After Abel and Other Stories (14 page)

“Surely, he must realize that his ambitions should be more modest now.”

“He will have excellent guidance in that area, I'm sure.”

“So, a teacher has been provided for him? One who understands the ways of the king and his kingdom?”

“The best I have ever seen. One so wise you would almost suspect any transgression would have been on purpose.”

Zeresh could breathe freely now. For the first time since waking, she reached for nourishment and took a bite of one of the cakes set before them. Hegai was a good man and had always been an ally to her sister, but there was only so much he could say, even here in the privacy of her rooms. He had taken a risk coming to see her. That alone showed how little his love for her sister had dimmed.

She knew that his life depended on his allegiance to the king. She could ask for no more information than he had just given her. Vashti was alive. She was in Susa. The king had not abandoned her completely. That was enough to know for now. Even if her personal eunuch had been punished along with her, she had him, and with him, no doubt, a full household. Zeresh thought of the prison that would be her sister's life from now on, but she knew how Vashti felt about living in the palace harem. She imagined her sister, resplendent as always,
laughing at Zeresh's naiveté for thinking her situation had changed one bit.

They talked of other matters. Hegai had already heard that her husband had gone to see the king, although the two men were still together when he slipped away to visit her. But the hour grew long, and he had to return. The women's building was no place to go missing from for too long. “They are too beautiful and too idle, and so they look for stories to tell each other and themselves,” he said.

“Someone I know always said a woman's beauty was her curse.”

“There is wisdom in that.”

Which was the last they spoke of her sister, except as he passed her doorway to leave. They both knew that this would be the last they would see of one another. It's too bad, Zeresh thought. She liked Hegai. He knew how to have a conversation. He must have been thinking the same thing, because as he passed her in the doorway, he bent close and embraced her, the mask of aloofness briefly gone. “I will miss her,” he whispered, which was, she knew, the truest thing he had said yet.

By evening she knew that the king had taken her husband's money, that it had bought him the position
of chief advisor. Within days, the king's anger passed, too, although she had no way of telling whether that was because of her husband's influence, or if it was the product of his new obsession. Women were being brought in from all over the empire to audition for the position of new queen. Not all were noble-born, as Vashti had been. Any girl young and plump with a round ass was welcome. Anyone who could catch the king's eye.

She took to calling her husband, “Your Excellency,” at first in loving jest and then in earnest. He seemed to grow even rounder with power, his chest and stomach like a drum proclaiming his importance. Hangers-on scurried around her property whenever he was home. She had tables and couches set up in the courtyard once they had trampled the grass to powder.

She had been right about another thing: her husband's new position didn't buy her entry back onto the palace grounds. Her friends flocked back to her, now that she was married to the king's right-hand man, but she couldn't pass the palace's outer gate. She still had ways of getting the information she needed, though. She had been part of the grapevine for too long to be kept out now.

Here it was, a year later, and very little had changed. They had traveled away from Susa and now back again. The good soil sprang beneath her feet. Her horse had traveled the road between her home and the palace so often in the past that it took her there almost without guidance. But she dismounted well away from the back gate, where Shaashgaz, too full of cynical mirth to care whether he was seen with her or not, came out to meet her.

He may not have been in charge of the harem, but he was obsequious enough to have wormed his way into the position of second in command. She was grateful for his time. She still had her properties—tenants, orchards, fields—to look after, and there were always her sons' needs. This one needed a new tutor, that one to be put in his place. But she missed court life, its glitter and secrets. She had no secrets now. His Excellency, her husband, kept his to himself.

And then there was the new queen. Shaashgaz told her himself. “Hegai took a liking to her, but between you and me, I can't tell why. Mousy little thing. Her cunt must be lined with hammered gold, though, because the king can't get enough of her. Calls her in three nights out of the week. Which I'll admit has put a glow in her cheeks that we had to work for months to get there with paints.”

“Do I detect some jealousy? Did you have another
favorite?”

“Goodness, no. That's Hegai's business. I just take care of them after the king has used them up. But she's so common. No noble blood at all.”

They had wound their way around the palace walls, which were as brilliantly white as ever. Thick ropes of ivy had been trained up the columns at even intervals. As always, people congregated around the main entrance to the outer court. Some waited for an audience with the king, others came to buy and sell from the ones with official business. Zeresh and Shaashgaz ignored them all, but she enjoyed seeing the mix of people from all over the empire—Babylonians, Egyptians, Macedonians—with their different styles of dress and hair, all mingling here at the center of it all.

“Perhaps he thinks she'll be more malleable than an aristocratic girl, who would come trailing a father and brothers who'd have ideas of their own,” Zeresh suggested.

“Or maybe he just doesn't care about tradition. The empire is secure. There are no deposed kings' daughters to be fucked into submission.”

“And will she?”

“Will she what?” He had lost track of the conversation, which often happened when he got going about the women he oversaw.

“She will be more malleable,” Zeresh said, sure it was
true. “More than my sister ever was. She'll have to be. She knows nothing of how the palace works.”

“I wouldn't be so sure. She's quiet. Keeps her thoughts to herself. Like your sister. Those are often the ones to watch out for. She's been helped along, of course.”

This was news to Zeresh. Who was this girl who seemed to rise out of the soil?

“Someone's bought Hegai's preference?

“Oh, come. You of all people know how things work in the palace. We all have to get by.”

“Everyone except the king.”

“Perhaps that's why he's the only one who doesn't know.”

“Doesn't know what?” Zeresh thrilled at moments like these, when she felt a curtain was being pulled back, and she was allowed to see past into the dim corners.

Shaashgaz pointed to a man standing just inside the outer gate. He was taller than most of the men there, and saber-thin.

“She's Mordechai's little ‘ward'.”

“That's Mordechai? The spy?”

Shaashgaz arched his eyebrow. Everyone either knew Mordechai the Jew or knew his reputation. He was the king's most ardent secret agent, ferreting out treason, sometimes when it wasn't even there.

“About a month after all the potential brides started entering the harem, Hegai began wearing a very large
necklace that appeared as if milled, polished, and deposited by fairies who live in the ground. He's been fawning all over the new girl ever since it appeared.”

“But what does he want? Mordechai, I mean. He can't possibly suspect the concubines of sedition.”

She studied the man. He seemed to be watching everyone and paying attention to none of them at the same time. She couldn't even be sure that he hadn't seen her, even though they were separated by gates, and a crowd of people moved between them. What a skill to have perfected, to look without seeming to do so, Zeresh thought. She wished for it herself on occasion.

“He wants what we all want, of course. Power. This is the oddest conversation, my dear. I seem to be saying things you should already know.”

After Shaashgaz had gone back into the palace and to his girls, Zeresh wondered at herself, too. She stood outside the palace walls, the closest she had been to the king in a year. The court had moved three times. The rains had come and gone. So had the summer heat. They were finally back in Susa's mild winter. But she was still on the outside. Since her husband had risen to his new position of prominence, she had been invited back into the fold of noble society. Every door except the palace's was opened to her now.

And yet she felt her distance more keenly. Her husband left at daybreak every day. He wanted to be the
first advisor the king would see each morning. When he did come home, his chest was more puffed than usual. He'd even begun to emulate the king's dress, wore clothes shot through with gold and a massive turban on his head. People bowed and scraped at his feet. They knew he had the king's ear.

All except one man. It was all she heard about when her husband did come home. He fumed about the man's disrespect, how he looked down his nose at him, how impertinent he was even to the second most powerful man in Persia.

“It's outrageous. He's nothing, cannot even come further than the outer courtyard, and yet he remains insolent. Curls his lip at me.”

“It can't be all that bad. He must be expendable. We can put our heads together to find a solution. Who is he?”

A look of disgust took hold of her husband's face, as if he had eaten meat that had gone rotten. “I will not deign to have his name spoken in my home. It doesn't matter who he is. He must be cut down to size. I am the chief advisor to the king. He will bow to me in the end.”

She could see that he was working himself up. But his anger worried her. It would cloud his judgment, and they needed him to be sharp.

“You have to let this go. It's not healthy to fixate on one man. You're getting careless. You may be the king's
right-hand man now, but we can't be too careful. Someone else can come along at any moment and offer him more gold. And then where will we be?”

The air seemed to go out of him. He deflated as only a fat man can, his spine burdened under all his flesh and the weight of his extravagant hat. “I cannot touch him.”

“Silly man. I may be kept out of the palace, but even I know that the king is ignorant of what happens in his own courtyard. He's far too taken with all his new women. Surely, you can figure something out. After this problem of the nameless man has been taken care of, you can get back to worrying about the important things again.”

It wasn't an affair of state, this obsession of his, but she was grateful that he still turned to her when something touched him this deeply. She didn't expect him to take her so seriously, though. For days, she saw him even less than usual. He was holed up with his own spies. Until the day he returned home triumphant.

“I've fixed that man now. In a month's time, he won't be a problem anymore.”