The Dovekeepers (42 page)

ALL THE WHILE
you were growing up, I was your brother. You followed me as the dove follows the fields of grain. I dressed in blue robes, my hair caught up, then tightly braided in the fashion of young boys. Your father taught me to ride a horse, how to use a slingshot and a spear. I was a natural warrior, made for iron. It was my element from the start. Rather than frighten me, it brought me comfort. Metal was cold and heavy and reliable. It did as I asked. In return I was dedicated; there was never a day when I did not speak my gratitude to the sword I carried and the horse I rode.

Evil spirits have an aversion to metal, and there are those who whisper that the name of iron when invoking it before the Almighty is
Barzel,
what some believe is a combination of letters taken from the names of the matriarchs of Jacob’s family, Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah. Weapons are kept from women, but such a naming suggests that perhaps men fear our talents in war as well as our desire for peace. I was watched after by the grace of the foremothers of our tribe, Rachel and Leah, but I did not walk the same path they had traveled. I never learned what it meant to be a wife. I never worked a loom. I did not go with the girls to welcome births, and for that I was especially thankful. Your birth was enough for me.

I preferred to be your father’s son, waiting with the horses in silence while the men made their attacks. I held on to the reins as the warriors crept down on foot along the narrow pass to attack caravans traveling west toward Egypt, the carts and fearless horses laden with goods from the east. I helped carry piles of frankincense, strands of lapis and coral and jade, baskets of cardamom and cassia, purses filled with bars and coins of gold. I saw more blood on the ground than any of the girls witnessed at the birthings. I knew things they could not begin to understand: how it felt to ride through the hot night with a spear upon my back. How we
swooped across the Iron Mountain, one creature, with one heart, hollering war cries, slick with sweat, darting beneath the moon. On these occasions it was possible to imagine that I had wings and was free as any bird of prey, fierce as any man.

My secret became my daily life. Our mother made certain that I bathed alone. When my breasts began to show, she bound them with a swathe of linen. That binding made me stand up straight, my full height, so that I might have been cast of iron rather than flesh. I could hit harder than the boys. I was faster, as well, and more nimble with a sword. In time your father grew proud of me, almost as if I was his own, as if our lie was the truth. At night our mother taught me to read and write. I learned Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew. There were girls who teased me and pursued me, as they did all the boys they admired. One kissed me during these games, and I laughed, thinking her a fool. I was above such matters. And yet I was confused, for when my friend Nouri pulled me away so we could flee from the girls, my blood raced. When he grabbed me, his fingers upon my arm stung, as though he’d burned me without meaning to.

I went to our mother and wept, like any other silly girl, as I told her what had happened. I fought the urge to be close to Nouri, but he drew me to him, as steel calls to steel. Our mother said it was time for me to understand I could never be like those heedless sheep who chased after boys. She told me she had seen my fate. Love would be my undoing. She whispered that she didn’t tell me this out of cruelty, but out of concern. She had thrown down stones on the day of my birth, and my fortune had appeared on the ground before her, a warning she now shared with me, as her mother had once shared the divination of her future with her. I was not to look at boys or think of them as anything but brothers. On the day that I did so, my fate and my undoing would claim me. There were tears in our mother’s eyes as she instructed me. I knew she wanted what was best for me and did not doubt her.

Not yet.

It was easy to give her my promise on that day. She embraced me and called me
daughter,
a dangerous slip of who I had been and was no more.

I AVOIDED
Nouri after that, though he was clearly hurt that I had abandoned him. I didn’t think about his handsome features, the way his face broke into a sudden smile. He wasn’t as good a rider as I anyway; he would never have kept up with me. I was the best among the boys of my age, fearless. When I unbound my breasts to bathe, I felt the wings above my shoulders, twining through the bone, the secret of my gifts, a legacy from the one who was my father, whoever and whatever he might be. I half-believed he might be an angel, for there were such luminous divine creatures, winged, gliding messengers from God, who were said to become entranced with women on earth and visited them in the night, joining themselves to human flesh.

I rode with the cry of your people in my throat as I chased down rabbits and the shy hyrax who burrow in the rocks and prowl the thickets. I practiced my skill to impress your father, killing my first ibex when I was ten. He said nothing when the ibex stumbled and fell, but I could see what he felt in his expression as I helped to butcher the animal. It was
Adar,
the time when ibex calves are in the grasslands, but I had killed a huge male. Your father touched my forehead in a blessing for my skill. From a man of such silence, this was high praise.

I was glad to be a boy in this world of men and to be granted a great honor when your father allowed me to ride beside him. I burst into each day, my black hair braided, my cloak the indigo blue of your father’s people. But our brother had been born, and as he grew everything changed. It was Adir our father looked upon with pride. Perhaps he really had forgotten who I was for all those
many years, and only now recalled it was a girl child my mother had refused to leave behind on the first night of their marriage, before we reached the land of Moab and changed who I was meant to be.

IN THE RAINY SEASON,
when there were no caravans, the men journeyed back to other villages, other wives. Your father and his kinsmen never stayed in one place but instead rolled down their tents and set off across the land, leaving their families on the Iron Mountain, visiting other wives and children far from our camp. They rode so far their shadows could hardly be seen by humankind. We stayed behind with the goats and the white-fleeced sheep. There were hundreds in the flock, all adding to your father’s wealth, and they needed tending. The acacia trees were abloom with yellow flowers, and the fields of grass were so tall we could disappear and never be seen when we ran across the meadow. At night the bats flew together in one dark cloud, dropping down to the trees to drink the juice of the figs. The air was mild, and the rain turned the air the same shade of blue as the cloaks your people wore.

Our mother did not complain that we stayed behind on the Iron Mountain when your father went off. She had other attachments. When our mother was cast out of Jerusalem, I was not her only pet. She had also brought along two doves, and she was devoted to them. They perched inside a wooden cage and were fed grain and dates. When they drank water, they lifted up their heads as though praising God. Our mother sent them out one at a time, slipping messages into bronze tubes attached to their legs. The doves lifted into the western sky as she tossed them upward, vanishing in a blink. They always returned to her. In time their children and grandchildren did so as well, following the same mysterious route.

Our mother would wait for their return as dusk fell across the
mountains in blue bands. She said the color of the sky reminded her of water, and of the land where she had been a child, before she was sent to Jerusalem. She yearned for the city of Alexandria, a place where the rivers were filled with miraculous creatures and monsters alike, where her mother had sung her to sleep with the same songs she offered us now. Throughout the years we were in Moab, she remained solitary. Perhaps she was thinking of the city of her birth. Perhaps that was why I often saw her weeping.

When one of the doves reappeared, our mother would become utterly absorbed. If you called to her, she would not hear your voice. If a bee lit upon her hand, she wouldn’t take notice. Unlike your father, who was satisfied, I understood that our mother yearned for something more. Still I couldn’t quite fathom her expression, not while I stood there barefoot, dressed as a boy. Only now do I understand. She was a woman in love.

Throughout the years we lived with your father, she was sending messages to another man, the one who was my father. Once I found a missive he sent back to her, written on a tiny scrap of parchment, smaller than a thumbnail. I knew then that an angel was not involved in the matter of my birth, for angels come to us in dreams and visions, not upon parchment. Our mother thought she had folded the note into her book of spells, but instead the message had dropped into my path. Perhaps the angels did indeed set it there, so I would know the truth about my origins, or perhaps a demon plucked it from between the pages.
My true wife
had been written. My mother had taught me the language of scholars, and because I could read Hebrew, I knew of her betrayal of your father, the man who taught me everything I knew, how to ride and how to hunt and how to be loyal to those I loved.

I tossed the parchment into the bonfire that night. As I did, it flew up like a wasp to sting me. There is a mark, beneath my left eye, that remains from that time. Because of this I can never forget what I found. Sometimes people imagine I am crying, they believe
they’ve spied a tear, but they’re wrong. I spent the first part of my life without tears, as any boy would. The mark beneath my eye is made of fire. It’s the single element that can overwhelm iron.

WE STAYED
until the summer when I turned fourteen. I knew that I bled even though the boys I ran with did not, but that did not change who I was, the fiercest among them, the rider with wings, Aziza, who carried both compassion and power within. I merely had to keep my blood secret, as I was to keep my body from view. The women here were not considered
niddah
when they bled, so I was not committing any true sin when I keep my secret and stayed among people during that time of the month. On hunting trips I insisted I was a restless sleeper and needed to make camp alone. When the others relieved themselves, I joked that I was a camel and could hold my water for days, waiting until I could sneak off on my own.

By then your father had given Adir a fine horse, the one I’d trained upon, no longer mine. Now I rode an old white stallion whose time had passed and who would never again win a race no matter how I might kick at him. Your father’s people were moving south, to Petra, giving up their traveling ways. The city that had arisen from the red rocks, taken from the edge of the deep, nearly endless ravine, had begun to call them to its great beauty and the settled life they might have there. There was a pool reputed to be larger than any lake and terraced gardens that were incomparable. It was said that every wanderer came home to this place, and that even these wild men who longed for freedom, who had spent their lives in pursuit of open grasslands, could not ignore the voice of Petra. And there was another reason—the Romans might attack our camp, despite their pledge of peace and their fear of the legendary courage of the tribesmen. There was a rumor that, should any
blood be spilled upon the iron cliffs of Moab, a dozen men would spring from the blood of the first. Perhaps the men were tired from their shifting homes, their many wives, and were eager for a single residence and a life of ease.