The Dovekeepers: A Novel

by Alice Hoffman

  Darkness was falling as I bathed in the pool. Stars would soon be appearing in the sky. When I heard the sound of sobbing, I pleaded with the ghost of my beloved’s wife to leave me be, certain that she was beside me, torn apart by all of her sorrow. Sia was the tender one, always ready to cry.

  I was certain these were her tears that I wept, not mine.

  BY THE END of Shevat the wildflowers were blooming with vivid color; the willows had filled with strands of tender green leaves. My father and I made do. We did not complain about our circumstances, or discuss the past. But each night I climbed to the cliff where the bones were. I knelt as the light floated away and the day ended. I was praying for something that could never be granted; another life, the one I had already lived and lost.

  I was there late one day, watching the light fade into bands of pink and gray, when I spied two men coming across the desert. They were young warriors. I called to my father, and he scrambled up beside me, using a branch from the tamarisk that he’d smoothed into a staff to help him make his way. Together we stood on our perch, watching as the strangers approached, the plumes of dust rising before them like clouds.

  “This is my dream,” my father said, his expression joyous. “Those are the clouds that will reveal where we should go. These men will lead us to the tower where Amram is hidden.”

  We had been alone in the desert for a long time, our only company the bones beneath the rocks. But the bones spoke to me. They told me that my prayers would not be answered. I would never be forgiven. I would have to pay for my sins. I wanted to escape from the voice that sounded like Sia’s. If I went elsewhere, perhaps it would be rendered mute. I wanted to believe in my father’s dream. I was more cautious than he, yet I, too, felt my brother near to us.

  “We cannot yet trust,” I said, and for once my father did not disagree. Dreams came to men for many reasons, both as oracles and as warnings.

  I watched the men approach, curious, my shawl wrapped around me. My father prepared in case those who came forth were enemies pretending to be our saviors, ready to fight should they turn against us and prove his dream to be a false prophecy. He took hold of his dagger, then murmured a prayer asking God to be on his side.

  The men stopped in the canyon below. They called out to my father, vowing they were Zealot warriors. My father answered their call. He was still holding the dagger concealed in his cloak. Though he was weakened and no longer young, he could throw a knife from a great distance and strike a man dead. I had seen him do as much when a soldier cornered him in an alleyway near our home. He had then walked away without a look back, as though he hadn’t taken a life.

  The young warriors shouted that Hol had sent them. They knew the phoenix, the warrior who managed to rise each time another would have fallen. At the mention of the pet name known only to my brother’s closest friends, my father dropped his weapon. Tears brimmed in his eyes, and his weathered face, so aged since we had left Jerusalem, broke into a grin.

  “Bring me to him,” he commanded.

  I noticed that my father did not say bring us to him. I was nothing, as I always had been. Only when he needed me to guide him, to feed him, to be his only sustenance in the wilderness, did he remember that I, too, was his child.

  The men who’d come for us were no older than my brother, young in years yet hardened by what they’d seen and done. I recognized one, Jonathan, from Jerusalem. He’d been a serious prayer student. People thought he would be a rabbi or a scholar, then he’d joined with my brother and picked up the knife. The other was called Uri, which meant light. He was a lumbering, warmhearted young man whose good humor dominated every discussion. I shied away, reluctant to make my presence known, but my brothers’ friends rejoiced in finding me and called me to join them. Amram had told them about me, the sister called Yaya, who had cared for him as a mother would, who had made his meals, sewn his tunics and his mantle, listened to plans so secret he hadn’t dared tell anyone else. The one called Jonathan took out a blue square of silk that the wind had carried to my brother’s path. This was how they’d found me.

  WE WOULD take a route that would lead us to the southernmost part of the Salt Sea. I knew that, if I went, I could not look back. I would be abandoning Ben Simon, the only man who had ever known who I was. His bones would not be gathered on the anniversary of his death, as had always been our custom, to be secured in a stone ossuary. But if I stayed, the desert would claim me. I could not falter now, or give in to my impulse to lie down beside my beloved.

  We would be going through the harshest part of the wilderness, a place of salt and sorrow, a land even more difficult to traverse than the valley where we’d found the Essenes. There were said to be troops from the Roman garrison scattered throughout, and we would need to take care to avoid their camps, backtracking when necessary. I thought of my poor little goat, whose milk was the only thing I could stand to drink. It is said there is a goat demon in the desert called the Sa’ir, but if anything I had found a goat who was an angel. She had saved our lives when we had nothing; she had been wild and I had kept her captive and she had forgiven me; she had been my only friend when I was alone.

  Before we left, I let her free. I tied a string of red around her throat and led her to the highest cliff. “Go on,” I said as I cut the strand that bound her. She was so accustomed to following me, she didn’t flee back into the wilderness. My pet merely stood there, looking at me. I smacked her rump to get her moving. I thought of Ben Simon’s dark eyes, his olive skin, the curl of a smile whenever he spied the goat trailing behind me so meekly. “Stay away from me,” I insisted, waving her on.

  I knew that although I was shouting at the goat, I was speaking to Sia’s ghost.

  AT THE START of our journey, the cliffs were so high the men had to tie ropes around my waist, and around my father’s waist as well, then help pull us up the sheer sheets of limestone. Because of the season there were herbs and wild asparagus sprouting in the nechalim between the cliffs. The air was scented with mint and tangy scallions. Every bit of green was a delight to see. There were the yellow blooms of mustard as well, like fallen stars upon the ground. The sycamore fruit had turned bright orange, and wasps were drawn to its ripening odor. We relished the sound of such abundant life, but soon enough we went on, higher, to where the air was pale, shimmering. We tramped across fields of rocks so sharp even the ibex could not run here. Our feet were bleeding by the second day.

  At twilight, no matter where we were, I went to sit quietly by myself. In this way I would procure our evening meal. Each night I would watch for birds. Once I discovered the delicate lattice of twigs where they nested, I sat nearby in silence. They came to me, thinking I was cast of stone, seeing me as a part of the desert and nothing more. I covered their eyes when I broke their necks. I should have let their breath rise all at once and given them a clean death with a single knife stroke. I always carried Ben Simon’s knife in my tunic, kept close to my skin, but I didn’t use it unless I turned it on myself to mark my leg. I held the birds close and listened to their hearts beating, and then I did what the desert had taught me.

  We roasted the birds over a fire the warriors had made. They applauded me as they ate the food I cooked. They said I had a talent. I was a huntress, they joked. My father glared when they sang my praises. “It was nothing,” I insisted. “The birds came to me.”

  The warriors seemed like boys when they teased me about my hunting skills; all the same, I tried to make myself invisible, as I had been in Jerusalem. Boys became men at night, when their pulses beat and the forbidden seemed possible. Though I had no gray cloak, I knew how to vanish. I could make myself disappear and seem like nothing as I hunched over cleaning the cooking pot with sand, my eyes elusive. But in the firelight my scarf slipped from my head, and my brother’s friends saw that my hair was red. They could tell I wasn’t a girl anymore. They looked away, uneasy, shamed by their own thoughts. They should not even have been sitting at the fire with a woman who was not thei
r mother or their sister or their wife, let alone taken food from my hands. I was considered a niddah, impure and unclean, for there was no mikvah, not even a silty pool of water. But we were in the desert, and they had little choice. They ate the birds I killed, they helped me up the cliffs, they led me toward my brother. As they did so, they recounted stories of the fortress they had commandeered, tales I found preposterous.

  The fortress was impenetrable, they said, the surrounding land so fierce no attack upon them would prove successful. The retreat had once been a palace built by King Herod, a place of unearthly beauty concealed by clouds. I knew of that king, whose cruelty was so legendary it was said he had once slit open a hedgehog, then turned the poor beast inside out to place upon an enemy’s face so that he might blind his foe. He had betrayed those around him and been responsible for the murder of his wife, Mariamne, whom he accused of trading in philtrons and pharmaka—medicines and love potions and spells. She was so beautiful the Roman general Marcus Antonius became maddened at the sight of her and was desperate to have her. Because of this Herod sentenced her to death. Soon after, his son was accused of having a poison concocted from the venom of asps, prepared by a woman from Edom who was a practitioner of keshaphim. The son’s execution followed his mother’s.

  Every betrayer knows his fate is to have the misery he once doled out to others returned to him in kind, yet Herod had dreams of outrunning the page on which his fate was written. He built his stronghold on the western slope of the mountain called Masada, completed a hundred years before our time. The Queen of Egypt wanted Judea for herself, pleading with Anthony and with Rome to grant her this desert as a gift, for she yearned for the treasures it possessed: the route to the sea, the fields of salt, the balsam forests that lay beyond in Moab, troves of myrrh and frankincense, riches beyond measure.

  Those who awaited us at Masada were said to be more than nine hundred strong, three hundred of them warriors. Five winters ago they had taken Herod’s great fortress from the hands of a small group of Roman soldiers lodged there. They had done so easily, in the cover of night, winding along the back of the mountain, a feat the Romans had thought impossible. Nothing was impossible, they had discovered. They had managed to climb into the sky, closer to God.

  I thought it was a dream when my brother’s friend vowed that the old king’s Northern Palace was more beautiful than the hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the wonders of mankind. The black and white columns had been transported from Greece, lashed onto boats that crossed the open sea, then hauled by ropes and pulleys across Judea on the backs of slaves. The glimmering mosaics had been brought into the wilderness from Italy to be laid down one tile at a time by the finest masons. The baths, heated by ceramic columns set beneath the floor, were made of quartz of such high quality the stones shone with red light when the sun was high. Floors were patterned in shades of rose and green and black, and frescoes had been painted by hundreds of Italian artists using the finest pigments from Rome, aquamarine and sapphire and carnelian, gemlike, gleaming as jewels do. The only colors I knew now were those of the white desert, the black night, the red stain of my own blood on the soles of my feet as we climbed over stones.

  As the men spoke of such wonders, we huddled in damp caves where scorpions gathered, seeking shelter from the raging windstorms. I thought of the scorpions which had nested in the hallway when I was a child. They were so still they might have been an illusion until they suddenly leapt to attack their prey and prove otherwise. Guilt was like that, I had discovered. Remote, until it struck. I heard her still, the friend I’d had, the woman I’d betrayed. When I slept I could feel the curve of her hip against mine. I’d heard that demons could attach themselves to a person. Once this was accomplished, it was impossible to leave them behind or dismiss them. At night they closed their hands over yours with a predatory ownership. They whispered a single word in your ear: Mine.

  Remorse engulfed me in this wasteland, as did my silence. It had risen around me as the thorn trees grew, wild, their limbs a tangle of treacherous sticks. There were hyenas where we camped; we heard them calling. At night we saw them forming a circle in among the stark black trees. We picked up stones, ready should the beasts’ hunger cause them to attack. My hands were filthy, my scarves shredded as if by knives. I held on to the single square of blue. It was all I had left of my brother and the life I had led before I’d come to this place.

  I found it impossible to imagine that if we journeyed deeper into the wilderness we would come upon frescoes that could rival any in the empire and the palace of a king. Still my brother’s friends swore on the name of Yehuda of Galilee, the man who had begun the Zealot way of life and the rebellion against the priests who bowed to Rome, that ahead of us there were a thousand oil lamps to light up the night, all burning so fiercely they equaled the stars in the sky. When I asked how long it would take to reach this miraculous place, they laughed and said it would take time, for the fortress could only be found at the end of the world, and we must be careful not to stray. One step and we might fall off the edge of all eternity.

  Mild air washed over us. Fortunately it was winter, so we didn’t roast alive. From the west the cold sea wind called Ruach Hayam came to us in clouds, and we shivered in its chilly grasp. The wind flew inside my tunic and reminded me of things it would be best to forget. The touch of Ben Simon, the way we were one, how he had possessed the ability to see me when I was crouched in the darkness. Though I listened to the stories of Herod’s palace, I was not compelled by thoughts of the future and of miracles. I longed for what I’d once had, all that I’d lost in the space of a single day, the hour when he was taken from me.

  My life in the wilderness had been turned to ash. I had the punishment I deserved. Just as I had not let go of her husband, Sia would not let go of me, no matter how far we might journey. I thought I could leave her behind, but if anything, the distance had helped her ghost to grow stronger. Her spirit wrapped itself around me every time I tried to eat, pecking at me. I couldn’t swallow more than a mouthful of food. If I did manage a bite, I would have to run off and bring it up again. When I closed my eyes to sleep, she was there, waiting. She gazed at me with the same doleful look she’d had when she asked if I would take care of Ben Simon, though she knew what we did together in the dark and what he was to me. It was he I longed for, but it was she who wrapped her arms around me, who slid her fingers over my skin, who whispered in my ear. I could feel her fever all over my flesh.

  ONE NIGHT we were so near to the Salt Sea I rose from sleep to discover that salt had wound through my hair and turned the edges hard and white. I had been dreaming of a path of stones and a snake so huge it could devour a city. I tried to talk to the slithering creature, pleading for it to go away and leave us in peace, but the serpent wouldn’t hear of it. Come closer, it whispered. I longed for the lion in my dreams. I missed him and yearned for him, despite the danger in doing so. I reached for the snake, but it disappeared, leaving me with a handful of black dust.

  The shouts of the warriors who led us roused me. Groggy, I pulled myself from the tangle of my sleep. I stood and rubbed the salt from my eyes. All at once I saw a miracle before me. If a thousand blue butterflies had risen from the ground it would have been no more of a marvel. Herod’s fortress was suspended in air, jutting out from the edge of a white cliff, exactly as the warriors had promised, a wonder of the world.

  There was the path that led to Masada, winding up the sheerest cliff imaginable. One misstep, one moment of doubt, and anyone who made his way here could easily careen to his death in the valley below. The wilderness had made me a disbeliever, but as I climbed what was called the serpent’s path, which wound like a snake up the side of the mountain, I felt something open inside me. This was where the snake in my dream had led us. I recognized it as surely as though it was a path I had walked a hundred times before: the small willows and clusters of bent olive trees, the chalky white earth beneath the limestone rocks. It had been written in the B
ook of Life that we would come to this path, and so it was meant to be.

  Above us there were birds of prey, falcons and hawks. I knew they would be upon me if I were to stumble. They would take their revenge for all the birds I had killed in the desert, all the feathers I’d plucked, some with my fingers, some, when I was starving, with my teeth. I had wished for another’s death and taken a man who didn’t belong to me. I had given myself to the desert to become what I now was, a woman possessed by a ghost, mourning an existence that would never be again, carrying a secret that would ripen and expose me for the thief I had become.

  I paid attention to the path and did my best not to think about the way I might appear to others, a barbarian, my skin powdered white with rock dust, my garments filthy, my hair turned to straw and salt, white at the edges but scarlet at the roots, my eyes empty except for the reflection of the desert. I was a lioness without claws or teeth, bent over like an old woman as I maneuvered along the rocks, so far from the girl I had been I could barely recall my own name. I thought of how I had given Ben Simon my promise to be silent. Now silence was all I had. The wind was howling as we rose higher on the cliff; that was the single voice we heard.

  The serpent’s path appeared endless. Stones fell and echoed when they hit the ground below. The world looked smoky and distant from this vantage point. I took the rope from around my waist and said I wanted to make my own way. I walked on without assistance, even at the steepest part of the path. I could hear the rattle of my breathing, sharp, like a dagger. The fortress before me was like a dream, and like a dreamer I went forth, marveling at the sight of what I beheld. It was everything they said, all the more brilliant for the desolation around us.