The Book of Esther: A Novel

CHAPTER 1

Dim pricks of blue light shone through the shutters’ decorative punchwork. Careful not to wake her sister, Esther braced her hand against one door while she drew back the other. The wooden panel stuck a moment before popping free, letting in the damp, salty air and a view of purplish sky. To the east, the sun cast its first pink glow over the place where the mighty River Atil spilled into the Khazar Sea. Esther raced through her morning prayers, her voice a sibilant whisper.

From her father’s house, high up in the walled city of Atil, Esther could see sailors on the island-sized expanse of an aerocraft carrier’s deck. Some worked with mops and pails; some checked the serried rows of flying machines; one hoisted the kaganate’s white flag, which hung limp in the still air as it jerked up its pole. The decks of the Khazar warships bustled with activity. Men also worked aboard great Ottoman and Persian merchant ships, moored across the river in Atil’s twin city of Khazaran. Fishing boats plied the water. Downstairs, someone dropped a log and swore to her native god. The smell of fresh flatbread rose from the kitchen. Much of the world was at work at this hour, just not the children of the bek’s kender, or chief policy adviser, Josephus. Esther’s sister, Elisheva, still slept, her mouth open, her dark hair trailing onto Esther’s pillow.

Esther slipped out of her nightgown, pulled on the sweater and loose trousers she’d worn the day before, and walked barefoot into the cold hallway and down the stairs. Her boots, like everyone’s, waited by the back door.

On her way through the kitchen, Esther filched a flatbread the older kitchen maid, Afra, had just pulled from the oven. The younger maid, Kiraz, looked up teary-eyed from chopping onions, but didn’t say anything. Holding the hot bread between three fingertips, Esther scooped into the pot of warm lentils over the fire. Afra began to complain—it had been her, swearing a moment earlier—and Esther gestured an apology and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’ll clean it up.” Butshe was already at the door, the bread and lentils folded into one hand while she wrestled on her fur-lined boots with the other. When she’d taken them off the night before, they’d been caked with red mud. Someone had brushed them clean.

She had nearly crossed the inner courtyard before Itakh zoomed upbeside her, hopping to pull on his second shoe. He carried a rucksack on his back. Mindful not to hit it or knock the Bukhari kippah off the back of his head, Esther put her free arm around his small shoulder. The top of his head reached her armpit. Itakh took the opportunity to grab the dripping bread and lentils. He took a big, sloppy bite before returning it to her. “Disgusting,” Esther said without meaning it. “You didn’t even bless it.” He was only about nine years old, but should have known better.

He sang out a quick Motzi and wiped his mouth on his forearm.

“Good morning to you too,” she said. Then she tore the bread in half. They kept walking, companionably quiet while they ate. The sharp, dry turmeric in the lentils cleared Esther’s nose. Lentil juice plopped onto the ground.

At the far end of the inner courtyard, the gate stood shut, held fast by a wire loop. Esther swung this up, then drew the gate open, careful to lift as she did so to prevent the hinges from squeaking. Itakh ran through and she closed it again behind them. A higher brick wall surrounded the house’s outer courtyard to protect the whole enclosure from attack. Nestled beneath it were the three small servants’ houses—empty at this hour, as the staff was up working—the storehouse, the barn, whose milk goats and irritable chickens were already out cropping and pecking at the grass, and Esther’s destination, the mechanical stable. As she strode toward it, Itakh ducked off toward the compound’s pigeon loft.

“It’s late, we have to hurry,” Esther said.

Not bothering to look back, Itakh made a gesture of dismissal behind him. Most of the birds belonged to Josephus and a few to foreign governments, who used them to carry intelligence, but Itakh had a passion for them. He kept and trained some of his own, and cared for the whole loft with Esther’s brother, Shmuel. The birds strutted and cooed, excited at his approach. Esther heard the rain like pitter of scattering feed.

The mechanical stable was as old as any building in the compound. In Esther’s grandfather’s time, it had housed the strong-boned natural horses one now mainly saw speckling the countryside, their flanks a pleasing motley of browns and grays. Esther had learned to ride one before mastering their mechanical kin. In her father’s young manhood, Khazaria had invented the mechanical horse, a war machine to protect the rough-terrained homeland from the Rus to the east, the Ottomanim to the south, and oil-hungry Europa to the west. The machines had stood guard as the conflict that brought down the Oestro-Magyar Empire rolled across the steppe to Khazaria’s western border. But the kaganate had not been of interest. A few skirmishes, and the chief combatants had moved on to fight with one another.

In the intervening twenty years, engineers kept improving the horses, which constituted Khazaria’s chief defense in the event of a land war. Early models had been big and clumsy as steer, with shift mechanisms so awkwardly placed and requiring such force to operate, people called them suicide shifters. The most recent model was smaller and faster, more aerodynamic, with the shifter incorporated more safely into the left handlebar. The unpredictable terrain of the steppe had for thousands of years favored the skilled, ruthless warrior, the man who could keep his horse while slicing off an enemy’shead with his broadsword. A Khazar mounted on a mechanical horse could fight with his ancestors’ brutality. The army’s few hundred tanks, purchased from the Rus, were rumored to break down as often as they ran.

As Esther entered her father’s stable, she knew that most of her country’s thousands of mech horses stood ready on the eastern bank of the Dniepra to fight the enemy barreling across Ukraina. She knew the bek had stationed warships in all of Khazaria’s seas and her many rivers. But Josephus ben Malakhi’s horses remained in his compound: four late-model and one hulking, old-fashioned mare called Leyla. Seleme was the one Esther drove. She liked the horse’s idiosyncrasies:  the way she might buck an unskilled rider; her general dark temper.

The stable’s pungent petroleum smell filled Esther’s nose. Though she and Itakh had to hurry before her father noticed them missing, she took a moment to breathe in. Bataar, the stable hand, was feeding one machine a bucket of petrol. He lifted his chin in greeting. Esther touched Seleme’s steel muzzle, although the machine could not respond unless she was running. Esther patted her side. A dull, muffled sound emerged.

“She’s fueled,” Bataar said. “Ready to go. Iyimiyiz?” Esther spoke enough Turc to nod and thank him. Bataar put down his funnel and bucket, took a grimy chamois from his pocket, and gave a cursory swipe at Seleme’s integrated saddle and stirrups. Steppe warriors could ride bareback when necessary, but a mechanical horse’s controls were all in its tack. The shift, throttle, and front brake resided in the handle bars that protruded from behind the ears, the rear brake in the right stirrup, the starter behind it. Esther climbed up and over, hooking her left foot tight to get a good jump on the starter. It took a couple of tries to make the engine turn over. Bataar opened up the choke for her; it was a far reach for a person of her size. As she settled onto the rumbling machine, she felt the pattern of Seleme’s riveting rub against the inner seam of her pants. She revved Seleme’s engine, shifted her into reverse, and prodded her with one foot as she eased out the clutch with her left hand to encourage her toward the open stable door.

“We’ll be back shortly,” she said, leaning down so Bataar could hear her over the engine. “Teşekkür ederim.” Her thanks.

Itakh came running toward the stable with one hand cupped overa small bulge in his shirt. One-handed and without even a foothold, he clambered up behind her and mounted the back of the saddle. Though mechanical horses had no provision for a passenger, he was small enough to ride pillion behind her. He wrapped one arm around her waist and held tight. The other must still have been cradling the bird she felt adjusting its position against her back.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“I promised Jascha.”

Irritated, she jerked her braid free of him. Dawn had already broken. The bird struggled before seeming to settle in against its master.

Seleme was not built for a casual stroll. She had a 150cc engine and a foul temper, never a lucky combination in a horse. But to the extent that she was capable of feeling anything, she grudgingly liked Esther,the person who drove her most often, and didn’t seem to mind Itakh’s negligible excess weight. So she walked almost docilely toward theouter courtyard wall in first gear. The guard said, “Salaam aleikum,”pulled the wooden latch, and opened the gate.

Esther said, “Aleikhem shalom,” and rolled the shifter forward toclick up into second, the lower trotting gear. She heard the gate shut behind them and the drum roll of aeroplane engines turning overon the carriers in the river. Preparing for their daily exercises, she thought; further proof she and Itakh had gotten a late start. Seleme’s hooves rang against the cobbled street as stuccoed house fronts, slate roofs, and brightly painted window boxes blurred past.

Past the river and the bridge stretched Khazaran’s covered market, onion domes, and the spire of the Nazarene worship house. Moments later, Esther and Itakh saluted a guard at the city’s Great North Gate and passed through. He shouted something after them, but they hurried on without hearing. Once Esther shifted the horse up into third,the faster trot, she was in her element. She let her feet dangle in the stirrups, unafraid of where the chugging machine would go. The exhaust vents in the belly blew warm air against her cold legs. When high-born Khazar men practiced horsemanship, they raced to get the horses up to third. Then, though the right hand held steady on the throttle, the left could fire a pistol or wield a sword.

Esther looked over her shoulder to ask, “What did you get?”

“Yesterday’s bread. A few other things. I could have done better.”A moment passed before he added, “I did remember the bird.”

Bat-winged KAF aerocraft took off westward. Esther pictured the river-crossed steppe they flew toward, all the terrain they would cover before they reached Ukraina and the enemy troops. She turned her mind back to guiding the horse. Seleme would have liked to gallop off toward the fields and grasslands but knew the routine. Esther kepther hands firm on the handlebars, and she headed up the riverbank toward the camp.

One couldn’t see it from Josephus ben Malakhi’s house, or from any wealthy dwelling in the city. When the great, hidden kagan had ordered the bek to give permission for a second camp near the capital, he had mandated its invisibility. Though the kagan never left the enclosure of his palace, he did not wish to see this camp any more than he did the one that sprawled along the banks of the Dniepra in the west. Most people Esther knew agreed with him. Among girls of Esther’s station, there had been a fad the previous winter of knitting for the refugees. Not one girl had gone to present her goat’s-hair hat or mittens to an actual displaced person. Servants had done it for them. Esther sometimes glimpsed Shimon ben Kalonymos in the settlement performing some act of tzedakah or khesed, charity or loving-kindness. Once she had overheard him talking to a man about irrigating his meager garden plot. As far as she knew, the two of them were alone in this predilection among people of their rank. To reach the camp, one continued beyond the port and wound around a wooded hill that concealed a bend in the Atil River. Then the camp opened up to view:a flat, haphazard sprawl as large and crowded as the city itself. Unlike any Khazar city or town, its outermost dwellings stood open to view, vulnerable to attack. There had been no time to build a defensive wall, no great interest in doing it.

Immigrant women by the hundreds were already out drawing river water for cooking. Others slapped wet clothes against the rocks. Many wore old-fashioned, Western-style dresses, though some were in Khazar castoffs, others in rags, and nearly all covered their pale or reddish hair with kerchiefs. Esther knew it was impolite to stare, but she was fascinated by their coloring, their uniformly fair skin. Khazarsdid not even all practice the same religion, and those who were Jews had not descended from a single clan. Under Kagan Bulan, more thana thousand years before, the nation of Turkic tribes had converted in a grand public ceremony. Their ethnic stock was mixed, colorful. Intellectually,Esther understood the refugees’ common heritage, yet she still puzzled over it. At that moment, watching the washer women in the morning light, their foreignness struck her anew.

Some of the women glanced up from their work when they heard Seleme’s engine gutter as she slowed. Most remained intent on their labor. Rukhl alone stood up, her lips pressed into a straight line as she gave a final wring to a heavy brown twist of fabric. She tossed it into one of the reed baskets at her feet, wiped her chapped hands on her dirty apron, and came toward the horse. “Gut morgn,” she said, pushing an orange curl back under the headscarf. When she smiled, her face looked drawn and tired.

Esther left the horse idling in neutral and jumped down. “Gut morgn.” Two nearby women looked at her again. Esther wasn’t sure if they were surprised to hear a Khazar attempting to speak their language or offended by her pronunciation.

“Nice to see you.”

Still cradling the pigeon in his shirt, Itakh brought one leg across the horse to sit side saddle, then slid down. “Wu iz Jascha?” he asked.

At that moment Rukhl’s son came running up, shouting, “Itakh! Did you bring her?”

“This is Nagehan,” he said, and from his shirt produced what looked to Esther like just another messenger pigeon, a repurposed bullet casing strapped to its back. Jascha murmured a syllable of approval, which made Esther look at it more closely. The bird blinked, tilted its head to one side. On second glance, it wasn’t a typical grayor brown pigeon: It was white with delicate gray spotting on its wingsand tail. Its eyes were red, but she thought all pigeons might have red eyes. She seldom paid them much mind, though she did admire the cunning fabrication of the message cases, their tiny straps. Jascha and Itakh bent their heads—one light, one dark—together to examine the bird and talk over her attributes. Like other boys in the camp, Jascha wore a loose-fitting cloth cap with a brim, different from the crewel-work pillbox Itakh and other Khazar Jews wore. The single gold earring of Itakh’s servitude glinted ...