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.
“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
