Did she know that? Esther can’t decide. And she can’t see how it matters now. She presses her legs together more tightly, trying to squeeze the fingers into retreat, but it’s difficult to clamp down one part of your body with all your might while keeping other parts—in particular the face—appearing jovial and relaxed. It is, in fact, as Esther is neither the first nor last to discover, pretty much impossible. And the face must take precedence—the face either masks or gives away. As the minister’s fingers reach their intended goal, Esther shifts sideways but cannot escape.
“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
