The Book of V.: A Novel(3)

SUSA


ESTHER


The Shapely and Beautiful Maiden



The camp is as you imagine—which is not to say that it is as it was. Heat and sand and rock. Bare feet. Brown tents. Sand. What grass grew in the low swells has been ripped up and woven into pallets. A damp, dark track shows the way to and from the river, trampled to a sheen by heels and hooves. They are hundreds, but not a thousand. They drain the red river mud to clay, bake the clay into brick, use the bricks to mark their fire pits. They attempted a wall once but gave up within a day, understanding that if it could save them, it could also be their trap. So their only wall is the one they threw the camp up against when they first arrived: the outermost palace wall, a tree-high, tongue-pink slab of boundary that curves away infinitely—like any circle—in both directions.

In summer, when the sun is so hot a pebble can burst into flame and the far sands send up smoke, they wake and begin to walk. They walk slowly, following the palace wall and its shade. They carry their water and wares and infants, working as they walk, returning, by sundown, to where they began. Each time a crude place is left and returned to it appears a little less crude. In this way the camp begins to settle in their bones, not as home—they are not that na?ve—but as a place they will stay for however long they can.

Some hunt, while others grow fruit in groves a day’s distance away. A few dozen keep sheep, at a farther distance. Most stay in the camp, making things out of the clay, which they sell at the city market; a select few, like one woman who makes necklaces out of bird and fox and mole bones, sell to the palace. A small group makes magic, but it is crude magic—each time they are banished from a place, their strength is diluted, so that the granddaughter of a woman who could grow a shade tree in a month now takes six times as long. And so on. This generation can make two yolks grow in one egg, they can spin twine out of sand and water, they can summon a goblin from his hole in the river.

The goblin is not a sure bet. Sometimes he spits up true Persian coins and sometimes he spits up counterfeit, and it takes a sharp eye to know which is which. But he answers their summons and allows them to play master and what choice do they have? He is their goblin. They bury the counterfeit in the sand.

They have been here for decades, some say a century. Sometimes they send two boys to climb up the wall and tie a tarp to the jagged fort. The boys throw the tarp down and the people, arms raised, walk backward until the tarp’s limit. The tarp is many tarps sewn together. They stake it into the sand with daggers and twine and luxuriate in their pitch of darkness until a palace guard severs the boys’ knots and throws down the tarp. Often this occurs within minutes, but occasionally they get a few hours of reprieve. Years ago, when a new king and queen were named and the guards fell over, sick with wine, the people remained in the tarp’s shadow a full week.

They are tolerated here. Which is more than they can say about most places.



* * *



Then a kid, barely nine, digging a hole to bury one of his baby teeth, finds a few of the goblin’s counterfeit coins and, not knowing the difference, sneaks off to the market to surprise his mother with a new spoon. He lost her old one in the river last week. His sister had cleaned it and laid it on the bank. He only wanted to see if it could float. But the river took the spoon faster than he thought possible, faster than the river itself moved, and by the time the boy, waist-deep, scrambled to the bank, the spoon had disappeared around the far bend.

At the market, the boy chooses the wrong stall, owned by a Persian whose family has fallen. The man’s bitterness is clear to the boy, it shines in his eyes, but once the boy has spotted the spoon—cypress and the length of his arm from elbow to middle finger, just like his mother’s original—he cannot be put off. He is a soft boy, according to his father, and might even choose the bitter stallkeeper with an unthinking urge to make him less bitter. The man takes his coins and hands over the spoon and the boy departs for the camp, triumphant. But within seconds, the man looks down and sees. His muscles twitch to action. He moves to run after the boy, but his wife grabs his arm. She knows he is capable of more. No one—not even her husband—knows the wife’s story, but her bitterness is deep enough to make her husband’s taste sweet. That boy is from the camp, she says. Swindler of the first degree. You’ll let him get away with a beating around the ears?



* * *



So it begins. The man gathers other men and they move on the camp like a wind. They kick over pots, stamp out fires, pull up stakes. They do not touch the people. They don’t even look at them. They sweep through as if the people are not there at all.

The Hebrews move. They know how to move. After the men have left—they come frequently now, once or twice a week, though never at the same time—they make their camp again, farther along the wall. This is like chasing the shade but different: they do not go far, but their work is hard. They must remake their tents and pallets and pits. They have little time to form their bowls and beads, or pit their dates, or wash their sheep’s guts. Some want to go west, or east, but others want to wait—the Persians will lose interest, they argue. They take turns hiding the boy who made the mistake with the coins. A few believe he should be sacrificed, laid out before the Persians, to save the camp. They are ignored. The boy, called Itz, is wrapped in rugs, or buried in sand, or hidden at the river behind rocks and sheets the women pretend to wash again and again.