Climbing the Date Palm Page 10

  “He’s insecure because he’s small,” Shulamit observed, looking around the room at her loved ones -- all bigger and taller than she. As usual, she was painfully aware of her own smallness -- in stature if not in political power or military might.

  “All the more reason to make this not to prove who has the bigger army,” said Isaac. “Let’s see those notes.”

  “Even so, if we fight, we’ll be ready,” said Rivka, flexing her muscles. “It doesn’t make sense to feed into his delusional fantasies. Why should we hold off on justice we’re all too well-equipped to provide, just because he thinks his patriotism is worth twenty armies? It’s not, and we’re--”

  “You can keep training,” Shulamit reassured her, “but I’m going to keep searching.” She got up, and her two friends followed her, headed for the Hall of Records.

  ***

  Outside, in Aviva’s garden, Kaveh wound his way between the fluffy and fragrant bushes of basil, lost in thought. Sunlight streamed down on him, and he figured he needed it, after so many days inside recuperating, even though it was making him sweat. After all, was this not still the Month of the Sun, even though he was exiled from those who celebrated it?

  The garden was beautiful, and he wished he and his beloved engineer were walking its lush paths together. It was all too easy to relive his kisses, sending jolts of spicy sensation down his entire body. His vivid imagination gifted him with the touch memory of having Farzin’s tongue in his mouth, and he was so distracted he had to stop walking for a moment.

  But then his treacherous mind betrayed him, and into his head flashed a darker image of that tongue... hanging out frighteningly from between dead lips on a frozen face, the noose scrunched up underneath his chin. No!

  Kaveh tripped over a cucumber vine and went sprawling. He put down a hand to stop his fall, but it landed on a cucumber and fine spines buried themselves in his palm. He groaned loudly and picked himself up, examining his hand. This was ridiculous. Even though that was his father’s word.

  Determination coursed through his veins. He would remain a victim of his own emotions no longer. Whirling through the garden like a violent gust of wind, he barged into Aviva’s kitchen, startling the cook as she stood weighing out dried chickpeas. “I’m sick and tired of feeling so useless and lost in misery. I want to do something with my time. Teach me to cook!”

  Chapter 13: Cucumber Salad

  “The secret to dicing an onion,” said Aviva, “is to make sure you don’t chop down the whole tree at once.” She demonstrated by rocking her knife into the large white orb in quick movements. “See how I’m leaving the root intact? That’ll keep it easier to handle because it won’t come apart. You can get rid of it at the very end, and by that time the rest of the pieces will do whatever you say.”

  Once more, Kaveh picked up the knife she had lent him and moved toward the onion she had just showed him how to peel.

  “Remember what I said about hiding your fingers. They’re shy -- don’t want them to get their hearts broken.”

  Clumsily, he shifted the hand that held the onion, making sure to keep his fingers away from the blade. With great deliberation he mimicked her rocking motions. As Aviva expected, the pieces of onion were of uneven thickness when he started, but he noticed his own mistake and began to correct.

  “Good! Onions are wonderful. They add depth to flavor. Soaking them in lemon juice takes away some of the--”

  Kaveh cried out in pain. “My eyes! What’s happening?”

  “Oh!” Aviva giggled slightly as she realized that the prince, for all his sorrowful life, was privileged enough never to have cut into a raw onion before.

  “It’s poison!”

  “No-- no, it’s okay. Onions are angry. Don’t worry. She’ll calm down quickly.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “I cut so quickly that she won’t be able to yell too much before I’m done.”

  “I’ve seen you chop food -- you’re so fast it almost looks like magic,” Kaveh observed. “I’d like to get that fast. I want to be good at something again.”

  “You’ll get there, with practice.”

  Kaveh was still blinking in pain, and he put the knife down so he could wipe the tears from his eyes with the back of his hands without accidentally stabbing himself in the face. “Ugh. I feel ridiculous. So weak!”

  “It’s okay -- it’s your first time! You’re doing great.”

  “I’m so glad you’re here giving me something to work at,” he said. “What my eyes are doing now is what my heart is doing all the time anyway. I miss Farzin so much, and not truly knowing if he’ll be rescued or not makes me feel like I’m drowning in my own nightmares. I’d much rather be in here, learning honest toil. Before I walked through that door, I felt completely useless, like a forlorn... I don’t know, a captured maiden in a legend.”

  Aviva lifted a sunny face to his and asked serenely, “So feeling useless makes you a woman?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I--” He picked up the knife again.

  “Now we’re going to cut across,” she said in a low voice, wanting to make it clear she wasn’t finished with the other conversation. She began to demonstrate, and he followed her lead.

  “Okay, so some real women aren’t like that. But women in legends -- somehow in stories, it’s always--”

  Piles of neatly diced onions gathered in the wake of their knives.

  “Yes, women in stories. Here’s another onion.” She plunked it unceremoniously next to his pile of translucent white squares. “Tell me, Highness, the people like us in stories. What are they like?”

  Kaveh grimaced, and he stared off into space for a moment. “Maybe you’ve made your point.”

  “Then stick your point into that onion skin and keep going!” She flashed him a sparkling grin and fished another onion off the pile for herself.

  “Why do they hate us?” Kaveh’s words fell from slack lips, and the rest of him was drooping morosely. “What’s the point? I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “They don’t hate me. They just like me for the wrong reasons.” There was a rare hint of sadness in her voice.

  Kaveh nodded in understanding and kept chopping. “They don’t see us as real people, do they?”

  “Not really. I don’t just like men, and I don’t just like women. That doesn’t mean I like twice as many people as everybody else. I’m just as picky. I like brains. I love the way Shulamit gets excited about something and then learns everything she can about it all week. I like to be needed, and appreciated. I like to dote on someone. I like intensity. Not everybody has that.” She gathered up her diced onion with both hands and placed it in a nearby bowl. “The queen makes me happy. And then there’s these.” She gestured to her chest. “They’re just fat. I could show you just as much fat floating around in a stew. Do you think that makes the stew crave passion? I mean, I guess it’s warm.”

  Kaveh chuckled, keeping his eyes on his knife. “I know what you mean. I mean... my father thinks of me as distracted, and Farzin as... as some kind of predatory monster. He rambled on and on about how I had been damaged by something that was so sacred to me that if I were to die this instant, all I’d be able to say to the Sun over and over again is thank you, thank you for Farzin...”

  “No, no, stop it.”

  He froze. “Huh? What?”

  “Don’t dream about him while you’re holding a knife. If you hurt yourself, the queen’s gonna blame me.”

  Kaveh nodded. “Got it. So... what about your parents? I mean, they live here. Do they accept your choices or do they pretend you’re only the palace cook?”

  “I’m not the palace cook -- there’s a real palace cook in a different kitchen. I’m the queen’s personal chef. Neither wheat nor fowl ever darkens this door. We can’t really trust everyone else to take that seriously.” She handed him another onion with which to practice.

  “Oh, okay.”

  “But Aba and Ima are our sun and moon and
shine on us -- the way every parent should.”

  “That’s so incredible.” Kaveh beamed and paused in his knife work for a moment. He looked as though he needed a minute to savor the idea. “I wish... this place is such a paradise. I feel like I made it up in desperation. What about King Noach? Was he also as kind?”

  Aviva considered her words. “He loved Shulamit more than anyone else in his world, and he wanted what was best for her.”

  “It doesn’t sound like that was you, in his opinion.”

  Aviva shrugged. “I wash the dust from my feet, or else I can’t walk.”

  “I need to learn how to do that. I’ve got a lot of dust.”

  “So do I. It hasn’t always been easy for me. I even left the palace at one point. Took the heart right out of my body, set it on a shelf, and crept quietly away...”

  “Because of King Noach?”

  “Someone thought he’d gain the king’s gold by paying for my mother’s surgery in exchange for me becoming smoke and a memory. My feet left the palace grounds... and my mother’s touched the dirt. You see her walking with a cane now, but she was in bed most of my life.”

  “And you came back when the king died?”

  “The queen found me and brought me home.”

  “I wish Baba had just tried to pay off Farzin like that. He’d have taken the money and given it to the poor, and we’d have met anyway, in secret.”

  “I’m sure it happens all the time. The queen read about something like that in your city, during her endless gorge of books.”

  “Oh?”

  “I know because it upset her -- it reminded her of what happened to us.” She didn’t tell Kaveh how Shulamit had needed Aviva’s arms around her for a good five minutes, soothing her, reminding her that she’d promised she wasn’t going anywhere. “Too bad, because to me that sounds like dessert reading. Something about... Memoirs of the Marketplace? Do you know it? It’s a pretty old book. Most of the stories are from before I was born. I think the writer was Nouri or Naveed or something starting with ‘nun’ anyway.”

  “I may have looked at it. I don’t know.”

  “It’s very funny. I think the man who wrote it sells scarves or shawls. Anyway, he wrote down all these stories from all his years in the market, and one of them was about a craftsman who was bragging in a tavern how he’d sold some jewels for twice the price they were really worth, to an important man who was trying to keep his son away from the craftsman’s daughter. Hidden in the price was a bribe. The craftsman had been sworn to secrecy, but, well, there was wine involved, and we all know about how Lady Wine loves to flirt until you’ll tell her all your secrets.”

  “I know. I remember being overcautious that I’d betray myself as a lover of men if I ever drank. Even before Farzin, when the only men I looked at were my father’s guards.”

  “The girl who sold shoes at market,” Aviva commented, daydreaming a little.

  “That’s how you knew?”

  “M-hmm. Speaking of things we like, do you like cucumber salad?”

  He nodded enthusiastically.

  “Then that’ll be your first complete dish. Here, I’ll show you how to peel and chop these.”

  After they’d been through the lesson on peeling, coring, and cutting up cucumbers, Aviva showed him the best way to juice a lemon. As she held it close to the fire for a moment, she explained, “If you warm her up a little, she’ll give you more of herself.”

  “You can get more juice out that way? I never would have thought.”

  “Watch out for the seeds. We don’t want them poking around in the salad.”

  Lemon juice went on top of the cucumbers and onions, which were soon joined by dill, mint, and other flavors. “This is amazing,” said the prince. “There was -- nothing! -- before, and now it looks like real food! I made real food!”

  Aviva pointed at his bowl. “Eat. Eat your usefulness.”

  Reverently, Kaveh lifted a small handful to his mouth.

  “How is it?”

  “It worked! It really worked! And I didn’t wreck the kitchen!”

  There was barely time to notice the large shape blocking the long afternoon sunlight from the doorway before Rivka was suddenly between them, seizing Kaveh’s knife. Next thing they knew, she had flung it straight into the wall opposite them, where it loyally stuck.

  Kaveh and Aviva, still as trees, stared at her. She grinned back at them, tossing her head brazenly. “What’s this about?”

  “I learned to make cucumber salad,” Kaveh stammered.

  Rivka reached into his bowl and tasted some. “Tastes pretty good! Hey, if you want to learn other things too, I’ll be in the far courtyard by the coconut palms.” She cocked her head toward her left hip, the hip where she wore her sword.

  Then she was gone as quickly as she had come. Rivka, Aviva observed to herself, is downright obnoxious after she and Isaac make the trees bloom.

  Chapter 14: Heavy Lifting

  It was morning, and Queen Shulamit was wandering around in figure eights by herself in a stand of bamboo in the garden between the palace and its outer walls. Sunlight made the blond stalks and green leaves glow, and her fingers slipped over their smoothness as she paced.

  In order to find the mystery woman in King Jahandar’s past, she reasoned, she had to run down the list of everywhere one might meet a woman. The most obvious persons, those wives he had married and then lost either to death or disharmony, she ruled out due to the poem’s clue of unconsummation.

  The next thing she thought of was “willing women,” simply because in her adolescent desperation when Aviva left so many years ago, she had herself thought of turning this way for comfort. But Kaveh had ruled that out; he characterized Jahandar’s disdain for those who participated in the sex trade as sincere and heartfelt, come from a mind that placed the love between man and woman as something not only set apart from love between those of the same sex, but too sacred to sell. Shulamit knew a son may not know if his father visits whores, but the objective literature, if there indeed was such a thing when dealing with monarchy, verified his claims. Besides, Jahandar had respected the mystery woman too much.

  If she’d been a notable woman of the court, her name would have come up in the many texts Shulamit and her household had read. But there was nothing. Clearly, she wasn’t “important” enough to have been noticed by historians.

  Where does one meet a woman?

  Like his son, Jahandar had gone to an expensive school with the other sons of noblemen and rich commoners -- all boys. Before that, his tutors had all been male, which ruled out Benjamin’s theory of a wise and beautiful young female tutor who quit her post when she realized her pupil’s passion -- romantic though it might be.

  But male classmates had kin. Sisters, cousins -- even mothers. And Jahandar’s father, King Omeed, had plenty of friends, and they might have daughters, nieces, sisters, and wives.

  Fiddling with one of her braids, which weren’t tied back behind her head as usual, she resolved to start at the beginning and piece together an organized catalog of every one of Jahandar’s classmates, with special focus on those he treated as close friends, and every one of Jahandar’s father’s close friends as well. Hopefully, somewhere in the sea of female names they’d turn up attached to those men, there would be a woman of strong moral fiber and large breasts, someone either in the nobility or born to a rich common family.

  And someone with whom the king hadn’t lain.

  The task seemed endless. Leaning against a stalk of bamboo, she closed her eyes and prayed. God, I just want to know that I can do this. I’ll work as hard as I have to if it’ll only come to something.

  “Majesty!”

  “Hmm?” Her eyes snapped open.

  One of her ladies-in-waiting had entered the bamboo grove, shooing away wild birds that had come begging for scraps. “The horses are ready to leave for the Games. Would you like me to fix your braids? They’ve come down.”

  “No, that’s f
ine... I’ll leave them down for today.” Swallowing her irritation that she had to leave her Great Quest behind for the day but always aware that monarchs can’t do everything they want, she left the grove.

  ***

  Meanwhile, Aviva rushed through the palace and poked her head into Kaveh’s room. “Are you ready yet?”

  A manservant was helping him put on a formal yet airy suit of clothes. “Almost,” he called back to her. “How do I look?” He held his hands out at his sides.

  “Great! We’re ready to leave, so they sent me to go harvest you.” She didn’t mention that Shulamit had required fetching as well.

  “Do I ride up in the howdah with Shulamit, or is that only for once we’re mar-- what?”

  Both Aviva and the manservant were giving him awkward looks.

  “The queen doesn’t ride elephants anymore,” said Aviva quietly. “She’ll be on a horse like the rest of us.”

  Kaveh’s brain switched on. “Oh. Oh, sorry. Wow, I’m sorry. Still? After all this time?”

  Aviva’s face twitched as if worms were crawling under her skin. “It cut deep.”

  “I was there when it happened, Your Highness,” the manservant commented. “It was horrible. He was a good king.”

  “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up tragic memories. It’s just that, in the city where I’m from, we’re too built-up for elephants. I guess I was kind of hoping... never mind, never mind!”

  “It’s okay. Come on! Before the horses forget the way there.”

  ***

  When the procession was finally ready, the queen and her retinue made their way out of the palace gates and down the road toward the field just north of Quiet Lake. Shulamit was relieved to see that the shaded tent over the royal platform was already set up. The sun had been baking down on her the whole way there. She was also happy to see more than one man selling coconuts to drink.

  “Here,” she called, motioning to one of them as soon as she and her company were settled on the platform. He lit up at being chosen, and everyone was grateful for the sweet refreshment.