Wisdom's Daughter: A Novel of Solomon and Sheba (13 page)

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Authors: India Edghill

BOOK: Wisdom's Daughter: A Novel of Solomon and Sheba
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Sow the Wind
Before I was brought to King David’s court, before I knew her for myself, I had always thought the harpers’ tales made Queen Michal sound too good to be true. No woman could be so wise, so virtuous, so tolerant—
“Unless she is simpleminded,” I had said one day, when my mother and her friends were telling over the latest gossip from Jerusalem as they filled their jars at the village well. I spoke with the pride and careless arrogance of ignorant youth. “I would never share a husband so, if I were queen!”
Many girls’ mothers would have cuffed them for such unseemly words; most would have rebuked them sharply. My mother merely regarded me steadily as she dipped her empty jar into the water and said, “Easy to say now, Abishag. Remember your words, Daughter, and say them again in a dozen years, if they still are true.” Then she lifted the water jar to her hip, balancing the heavy vessel as if it were a child. “All women should be as simpleminded as Queen Michal. The world would turn a good deal better than it now does!”
My mother smiled, and her friends all laughed—my mother owned the gift of bringing laughter with her. And as they laughed, I bowed my head and splashed water from the well upon my hot cheeks, knowing I had sounded both young and foolish. But no woman can be so openhearted as men say the queen is!
And so I thought, even upon the day I first met Queen Michal, the day I entered King David’s palace.
My mother was my father’s first wife, the bride of his heart. I never knew her, for she died bringing me into the world. But I knew my father; knew him better than most daughters know their sires, for having lost his most cherished wife, he cherished me in her stead. This was good of him; many men would have blamed the child that had cost them the much-loved mother—and that child not even a son, but a mere daughter.
I was the king’s only daughter, the court’s only princess. My father was a good man who deserved a perfect daughter, a model of womanly grace and beauty: meek, docile, obedient. A girl who could weave and embroider, knead bread and bake sweet cakes. A paragon of the womanly talents.
Instead, he had me.
Hard as I tried—and I wished very much to please my father—I could not be that perfect girl. My father was handsome as the sun; my mother, so I had been told, had been sloe-dark and shapely, partridge plump. I should have been a beauty too, sleek-haired and soft, wide-eyed and pearl-smooth.
But some unknown foremother had bequeathed me wild hair and restless eyes. Worse, I owned a will as untamed and unruly as my hair, possessed a lust for knowledge as keen as my searching eyes.
Oh, I could weave, and embroider as well as most and better than some; any task is better well-done than ill. But I also wished to play upon the harp, and to dance; to drive a chariot; to read, and to write as well. To have the freedom my brothers squandered so carelessly.
My father did his best for me; treated me almost as if I were indeed a son, rather than a daughter. Bestowed upon me as much freedom as he could.
“Let her learn to read; what harm can come of her knowing?”
“Let her play upon the harp, if it pleases her. She gets that song-love from her grandfather, Great David.”
“Let her accompany me in the chariot if it amuses the child.”
Although none of them stood in place of my mother, my father’s wives objected to each concession granted me, arguing that such indulgent treatment would spoil any girl. That such liberty would turn me headstrong and unwomanly. Unmarriageable.
My father laughed at that, and said only that no knowledge was ever wasted. “Wisdom is better than rubies,” he told them, “and as for the
rest—when the time comes for her to marry, she will have her choice of the world’s kings. Who would spurn the daughter of King Solomon?”
So I learned what I wished, and tried to be what my father desired, what he thought I truly was: his soft, womanly, loving little daughter. I did try. And I did love my father dearly.
But I was not soft, and I was not womanly.
Those things I knew I would never be.
 
 
So greatly did my father cherish me that, although I was only the king’s daughter, I dwelt in the rooms that had once housed Queen Michal herself. This prize was granted to me by my father the summer I turned thirteen. The gift was generous and the giving of it ingenious; my father had a taste for riddles and puzzles. He summoned me to the women’s courtyard, the large one that belonged to all his wives in common, and there handed me a knotted thread.
“Follow this to its end,” he told me, “and what you find there will be yours.”
The thread he handed me was thick and rough enough to be more rightly called cord; I began to gather its length up into my hands, then saw that the scarlet thread fell to the ground and led off across the courtyard. My father smiled at me, and my heart beat faster, knowing there must be a special gift waiting for me at the end of the trail of thread. I am glad to say that I remembered to thank him before I followed the thread, winding it into a ball as I traced its path.
It took me half the morning to wind along the thread to its end; whoever had laid down the thread’s pattern had been industrious, and the course I followed wound about columns and along corridors, traced around fountains and down stairwells, wove in and out of doorways. The game caught everyone’s fancy, and so I was watched by smiling women and trailed after by excited children. It seemed I paced every foot of the women’s quarters before I at last came to the cord’s end at a courtyard gate.
The gate was ebony, dark wood polished smooth and inlaid with rows of ivory plaques. The cord was knotted to the gilded latch. My father stood beside the gate, waiting for me.
The ball of cord I held had grown unwieldy over the course of my quest;
now I set it down before my father. “I am here,” I said, and my father looked down at the ball of cord and then at me. “Now I see why it took you so long to find your way to your prize,” he said. “You could just have hastened along the cord and left it lying upon the floor, you know.”
“Isn’t the thread mine too?” I asked, and my father laughed and hugged me, and kissed me upon my forehead. “My clever, careful daughter! I am twice glad to give you this gift; I can think of no one else worthy of it.”
He turned and pushed open the ebony gate. “Once what lies behind this gate belonged to Queen Michal,” he told me, “and now it belongs to you.”
My eyes grew wide, for Queen Michal had been Great David’s first wife, foremost among his women, the woman he had won with blood and kept with iron. The woman who had raised my father more truly than had his own mother. My father spoke of her as he spoke of no other woman save my mother. Now he had given me Queen Michal’s court for my own. I tried to form words into a graceful thanks, but in my excitement I could say only “Queen Michal’s rooms? For
me?”
But my father seemed to think this enough; he smiled. “The queen’s rooms, for you, my daughter. You are no longer a child needing a nurse. You are growing into a woman; it is time you had a court and maidservants of your own.”
He said also that I might do as pleased me with these rooms which now were mine, but there was a stiffness in his voice, and I knew he hoped that I would make no changes to this place in which he had been raised. So I thanked him, and said only that the rooms pleased me just as they were.
“If they were good enough for a queen, surely they are good enough for a king’s daughter,” I said, and sensed my father’s pleasure at my answer.
And truly, the old queen’s rooms were lovely; the walls painted with swallows and poppies, the courtyard gay with lilies and a fountain whose water sang endlessly over pale stone. I sat upon the edge of the fountain, dipping my hand into the flowing water, and smiled.
Truly I am now a woman grown, and as good as a queen.
So I thought, in my pleasure and my pride, but I did not say so aloud—that much modesty and sense I did possess.
Only later did I wonder why my father had given me Queen Michal’s rooms, and not Queen Abishag’s. I had received not my mother’s rooms but his mother’s—or rather, his stepmother’s. And so I wondered.
But I did not ask.
 
 
That was the night my dreams began, the night I first slept in the old queen’s rooms that were now my own.
I held a scarlet thread in my hands, a thread leading into darkness. Behind me a wall of stone stood cold against my back. Light gleamed through chinks between the stones, bright sparks of warmth, but I could not retreat from the darkness that lay ahead.
Slowly I began to follow the scarlet thread, coiling it into a ball in my hands as I traced its path. The thread led me in a long slow dance through darkness into shadow, through shadow into smoke. I followed where the thread led me, obedient to its will.
Darkness lifted; I stood within a vast courtyard, a court whose walls were set with a dozen gates. The gates stood open, waiting for my choice. Trusting my guide, I looked down at the ball of scarlet thread, knowing it would lead me to the gate I must pass through. But I no longer had one strong true thread to follow; a dozen thin lines of red now flowed from my hand, and each new thread led through a different gate.
Now I must choose; choose one path, and see all other gates close against me forever—
I woke weeping. My own sorrow shocked me, for the dream had not been so fearful after all. A thread to follow, a gateway to choose—
Do not be foolish, I chided myself, you dreamed because you sleep in a new room, in a new bed. You will forget those dream gates by the morning.
But I did not forget.
Until now, my dreams had been a child’s; bright images faded into nothingness by dawn’s light. Never before had I remembered a dream as vividly as if it were true memory.
Never before had my dreams troubled my nights, and my days. Perhaps my passage into womanhood bred these unquiet illusions. Once I would have asked my grandmothers, sought wisdom from their lips. When I was a child, it seemed to me they knew the answers to all questions, the keys to all riddles. But now they were gone, and I must find my answers for myself.
As always, to think of my loss summoned tears to sting my eyes. And just as I had possessed more than most, so my loss was greater. For most girls, if they are fortunate, can claim two grandmothers. I was truly favored, for as I said, I grew up under the guidance of three: my mother’s mother, and my father’s mother—and his foster-mother as well. These three shaped my dreams, and hence my life.
As did my mother, although her I never knew. Yet she had left me a
legacy of love that served me well; better than gold and rubies, in the end.
And of course I owned much that had been hers; all the jewels that had been Queen Abishag’s became mine, treasures to serve as dowry, to be handed down to my own daughter in her turn. Thick chains of gold, bolts of cloth fine enough for a goddess, handfuls of rubies and pearls—such things any queen might own. Nor was I too high-minded to spurn gems and silks and gold; always I have liked pretty things.
But I had other treasures from my mother, and these I cherished more than gems or gold, for these she had chosen herself, and given into her mother’s hands to bestow upon me, when I should be old enough to understand and to cherish the gifts. This legacy seemed little enough; no more than the contents of a small ivory casket. A spangled veil. A necklace of coral and pearl; a glass vial iridescent as a dragonfly wing, still smelling sweet of roses and sharp of cinnamon. A silver mirror small as a woman’s palm. A bracelet, a shabby trinket of worn brass chains and flakes of crystal. An ivory Asherah, an idol carved so long ago its curves had darkened to the color of wild honey.
I did not know why my mother should have kept the Asherah; never had I heard any word that hinted she was less than a good Daughter of the Lord. But there the little goddess lay, wrapped in a scrap of crimson silk.
My handmaiden Rivkah, who once had been my mother’s maidservant, had given me the casket the first time the moon’s pull drew me into womanhood. “Your mother’s mother gave it into my keeping, when she knew she could no longer remain here. She bade me lay it in your hands and tell you it is your legacy from your mothers.”
My mother’s mother’s name was Zhurleen, and even though she was no longer young, she was very beautiful—or knew how to seem so. She knew everything there was to know about women’s secrets. She had spent much time with me when I was a small girl, singing me secret songs and telling me mysterious stories. In her tales, girls and goddesses did not sit spinning by the hearth; no, they sought treasures and rescued children, created gardens and ruled the heavens.
She liked best to tell me the tale of the Bright Lady Inanna, who sought her dead lover in the Underworld, defying her sister Death. “There are seven gates one must pass to reach the Queen of Death’s palace, and at each gate a treasure was taken from Inanna, until the bright Queen of Heaven
walked clad only in her flowing hair. Only that was left to veil her, to keep her safe.”
Inanna faced her sister Ereshkigal bravely, but Ereshkigal slew Inanna and hung her upon a tree. And for three days Inanna hung there dead in the Land of No Return—until her servant cunningly smuggled the food and water of life into Death’s palace of lapis lazuli.
“And so Inanna returned to walk the fields and touch the flowers, so that the world rejoiced once more in her love.”
That I liked, that the Bright Lady returned to smile upon the fruit and flowers. But I liked Lady Death too, who ruled her own kingdom and did not need to bargain away her jewels for a lover. When I told my grandmother that, she laughed.
“You do not understand now,” my grandmother said, just as she did at the end of each tale she told me, “but one day you will. Remember, little goddess, that a woman may have whatever she desires, so long as she remains veiled like the Goddess Herself.”
And then she would laugh, and feed me pomegranate seeds or bits of honey-cake. “So you will remember wisdom is sweet.”
Zhurleen was my laughing grandmother.
Bathsheba was my father’s mother; my indulgent grandmother, who granted my childish whims without question. I remembered her as a pair of soft loving arms and an endless kindness. “Of course you may have my necklet, sweetling—there now, little dove—see how pretty you look!” She was never strict, never stern. Even as a child, I knew my other two grandmothers guarded the Lady Bathsheba as if she were their own daughter, rather than the mother of the king.

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