The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen by Tosca Lee Read Free Book Online

power of its own.
    Almaqah had called me back to Saba. Almaqah must make me clever.
    I spoke seldom but listened to everything. I learned quickly who was—and was not—among my expected list of allies. Who had the best spies. Which nobles the others looked to first. Whose men had the best camels, most kin-ties, deadliest feuds.
    Thread by thread, I began to decipher the lacework of loyalties, ambition, and grudges that had knit me at its center years before my knowledge. With every company of tribesmen who joined us, I did the thing I had done now for years: I studied. I learned. Whom I must exercise the greatest influence over. Whose backing I required before all others. Whom I could trust. Whom I must not.
    But knowledge did not lessen the nobles’ distinct forbearance whenever I approached or smooth their stilted answers even as they bowed their heads—except when it came to the fluent reminders of their contribution to my cause.
    “The tribesmen of Kahar come to you with axe and spear and sword,” their chieftain said in his accented Sabaean. “Six hundred men I bring you. A hundred animals will we sacrifice to Almaqah for your health when we return to our territory and you are queen. And you must not forget us either.”
    I felt by now that what had started as blood right had become a long list of bartered favors to the point that I had never felt so indebted in my life.
    “Yafush,” I whispered, late one night, rolling up the corner of my black tent flap. In this sea of men sleeping by dying fires and couched camels, my tent was practically indistinguishable from nearly fifty others like it.
    The eunuch, who faced always away, did not turn. “You are restless, Princess.”
    I lay down, the broad slope of his shoulder like the westernrange against the stars. He never strayed far from my side, standing over me even when I squatted to relieve myself beneath the privacy of my cloak—the same way any Sabaean man did, which Yafush, the eunuch, never failed to call womanly.
    “I see the way they look at me,” I said softly. “I am a thing—a crown to be worn on another head.”
    “That is good.”
    “Why?”
    “They, too, will protect you with their lives. At least for now.”
    A man murmured in his sleep from a neighboring fire, the sound cut short by a gruff complaint.
    “Tell me about the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut.”
    “You know already about this queen.”
    I did—had read every account of the Egyptian monarch who sent the first expedition down the Red Sea to trade with my ancestors in Punt. The female Pharaoh who styled herself king. I had dreamed mottled dreams of her, of the false Pharaonic beard, delicate fingertips curled around the flail of her office, of the sun god Amun, her divine father.
    “Tell me what your people say about her,” I whispered.
    He rolled slightly onto his back at last without turning to look at me. “They say she made herself like a man. And that the Pharaoh after her erased her every image. You must not let that happen, Princess.”
    “There’s little I can do about that if I am dead.”
    “A woman cannot rule like a man, Princess.”
    “And why not?”
    “Because she is a woman.”
    “You say this to me? Your own people have queens.”
    “A queen must rule as a woman, Princess.”
    I was silent for a moment, understanding the enigmatic Nubian at last.
    “Tell me, is it true she was the daughter of Amun? How can a woman be the daughter of a god?”
    “She is the Pharaoh. If Amun, rather than her father, puts her on the throne, whose daughter is she?” He smiled, his teeth white in the darkness.
    I smiled, started to let the tent flap fall, but then caught it.
    “Yafush . . .”
    “Yes, Princess.”
    “Will you not call me ‘queen’ now?”
    “You are a woman of many names, Princess.”
    I stared up at the darkness in my tent nearly until dawn, thinking of what Yafush had said. If I was discounted as a woman but must not be made masculine, then I must