Hadassah Covenant, The (29 page)

You see, I knew one thing for certain—I wasn’t awake. I lay suspended somewhere between true sleep and consciousness, but I was not a fully wakeful person at that moment. And yet something was objectively not right. Even within the routine of my perennial nightmare, this seemed jarringly out of the ordinary.

I sensed motion, lightning fast and graceful. And movement just next to me, yet nearly silent. Not enough provocation to truly awaken me. Was Xerxes having his own restless dream?

Until . . . a
groan
. A man’s voice, not in the throes of a nightmare. It was a groan of mortal agony forced into some form of restraint.

Thank G-d I did not allow my eyes to fly open as swiftly and emphatically as my mind did. Yet in the tiniest instant I was truly alert, aware only of my heart hammering away in my chest. I parted my eyelids, but only by the slightest margin.

And, Leah, I cannot—nor do I wish to try—describe to you the full weight of terror that crushed down upon my entire body, soul, and mind at that moment.

For it hung there—quivering in the gloom of a real night. A long, polished sword, poised barely a cubit above me.

As on that earlier night, my shock and fear kept me silent far more than my actual poise. My limbs were paralyzed. The air within me seemed frozen still. I could not have moved even the tiniest bit if flight had been my only hope.

But now confusion, mixed with an implacable dread, descended upon me. Every sensory cue I had told me that I was now awake, in the real, present world. Yet how could I be once again in the center of a midnight murder? How could I awaken twice in one lifetime to the reflection of moonlight on sharpened steel? This was not a coincidence, or a fate, I could bear to live through again. One such night was enough.

I parted my eyelids again and rolled my shoulders slightly, feigning sleep-induced motion. Now I could glimpse a ways beyond my immediate surroundings. And not ten cubits beyond, I saw my Xerxes in all his bulging nakedness, struggling with every muscle he had against the grip of two men with giant arms holding him from behind. A cloth covered his mouth, pulled as tightly as seemed possible.

Another man stood before him, holding a sword in that two-fisted, downward-facing hold of an executioner about to make his thrust.

And then I gained my true bearings about the situation. I had been asleep next to Xerxes in the royal retiring chamber, for I often spent the night with him in those days, and plotters had chosen this of all nights on which to strike. Something inside me shattered into pieces. My husband was going to be killed, and any attempt to help him would mean we would both be dead within moments of each other. My only hope for survival lay in continuing to feign sleep and give his killers no reason to fear me. If I even twitched, the sword quivering above me would surely plunge down and eliminate my witness along with my husband’s.

I did the only thing I knew: I shut my eyelids again and concentrated on imitating the languid rhythm of deep sleep. But from Xerxes I now heard an emphatic
thump
! and a long exhale, and I realized my
husband was dead. Only the terror of my closest brush with death was keeping my throat closed against the cry of a heart rent in two. The killer watching me had to make his final, crucial determination of whether or not to let me survive. I poured every ounce of my will into continuing the breaths without interruption, pause, or acceleration.

A moment passed—the most terrible and endless of my life. I was not sure I could bear another instant without succumbing to the ice bath of terror and heartbreaking sorrow pumping throughout my body. Yet I knew: the tiniest mistake, the slightest miscalculation, and the next thing I felt would be a blade cleaving my own chest.

The moment passed. I heard a whispered cry and footsteps in the foreground, felt the air move about me, and heard more running, closer. I parted my eyelids again and saw only the distant, ornate ceiling.

The massive doors shut with a slapping sound.

The murderers were gone.

I practically fell off the bed to crawl over toward Xerxes’ prone shape. I cradled his body, bent down toward him, and felt the whole vastness of emotion I had trapped within me now escape in one violent, inner heave—then a shrill scream flung up in the air. I know it was imprudent to raise such a cry, for I did not know how far evil had fled. But now it was not a matter of choice.

There was never even a moment of conceding his death—I had felt it was coming, almost as a matter of fact, since catching sight of that sharpened sword. But now his terrible death felt like a vast, threatening fact into which I plunged whole. Inside my chest, I felt again the sensation of something coming apart.

Still lying upon the cold marble, I bent backward and gave my screaming full vent. As though I were trying to fill the cavernous room with my grief. I emptied my lungs, gulped for air, and started again. And again. I’m not sure the sounds that poured from my throat sounded sane, or even human. But I could not have stopped them to save my life.

Leah, you know as much as anyone how much I loved the King. Anyone else would be forgiven for suspecting that I loved being Queen more than I loved Xerxes himself.

But the truth turns out, as it so often does, to be far more complex
and interesting than shallow conjecture. Xerxes and I had carved a special affection out of an insane and impossible existence. He loved me because I gave myself to him like no other woman he had ever known, or even imagined. And I loved him because he had opened himself to me in ways no King ever had with anyone, ways that made me feel incredibly close and needed.

He was a deeply flawed man, to an extent I am only now learning. I’m entirely unsure whether history will record him kindly. And I offer no defense for the many errant deeds attributed to him. But even though this sounds like the rationale of a foolish teenager, I have to insist that when he was with me, Xerxes was a different person. Often when we were together, nearby courtiers would turn around and stare, not sure if the man laughing so heartily and speaking in such a relaxed voice was the King they knew. They had simply never heard him laugh that freely, or speak with such a tone.

He was such a virile personality that I felt his presence like a stamp on nearly every memory of my adult life. And that is why the life drained from my veins when I realized he was gone from my world. I had never contemplated a future without him.

Finally, the strain of my screams drained the final measure of strength from me, and the world around me simply blinked away.

Chapter Thirty-two

I am unsure how long I lay like that. All I remember is snapping back upright at the sound of the doors being punched open and dozens of feet running in. Deep growling shouts rang out, even screams.

I looked up and saw that the five soldiers wore the gilded finery of the Immortals, the elite royal bodyguards. Their faces were wracked by anguish. And well they might, for rumor had it that if a king was murdered, the Immortals on the watch would be impaled within the hour.

I felt hands about my shoulders, bearing me up gently. And then I saw Mordecai’s face, and never have I been more relieved and grateful to see anyone. Although, for some reason, the sight of his anxious expression seemed to trigger even greater emotion. Sobs wracked my body, and in between the same phrase, over and over, burst through my lips from my soul. “
He’s gone, Poppa. They killed him. . . . ”

How helpless and hopeless I felt at that moment! I repeated those words countless times before Mordecai found a pause in which to ask me if I was hurt. I shook my head through my sobs, and I remember feeling at that point, for just a moment, that I wish the killers had taken me with him.

Mordecai helped me to my shaky feet. With gravity beneath me, I felt like an old woman shuffling along in a century-old body. I know I moved like one.

“I’ll try to remember one of the attackers,” I told him hoarsely. “I might recall the man who held the sword.” And Mordecai, always on his “palace guard,” hushed me quickly, causing me to recall that on a night like this, one never knows who the plotters were. The soldiers around me could have been the killers, only feigning grief and shock. Anyone within earshot could be a conspirator who might interpret the least wayward utterance as a pretext for more murder.

And it was true. I could almost smell the madness in the air. There was a feeling about that all was unhinged, that bloodlust, like that ominous hint of sulfur in the nostrils, could explode at any moment.

We heard more loud voices, shouts of alarm, from the hallway outside. My blood went cold, for I remembered that the assassination of a king was often the occasion for whole strings of secondary murders, like the cascading aftershocks of an earthquake.

Finally, my feet rediscovered their rhythm and we emerged through the doorway. Guards and servants were running as one down the corridor, away from us.

“Who is it?” Mordecai cried at the top of his voice.

A palace servant, running past, glanced at him and yelled over his shoulder, “It’s Darius, sir! Darius!”

I remember stopping cold in the hall, surrounded by bleary-eyed, panicked palace staff, and feeling a new wave of vertigo overwhelm me, unaware whether the sensation came from events in the chamber behind me or the shock of what I had just heard.

Darius
—of course. The crown prince, Xerxes’ oldest and most beloved son, namesake of Darius the Great. He would be next.

No
. . . I heard myself groaning over and over, and then holding on to Mordecai’s hand, I too began to run and watch the hallway flow fitfully past me. In my haze of residual stupor and caustic grief, I could not remember the direction of Darius’ quarters. I looked around me, fought a cresting surge of nausea, and then realized the imbecilic truth—the best source was there right beside me: Mordecai, faithful, unquestioning, supportive. And he knew exactly where to go.

Three turns, two more hallways, and one covered veranda later, we rounded the final corner and rushed upon a scene that left me even more faint and closer to retching.

Sprawled in the open doorway to his own personal quarters lay the body of a broad-shouldered young man whose wristbands, headband, and boots were trimmed in gold. I could not see his face, which lay pressed into a puddle of blood, but I knew at once it was Prince Darius, once the future King of Persia. Less than five cubits away lay three more bodies clad in the attire of the Palace Guard.

I remember the gray look on Mordecai’s lined, hard-breathing face when he whirled around to look at me.

“What about Artaxerxes?” he asked in a voice I had never heard issued from his mouth before. I remember asking myself whether he had asked me a question or issued me a warning, for his tone was equal parts foreboding and outright fear.

Despite my haze, I realized instantly how correct he was. Artaxerxes was the next in line to the throne. He was also one member of the extended royal family whom I knew better than any other. In fact, few remember it now, but he was practically my adoptive son.

All at once my body remembered its old energy and speed. I leaped from the hallway, it seemed, with Mordecai in close pursuit, and we ran without hesitation to an apartment not far away. I began pounding on the door.