The Dovekeepers (36 page)

Shirah sank back, her face ashen. Now only she and God knew the manner in which I’d killed the beasts who had fallen upon us,
the delight I’d taken in watching them drink themselves to death, the terrible pleasure there had been in cutting their throats. I threw off my cloak, the better for her to see me and know what I had become. I was not a baker’s wife or a grandmother or a woman who cared for doves, feeding the ailing birds spoonfuls of barley water, tending to them through the night. I was a murderess. I held the lamp to my palm to let Shirah see exactly what was before her. The mark of death.

I was spent and exhausted. Words had done that to me, twisted my heart as they poured out, clattered like stones onto the cobbled ground. Perhaps my grandsons were lucky to be mute, protected against the stories of their own lives. Shirah drew me close, and in her embrace it seemed that I was the child who had seen too much, peering through the waterfall at the horror of what a beast could do to a human being and what a human being could then become.

“For every evil there is a cure,” Shirah said softly. “Any mother would defend her daughter. It would be a sin not to do so, a crime beyond any that are written. What you did, you did for love.”

Against my fevered skin, her flesh was delightfully cool. She confided in me that water was her element and had been since she was a child, that was why I had found her in the cistern. Her mother had brought her to a river, and she found she could swim without ever having been taught to do so. What was dangerous to one person was a mercy to another. My son-in-law’s wish was not an impossible task, she assured me, but the price was patience. Wait and have faith, she urged. Catch a demon and you will break the spell. Offer an angel gratitude and he might return the voices he’d taken to stop the children from crying out when they were hidden behind the waterfall. I was to pray every night to Beree, the angel of rain. This angel was silent, as my grandchildren were, so I should not expect an answer, at least not right away.

“I know what it is your son-in-law desires,” Shirah now said. “But what of you?”

“His wish is mine,” I assured her.

“No.” She was not convinced. When she gazed at me, I felt my throat tighten, perhaps to hold back the truth. “There’s something more.”

Shirah raised my hand to her mouth. Before I could think to pull away, she kissed the center of my palm. In that instant I let go of the truth, that which I’d kept from her and from God and from myself. I broke into a shuddering sob. The soldiers had been beasts and it had been a pleasure to kill them, but they had been men as well. They had walked on the earth and under the sky. The one who had pleaded with me was the one who had stayed with me, for he had begged for something I now longed for as well.

I wished to be forgiven.

“It was always so in the eyes of God,” Shirah told me.

She let her robe slip from her shoulders so that I could take in the full measure of the forbidden red tattoos on her skin that I had spied in the cistern. I knew what they represented: loyalty to the goddess, a life given in service, a woman’s deepest sacrifice, scorned by our own people.

“Should I judge myself?” she ventured to ask. “Or should I leave that to the Almighty, who forgives us all for being what He made us?”

Beneath the mulberry tree I had nearly been moved to renounce my faith alongside my son-in-law. Who was there to look down upon my trials and my transgressions? Who could heal a wound that might never be closed? Shirah had tasted my sorrow and had trusted me enough to reveal herself to me in return. If she could, and if God would allow it, my son-in-law would be granted his heart’s desire.

Perhaps then I could forgive myself.

I PRACTICED
patience throughout the month of
Tishri,
for this virtue did not come easily to me. In truth, patience had never served me well in the past. If I’d had patience, my grandsons would have been beside the pool of green water when the renegades came to us, waiting like sheep to be slaughtered. If I’d had patience, my daughter’s murderers would still be walking this earth. I thought of my husband and how he had waited for the dough to rise, never rushing the loaves into the oven. He’d known the exact moment to take the linen cloths from the rising loaves, when to slide the wooden board into the red-hot oven. It was as if he was the
challah
as well as its maker, and therefore understood its mystery from the inside out.

I began to study the slave. He, too, was a deeply patient man. He waited without complaint every evening, settled upon the stones of the dovecote until Yael’s return the following day, as calm as the doves who waited for our return. But I took note of the heat in his pale eyes; he couldn’t hide that. Even his patience would last only so long.

It was a difficult season, and the heat had not dissipated. Sleep did not come easy to me, although the others beneath my roof slept well, including Arieh, who was more than two months old, a healthy, quiet little boy. There came an evening when I was tidying our chamber, setting new straw into our sleeping pallets, when I looked out to see movement beside our door. I noticed a shadow, as I had at the oasis when the darkness of the soldiers crossed the sand. That was my talent. I could observe what was only half there: the beasts on the ridgetop, the rat in the corner, the woman meeting her lover, the vial of poison behind the spice jars, the lanky form of a man lingering outside our chamber. I thought it was a spirit who had risen to walk among us, having left his slumbering body behind. But, no, he was flesh and blood.

*

WHEN I
recognized him, I understood that the Man from the North was not as patient as I had imagined. Perhaps this was true for all men. I now remembered there had indeed been days when the Baker cursed the ovens for being slow, when he pulled the loaves from the racks before they were fully cooled. Even the most patient among us has a breaking point. On this evening when I saw the figure slinking along the wall, I knew such a time had come for the slave. He wore a head scarf to disguise himself, but anyone could tell he wasn’t one of us. His fair hair shimmered. You would think a man from the world of ice would hold little feeling, but that wasn’t the case. How hot ice could be, how impatient, ready to melt.

The Man from the North was fortunate that I alone spied him. Anyone else would have set upon him immediately, and even if he was quick to surrender, whoever might have chosen to murder him would have been within his legal rights. I waved him away, clapping my hands, as I would to chase off rats. He slipped back against the wall, falling into the dark, disappearing, as a dream might. But unlike a dream, he left his mark. When I went to the wall in the half-light and ran my hand over the stones, I found them hot to the touch in the place where he had waited, cast by the impatience that was evident in any man in love.

The following morning, as Yael and I walked through the field, she kept her eye on the dovecote where the shadow who had stalked her was kept. My walk was slower than hers, and I saw her impatience when she bade me to hurry.

“The doves can’t wait?” I asked.

She flushed and began to fuss with the baby she carried at her hip. “Dear heart,” she said, masking her eyes, rubbing the soft skin under Arieh’s chin.

“Is there a reason you’re so impatient?” I pressed her.

She looked up at me, hesitant. I could feel her lie forming before it was declared. “No hurry,” she answered, but her gaze said otherwise.

That was when I knew she was the one who had left the slave’s chains unlocked.

She was treating him like a man.

I said I had a stone caught in my sandal. I stopped to slip it out, stating that I could not walk with a stone any more than a slave could become one of us. I glanced at Yael and saw she was flustered, angered by my remarks.

“Do you think he’s less than we are? Is he nothing more than a stone?”

It was said that angels came to human beings for comfort. How lonely they must be, locked in the silence of their world. But a human burned in the embrace of the angels, his body set aflame, and the kindness of such creatures could become a curse. Here on this mountain, Yael’s indiscretion would be considered treachery.

“If they find him roaming, they’ll kill him,” I warned. “If you unlock him, you unlock his death. Do you think he’ll be happy to do our bidding once his chains are off? He’ll want more, like any other man.”

Yael softly admitted that the Man from the North had spoken of his plans to escape. He knew of others who had done so. Several of his fellow conscripts had deserted the legion before they’d crossed the Great Sea, still more had disappeared after reaching Jerusalem. I was silent, wondering if he might have known the beasts who had attacked us, perhaps had considered them friends.

When the Man from the North made his impassioned speeches about freedom, I suspected he was trying to convince Yael to flee as well. He insisted the Romans would soon enough be upon us—and it was true we more often spied scouts in the region. Before long we would be the slaves, the Man from the North had vowed. But perhaps he had forgotten that, when Yael left the dovecote, she was not alone. She had told me she would never return to the desert, where there were bones left beneath the piles of rocks, glinting in white heat, the remains of the man she had loved.

I knew about the lion who had bitten her and possessed her. She’d rambled about him when we paused on the steps so that she might draw breath on the night she labored to bring forth her child. Although she never spoke of it again, I knew she was not about to bring another lion into the desert. If the Man from the North was planning to escape, he would have to do so alone.

I made no further comment when I saw them working together. I turned away when she brought him a blanket and a goatskin bag of water. She was not my daughter, though I had allowed her to use the Baker’s possessions, the vials of coriander and cumin, the wooden spoons, the apron he had tied around his waist. I had wept over these things before and would again, whether or not Yael ruined what was left of her life ministering to the slave. She should have treated him as a mere stone in her sandal. Instead, she saw him as a man.

When they went into what was left of the orchards, those trees that had not been hewn for firewood and still bore fruit, the hawk followed, dedicated, not veering away from the mountaintop. I watched their shadows stretch across the field, then disappear as a cloud passed overhead. I felt sure this was the sign of disaster to come. Perhaps I no longer believed in kindness and mistrusted it. I had come to consider compassion a knife in the hands of the angels of disaster.

ONE SABBATH EVENING,
the council announced they would no longer bring conscripts or slaves to the fortress after a battle but would instead slay them along with their owners. Several Roman conscripts had been captured and now worked with the donkeys who carried up barrels of water. There was little enough food for the residents, we hadn’t a surplus to feed more. What was a slave but a stone? people murmured. Exactly as I had said. I watched
Yael carefully after that proclamation; she frowned and gazed at the council in alarm as the slaves among us were denounced.

“It’s a sin to keep people so,” she said to me with a naked flash of emotion as we left the plaza.

“I suppose you won’t listen to my advice,” I muttered.

She laughed and linked her arm through mine. “I’ll listen,” she assured me.

“And then you’ll do as you please,” I remarked.

We laughed together, then I fell silent, for I realized how much I feared for her in this wicked world. Although she was not my daughter, I fretted as if she were.

THE NEXT MORNING
I saw that Yael had brought the Man from the North a bow and several arrows, one for each of the seven sisters that gather as stars in the sky. She had hidden them under her cloak, but I recognized the shape of the weapon from its shadow when she stored it beneath a pile of straw. The bow was one her brother had carried. When he found it gone, he would question his friends in the barracks and never once remember he had not seen it since his sister’s most recent visit. This was the shade I had spied in the field as the hawk drifted above them. She was willing to do too much for this man who was nothing on this mountain and should have been nothing to her as well.