Free Esther by Rebecca Kanner Page B

not tall, he had just surrounded himself with smaller eunuchs.
    He gazed at us one by one. “As you may have heard, I am Hegai.” His tone suggested that he was recognized and spoken of over all the provinces. “I will teach you to please the king.”
    â€œYou will teach them to please the king?” Halannah cried. “That is like a man with no hands teaching a child to be a great swordsman.”
    Without looking at Halannah, Hegai said, “Any who disobey me will not stay here.”
    He did not threaten that we would go to the soldiers. Perhaps too much relief shone in my face. Hegai’s gaze fell upon me. I did not know if it would be disrespectful to meet his eyes, or not to. I remembered what Erez had told me about hiding my wildness. I dropped my eyes to the marble floor and bowed slightly—just enough that no one could argue that I hadn’t, or that I had.
    Hegai laughed, delighted. “You may mistake me for the king, but Halannah has spoken true. I cannot enjoy you as he will. Yet you will find I am far more demanding. You are wise to show me respect.” His gaze moved over the girls. “Almost all of you will spend one night with the king, and the rest of your days with women and eunuchs.”
    The lioness yawned again, this time roaring loudly as she did so. A golden vase sitting along the edge of the room trembled slightly.
    â€œTake off your clothes and follow the servants to the baths,” Hegai said. When we did not immediately do as he had commanded, he continued, “Do not flatter yourselves that you have anything worthy of even the slightest crumb of modesty. The king has many palaces and you are in the greatest of them—the greatest palace the world has ever known. You are filthy and underfed. You have lice or you had them once, perhaps ‘once’ for your whole lives. You have stepped on floors covered in filth, dust, dung, and the footprints of diseased children who have since died. If the king saw you now he would ask the soldiers to gather another batch.”
    Servants began prodding us and pulling at our clothes. The gray of the tiles was quickly covered by a sea of blue, purple, green, and yellow as scarves and tunics fell to the floor. The girls were now a mass of flesh, some of it sand colored, some of it the color of clay, and some the color of soft wet earth. They looked like one shifting, trembling throng.
    I let everything I wore fall to the floor, except the necklace Erez had given me, which I hid in my mouth. I needed one thing in the world that was mine. It tasted of the road, something I thought I would never walk upon again.
    Hegai ordered the servants to bring wine. “This will ease what is to come,” he said. “You are going to be in a beauty contest, one that will take a year of preparation and will determine your fate.”
    Do I want to win? And if so, who will tell me how? I did not know what kings were like. Other than what Mordecai had told me, all I knew of Xerxes were the exaggerations spread at the market square: He was the tallest man in the world, the most beautiful, the strongest. Few people ever actually saw him. He sat behind a screen whenever he dined with his officials, and he invited only a handful of people a year to come closer. To go in to see him without being invited was a crime punishable by death.
    As we were prodded into different rooms containing tubs of washing water, I had to pass by the she-lion. If a girl quickened her pace or knocked into another girl in an attempt to leave a wide berth, the she-lion’s tail began to lash back and forth. She was huge. Even her paws. “If you show fear she is more likely to attack you,” Hegai said. “Animals cannot tell the difference between fear and aggression.” I looked only at the goblet a servant handed me as I took slow, steady steps away from the beast.
    Instead of sating my thirst, drinking seemed to increase it. I drank