Long after the Queen of Sheba left King Solomon to his 700 wives and 300 concubines, bearing away with her his gifts of jeweled ornaments and fine fabrics and scrolls written by the wisest of men, including his memoir copied out by scribes over the length of her visit—long after she had departed Solomon's bedchamber, leaving behind a scent he'd never come across before and never would again, though he opened jar after jar of the perfumes and spices she had given him—long after his craftsmen had worked her Ophirian gold into bracelets and earrings and breastpieces and bells, and his workers had hewn her sandalwood to make beams for the Temple and for Solomon's own house, filling rooms with its creamy aroma—long after he had turned over his answers to her conundrums (how to best reward one courtier without offending another, how to address famine in her southern territory, how to cure her cattle from the disease that mottled their hides, how to predict the weather, what laws she should add in the coming years) and decided he'd responded as thoroughly as he would have liked—long after the fading of memories of her fingers on his lips, her lips on his back, her eyes on his body as he disrobed—long after he'd told her the story of how his father had made him king even though he was not the oldest of his brothers, and the story of how only one of the hypothetical mothers had protested his order to divide the child with a sword, while the other had pronounced it a fair solution, proving she was not the mother (unless she was utterly mad, he now wondered) (or unless neither woman had been the mother, but only one had the craftiness to reject his proposal?)—long after the queen had returned to Ethiopia with all she desired and asked for in addition to what he'd given her from his royal bounty (including, perhaps, a child of his own), it occurred to King Solomon that he'd neglected to ask her any questions about herself: Do you visit other kings with your gifts and your questions? Where do you go to find quiet at the end of the day? What words from your father still lodge in you like a shard? Do you have 700 husbands, and what do you tell them when they ask you, again and again, to build shrines to their gods? When we already have so much, why do we still yearn for more?

.