The Royal Throne

In time, the well-ordered neighborhoods of Qart-hadasht took shape. The magnificent Temple of Tanit stood, with the Priestess in residence, at the apex of the hill overlooking the city. Bitias and Barca, ensconced as suffites, made their homes in apartments in the new hilltop palace. The Oarswoman lived in a modest house down the hill, though she spent most of her days working at the shipyard where new merchant vessels were constantly under construction.

Qart-hadasht remained a place where everyone knew their neighbor’s life story as intimately as their own. The only stranger in the city was a crooked old woman who occasionally appeared wearing a tattered widow’s veil that covered her from head to toe. Leaning heavily on her walking stick, she picked her way along the cobbled roads. Everyone assumed that she had arrived on one of the other ships as they had not seen her on their own. Some figured she was an Amazigh grandmother who wandered through town every now and then. Some even mistook her for the old nursemaid who had died and was buried back in Gozo. Sometimes in the evening, Amaal noticed her resting on the Phoenix bench outside the Lieutenant’s cottage at the edge of the pine forest. He would bring her a glass of tea, and they would light a small lamp and sit talking until long after the sun went down. But, as she was just a meandering old woman, nobody bothered to ask anything more about her.

One day, Amaal was looking for a good place to write when she came across the makeshift wooden throne, the one that had been built for the Queen during the voyage. Someone had tossed it onto a pile for firewood. Amaal pulled it out and dragged it to a quiet place on the west-facing side of the hill. She sat for a while on the cushion-less seat and laid her hands on the curved arms where Elishat had lain hers, wondering if something of the queen’s wisdom and spirit might still be stirring in the wood. She listened, but all she heard was the sound of the wind blowing through the pine forest on the far side of the fields. Maybe that’s it, she thought, watching the tops of the trees bend gently with the wind. Maybe those are the whispers of the ones who have passed away and can no longer be seen. And if they were, she thought, the original owner of the old throne would be telling her right now to stop daydreaming and get to work.

Amaal took out a piece of papyrus and mixed up some ink. A trio of girls, children of the Birdman, approached the throne. The oldest of them, the one Amaal thought of as the little priestess, approached and without hesitation asked, “What are you doing, Amaal?”

“I’m getting ready to tell our story.”

“Our story?”

“Yes, the story of how we got here.”

“You mean on the ships?”

“Yes, all the way from Tyre.”

“She didn’t come from Tyre,” the little priestess said, pointing to the smallest girl. “She came from Kition. Are you going to write about Kition, too?”

“Yes, I’m going to tell it all.”

The little priestess thought for a minute and said, “How does it start?”

“Well, I’m having a bit of trouble with that, to be honest.”

“Why don’t you just start at the beginning. You know, ‘Not so long ago…’”

The girls made themselves comfortable on a flat-topped boulder, waiting for the story to begin.

“Oh,” Amaal hesitated. “I was going to write it down.”

The little priestess replied decisively, “You should tell it first, to make sure it sounds right.”

The others agreed and settled in.

Amaal smiled and set aside her papyrus. “Okay…‘Not so long ago, there was a city called Tyre…’”

“No, no, start with the Queen. It’s more interesting.”

Again, they all agreed.

“Okay,” Amaal said, “‘Not so long ago, there was a princess named Elishat…’”

And so, that day and the next and the next, for many weeks and many months, after her moon time had come and gone many times, after her first kiss with Ta’am, after Hannu returned from his travels with a full beard and the Kaleva loaded with exotic goods, after Qart-hadasht gave him new cargo and Uru brought him more purple fabric, and again they cried when he sailed away, after Shikma finished her temple to Eshmun and the great circle harbor was nearly done, Amaal sat on the make-shift throne with its seashell back and its seahorse arms, writing the story of Princess Elishat, later Queen Elishat, and finally, affectionately, Queen Dido, the Wanderer. Every day she wrote until late in the afternoon when the fading light made it impossible to see the letters on the page and Ta’am came to watch the sunset with her and walk her home.

When she was finally done, Amaal brought all the leaves of papyrus to the old throne and sat reading from beginning to end. She held the pages on her lap and, as she read each one, she let the completed sheet fall onto a pile on the ground near her feet. She allowed herself to be captivated by the story, smiling at the amusing parts and letting the sad passages bring a tear to her eye. When at last her lap was empty and all the sheets lay in an orderly stack on the ground, she sat back, satisfied, and let her gaze fall on the distant pine forest that had stood day after day like a loyal audience eagerly awaiting her final stroke of the pen. In the hazy afternoon heat, a shadow fell across the sun. She looked up and shaded her eyes, thinking she might see a falcon circling the sky. Instead, it was a bank of dark rain clouds swiftly moving in her direction. The first gust came too soon. She hadn’t a moment to scoop up the pages at her feet. The sudden updraft pulled the sheets high into the air and sent them fluttering on the wind. Amaal grabbed one or two and tried to follow the others, but they blew away in every direction. “No, no, no! Come back!” she cried.

The sky darkened and the rain started to fall.

“Oh, no, my beautiful story!” she called out. She tried desperately to reach the pages before they scattered beyond reach, lifting some from the ground and plucking others from the prickly pear cactus plants, but it was no use. The storm front had already scattered them far and wide. A bolt of lightning flashed directly above her head. She felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck and hurried back to the throne. There was nowhere else to go. She sat hunched over her few rescued pages and tried to wipe away the mud that filled the tiny spaces in the fiber and covered her precious words. She shut her eyes against the driving rain. Bad as it was to be on the open hillside during a storm, it was hardly worse than all the time and effort it was going to take to start over and put her story back together again.

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