“Let our wives die unharmed, our children without the bitter mantle of slavery. Do you want them half-devoured by wild beasts, tortured by fire and whippings, enslaved? Let us make haste. Let us avoid the evils of mankind. We prefer death before those miseries. Let us go out of the world with our wives and children in freedom.
“Let our story bear witness that we perished out of choice, a choice we made at the beginning, to chose death rather than slavery.”
Warriors were sent to set fire to the storerooms. The heat was worsened so that it became an inferno. We seemed to have fallen headfirst into the month of Av, that time when the sorrows of our people blaze, when God tests our faith and our duty and our belief in His greatness.
WE LISTENED to Eleazar as we might listen to a dream, one we could not stop, one from which there was no waking. I felt my love for him so deeply I thought I might break as the boughs of the almonds had, my ardor the knife that pierced me. People began to run to their houses, not to escape but to gather their worldly goods so they might be destroyed rather than fall into the hands of the Romans. A great bonfire was begun, and all we owned was heaped upon it, garments and sandals and wooden bowls and yards of wool. The goats and sheep that were left had their throats slit, and their bodies were placed upon the fire as burnt offerings sacrificed to God, for there would be no need of meat or milk, only of God’s grace. There was no Temple standing and this would be our last sacrifice.
Eleazar’s men, his favorites, warriors who had fought beside him, men scarred by battle who had journeyed from Jerusalem to become hawks in this desert, came to him to encircle him. Some of them sobbed and were consumed by grief; others no longer felt the pains of the world, for they were in a state of sacrifice, as warriors were before they entered into battle. There were fifty or more, Amram among them, and these men brought broken pottery pieces, ostraca, upon which their names or initials were written. The weeping grew more furious as the lottery was begun. The priest and his learned men began to pray and chant, rocking back and forth with the passion of their prayers.
Ten men among them would be chosen. They would do the deed and dispatch with the rest of us. They would bear the burden as death-givers so that we did not have to carry the sin of harming ourselves, which was forbidden. When the time came they would slay each other, until only one was left. That man would hold the weight of all our sins, and would be commanded to enter through the three gates of Gehennom, the valley of hell, where he would suffer the torments of demons for all eternity.
“Why should we fear death when we do not fear sleep?” Eleazar cried out, in a frenzy, in such a pure rapture that none could look away. I saw him as he was at the well, furious with all of men’s wrongdoings, assured he could set things right in the name of God. “Death allows freedom to our souls. It takes true courage to find true freedom and to be called to God’s side. It would have been better if we had died before seeing Jerusalem destroyed. Now our hope has fled, but we can avenge the enemies of the holy city, and show kindness to those we love, and not see them led away in slavery and be witness to the torture and violence that awaits our wives and our children and our dearest friends.”
Husbands and wives were embracing, mothers had taken up their children, sons ran to search out their fathers so they might die side by side. The ten men were chosen, our saviors and our executioners. Ben Ya’ir took his sword to make his pledge upon the weapon he had used to fight for God, and for his nation, and for us.
“We were born to die, as are all who are brought into the world. This even the most fortunate among us must face. This is our fate, and our fate is now upon us.”
My fate was upon me as well.
I quickly signaled to Yael and Revka. We made our way back to my chamber, pulling Revka’s younger grandson, Levi, along, lest he be taken up by the crowd, with Noah following behind. Revka herself all but fainted in the crush.
Yehuda was in my chamber, wrapped in his white garment, reciting the prayer for the souls of the dead. Adir was nowhere to be seen.
“Where is he?” I was so distraught I caught the poor Essene boy by his prayer shawl. Revka, who had come to consider Yehuda as her own, came to coax the frightened boy into speaking.
“He was worried for Aziza. He said she was in his place, and he would find her and bring her back here.”
I ran to my cabinet for my mother’s book of spells, my two hearts stirring inside me. There were screams echoing from the plaza, for the death-givers had begun their work and some of the dying could not bear to see their families slaughtered, even at the hands of our own men, angels of mercy, the messengers of our fate. My hands were shaking. Perhaps it had been written that I would be redeemed. Perhaps love would not be my undoing but my salvation.
I cast my mother’s book into Yael’s hands and insisted that she must keep it safe. I noticed that she wore the collar of the lion twisted around her arm, and then I knew I had been right to choose her, for she was as fierce as she was loyal.
Revka was huddled with her grandsons, keeping Arieh on her lap. He was little more than a baby, but he was sensitive and knew when silence was needed. When Revka held a finger to her lips, he hushed and leaned against her. She then patted Yehuda’s shoulders as he wept, guilt-ridden for having allowed Adir to leave. He was only a boy, and his mother had left him in our care so that he might be safe from harm. They all huddled together on the tiled floor fashioned for a king’s kitchen, a room that had turned fetid, burning hot, like a grave in the sand.
The child who was my heart cried. I took her from beneath my cloak and gave her into Yael’s hands as I had given her the book of spells. I went to my ironwood box, which had come with me from Egypt, the one my mother had locked with a key in the shape of a snake, a snake I’d thought came alive to inch across my palm when I was only a girl. Inside the unlocked box were ingredients I had been storing for the worst of times: snakeskin for the black viper that sleeps between the rocks, ash from the fire of a sacrificed dove, crushed lapis from the stone that is stronger than all others, strings tied in precise knots, all of these meant to weave a web of protection. I took what I needed. I was going to find my children in the plaza, then I would go to Eleazar. Panic was beating inside me, for I knew, no matter what I did, I would indeed drown on this day. That was the fate that had been cast by the bones in the tower.
Yael put her hand on my arm, attempting to stop me as I went to the door, insisting it was too late for me to go.
“What would you not have done for the one you loved?” I asked her.
“I am doing that now,” she answered, as if she were indeed my daughter. “Don’t go to him.”
She had promised me once that she would do as I asked. I reminded her of this as I gave her the last piece of fruit I had saved, a pomegranate, the same fruit I had given her at our last farewell. She knew me then as the girl who had cared for her in Jerusalem. She threw her arms around me, and we might have wept if there had been time. Instead, I drew away and told her what she must do. I hoped she would obey me as she had when she was a child. If she saw a sign from the doves, she was to ask Revka where she first saw me as I am. She was to go there without hesitation.
*
THERE WAS chaos everywhere. I did my best to make my way. Those who say you cannot see Mal’ach ha-Mavet could not be more wrong. I have seen him standing right in front of me, his twelve wings blackened by fire, his thousand eyes seeing all that we are and all that we do. I was grasped in the grip of his darkness, a violation of God’s radiance and His glory. We must suffer in his presence, we must stand before him, but I was not ready to face him until I found my children.
The Romans had already begun to lay down planks so they might walk across our wall in the morning. It was the night before our forefathers’ escape from Egypt, the night when our death began. There were husbands and wives lying down side by side on the blood-soaked cobblestones so that they might find their death together; children lined up, wailing. The ten executioners wer
e at their sorrowful work, going from house to house, as the Almighty had done on the night of Passover, when Jews painted their doors with bloodstained hyssop flowers allowing Adonai to know them as true believers and pass them by so they might live.
I went through the Western Plaza, then down the steps toward the Northern Palace. My chest was aching, and drops of blood fell from me, but I went on. Above the chaos, I heard my daughter’s dog barking. I ran, following the echo of that desperate beast, avoiding all men, staying to the shadows until I saw figures near the entrance to a small pool where the king had once bathed in cool water surrounded by white lotus lilies he had brought from Alexandria. There, on the stairs, Amram had come up behind my daughter. Her arrows had fallen around her as he grabbed her at her waist and slit her throat. In doing so he had her for himself at last, but while she gasped in his arms, he had seen the silver medallion at her throat. When I spied him he had clasped her to him, his grief enormous, for he knew her for who she was for the first time, the warrior who had fought beside him and saved him. He cried out for what he had done, mourning all that had died with her.
Adir came rushing at Amram as I watched. My son hadn’t a spear or a sword, only his crutch, which he used to beat Amram, for he had seen his sister murdered and was standing in her blood. Amram turned and pierced him through, then finished his work with one swift cut at my boy’s throat. He wore his prayer shawl, as all the death-givers did, the garment which was always to be made of linen with a single blue woolen thread to remind its wearer of heaven and of God’s commandments. But Amram’s prayer shawl was stained, and appeared brown as the blood upon it clung to the linen.
I watched in a dream, as if I had seen this all before and had come here as a witness so that my children would not be alone in the hour of their death. I prayed to God that they would be embraced in the Shechinah, the dwelling place of the Lord.
My son was no warrior, only a boy. My warrior was a woman who would not have expected an attack from someone who had loved her so well.
The dog was wild over the injury to his mistress, wailing as though he were a man rather than a beast. He would not stand down when Amram turned to shout at him; he straddled Aziza’s fallen body, protecting her still form, his jaws snapping, flecked with foam. Amram kicked at him, then charged, but the dog stood his ground. He was a beast who craved revenge, more loyal than the warrior who now stabbed him through, time and again.
The mastiff refused to die, the guardian of my daughter, who in her death revealed herself to be only a young woman who had shorn her hair and worn men’s garb. Her red feathered arrows fallen around her, her field of flowers, her last farewell. Though mortally wounded, the dog grabbed on to Amram and refused to let go, his teeth sinking into his enemy’s flesh. I watched the struggle in a haze of grief, until both dog and man were so wounded neither could go on, yet neither one would die.
The Man from the Valley should have been at his leader’s bidding, for he was one of the chosen ten. Instead, he had come for Aziza. When he saw what had happened, he slit the dog’s throat so that the beast could die with honor, thereby releasing him from pain and from his duties in this world. But the warrior stood over Amram and watched him in his throes, offering no solace and no assistance. The man who had been Revka’s son-in-law when his name was Yoav, when he still had compassion and faith, let my daughter’s murderer die in anguish.
When Amram was no more, the Man from the Valley cut off the dead man’s armor to further dishonor him, so that the ground was littered with silver scales, and it could be known to God that here lay a coward unworthy of being called a warrior. Then the Man from the Valley took off his prayer shawl and covered Aziza, as though she were a man, a warrior who had fallen in battle. Perhaps that was what he wanted to believe. He could not bear to see her as a woman he had loved, a girl made of flesh, not iron, who had loved him in return.
When that maddened warrior had slipped back into the turmoil of the plaza, I hurried to my children. I closed their eyes and prayed for their spirits. I washed their feet and hands with water from the pool, though ashes had turned the water black. I wound the spells I had carried with me through the strands of their hair, so that they might be protected, if not in this world then in the World-to-Come. I thought of the moments of their births: Aziza’s in a chamber in Jerusalem where the women who worked at keshaphim urged me on to bring forth her life. Adir’s in a tent on the Iron Mountain, where I waited for my husband to ride his horse from the eastern reaches of Moab so he might be there on the tenth day to see his son and to name him a king of his people.
THE TEN went on their murderous rampage for our honor and for the Glory of God, and in this they had succeeded. As I made my way up the stairs to the plateau atop the mountain, there were bodies everywhere, those who loved each other, those who despised each other, those who had believed there would be freedom in Zion, those who had followed a husband or a brother, those who had been born on this mountain, those who had dreamed they would die here, all in a jumble upon the stones. I saw the raven in a black shawl who had cast me into the wilderness curled up in her garden, and I wept for her spirit. I saw Yael’s father, the assassin who had killed so many in the courtyards of the Temple in Jerusalem, splayed out near the barracks, his blood as bright as any flower.
I went to the dovecotes and opened the doors of the first two, at last coming to the stone columbarium that was shaped like a tower, the place where my daughters had most often worked beside me, where Revka had come in her mourning, where Yael had called the birds to her without a single word, as I knew she would when we’d gone to the marketplace in Jerusalem and she’d begged for a dove’s freedom and in return had given her promise to do whatever I asked.
I chased the doves out, shaking my shawl, whistling, as the hawk does, forcing them from their roosts. They lifted into the blackened sky all at once, flecking the darkness with their radiance, delivering the message that there was a time to die and a time to rise up.
THE MAN I loved met me at the door to my chamber. No one else was there, only the two of us, as there had been on the day he took me into his bed, when I left a scrim of vermilion on the bedclothes, not henna but blood. The others had fled. Yael had kept her promise. She’d done as I’d asked.
I let go of everything but my beloved. I did not care if there was blood upon him. I didn’t want to know how many he had slain, or if he had embraced his wife before he made quick of her or even if he’d asked for her forgiveness after all this time.
“Death walks beside us, but not with us,” he said to me as he took me into his embrace.
I was glad he hadn’t seen his new daughter. Had he done so, it would have been too painful for him to leave her, and I never wanted to be the cause of his pain, as I knew he never wished to cause me any grief. My mother had warned me what love would do to me. I hadn’t cared then, and I didn’t care now.
His eyes were gray, like the dove, like the mist that cleared when the world was first begun on the day God gave us the word and we could speak and our words turned the world into what it has come to be. I could have howled at fate and covered my head. I could have begged for more time, pleaded with him to flee with me. But perhaps I had been granted all that I had needed in this lifetime. My beloved was a stubborn man, a true believer. He was more complicated than any man I had ever known and the only one who could have called me to cross the Salt Sea and leave behind my husband and the green hills of Moab.
That was what my mother meant when she told me love would be my undoing. Love made you give yourself away, it bound you to this world, and to another’s fate. I lay down beside Eleazar. We were together as we had been even when we were apart, for we were one person, wed by more than our desire.
We had our last moments of life in this world, but I would have died a hundred times to have had his love. I kissed him in a way I would never kiss another. His spirit entwined with mine as he entered me and took me to be his. If I wept, it was only because water wa
s my element, what I yearned for and needed most of all. When he was done, I still wept to give him up, although it had been written that I must. I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered, Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.
Nissan the 15th, 73 C.E.
Alexandria
77 C.E.
They call me the Witch of Moab.
So it was written in the Book of Life. Before I was born of a woman who was already dead, before I left Jerusalem and was bitten by a lion, before the Romans came to destroy us, it had already been determined that this would come to be.
Once I was certain I would never again know the pleasure of the simplest things: a loom, a table, a comb for my hair. I thought my life was over and the angel with a thousand eyes was at my door. But I was wrong. I have a house made of white stones. Workmen labored to build the fountain in the center of the courtyard deep within a walled garden where there are date palm trees and pots of jasmine and the white lilies that can be found in no other land, except, perhaps, in the fields of the world beyond our own.
When Mal’ach ha-Mavet came for me, flecked with the blood of my people, I was wearing the cloak of invisibility. I had journeyed so far down into the earth he would have had to have taken a hundred steps before he could spy me, though he possessed the vision of an army. Despite his gift of sight, I still would have been hidden from view, for it is said that Death must close his eyes when he enters into water, and I was submerged in a cistern, a well so deep there are those who believe that it has no bottom, that it reaches to the center of the earth, back to the foundation stone in Jerusalem, where creation began.
It was water that saved us, protecting us from the flames that flickered and from Death’s grasping hands. We had hurried down the stone steps, breathless in the dark, as Death surged above us, before we slipped into the water, as though we were fish, for our people are sister and brother to such creatures, and that is why we can endure where others are doomed to perish.