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

become something else entirely.
    The next day I had Asm, my priest, proclaim me High Priestess and Daughter of Almaqah before our entire company. He had frowned when I first told him.
    “Princess, why do you ask this thing?” he said.
    “Who do you think will provide the gold for the temple when you are chief priest? I am not asking.”
    For the first time since my arrival on the southern shore, I set aside my soiled tunic and donned my carnelian robe. I unwound my hair and hung my heavy crescent collar around my neck. I put on my rings, the weight of them foreign to fingers dried and cracked with travel, and set my gold headdress with the fall of delicate filigree on my brow.
    All morning the sky had progressively darkened to the west. The moment Asm held the gilded horns over my head and proclaimed me High Priestess of the Moon, Daughter of the Bull, a rumble sounded from the far range as though the mountains had calved from the edge of the earth. At the time I thought nothingof this; it was the season, and the highlands had gathered clouds for days. Under the weight of so much cloth and gold, I would have counted the gale of any storm a blessing in the mid-morning swelter.
    I was not prepared for the startled ripple that shuddered through the tribesmen. For the tens and then hundreds who sank to their knees. I saw from the corner of my eye how Khalkharib stared and Wahabil fell low . . . my priest, stark-faced, and Maqar, palm outstretched as though I were not the woman who had slept a hundred nights in his arms, but a god.
    Afterward, Asm, who had wanted to wait to conduct the rite at the temple complex in Marib, proclaimed the moment a sign, and said he would never question me again.
    “Tell me, Daughter of Almaqah, did you have a vision?”
    I shook my head and he seemed to accept this with some disappointment. I did not tell him that I had not been looking for signs. That the rite, for me, had been claim and dread bargain, both. Daughter of Almaqah. Even my father, high priest before me, had not dared to identify himself as the son of the god. He had not needed to, using his throne as a vehicle for the cult, rather than the other way around.
    Now my triumph or failure would be shared by the moon god himself—the name of Almaqah irrevocably burnished or tarnished by the outcome of this march for generations to come.
    If I was the moon god’s thrall, he would also be mine.
    I buried a precious jade necklace in the clearing before we broke camp.
    See me to my throne.
    That afternoon, the sky roiled and broke over the mountains.
    A t the eastern end of the Harib Valley we were met with nearly seven hundred tribesmen who pledged ready loyalty to me. Half that number were my kinsmen, the faces of those few I had once known—cousins, slaves, and uncles—grown unfamiliar. The kinsmen of Khalkharib and Maqar, led by his father, Salban, comprised the other half.
    I saw the way they pretended not to search my face behind the veil. The way one of them stared into my eyes before he lifted his palm. So they had heard, by then, the story of my installment as High Priestess. And somehow I felt that we met as greater strangers because of it.
    It was a relief to me when one of them said, “Cousin, do you remember how we used to play in the palace? You were four and I was five and I would catch lizards for you. Now, I will cut down north men for you!” I said that I did and embraced him, but part of my memory of those years had long burned away.
    We were by now within the western fringe of the Sayhad, the desert that formed the southwest corner of the waste. There was fodder here, where the great wadi once ran into her thirsty sands—bindweed, salty tamarisk, and last year’s sedge.
    From here, a man traveling north and east might ride for a month, losing himself among the dunes and calcified flats to exhaustion, dehydration, or madness before he ever encountered another soul. The vast sands had protected Saba’s eastern