The Wild Rooster That Found Sheba's City

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The Missing Guest

When the wine made Solomon's heart merry, he summoned the whole of creation to dance before his guests. Beasts of the field came. Birds of the sky came. Creeping things came. Demons, spirits, and night-spirits arrived unbound and uncaged, with no keeper to drag them. His scribes called each one by name the way a roll is called in a court that expects every subject to answer. The hall filled with motion and noise and the strange peace of a king who believed the world itself had accepted his invitation.

Only the wild rooster failed to appear.

The king's anger rose the way a storm rises over a calm sea. He ordered the bird destroyed. Absence at a feast of total obedience looked like rebellion. Before the sentence could fall, the rooster answered for its life. For three days, it said, it had eaten nothing and drunk nothing, flying over the whole world to find the one land that did not bow to the king. Hunger had been its companion. Distance had been its work. It had not been idle. It had been hunting a blank space on Solomon's map.

Kitor in the East

It had found a city in the east called Kitor, where dust was worth more than gold and silver lay in the streets like dung, where the trees were rooted from the days of creation and drank from the rivers of Eden. A people lived there who knew nothing of war and could not draw a bow. Their peace was so complete it looked, to a bird trained in a warrior-king's court, like a kind of nakedness. Over them ruled one woman, the Queen of Sheba.

Give me leave, the bird said, and I will bind her kings in chains and bring them to my lord. Solomon's anger turned into a letter. The feast that had stalled for one missing guest now turned toward a queen no one in Jerusalem had named until a half-starved rooster forced her onto the record.

The Sky Goes Black Over the Queen

Scribes tied the letter to the wild rooster's wing. The bird shot into the heights, shrieked once, and flew east at the head of every bird in the sky. They blackened the sun over Kitor. The Queen of Sheba had gone out at dawn to bow to the sun, and when the light went dark she tore her robe in fear. Day failed without warning. The air filled with wings. Then the rooster dropped beside her with the message, a single courier at the head of a living eclipse.

Solomon's words were not gentle. The God of heaven had set him over beasts, birds, demons, and night-spirits, the letter said, and every king of the four directions came to greet him. She would come too, or his armies would come to her. And what armies? The beasts were his cavalry, the birds his horsemen, the spirits and night-demons his legions, and they would strangle her in her bed. The letter did not flatter. It named the price of refusal in the language of a king who could already darken her sky.

Three Years Instead of Seven

She tore her clothes a second time. Her elders shrugged that they had never heard of Solomon. She did not believe them. A man who could command the birds that ate the sun was not a rumor to dismiss with a shrug. She loaded her ships with jewels, sent six thousand children all born in a single hour and dressed alike in purple, and wrote that she would come. The road was seven years long. She promised to arrive in three.

The feast in Jerusalem had stalled for one missing bird. That bird returned with a queen's fear and a queen's pride packed into the same flight. Solomon's court, which could call every creature by name, learned there was still a city that had not answered the roll until a rooster, half-starved and full of news, forced the question. Power that summons the whole of creation still has blank spaces. The wild rooster found one, and the Queen of Sheba began to count the days of a shorter road.

In the hall the scribes put away the roll of beasts and birds. In the east a queen ordered ships loaded and children dressed in purple. Between them flew the same rooster that had nearly been destroyed for arriving late, now carrying a kingdom's pride on a wing that had gone three days without food. Solomon waited with the patience of a man who already owned the sky. Sheba moved with the urgency of a woman who had seen that sky fail. The map of the world grew one city larger, and that city had a woman's name at its head.