The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

  She stood within the circle, then reached inside her cloak to bring forth ashes, which she sprinkled on her head, chanting as she did so in a low, even tone. The crowd strained to hear and were frightened by a language they didn’t understand. Many among them believed she was bringing a curse upon us and hung back, drawing their children near to protect them from evil.

  It began all at once, before we understood what was happening. The sky paled and turned incandescent. Rains begin in different ways, but this was a torrent that had no equal. One moment the earth was dust, and the next lakes were forming. The world became wet and luminous, brimming with sheets of water. I had never before noticed that rain contained every color within itself, green as the fields, blue as heaven, white as a lamb, yellow as my daughter’s hair.

  Men sank to their knees, raising the fringes of their prayer shawls to their lips and then to the heavens to offer praise to God and to the mystery of life. We could hear the goats and the sheep in their pens. Before our eyes the living fence of thorns that held back the livestock gave forth buds, and then, as if commanded by the Almighty, those buds unfurled to become leaves.

  People whispered this was the reason the Witch of Moab had been able to walk across the Salt Sea without drowning. She, who had slipped down a thousand steps into the cistern to bathe in the dark, was our salvation. I blessed her for this as I raced through the blasts of wind, hurrying to our chamber for the incantation bowl she had cast. I was only a simple woman, but I recognized the missing ingredient exactly as Shirah had assured me I would.

  I brought the bowl outside and held it above my head, chanting to the Almighty, singing His praises though the wind was in my face, its roar filling my ears. The bowl overflowed, and my heart did as well. I could hear my grandsons calling to each other as I stood there dripping with rain, as joyful as I’d ever been. Their voices had been caught inside the waterfall all this time, stored in a vessel by the angel who had protected them from evil. Now those voices had been released, drawn toward the prayers in the bowl as the angel Beree rained down upon us. Later, I would bring them before their father, and although the children would shrink from his fierce form, when I urged them to speak a greeting, I would see the Man from the Valley weeping in gratitude. Perhaps his faith would be restored by this gift, as mine was.

  I heard the voice of God all around me, but I was unafraid. I should have trembled before the Almighty and hid myself from sight. I should have taken a knife to my own flesh to cut away the mark of my past deeds. But now I understood that, although words were God’s first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.

  I listened to the wind that had risen in the desert to follow us here.

  I heard what it had to say.

  Winter 71 C.E.

  Part Three

  Spring 72 C.E.

  The Warrior’s Beloved

  You are my armor and my sword, my faith

  and my treasure, everything I’m fighting for.

  My sister, you are like the dove, so beautiful and so distant, the child I saw born into this world as I crouched beside our mother. You are the reason I refuse to witness another birth. The cord of life was wrapped around your neck, and when I looked into your eyes I saw the World-to-Come, a place so distant and vast no one alive should ever view its reaches. You were gasping, turning blue, a fragile creature drawn into our fragile world. I was only a child myself, unwanted, brought into the marriage between our mother and your father in the land of Moab, where the women wore blue veils and no one knew what our mother had been, or what she would become, though they feared her all the same.

  Because our mother was a foreigner, none of the women we lived beside came to help when the time for you came upon her. They arrived at other times, when their own needs drove them to appear in the dark, searching for curses or cures. They brought delicacies of lamb and herbs and olives in beautiful pottery dishes, clay bowls decorated with dark red designs. These women came to beg for our mother’s magic when they needed it. She was kind enough to offer the barren among them love apples, the yellow fruit of the mandrake that ripens with the wheat, so that they might conceive. She gave them a healing poultice made from figs for rashes and boils and, in the most sorrowful cases, brought them her knowledge of tzari, the ancient Syrian cure used for leprosy, the illness wherein the flesh is consumed by demons and falls away from the bone. Yet when she was the one in need, the women of the camp hid themselves from view, terrified that our mother might bring another witch into the world, and that her power would double. Then, despite their aversion to her and their bloated grudging jealousy, they would all be forced to drop to their knees before her.

  I was the only one to witness the occasion of your birth, and if the truth be told I, too, wished to run into the daylight, afraid less of witchery than of blood. There were pools of it, and the gushing heat of it terrified me. This liquid was alive, pulsing with the power of creation. I was too young, too innocent to be of help. But our mother cried out Save her, her words like stars, brilliant and stinging.

  I did what I could. I unwound the cord. But that was not enough, so I breathed into your mouth and drew out the liquid that was drowning you. I tasted blood and salt, everything life is made of, and spat it upon the ground. It is a miracle when you know what you must do without any instruction, and that is what happened to me at the hour of your birth. This mysterious knowledge was granted to me by God in the time of my desperation, and for that I will always be grateful. I took your death and your life into myself. In that moment we became one being, sisters claimed by the same force. Because of this I will always look after you. Even if you try to break away, you will find you cannot leave me.

  These days you turn from me in the fields where the almonds will soon flower. You insist you belong elsewhere, but I will not abandon you. I see you dressed in white linen, in the rocky field, tending to six black goats, your head bowed, your feet bare, and I weep to see you taken from me in your fervor and your desire for a man who can never know you as I do. Perhaps you do not wish for him to know you. You keep your back to me and will not speak, not even when I knock on the rough wooden door of the goat shed where you live beside the people you’ve chosen as your own. They are paupers whose only desire is to praise the Almighty with prayers for peace, even though outside the confines of our fortress the world snarls with war. You will not sit at our table, for our practices are not as strict as those you now revere, and our ways are unclean in your eyes.

  I sent a dove to you, one that was pure white, a favorite of our mother’s, thinking this creature would fill you with remorse and you would follow him, but the bird returned to the dovecote with my message unread. Inside the tube I had attached to the bird’s leg I wrote your name and mine intertwined, as our fate intertwined at the moment of your birth. I cannot imagine whom I could ever love more in this world we walk through.

  When I see you at the wall, at prayer with the Essene women at the hour when day becomes night, you don’t glance at me, though my breath is inside you and yours is a part of me. No matter how you refuse me, our spirits combine to form a single thread. Even if you never speak to me, or raise your eyes to me, even if you are ashamed of me and of our past.

  You are mine and mine alone.

  YOUR FATHER was a wealthy man, and he knew what he wanted. Had this not been so, had he not traveled to Jerusalem from the far shore of the Salt Sea, our mother and I would have perished, cast out on the day I was born. I had no sister to comfort me as you did on the day of your arrival in this world, only the taste of my own blood in my mouth.

  The man who was to be your father had come such a great distance to trade the riches he had amassed, piles of black myrrh and balsam, spices in heaps of ocher and red, baskets of frankincense grown from the white star flower of Edom, salt from the sea, limestone from the cliffs. Perhaps an angel stopped him on the street and
whispered in his ear, suggesting that he turn his head. He wore a long scarf and the blue robes of his people, which were dyed with the root of the ginger plant. Although he was far from young, his eyesight was sharper than a falcon’s and he took note of my mother’s great beauty. Among the men he rode with, he was known for seeing what others could not. That may be why he spied us in a cart meant for sheep brought to the butcher as we were driven into the wilderness. The Angel of Death was waiting for us—Mal’ach ha-Mavet, who has a thousand glinting eyes—but he was defeated when your father followed us.

  Your father gave the driver a handful of coins that he himself deemed worthless. He was a man who believed what mattered came from the earth, not from the treasuries of a temple or the workshops of men. He took us with him that very day, destined for the east, the ancient land across the Salt Sea, where the mountain is made of iron and mounds of black asphalt float along the shore, setting themselves on fire when the heat rises. Your father’s people collected nets full of asphalt to sell at a high price to the legion so that the soldiers might forge paved roads in Alexandria and Rome.

  Our mother confided that when she saw the black sea she didn’t know if we’d been rescued or forsaken by this fierce, silent man whose arms were ringed with blue tattoos and who marked his own face with scars he had cut with a thin knife to commemorate his many battles. She feared he was bringing her to Gehennom, the valley of hell. In fact we journeyed from Judea to Moab, a kingdom that had been ruined and deserted more than once but that was now in full flower. Many of the tribesmen of this land refused to stay in one place but instead called every corner of their country home. This was the land Ruth had come from when she followed Naomi into Judea, though her people had cursed ours. From her line our great King David was born, a gift to his people and to the world. The land here was green, the earth rain-spattered even when other countries were aflame with heat, the vistas lush with fields of grass. There were acacias in bloom, the tree God asked be made into the Ark of the Covenant so that its strong and fragrant wood might house His word to mankind. Myrtle bushes grew tall in Moab, and there were spills of wild cassis. The bursts of yellow iris made it appear as though sunlight had spilled across the land as a blessing.

  Your father and his kinsmen lived in the hills, made wealthy not only by the sale of asphalt but by the treasures they seized from caravans that traveled the King’s Highway from Damascus to Egypt. Stolen goods some might say, but in the eyes of the tribesmen, these treasures were a simple payment, taken as their just due, for their homeland was the route connecting two nations. A robber is a king in his own land, that is what your father believed, the lord of his own mountain. Every man in this region was said to be born with a knife in his hand, a horse already chosen for him, and a prayer to offer to his God.

  My mother was still bleeding from my birth when they stopped to make camp the first evening. All the same she wrapped me in cloth and laid me in a hollow, so that your father could make her his wife that night. To celebrate their marriage, he gave her a pair of earrings set with rubies. Anyone in Jerusalem would have known why she was marked by tattoos, a swirl of henna-red inkings upon her flesh. From the time she was a child, she had been trained to be a kedeshah in Egypt, a woman meant for the holy use of the priests, as her mother before her had been. But such things had become secret and outlawed. Our mother had been sent out of Alexandria, to be raised by her kinsmen in Jerusalem. She never managed to return to the city where her mother longed to see her again, waiting by her gate for her only daughter’s return.

  Our grandmother whom we never knew gave our mother two gold amulets for protection. On one was written Chayei ‘olam le‘olam—Eternal life, forever—the gold imprinted with images of the sun and the moon. On the other the words I have placed the eternal always before me were inscribed; on the back of the medallion a fish had been engraved, to ensure that the wearer would always be near water, the most precious element, the giver of life.

  Although our mother was sent to Jerusalem for her safety, she was repudiated for her sins there, accused of seducing a man who was married. It was claimed she had been wed both to him and to a demon. When the case was brought before the priests by the man’s family, my mother refused to admit any wrongdoing. The sotah ceremony was held, in which God’s name is written on papyrus, then slipped into a tumbler, where it is erased into the water and mixed with the dust of the Temple floor, to be consumed by the suspected adulteress. My mother drank God’s name and did not falter; still, those who opposed her considered her to be in league with the demons. She could deny her sin, but I was the evidence, held up by my heels before three judges. Perhaps when they examined me they were looking for proof that she had indeed slept with a demon, searching for horns or wings, to see if I was a shedah, the child of a watcher, an angel who had been called to earth by my mother’s beauty, or if I had simply been born of the flesh.

  The tribesman from Moab who was to become your father did not care about such matters. Judgments made by our councils were meaningless to him. Our God was not his God. Our mother’s sin was not his interest. He knew what he wanted. He was simple in that way, yet he was complicated as well. As for me, I was little more than a mouse caught in a snare, a creature he allowed our mother to keep as a pet when they set off the next morning and she refused to leave me behind. The world was still dark on the day they left Judea, as the sea was, but before them the horizon was radiant, like a pearl. Our mother told me that, after they passed by the black mounds of burning asphalt in the Salt Sea, she was grateful we had not fallen into the fires of hell. She felt her heart lift at the sight of the mountains, which are green even when the rest of the world is dying of thirst. The lilies that grow there are red, and she still wears their perfume; a ceramic vial of their scent was one of the few belongings she took with us when we came to this fortress.

  Perhaps when she wears the scent of the lilies she remembers the morning when we were given another life.

  OUR PEOPLE believe that the world is split in two. On the side of goodness are the malachim, the thousand angels of light. On the side of evil there are mazzikim, demons who are uncountable and unknowable, uncontrolled even by the Almighty’s wishes. Your father was both combined. We made camp in the mountains, above the pass that overlooked the King’s Road from Damascus. Your father did not think twice before he swooped down with his men upon a caravan to take what he wanted, but he was shy with children and kind to our mother. Though he was a warrior, he could become flustered in the presence of our mother and hardly knew what to say to her. His eyes burned when he gazed at her, and he often sent everyone from our tent so he could be with her, even in daylight hours. He had other wives who lived in a far valley, women whose names we never heard spoken aloud. Perhaps he loved them, too. Surely he could not look at them in the way he gazed at our mother. She was his favorite. Because of this, we were safe with him.

  Then on a night I can hardly remember, before you were born, bandits came into our tent, nomads who had no law and no gods. They came as thieves, but when they saw our mother, their purpose changed. She was so beautiful with her long black hair, still so young, and there were those who said she possessed the ability to hypnotize a man with one look, as she could heal the sick with a single word of prayer. She told me that, as they held her down, one of the intruders swept me up, though I was yet a little child, thinking he would have me as well, tearing off my tunic. I don’t remember the screams she vowed I cried, furious wails that recalled the shrill cries of a mouse when it is caught and struggling in a trap, but my throat hurt anew when she told me the story of that night. She disclosed this account only once, when we left Moab to travel to Masada. I tried to remember every word she said. I knew she would not tell me again.

  Just as I knew that night was the reason for my fate and for who I had become.

  YOUR FATHER, alerted by his kinsman that there were intruders, returned before he was expected, his blue scarf over his dark, scarred face. He was like
a whirlwind. Our mother held me close, hidden in her robes, while your father killed each of the thieves. The crude, keening sounds he made were terrible, like the wind when it falls upon you. It was said people could hear him far to the south, where there was a city rising out of red rock, its great temple and carved columns a wonder to be seen. Many among us swore that he possessed the cry of a mazzik, a demon from another world.

  After the struggle was over, your father was the only man left alive in our tent. My mother confided that outsiders often whispered that the blood of your father’s people runs blue, and indeed they were a tribe so fearsome even the Romans avoided them. But I remember that he knelt beside our mother with great tenderness, even though he was slick with blood. When he did so, he seemed like one of the thousand who watch over our world, an angel who had rescued us from the wilderness.

  After that night our mother cursed what it meant to be a woman. Her life had been molded by all she could not do and all she never would be. But there was a gift she had as well, one no man would ever understand. Her mother had given her a book of spells, magical recipes that would offer her protection while they were apart. She carried that manuscript with her, the most precious of her belongings, along with the gold amulets she wore around her throat, preferring them to all other jewels she might be offered. No protection against evil was stronger.

  But what was magic on that night? My mother had tried to bind the vile intruders by reciting an incantation, but we’d had need of another sort of protection, one made of iron, a man, a sword, a rescuer. Our mother offered thanks to the Queen of Heaven for our salvation. Still, her blood was hot and she was unsatisfied. She wished she had been the one to wield the knife so that she might have slain the robbers instead of merely standing mutely by to watch your father do so.