The Dovekeepers (37 page)

“Don’t tell me when it will happen,” I overheard her say as she stood beside him. “I’ll arrive one morning and you’ll be gone.”

The Man from the North was aware that he had a rival, but unlike most suitors, he wasn’t jealous. Rather, he doted upon his competition, our little lion. He might have resented Arieh his mother’s joys and arms, instead he was happy to help amuse the child, lifting him up to see the hawk above us. He whistled in a way that brought the bird swooping, which made the baby throw back his head and
laugh. The slave often listed the names of things in his own rough language, trying to teach Arieh how he might say
dove
and
hawk
and
mother
and
snow,
as though convinced the child might someday live in the slave’s cold land and speak as he did.

“You’re wasting your time,” I warned when he clasped Arieh in his arms, then tossed him in the air until the child melted with laughter.

Then one day he told the child his name. We worked in such close quarters that we all overheard. It was Wynn, a rough word that stuck in the throat. Shirah and Aziza exchanged a look, surprised that the slave would reveal himself. He had addressed Arieh in the manner in which a man might speak to his son. I knew then that the time of his leaving had come. A slave never speaks his name aloud; once he was captured, it was not to be uttered until he walked into the world beyond. His name was to be a word known only to his kinsmen who awaited him and to whatever God he revered.

Only a free man would take such a risk.

In the evenings I waited, holding the baby, while Yael ducked back inside the dovecote and unlocked his chains. It was a simple lock; the key was hung on a hook hammered into the dovecote wall. And yet it took some time before Yael emerged, smoothing down her hair. No one else would have spied her shadow, or known how it drew her back to this man, but shadows were my gift. Because she was not my daughter, I stood with the baby and sulked and said nothing.

This was the time of year when night came earlier, washing across the sky to flood the corners of the horizon. Each night when Yael left the slave, her expression was dark.

She erupted one evening when an edict went out that rations would be halved and there would no longer be clean water for animals or slaves. “No one should be treated this way.”

“Would it have been better if they’d killed him?” I asked.

“When men act like beasts, they become so,” she countered.

I couldn’t deny this, so I let it be. “This is the world we live in,” I murmured, and she took my hand, as if she were indeed my daughter.

YAEL WASN’T ALONE
in her unhappiness. We all felt the constraints of the mountain, the lack of food, the petty jealousies. Many of the sheep and goats that we valued for their milk were being butchered out of need. People were going hungry. Cucumbers on the vine shriveled in the last bursts of heat, turning to ash, as the fruit was said to do in the blighted city of Sodom.

The council allowed a group of travelers to camp in the far field, beyond the Essenes’ goat house. They were nomads who dyed their hands blue and spoke in their own tongue, but they brought with them livestock to share with us, although we would have nothing to do with the swine they kept. They, too, had been driven off by the Romans. Some of their women, the ones who had been violated by soldiers, cut deep gashes into the palms of their hands and soles of their feet to allow the sorrow to rise out of their bodies.

When they left to return to the wilderness, their flocks in need of grasslands, we found a baby who had come from a union a Roman soldier had forced upon one of their women. The baby had been suffocated, then placed beneath an almond tree, knees to his chest, his small arms folded, as though asleep and in peace, rescued from the harshness of the world. Yael stood beside me and wept. She had seen two child-brides from this tribe buried in this way in the wilderness. She said they had held hands so they might walk together into whatever world awaited them.

There were many among us who wished we could flee and find our way back to cities and towns. But there was nothing to return to. Our houses were burned, our towns destroyed. I wondered if Yael wished she could escape and make her away across the desert,
over the Great Sea, to the world where snow was an everyday occurrence rather than a miracle.

I could see my grandsons playing near the wall much like shadows sifting across the gathering dark. My throat closed up as it often did when I gazed upon them. I thought of the baby, smothered, then carefully and lovingly laid to rest. Yael put her arm through mine, for we spent every evening together. The first star had appeared above us, the one they say is Ashtoreth’s lantern, which burns so brightly it allows her to cross the sky when all others are trapped in the dark.

THE SENTRIES
caught him one night in the month of
Cheshvan
when the air was glazed with cold. It was the beginning of the rainy season, the time of the year when we lived beneath the sign of the scorpion, which brought disorder and gloom, the time of the floods. Yet the sky hung over us like an empty bowl, throwing down darkness but nothing more. There had been no rain, and we all knew this was a sign that our people were not in God’s favor.

The guards fell upon him as he crossed the field where the trees lifted their boughs upward, desperate in their thirst. He was near the portion of the wall that circled past our chamber, the place where he’d left his mark of heat upon the stones on the night I’d spied him waiting, perhaps with patience, most certainly with desire.

We did not speak of it, but we all knew that if he’d been heading to the Snake Gate to make his escape, he would not have come in this direction. There was only one reason why he was apprehended in the garden of onions where the scorpion resided, and that reason was Yael. Perhaps he had convinced himself that, if he spoke to her once more, and if the words were strong enough, they might pierce through her resolve and she might be willing to leave us.

We didn’t know he had been captured until morning. There was
a sharp breeze that carried the scent of myrrh, and also of fragrant cypress, reminding me of the valley where I had once lived. We usually had rain in this month, but so far none had fallen, though the priests were praying for such an occurrence three times a day. People were reminded of the stories of the great drought, when a sage named Honi called down the rains and saved our people. The situation warranted a miracle and the voice of someone who might be heard when calling out to God.

Upon discovering the news of the slave’s imprisonment, Yael leaned against the wall of the dovecote for support, so that it seemed she’d been struck and could go no farther. The baby was tied to her, and he stirred in his sleep and made a whimpering noise. Yael quickly stroked his dark hair to settle him. What might a baby dream of? Milk and love, the language of a mother’s care, the voice of a man who was born in snow? It is the sort of sleep we can never have again. Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.

No one told us where the slave was, but when we spied the hawk circling a tower, we knew where they’d taken him. They would have killed him, but it wasn’t worth the effort. If they left him be, locked up and forgotten, he would die on his own. I saw Shirah’s eyes flit over to Yael, who now forced herself to show no expression. No outsider would guess she felt more than the rest of us, unless they noticed she’d grown so pale that the freckled marks on her skin stood out like a scrim of blood.

We kept to ourselves that day, mourning the slave’s absence, on edge and waiting for worse news to come. I, for one, had not expected to miss him as strongly as I did. He was such a big man and had taken up so much space that the dovecote seemed quite empty without him. The birds were unsettled; there were few eggs to be found, and the ones we discovered in the straw had dark spots speckling the blue-gray shells, a bad omen. We ate our noon meal together in the garden behind the dovecote in silence, taking small
bites of cold barley cakes with olive oil as we waited for what was to come next. It seemed a stone had been dropped into water, and every circle that fanned out moved the tide of our destiny along the course of some inevitable destination. Today was not like the day that had come before; by tomorrow we would be carried even further from the everyday world we’d grown accustomed to.

When the guards came to question us, as we knew they would, we said we were stunned by the slave’s disappearance. We had no idea that he had puzzled out the trick of unlocking his chains or that he’d learned to work the bolt on the door. Shirah found a thin twist of steel which she quickly bent to resemble a key. She handed it to the guards, suggesting perhaps this was the way the slave had escaped. Her glance went to Yael, whom she strove to protect against inquiry. Again, Yael’s face was blank.

We went on, saying more, clucking like chickens, insisting that we’d thought men from the north were steady and dumb, unable to plan an escape. “But see how clever he was,” Shirah said to the guards, shaking her head, “to make a key out of nothing.”

“He’ll starve to death soon enough,” one of the guards told us, perhaps believing that was news we wished to hear.

Shirah asked if one among us could speak with their prisoner, saying he had devised a rake that was helpful and we wanted to learn his methods so that we might make use of the tool ourselves. Yael glanced at her with gratitude, aware this dispensation was the single way food and water could be brought to the tower. There was only one person who might allow such a meeting, our leader, Ben Ya’ir.

“Tell him our wish,” Shirah said without hesitancy. “He will be generous to us.”

But Ben Ya’ir had gone into the wilderness with his warriors, leaving no second in command other than the elders, and they would surely not listen to Shirah’s pleas or even allow her to come within their doors.

We were told there was but one person who might convince the authorities that the Man from the North deserved a visitor—Ben Ya’ir’s wife, Channa, the dark woman who lived in the lower section of the Western Palace, a villa in which the frescoes had been created by master painters from Rome. She held some of her husband’s authority when it came to domestic matters, hearing complaints about living space or work allotments among the women. She was revered even though she set herself apart from all others. For days at a time she refused to open her door; her ration of food was brought to her, then left outside her gate, her water set beside her garden in buckets and goatskin flasks. She ventured out at night and was sometimes seen in the Western Plaza, flowing scarves wrapped around her that resembled a shroud, her sharp face set in mourning, although she had lost no one. She was a mystery and a shadow, but shadows were what I understood most of all.

When we stated our plea, the guard asked who among us would visit Ben Ya’ir’s wife. I could feel the others’ hesitation, and even Shirah turned away, wary of such an encounter. I found myself offering to go. I was the eldest, and because of this it was my duty. But there was more. I was the diviner of shadows who had learned not to show what was inside. I could pretend to be a baker’s widow, a simple woman, and held a talent of disguise that would help with this task. The other women looked upon me, grateful for my offer, each with her own reasons for not wanting to go to the palace.

As I was to leave, on impulse, I decided to bring Arieh with me. I had a premonition. I thought I heard a voice say his name. Perhaps the angel who had stood with me in the bakery was beside me again. Perhaps he who had instructed me to take up the vial of poison now murmured that this child might be the key to unlock a prison door.

“Who could deny a smile to Arieh?” I said to Yael. “What harm can it do?”

Ben Ya’ir’s wife might take an interest in the welfare of the dovecotes if she took an interest in the baby. If so, she might allow us to visit a man who was nothing more than a stone, but who all the same had entrusted us with his name.

WHEN I RAPPED
upon the palace door, the great man’s wife was quick to call
Go away
. I set to knocking once more. I’d often needed to call upon customers who had forgotten to pay the Baker; I did not give up easily when told to leave. The door of this grand house was made of red cypress, which I took to be a good omen. Our town in the Valley of the Cypresses was said to have been blessed by the angel Michael; perhaps the wood used for this door had come from our forest and had therefore been blessed as well. My mother’s great-grandmother might have walked beneath this very tree’s branches before King Herod’s builders cut it to the ground.