The Dovekeepers (60 page)

Had I loved him, my children would have been safe, my future assured. Instead I brought them to be trapped on this perch from which there was no deliverance. Though the angels might hear us call to them, they could never reach us here on the periphery of the world, even if they wished to save us. I understood this when I threw the bones of the doves, for they prophesied that, just as there was no escape from what had already been written, there would be no escape from this fortress.

Our people gathered to watch six thousand of the legion approach, accompanied by more than a thousand of their slaves and followers. We trembled in silence. What terrified us was not only their number but their sheer determination. They had come for us from Jerusalem, though we were but a few hundred. They had found us as the jackals find their prey, encircling the weakness of their victims, biding their time, ready to leap when the moment is right.

In the dust storm they raised, birds fell from the sky, unable to take flight in the bursts of swirling gravel. Soon the ground was littered with ravens, more in number than the soldiers. The flightless birds transformed the ground into a mournful stretch of black, and all at once it seemed the reaches of the World-to-Come had been laid down before us in a road of flesh and feathers.

“I have seen this before,” Revka murmured to me, her face ashen. “We cannot escape from harm.”

There was only one reason why Rome should come to try to defeat us when we were so few and their empire so great. They feared we rebels might serve as an ember to reignite the flame of freedom. Disgrace smolders, it burns when you least expect it to ignite. The Romans could not allow this. We were fish in a net, already drawn in upon the rocky shore; all they needed to do was cut us off from the water that sustained us. Already, coins had been printed in Rome to celebrate the fall of Judea. The image of a Roman legionnaire and a captive Jewish woman, humbled and enslaved beneath a palm tree, had been imprinted upon silver. As they had written it, so they wished it to be, as if they and not God alone could create matter out of words and will.

In a land where rebellion has been crushed, there cannot be a single warrior left.

*

IT WAS WINTER
and the air was raw. We wore our cloaks drawn about us like armor, shivering in the wind, watching as our fate approached us. The rains had come, filling the valleys with torrents of water. Fish that had disappeared deep within the soil during the arid months appeared once again, magicked into life. Throughout the hills there were wildflowers and honeybees. The trunks of dead trees hummed as if they themselves had come alive. There were greens for the ibex, meat for the leopard. The desert had given the Tenth Legion the most favorable conditions for a crossing. Surely our enemies took this as an omen that they would be the victors. They were hungry, and they were fed. They were thirsty and needed look no farther than the streams that turned into waterfalls.

Perhaps those who were new to Judea wondered how it was that the desert had destroyed so many who had come before them, how the brutality of its fierce heat had changed those who had fought to stay alive in its arms. For this was the merciful time of the year, when birds began to return from Africa and Egypt, when there were herons rather than vultures and the land was plentiful. The army that came to our valley was made up of men from a dozen different lands, all speaking Latin, each one rewarded by Rome with provisions they had not dared to dream of in the poverty of their homelands, for they traveled with camels and donkeys loaded down with meat and dates and leather barrels with enough water to fill ten cisterns.

They approached our fortress with their strength intact, while we were eating grass and doves, sacrificing the sheep for which we no longer had grain, slitting the throats of the goats who no longer gave milk. We had water, what we always longed for, and the cisterns were full, yet we were poor and our hunger throbbed and reminded us of our poverty. So many of the doves had been taken for food and sacrifices, their waste no longer filled our baskets or fed the fields. The orchards failed us, the gardens were empty,
the storerooms no longer sustained us. Now when we entered the dovecotes, there was a hush; in place of the song of the doves, there was only a faint cooing.

Our warriors were exhausted. They had been fighting for so long, without reprieve or rest, many of them young and untrained, mere boys, ten- and eleven-year-olds conscripted to stand in the place of the fallen. Yet they hid their fear. They shouted that the legion might bring all of Rome and still they could never scale the mountain to reach us.

But this was the army that had murdered twenty thousand of our people in Caesarea, so that not one had survived. They had dispatched the two other Jewish strongholds, Herodium and Machaerus, where they had slain those they had given a promise of reprieve. Having heard there were those who had managed to escape and were still in hiding, the Tenth Legion had cut down the Forest of Jardes, so there would not be a single tree for the escaped rebels to hide behind. There they killed three thousand more, their bodies left strewn on the field for the birds of prey without even a shred of cloth to cover their nakedness.

Flavius Silva then set his glance upon us. It was said that he was a man without regret, with violent moods and tempers, but with the gift of pure logic when he needed to advance on his enemy. I stood upon the wall with the rest of our people and watched our valley fill with columns of fighting men. Following were those who would bake the soldiers’ bread and cook their meals and mend their cloaks, along with the
zonnoth,
women who would be kept in tents for the soldiers’ pleasure, and the slaves who would build the camps, dragging enormous timbers from the north through the desert, along with the smiths with their carts of weaponry—spears and shields and thousands of arrows. But there was something more fearsome that arrived with the legion, the sign of our fate, for the Romans had brought a lion on a chain with them. We grew faint when we saw this beast. He, who had once been free in the
desert and had ruled the wilderness from his cave, the symbol of the strength of the ancient tribe of Judea, now must do his keepers’ bidding. He gazed at us, and in his eyes we saw the Romans’ desire.

They meant to devour us.

They attached the poor creature to a metal post, constructed directly across from the palace that had belonged to King Herod. This was where Silva’s camp was to be built, in a location that would be an insult and a challenge every time we looked upon it. While they built, we heard the roaring of the vanquished beast.

Yael had confided to me that she dreamed of a lion. As she had feared this creature, so had she been drawn to it. She wept when she told me this, and I understood why she was torn by the meaning of her dreams. A lion may lie beside an ibex in the shade if his appetite is sated, they may even sleep together, their backs resting against each other, but on the next day, if the lion wakes with hunger, then he must serve himself.

Now Yael’s dream had appeared before us. She stood beside me and wept to see the lion subdued in his chains, trapped as we were, enslaved by those whose brutality was an affront to nature, and to our people, and to God. After the dust had settled, we could observe him clearly, for there was only the pale blue air of winter before us and the light was clear, the wind fresh. Many said it was possible to view heaven from this mountain of ours, but now we seemed much closer to the first gate of hell. What we heard and what awaited us did not come from the reaches of God. It was below us, in the roar of the lion.

SOON ENOUGH
a village was constructed by camp followers, with tents and shacks set up overnight. The scent of food drifted over the valley, cooking meat, bread, spices. We watched, poverty-stricken, starving, like ghosts at a table laden with a great feast. The building went on without ceasing, with slaves working through the night.
This was an endeavor that was meant to last; the Romans were settling in. They would not leave, and they would not admit defeat. They began to build twelve towers, set a hundred yards apart, rising so quickly it seemed they came into being before our very eyes. Once the towers had been constructed, any man wishing to break through to the eastern valley would be running a gauntlet, with guards atop the observation posts. He would never make it to the other side.

As the slaves were completing the camps, more were brought in from the north to give form to a wall of stones. This wall was no worry to us until it began to zigzag into the mountains in a strange design. We did not understand the Romans’ intentions, for it seemed a fool’s endeavor to set a thousand Jewish slaves to labor throughout the day and night, carrying boulders so heavy many of the workers fell prostrate on the ground. When these pitiful men could not rise again, they were slain and left in the dirt, for it was easier to dispose of them than to heal them. The Romans were intent on this wall they built. We assumed they meant to enclose their camps, thereby protecting themselves from us. Certainly our warriors had plans for raids, however perilous, already in the making.

As soon as he was told of this wall, Ben Ya’ir came to look down upon it. When he took note of the stones cutting across the cliffs, he saw that this was a wall meant to encircle us. It surrounded not only the Roman camps but the entire mountain. It was a siege wall, six feet thick. Our leader immediately understood that its purpose was not to protect the Roman camp but to keep us in.

Some of the warriors laughed at this, for the wall was not so high that a man couldn’t climb over beneath the cover of night. They had not yet realized there was another purpose to this endeavor. The Romans intended a crucifixion of the land that belonged to us, each rock in the wall serving as a nail in our flesh. They were telling us that we belonged to them, like the lion on the chain, like
the slaves at their bidding, like the six hundred thousand they had slaughtered in their war against the Jews.

They wanted our fear, and that was what they received. Dread went through the fortress as though it was a fever. All at once the blue air seemed difficult to breathe. We had made a world here, one that mirrored the villages where we had once known freedom and the city we loved and hoped to return to. We minted our own pennies, the bronze poured into molds in the palace workshops, imprinted with our dream:
For the Freedom of Zion.
We had our marketplace, our bakers and wine merchants, the potters who fashioned jugs and cooking vessels from the clay that was found below in the
nachal.
As
Adonai
had created us in His image, so we had created Masada in the image of our past lives and the lives we hoped to live again, when we were free.

Now that the siege wall was in sight, people panicked, afraid that Zion would never rise again. They rushed the storerooms, greedy in their fear, thinking only of survival, as the jackal does in the middle of the night when the morning seems such distant territory. But even the jackal shares with his kind, and does not trample them, or forsake them. Our people were maddened by the deeds of the Romans and by their fear of what was to come during a siege that might last months.

Eleazar stood upon the fountain to stop the chaos. His followers had given to him a gold breastplate on which there were four gems of great worth. Although he had accepted this gift, he never dressed in it for battle, preferring instead to take up the same iron mail that his men used. Now, upon the arrival of the Romans, he wore the gold so that he might show the legion, even from a distance, that we were strong and unafraid and that we had been chosen by the Almighty to defeat Rome.

“We have one enemy,” he cried out.

People turned to him, as they might turn to a prophet. He was the one who had led them here, who had believed this fortress
would be their salvation. The mountain had defended Herod in the time when Cleopatra sought to take this country from him, as it would defend us now. On that point he had never wavered.

“The wall is just a wall, made of stones. But the stones are the stones of Judea. They belong to us, and our enemy only gives us what is already ours. We will not starve, for there is still enough wine and oil for us to make do. Even in a time of siege, we will have enough to eat. Our cisterns are filled with water. Our God is everywhere, on both sides of the wall.”

Those who had panicked and been set to trample one another out of fear backed down. We could no longer hear the soldiers in the valley, for like a miracle the wind had shifted and those rough voices disappeared so that we could listen to our leader. The crowd stood close so they might hear the psalm Eleazar now spoke, the words of David, our great king of the past, a warrior who, like any other man, had walked with fear, as we did now, as all men must.

“Because of the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked: for they cast iniquity upon me, and in wrath they hate me. My heart is sore pained within me: and the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me.”

I remained in the latticework of shadows falling through the boughs of the olive tree in my garden, but my heart lifted to hear my beloved’s voice. This was what I had yearned for when I was cast out of Jerusalem, for the way he spoke was a miracle. With his words, he could approach the soul where it resided, a glory to God, for words were what the Almighty first created, after the silence of the world, and they were Eleazar ben Ya’ir’s gift as well.