The Queen of Sheba Mistook Solomon's Glass Floor for Water

The queen reached the threshold of the great hall and stopped. Water lay across the floor in front of her, bright and unmoving, lapping at the foot of the seat where Solomon waited. She bent, gathered the heavy hem of her gown in both hands, and raised it to wade across. Her bare foot came down on dry stone. There was no water. The floor was glass laid over pale marble, polished until it swallowed the light and gave back the picture of a flood, and the king of Israel had unsettled the proudest ruler in the south before she had asked him a single question.

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A Bird Carried the Summons to Kitor

It had started with a bird. Solomon held court over more than men, and at a muster of every winged creature in his kingdom he found the hoopoe missing from the ranks. When the bird came back it spoke of a country far to the south, the city of Kitor in the land of Sheba, where the dust was gold, the trees had grown from seeds of Eden, and a queen knelt each morning to worship the sun. The king's scribes wrote a letter, bound it to the hoopoe's wing, and sent the bird south at the head of a darkening cloud of wings. The queen walked out at dawn to pray and found the sky above Kitor gone black. She tore her robe in alarm. Then she loosed the letter and read a summons from a king she had never met: come to Jerusalem, or his armies and his spirits would come to her.

Solomon Ruled the Beasts, the Birds, and the Night

The reports she had collected over the years were not modest ones. A king sat in Jerusalem who understood the speech of beasts and birds and demons, who commanded the spirits and the spectres of the night, and who had never met a riddle he could not crack open. He ruled from a throne of gold carried out of Ophir, guarded by seventy-two golden lions and seventy-two golden eagles, a seat no other kingdom on earth could copy. She did not believe a word of it. So she loaded her camels with spices and gold and the hardest questions her wise men could invent, and set out to see the wonder for herself, or to break it.

The Hall Where the Floor Looked Like Water

Benaiah met her at the city gate and walked her in. Solomon had gone ahead to seat himself in a chamber of glass, and that is where the illusion caught her. She saw the king ringed by water and lifted her skirt to keep the cloth dry, and as her foot came down on the bare glass he looked at her uncovered legs and saw they were thick with hair. He did not look away. "Your beauty is the beauty of a woman," he told her, "but your hair is the hair of a man. On a man it is an ornament. On a woman it is a blemish." She had crossed a desert to strip his reputation bare. He had stripped her first, in the space of a single step, and only then did she begin to ask her questions.

The Riddles She Carried From the South

She set traps that looked like games. She lined up children of the same height dressed in the same clothes and told him to tell the boys from the girls. Solomon called for roasted ears of corn and handfuls of nuts and scattered them across the floor. The boys snatched them up with bare hands. The girls drew them in from under their garments, too modest to bare their arms, and the king named each child without a single miss. She brought him men, some circumcised and some not, and asked him to sort them. He gave a sign to the high priest, the Ark of the Covenant was opened, and the circumcised bowed low as the light poured out of it. One snare after another sprang shut on nothing. Every secret she set before him was already lying open in his hand.

What She Carried Home

By the end she had stopped testing him. She blessed the God who had set such a man over Israel, gave the king a fortune in gold and spices and gems, took gifts of his own in return, and turned her camels back toward the south. She had crossed a desert to break a legend and had only fed it. The floor that looked like water, the king who read her before she spoke, the riddles that shattered one after another against his calm. She had come to unmask a fraud and left as his witness.