A Garden Locked Read online

  In the days that followed, I made short census rounds in the late morning and longer ones in the afternoon. My arms ached constantly from carrying the heavy tablets around, and as I kneaded their knotted muscles in my tent at night I swore to myself that one day I would have at my disposal a stack of papyrus as high as my head. Over the course of my census I met so many women that they all began to blur together in my mind. But I remember some of them clearly.

  Melita was one of the king’s wives, and she was also the daughter of King Hiram of Tyre. Of course I knew of the treaty between my father and King Hiram, who kept a steady supply of cedar and cypress rafts crossing the sea from Lebanon to Jaffa. These were disassembled and brought to Jerusalem to build the temple and the palace. In return, King Hiram was supplied with grain and fine oil. But I hadn’t known that the treaty between the two kings had been sealed in marriage.

  I arrived at Melita’s room in the afternoon hour, but she wasn’t asleep. When I knocked on her door, I heard the scrape of a chair. The door opened and there she stood, towering over me. I might have taken a step backward.

  Melita was barrel-shaped about her middle. Her hair had the texture of a rat’s nest, with some gray cobwebs threaded through the straw. Her face was an unfortunate assortment of features: small eyes too close together and of noticeably different heights, a large nose, and crooked, yellowish teeth. Later, I had no trouble deciding on a beauty score of one line, and the wicked thought occurred to me that in Melita’s case I could have left off the beauty lines altogether.

  I took a breath and explained my fictitious mission, and Melita invited me in. The contents of her room were spare, hardly the room of a princess by birth and a queen by marriage. There was a bed with a small table beside it and one shelf of clothing. There were no rugs, no mirror, no trinkets, no food, no flowers. The walls were a different story. They were entirely covered in vibrant tapestries, mostly landscapes of tree-covered mountains sloping down to a brilliant blue sea. A quarter of the room was taken up by a large loom in which rainbow strands of wool were beginning to form another landscape.

  Melita dragged the room’s single chair from beside the loom over to the bed, offered me the chair and sat on the bed herself. I began questioning her. She was forty-four years of age—two years older than my father the king. She had been married to him for twenty-one years.

  “Have you any children?” I asked, though I thought that a child would have left some imprint on this strangely barren room with its richly decorated walls. Melita gave me a look of such bitterness that I thought maybe she was barren too.

  “My father offered my hand to your father and he agreed, sight unseen,” she said. “I did not meet him until our wedding day. The first time I was alone with him was in the seclusion room after the ceremony, when he lifted the veil from my face. And I have never been alone with him since.”

  I could think of no reply, and the silence between us lengthened and was filled with all the anguished implications of Melita’s words. I rose to my feet and thanked her for her help. I glanced around her room again and thought of one more question.

  “Your tapestries—what are these scenes?”

  Melita raised mournful eyes to mine and said, “Home.”

  §

  Tereth was a concubine, a Moabite by origin. She had a room in the palace, which was an indication of her seniority. Nowadays, new concubines were all housed in tents. Her room was the opposite of Melita’s—crammed with rugs, pillows, divans, small tables covered with perfume bottles, trinkets and plates of half-eaten food. Her height was slightly less than mine, and she gave the impression of being as wide as she was tall. With every step she took, her prominent stomach and prodigious posterior trembled. Though it was scarcely an hour after the midday meal, throughout our conversation she continuously nibbled on nuts, dates, and pieces of bread soaked generously in olive oil. She told me she’d been chosen as a gift for the king from among the young girls in her tribe, because of her beauty. I must not have hidden my skepticism very well, because she caught my expression and laughed good-naturedly.

  “Oh, yes, I was a beauty once, and no rounder than yourself.”

  I was irritated by this comparison. I was indeed well-rounded, as a woman should be, but my flesh was firm. Nothing like Tereth’s.

  “Children?” I inquired shortly.

  “A son. He is thirteen and has just moved to the men’s quarters. I do miss my little man.”

  She looked forlorn and I relented.

  “And the king? How often do you see him?”

  She laughed her big, easy laugh again. “The king! Only on feast days. But no matter. What need have I of him? I have done my duty by him, and he has done his by me. I want for nothing. And I have my sister wives for company.”

  She scooped up a handful of dates and offered me the dish. I was going to refuse, but the dates were plump and shiny. I took two, thanked her and took my leave. I resolved to remember Tereth. It was far too easy in the plentiful complacence of palace life to eat oneself into oblivion.

  On the tenth day I finished my survey of the women in the palace and started on the tents in the encampment. Since these dwellings lacked door frames, I left my census marks on one of their front stakes.

  Amisi lived in the encampment. When I called out a greeting from outside her tent, it took some time for her to draw the flap aside and peer out, her cheeks flushed with sleep. She seemed alarmed at the sudden intrusion. Of course I would have ample reason to remember Amisi, because of everything that happened later. But several things would have made her stand out in my memory regardless. One, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, and I’d seen quite a few beauties during my survey. Two, she was heavily pregnant. And three, she kept a cat in her tent. She looked familiar; I had seen her before, but not often, and not recently.

  I gazed at her face in rapt silence for a long moment. Her skin was milk and honey. Her hair was a flowing black river. Her eyes were green and slightly slanted above her high cheekbones. Finally I recalled why I was there. I apologized for waking her and repeated the story of my task.

  “May I come in?” I asked, and she stood aside for me to enter.

  I asked for her name and when she told it to me I said, “That’s lovely. What does it mean?”

  “It is ‘flower’.”

  “Have you any children?”

  “No. I am just myself.” She spoke a little oddly and I could tell by her accent that she was Egyptian.

  It was then that I saw the cat. He had the same coloring as his mistress—black hair and green eyes. I was delighted—previously I had only seen such animals in drawings. He was prowling silently and gracefully about the tent, eyeing me and keeping his distance. I knelt and held out my hand patiently until he came to sniff it, then I stroked his smooth fur.

  “You have no fear!” Amisi said.

  “Should I? He’s hardly a lion. I could pick him up in my two hands. I like animals.”

  “I as well!”

  We smiled at each other.

  “But the other women, they say he is…” I could see Amisi groping for the right word. “…a not-holy animal. They won’t come near.”

  I recalled that the Egyptians held cats in high esteem, and even worshipped a cat goddess. Perhaps that was why some of my own people feared this charming, furry creature and associated it with heathen practices.

  “Does he have a name?” I asked.

  “Anubis.”

  “Is that not the name of the dog god?”

  “You are much learned.” Amisi smiled. “Anubis has the head of the jackal. But he is black, like my cat.”

  “Have we met before?” I asked, trying to remember where I’d seen her. “I live in the encampment too.”

  “Do you? And how long have you belonged to the king?”

  “Oh, I don’t belong to the king. That is, I’m his daughter.”

  “Then you live with your mother?”

  “No. She died.”
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  Amisi was nineteen years of age. She’d been married to the king for a little over three years. Her father was a famed Egyptian horse breeder, who had honored the king by presenting him with his daughter, and the king had reciprocated by making her his wife rather than concubine.

  “You said you have no children, but I see that’s soon to change,” I smiled and gestured toward her swelling belly.

  Her face turned pomegranate-red, and she lowered her gaze and didn’t answer. I wondered whether according to Egyptian custom I had been terribly rude to allude to her pregnancy. She was so beautiful that every new angle of her face and every change in her expression were fascinating to behold. As she spoke I had to continually rouse my mind from its rapt admiration and yank my own attention back to what she was saying.

  “You are exquisite,” I couldn’t help blurting out. “The king must visit you often.”

  “No,” she said, still not meeting my eyes. “Not for many months now. The first month, he came to me every night. He wrote poems for me.”

  “Do you have them?” I asked, ashamed of my own audacity but unable to help being curious.

  “No. He spoke them to me from the pages, then took them away. I could not read them anyway.”

  I wondered how many other women thought those poems were written exclusively for them. “And then what happened?”

  She shrugged. “He came less. Then more less. Then stopped coming. He found another woman.”

  “More beautiful than you? I find that hard to believe.”

  “You are kind to say. Perhaps not more beautiful. Perhaps only new. I think…he uses up women quickly.”

  “Uses up?” I was struck by her phrase. “Are we almonds to be consumed and the shells discarded? There is no end to a woman. To any person.”

  We were silent for a while, both of us uneasy with our exchange.

  “Will he come to see the child when it’s born?” I finally asked.

  “No, no. I don’t think. Does he come to see you?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “No, there is no need.” She hugged her round belly.

  I stroked Anubis once more and rose.

  “Thank you for speaking with me,” I said. “May your child be born in a propitious hour.”

  Amisi’s expression changed to one of gentle sadness, making her face freshly enchanting.

  As I left Amisi’s tent, vaguely troubled by what I’d heard, I walked quickly and my clay records clanked noisily against each other. I slowed my pace lest I grind the tablets to dust and have to start all over again.

  “Abigail!”

  I looked up and saw Moth waving at me from the balcony overlooking the women’s court. I waved back.

  “I’ll be with you in a moment!” I called.

  I’d meant to visit more tents, but now I decided to put the tablets away for the morning. As I walked towards my tent, I pondered my meeting with Amisi and the other women I’d encountered. My original reasons for starting the survey had been no more than boredom, idle curiosity and the imperative of proving Moth wrong. But I was finding out more than just the dry numbers I’d set out to discover.

  I’d always taken our way of living in the palace for granted and had never questioned the king’s right to do as he pleased. But after hearing the stories of hundreds of the kings’ wives, and learning how quickly he lost interest in even the most beautiful among them, it was hard not to compare between these women and the king’s other collections—his horses, his menagerie, his gold trinkets. He treated the women as possessions. And indeed, how much attention could one man give to each of so many wives, even if he had the will?

  What was it that caused women to be property, but not men? Except for slaves. Both female and male slaves were property. Slaves and women had only their bodies to call their own. Men, at least some men, possessed gold and silver, houses, land, animals, slaves, wives and children. Other men derived their power from their positions in society, positions they were born into like priests and, yes, like kings, or positions they acquired through their own abilities.

  I entered my tent and stashed the tablets under some cushions, then made my way out of the encampment and over to the stairs that led to the balcony. As I climbed them I continued to think.

  To be something other than property, I would need to have a value beyond my own body. How could a woman achieve this? Was it even possible? I was surrounded by queens. They had attained the highest rank a woman could possess, but I’d seen how powerless they actually were. The only exception I could think of was Queen Bathsheba, the king’s mother and my grandmother. She was responsible for making some decisions in the women’s court, and I assumed she had the king’s ear. But from the little I knew of her, she’d never struck me as a very powerful figure. Her status had been conferred upon her by the previous king who’d chosen to marry her, and her present authority by her son. Marrying a powerful man was one way for a woman to attain status, but it wasn’t what I meant when I thought of being a person of value. Though what I did mean, I couldn’t quite envision.

  I had reached the balcony. I went to stand beside Moth, leaning my elbows on the bannister. Moth nudged my ribs with his elbow.

  “How goes it?” he asked.

  “Tolerably well, I suppose.”

  “I brought you something.”

  I glanced at him. He was hugging one of the cloth-wrapped clay tablets to his chest.

  “Oh, did I leave that in your room? Thanks, but I’m finished for today.”

  “No, it’s…it’s a poem.” he said. “Twenty lines, all in rhyme, like you said. I wrote it on the smooth side.”

  “A poem! Paying your forfeit already? I’m not done with the counting. But you are going to lose, of course. There’s no way it will come to more than five hundred women.”

  I held out my hand for the tablet, but he seemed strangely reluctant to give it to me. I shrugged and turned back to stare across the women’s courtyard and the encampment beyond.

  Continuing my previous train of thought, I said, “Moth, I’ve decided I’ll never marry.”

  “What?”

  My sudden declaration must have startled him, because he dropped the tablet, which broke on impact with the balcony floor.

  “Moth, you’re such an oaf!”

  “Sorry.” He gathered up the shards into the cloth.

  He looked so stricken that I said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m sure it was a masterpiece, but I won’t make you write it out again, even if I win.”

  “What do you mean, you’ll never marry?”

  “Look at all these women.” I gestured at the courtyard below. “You said it yourself: like goats in a pen. Swallowed up into the palace, never to be seen or heard of again. Bought and sold, given as a gift like one more gold chalice. The king admires them for a moment, then puts them on the shelf to gather dust. They’re his property. I’m a woman, but I’m a person, not a thing. I don’t want to be a man’s property.”

  A shadow passed over Moth’s face. “You’re already the king’s property,” he said softly.

  “You’re right,” I was forced to agree. My sisters were also spent like so many silver coins, to reward the king’s officers or to seal a political bargain.

  “But what about…love?” Moth asked after a moment’s pause.

  “Love? Every man who can afford to has several wives. Does he love them all? And so far I haven’t met a single one of the king’s wives who seemed to love him. No, I’m suspicious of anyone who speaks of love. Especially men. And especially those who do so in rhyme!”

  Moth was shaking his head in agitation. I hastened to soothe him.

  “I’m talking about marriage, of course, not all kinds of love. I’m so grateful to have a brother I can trust!” He still seemed distressed, so I went on. “Rest assured that I see you as my brother, Moth, though we share no blood.”

  §

  After thirteen days, I had interviewed four hundred and forty-eight women. I was
heartily bored by then, but I was determined to finish what I’d started. I reckoned that I needed one more day to finish, judging by the number of tents I had yet to visit. My clay tablets with their cryptic markings were stacked neatly in my tent and covered with a rug. I looked forward to spending some quiet time alone with them, tallying up the results.

  And that’s when I did something careless. Until then, I’d started my rounds in the late morning hours, as I was not naturally an early riser. But on that last day, the anticipation of concluding my survey woke me earlier than usual. I decided to start promptly, to be sure of finishing that same day, and I arrived at the remaining cluster of tents even before breakfast. Since I couldn’t knock on the tent flaps, I would call out a morning greeting and enter when bidden. If I heard no reply, I would poke my head inside anyway. Some of the women were too shy or startled to answer me. If I saw that the tent’s occupant was sleeping, I left her for a second pass later that day.

  I had visited three tents in this fashion. Outside the fourth tent, I called out a good morning but there was no reply from within. I lifted the flap and peered inside. There, staring at me no more than two hand spans away, was none other than my father King Solomon.

  Chapter Two

  The Abacus

  Melita, the king’s Tyrian wife I’d met during my census, had said she spent only a few moments alone with him in all the years of their acquaintance. I couldn’t even claim that much; I had yet to exchange a single word with him. But I’d been a frequent visitor to his court sessions.

  I’d been intensely curious to witness the king’s legendary wisdom in action. Strange to tell, I gave no thought to my personal relationship to him. Rather I wanted to see King Solomon, public figure and master of judgment. His court sessions were open to the public, but there were always more hopeful spectators than room in the Hall of the Throne, and many late-comers were turned away. Of course, I had an advantage, living inside the palace compound. I would station myself outside the Hall on court days, just before the guards opened its doors to the public, so I always got in. But I never sat in the front rows, though I could have. I wanted to see the king, but I wasn’t sure I wanted him to see me. Peculiar as it seemed to me, the king’s wives and other daughters rarely attended his court. Moth came with me a few times, but unlike my continuing fascination, his interest soon flagged. Then his military training started, so that he was usually busy at court time.