at last to the rose glow of dawn through an open window, the pine-scented kiss of a morning breeze and a twittering crescendo of sparrows. His eyes strained to see beyond—
to focus on a framed landscape of olive trees, an Arab minaret, and a distant slice of the Dome of the Mosque beneath a cobalt sky.

He closed his eyes again and struggled back to his last memory before the darkness, the black fog that had held him until this moment. He remembered and winced.

The little girl, with a knife to her throat, her face rendered even more formidable by the magnifying power of high-definition television. Shouts off-screen, then the sound of his name groaned from her small, tense lips
.

He turned his head away in dismay, and only then did he notice his son Ari standing in the opposite corner, dressed in his customary black suit. A woman stood beside him, and even in his state he recognized her as well.

Hadassah
. The public figure. His private niece.