“But as you also know,” the minister continues, “one must not change direction. The queen had to be killed. The bird had to be killed. All this is clear. Less clear is how you brought the thing to life. Your people—” his breath in her nostrils, smelling of meat “—insist there is one God. They insist to the point of torture. To the point of death. It’s their one bravery, I suppose. And perhaps it’s why they stay. Perhaps they imagine from that quarter will come their relief.” The fingers go slack for a moment, before coming alive again at his next thought. “But that’s irrelevant to what I want to know, which is how you can be one of them, yet play God.”
Esther struggles to speak. “I did no such thing.”
“The bird,” breathes the minister. “You created the bird.”
“The bird was already a bird.”
“Is that right. I want to know how you do it.”
“That’s not possible.”
“But Darius is growing larger.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“He’s walking. He might be sent to the training grounds. They’re far from here, you know. He’ll make a fine warrior. One day a warrior king.”
“I’ll go with him.”
The minister chuckles. “You’ll go nowhere. Teach me.”
“It can’t be taught,” says Esther, her voice hoarse with the effort of trying to ignore his hand. Where is the beast? The beast would not have to endure this. “You have to be born into it.”
“Ahhh. But that’s what everyone told me when I was a child. Stop your airs. You’re nothing but a butcher’s son. I was lower than the king, who was not high. But now look at me. I tell him what to do.” The fingers wriggle. “Look at me.”
Esther vomits onto her plate.
It is the only alternative to screaming. It is excused, her condition being what it is. It gets her out of the room. But it does not get her away from the minister more generally, neither his actual presence nearly everywhere she goes—pressing, rubbing, taunting—nor his questions, which torment her now as if he’s grafted them into her mind. Had she tried to act as God? But what else would make them go at this point? If not pillage and rape, if not a ban on spices? Somehow the ban scares her the most—it seems the kind of silent loss that could finally tip a people out of existence.
She begins to walk the palace again, searching, though she does not know at first for what. She sees faces, Itz’s and Nadav’s and her aunt’s and her aunt’s washing partner’s and Marduk’s and faces of people whose names she never knew. But the faces are false, she knows. Even as they appear clearly in her mind she sees that they are facades of faces, molds, as if the real faces have been caught in sap. Who knows if these people are alive anymore? Even Marduk appears as an innocent, his long cheeks and hard eyes calling up a longing in her. She has been gone too long, she understands. The understanding makes her more frantic. She is looking, she realizes, for the bones room. She wants a fox, to replace the bird. If playing God is what she was doing, she will do it again. She has the energy for a fox. She is almost certain. She will teach the fox not scent but language, and the fox will dig until it hears her people talking up above, then it will deliver her message. At last. And then they’ll leave, before they’re all killed.
If the idea is impractical, so be it. Through portal and passage Esther searches, Darius on her back or running beside her, her stomach preceding them like a moon. The midwives don’t stop her this time, maybe because she carried the first one well, or because he is the boy the king wanted; that need is sated. Or maybe they let her go because she moves so quickly, like a surging wave, that they are afraid of what she might do if they try to restrain her. This isn’t the same as their fearing her, she knows—if they feared her, she would have power over them, and she doesn’t. It’s her lack of power that scares them—they know she is fully trapped; their fear is that she will blow.
A week after the dinner, her punishment arrives. Darius is taken from her rooms. He’ll be raised at the training grounds, she is told by one of the midwives as she measures Esther’s stomach. So matter-of-fact Esther almost misses it. Just right. Not much longer now. Your son …
She is allowed one visit each week.
When she sees him, she thinks she might bite into him. Take a doughy forearm into her mouth. Swallow an ear. When he is taken again, she cries until the midwives do something—she never knows—that makes her fall asleep, and when she wakes, and remembers, she begins again to cry. She would kill herself trying to get to him, if she did not have the other one inside her.
So she begins to teach the minister. He will not succeed. She comforts herself with this. Even if a shred of magic were buried somewhere in him, he would not be able to access it; to access it, you had to be receptive; to be receptive, you had to be capable of admitting all you did not know. But she can’t let him fail outright, either. If he fails, he will blame her. He will take Darius to Persepolis the whole year round. She has to make the minister fail without realizing it; she must make him an eternal apprentice, so that he inches forward, or perceives himself inching forward, but never quite enough. This will be its own kind of sorcery. She will have to trick him into thinking he is learning until he dies.
It will be a kind of circling, she thinks, endless movement without actually going anywhere. Like the camp used to do before the attacks started, when all they were hiding from was the sun.
She teaches the minister. He does not touch her during their lessons, a pleasant fact she understands has nothing to do with humility; he is simply unexcited by the prospect of molesting her without the king present.
Darius is returned to her. Though he is walking now, often away from her, she does not let him out of her sight.
Her stomach begins, once or twice each day, to harden as if into rock. Her time to find the bones room is running out.
She searches. But the minister is probably right. Why would they leave now if they haven’t already?
She searches. But what if they are already gone? Maybe they walked off a year ago, into the desert. How would Esther know? The only information she gets comes from within the palace. Everyone could be lying. Even Baraz. Maybe especially Baraz.
Baraz is nowhere to be found.
People stop looking her in the eye.
Only the midwives touch her. And Darius. Though he runs now, fast, laughing.
A midwife tells her that Darius was well cared for, by a woman who claims she knew Esther in the night station, a woman with one eyebrow. And Esther thinks of the last time she saw Lara, and wonders if it’s too late, if Lara might yet be a friend, if she might help. Esther starts thinking she sees her, around corners and behind doors, but she can never move fast enough to reach her.
The minister tells her she is losing her mind.
She is the minister’s teacher.
But the minister may be right.
* * *
She is dreaming when he wakes her, his voice a comfort she brings into the dream with her, a dream of childhood, a floor of papyrus reeds, yellow grass, Darius’s hair, Darius a friend, Esther only as tall as the grown-ups’ knees, Baraz’s voice: “Shhhh, wake up,” a tilting sky, a bowl of rice. It takes his hand on her shoulder to lift her out. At once, her blood begins to pound. Is the baby coming? Has Darius been taken? She rises onto her knees. Darius is there, his skin pink in the light thrown by Baraz’s torch. Her inside is calm.