The Dovekeepers

  Against my fevered skin, her flesh was delightfully cool. She confided in me that water was her element and had been since she was a child, that was why I had found her in the cistern. Her mother had brought her to a river, and she found she could swim without ever having been taught to do so. What was dangerous to one person was a mercy to another. My son-in-law’s wish was not an impossible task, she assured me, but the price was patience. Wait and have faith, she urged. Catch a demon and you will break the spell. Offer an angel gratitude and he might return the voices he’d taken to stop the children from crying out when they were hidden behind the waterfall. I was to pray every night to Beree, the angel of rain. This angel was silent, as my grandchildren were, so I should not expect an answer, at least not right away.

  “I know what it is your son-in-law desires,” Shirah now said. “But what of you?”

  “His wish is mine,” I assured her.

  “No.” She was not convinced. When she gazed at me, I felt my throat tighten, perhaps to hold back the truth. “There’s something more.”

  Shirah raised my hand to her mouth. Before I could think to pull away, she kissed the center of my palm. In that instant I let go of the truth, that which I’d kept from her and from God and from myself. I broke into a shuddering sob. The soldiers had been beasts and it had been a pleasure to kill them, but they had been men as well. They had walked on the earth and under the sky. The one who had pleaded with me was the one who had stayed with me, for he had begged for something I now longed for as well.

  I wished to be forgiven.

  “It was always so in the eyes of God,” Shirah told me.

  She let her robe slip from her shoulders so that I could take in the full measure of the forbidden red tattoos on her skin that I had spied in the cistern. I knew what they represented: loyalty to the goddess, a life given in service, a woman’s deepest sacrifice, scorned by our own people.

  “Should I judge myself?” she ventured to ask. “Or should I leave that to the Almighty, who forgives us all for being what He made us?”

  Beneath the mulberry tree I had nearly been moved to renounce my faith alongside my son-in-law. Who was there to look down upon my trials and my transgressions? Who could heal a wound that might never be closed? Shirah had tasted my sorrow and had trusted me enough to reveal herself to me in return. If she could, and if God would allow it, my son-in-law would be granted his heart’s desire.

  Perhaps then I could forgive myself.

  I PRACTICED patience throughout the month of Tishri, for this virtue did not come easily to me. In truth, patience had never served me well in the past. If I’d had patience, my grandsons would have been beside the pool of green water when the renegades came to us, waiting like sheep to be slaughtered. If I’d had patience, my daughter’s murderers would still be walking this earth. I thought of my husband and how he had waited for the dough to rise, never rushing the loaves into the oven. He’d known the exact moment to take the linen cloths from the rising loaves, when to slide the wooden board into the red-hot oven. It was as if he was the challah as well as its maker, and therefore understood its mystery from the inside out.

  I began to study the slave. He, too, was a deeply patient man. He waited without complaint every evening, settled upon the stones of the dovecote until Yael’s return the following day, as calm as the doves who waited for our return. But I took note of the heat in his pale eyes; he couldn’t hide that. Even his patience would last only so long.

  It was a difficult season, and the heat had not dissipated. Sleep did not come easy to me, although the others beneath my roof slept well, including Arieh, who was more than two months old, a healthy, quiet little boy. There came an evening when I was tidying our chamber, setting new straw into our sleeping pallets, when I looked out to see movement beside our door. I noticed a shadow, as I had at the oasis when the darkness of the soldiers crossed the sand. That was my talent. I could observe what was only half there: the beasts on the ridgetop, the rat in the corner, the woman meeting her lover, the vial of poison behind the spice jars, the lanky form of a man lingering outside our chamber. I thought it was a spirit who had risen to walk among us, having left his slumbering body behind. But, no, he was flesh and blood.

  *

  WHEN I recognized him, I understood that the Man from the North was not as patient as I had imagined. Perhaps this was true for all men. I now remembered there had indeed been days when the Baker cursed the ovens for being slow, when he pulled the loaves from the racks before they were fully cooled. Even the most patient among us has a breaking point. On this evening when I saw the figure slinking along the wall, I knew such a time had come for the slave. He wore a head scarf to disguise himself, but anyone could tell he wasn’t one of us. His fair hair shimmered. You would think a man from the world of ice would hold little feeling, but that wasn’t the case. How hot ice could be, how impatient, ready to melt.

  The Man from the North was fortunate that I alone spied him. Anyone else would have set upon him immediately, and even if he was quick to surrender, whoever might have chosen to murder him would have been within his legal rights. I waved him away, clapping my hands, as I would to chase off rats. He slipped back against the wall, falling into the dark, disappearing, as a dream might. But unlike a dream, he left his mark. When I went to the wall in the half-light and ran my hand over the stones, I found them hot to the touch in the place where he had waited, cast by the impatience that was evident in any man in love.

  The following morning, as Yael and I walked through the field, she kept her eye on the dovecote where the shadow who had stalked her was kept. My walk was slower than hers, and I saw her impatience when she bade me to hurry.

  “The doves can’t wait?” I asked.

  She flushed and began to fuss with the baby she carried at her hip. “Dear heart,” she said, masking her eyes, rubbing the soft skin under Arieh’s chin.

  “Is there a reason you’re so impatient?” I pressed her.

  She looked up at me, hesitant. I could feel her lie forming before it was declared. “No hurry,” she answered, but her gaze said otherwise.

  That was when I knew she was the one who had left the slave’s chains unlocked.

  She was treating him like a man.

  I said I had a stone caught in my sandal. I stopped to slip it out, stating that I could not walk with a stone any more than a slave could become one of us. I glanced at Yael and saw she was flustered, angered by my remarks.

  “Do you think he’s less than we are? Is he nothing more than a stone?”

  It was said that angels came to human beings for comfort. How lonely they must be, locked in the silence of their world. But a human burned in the embrace of the angels, his body set aflame, and the kindness of such creatures could become a curse. Here on this mountain, Yael’s indiscretion would be considered treachery.

  “If they find him roaming, they’ll kill him,” I warned. “If you unlock him, you unlock his death. Do you think he’ll be happy to do our bidding once his chains are off? He’ll want more, like any other man.”

  Yael softly admitted that the Man from the North had spoken of his plans to escape. He knew of others who had done so. Several of his fellow conscripts had deserted the legion before they’d crossed the Great Sea, still more had disappeared after reaching Jerusalem. I was silent, wondering if he might have known the beasts who had attacked us, perhaps had considered them friends.

  When the Man from the North made his impassioned speeches about freedom, I suspected he was trying to convince Yael to flee as well. He insisted the Romans would soon enough be upon us—and it was true we more often spied scouts in the region. Before long we would be the slaves, the Man from the North had vowed. But perhaps he had forgotten that, when Yael left the dovecote, she was not alone. She had told me she would never return to the desert, where there were bones left beneath the piles of rocks, glinting in white heat, the remains of the man she had loved.

  I knew about the lion w
ho had bitten her and possessed her. She’d rambled about him when we paused on the steps so that she might draw breath on the night she labored to bring forth her child. Although she never spoke of it again, I knew she was not about to bring another lion into the desert. If the Man from the North was planning to escape, he would have to do so alone.

  I made no further comment when I saw them working together. I turned away when she brought him a blanket and a goatskin bag of water. She was not my daughter, though I had allowed her to use the Baker’s possessions, the vials of coriander and cumin, the wooden spoons, the apron he had tied around his waist. I had wept over these things before and would again, whether or not Yael ruined what was left of her life ministering to the slave. She should have treated him as a mere stone in her sandal. Instead, she saw him as a man.

  When they went into what was left of the orchards, those trees that had not been hewn for firewood and still bore fruit, the hawk followed, dedicated, not veering away from the mountaintop. I watched their shadows stretch across the field, then disappear as a cloud passed overhead. I felt sure this was the sign of disaster to come. Perhaps I no longer believed in kindness and mistrusted it. I had come to consider compassion a knife in the hands of the angels of disaster.

  ONE SABBATH EVENING, the council announced they would no longer bring conscripts or slaves to the fortress after a battle but would instead slay them along with their owners. Several Roman conscripts had been captured and now worked with the donkeys who carried up barrels of water. There was little enough food for the residents, we hadn’t a surplus to feed more. What was a slave but a stone? people murmured. Exactly as I had said. I watched Yael carefully after that proclamation; she frowned and gazed at the council in alarm as the slaves among us were denounced.

  “It’s a sin to keep people so,” she said to me with a naked flash of emotion as we left the plaza.

  “I suppose you won’t listen to my advice,” I muttered.

  She laughed and linked her arm through mine. “I’ll listen,” she assured me.

  “And then you’ll do as you please,” I remarked.

  We laughed together, then I fell silent, for I realized how much I feared for her in this wicked world. Although she was not my daughter, I fretted as if she were.

  THE NEXT MORNING I saw that Yael had brought the Man from the North a bow and several arrows, one for each of the seven sisters that gather as stars in the sky. She had hidden them under her cloak, but I recognized the shape of the weapon from its shadow when she stored it beneath a pile of straw. The bow was one her brother had carried. When he found it gone, he would question his friends in the barracks and never once remember he had not seen it since his sister’s most recent visit. This was the shade I had spied in the field as the hawk drifted above them. She was willing to do too much for this man who was nothing on this mountain and should have been nothing to her as well.

  “Don’t tell me when it will happen,” I overheard her say as she stood beside him. “I’ll arrive one morning and you’ll be gone.”

  The Man from the North was aware that he had a rival, but unlike most suitors, he wasn’t jealous. Rather, he doted upon his competition, our little lion. He might have resented Arieh his mother’s joys and arms, instead he was happy to help amuse the child, lifting him up to see the hawk above us. He whistled in a way that brought the bird swooping, which made the baby throw back his head and laugh. The slave often listed the names of things in his own rough language, trying to teach Arieh how he might say dove and hawk and mother and snow, as though convinced the child might someday live in the slave’s cold land and speak as he did.

  “You’re wasting your time,” I warned when he clasped Arieh in his arms, then tossed him in the air until the child melted with laughter.

  Then one day he told the child his name. We worked in such close quarters that we all overheard. It was Wynn, a rough word that stuck in the throat. Shirah and Aziza exchanged a look, surprised that the slave would reveal himself. He had addressed Arieh in the manner in which a man might speak to his son. I knew then that the time of his leaving had come. A slave never speaks his name aloud; once he was captured, it was not to be uttered until he walked into the world beyond. His name was to be a word known only to his kinsmen who awaited him and to whatever God he revered.

  Only a free man would take such a risk.

  In the evenings I waited, holding the baby, while Yael ducked back inside the dovecote and unlocked his chains. It was a simple lock; the key was hung on a hook hammered into the dovecote wall. And yet it took some time before Yael emerged, smoothing down her hair. No one else would have spied her shadow, or known how it drew her back to this man, but shadows were my gift. Because she was not my daughter, I stood with the baby and sulked and said nothing.

  This was the time of year when night came earlier, washing across the sky to flood the corners of the horizon. Each night when Yael left the slave, her expression was dark.

  She erupted one evening when an edict went out that rations would be halved and there would no longer be clean water for animals or slaves. “No one should be treated this way.”

  “Would it have been better if they’d killed him?” I asked.

  “When men act like beasts, they become so,” she countered.

  I couldn’t deny this, so I let it be. “This is the world we live in,” I murmured, and she took my hand, as if she were indeed my daughter.

  YAEL WASN’T ALONE in her unhappiness. We all felt the constraints of the mountain, the lack of food, the petty jealousies. Many of the sheep and goats that we valued for their milk were being butchered out of need. People were going hungry. Cucumbers on the vine shriveled in the last bursts of heat, turning to ash, as the fruit was said to do in the blighted city of Sodom.

  The council allowed a group of travelers to camp in the far field, beyond the Essenes’ goat house. They were nomads who dyed their hands blue and spoke in their own tongue, but they brought with them livestock to share with us, although we would have nothing to do with the swine they kept. They, too, had been driven off by the Romans. Some of their women, the ones who had been violated by soldiers, cut deep gashes into the palms of their hands and soles of their feet to allow the sorrow to rise out of their bodies.

  When they left to return to the wilderness, their flocks in need of grasslands, we found a baby who had come from a union a Roman soldier had forced upon one of their women. The baby had been suffocated, then placed beneath an almond tree, knees to his chest, his small arms folded, as though asleep and in peace, rescued from the harshness of the world. Yael stood beside me and wept. She had seen two child-brides from this tribe buried in this way in the wilderness. She said they had held hands so they might walk together into whatever world awaited them.

  There were many among us who wished we could flee and find our way back to cities and towns. But there was nothing to return to. Our houses were burned, our towns destroyed. I wondered if Yael wished she could escape and make her away across the desert, over the Great Sea, to the world where snow was an everyday occurrence rather than a miracle.

  I could see my grandsons playing near the wall much like shadows sifting across the gathering dark. My throat closed up as it often did when I gazed upon them. I thought of the baby, smothered, then carefully and lovingly laid to rest. Yael put her arm through mine, for we spent every evening together. The first star had appeared above us, the one they say is Ashtoreth’s lantern, which burns so brightly it allows her to cross the sky when all others are trapped in the dark.

  THE SENTRIES caught him one night in the month of Cheshvan when the air was glazed with cold. It was the beginning of the rainy season, the time of the year when we lived beneath the sign of the scorpion, which brought disorder and gloom, the time of the floods. Yet the sky hung over us like an empty bowl, throwing down darkness but nothing more. There had been no rain, and we all knew this was a sign that our people were not in God’s favor.

  The guards fell u
pon him as he crossed the field where the trees lifted their boughs upward, desperate in their thirst. He was near the portion of the wall that circled past our chamber, the place where he’d left his mark of heat upon the stones on the night I’d spied him waiting, perhaps with patience, most certainly with desire.

  We did not speak of it, but we all knew that if he’d been heading to the Snake Gate to make his escape, he would not have come in this direction. There was only one reason why he was apprehended in the garden of onions where the scorpion resided, and that reason was Yael. Perhaps he had convinced himself that, if he spoke to her once more, and if the words were strong enough, they might pierce through her resolve and she might be willing to leave us.

  We didn’t know he had been captured until morning. There was a sharp breeze that carried the scent of myrrh, and also of fragrant cypress, reminding me of the valley where I had once lived. We usually had rain in this month, but so far none had fallen, though the priests were praying for such an occurrence three times a day. People were reminded of the stories of the great drought, when a sage named Honi called down the rains and saved our people. The situation warranted a miracle and the voice of someone who might be heard when calling out to God.

  Upon discovering the news of the slave’s imprisonment, Yael leaned against the wall of the dovecote for support, so that it seemed she’d been struck and could go no farther. The baby was tied to her, and he stirred in his sleep and made a whimpering noise. Yael quickly stroked his dark hair to settle him. What might a baby dream of? Milk and love, the language of a mother’s care, the voice of a man who was born in snow? It is the sort of sleep we can never have again. Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.

  No one told us where the slave was, but when we spied the hawk circling a tower, we knew where they’d taken him. They would have killed him, but it wasn’t worth the effort. If they left him be, locked up and forgotten, he would die on his own. I saw Shirah’s eyes flit over to Yael, who now forced herself to show no expression. No outsider would guess she felt more than the rest of us, unless they noticed she’d grown so pale that the freckled marks on her skin stood out like a scrim of blood.