Esther (10 page)

“What can she do to me? Take away my beauty? Take away my freedom? I do not even remember what it is like outside these walls and I have no children to take care of me. All I have is my life and now, a reason for it.”

I suspected that if Ruti truly was loyal there was a reason for it that she hid from me. And yet I was somehow certain that she really did care for me, or for something she hoped to gain from me, and I wanted to help her as much as she had helped me. “I hope I
am
made queen, so I can give you a life worthy of all you deserve.”

She laughed. “Well, if you are going to be queen, I would prefer much more than that.”

In the morning, an old woman massaged oil of myrrh into my skin. I was both thankful and unnerved to see that she wore the expression of someone performing a menial task with which she has long ago grown bored. I did not close my eyes, even when my hair was soaked with olive oil and wound in a warm towel.

Ruti explained that I would undergo skin softening and hair treatments for the next six months. “During your second six months of treatments we will more thoroughly cover you in perfumes and cosmetics.”

When the old woman told me to turn my head so she could apply perfume behind my ears, I pretended I did not hear her. I needed to keep watch for Halannah. Perfume was also dabbed between my breasts, and in my private places. I wound my fingers tightly together to keep from knocking the servant's hands away.

I closed my eyes only briefly as my face was powdered and my eyes were ringed with kohl. Then I resumed my vigil over the entrance to the baths as pomegranate juice was rubbed into my cheeks and lips, and my hair was brushed with ivory combs and styled high on top of my head. I understood why Halannah kept her head straight upon her neck. I would have to get used to the added weight.

When I stood up with my hands covering me, Ruti sighed impatiently but wrapped me in a large swath of thin gauze identical to those the women of the harem wore. I felt no less naked than I had without it. Unlike other Persians, the women of the harem did not wear undergarments.

“Is there not a robe to wear over this . . .” I did not know what to call it.

Ruti wrapped two more swaths of gauze around the first. They floated behind me as Bigthan led me toward the harem room and my new place among the virgins. Even before we entered, I heard the women's voices bouncing against the marble; it sounded like the room itself was speaking.

As soon as we stepped inside, the noise faded to echoes and then disappeared. Hundreds of kohl-ringed eyes turned to stare at me. The day before there had been space for the concubines to be scattered throughout the room, each woman on her own cushion. Now the room was divided into two separate sections left and right: one for concubines and one for virgins. Most of the concubines and all of the virgins had to share cushions.

There are so many,
I thought. Each one of them seemed to be looking at me.
Are all these eyes that look upon me now unkind, or do all eyes heavily lined with kohl look so merciless? Do my own eyes make me look as capable of cruelty as all of these?

Maybe word of the struggle with Halannah the night before had already made its way through the harem. No one spoke or invited me to come near. Perhaps Halannah had not lied when she said that there is no such thing as a friend in the harem.

Bigthan stopped near the entrance. It was where Hegai had said the least beautiful virgins would be kept in case the security of the harem was breached. But around me were girls who could not possibly be the least attractive among us.

I turned to Bigthan. “Certainly these girls are not—”

“Hegai is fickle, as you will soon learn. Now he has decided the most beautiful virgins should be where he will see them each time he enters. If anything happens to you or the others he will lose his position.” He could not suppress a little smile.

“Sit next to Bhagwanti.” He gestured at an Indian girl.

“I am flattered that I am thought one of the most attractive,” I said, “but I would prefer to be farther back.”

“Your preferences are not important.”

“Surely I should not be in the same place as Halannah. Is not the front of the harem where she is kept?”

“Halannah is not kept.”

With that he went back toward the baths, to fetch the next girl and show her the small spot where she was to live out the rest of her days. Before disappearing through the entrance to the harem he looked over his shoulder and spoke to me loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Sit down. You do not hold your wine well and you are less likely to hurt yourself if you are already on the floor.”

From the silk cushion where she lay, Bhagwanti raised one of her perfectly drawn eyebrows. “Are not your feet tired? Sit down before you draw any more attention to us.” Without waiting for me to respond she turned her body away from me.

The first meal we were served was lamb's meat cooked with dates and plums, and sugared almonds for dessert. And of course wine. I hesitated. Was the lamb before me slaughtered according to Jewish dietary law—a quick, deep stroke across the throat with a perfectly sharpened blade? Was it drained of all blood? Was it prepared in a kitchen that kept meat apart from milk, cheese, and yogurt? I was certain that the answer to at least one of these questions was no. But Bigthan was looking at me. And I had broken our dietary laws already. The day before I had drunk grape wine prepared by gentiles. I had drunk so much of it that it had overcome me.

Without moving my lips or making a sound I implored God,
Please forgive me
.

I tried not to taste the meat as I chewed it, as though that might lessen my sin. The other girls spoke of the food before us and of the beauty treatments we had received. If any began to speak of their families or where she was from, a eunuch told her to eat lest she be too reedy, boyish, or chicken-legged for the king. Kohl ran down the face of a girl who cried loudly beside me.

“One of you will be queen,” Bigthan said, “but this one has little chance. There is none less desirable than the girl who dares cry with the riches of the palace kitchens spread before her.”

Not long after our first meal, I heard Bigthan shout, “Opi! Get back.” Out of the corner of my eye I watched a tall Nubian girl walk toward the pool.
“Return to the rear of the harem before Hegai sees you here.”

Instead the girl sat by the pool, not far from me. She dangled her toe over the water.

“None are to touch it,”
Bigthan said.

Opi did not lower her foot to touch the water. But neither did she take it back.

The eunuch said, “I will get someone larger than myself to put you where you belong.”

She appeared not to hear his threat, but I suspected that she stayed close to the pool to torment him. My heart expanded in my chest.
Her
. The cruelty we had been subjected to had not shamed or broken her. Just the opposite, it seemed.

Before I could approach her, the girl yawned and returned to the back of the harem.

It was painful to eat all that the eunuchs insisted upon. I had never before wondered at the skin of my stomach, how thick it was and how far it could be stretched before it tore. I could not help imagining the food piling higher and higher inside me, dates and pastries and salted meats filling my lungs, my throat. Suffocating me. After the third meal, I ran behind the screen to the chamber pot and vomited. The relief was so great I began to cry.

After the fifth meal, the concubines began talking amongst themselves, but loudly enough for everyone to hear.

A woman with a voice as high-pitched as a eunuch's said, “Halannah has not returned. Perhaps someone else will be called in to the king tonight.” I rose up on my cushion to look at her. Her face was almost perfectly round. She looked like a large child.

“
Someone,
yes. But the king never bothered to learn your name—Nabat, is it?—so how could he call for you?”

“You think he remembered
yours
?” Nabat said.

“He called for me twice.”

“Perhaps he told Hegai ‘My councils tire me and I have not laughed for many days. Bring me the old woman with two different breasts.' ”

More women's voices joined these, yelling out similar insults, until it seemed all the women must have misshapen, tiny, or otherwise hideous breasts along with hips too small or large for the king's pleasure.

The eunuchs did not stop the arguing. A few barely stifled their smiles or laughter. To a plump woman deriding another woman for her thinness, a eunuch said, “But, Armaiti, look how much flesh this little bird has added to her bones since she first flitted into the harem.”

“It does not matter how much she eats now,” Armaiti said, “the king will never know. He will only know the twisted vine he found beneath him once, which was one time too many for his taste.”

The woman retorted, “You were as fat as you are now when you went in to him. So what is your excuse for not being called back, Armaiti?”

“I am sure my name is on his tongue, and my body shall soon follow.”

A third woman laughed so wildly the bracelets on her arms jangled. “He will need more than his tongue to hold
you
up.”

I remembered what I had heard in the market after going to live with Mordecai in Shushan. Each woman in the king's harem got to pick out jewelry from the harem collection to wear when she went in to the king. If he liked her he would let her keep one piece. I now saw the cruelty of this. Every woman was reminded day and night that the king did not love her as much as he loved another woman. Every woman except Halannah. The day before I had marveled at how much jewelry she wore. She was so heavily weighted with the king's affection for her that she would not be able to jump if a mouse ran through the harem.

There was only one adornment that I truly longed to feel against my skin, and the king could not give it to me. Only Ruti could.

“His big chest must contain a huge heart. He calls you in to him out of pity,” Armaiti, the large woman, said to the woman with many bracelets on her arm.

The once-thin woman cried out, “And is that why
you
grope my breasts at night—
pity
?”

“Oh, was that you? I only meant to search near my mattress for some grapes I dropped. When my hand felt how they had turned to raisins I did not want them anymore.”

It was a relief when Hegai came in to announce who the king wanted that night, or would have been if the she-lion had not been with him. The women went silent as he stepped into the harem entrance, his purple robe more lustrous and splendid than anything the women wore, his tall white turban towering over the four smaller eunuchs who attended him. The lioness also wore a purple robe. It was draped over her back like a cape, and it fell around her as she sat upon the floor. She waited patiently while Hegai's eyes sifted through us as carefully as if it were he and not the king who chose a woman for the evening. I do not know why he looked at virgins too, when we were not going to see the king until we had completed a year of beauty treatments. He frowned at the crying girl and sniffed as if he could smell her from where he stood more than twenty cubits away.

Then he looked at me. “My eyes are tired little flower, come closer.”

Slowly, I rose and walked toward him. My legs grew weak as I came within ten cubits of the she-beast.

“Stop. If you come any closer I will not be able to see all of you at once.” His voice was high but his eyes moving over me made me wonder if he truly was without his manhood. “I have seen enough women to know when I am not seeing as much of one as usual. You are wearing too many robes.”

I grabbed the third robe I wore and started to pull it over my head.

“No. At least there is one girl in the harem who is still a mystery.”

“You are kind to let me keep my robes, my lord.”