They are tolerated here. Which is more than they can say about most places.
* * *
Then a kid, barely nine, digging a hole to bury one of his baby teeth, finds a few of the goblin’s counterfeit coins and, not knowing the difference, sneaks off to the market to surprise his mother with a new spoon. He lost her old one in the river last week. His sister had cleaned it and laid it on the bank. He only wanted to see if it could float. But the river took the spoon faster than he thought possible, faster than the river itself moved, and by the time the boy, waist-deep, scrambled to the bank, the spoon had disappeared around the far bend.
At the market, the boy chooses the wrong stall, owned by a Persian whose family has fallen. The man’s bitterness is clear to the boy, it shines in his eyes, but once the boy has spotted the spoon—cypress and the length of his arm from elbow to middle finger, just like his mother’s original—he cannot be put off. He is a soft boy, according to his father, and might even choose the bitter stallkeeper with an unthinking urge to make him less bitter. The man takes his coins and hands over the spoon and the boy departs for the camp, triumphant. But within seconds, the man looks down and sees. His muscles twitch to action. He moves to run after the boy, but his wife grabs his arm. She knows he is capable of more. No one—not even her husband—knows the wife’s story, but her bitterness is deep enough to make her husband’s taste sweet. That boy is from the camp, she says. Swindler of the first degree. You’ll let him get away with a beating around the ears?
* * *
So it begins. The man gathers other men and they move on the camp like a wind. They kick over pots, stamp out fires, pull up stakes. They do not touch the people. They don’t even look at them. They sweep through as if the people are not there at all.
The Hebrews move. They know how to move. After the men have left—they come frequently now, once or twice a week, though never at the same time—they make their camp again, farther along the wall. This is like chasing the shade but different: they do not go far, but their work is hard. They must remake their tents and pallets and pits. They have little time to form their bowls and beads, or pit their dates, or wash their sheep’s guts. Some want to go west, or east, but others want to wait—the Persians will lose interest, they argue. They take turns hiding the boy who made the mistake with the coins. A few believe he should be sacrificed, laid out before the Persians, to save the camp. They are ignored. The boy, called Itz, is wrapped in rugs, or buried in sand, or hidden at the river behind rocks and sheets the women pretend to wash again and again.
The boy’s father, Marduk, who was already angry at the boy generally, for his softness, is now angrier because the boy is useless to him. Itz is his oldest child—the others are one and two and four and five and six and eight—yet he can no longer be sent to carry water or taken on the journey to work the family’s fig trees. And Marduk cannot go as often as he should, because he is needed to help remake the camp. When he does go, he finds fruit rotting on the ground. His anger swells. He can’t afford to pay a boy from a neighboring tent to help, and he can’t bear to beg for help, and he can’t even bring the one person who would help him along to help, not because she can’t do the work—she can, far better than a nine-year-old boy—but because he cannot allow himself to be alone with her. She is seventeen. She is Marduk’s niece, left in his care when his brother died, and she is the source of Marduk’s holiest anger, the frustration that heats his blood until it hurts. Her name is Esther.
Esther will not be beautiful always. In some other time, her tall nose and brown lips and ferning eyebrows that touch between her eyes will not be considered the pinnacle of beauty, but now, in the early summer of 462 BCE—and now is all Marduk has, unable as he is to go back to when his brother was alive or forward to when the girl will be old enough to marry respectably among the Jews, let alone far enough back or forward to reach an entirely different pinprick of civilization—now her face contains nobility (a lank, tall angle to the nose and jaw) and sex (a pink shimmer to the eyelids, glimpsed at each blink) and mystery (even Marduk, who knows perfectly well the tribes from which she descends, looks at her and wonders, What is she?).
And only seventeen. And a late bloomer, which is why it’s taken so long for her to smoke up Marduk’s tent, swell his brain and nether parts, obscure his wife, who is or at least was beautiful, too. Only Marduk’s children are innocent to Esther’s menace: to them she is a second mother, more patient and less tired than their own.
Marduk thinks of selling her into slavery. He thinks of killing her. He loves his niece, he hates her. He loved his brother, he hated his brother. Harun. Favorite from the age of three, barely up to Marduk’s waist and already sitting with their father in shul. This was when they lived in the city still, within four walls. While Marduk rolled marbles, Harun taught himself to read; by four he spoke three languages; by five he recited Torah, though he couldn’t look you in the eye. Later he was celebrated in Bashan for opposing the old synagogue’s opulent renovations and starting his own services in a former stable. He stayed a dreamer even after his wife died; he was carrying an armload of books during the Four Day Raid when he turned down the wrong street. Marduk cannot kill his brother’s daughter, and he cannot sell her into slavery. He can’t even climb on top of her, though he knows most other men would. He is a good man, Marduk. This is what his wife says to his children when they run from his flexed palm. And he is. How could a man who was not good grow such sweet, perfectly formed fruit?
“Let me come,” Esther says to Marduk, balancing the baby on her right hip as she chops figs. Esther’s left-handedness is her one ugliness, but even that Marduk wants to eat.
“I can help pick,” she says, and it’s clear that she offers freely. Her black eyes are flecked yellow, like a night sky. He would swim into them, if he could. He would hide there, safe from her body.
* * *
One day, the answers to Marduk’s many problems seem to come all at once, in the form of a command sent out from the palace: A pageant! Bring the most beautiful virgins from across the kingdom! The king will choose one for a new queen!
What happened to the old queen—who was herself newish—Vashti? No one knows—certainly no one in the camp. The command is not meant for them. But they are not deaf. We are not deaf! Marduk shouts silently. His ire fists, then coalesces into a thought. It’s like a ball of mud suddenly turning to clear water.
Esther will be the queen of Persia.
Ha!
He knows it’s impossible. She is a Jew; she is a no one. She’d go up against girls from as far away as Greece. If he spoke the idea outside his tent, the people would howl.
And yet. Maybe it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t have a chance. Maybe the idea is smaller, and more practical: Marduk sends her with his figs—his most succulent, sweet enough to make a man moan—and the king, though he cannot choose her, chooses Marduk as his new fig vendor. He cancels his existing contract and takes on Marduk and then, at the right moment, Marduk tells the king about his son. (For the purposes of optimism, Marduk ignores the question of whether the king’s fig man would have access to the king’s ear.) He is honest. He confesses to his son’s mistake with the coin. Then he tells about the marauders. The king, understanding—or at least fig-loving—orders them to stop. Itz will be a boy again. In a year, Marduk will have made enough from his figs to marry Esther off to Nadav, the boy she says she loves.