Read The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen for Free Online

them make you one! You are smarter than they are, more learned than any sage. And you loved Saba once.”
    Yes. I had. Before my mother left me for the afterlife and I gave up my voice. Before Sadiq poisoned my chambers and Punt became my sanctuary if only because it was not the Saba I had come to know.
    This morning I had dreamed of her rains. In days to come, I would wonder if it had been an omen. I had never been able to banish the past but had lived always in fear of its tendrils, even as I invited traders from the ports to dine with me in exchange for their stories. From the safety of Punt’s halls, I had followed the exploits of the council, the shifting politics of the tribes, and news of the growing cult of Almaqah and the temples my father built in his name. Almaqah, the god of the thundering bull and lunar cycle to whom I had sworn myself so many years ago.
    Saba had found me in my dreams. Saba had found me here. I might have left Saba, but it had never left me. And now I saw that a part of me, more wise and seeing than my waking mind, had prepared for this future all along.
    Somewhere outside the shrill song of a flycatcher caught the air. I closed my eyes.
    “You asked what I would have you do.”
    “Yes. Name it!”
    “If I become queen, I will never marry you. To marry you would be to wonder all my days. I want something of certainty in this world. And so you will not be my husband, and never my king. Now what is your answer?”
    “That you will be a better queen than the kings before you.”
    I dropped my head to Maqar’s shoulder. His arms closed around me more gently than before. At last, he exhaled a long and shaky breath as though he had held it all this time.
    “Stay with me,” I said.
    “I will serve you all my life.”
    An hour later I walked out of that chamber, I thought, forever. I was not a queen. Not yet. But I was no longer the princess I had been. That morning I boarded a ship on the edge of the narrow sea and assumed again the name by which Saba knew me: Bilqis.
    And so my days of obscurity came to an end. I was eighteen years old.

THREE

    W hen I closed my eyes, I thought I could smell the frankincense weeping from the trees. It was said the perfume of Saba wafted out to sailors on the Red Sea and throughout the southern gulf. Here, in the Markha Valley, one could almost believe it.
    “Princess.”
    I opened my eyes on the tents and camels of twelve hundred tribesmen sprawled near the edge of the great waste.
    Overhead, the sky was churning. And yet, the heavens had held. It was a sign from Almaqah, they had said days ago on the southern coastal plain. There my priest, Asm, who had come with me from Punt, had sacrificed a camel—one we could not afford, and therefore one Almaqah must honor.
    Maqar, mounted at my side, pointed. Riders, on the northern edge of the valley.
    “Come,” I said, refastening my veil. I guided my camel down the ridge.
    To leave or enter Saba was to risk all—through treacherous mountains after the hot hell of the coastal plain, only to be laughed at by baboons. Through an ocean of sand in the vast eastern waste, graveyard to innumerable would-be invaders. The only traversableway in was from the north through the oases of the Jawf, and then only if one had kin-ties to the tribes or riches to trade . . . or south from the seaport through the valleys, and then only if one had a ship. It was never the sea that safeguarded the cradle of Saba—along with her wealth—but always her mountains and sands.
    I had wept on landing in the southern port. Not in relief that our company had made the crossing before the rains or that we had been met by the southern tribe of Urramar with much-needed supplies and camels. But because I had not thought I would ever be glad to see Saba’s high mountain ranges again.
    Maqar was right. I had loved Saba once. And now, like a lover returned, I was broken at the sight of her.
    But my return was not without cost. Sadiq came to me