Lilah by Marek Halter Page A

perfect dish, or a maid’s hands were cut off for not rejecting an ointment the Queen found less than smooth.
    Parysatis, it was said, had only two loves: her sons and the power she enjoyed as a queen and the mother of the King of Kings. It was whispered that her pleasures were as refined as they were cruel, her whims infinite, her desires unusual and never sated. The lords of the Apadana would break out in a cold sweat whenever they had to share her meal. Two of the wives of her eldest son, Artaxerxes the Second, had died because they had opposed her. And Lilah had heard Antinoes express surprise that the most powerful generals were more afraid of the Queen’shatred than they were of the massed armies of the Greeks.
    And now Parysatis had brought her here from Mordechai’s house. A young Jewish woman from the upper town – little more than an insect in the Queen’s eyes.
    But an insect whom Antinoes, son of Artobasanez, the late satrap of Margiana, wanted to marry . . .
    Did Parysatis wish merely to satisfy her curiosity?
    The voice of a eunuch drew Lilah out of her reflections. He presented her with a basket of bracelets and necklaces.
    â€˜Take these jewels and put them on. You will soon be taken to our queen.’
    Rather than obey, Lilah looked out through the wide window. A low sky, swollen with clouds, hung over the plains and hills to the west of the Shaour. It was not easy to tell what time of day it was. Lilah felt as though she had been in the palace for a long time, but that might have been the result of waiting and the long process of washing and dressing to which she had been subjected.
    How pointless it had been for Aunt Sarah and Axatria to fuss over her clothes and hair before she left Mordechai’s house! Saying little, treating her with neither formality nor familiarity, a number of handmaids and young eunuchs had led her to a smallroom where her clothes had been removed before she could protest.
    The handmaids had pushed her, naked, into a narrow pool, into which the eunuchs had then poured the warm, scented contents of two big jars. To her shame, they had washed her as if she stank like a girl from the lower town. Then they had taken her into an adjoining room, where laurel and eucalyptus leaves burned in braziers. They had dried her, and scented her with a thick, oily golden cream. She had had to wait for her skin to absorb it.
    Shocked as she was to be stripped, prodded and smeared in such an unrestrained way, Lilah had soon realized that the handmaids and eunuchs performed their tasks with unmistakable coldness.
    She could not even look them in the eyes. Their expressions remained distant and indifferent. As they worked, they spoke no more than was strictly necessary. They seemed to be thinking about nothing and seeing nothing. In their hands, Lilah was not a person, merely a duty to be fulfilled.
    At first Lilah was ill at ease and fearful, but she had exploded with anger when they brought her a white linen tunic so thin as to be transparent. It left her right breast and most of her back bare, and ended mid-thigh. Her cheeks scarlet with shame, she had demanded to put on the tunic in which she hadarrived. Her fury had raised barely a smile from the handmaids.
    â€˜No woman appears before the Queen in her own clothes unless she is the wife of a lord of the Apadana. That is the law. Queen Parysatis has ordered you to wear this tunic, and you must obey. Have no fear. You will be given back your clothes and jewels when it has been decided that you may go home.’
    Then they had given her a shawl to cover what her tunic revealed, and had made her wait – for so long that she had had plenty of time to think of the moment when she would be displayed to Parysatis in this shameful attire.
    Now the eunuch was pressing her to put on the bracelets of silver and ivory. ‘Do not look at the Queen before you bow,’ he advised her. ‘And do not speak except to