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Fantasy Stories

The Queen of Sheba's Diamonds

Written by Paula R. Stiles

This young girl, she is Africa, my friend, Africa. All of the lush area that travels from the broad but barren shoulders of the Sahara down to the closed thighs of South Africa, that still mourns an abusive husband, Apartheid. This girl is the Queen of Sheba, though none today will show her scepter its due. Soon, though, they might. They might bow their heads before her throne and prostrate themselves on her marble floor and count themselves very fortunate to leave the balance of her scales alive.

What will the Queen do today? Let me tell you. She will get up in her little cement rented room. It will still be dark enough that she must light a dingy tin kerosene lamp imported from China to see. It will be cold enough that the cocks have been crowing for over an hour to keep warm. The muezzin in the town mosque will be calling the Muslims in the quartiers to come to morning prayers in le grand matin, the hour before dawn, his wailing voice rising and falling over the roosters and the otherwise silent town.

The Queen of Sheba does not sell her body to bring men to her scales; she has something else to sell: diamonds.

It is a mystery, is it not, how no one ever robs the Queen of her diamonds? It's because she never tells them and no one notices what she does not tell them about.

She will put on her lion-print blouse and her parrot red-and-green pagne skirt. She will push her feet into rubber-soled flipflops that cost 200 CFA. Then, she will dip out water from the tub in the corner of the room, to wash her face and for breakfast. She will cook on a small fire in the courtyard in front of her room—a little morning Matinal hot chocolate, an omelette with some long, hard bread to soak up the golden palm oil on which the omelette floats, and hot red ground piment to kill the off taste of the eggs, which are over a month old. Eggs are scarce this month because so many hens have died off from a flu (and yet, there are always cocks to crow three hours before dawn). Someone will buy more hens and sell more eggs. But not this week.

She will tie a scarf that matches her pagne over her head, around and under her hair in back. She will put a metal chain with a plastic-gold fish around her neck. Her earrings will be semiprecious stones set in cheap silver that would stain her skin if her skin were not as slate black as midnight, as the bottom of a trap, sucking in all light yet shining in the sun.

Before she leaves her room, she will take out a leather pouch that thieves never seem to find and she will shake out its contents. Diamonds will spill out, each one unique, but each different in cast of light and color, for there are three hundred of the kind that men hunt. Some of them will be blood-red as rubies and others will be rainforest-green as emeralds and some will be as sandy-brown as the Sahara, and some will have no color at all. You won't be able to tell how many. Sometimes, they will seem less than a hundred, other times a thousand or more, and sometimes millions. You will only know one thing for sure if you see those diamonds and that is that by the end of each day, the Queen of Sheba will have acquired at least one more.

It's bad juju, my friend, bad juju, which only means voodoo before there was voodoo, and there is nothing you can do about it.

She will scoop those diamonds off her shabby pallet on a bunk kept off the floor by a meter. This protects the sleeper from snakes and scorpions. But you can't keep off the rats and the spiders because they come down from above. She will shake her gems back into her pouch, smiling to herself. It won't be a pleasant smile.

She will tie the pouch up inside her pagne under her blouse and go outside, locking the door with a padlock because there are thieves everywhere. Then, she will go down the red-dirt courtyard past the palm and banana trees and the little mango tree waiting patiently for the coming rainy season to come into fruit for just one month.

She will push open a ribbed tolle gate, the rusting tin bleeding onto the wood, and step out into a dirt alleyway. She will skip down it to another gate and onto a street frenetic with early morning activity. Lorries and bush taxis loaded with goods and people will roar past, belching noxious fumes. Goats and sheep will run in between the vehicles and feet, bleating to distraction. Everyone knows that they have until nine in the morning to get anything done before the sun becomes their enemy, sapping their strength more than any disease, killing their will. By noon, everyone will have retreated behind closed doors into the cool houses, drinking soda or beer, depending on their religion, talking and laughing. The women will beat manioc or cook (for cooking takes all day in Africa) or sew or feed a baby. Women have no real rest between four in the morning and eight at night.

Then the Queen of Sheba will stroll down the street toward the marché, smiling in anticipation of the day's riches.

In the marché are many women. This is a big city, en ville, and such have permanent marchés with ramshackle wooden buildings for the cloth and gold merchants and big outdoor wooden racks containing musty, maggot-ridden fish. Narrow, treacherous lanes boast everything from bicycle tires to brassieres and are full of fetid mud and stinking thieves. It's a dangerous place, the marché, and it could all burn down in an hour. Sometimes, it does.

The Queen of Sheba will take her place not far from the women crying their wares of street food, of hard-roasted corn and leaf-wrapped manioc paste. On her other side will stand the meat-sellers, hawking offal, bloody meat and cooked beef brochettes on wooden tables. No one will take note of her in any way. She will hunker down in between the buildings and lay out her treasures in piles called "tas" on a round tin tray, each according to his color. She will pick up two and roll them, snake eyes. "Diamants!" she will cry. "Un tas, deux tas, trois tas, quatre! Come see my diamonds!"

No one will pay her any heed, for they will only hear her if they want, need, ought to, must hear her. She doesn't care about the rest.

Then, along will come a man.

Some days, he will be French and some days, he will come from North Africa and some days, his ancestors will have come, generations ago, from India. But today, he will come from the rainforest below the savannah line. He will swagger, tall and burly, and he will think he owns the world.

He will come down the narrow track, shoving everyone who does not scramble to get out of his way fast enough. He will hear the Queen of Sheba's call and his head will lift. Diamonds! He will follow that call down the narrow lanes of mud and wood until he turns a corner and there, between the meat and the corn, will she crouch against a wall, her tin tray of treasures in front of her.

There is always a man, you know. She never has to go looking for them.

He will approach her and tower over her. The sun won't have risen quite high enough yet to shine into the wood-sheathed alleyways, but his shadow will make them even darker. He will look down at the diamonds, marveling at how they gleam even in the dim morning light. Could it be that they sense profit, like their mistress?

The Queen of Sheba will stop shouting her wares and stand up. This will be her first customer for the day. "Bonjour, Monsieur. How may I help you?"

"You have some fine wares for a street urchin, ma petite," he will say. His voice will be boisterous and, on the surface, good-natured. But it will be the kind of good nature based on contempt. He will literally talk down to her. "Where did you get them?"

"I dug them up and traded them, and some have given them to me," she will reply, her dark eyes not lowered or narrowed by his bulk.

The man will frown. He will