The Book of V.: A Novel(67)

“Your figs,” Vashti says. “I know, Esther told me, that you have a secret method of splicing their seeds, and that this is what makes them the most delicious in Persia.”

Marduk looks at her. There is pride in his eyes, wound with sorrow (his fig trees are no longer his) and warning (the secret still is), and Vashti nods, her promise not to tell.

“She sent us here to tell you. Tomorrow, there will be a massacre.”

She lets the lie sink in. They’ll all be dead within a year, that much she can see. She feels no regret, only a growing ease in her role. She is not in a hole and she is not in a palace; she is in a tent. A middle place, a moveable place. She will convince them.

“Esther says you have to go.”

The man and boy stare at her. Marduk lifts his chin. “She could not come herself?”

“No. She could not come herself.”

“She won’t help us?”

Vashti can’t speak for a moment. She nearly laughs, not because she finds him funny but because his query, his angry hope that has somehow survived these years, strikes her as impossibly sad. What did he imagine his niece was waiting for? What kind of queen did he think he had created, that she might have the power to save them and also the cruelty to bide her time? “No,” she says at last. “I wish I could tell you how she tried.”

Itz steps out from his father’s shadow. He has lowered the knife but his face contains its own sharpness. “What have they done to her?” he asks, and though his cracking voice betrays his youth, it is the only youthful thing about him. If there is a problem, Vashti thinks, it will be Itz. He and Vashti are not entirely unlike. They both know what it is to be hidden, trapped, for the sake of your own life. He sees through Vashti’s hedging. He understands that she could tell them how Esther tried and that she chooses not to. Even if he does not know the details, how she went to the king unbidden, brought to life a bird, offered her sex, he knows: Esther was never in a position to save them. He does not believe, as Vashti counted on everyone believing, that a queen is a queen is a queen.

“She is treated well,” Vashti announces, avoiding Itz’s eyes. “She has one child, a boy, and another soon to be born. She sleeps on a bed of silks?…” As Vashti describes Esther’s days, the shaded courtyards she walks in, the robes she is wrapped in, the banquets she attends, she includes every sumptuous detail she can think of, colors and textures and scents, scenes that are somehow both factually true in that Vashti can attest to them—she once lived them—and also fantasy, a tripling and quadrupling of the facts, an eruption of desires fulfilled. The more she talks, the more she herself begins to believe. She feels the tent nod and shares in their gladness, absorbs it for herself: Esther, she is convinced, will do more than survive. The child is beautiful, she adds—Esther sleeps with him in her bed. And she has Baraz, too, the most trustworthy eunuch in all of Persia. Vashti pauses, making sure the eyes take him in: his height, his palpable goodness. She has him, that is—and here is Vashti’s pivot, here is where she must go gently, as if innocent of her own intention—Esther will have Baraz if he gets back to her before daybreak. She will have him only if they leave in time.

“He can go now,” says Itz.

“He’s here to help.”

“We don’t need his help.”

Vashti wishes she could stuff Itz in a rug again, just for a while, until they are out. He’s here to help me, she thinks at him. I was first, I am still first, I will be first until I am gone. There is no way to change this.

Itz narrows his eyes. He hears her, maybe. Or he is just a precocious boy, expert in skepticism. “Who are you?” he asks.

Vashti perceives in the upturned faces around her a breath withheld—Itz has planted doubt in them, too. She looks to Baraz. She is a loyal maidservant to Esther; this is the answer she is supposed to give. But in Baraz’s raised eyebrows she can see that he agrees with her: Itz will never believe that story. Itz has the power to turn the camp against them.

Vashti looks into the shadows of Itz’s eyes and says, “I am Queen Vashti.”

The people shift as one. Their awe makes a heat that she can feel, a heat she knows well, so well that for a moment the scene is familiar to her, and her feet press into the earth, lifting her body away, so that she feels herself at a distance. She is pleased, for they want to believe her and she depends upon their believing her, and also ashamed, at how susceptible they are, even these people who are not supposed to worship other people.

But there is no time for shame. And she is not in a position not to take full advantage of them. She says: “If I am not gone by sunrise, if I am found, they’ll kill me.”

A murmur rises. Marduk reaches for his son’s hand and pries his knife from his fingers. But Itz stands unmoved as a statue. “You’re Vashti,” he says. “Prove it.”

Again she looks to Baraz. It’s the first time she has known him to look afraid, and her blood grows heavy. She isn’t sure what he fears more: her failure to convince Itz or what she will do to convince him. They are both thinking of the same thing, she knows, though it makes only an illusory kind of sense, and though Baraz has spent his career protecting her from such humiliations. But without Itz, they lose the people, and she and Baraz will have to go out into the desert alone, as almost no one does, certainly not a tree-tall eunuch and a woman. They will be caught and killed, the gold sewn into Vashti’s robes sliced out and stolen—or she will be recognized, and hauled back, and both will be killed where they began. And in the process Esther will have lost Baraz, as they promised her would not happen.