The Dovekeepers: A Novel

by Alice Hoffman

  “Now we’ll discover who you will be,” my mother said to me, eager to see what her daughter might become.

  I sank under, my eyes open. I would have blinked had my mother not told me to be vigilant. I trusted her and always did as she said. I made certain to keep my eyes wide. Because of this I saw a vision I would carry with me for my entire life. There was a fish as large as a man. He was luminous in the murky dark. He was enormous, a creature who needed neither breath nor earth, as I did, and yet I had no fear of him. Rather, tenderness rose inside me. I felt he was my beloved. I reached out, and he ventured close enough for me to run my hand over his cold, silvery scales.

  I arose from the river with a sense of joy, but also with a melancholy I had not known before. It is not usual for a child to feel such sadness when nothing has changed and the world around is still the same. Yet I had a sense of extreme loss.

  When I told my mother about the fish, she said I had seen my destiny. She didn’t seem at all surprised.

  “Did he bite you?” she asked.

  I shook my head. The fish had seemed very kind.

  “Well, he will,” my mother told me. “Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away.”

  I did not know what this meant, though I knew the world was a dangerous place for a woman. Still, I did not understand how a person whose element was water could stay away from fish.

  THEY SAY that a woman who practices magic is a witch, and that every witch derives her power from the earth. There was a great seer who advised that, should a man hold a witch in the air, he could then cut off her powers, thereby making her helpless. But such an attempt would have no effect on me. My strength came from water, my talents buoyed by the river. On the day I swam in the Nile and saw my fate in the ink blue depths, my mother told me that I would have powers of my own, as she did. But there was a warning she gave to me as well: If I were ever to journey too far from the water, I would lose my power and my life. I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.

  IN THE DESERT, the air burns. Breathe and it flames inside you, for it is strong as iron, as unrelenting as the swirling dust that rises in a storm. Our water comes from the rain, and from aqueducts long ago built by Herod’s slaves, wide ceramic tubes which carry the rushing waters of the nechalim to us when they fill with sudden streams in the winter months. Still, it is not enough for me. The desert is overtaking me, my strength is dwindling. In water I float, but in the dry inferno of this wilderness, I can barely catch my breath. I dream of rivers and of silver fish. There are those who say our people themselves are like the fish in the sea, nourished by the waters of knowledge that flow from the Torah, and that is why we can survive in such a harsh and brutal land.

  I often wake from sleep with a gasp, drowning in the pools of white light that break through the sky each morning. Women carrying new lives within them are especially susceptible to heat. I have felt so afflicted three other times. Once in Jerusalem when I was only thirteen, barely a woman myself. Twice on the Iron Mountain, which was little more than exile to me. And now here, again, in the place where I have found my destiny.

  At night I go to the cisterns, led there by the scent of water. To me, this odor is more pungent than myrrh or frankincense. The single thing that can rival it is the fragrance of the white lily that can only be found in Alexandria. People say that I can call down the rain and that water is drawn to me, but they’re wrong. It is I who am in pursuit of water, as I have always been. When I dream, I dream of the Nile on that pink morning, and of my mother, whom I have not seen in so long she would no longer recognize me, if she has not already gone on to the World-to-Come.

  The stars are reflected from within the black water in the cistern. I find comfort in the omen I glean from this: light in the darkness, truth when it seems there is none. This is the only place where I can be myself, the girl who fell into the fountain, the one who was not afraid of monsters, nor of deep water, nor of drowning. I walk down the hundred stone steps, the granite cool against my feet. I know where love will take me, for on the day we traveled to the Nile, my mother told me that it would bring me to ruin and that anyone I dared to love would be drawn down with me. But even as she spoke she knew, I had no choice but to follow my destiny.

  I pause on the edge of the cistern, where the stones have been covered with fine plaster. The white plaster dust clings to my flesh. I watch the shimmer of the heat over the water. It is said that the spirit of God hovers over the water, as it did on the first day of creation. I stand before the glory of what He has created. I remove my cloak, my sandals, my tunic. Other women purify themselves in the mikvah, but I need deeper waters. I dive in.

  Some people say that this, the largest of the cisterns built by Herod’s stonemasons, is bottomless, and if we ever see the floor of this well, we will also see our doom. This pool is deep, but it is not endless. I know that for certain. All things end. I often dive to reach the depths, then keep myself from rising back up by holding on to the rocks piled at the foundation. They are sleek against my hand, smoothed by the endless lapping of the water against stone. I keep my eyes open even though the water is black. There are no fish, no flashes of light, but when I surface, my cousin Eleazar will be waiting.

  It was he I saw in the water of the Nile when I spied the fish beside me.

  From the beginning until now, that alone has never changed. He is my fate.

  THE SOLDIERS of the Tenth Legion were led through the wilderness by Flavius Silva, the procurator of all Judea, the newly appointed Roman governor. The troops raised a dust storm so enormous it could surely be seen as far away as the Iron Mountain, where I spent so many years in the company of a husband who was twice my age and knew I did not love him, yet he still protected me. He never mistreated me, though he had the stony aloofness of many of the fierce people of Moab, along with a surprising tenderness with his children. His name was Sa’adallos, though I never called him that. If I had, I might have loved him in return. I might have been in Petra instead of at this fortress when the Romans arrived. I might have been walking through that red city with its miraculous carved columns of elephants and camels, enjoying its pool, rumored to be the size of a lake, and the gardens that hang from cliffs, causing men to look upon the mountainsides with awe, amazed to see date trees where in another country there would be only clouds.

  Had I loved him, my children would have been safe, my future assured. Instead I brought them to be trapped on this perch from which there was no deliverance. Though the angels might hear us call to them, they could never reach us here on the periphery of the world, even if they wished to save us. I understood this when I threw the bones of the doves, for they prophesied that, just as there was no escape from what had already been written, there would be no escape from this fortress.

  Our people gathered to watch six thousand of the legion approach, accompanied by more than a thousand of their slaves and followers. We trembled in silence. What terrified us was not only their number but their sheer determination. They had come for us from Jerusalem, though we were but a few hundred. They had found us as the jackals find their prey, encircling the weakness of their victims, biding their time, ready to leap when the moment is right.

  In the dust storm they raised, birds fell from the sky, unable to take flight in the bursts of swirling gravel. Soon the ground was littered with ravens, more in number than the soldiers. The flightless birds transformed the ground into a mournful stretch of black, and all at once it seemed the reaches of the World-to-Come had been laid down before us in a road of flesh and feathers.

  “I have seen this before,” Revka murmured to me, her face ashen. “We cannot escape from harm.”

  There was only one reason why Rome should come to try to defeat us when we were so few and their empire so great. They feared we rebels might serve as an ember to reignite the flame of freedom. Disgrace smolders, it burns when you least expect it to ignite. The Romans could not
allow this. We were fish in a net, already drawn in upon the rocky shore; all they needed to do was cut us off from the water that sustained us. Already, coins had been printed in Rome to celebrate the fall of Judea. The image of a Roman legionnaire and a captive Jewish woman, humbled and enslaved beneath a palm tree, had been imprinted upon silver. As they had written it, so they wished it to be, as if they and not God alone could create matter out of words and will.

  In a land where rebellion has been crushed, there cannot be a single warrior left.

  *

  IT WAS WINTER and the air was raw. We wore our cloaks drawn about us like armor, shivering in the wind, watching as our fate approached us. The rains had come, filling the valleys with torrents of water. Fish that had disappeared deep within the soil during the arid months appeared once again, magicked into life. Throughout the hills there were wildflowers and honeybees. The trunks of dead trees hummed as if they themselves had come alive. There were greens for the ibex, meat for the leopard. The desert had given the Tenth Legion the most favorable conditions for a crossing. Surely our enemies took this as an omen that they would be the victors. They were hungry, and they were fed. They were thirsty and needed look no farther than the streams that turned into waterfalls.

  Perhaps those who were new to Judea wondered how it was that the desert had destroyed so many who had come before them, how the brutality of its fierce heat had changed those who had fought to stay alive in its arms. For this was the merciful time of the year, when birds began to return from Africa and Egypt, when there were herons rather than vultures and the land was plentiful. The army that came to our valley was made up of men from a dozen different lands, all speaking Latin, each one rewarded by Rome with provisions they had not dared to dream of in the poverty of their homelands, for they traveled with camels and donkeys loaded down with meat and dates and leather barrels with enough water to fill ten cisterns.

  They approached our fortress with their strength intact, while we were eating grass and doves, sacrificing the sheep for which we no longer had grain, slitting the throats of the goats who no longer gave milk. We had water, what we always longed for, and the cisterns were full, yet we were poor and our hunger throbbed and reminded us of our poverty. So many of the doves had been taken for food and sacrifices, their waste no longer filled our baskets or fed the fields. The orchards failed us, the gardens were empty, the storerooms no longer sustained us. Now when we entered the dovecotes, there was a hush; in place of the song of the doves, there was only a faint cooing.

  Our warriors were exhausted. They had been fighting for so long, without reprieve or rest, many of them young and untrained, mere boys, ten- and eleven-year-olds conscripted to stand in the place of the fallen. Yet they hid their fear. They shouted that the legion might bring all of Rome and still they could never scale the mountain to reach us.

  But this was the army that had murdered twenty thousand of our people in Caesarea, so that not one had survived. They had dispatched the two other Jewish strongholds, Herodium and Machaerus, where they had slain those they had given a promise of reprieve. Having heard there were those who had managed to escape and were still in hiding, the Tenth Legion had cut down the Forest of Jardes, so there would not be a single tree for the escaped rebels to hide behind. There they killed three thousand more, their bodies left strewn on the field for the birds of prey without even a shred of cloth to cover their nakedness.

  Flavius Silva then set his glance upon us. It was said that he was a man without regret, with violent moods and tempers, but with the gift of pure logic when he needed to advance on his enemy. I stood upon the wall with the rest of our people and watched our valley fill with columns of fighting men. Following were those who would bake the soldiers’ bread and cook their meals and mend their cloaks, along with the zonnoth, women who would be kept in tents for the soldiers’ pleasure, and the slaves who would build the camps, dragging enormous timbers from the north through the desert, along with the smiths with their carts of weaponry—spears and shields and thousands of arrows. But there was something more fearsome that arrived with the legion, the sign of our fate, for the Romans had brought a lion on a chain with them. We grew faint when we saw this beast. He, who had once been free in the desert and had ruled the wilderness from his cave, the symbol of the strength of the ancient tribe of Judea, now must do his keepers’ bidding. He gazed at us, and in his eyes we saw the Romans’ desire.

  They meant to devour us.

  They attached the poor creature to a metal post, constructed directly across from the palace that had belonged to King Herod. This was where Silva’s camp was to be built, in a location that would be an insult and a challenge every time we looked upon it. While they built, we heard the roaring of the vanquished beast.

  Yael had confided to me that she dreamed of a lion. As she had feared this creature, so had she been drawn to it. She wept when she told me this, and I understood why she was torn by the meaning of her dreams. A lion may lie beside an ibex in the shade if his appetite is sated, they may even sleep together, their backs resting against each other, but on the next day, if the lion wakes with hunger, then he must serve himself.

  Now Yael’s dream had appeared before us. She stood beside me and wept to see the lion subdued in his chains, trapped as we were, enslaved by those whose brutality was an affront to nature, and to our people, and to God. After the dust had settled, we could observe him clearly, for there was only the pale blue air of winter before us and the light was clear, the wind fresh. Many said it was possible to view heaven from this mountain of ours, but now we seemed much closer to the first gate of hell. What we heard and what awaited us did not come from the reaches of God. It was below us, in the roar of the lion.

  SOON ENOUGH a village was constructed by camp followers, with tents and shacks set up overnight. The scent of food drifted over the valley, cooking meat, bread, spices. We watched, poverty-stricken, starving, like ghosts at a table laden with a great feast. The building went on without ceasing, with slaves working through the night. This was an endeavor that was meant to last; the Romans were settling in. They would not leave, and they would not admit defeat. They began to build twelve towers, set a hundred yards apart, rising so quickly it seemed they came into being before our very eyes. Once the towers had been constructed, any man wishing to break through to the eastern valley would be running a gauntlet, with guards atop the observation posts. He would never make it to the other side.

  As the slaves were completing the camps, more were brought in from the north to give form to a wall of stones. This wall was no worry to us until it began to zigzag into the mountains in a strange design. We did not understand the Romans’ intentions, for it seemed a fool’s endeavor to set a thousand Jewish slaves to labor throughout the day and night, carrying boulders so heavy many of the workers fell prostrate on the ground. When these pitiful men could not rise again, they were slain and left in the dirt, for it was easier to dispose of them than to heal them. The Romans were intent on this wall they built. We assumed they meant to enclose their camps, thereby protecting themselves from us. Certainly our warriors had plans for raids, however perilous, already in the making.

  As soon as he was told of this wall, Ben Ya’ir came to look down upon it. When he took note of the stones cutting across the cliffs, he saw that this was a wall meant to encircle us. It surrounded not only the Roman camps but the entire mountain. It was a siege wall, six feet thick. Our leader immediately understood that its purpose was not to protect the Roman camp but to keep us in.

  Some of the warriors laughed at this, for the wall was not so high that a man couldn’t climb over beneath the cover of night. They had not yet realized there was another purpose to this endeavor. The Romans intended a crucifixion of the land that belonged to us, each rock in the wall serving as a nail in our flesh. They were telling us that we belonged to them, like the lion on the chain, like the slaves at their bidding, like the six hundred thousand they had slaughtered in their war
against the Jews.

  They wanted our fear, and that was what they received. Dread went through the fortress as though it was a fever. All at once the blue air seemed difficult to breathe. We had made a world here, one that mirrored the villages where we had once known freedom and the city we loved and hoped to return to. We minted our own pennies, the bronze poured into molds in the palace workshops, imprinted with our dream: For the Freedom of Zion. We had our marketplace, our bakers and wine merchants, the potters who fashioned jugs and cooking vessels from the clay that was found below in the nachal. As Adonai had created us in His image, so we had created Masada in the image of our past lives and the lives we hoped to live again, when we were free.

  Now that the siege wall was in sight, people panicked, afraid that Zion would never rise again. They rushed the storerooms, greedy in their fear, thinking only of survival, as the jackal does in the middle of the night when the morning seems such distant territory. But even the jackal shares with his kind, and does not trample them, or forsake them. Our people were maddened by the deeds of the Romans and by their fear of what was to come during a siege that might last months.

  Eleazar stood upon the fountain to stop the chaos. His followers had given to him a gold breastplate on which there were four gems of great worth. Although he had accepted this gift, he never dressed in it for battle, preferring instead to take up the same iron mail that his men used. Now, upon the arrival of the Romans, he wore the gold so that he might show the legion, even from a distance, that we were strong and unafraid and that we had been chosen by the Almighty to defeat Rome.

  “We have one enemy,” he cried out.

  People turned to him, as they might turn to a prophet. He was the one who had led them here, who had believed this fortress would be their salvation. The mountain had defended Herod in the time when Cleopatra sought to take this country from him, as it would defend us now. On that point he had never wavered.