“She is treated well,” Vashti announces, avoiding Itz’s eyes. “She has one child, a boy, and another soon to be born. She sleeps on a bed of silks …” As Vashti describes Esther’s days, the shaded courtyards she walks in, the robes she is wrapped in, the banquets she attends, she includes every sumptuous detail she can think of, colors and textures and scents, scenes that are somehow both factually true in that Vashti can attest to them—she once lived them—and also fantasy, a tripling and quadrupling of the facts, an eruption of desires fulfilled. The more she talks, the more she herself begins to believe. She feels the tent nod and shares in their gladness, absorbs it for herself: Esther, she is convinced, will do more than survive. The child is beautiful, she adds—Esther sleeps with him in her bed. And she has Baraz, too, the most trustworthy eunuch in all of Persia. Vashti pauses, making sure the eyes take him in: his height, his palpable goodness. She has him, that is—and here is Vashti’s pivot, here is where she must go gently, as if innocent of her own intention—Esther will have Baraz if he gets back to her before daybreak. She will have him only if they leave in time.
“He can go now,” says Itz.
“He’s here to help.”
“We don’t need his help.”
Vashti wishes she could stuff Itz in a rug again, just for a while, until they are out. He’s here to help me, she thinks at him. I was first, I am still first, I will be first until I am gone. There is no way to change this.
Itz narrows his eyes. He hears her, maybe. Or he is just a precocious boy, expert in skepticism. “Who are you?” he asks.
Vashti perceives in the upturned faces around her a breath withheld—Itz has planted doubt in them, too. She looks to Baraz. She is a loyal maidservant to Esther; this is the answer she is supposed to give. But in Baraz’s raised eyebrows she can see that he agrees with her: Itz will never believe that story. Itz has the power to turn the camp against them.
Vashti looks into the shadows of Itz’s eyes and says, “I am Queen Vashti.”
The people shift as one. Their awe makes a heat that she can feel, a heat she knows well, so well that for a moment the scene is familiar to her, and her feet press into the earth, lifting her body away, so that she feels herself at a distance. She is pleased, for they want to believe her and she depends upon their believing her, and also ashamed, at how susceptible they are, even these people who are not supposed to worship other people.
But there is no time for shame. And she is not in a position not to take full advantage of them. She says: “If I am not gone by sunrise, if I am found, they’ll kill me.”
A murmur rises. Marduk reaches for his son’s hand and pries his knife from his fingers. But Itz stands unmoved as a statue. “You’re Vashti,” he says. “Prove it.”
Again she looks to Baraz. It’s the first time she has known him to look afraid, and her blood grows heavy. She isn’t sure what he fears more: her failure to convince Itz or what she will do to convince him. They are both thinking of the same thing, she knows, though it makes only an illusory kind of sense, and though Baraz has spent his career protecting her from such humiliations. But without Itz, they lose the people, and she and Baraz will have to go out into the desert alone, as almost no one does, certainly not a tree-tall eunuch and a woman. They will be caught and killed, the gold sewn into Vashti’s robes sliced out and stolen—or she will be recognized, and hauled back, and both will be killed where they began. And in the process Esther will have lost Baraz, as they promised her would not happen.
A shift occurs in the color of the tent’s walls, an upturn of hue so slight it might only be perceptible by someone whose life depends on darkness. Vashti, who has not seen the sun in thirty-four months, experiences it as a pulse of fire. She turns her back to Itz and lets her robes fall off her shoulders until she is exposed from nape to waist. A gasp goes up in the tent, followed by silence as they take in what she is showing them: the wings spanning her shoulders, the beak pointing in tandem with her spine toward the sky, the two black eyes that look out from the top of the head.
She begged Baraz for the bird when she still imagined that she might escape aboveground. She had seen high priestesses turn their skin into parchment, had seen dancers in the night station do it, too, ink flowers they had never seen onto their buttocks or breasts. Baraz had balked, then given in—of course he had given in. He must have been relieved that she was no longer raging and pacing, as she had in the early days of her banishment, when she swung between planning ways to kill herself and planning a coup to topple Ahasuerus. I could do it, she would declare, I would win, to which Baraz would nod—of course. He nodded because he loved her and he nodded because it was true: if she called for it, she would have the loyalty of the guards. Most of them had worked for her father; they saw Ahasuerus as a benign but inferior intruder; they would turn for her if she commanded them to. She went so far as to order Baraz to gather arms.
Then, as suddenly as if she’d run into one of her walls, she was done. A calm fell over her, she lost her appetite for blood; she saw clearly that to wage war on Ahasuerus would be to destroy the kingdom. Her father had raised her too well for that. She knew that her banishment itself, understood by most to be her death, would be enough to confuse the people for thousands of years, and that to reverse it would be far worse, that the course had to be kept. She would have to flee, instead. And so the bird began to take shape in her mind, and soon she wanted it not only in her mind but on her body; she wanted to become it.
Baraz brought substances, some for her to drink, some for her to smoke, as he worked with his needles and ink. The needles were longer than any she had seen, made from antelope horn, he said, and she played with the ones he wasn’t using, rubbing their silky lengths against her lips, jabbing their points into her fingertips until she bled. She was high, she was hibernating in highness—and all the while, the heavy air never moved. Then Baraz came with news. His favorite virgin, the one who did not want to be queen, had been chosen. She had turned herself into a beast—no, not metaphorically. She had tried to escape her fate, and failed, and now the palace was thicker with guards than he’d ever seen it; some were new, loyal to Ahaseurus, others brought in from Persepolis, men who’d known Vashti since she was born. Her idea that she would sneak out in costume was unlikely to succeed.
This time, she did not scratch or slam the walls. She thought. If Ahasuerus learned she was alive, he would break. Any equilibrium he’d found—which the new queen was testing, evidently—would be spun into chaos.
And so the fox. Vashti did not know that Esther was above somewhere, in the bones room, working out the same problems, devising parallel solutions. Though she must have known. Esther, too. They must have moved, in moments, as one. Or, it was simply obvious, universal: anyone would think first to fly, above the earth, and, when that didn’t work, to go through.
She turns now, baring the fox that crawls across her stomach. One front claw wraps around her waist; the other cups her left breast. Baraz’s lines are simple but bold, so that the fox’s tail, skirting her ribs, appears to quiver. Itz’s mouth is open. Agony sings in Vashti’s ears. Who is this whore, she thinks. This whore has swallowed the woman who was called a whore for her virtue. It does not follow. But of course it does. Of course Ahasuerus hadn’t wanted her to be virtuous at that particular moment, because it made her look frigid, and if she was frigid, it was about him, whereas a whore—or a leper, or whatever other conclusions they came to—well, that was about her. She was a woman like that. By the time his drink wore off, she knew, it was too late. She was gone, dead—and he could not change his mind. He could not be seen as weak.