And this, my dear Queen candidate, brings me to one of my strongest instructions for you. If my story has struck the least chord of sympathy within you, then I urge you to heed this advice.
If you want to gain the King’s favor, listen to the Chamberlain.
You will be given a gatekeeper, a person who knows intimately the King and whose favor will do much toward gaining that of His Majesty. Listen to this person, for he speaks in the King’s stead. He knows every one of the King’s preferences and tastes. Heed his admonitions as well as you heed mine—or better. Seek his counsel, then follow it as if your life depended on it—for it may indeed be so.
It was in my case.
You may say that’s fairly elementary advice. But of hundreds of girls who came to Xerxes’ harem when I did, I was the only one who lived by this axiom. Nearly every other candidate allowed the luxury and stature of living at the King’s Palace to go to her head. For many of them, the intoxication of incredible luxury eventually overcame the fear and anger at being taken. For others, having defeated high odds and already been recognized as the most beautiful in their districts made them think of themselves as having arrived exalted and exempt from the normal rules and dynamics of human courtesy. Among other things, many began to treat Hegai as some sort of personal footservant. Some of them were daughters of nobility, whose sense of superiority and privilege now raged unchecked. Their families’ hopes of royal accession rested on their shoulders, so these girls knew no bounds of ambition and treachery in the pursuit of their goals. What all these young women from various backgrounds and levels of social standing had in common was inexperience—we all were virgins.
And Hegai, ever the wise one, did not bridle or openly protest this uncalled-for treatment—although in the Palace hierarchy he was far more influential than any of us. He merely dropped the girl who acted this way from his list of favorites. And just as quickly, her chance of becoming queen effectively ended. The girls had no idea, of course. They were too wrapped up in their own elation to even notice they had fallen from any sort of standing. They simply went about their indulgences and chased after the esteem of the other girls—the last group from whom a prudent person would ever seek approval.
Even though Hegai was not a follower of YHWH, I found him over the months to be a wise and principled man. Every morning for weeks, a group of girls newly arrived from some far-flung province would meet their first dawn as Queen candidates in the harem. He would gather them by the pool and give them the same speech I had heard on my first morning.
He would stand by the water, adopt a nurturing, grandfatherly expression and say, “Young women, if I do not stray badly from the truth, I would say that each of you is experiencing a wide, even conflicting set of feelings right now. Exhilaration. Fear. Alienation. Homesickness. Anticipation. Loneliness. Joy. And probably a dozen other possibilities I have not named. If I can, let me heighten the joyful emotions among those. You have just become part of a highly select group, the most beautiful virginal young women in the entire Persian Empire. And if the Greek women I have seen are any indication, you are the most beautiful young women in the entire world.”
Invariably, a modest patriotic cheer would go up at those words. Nothing, in those days of war, could stoke the fires of a dutiful young Persian like some slighting reference to the Greeks.
Soon, his comforting, reasonable tone and his words would quietly begin to dry teary eyes and settle anxious hearts. “And because of your youth and beauty, and maybe some other qualities that we will discover in the weeks and months ahead, you have a chance to be selected as the new queen of this whole empire.” He would smile and say, “You may think I’ve been nice to you because it’s my duty—actually, I’m being nice because one of you will be my queen someday, and I’d like to keep my head right here on my shoulders.”
This time laughter, albeit somewhat nervous.
“Remember that you are not concubines, at least yet, and no one is allowed to treat you as such. You are Queen candidates, every one of you. Now, here is what your next twelve months will consist of. You will be immersed in the most complete regimen of luxury and indulgence any woman has enjoyed in the history of the human race. You will be fed the finest, richest foods Persia can offer. In a few moments you will be given a large supply of rare cosmetics from India, Lebanon and Egypt. For six moon cycles, you will be pampered with treatments of myrrh, the King’s favorite essence. When you have been so thoroughly soaked in myrrh that you secrete its fragrance through your very pores, then will come six additional months of treatment with a wide assortment of spices from around the world. How does that sound?”
And then, invariably, would come the loudest, most sincere cheer of the day.
“At the end of that year, we will begin the process of selecting each of you for a night spent in the King’s bed. That night, you can choose any garment, any amount of jewelry you wish to wear in with you. The decisions will be entirely your own. At the end of the night, whatever the King’s ultimate choice may be, the jewelry and the clothes you wear are yours to keep. And should you not be chosen, you will take them with you to the concubines’ harem, across the Palace courtyards. There I will help you adapt to the life of a Palace concubine—one of the most envied and luxurious lifestyles in Persia today. Should you be chosen as Queen, the royal bride—and I presume one of you will—then, well . . . there is no limit to the power you will wield—except the King’s.”
More clapping and cheering, after which the group would break up for a breakfast of rich baked goods and roasted sweetbreads. I routinely stayed away from such breakfasts, opting instead for a small pitcher of water and a few oranges from the orchards.
It turned out to be no difficult task keeping the dietary laws; I simply followed the habits Rachel had instilled in me most of my life. With the noon meal and dinner, the girls were served a sweet wine made from honey. The concoction obviously earned their rapid allegiance, but since I knew such a drink would never find its place in Mordecai’s household, I avoided it. At first I had anticipated facing some scorn from my fellow candidates, but as it turned out no one ever noticed what color liquid was in my goblet or the fact that I had not approached the wine table.
And besides the satisfaction of obeying my race’s religious laws, I enjoyed another unexpected benefit: While every other girl swiftly gained a visible fat layer around her hips and thighs, I remained slender. None of the other girls could explain how I did it—I of course said nothing about the dietary laws or their source, although I gave plenty of general advice about staying away from the rich and fatty foods.
I hope it does not sound like I held these young women in contempt. Far from it. In fact, though I was not the oldest of the girls, many of them began to seek my company for counsel. Perhaps they sensed the regard Hegai already had expressed for me. Or maybe they discerned that something in my upbringing had imbued me with a certain reserve upon gaining the Palace, rather than the hedonistic abandon that the others had embraced.
Eventually, I did make some friends among the other girls. But the emotional rigors of the competition ahead seemed to limit our closeness. The sense of loneliness never really went away, a feeling I had been familiar with my whole life.
And Jesse—I simply would not let my mind stray his direction too long. My thoughts and images of him had acquired the same sense of palpable horror as those of my family’s murder. Something else I struggled to forget.
In fact, during those early days the only thing that would occasionally jolt me from my isolation would be the fleeting sight of that twisted cross trotting by on the side of a warhorse in the distance or briefly seen on the tunic of some figure in a crowd. I never failed to shudder and weaken at the briefest glimpse. For a time I harbored the mistaken conclusion that those two lines, crossed like the first letter of Xerxes’ name and then twisted to the right at the ends, was the King’s royal emblem. Thank G-d I soon learned better and the origin of the symbol soon faded into mystery—for I never could have given myself, no matter the consequences, to a man who bore that hateful sign as his own.