The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

  Our mother bowed her head, disgraced. I thought of the way she had labored to bring my sister into this world, for I had been her witness on that day.

  Save her, she had commanded.

  Never once Save me.

  ON THE NIGHT that we left the Essenes, my mother tore at her cloak, as women did when they entered into mourning. There are those who say that our word for grave, kever, is also used to describe where a child dwells inside a mother, for life and death are entwined. The child my mother had labored to bring into this world was gone to her now. She would not tell the truth of who Nahara’s true people were, for Nahara would then be a dishonored woman. Instead, she gave her up. We did not speak of my sister again, although my mother chanted for her for seven days, as one chants for the souls of the dead, for that is how long the spirit lingers near the body, unable to part with its earthly form.

  From that time on we lived side by side in our chamber, but as time passed, we rarely spoke. It was only the two of us, for my brother had moved to a tent near the barracks, to better serve the warriors but also to avoid the silence between my mother and me. A deep pool of distrust had come between us, a drowning place. Anyone with sense would stay away from such bitterness, and Adir was a practical boy.

  I took to working in the smallest dovecote, set apart from the others. I couldn’t make amends. I had lied to my mother and deceived her. I had been with a man before marriage. What had been done could not be undone, for even in the hands of a witch, a ruined woman could not once more be pure.

  AND YET, when I lay down to sleep, I was someone other than the woman I’d become. I often dreamed I was riding through the acacia trees. I thought of my old friend Nouri, and how I had betrayed him, pretending to be something I wasn’t, a creature cast from sinew and muscle rather than a woman of flesh and blood. I had pretended no such thing with Amram, but perhaps I kept from him what was most important. I never told him my given name. Because of this he didn’t know me and he never could, no matter how many times he might possess me, or how I might try to offer my love in return.

  Because of this, even when I was beside him, I was alone.

  He was not the one for me, for he would never accept the hidden part of me. He called me his sheep, his dove, his darling girl, but I was none of those things. I began to avoid our meeting place. He who had known me as a husband would, waited beside the fountain, burning for me. But I watched from the shadows, as angels watch our kind from their lonely distance. I longed for what I dreamed about, the freedom I’d once had. In my dreams I asked the father of my sister if he had seen the person I was at my core. He gazed at me sadly and did not answer, for he had lost us all and could not follow or respond, not even in a dream.

  I began to slip into an old tunic that had belonged to my brother. It was brown, dyed with walnut shells, soft from wear. Immediately, I felt comfortable. I braided my hair, then pinned it with a brass clasp beneath a head scarf, so that I might wander through the fortress, a nameless boy who was most grateful to be ignored.

  For the first time since we had come here, I was myself.

  AT THE DOVECOTE we worried about the Man from the North in his confinement. We had moved through the month of Iyar and were nearing summer, the month of Sivan, when the heat rose up from the center of the earth and fell down from the heavens. The Man from the North was nothing to us, a prisoner in a tower, a man who barely spoke our language, who was made of ice and was never meant to be among us. But more than six months had passed. Another man would have starved to death, but another man would not have had Yael and the rest of us to see to his needs. Perhaps we had forgotten he was a slave. His quiet restraint had caused us to befriend him, for he was not like other men to us. We feared neither his strength nor his judgment. In many ways he had surprised us, never more so than when he spoke his given name before he was arrested. The others were stunned by the intimacy of this admission, but I understood why he might have revealed such a private detail. Know a man’s name and he belonged to you. In return, no matter how you might deny it, you were his as well.

  The first time Wynn spied me taking up the bow, in the month before his arrest, he knew I was more of a boy than a woman. He was a strong warrior, and he recognized the same in me. I should have been more cautious, but I was so accustomed to handling weapons, I couldn’t hide my joy or my skill. I knew from the Man from the North’s expression that he saw in me a brother, someone he might have hunted beside in another world and time.

  “Good work,” he said to me, after I had tested the arrows I’d fashioned for Amram. The women had returned to the dovecote. I was gathering the arrows, pulling each from the target of the olive tree.

  “Yes, they’re pretty,” I said politely.

  He laughed then. He had a strange way with our words; they seemed cold when he spoke them, more to the point. “Pretty? I meant your aim. How many men have you slain?”

  I lowered my eyes so he wouldn’t notice the gleam of the truth. “Do you think I attack my victims while I’m at the loom in the evenings?”

  He took my hand and examined my calluses. “Those aren’t from the loom.”

  He instructed me in his people’s method of weaponry as he might have taught a younger brother. Slaves do not betray one another, and although I was not in irons, I was a slave to the truth of who I’d been born. This man named Wynn was a fine teacher, patient, more than willing to share his secrets of warfare. When I wound feathers to the shafts of the arrows, binding them to the wood as his people did, they flew with greater speed. I spent hours behind the dovecote at practice. Once I felled one of our own doves, a bird so far away anyone might have taken it for a wisp of a cloud.

  Wynn educated me in the art of the bow, how to take a breath before I pulled back the string, then to wait an extra heartbeat before letting go. Adding that extra beat proved to be a miracle; it gave the arrow life and breath and speed. He spoke about a creature like a deer in his country that was faster than the wind, faster than the leopards in the desert, so quick only the birds could keep pace with it. That was what we wished for our weapons: the feathers fashioned the arrows into birds that would stir the air. The extra instant before the shot was taken accounted for the way a bird dips, containing the power of its wings, before it lifts upward to race across the sky.

  WHEN MY FINGERTIPS bled from my practice, I told Amram that I had pierced them on the looms. Unlike the slave, he believed me. He was blind to who I was. It was as though I were the one who possessed the cloak of invisibility his father was said to have worn in the courtyards of the Temple when he struck his enemies. Amram asked me to weave a cloak for him in his favorite shade of blue as a token of my love. I agreed, though I knew this was a gift I would never give to him. I did not know how to work the loom.

  My arms grew stronger after my many hours with the bow, as muscled as a warrior’s, but I insisted my strength was honed from lifting the baskets that we carried into the field. For weeks afterward, Amram came to help me carry the baskets, imagining that the work was too heavy a burden for me. Behind his back Wynn grinned, and I grinned in return, for some secrets bring you closer in their sharing, just as others break you apart.

  I DIDN’T WISH to know what was between Yael and the slave, though I could tell he burned for her. Once Yael had told me that whom I loved was my business, now I gave her the respect she deserved. All the same, I saw the way he watched her and knew she had left his irons unlocked.

  “Have you asked her how many men she’s slain?” I asked Wynn one day. The words had slipped out in jest, but he stared after Yael, wounded.

  “One certainly,” he said.

  I should have seen then he would be a fool on her account and try to convince her to flee with him. He was the sort of open man who could not hide himself, even if it meant he would be locked in irons.

  It was Yael who brought him his meager provisions during the time he was locked away. She told us she could barely hear him speak. He was so weakened he could
not rise from his pallet, a rough thing made from the chaff of the wheat. The cell was fetid, made the more filthy with his own waste. Still Wynn did not complain or curse his captors, but instead he spoke of the land of ice where he had been born. It was as though he were seeing it before his eyes. The heat dissipated as he spoke of his country, and he shivered as though he walked in snow. His people believed that a man would return home upon leaving this life. In the next world he would walk beneath the great yew trees of his homeland and once again be reunited with those who had gone before him.

  One day he insisted he could see a stag outside the window. It was the animal that was so difficult to hunt, for it flew across the grass as the birds fly above us.

  “What a beautiful creature,” he whispered.

  Yael wept when she told us this, for there were no stags in our country, and no window in his cell.

  It was a dark time. We had come to realize that our lives were here, so removed from the rest of the world we might as well have been in the World-to-Come. We would soon celebrate Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, in remembrance of the day Moses was given the Torah. In the past our people would make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem with sacrifices of bikkurim, the first fruits brought forth after seven weeks of working the fields, sacrificing the seven species of the harvest: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, dates.

  Such was our tradition and our law, but there was no Temple to journey to, and we had little to celebrate and no place where we might offer a sacrifice. Our orchards were failing, despite the rain my mother had called down. There was so little grain that many of the storage jars were only half full. People wondered if demons had been at work. Indeed, now when it rained the sky hailed down upon us so strongly the rain itself might have been made of stone.

  Although it was said that Masada could never fall, and that God had made this mountain for the purpose of our rebellion, allowing us to continue to give glory to Him, I wondered how long we could endure a siege should the Romans come. The storerooms of the king would not sustain us forever. Herod’s oil and wine and lentils had fed us, and we had depended upon them, but they were no more. There was a large oil press, but the olives on the trees were few and the oil produced was meted out in small jars. Now the rats ruled the storerooms. It was rumored they had been brought here by the Romans, purposely left behind in case our people ever took back this fortress, so that they might bring us disease, devouring what little we had left.

  WORD HAD gone out that the Roman garrison had captured another Zealot stronghold in the desert. The fortress of Machaerus, east of the Salt Sea on the border of Moab, had fallen to the Tenth Legion, led by Lucilius Bassus, a general some people said was impossible to defeat. An oracle had declared that favor would always be his, and so it seemed to be. But although Machaerus’s very name meant sword, perhaps its inevitable defeat had been caused at the hands of its own people. There was a bloody history in that place, and it was rumored that a great teacher named John had been imprisoned and beheaded there when he refused to renounce his teachings.

  It was also reported that when rebels at Machaerus arrived at their fortress, they wanted to destroy all that had belonged to cruel Herod and his sons. In their zealousness, they chopped down an enormous rue that had grown there for hundreds of years, a plant taller than any fig tree, a talisman said to hold the secret to our people’s freedom and success. With that one impulsive action, they had destroyed their chances at victory. Rue can save you or ruin you, it can bring luck or agony. Several warriors were said to be so haunted by their deed that they had tried to plant another herb in the same spot, but the roots always withered and refused to take.

  When the Romans encircled them, one of their most beloved warriors had been trapped. He had been tortured in the open for all to see in ways too horrible for most decent men to imagine. His friends and loved ones were forced to watch as Romans cut off pieces of his flesh and filled him with burning thorn plants still alight, unwrapping his blistering skin from his soul. His fellow warriors pleaded for his freedom and the promise of their own safety, willing to surrender in exchange for the life of their brother. The bargain was made, and the rebels came down from their mountain. Their safety was assured but never granted. It came as no surprise to our people to hear that Lucilius Bassus was a liar. When our warriors thought of demons, they imagined his name. Each and every man at Machaerus was slain, their blood turning the ground black.

  The Romans piled the pyres high with bodies—not only the dead were cast onto the flames but also the weak and the sick, those not worthy of being slaves. The sound of their cries echoed throughout Judea. Some women in our fields vowed there had been a rain of stones on that day, and when the last of the figs had been dashed to the ground, there had been ants inside the sticky fruit, destroying it from the inside.

  There was a prayer meeting at the synagogue, and the men who gathered were stricken by the horror of the news. That evening we heard not only prayers but arguments. How could we avoid the fate of Machaerus? We could hear Ben Ya’ir’s low, steady voice. We knew it was he because when he spoke all others fell silent.

  “We’ll never let our women and children die on pyres,” he told his warriors.

  There was no choice for us, he cautioned, no retreat. It was apparent that our strength emerged from his courage; all the same, when I went into the fields I saw that the figs had indeed fallen; in what should have been the greenest time of the year, that golden fruit lay blackened on the ground.

  YAEL WORRIED not only for Wynn but for her child as well. Arieh had served as the key with which to open the barred door in the tower. He had been presented to our leader’s wife for her amusement in exchange for permission to bring provisions to the slave. But some keys can be used for many locks and should never be lent or given away. Our leader’s wife had taken a dangerous liking to Arieh, and a new prison had sprung forth, one made from her arms and from the net of her desires.

  I had spied this dark woman alone in the evenings, walking beside the wall that surrounded us, as though she were a shadow in search of the substance that would bring her to life. Perhaps the child was such a cure for the ailment our leader’s wife carried within her, her barrenness and her despair.

  Ben Ya’ir’s wife had begun to withhold Arieh when Revka came for him at the end of the day, insisting on keeping the baby through the night, rocking him as though he were her own. She threatened that, if she could not keep Arieh with her, she could no longer offer the slave her protection. Why should the barbarian live and she have nothing for her efforts? She went so far as to go to the priest to choose an auspicious day for Wynn’s death.

  Yael herself went to the small palace when she heard of this. She bowed her head to Channa, but told her in no uncertain terms this was to be Arieh’s last visit in exchange for the life of the slave. When she returned to retrieve the child that evening, the door was bolted. A guard was stationed outside, there at Channa’s bidding. He was a friend of Amram’s, Uri, who had brought Yael to the fortress, a good-natured young man who was liked by all. Yet he denied her entry.

  “We do as we’re told,” he said apologetically. “She speaks with her husband’s voice as well as her own. You understand. I have no choice in the matter.”

  Yael took to lurking around the palace, much as beggars roam the markets, hands outstretched. On nights when Revka kept vigil beside Yael, it was the older woman who wept, blaming herself for what had come to pass, for it was she who had fashioned the agreement with Channa. My mother had warned that nothing good could come from a bargain with Ben Ya’ir’s wife. She was dangerous, my mother said. More so than she appeared. I’d overheard Revka insisting that Channa’s interest in the baby was only a lonely woman’s attachment.

  My mother had laughed coldly in response. “Then perhaps we should say a snake has an attachment to a dove when we speak of his hunger. Wait and see how much Channa is willing to devour.”

  Now Yael came to my mother
, tearful, desperate for a spell that would help her regain her son. “There must be something you can do,” she pleaded.

  I was certain my mother would help her favorite. Instead, she shook her head sadly. “You shouldn’t have let her touch him. Now she has him in her claws.”

  “Give me something to defeat the demon,” Yael begged.

  “She’s not a demon, she’s a woman,” my mother said sadly. “In this case, that’s worse.”

  I BEGAN to keep watch with the others. We had all come to despise Channa for the liberties she took, showing off the child, dressing him in a tunic she’d had woven for him. This woman, who had set herself apart for so long, whose servants toiled in her garden and kitchen while the rest of us went hungry, was now prideful, strutting through the plaza in the afternoons with the baby on her hip as though he were her own, chatting with the other women, who were quick to admire him, how handsome he was, how easily a smile came to him.

  Revka’s grandsons acted as spies on our behalf, tracking Ben Ya’ir’s wife each day, reporting her activities to us. Noah and Levi had the ability to fade into the shadows, though their voices had come back strongly. People say that when you have lost something and it returns to you, it is doubly sweet, and so it was with Revka’s grandsons. When they spoke, their words captivated a listener. It seemed the conversations that had been silenced for so long could now be released in honeyed tones, and what they described they did artfully, their reports appearing before us as though written in the air.

  “She stops where the black viper lives on the rocks and makes an offering,” they confided. “She feeds the baby from her fingers, filling him with figs and pomegranates and barley cakes as though he were a dove. She tells him he is so sweet the bees will follow him.”