The Dovekeepers (30 page)

“The world is many things to many creatures,” she told the children as we all surveyed the walled garden, what was surely a forest for a small creature that had been torn from its home. The
scorpion had scuttled out of sight. “We are considered giants by some and ants to be stepped upon by others.”

PEOPLE
were whispering about Yael, wondering who the father of her child might be and speculating about the night the assassin Bar Elhanan had cast out his own daughter. My grandsons, however, had already grown to adore her. Although I kept my distance, I became accustomed to her as well. If people spoke poorly of her in my presence, I glared at them, and that was the end of it. Though I preferred to keep to myself, there was a way in which I was comforted to have Yael in my home, to hear her breathe easily in her sleep, as my own daughter might have done had she still been with us.

Admittedly, I was grateful for help with the household chores. Even in her state, so big with the child that was to come, Yael was far from lazy. She cooked our meals, crouching over the fire pit to fry our food on a grill which fitted over the ring of stones. She went to the storehouses to collect our daily allotment of beans and grains, and made certain there was firewood, all to repay me for taking her in. But the stories she told were the only repayment we needed. The boys’ eyes brightened when they listened to her at bedtime, mesmerized. In all of the scorpion’s exploits, silence was an asset and a gift, not a flaw but a virtue. The scorpion could do what others could not: he could see in the dark, hear a fly buzzing on the far side of the mountain, sense danger while the rest of the world slept.

“Did your mother tell you these stories?” I asked one evening when Yael and I went to the plaza. We had taken to working at the looms on a regular basis. We kept ourselves removed from the other women, but it was a pleasure to weave and our garments were tattered; we had need of shawls and cloaks. When we busied ourselves in this manner, it was possible to forget the dust that rose
in clouds all around us and to distance ourselves from our hunger. If we had nothing else, then at least we had the sheep’s wool and the work of spinning and weaving.

“I had no mother.” Yael kept her eyes downcast.

We reached the looms, where we settled, bringing forth our lengths of carded, dyed wool. Yael was working on a pattern everyone praised. Even those gossips who whispered about her were impressed. There were intricate threads of color forming a line of continuous blocks of multihued squares. I noticed it was the same pattern as the cloth the slave wore.

“Every human has a mother,” I insisted as we worked.

“Are you sure I’m human?” Yael said, her chin tilted, teasing me.

I had never seen a woman with hair so red, or one with so little fear that she was willing to grasp a scorpion between her fingers. Others might whisper she was possessed by a demon and swear she was unlike other daughters and wives. But I had seen her on the night when her father cast her out, when she huddled in a corner like any other beaten woman. And I had taken note of the expression on her face when she stood beside the Man from the North.

She was human.

WHEN THEY
thought they were alone, I heard what I should not have pass between them. Yael was fortunate that I was accustomed to silence, and therefore held my tongue. A gossip would have been unforgiving, making quick use of the intimate encounter I’d stumbled upon. A hawk had been circling the largest dovecote for several days, intent on taking our doves for his dinner. We set out sticks tied together with rope that looked like a child’s toy; when the breeze stirred, the sticks whirled and frightened the hawks away. But one hawk was fearless; he wouldn’t be chased off. He looked underfed and seemed intent on having his supper. Hunger struck everyone in the desert at the same time.

When the hawk lit on the window ledge, Yael found some grain and reached out to him. I was stunned to see the creature eat from her hand, as if he were a dove himself. I was not the only one to take notice. The Man from the North had come up beside her. I overheard him say that in his country hunters trained hawks to strike down prey and bring back partridges and doves. Their sharp yellow beaks were wound with strands of leather, clamped halfway closed so they couldn’t devour their kills; they had to learn to wait patiently when they brought back their prey, hungering until the hunter tossed them a bit of meat.

It usually took months to gain a hawk’s trust. The slave was astounded by how easily Yael had called this one to her. He said she must possess magic. He sank to his knees and bowed his head, only half in jest, declaring she had bewitched him as well. Yael laughed at his remarks—I remembered because I had not heard her do so before. It was a lovely, surprising sound. She said that women with red hair had the ability to tame wild creatures. Since the slave had come from a country where many of the women looked so, he should have known this to be true. He got to his feet, though he had to shift his tall body just to be near her.

It was then I overheard him say, “You’re not like them, Yael. You’re not like anyone.”

I wasn’t certain if he meant his words to be a compliment or an insult, but then he took her hand and kissed it, at her wrist, the place where what someone needs and what she desires cross each other to become one.

YAEL WAS NOT
my daughter, but she lived in my home, and that prompted me to be concerned. I knew that a woman at the end of her term might look for solace in curious places. Being with child could cause confusion, and kindness in a cruel world might coax Yael into forgetting that the Man from the North was not one of
us. On the blanket where she lay at night, she tossed and turned, uncomfortable in the heat. In the mornings she brooded, her eyes filled with sleep. I wondered if she dreamed of her baby to come, as I had long ago, if she had already seen her child’s face and had perhaps chosen a name, though it was best not to do so. Naming the unborn alerted demons a child was about to come into the world. Hand over a child’s name and that newborn might be more easily called into the darkness. I had done so, tempting fate. Perhaps the night demons had followed my daughter ever since I called her Morning.

WE DIDN’T
complain about our work at this brutal time of the year, for the dovecote was cool, its plaster walls giving some relief. We were sheltered from the season’s unforgiving fever. Below us the valley sizzled in a pink haze. The world beyond our gates glared with light, and we wore our head scarves pulled down to shade our eyes. There was not a single green shoot to be seen; even the fierce leaves of the thornbushes had shriveled as if made of parchment. We could hear the jackals crying at night, and we shivered at the sound. Huge flocks of birds flew above us, abandoning our barren land, searching for water and sustenance in far-off places, flying to the mountains in the north or east to Moab where the fields were said always to be green.

Each day the Man from the North set out a line of grain on the window ledge for the hawk. When he spoke in his language of unearthly grunts, the creature seemed to understand, a glint in his yellow eyes. The bird had a red head, and because of this the slave called him Odeum, ruby, which was also his name for Yael. Yael grinned when he did so, knowing he was provoking her. She teased right back and said only a fool would keep a hawk so near to a dovecote. Eventually we would arrive to find that the hawk had slaughtered all of our charges. She had fed the bird of prey a few
grains out of pity, but the slave had gone much too far, making a pet of a wild thing. Could he not understand his mistake? Here was a creature no one could ever trust.

“You’re wrong about him,” I heard the Man from the North say. “He’s at your beck and call.”

“A hawk is always a hawk,” I informed them both, unable to hold my tongue any longer.

After I made my remark they were quick to fall silent and return to the tasks at hand. How could they argue with me? They knew my statement to be true. You cannot change a hawk’s nature any more than you can teach a dove to kill. And yet later in the day, when I saw the slave and Yael bringing baskets of dung into the fields to feed the ravished, heat-struck earth, the hawk glided above them as though he were a dog, tame and subservient. I thought perhaps I had been wrong, too quick to judge the essence of a being by its appearance, still not fully understanding that, in the world God has given us, all things must change.

FOR NOW
the one constant was that the days fell heavily, all with the same hypnotic, unrelenting heat. Heat waves rose up in shimmering curtains of light. There were lines of exhausted, baffled women at the storehouses, each waiting for her family’s share of water and food. I felt immobilized inside the month of
Av
the way I had once lingered inside my dreams as I slowly awoke to the yeasty odor of baking in my old life, on those precious mornings when the countryside was green and the scent of the cypress drifted in the air. I had been caught up in time then, as I was once again, but one tableau was a treasure chest, the other a cage.

We had so little here on the mountain, but at least we were safe. In the world outside ours, the violence against our people had only grown worse. There were rumors that the dead were heaped upon the main roads throughout Judea, that the Jordan River was so
rife with bodies you could walk across on dead men’s backs as if they were stepping-stones. News came to us that another Essene settlement had been decimated. I’d heard of their people, those who called themselves the Children of Light and who had occupied the settlement known as Sechacha. One day a small, impoverished troupe appeared in our valley. We saw dust rising as they approached. Their white linen garments glinted brightly as they crossed over the rocks. Our warriors went down the serpent’s path to meet these visitors and bring them to us. It was well known that the Essenes abhorred warfare, and we were a fortress. Still, like the rest of us, when they had no options and no place else to go, they came to this mountain.

There were seven men and three women, along with four children. The men carried their belongings in packs tied onto their backs with thick ropes of woven flax. The women followed behind, simply dressed, barefoot, unadorned. It was the women who toted the goatskin containers of water and cheese and led a flock of scrawny goats tied together with leather strands forming a
ribqâh,
so that from a distance the animals appeared to be one creature with five heads. There were also two black donkeys laden with tall ceramic vases; inside were the rolled parchment scrolls of the Essenes’ teachings. The men were learned, holy in their aspect, especially one elderly man, who was perhaps the most ancient I had ever seen. They had been traveling ever since the Romans destroyed their settlement, living in caves, leaving behind their writings whenever possible to ensure their beliefs would not be lost should they be the next to be slaughtered.

When the visitors entered through the Snake Gate, a crowd had already gathered. The survivors appeared dazed, alarmed by the fortified conditions of Masada. They gazed with grim faces at the parapets our warriors had readied, the piles of armor, the spears with sharpened bronze tips kept beside the synagogue so that wise men could bless them. The Essenes had stumbled into a province
made for war and war alone, where weapons were stocked in the manner that other villages might store oil and wine, where every stone had been rounded with a chisel, ready to be used as a weapon should the battle come to us.

We gazed at each other in the presence of these gentle people, made aware that blood and vengeance coursed through us as if we were barbarians. It was war that roused us from our dreams in the morning and sang us to an unquiet sleep at night. Some among us cast our eyes downward, stunned by what we’d become. Others glared at a group they considered fools, unwilling to fight for Zion.

The oldest of the Essene men, whose people called him Abba as a term of respect, was carried by his followers. He was weak in his body but strong in spirit. His people lifted him high upon their shoulders so he could call out to us.

“We all belong to our Lord. All that is now and ever shall be originates with God. Before things come to be, He has ordered their design. His glorious plan fulfills our destiny, a destiny it is impossible to change. We have come because we were meant to be here though we are as different from you as night from day.”

I didn’t know if our people would accept Abba’s proclamation, or if shame and fury would make that impossible. There was a tension, shown in a great and echoing silence; then Yael ran up to one of the women in the group and embraced her. Their joy at seeing each other broke through the silence. We learned this was her friend Tamar, who had once had four sons and now had only one—the others, along with her husband, had been slain in the raid upon her settlement by the legion. Now all this Essene woman had left was a boy of ten, one named Yehuda, whom she clung to as if he alone held her to this earth she walked upon.

Ben Ya’ir himself allowed the Essenes to stay. He came to speak with their leader, this learned man who was both father and priest, who wore pure white linen and was barefoot, whose face was unlined even though he was so very old. They sat together beneath
an olive tree, speaking for hours. They then sat with Menachem ben Arrat, our great priest. At the end of that time the word went out—no one was to trouble the group of outsiders, no matter how different they might appear. Their customs were their own, allowed within our walls while they stayed among us.