But even the most enthusiastic of the girls now understands that this particular sort of ease can be unbearable. They understand that they are essentially slaves—and that only one of them will be freed. Their response is to fight, like dozens of crows going after the same bone. They hoard wires and ribbons and animal hair and bird feathers for their hair towers, whatever the eunuchs will smuggle in to them for whatever services they’ll perform for the eunuchs. This, too, they understand: they do work in the night station, albeit a particular kind of work, the oldest kind. They hide, they steal, they sabotage one another. They also braid each other’s hair, and take turns putting on finger-shadow plays about the king and Queen Vashti, and make each other laugh. They have to, or they’ll go crazy. Another old story. They have to despise and depend on each other.
The night station is not as Marduk thought: a brutal prison or a luxurious bathhouse. Evil or pure. Like nearly everything, it is neither, and both.
Lara and Esther are different from the other girls in that they believe that the one chosen as queen won’t actually be free. Lara’s tribe is anarchic and violent—anyone who tries to lead, man or woman, is swiftly killed. The palace, she says, is nothing but a facade, with the queen at the center of its hidden misery. Esther’s view, while less extreme, bears similar fruit: as a Jew she was raised to mistrust people who are worshipped, and as the daughter of her particular parents, she was taught to judge those who aspire to wealth and power. Both girls believe themselves superior to other people, subject to different rules, or in Lara’s case no rules at all. Between them they have created a third option, an alternate plot in which they will be released. Each has begun cultivating her own eunuch; she gives him something, but not too much. Esther’s is tall and too thin and has heavy eyelids and a soft mouth that make him look perpetually half-asleep. She lets him watch her. They meet in the room where the sheets and towels are stacked and she touches herself while he watches. One breast. That’s all, for now. Soon, she’ll introduce a second—later, she’ll lift her cloth. The eunuchs are nothing like girls, it turns out. Their voices aren’t high, despite what historians will report. They are not sexless. She has watched them hold a girl down until she licked another eunuch’s asshole, stick fingers into any place a finger can be stuck, make girls lie beneath them on the floor in the defecation room. Her eunuch is not like that. Baraz is his name, and she chose him for his fealty, perceived it in him as palpably as a scent. Though she doesn’t trust him fully yet, she trusts this. He touches her only with his eyes. The idea is that little by little, Esther will agitate and titillate him to such a degree that eventually he will do whatever she asks. The idea is that after the king has finally chosen, and Esther is not queen, she will go to him and say: Get me out. Do anything you want to me. I’ll do anything, if you’ll bring me back to the camp. And by that point his anguish will be such that he’ll do anything to have her.
Lara chose her eunuch because he’s very pale skinned, so pale it’s as if he’s not fully formed. She guessed, correctly, that he would like her fur. She lets him lie with her on her bed, his chest against her back or his back against her stomach. That’s all; they lie together. Already she has gotten him to sneak her tea, which Lara is not allowed because Mona says it stimulates hair growth. Like Esther, she has her plan.
The girls understand that their “plans” may be overly optimistic. They have no experience in these matters—does anyone? No special knowledge has been imparted to them, nothing beyond a belief in their own exceptionalism, and this was granted to them by two people who are dead and two others who live in a cave. Mostly, though, they are able to ignore their doubts, just as they ignore the despair that subsumed them when they first arrived. They have to. But sometimes, like now, as she sits in front of her patch of newly blank wall, her despair hits again—the erasure of her tally marks is like a blow to her ribs. Questions tumble through her mind, questions she has asked and tried to answer every day since she arrived. Why didn’t she run the night her uncle told her what he would do? (Because she did not want to go out into the desert alone.) Why, the day she left Marduk and the palace guards took his figs without a word, why didn’t she do something in that moment, shout or scream as she wanted to, to get herself kicked out? (Because she feared she would be killed.) Why did Marduk think Esther’s problem would be her Jewishness, a laughable notion now that she’s lived among half-breeds and mutts, many of them tribeless? (Because he believes in the exceptionalism of his own oppression.) And why would the king, after a queen like Vashti, of noble birth, known to be educated in archery and hunting, decide to choose from the streets and sands, the lowest of the low, when all they have to offer is their bodies? (Because all they have is their bodies.)
“What are you looking at?”
Lara is back, her jaw red from a shave. She lies down on Esther’s bed. Esther lies next to her. “My tally marks,” she says.
“They’re gone?” Lara is on her side, facing Esther.
“Look!” Esther says, nudging Lara’s knee with her own—turn over. But Lara shakes her head. “I’m too tired. I believe you.”
Esther watches as Lara’s eyes close—she observes the now familiar pattern of veins on her lids, the angry skin at her upper lip and jaw. Once, privately, Esther asked Mona why Lara wasn’t just sent home, a question that required every ounce of selflessness she possessed, for if Lara went, Esther would be alone. Mona answered as if she’d been asked where to find a chamber pot: It would be to admit failure, she said. Also, the king’s minister prefers a round number.
Esther cups a palm around Lara’s chin and presses as Lara has shown her, rocking from the heel of her hand to the tips of her fingers. Lara is quiet for a while. Her face relaxes. “Thank you,” she says without opening her eyes. Her knee finds Esther’s and nudges it back. “Sorry about your marks. How far had you got to?”
“Sixty-three.”
“Counting today?”
Esther thinks. The days run together. That was the reason for the marks in the first place.
“I don’t know,” she says.
Other girls walk in, laughing and talking. One asks another why she’s limping and the girl says it’s from a foot treatment and then another says no, it’s because she’s drunk, and they laugh more loudly than before. Lara opens her eyes and rolls them and Esther giggles. They watch each other as the girls continue their banter, which turns soon enough, as Esther and Lara know it will, to Queen Vashti. She is the one subject no one tires of, the story that gets told and told because no one knows how it ends and everyone who tells it gets to arrive at a cliff, look around at her audience, and smile. Then the speculations begin.
“But do you think she’s actually alive?”
“No.”
“Yes! They mated her with a donkey.”
“No! They decapitated her.”
“She was impaled.”
“How do you know?”
“My brother said—”
“What’s he, the king’s minister? I thought you come from Farna.”
“No, no, no. She was buried alive.”
“Can you imagine?”