“Come,” answers Amira.
But Vashti is thinking. She thought of the story incessantly the first couple days of their march—what she would tell, what she would leave out. But then she stopped, maybe because she stopped believing that they would ever rest. Who was to say when a people was gone from the place they had been? It seemed to her that they might walk forever. So now she must work to recall what she decided. And now, too, she has walked farther with them. She must consider what she has come to know.
She begins to walk again but slowly; soon the people around her slow, too, adjusting to match her pace. They do so without looking at her, as they’ve done the whole way, ever attentive to her without admitting their attentiveness, shifting as she shifts, making sure she is never left on the flanks or behind. Whether they think they’re protecting her or protecting themselves, she can’t decide, or rather she comes to different conclusions on different days. They don’t trust her fully, that’s clear. And why should they? But now that they’re close to a destination she senses in them a new impatience with her, something that borders perhaps on contempt and makes her feel more acutely the demands of her task ahead. They left for her. Or this is what they tell themselves—as little fealty or fear as they should seem to owe her, this is what they need to believe. What will she give them in return?
It’s not her story they want, of course. She is only the queen who was banished so their part could begin. She warrants a mention, maybe two. Make way for Esther! They will think they want to know everything. So Vashti will have to make them think she is telling them everything. Esther the maiden in the night station. It will have to be a bowdlerized night station, bawdy but not dark, not depraved. Only as they imagine. Esther the one girl (Lara will be excised; Lara is too complicated) who will not paint her face or tower her hair, whose natural beauty is such that the king is instantly besotted. The king means well but does not have his own thoughts; the king wants above all to be king, to possess and declare; the king is a dupe. They will like this. He is not one of them. But Esther. She will have to do something very brave. Esther had in fact done something very brave, but it was not the thing they would want her to have done—never mind that she became the beast for them as much as for her. In the story, she has to do something that is entirely and explicitly for them, something that emphasizes her virtue (excise Baraz in the linen room, excise the minister’s advances, excise anything she may have wanted for herself) and above all proves her loyalty and her good luck. It will be the kind of outrageously good luck that can masquerade as wisdom, the kind of luck that results in triumphs a people can then believe they deserve.
Her trial will involve going to the king unbidden, Vashti thinks. Esther did that, and she will do it in the story. He is harmless, of course. But they don’t know that.
She slows further, to think. The story is like tendrils of twine she’s trying to braid into rope. Around her the people’s frustration at her pace is a palpable heat, and Vashti finds the uncle—Marduk—squinting back at her. Why he hates her she can only guess. Maybe he hates all Persians, or anyone who is higher than him, anyone who makes him feel as his brother did. Maybe he is simply exhausted. He has lost his wife, it seems, and maybe one child—it is hard to tell which children belong to which adults. Or maybe it’s simpler than all that. Maybe he does not like Vashti because she is not Esther. Vashti saw how his mouth gaped as she talked about his niece, how when she exaggerated the girl’s newfound plumpness, he flinched.
The story, she thinks, lengthening her stride again, will have to prominently and positively feature the uncle. It will begin with him. It did begin with him! The uncle with the idea of sending his niece to the king. The uncle will have to return, more than once.
As Marduk turns away and begins to walk, next to his tall son, the story grows and coalesces in Vashti’s mind, not the story Itz asked for but the one he actually needs. Itz will not be in the story. Itz needs a new story, one that has nothing to do with him. But the uncle wants the old story—not as it is but as it might have been. He wants to go back, and do better, and for everything to turn out well. He wants to slay the villain. The villain will be the minister, of course. (The villain is, in fact, the minister.) So Marduk will be a hero, too, along with Esther, Esther who will want what she has. (And she does now, in certain respects, doesn’t she?) Marduk and Esther standing atop Persia, grinding the minister’s head into the earth. Or maybe not that, exactly, but something like it. A gallows. A hanging meant for one of their own but delivered to another. Reversal, revenge. Yes. Vashti picks up her pace. And other things, she thinks, that would never happen but must happen. Things they don’t have the shamelessness for in life. The story doesn’t have to be believable, she realizes. It has to be the opposite—so unbelievable that they can believe in it. So far from what they know to be true that they can lose sight of the truth. Rivers of wine. Harlots. A pageant. A parade! Spies and riots and then a party. So much blood shed by their enemies they won’t know what to do but howl
