The Book of V.

because he’s very pale skinned, so pale it’s as if he’s not fully formed. She guessed, correctly, that he would like her fur. She lets him lie with her on her bed, his chest against her back or his back against her stomach. That’s all; they lie together. Already she has gotten him to sneak her tea, which Lara is not allowed because Mona says it stimulates hair growth. Like Esther, she has her plan.
The girls understand that their “plans” may be overly optimistic. They have no experience in these matters—does anyone? No special knowledge has been imparted to them, nothing beyond a belief in their own exceptionalism, and this was granted to them by two people who are dead and two others who live in a cave. Mostly, though, they are able to ignore their doubts, just as they ignore the despair that subsumed them when they first arrived. They have to. But sometimes, like now, as she sits in front of her patch of newly blank wall, her despair hits again—the erasure of her tally marks is like a blow to her ribs. Questions tumble through her mind, questions she has asked and tried to answer every day since she arrived. Why didn’t she run the night her uncle told her what he would do? (Because she did not want to go out into the desert alone.) Why, the day she left Marduk and the palace guards took his figs without a word, why didn’t she do something in that moment, shout or scream as she wanted to, to get herself kicked out? (Because she feared she would be killed.) Why did Marduk think Esther’s problem would be her Jewishness, a laughable notion now that she’s lived among half-breeds and mutts, many of them tribeless? (Because he believes in the exceptionalism of his own oppression.) And why would the king, after a queen like Vashti, of noble birth, known to be educated in archery and hunting, decide to choose from the streets and sands, the lowest of the low, when all they have to offer is their bodies? (Because all they have is their bodies.)
“What are you looking at?”
Lara is back, her jaw red from a shave. She lies down on Esther’s bed. Esther lies next to her. “My tally marks,” she says.
“They’re gone?” Lara is on her side, facing Esther.
“Look!” Esther says, nudging Lara’s knee with her own—turn over. But Lara shakes her head. “I’m too tired. I believe you.”
Esther watches as Lara’s eyes close—she observes the now familiar pattern of veins on her lids, the angry skin at her upper lip and jaw. Once, privately, Esther asked Mona why Lara wasn’t just sent home, a question that required every ounce of selflessness she possessed, for if Lara went, Esther would be alone. Mona answered as if she’d been asked where to find a chamber pot: It would be to admit failure, she said. Also, the king’s minister prefers a round number.
Esther cups a palm around Lara’s chin and presses as Lara has shown her, rocking from the heel of her hand to the tips of her fingers. Lara is quiet for a while. Her face relaxes. “Thank you,” she says without opening her eyes. Her knee finds Esther’s and nudges it back. “Sorry about your marks. How far had you got to?”
“Sixty-three.”
“Counting today?”
Esther thinks. The days run together. That was the reason for the marks in the first place.
“I don’t know,” she says.
Other girls walk in, laughing and talking. One asks another why she’s limping and the girl says it’s from a foot treatment and then another says no, it’s because she’s drunk, and they laugh more loudly than before. Lara opens her eyes and rolls them and Esther giggles. They watch each other as the girls continue their banter, which turns soon enough, as Esther and Lara know it will, to Queen Vashti. She is the one subject no one tires of, the story that gets told and told because no one knows how it ends and everyone who tells it gets to arrive at a cliff, look around at her audience, and smile. Then the speculations begin.
“But do you think she’s actually alive?”
“No.”
“Yes! They mated her with a donkey.”
“No! They decapitated her.”
“She was impaled.”
“How do you know?”
“My brother said—”
“What’s he, the king’s minister? I thought you come from Farna.”
“No, no, no. She was buried alive.”
“Can you imagine?”
“I think she was stoned.”
“You think everyone’s stoned.”
“Haaaaaaaa!” Everyone laughs. By now they’ve all either drunk opium or watched others drink it. Esther and Lara belong to the latter category. But they giggle, too. Lara jounces her chin in Esther’s palm and rolls her eyes back in her head, making Esther giggle harder.
“I heard something different,” someone says. “From Mother Mona.”
“Mona? She barely opens her mouth to eat. What did you do for her to make her talk?”
“Shut up.”
“What did she say?”
“It’s not about her punishment. It’s about what she did.”
“So?”
Lara’s eyes are closed again. She thinks she’s sick—from the shaving, or the lack of sunlight. She says she feels like an old woman, and sometimes, like now, Esther thinks she looks like one, too. Her lips are so dry they’ve begun to peel—tomorrow, maybe, they will be slathered in yet another paste, made of a different animal’s hoof. Esther looks past her, out the one window, which gives a view of the palace wall and a narrow strip of purpling sky.
“I thought it was leprosy,” says another girl.
“That’s a myth, spread by the lepers.”
“I heard that, too. She slept with the king’s minister! Obviously.”
“She took a eunuch into the royal bed.”
“And told him a state secret!”
“My mother said she tried to poison the king.”
“She said that, then sent you to be his queen?”
No one talks for a moment. Esther watches a black bird with yellow wings light on the wall, then fly out of sight into the dusk.
“Doesn’t anyone want to know what Mona said? She said he threw a weeklong banquet and, days in, asked Vashti