Our warriors had the best of the townspeople before long; the bodies of the slain were everywhere. I spied the Man from the Valley, a whirlwind with his ax. In the midst of four of the enemy, he brought each one down, then stood among them, appearing to dare their corpses to rise again and battle once more. When yet another villager raced at him, leaping upon his back, he calmly drew his enemy from him and split him open with his ax. The Man from the Valley looked for the next to be slain, diving into the chaos with an intensity that belied the danger around him, his weapon readied. I could feel my blood racing and a kind of joy rising inside me as I shot a man who dashed toward him. I thought that, if my father knew how many had fallen to my arrows, he would be proud to take me to him as his son.
The night was hot with blood, the ground slick, the scent of death everywhere. There were locusts in the air, humming and rising before us. Because I wore silver-scaled armor beneath my cloak, my limbs ached and were heavy, and I was drenched with sweat. I used my head scarf to wipe the film from my eyes, rising from my knees.
In that moment when I lowered my bow, it was as if I had stepped outside the battle. Perhaps I watched as the angels did, removed and distant but holding the ability to see far more than the men who were embroiled in the fight. My hazy vision made me disbelieve what was before me. We had slaughtered the men who had come to defend themselves, along with the travelers in their blue cloaks, men from Moab who had journeyed here to trade spices and dried fruit. There were no acacia branches to burn in their honor, therefore their spirits would not wish to leave their bodies. I was pained to know they would be trapped in a netherworld, far from the Iron Mountain, for no other men would rise from the blood that had been spilled, blood that was as red as ours until it pooled blackly in the earth.
The night had become a dream. The battle now was to force myself to wake from what was before me, for beyond the piles of dead men was something far more terrible than the corpses of warriors. Our men had begun to kill the women who ran from the houses. It was impossible, we did not believe in such cruelty, yet I knew it was true because I heard the voices of the slaughtered. Theirs were the screams of women, and yet there was worse still. Beneath those screams, I heard the cries of children. When I spied Amram, he became a part of the dream, changing before me into a demon, his face a demon’s face, his deeds a demon’s doings.
Our leader had said there were to be no slaves taken. I had understood this to mean we would let the women and children be, but that was not how warfare was practiced in this sorrowful world. The dog was going mad, yelping and barking, distraught as no beast should be. I held him around the back of his neck and bade him stay, breaking my nails on his rough fur. I felt maddened, as he was, by the sights before me and the wild death calls of the innocent. I nearly leapt in, but on our enemies’ behalf, against my own people. I had the urge to fight the men I’d come here with, my brethren. Confused amid the rising bloodshed, I suddenly had no idea why we believed we had the right to take what these people had, other than the fact that we wanted it and assumed we were entitled to what belonged to others, as the robbers had once wanted me and my mother and all we possessed.
I stood there, encircled by the destruction, escaping my own death by the grace of God. I no longer cared to fight, nor had I the stomach for it. I closed my eyes and waited for Mal’ach ha-Mavet to come for me, as he was meant to do when my mother and I were sent into the wilderness. Perhaps I was never intended to live past that day when Eleazar’s wife disposed of us and had been wrong to elude my fate.
I would never know if the Angel of Death meant to approach on this night of battle, for the Man from the Valley gripped me by my cloak and pulled me after him, out of Death’s grasp. Eran and I went with him, even though I could barely breathe, my heart heavy inside me, beating much too fast. I bit my lip until there was more blood to come, until it was my own. I wanted the taste of it. I deserved it.
The warrior led me to a ridge where the haze of the evening had dissipated. He had many wounds from this battle, but he paid no attention to them, just as he made no mention of the fact that I wept. We could see the massacre from here. The houses in the village were made of stone; soon they would be emptied completely. Everything these people owned would belong to us. I took off my helmet and my bloodstained cloak. I understood now that the Man from the Valley had told me not to go because he had known what might happen. He would not murder women and children and refused to see their blood shed. He’d known I was a woman, yet he’d said nothing. He’d known what his commander wanted of him, yet he’d done God’s bidding instead.
Of all who were before me, he was the only one I wished to stand beside.
THEY LET the donkeys live, heaping them with the possessions that now belonged to us, the ginger and pepper, the gourds and leeks, all manner of wine and oil and wheat, small amounts of gold, earrings and rings taken from homes and from corpses, heaps of precious cinnamon, lamps, stacks of weaponry. They took the goats and the sheep and killed the chickens. They filled leather containers with water and cheese. Everything smelled like blood.
I went back to the village to gather my arrows. They were easy to find among the slaughtered, a field of red lilies I had left behind. All I needed was to pluck them one by one from the chests and backs of the fallen. I took nothing else. While others gathered the rings from cold fingers, the wine from the storerooms, I washed the blades of my arrows in a bowl of water taken from a rain barrel, reciting a prayer as I did so, entreating Adonai not to cause those who had died tonight to suffer any further torment, pleading for Him to keep them safe from the three gates of Gehennom, the valley of hell. I could not look into the faces of the slain women and children, but I began to search among the men from Moab for those I might know.
Amram came by, covered with sweat and dried blood. “Don’t bother,” he said to me as I turned over the bodies of my sister’s father’s people. “They’re all the same.”
BEN YA’IR spoke to the warriors as the last of the night settled around us. I could not abide to be among them. People said that he thanked God, then praised his men for their bravery. He instructed his warriors to say prayers for the souls of the dead and told them that, in another time and place, if our enemies from Rome had not forced us into starvation and poverty, we would have called our victims our brothers.
By that hour we had moved into the high desert, making haste so that we could not be found by any of the townspeople who might have been absent during the raid, returning with vengeance in their hearts. The warriors prayed to God and then killed a goat for their supper. To me the goat’s cries sounded like those of a woman. I huddled beside my dog, covering my ears, rocking back and forth on my haunches. The radiance of the Shechinah, the light and compassion of the Almighty, was nowhere near this campground. Here, we were surrounded by what some called the other side, the dark realm, for on this night we had wandered onto the evil side of the world that was also born from creation, that terrible region which could be found at the left hand of God and fed on human sin.
I had planned to lie beside Amram that night after our victory, to bring his hands beneath my cloak so that I might finally let him know who I was and give myself to him, but I did no such thing. I was sick to my stomach and sick at heart. I went into the desert and brought up everything I had eaten since I’d left my mother’s house. The taste was sour, as if I had spat out a demon. I was glad my brother had not been among us. Adir, who had such a gentle spirit, yet wanted nothing more than to be among the warriors, had been spared the sight of the cowardly actions of those he so admired.
The white cliffs were invisible in the dark. Everything was hidden. I now understood it was our duty as human beings to see behind the veil to the inside of the world, to the heart of things.
I glimpsed the Man from the Valley and went to stand beside him. There was a circle of thornbushes, and larks were sheltered in the cluster of branches. We heard the others’ voices singing, but their songs meant noth
ing to us. Every bit of the stained earth we walked upon seemed a part of the territory of transgression, where enemies were subdued at any cost. No acacias grew here. There was no way to help the souls of the dead find peace.
Today I had seen my beloved kill a child who could not have been more than four. It seemed nothing to him to do so, but everything to me. Other than the stars in the sky, I could not see any image but the face of the child who’d been murdered, for he now lived behind my eyes and would be a part of my vision forever-more. Every time I looked at Amram, it was that child I would see.
I wished I had been a woman and had stayed at home.
“Did you not think this was what the world was like?” the Man from the Valley said to me.
My dog lay at my feet. There was blood on his fur. By daylight flies would be swarming over him and he would look monstrous. Eran had never once deserted me in the bloody turmoil but had lurched toward anyone who approached me, snapping at them, baring his teeth.
I had never felt as vulnerable, or as flooded with shame. I had lost something so completely, I did not think I could get it back from anything that had been created on earth. I needed to look into heaven. The haze had vanished by this time, and the stars were bright. We saw some drift across the darkness in blasts of light, then vanish, invisible to our eyes. I was transfixed by the sight, and by the goodness of a dumb beast who had never once thought to flee from my side, and by the fact that both I and the warrior I stood beside were still alive.
“Is it not beautiful?” I said of the world around us.
“Is it not terrible?” the Man from the Valley countered.
He gazed at me, and all at once I knew that it was a question and that he needed an answer. I took his hand and pulled him to me, and had him lie down beside me. As he had rescued me, I did the same for him. For one night, when we could still smell the blood on each other, when the night was black and all the world was invisible, we were not alone.
ADIR’S WOUND had healed and his fever had ended, yet my brother limped and seemed frail. My mother worried over him and tried one cure after the next, sifting through her piles of herbs and her recipes for pharmaka. Still he was weak. Though she had disapproved of my actions in the past, she agreed I should again take Adir’s place when the time came for him to be called back to fight. This was as it should be. I was the better warrior, the one more likely to return. Once again, my mother and I shared secrets. It was a bond we didn’t deny, one that was meant to be, for our fate had always been entwined. Whatever bitterness had been between us had dissipated.
Perhaps my father was hoping for a son, as Adir’s father had, for Ben Ya’ir had grown reckless when it came to my mother, meeting her in the cistern nearly every night, delighted both with her and with the child that was to be. His own wife was confined, nowhere to be seen. People whispered that Channa was ill again, but I wondered if perhaps her husband had forbidden her to go among the other women. He would not tolerate her interference any longer, for he had given her most of his life. What little he might have left he now claimed for his own.
Ever since our arrival he had been practicing his own form of invisibility, not unlike the skills the old assassin had taught me. He had kept his yearning for my mother hidden right in front of other people’s eyes. Indeed, they had looked past what was so evident and seen nothing. He had the right to claim another wife when his own proved to be barren; still Channa had fought him and done her best to trick him, insisting that God had given her the child she stole from Yael.
Now, when it seemed that every day was a gift and another might not follow, as the Essenes had vowed, my father no longer bothered with subterfuge. I had spied him with my mother outside our door, in an embrace so deep it seemed they were drowning. There were evenings when he sat at our table, to join in the meager meal. At such times I remained outside the door, bringing my brother with me into the yard, though he had to lean on my shoulder merely to walk. We sat outside and ate dried fruit and flatbread from our hands. Perhaps my brother assumed I believed neither of us had the right to be in the presence of the great man. But I could not see Ben Ya’ir without my head swimming with the screams I had heard during the village raid. I felt that I had failed him in some way, and that he in turn had failed me. Perhaps it had been better to have viewed him from a distance, so that his flaws were left unseen. I had wanted him to know me in battle and acknowledge me as his own; now I felt invisibility suited me.
And yet one night, as he left our mother’s chamber, Ben Ya’ir stopped before us. I had warned my brother what to do if such an occasion should ever occur. We were both to lower our eyes in the presence of our leader.
“When you go into battle again, you may need this,” Ben Ya’ir said.
He laid a knife down before us. I spied that the hilt was set in bronze, beautifully decorated with a bower of leaves. Perac lavan was engraved upon it. White flower. He had carried this knife in honor of my mother and of the lilies she had loved as a girl in Alexandria. I did not agree with all that he did, or his ways in battle, but he was my father. The gift was for a warrior, so I elbowed my brother. Adir mumbled words of thanks, but when Ben Ya’ir left us, I was the one to take up his knife.
*
MORE AND more often, we had our meals in the yard so that my mother and Ben Ya’ir could have privacy. We were not the only ones who knew that our leader came to my mother’s chamber each night. Jealousy stalked my mother and mistrust had sifted down upon the mountain. She was a woman who had been in chains, who could call to demons and draw the kadim to her. One midnight a quartered dove was left outside our chamber, its beak and feet chopped off, the white feathers dusted black with a scrim of soot. I gave my mother Ben Ya’ir’s knife after that, so that she might rebuke any ill intentions. It was a gift from her beloved and therefore rightly belonged to her, for although I owed my mother my first life, I owed my second life to the Man from the Valley, not to Ben Ya’ir. I now felt I had been a fool to think my father had been one of the angels; my true father had been the man on the Iron Mountain, the one who had rescued us and taught me all I’d needed to know.
My mother took the knife, the token of Eleazar’s protection. I advised her to lock the door whenever I was gone, and to be more discreet, lest she be the cause of her own prophecy and be brought to ruin by love.
A GROUP of Roman exploratores stunned us all when they set up camp in the valley. It happened in our holiest month, Tishri, when we celebrate our new year and atone for our sins, the ones we are responsible for and the ones that are to come.
When the scouts arrived, we thought they would be like all the others; they would stand amazed at the position of our fortress, then move on to report we could not be conquered. But this group was different. These soldiers intended to stay. They’d brought urns of wine and oil, herds of camels, and most telling of all, bakers who had settled into their own camp. We could smell the scent of fresh bread baking in their domed ovens.
It was apparent that these soldiers were only the first of what would soon be a legion. Rome was amassing an army outside of Jericho with ten thousand soldiers, along with a thousand Jews who were enslaved and made to serve the Emperor. Our council proclaimed that women were no longer allowed to venture beyond the gates for any reason, to make certain they would not fall into the hands of our enemies. Men who journeyed away from the mountain did so at their own peril. The warriors still went out but more stealthily, taking the serpent’s path in the cover of dark or making their way down the back of the mountain, a climb so treacherous, several lost their lives upon attempting to return. Despite the danger, I lived for these nights when the owls glided above us. We made our way past our enemies as though we were mist, freed from our earthly forms.
At night I paced our chamber, wanting nothing more than to go beyond the gates. The only small joys we had were in celebrating Arieh’s many accomplishments. He was now fourteen months old. Even those who looked down on a fatherless child admitted he was unu
sual, handsome and large and respectful. He was so beloved among the women in the dovecote that, each time he ran on the cobblestones or spoke the name immah to his dear mother, we applauded as though he had climbed a mountain.
I sat with the women at the looms in the evenings. Though I could not weave, I helped to spin what little wool there was. Beside me, my dog put his head on my knee. Eran and I wanted the same thing, the freedom of the wilderness, but we needed patience. I yearned to be like the Man from the Valley, who slept beyond the fields. I did not see him, or search for him, but I knew he was there. Whenever we were called to go back down the mountain on raids, slipping past the Roman scouts, I made certain to walk beside him, for with him I did not have to pretend to be anyone other than who I was.
*
AMRAM had sent a girl to me to ask why I no longer met him at the fountain. He waited for me in the evenings, but I did not appear. Now he had taken a risk and engaged this child to do his bidding. The girl, not more than four or five, was the daughter of one of the warriors, a friend he trusted from his days in Jerusalem. The child’s braid was thick and black, her manner friendly. She reminded me of Nahara, with her bright, knowing eyes. I said to tell the man who’d sent her that a fever was upon me. I flushed with the burden of my lie, and perhaps I appeared aflame, truly overtaken by an ailment, for the child seemed to believe me. Quickly she backed away, then ran to deliver my message.
It was the time of Rosh Chodesh, and the priest who watched for the rising moon sounded the call of the ram’s horn for us to gather for the Blessing of the New Moon, Kiddush levanah, a prayer which grants us favor from God and invites the Shechinah, all that is compassion and wisdom, into our midst. Our people stood beneath the new moon to listen to the priests and the learned men. We rejoiced, celebrating the passage of time with dancing, our musicians taking up rattles and cymbals and bells in defiance of the Romans stationed in our valley. We prayed and danced together, but only the women would not work in the morning, for they were tied to the moon in ways men could not understand, closer to the female heart of creation.
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