But I would not cry in front of this boy. My mother pulled my arm but I would not yield and was rewarded with a sharp tug of my hair. I had all of two friends in this life, and the camel was one of them.
Give it to him, my mother whispered, leaning over me. A gift from my father, who sold stock to the king’s traders for their caravans. But the prince pulled away and ran back to peer, unblinking, into my face.Īt last his gaze fell to the carved camel in my hand. I shrank back as my older brother tried to lead him out to play now that the forced introduction was over. When my mother’s hand left the back of my neck and I was allowed to straighten at last, I found him staring, woe forgotten, at me. And so I was made to bow before him as though he were the king himself. Second, no male kin of mine would ever be seen recovering from tears.īut he was the youngest son of the king, who was cousin to my father. Ismeni, my mother said and pulled me forward by the wrist. He was two years older than I, or so they said, but I thought he acted like nothing so much as a baby. He had screwed up his face upon entering the cool mud-brick of our home with his nurse and I was sure he had just been crying. I didn’t think much of the runtling, as he was called within the tribe. He and his siblings had returned with their retinues to Sirwah, the old capital, to escape the summer heat of Marib on the edge of the desert. I was five the first time I laid eyes on Prince Agaziah. And so I grew up with the burden of a beauty that cannot be celebrated because of its potential, at any moment, to kill. My mother argued my innocence against the tribal elders, who, I am told, craned to peer at my face even as she tried to shield it with her hands so they might not call such loveliness in a child unnatural. Crops withered in the field and animals died of thirst. That summer was the hottest in memory for a generation. The morning I was born it is said the midwife cried out at the double misfortune of the star’s hazy glow and my having been born a girl. What they do not say is that in anything but the clearest sky, the Dog Star radiates confusion, muddling the minds of men at best-and portending ill omen at worst.
The hour of my birth, my mother burned incense to Shams, goddess of the sun, thinking in her innocence she, of any god, might understand a girl born under the brilliance of the Dog Star-a light so powerful that its first appearance just before sunrise in Saba invokes the floodwaters of the Nile in faraway Egypt.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP Ismeni, by Tosca Lee, Howard Books Saba (The biblical kingdom of Sheba in present-day Yemen) 989 BC
0 kommentar(er)
