Harvest of Rubies (26 page)

I realized that although he wasn’t weeping, he too was mourning; he merely held his grief deep inside. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Perhaps if I had managed this affair in a different way, he wouldn’t have been hurt.”

“This is not your fault. It is that man’s doing and he shall pay for it. What manner of evil would unleash such murderous behavior? What will become of Persia if our men turn into cheats and murderers? And to think I gave him the run of my household.”

There was a knock on the door. In days past I would have just bid them enter, but the palace was now milling with Darius’s men and I could not very well ask one of them into my apartments. Without comment, Darius rose to open the door. “It is your maid. She wishes permission to enter.”

Of course with Darius in my room, Pari couldn’t barge in unannounced as was her wont. “Oh, please tell her to come in. She loves the dog too.”

Pari entered; wordlessly we clasped each other in a comforting embrace. More commotion at my door drew our notice. It was Darius’s man, reporting that Teispes was missing.

“They searched everywhere,” Pari whispered in my ear. “There’s no sign of him, and one of the horses is missing too. He must have left in a hurry.”

Darius came to give the same report. “I must go and find him. The sooner we leave, the better our chance of apprehending him.”

“I think I know where he has gone. His courtesan’s lodgings in Persepolis would be my guess. He will think himself safe there, not realizing that we followed him and know about it.”

“It’s a good starting point,” Darius conceded. “Even if he hasn’t gone there directly, he is bound to try and get in touch with his
hetaira
. I will post a few men at the house. We’ll catch that rat sooner or later.”

I gave him the directions. “Will you go yourself?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from wobbling.

“Of course.”

“My lord, I … I don’t know what to do for the dog. When Bardia comes with the purge I mean.” From what Darius had said earlier, there was not much any of us could do. But at least he had some training in the healing arts from his years of study at the palace. If any of us could help Caspian, it was he.

He chewed on his lip. I knew the struggle before him: the need to capture a man who had wronged him grossly, to bring him to justice and end the trail of his destruction, or to remain and do what he could for a beloved animal.

My heart melted with relief when he said, “I will stay.” I was too distraught to know my own feelings then, but I believe that was the moment I began to fall in love with Darius Passargadae, the man who despised me for my public betrayal.

He was accustomed to command on the field of battle. He knew how to organize and mobilize under pressure. By the time Bardia arrived with his bag of herbs, Darius’s men were on their way in three separate detachments—one bound for the house of Teispes’s
hetaira
, another searching for general clues, and the last back to Ecbatana to arrest Teispes’s brother and gather evidence from Mandana.

I had no interest in Teispes anymore. My whole attention was focused on the creature that lay dying before me. Bardia and Lord Darius made up an infusion of herbs, discussing between them the advantages of mixing one over another, and poured it down Caspian’s throat. How the poor dog retched! He hardly had any strength and I worried that the struggle to empty his stomach would be enough to kill him. Several times he choked and Bardia and Darius had to manually help open his throat. I was astounded by my husband’s patience and
gentleness. Was this the same man who had sat next to me at our wedding, fuming with cold bitterness?

Finally, there was no more in the dog’s stomach to purge. We could only wait.

“It’s a good sign that Caspian has survived this far, mistress,” Bardia assured me. “He is strong.”

I sat with Caspian’s head on my lap hour after hour, counting his breaths, praying he would survive. I must have fallen asleep some time during the night, for I awoke with a start. My head was on Darius’s shoulder, and I was leaning heavily against his side. I turned to him hoping to find him asleep and unaware of my transgression, but found him watching me.

“Pardon.” I scooted away, putting a bit of distance between us. He said nothing, but continued to watch me as if I were a puzzle he could not make out.

“How is he?” I asked. My throat felt parched and scratchy.

“The same.”

Bardia had gone to sleep in a corner of the room, wrapped in one of Pari’s blankets. Pari too was asleep at the foot of my bed, where Caspian usually lounged. I looked longingly at a flagon of pomegranate juice that sat on a desk nearby, but I did not want to disturb the dog’s rest by moving his head. To my astonishment Darius rose and poured some into a silver goblet and brought it over to me.

“I … thank you.” We sat in silence for a while. Having witnessed his kindness, I felt emboldened to ask, “What brought you home? I thought you were in Ecbatana for the summer.”

He sighed. “The queen.”

He said no more, which was cruel. He must have known that I was writhing with curiosity. I could not resist prodding, “The queen?”

“Yes. You know, King Artaxerxes’ wife. I believe you are
somewhat acquainted with her.”

“I believe I am. So
that
queen sent you home? Why? Were you naughty?” That would teach him to try and torment me.

He smiled into his goblet before taking a deep swallow. But he said nothing to satisfy my curiosity, the wretch. Not a man to be goaded into giving information, I concluded.

“Bardia said you cleaned his cottage for him. With your own hand, he said.”

The swift change of topic caught me off guard. I shrugged. “He wasn’t supposed to know. Pari did much of the work.”

“I thank you for that.”

I looked at him through the veil of my lashes. “I didn’t do it for you. I did it for him. He has become very dear to me.”

“You were right; you have done me a good turn, and I am grateful for it. But it doesn’t undo the past, Sarah. It doesn’t make what you did disappear.”

Sometime in the night my hair had come undone from its elaborate arrangement and now it fell about my back in loose curls. I bent my head until a curtain of hair hid my face. I didn’t want him to see how much his words hurt.

Darius leaned back. “Let me tell you how I came to hire Teispes. His uncle held the post of my steward before him. When his uncle passed away, Teispes was very helpful to me in the chaos following the loss of a trusted steward. I hired him on the strength of these circumstances: his connection to my last steward, who was as honest a man as the world has to offer, and his own good service to me when he had little to gain by it.

“Even bad men can have trustworthy connections. Even evil men are capable of doing good upon occasion.”

“You mean you can’t trust me merely because you have seen a better side of my nature. For all you know my current
actions are as much of an anomaly as Teispes’s behavior after his uncle died.”

“I’m not soon going to forget becoming the butt of every courtier’s joke because of what you did. Nor can I respect a woman who would so publicly humiliate another for the sake of her own ends. How can I place confidence in you when you will not even admit what those ends are, but hide behind feeble excuses?”

I stroked Caspian’s head. “What if you’re wrong? What if you are being cynical rather than perceptive?”

“Sometimes the two are the same. The best a man can do is weigh the evidence before him and make the wisest judgment he is capable of. This I have done with you.”

“Is it not better to commit the error of thinking others better than they are rather than mistakenly consider them worse?”

“You ask me that on
this
day, with the damage of Teispes round about us, because I thought better of him than I should have?”

What could I say? He considered my explanations
feeble excuses
. I clenched my teeth. Just as well, I thought. He probably wouldn’t enjoy being married to a former courtesan with a shopkeeper for a potential customer. I drank the rest of my tart juice and shifted my legs, which had begun to fall asleep.

“The queen sent me to fetch you,” he said without preamble.

“What?”

“I came home because Damaspia sent me to fetch you to Ecbatana. She wants you there for the feast of the equinox.”

“I see.” So Damaspia had
commanded
him to personally escort me to Ecbatana. She, after all, had not forgotten me. The thought of her kindness brought no comfort. That very kindness
had landed me in this plight to begin with.

A dark mood descended on me as recent events sank deeper into my consciousness. I had escaped my own demise by the merest wisp of circumstance. Now I held in my arms a beloved animal whose impending death cast its pall on all our hearts. Once again, my husband had rejected me, though with more benevolence this time. The fact that my adversary was finally about to be caught didn’t assuage the larger miseries of my life. With longing, I thought of the peace I had felt when I had prayed with Pari. I felt none now.

Why Lord?
I cried out in the privacy of my thoughts.
Why have You allowed so much hurt in my life? Why did You take my mother? Why would You not turn my father’s heart toward me? Why did You take away the work of my hands? Why did You marry me to a man who will never care for me? Why did You allow this poor creature to be poisoned? Why?

God, it seemed, had no answers for me. I railed against Him to no avail. I pummeled Him with my demands for an explanation, an excuse, a justification. He only gave me His silence.

I thought of King David and the many disappointments he had suffered. He too had put God to the question.
Eli, Eli, lamah azavtani? My God, My God
, why
have You forsaken me?
I hurled David’s question at God, hoping that He would honor His beloved king where He had chosen to ignore me.

And then I went still.

I remembered that in the Hebrew Scriptures you sometimes asked a question not because you expected a literal answer, but because a question was another way to express your feelings. King David had asked God
why
, but he had never intended to take Him to task with that question. He was not asking the Lord to explain Himself. He was merely
pouring his heart out to God. He was telling his Lord that he felt abandoned.

I became mindful of how differently I had addressed the Lord. I had asked my whys of Him for years, expecting an explanation that would satisfy
me
. I had put Him on trial for what I perceived to be His insufficiency—His failure—and refused to surrender my heart to Him unless He would answer me. Unless He would give me a satisfactory explanation of His ways. How different was my heart from David’s.

It occurred to me that the Lord must have cherished David’s simple
lamah
. That was the cry of a child, who not understanding, still clung to his father. My
why
, on the other hand, was an indictment. It was a finger pointing at God. It held no trust.

In those moments of inward examination, with three other people and a sick dog in the same room with me, I felt myself completely alone before God. And I saw the state of my soul for the first time. I saw how arrogant I had been to judge Him. To reject Him.

I was faced in that moment with a decision. Surrounded with reminders of the disappointments of my life—a husband who was only here because of a queen’s command, a dog who lay dying in my lap, a house that was little more than a gilded prison—surrounded by these very sorrows, would I turn to God as a trusting child instead of a demanding judge? Would I lay down my accusations and exchange them for the intimacy of a weeping infant’s arms who clung about her Father’s neck? A child, who, not understanding why her Father took away her favorite prize, still turned to Him for comfort?

Would I exchange my
why
for David’s
why?

It occurred to me that even if God wished to give me an accounting of Himself, His explanation would make as much
sense to me as Bardia’s elucidation of pruning would make to the vine. I simply could not comprehend a God who was so far above me.

But, like David, I could have His comfort. I could have His love. I could have His peace. I could have all this without understanding.

This was the choice before me then: an unreasoning surrender that paved the way to love, or a stubborn distance from God until He justified Himself to me. Until He chose to run the world my way.

I was so tired of battling God. It had availed me nothing but bitterness. He had allowed me to wander far, to have my own way, to follow my own will. To taste the sour fruit of running my own life. I had had enough. I wanted David’s heart. I had started that night with sharp accusations against my Lord; I ended it with the desire to love Him. I chose to give my life back to God on His terms, not mine.

Since King David had led me to this new path, it was in his words that I prayed silently: