The Dovekeepers (18 page)

“She has the two little boys to care for, and this may take all night.”

“Revka?” I was surprised. She was so bitter, barely speaking. “She’s too old for little children.”

“Her grandchildren. She takes care of them and they sleep beside her. You’re all alone. No one will miss you.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“My mother wanted you.” Nahara looked at me with a respect that surprised me. “She told me you’d be able to catch the black dog, and you did. You should be flattered.”

We entered through an iron gate, then together used our strength to push open an ancient door of carved acacia wood that brought us into a corridor leading to the oldest of the storerooms. These chambers had once been so filled with treasure there was said to still be gold dust between the stones. We went down a hundred steps that twisted underground, and true enough, there was a faint shimmer on the stairs. The air felt damp and cool, murky, the shadows a dim slate color. The hallway grew more narrow as we went on. At last, we were forced to walk single file. Nahara carried a lamp filled with olive oil. I had the pitcher of milk. We came to an empty room made of crumbling stone.

There was an echo as we went on, though we were barefoot. Someone was calling out, but the sound was muffled. I recognized the plaintive bursts of pain. Sia had cried in this manner when she fell ill, her hand covering her mouth so that she might hush her sobs, hiding her frailty from the rest of us.

When I peered through the long furrows of shadows cast on the wall, I half-believed there was a demon flung onto the ground, much like the one imprinted upon my brother’s amulet, the female
monster Solomon is said to have killed on the Temple floor. As we came near, I could make out the form of a woman rolling back and forth in agony. She was the young housemaid who had begged Shirah for a spell, the one who’d stayed on the edges of the bath the night when I was told Aziza belonged to the world of angels and demons. She had traveled to this place as a servant but had recently been cast out by the family who had rights to her when her situation became evident. Now she was no longer considered worthy to pick mulberries or pistachios, or to carry her mistress’s baskets. She had been lurking near the storerooms, stealing food from the goat barns. Her current state of misery affected me deeply. I felt fainthearted at the sight of her as she tore at her abdomen, panting, riddled with pains.

Shirah was urging her to sit up, but the young woman refused. There was a child about to enter our world, one who had no father and no family. If it became known that the father of this child was a married man, this young woman’s fate would be impossible to escape. The council might well recommend she be cast out onto the mountain. This birth must be a secret, and as I would soon understand, secrets were Shirah’s greatest gift.

Shirah signaled to me, but I stood motionless, stung by panic as I had once been stung by a wasp. I, who’d been born of a dead woman, had no right to tend to anyone bringing forth life.

“Hurry,” Shirah insisted. There was a second pitcher beside her. “Mix the milk with water.”

I did so, then watched, caught up in a dream as Shirah and Nahara held the woman up and urged her to drink the mixture of she-dog’s milk. The housemaid spat some of it on the ground and made a terrible sound, the cry of a woman who was drowning. She held on to her belly as the pain tore at her. Shirah and Nahara lifted her up and did their best to make her walk, but even this made no difference. The baby would not come.

Shirah now commanded the housemaid to crouch upon the birthing stool she had brought along, and to bear down. Still there was nothing. The housemaid was so young she seemed little more than a child at this moment. She cursed not the man who was the father but herself. I felt something rise in my chest and throat as I surveyed a birth that would not come to pass. I had Ben Simon’s knife in my tunic, cold against my skin. I thought of the knife that had been used to take me from my mother, and her great echoing cries, and the silence of her last breath.

Shirah came to me and shook me. “Stop dreaming! Go to the dovecote and get me a basket of droppings.”

It was broiling hot inside the storeroom, and Shirah was drenched. Her black hair streamed down her back. The kohl around her eyes was melting so that her eyes seemed to stare out from behind a veil. I thought I had never seen anyone as beautiful or as fierce. Her tunic had been flung open, and I was shocked to see a swirl of red tattoos on her shoulders, a practice that was forbidden to our people. Those who had been marked so were said to belong to the
kedeshah,
holy women who were loyal to religious groups with practices so secret and controversial they had been outlawed long before Jerusalem fell.

“Go on!” Shirah demanded. “If this woman had anyone else to turn to, do you think she’d be here? She has no one, only a man who wants nothing to do with her and a baby who refuses to leave her womb.”

The faster I did as Shirah said, the faster I would be back in my own chamber, away from this mad scene. I went recklessly through the hallways, which seemed a series of dungeons, black as pitch, for I had no lamp. At last I reached the doorway that led me into the night. There was a pale moon, and the lemon-tinged light was nearly blinding after the dim air of the storehouse. Still, no one noticed as I ran to the dovecote, my footsteps silent on the granite
stones. I unlocked the door, then made my way among the birds as they fluttered about, surprised to have been disturbed at such a late hour. I began to fill the basket, frantic, my blood racing.

It was then I saw the slave. His chain reached from the loft where he slept down to the floor. He had been awakened when the door to the dovecote was thrown open, ready to defend himself if our warriors had come to mutilate him, or murder him, or trade him to nomads. I had completely forgotten about him. I could hear my own panicked, raspy breathing. Tears that did not fall were burning behind my vision. Our eyes caught. We looked at each other much as two animals who had met at a pool might have, both thirsty and mistrustful, both perfectly capable of violence. After a moment, the slave nodded for me to continue what it was I’d come for. He sank down and lowered his eyes, so they seemed like slits. He pretended to be sleeping, his back against the stones. I was grateful and told him so. Whether or not he could speak our language did not matter. He gazed up, and I could tell he understood.

I finished my gathering, then locked the dovecote and ran back the way I had come. There were almond blossoms falling from the trees, and the ground looked white. I thought of snow, and of
manna,
and of Jerusalem. I thought of the slave crouched down among the doves. My breath hit against my bones.

Shirah was waiting for me, pacing the floor. She had piled her long, sleek hair atop her head and had thrown off her veils. With a fine-edged pen made from a hawk’s feather, using blood rather than ink, she had written the name of our Lord on her arms, the letters reading upward, leading to heaven. She had concocted
pharmaka
from the precious leaves of the rue, an herb most women with child avoid, for it brings on cramping. Many refused to touch rue, for it burned the flesh. Often it was removed from the ground by tying it to a dog, which allowed the curse of pulling out the root to fall upon the animal. Some women used the herb when they
wished to miscarry, but rue could also be depended upon when a full-term baby needed to be hurried along, both for his sake and for the mother-to-be.

Shirah gathered the dove droppings and set a fire using them as peat. She fanned the flame until there was a plume of smoke. The scent that emanated was bitter but also familiar. It seemed the doves had followed us to this place; we could hear their wings beating, fast as our breathing, fast as the birth must become if mother and child were to survive. After the laboring woman drank the bitter rue, retching as she did, Shirah had us take her by either arm. We forced her to stand above the fire. The air burned with heat, and we were all slick with sweat. I grabbed off my shawl, feeling I might suffocate. I could hardly see for all the ash and sparks. The world was made of salt and smoke, and there was no choice but to go forward.

We had entered into the deepest of places, the seat of the great goddess Ashtoreth, written of by the prophets, a goddess who was with us still, even though the wise men in the Temple had done all they could to destroy her. Neither could they defeat what many claimed was the female aspect of God, the Shechinah, all that was divine and radiant, the bride to
Adonai
’s groom. The Shechinah healed the ill, sat among the poor, embraced the wicked and the good alike.

The woman who was laboring sobbed in our grasp. As for me, I had stopped thinking and merely did as I was told. I didn’t know how I had been drawn here, woken from my dreams, dragged from my chamber into this dim night. I of all people, a harbinger of the Angel of Death, known to
Mal’ach ha-Mavet
before I was known to humankind, a murderer of my own mother, now stood guard for the Queen of Heaven.

The housemaid pleaded with us not to keep her positioned over the fire. She said she was burning alive, that the sparks were entering her, entwining with her blood and bones. I asked to be allowed
to move her, but Shirah insisted the smoke was needed to open her womb. “Kindness can be a curse,” she said. She crouched beside the servant woman and began to chant.

Beshem eh’yeh asher eh’yeh tsey tsey tsey.

Shirah’s voice was hoarse and hot, the intonations rising. She spoke the words repeatedly, until the chant wound around us and we could hear only its tone and its desperation.

Va’yees’sa va’ya’vo va’yett. In the name of I am what I am, the name of God, get out. You have journeyed and now you have arrived. Amen Amen Selah.

The woman had been wailing, but now the sound worsened. Jackals called to each other in this way, crying in the night. The poor servant woman was so far inside herself, at the deepest core, it seemed impossible she would ever surface again. I thought of my mother in her last moments, before the silence fell, how her voice might have called out against the brutality of her fate, how my father might have wept at the door as he cursed me.

The laboring woman spoke to those who were not there, praying to our God,
Adonai,
and to Abraxas, a god of the Egyptians, and to Ashtoreth. She made secret bargains, promising all she would be willing to sacrifice if only her torment would end, her life, her soul, her newborn child.

“Take them!” she cried out. “Take me as well!”

I was frightened that she would call the warriors to us with her wailing, or summon demons we could not repel, but Shirah said no, it was silence we needed to fear. Silence at a birth meant that the demons had won and that Lilith, the night creature from Babalonyia with long black hair and black wings who preys on other women, seducing their men and stealing their children, had prevailed.

Shirah wrote down the name of Obizoth, the demoness that strangles newborns, then burned the papyrus upon which she’d written that vile name. The smoke was scarlet, the color of blood.
We were the defenders and we were in battle. I felt I could have taken a demon by the throat, should it dare to appear before us. The desert had taught me that we must destroy so that we might live. We had piles of salt to throw upon any creatures of the night that might venture close by. I took a handful and rubbed it across my abdomen, for unborn children were especially vulnerable to demons.

We remained beside the fire, the sweat from our own bodies stinging our eyes. As the fire flamed red and then blue, Shirah recited her devotion to
Adonai
so that the angel Raphael would thwart any attempt to do harm to the baby when at last it emerged. The mother-to-be began to have contractions. When I looked, I could see movement inside her; a storm was passing through her body. I found I was reciting Shirah’s incantation. I had learned the words and memorized them, for I, too, had come to believe this alone could keep us from harm.

Shirah had us move the woman away from the flames as soon as her liquid came in a rush. I realized that I was terrified the child might not follow, but Nahara, though she wasn’t more than thirteen, had no fear of what was to happen.

“Finally he arrives,” she said, overjoyed. She clapped her hands, then crouched down, ready. The baby came into her hands quickly, his sulky face twisted into a scowl. Nahara grinned, fearless, though blood was everywhere. I thought,
She is a woman and I am not. She is already everything and I am nothing at all.

“What will happen to her now?” I asked Nahara, nodding to the new mother.

“She will return to the woman who is her mistress and say she found a baby in the cliffs.”

“And will she be believed?” I wondered.

“My mother will escort her. They’ll take her in. They’ll believe what they must so that the man of the household can have a new son.”

Shirah knelt and reached inside the woman, chanting as the afterbirth was coaxed from within. It would be buried in the orchard, where no one would discover it. What had once given this child life would bring good fortune to our crops.

The night had been a whirlwind. At last silence washed over us. We were slick and hot, too spent to cleanse ourselves. Now that the baby had been delivered and was bound in clean cloth, the mother grabbed for him and put him to her breast. I heard a sob and realized it came from my throat.