Vivian Barr looks at Lily for a long moment. Then she sits back from the table with a sigh. One of her hands drifts downward. Within a second, the dog is there, fitting himself to her fingers. “Girls are always unnerving,” she says.
SUSA
VASHTI
Is Her Mind Sound?
For an instant, engulfed by the tent’s blackness, Vashti fears she is in the earth again. The sky, the breeze, the sand, must all have been a hallucination. Fevered answers to questions she’d thought she’d stopped asking. Sour air fills her nostrils. A keen forms in her throat. I am entombed again.
Then a torch flares. An arm shimmies into view, a chest, a man—or not quite a man. A man-sized boy whose bones have stretched faster than they’ve been fed. He wears only a cloth at his hips; in one hand he holds the torch, in the other a knife. Vashti knows at once that he is Itz. The boy who lost his mother’s spoon and accidentally stole another, the boy who started the war on the camp. He would be the first to wake. His head lifts the tent’s ceiling; his jaw has the overshot squareness particular to pubescent boys; an Adam’s apple slides in its slot. Vashti takes it all in. She will relay what she sees to Baraz—each hair, every angle, the kinds of details he will miss on his own—and instruct him to bring all of it back to Esther. Not the small number of tents remaining, nor the empty-stomach smell, but the beauty of her cousin as he brandishes that tiny blade. This will be Vashti’s token of thanks, however small, for the hours Esther spent in her cave, telling Vashti what she needed to know.
“We won’t hurt you,” Baraz says. He lifts a hand, his gesture for peace, a gesture he used so often on Vashti in her first days in the hole that she began to think—because it worked on her—that he possessed hypnotic powers. But it doesn’t work on Itz, who continues wagging his knife at them, and whose eyes, dark in their hollows, are impossible to read.
Vashti is sorry, to come upon them like this.
The others are stirring now, a collective rumbling like a caravan. They are more than one family—they are, she will learn, four families and assorted abandoneds—and Baraz, trying to preempt attack, says loudly: “Esther sent us.” He says it again, making sure they hear the name, for though Esther insisted they speak basic Persian, and though Baraz loves Esther, he has the same view of her tribe as most, Vashti included, that they are an insular and stubborn people.
He says it a third time, and as their faces rise into the torchlight now, creased with sleep, blinking, they are silent, with the exception of one man who leaps up and says, “How can you prove it?”
This is Marduk, of course. Vashti recognizes him right away. A bit like the king, Esther said, and this is true: the uncle puffs his chest and steps in front of Itz. He looks from Vashti to Baraz and back with a practiced violence in his eyes, though it’s easy to see, in his stooped form—his son, behind him, stands a full head taller—that his gaze is more forceful than any harm he can actually inflict.
She thinks of all the proof she can offer. All Esther told her to help her ingratiate herself with them. Vashti knows about the goblin. She knows about the rugs that rolled Itz back and forth from the river, and she knows how Marduk and his wife laughed, like vultures, before he slapped his niece. She knows more still: that Marduk was forever jealous of his brother Harun; that he lives in fear that he’s a fool. A blowhard, Esther called him, perhaps not with that word but with another that meant the same in that time and place.
But not everything Esther told her will be of help. Much of it—most of it, probably—they do not want to hear. And some of it would only stretch their disbelief further. The malformed tips of Esther’s ears, for instance, or the bird she brought to life. Even if her exertions might demonstrate her devotion to the people in this tent, they will not go down smoothly, for they are not tales of mere goblins or simple sorcery but—Esther’s term—perversion. She had sat on Vashti’s bed as she said this, her hands absentmindedly catching her son’s hair as he toddled by to explore some other corner of the cave. Vashti watched the boy as he went, digging in the floor and poking his fingers into the walls as his mother told her story. She watched one thing and listened to another. The beast Esther had become. The nails the minister had dug into her face as Ahasuerus watched. (Poor man, Vashti thought, before thinking, Poor girl. He had never chosen before. He had only been chosen, and in a desperate moment.) The skeleton she had stolen from the bones room. The breath she had drawn from the bird as the boy slept.
What she had done was to pervert nature itself. I didn’t see it that way, she said. But the minister made me see it. I played God. Vashti didn’t understand at first. She didn’t think Esther, or anyone, ought to listen to the minister. But you said you had a lesson, she said, with a sorceress in the camp; you said your own mother came from a family with sorcery running through it. Not the same, Esther said. What they did and what she had done. They turned grass into rope, lit fires out of rock. They did not turn a living being into another being or bring a dead thing to life. So even if Marduk and Itz and the others believed it, Vashti knows that they would not want to know. Neither would they want to know about the bare, almost vacant tone with which Esther had laid out her story before Vashti, like a servant laying a table of words. Vashti did not believe that Esther was in fact unharrowed by all that had happened—whenever she turned back from watching Darius, Vashti caught something, a twitch in her jaw, a darkness in her eyes—but she understood that Esther needed to pretend to be. And she knows that Marduk and Itz will need for her to have been that, too. Blasphemy, and suffering, will have to be excised. They need—look at them—something, one thing, that is not tragic.
“Your figs,” Vashti says. “I know, Esther told me, that you have a secret method of splicing their seeds, and that this is what makes them the most delicious in Persia.”
Marduk looks at her. There is pride in his eyes, wound with sorrow (his fig trees are no longer his) and warning (the secret still is), and Vashti nods, her promise not to tell.
“She sent us here to tell you. Tomorrow, there will be a massacre.”
She lets the lie sink in. They’ll all be dead within a year, that much she can see. She feels no regret, only a growing ease in her role. She is not in a hole and she is not in a palace; she is in a tent. A middle place, a moveable place. She will convince them.
“Esther says you have to go.”
The man and boy stare at her. Marduk lifts his chin. “She could not come herself?”
“No. She could not come herself.”
“She won’t help us?”
Vashti can’t speak for a moment. She nearly laughs, not because she finds him funny but because his query, his angry hope that has somehow survived these years, strikes her as impossibly sad. What did he imagine his niece was waiting for? What kind of queen did he think he had created, that she might have the power to save them and also the cruelty to bide her time? “No,” she says at last. “I wish I could tell you how she tried.”
Itz steps out from his father’s shadow. He has lowered the knife but his face contains its own sharpness. “What have they done to her?” he asks, and though his cracking voice betrays his youth, it is the only youthful thing about him. If there is a problem, Vashti thinks, it will be Itz. He and Vashti are not entirely unlike. They both know what it is to be hidden, trapped, for the sake of your own life. He sees through Vashti’s hedging. He understands that she could tell them how Esther tried and that she chooses not to. Even if he does not know the details, how she went to the king unbidden, brought to life a bird, offered her sex, he knows: Esther was never in a position to save them. He does not believe, as Vashti counted on everyone believing, that a queen is a queen is a queen.