The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

  Yael and I huddled beside a cliff as bees circled around the honeycomb. I sprinkled salt upon it, forcing the bees to float away, back to the deadly pink flowers, where they gathered more nectar. When I described my intentions, Yael was not surprised. She admitted that she had come in search of me, for she had heard a voice calling to her, telling her what she must do. She was the one who would bring the poison to our enemy. That was the reason she had chosen to leave Arieh with her father, and why she’d dressed in the assassin’s cloak, slipping it from a hook in his chamber to serve as her armor, flimsy and thin as it might be. When she drew it over her head, she all but disappeared before me. The cloth was the color of the pale sky, and of the stones, and of the thin sunlight that fell upon us. Even her scarlet hair faded beneath the hood; her face disappeared and became a mist.

  I had planned to deposit the tainted manna for the Romans, but Yael insisted the voice had spoken to her for a reason. I did not wish to let her go, or to be the cause of any harm that might befall her. I pleaded with her, but she would not listen. She believed she had been called to take the honey from my hands. In truth, I understood, for in my dream she had been beside the acacia trees. She had lifted her arms to heaven as she’d stepped into my place.

  I appreciated why Yael had given the slave the gold amulet of protection; we were all comforted to think of him finding his way to his own country, where the snow was spiraling down. Still, she was in need of protection. I fastened the second gold amulet around her throat, despite her pleadings that she wasn’t worthy. I knew that she was meant to be sheltered by the sign of the fish, and by the promise of water, and by the grace of the Almighty.

  I WAITED in the fading daylight as Yael went on alone. We had entered the hour that opens the heavens to our sight, a time when holy men insist it is possible for them to witness the throne of God. I saw only the cliffs that were before us. I dared not raise my eyes to the cave on the sheer cliff where the Essenes had died, for my daughter’s spirit lingered there, cold and alone. The wickedness of the world was a part of creation, I knew this, and the Angel of Death had been created on that day when life first appeared, yet I was embittered. I wept for what I had lost and what the world had lost and would yet lose again.

  Yael was quick as she made her way down the mountain. I barely managed to observe her form beneath her cloak as she approached the white ramp that led to hell, for that is what we called the valley that had once been ours and had come to belong to Rome. When she neared the building site, she immediately left the honeycomb on a ledge of rock, placed carefully, so that the soldiers who oversaw the slaves would be sure to find it. The sweet scent would call to them, and they would devour the poison as our people enjoyed the bounty of manna when we were released from bondage in Egypt. Our warriors would then have a measure of safety when they attacked.

  The curtain of night would soon be upon us, the honeycomb was in place, yet Yael tarried. I grew cold watching the stars appear, still she did not come. I began to worry and pace, for she seemed to have vanished. Though she wore the gold amulet of protection, God alone could protect her in this valley. As the hour grew late, I became frantic, nearly overcome with the fear of what might have happened to her. Then I saw a flicker of mist.

  In the darkness, Yael had managed to slink down beside a rock and remain hidden as the Romans in the field practiced for the warfare to come, setting to with the swords and javelins they would use against us when the white ramp was completed. When the soldiers at last went to their barracks, Yael rose up from beside the rock. I couldn’t fathom the meaning of her movements as she left the safety of her perch and continued to go forth. I wondered if perhaps she had eaten from the honey and if she herself had gone mad to think she could enter the valley floor of the Romans and survive. Still she moved forward.

  The pool of mud was before her, and beyond that lay the lion.

  In all the valley this beast alone had spied her, or perhaps he had picked up her scent. Yael had gone to the mikvah that day, and when stench is everywhere, the scent of what is pure is most noticeable of all. The lion raised his head and gazed across the pool as Yael made her way, wading carefully. I could not abide the thought of seeing her torn apart, ravaged and devoured while I watched, the little girl I had loved as though she were my daughter when I was but a girl myself. My grief was enormous as I stood alone in the falling dark, weeping for all I had done in the world and the many people I had wronged. I thought that perhaps I was witnessing the End of Days and that the Essenes had been right all along, and we had been merely too foolhardy to listen. I thought of what the bones I had thrown had revealed, and the future I had seen and all I had yet to lose in this world.

  Yael had come to stand before the lion. He could have easily reached to attack her, yet he did not move. His tail switched, nothing more. Yael drew closer still. I could see them through a layer of mist. A fierce creature, a pool of water, a woman who was unafraid. Perhaps because she had once been bitten by a lion, she imagined she was immune to any further bites, as some who are attacked by bees never again react to their sting.

  No one in the Roman camp had paid attention to the lion for some time, or had even thought to feed him since their arrival. One donkey was all he’d been granted. He had been mistreated, half-starved, made to stay unsheltered from the burning sun, unable to flee the torrents of rain when they came. He had served his purpose, to frighten us, and now he was abandoned. Ravens came close, but he could not reach them. Ibex and deer and sheep had been roasted over the fires of the Romans, but the lion had not been granted a shred of their meat or bones.

  He did not move as Yael approached, nor did he shrink from her. Perhaps he did not maul her because he had been broken, taken from his land, abused, unable to act like a lion. Or perhaps he was merely waiting for a messenger from God, as we wait for Gabriel.

  Yael now came close enough to unhook the brass buckle which fitted the creature’s collar to his chain. I could not breathe or move. I imagined he would turn on her then and I would see her death before my eyes. Instead the lion rose to his feet and stood before her. He stared at Yael with his yellow eyes, more curious than ferocious. He may have thought she was one of his own kind and wondered if she meant to accompany him. He may have believed she was a dream, for if lions dreamed it would surely be this, freedom in the night, hands that unleashed you, the mountains before you.

  Yael lifted her arms, as we do to bid the doves to take flight. The lion turned to run across the valley, disappearing into the cliffs, his dun color the cloak which allowed him to vanish before our eyes.

  I knew then I had witnessed a miracle. I waited where I was, praying, offering gratitude to the Almighty, my faith renewed, while on the valley floor the bravest warrior among us made her way back to our mountain, invisible to all men beneath her gray cloak, but radiant in the darkness, a shining star before the eyes of God.

  *

  OUR WARRIORS went out that night to find the soldiers of the legion intoxicated, maddened and half-asleep, for they had mixed the toxic honey with wine to make a mead, and many had drunk from this poison. Our men killed as many as they could before the cries of the slaughtered brought hundreds of soldiers racing. By then the warriors of Masada had begun to climb back up the cliff. Several were lost in the fray and were carried upon the shoulders of their brothers. At least we had their bodies and could prepare their earthly forms for burial. In Jerusalem we would have taken our dead to the caves of our fathers, then a year later collected the bones to be stored in stone ossuaries. Here there was no time for such practices. Though the Romans had retaliated with a storm of burning arrows, we gathered in the plaza to sing lamentations and tear at our garments and lay the dead to rest.

  In the midst of our mourning, some among us looked down upon the valley. They saw that the lion had been freed from the chains of Rome to return to the cliffs of Judea. There were shouts and prayers. Crowds gathered, mystified, wondering if it had been Gabriel, the fiercest of t
he angels, who had brought this omen to us, for surely no man would have dared to approach a lion.

  STILL THE ROMANS built their white ramp, still it rose higher. Though we sent down hot oil, stones, arrows, they continued on, a machine of death intent on victory. In weeks, the ramp was a few arms’ lengths from our walls, and the damage their soldiers could now manage was great. We had many losses and fires occurred every day. Whatever they destroyed with stone and flame we rebuilt, but we hadn’t enough hands, and there were ruins all around us. No one dared to leave the fortress now, or even venture close to the wall. We huddled together in the wind. There was a great silence over us. It was despair, and it passed from one to the other more quickly than a fever.

  When Eleazar came to me at night, he did not speak. Though words had always bound us together, they were not enough to save us now. Below us, there was a blur of movement, faster all the time, more purposeful and more brutal. We were reminded of the way in which bees could create entire cities overnight in their hives. So, too, could the legion. Where there had been six thousand, ten thousand now stood before us. The Romans were like an endless swarm. You could not outfight them or outrun them. The only choice was to put salt on your skin, though it might pain you to do so, to cover yourself with a cloak, so that you might disappear.

  My beloved cousin had told our people the Romans would move on once they understood a siege could not take us down. We had enough to sustain us, we would be hungry, but it was possible to live in poverty and survive for a year on rations, perhaps two. Surely Rome would tire of us and decide to use the legion’s power to a better purpose. Now that the ramp had risen so high on the western slope, my cousin no longer spoke of such things or gave us false hope. The Angel of Death has a thousand eyes and no man can outdistance him. There have been stories of men who have ridden all night to escape their fate, only to arrive in a far-flung village where the Angel waited, knowing his victim’s destination before the rider himself did. Mal’ach ha-Mavet would find his intended no matter how fast a victim might ride, even if his horse was as swift as my husband’s had been, the great Leba, who held the heart of a thousand horses.

  Eleazar and I went to the cistern together after darkness fell, no longer caring who might accuse us of sin. As Death saw us, we saw him in return, even when we closed our eyes. In the water, I embraced my beloved in silence; he winced, for he was freshly wounded and had paid no attention to this injury. I wanted to dress the cut with samtar, but he told me there was no time. When he said this I began to weep, as I had on the day in Jerusalem when it rained and he went to the market to find me the vial of perfume scented with lilies. That had been the last time we saw each other until he had called me to this mountain. Now I was losing him again.

  “Don’t,” he said to me as I cried. “There’s no time for that either.”

  He had been hardened by his years of fighting. He had been not much more than a boy when I first knew him, now he had killed so many that his hands were stained. Yet tears could undo him and remind him of how human we were. The suffering of the world weighed heavily upon him. I dried my eyes because he asked me to do so. I had always done as he asked, not because I was bound to do so by duty but because I saw the depth of who he was and how he himself suffered. When I gazed at him, I did not see the brutal face his enemies looked upon, or the heavy arms and back of a warrior who carried armor and steel, but the young man at the well who had seen beyond my henna tattoos. He had always known who I was.

  Eleazar gathered my hair and lifted it so that he might kiss my throat. Without my amulets, I was unprotected. I felt myself burn. I believed myself to be safe with him. He who was so cruel in the field of battle, was still the boy he once had been, so eager for me that his wife and father and all the laws of Jerusalem could not keep him from me. He whispered that he would prefer to spend what little time we had left in each other’s arms. Let us not speak, or tend to our troubles, let us lie together and forget the world, remembering only each other.

  The Romans would find us, as bees did; they would swarm upon us and the salt would fall from our skin and we would be naked and defenseless before them, as we now were with each other.

  WHEN WE rose from our restless sleep, we found that the ramp on the western side of the mountain was already completed. It was a cool day, misty and blue. Already the month of Nissan was upon us, when our people celebrated their freedom. When we opened our eyes, it was as though the ramp had always been there, magicked into being, more real than the mountains that had stood since God created them.

  On that same day the dust rose up along the desert floor when a group of travelers from the east arrived. I saw that many of their cloaks were blue. They belonged to the people of Nahara and Adir’s father, nomads from the hills of Moab. They had brought all manner of spices and treasures from Petra and had come to offer their help to the Romans, with whom they had a treaty of peace. When I regarded these men, my heart fell, for I knew how fierce they were and how difficult they would be to defeat.

  My hair was damp from my night in the cistern, my arms ached from holding on to a man who always left me while I slept. I would awake on the edge of the well, beside the deep water, a scrim of plaster dust flecking my skin, and I would be alone. Despite my enlarged belly, I had grown thin. The man who had been my husband in Moab would have noticed, he would have been certain to feed me dates and figs, for he thought a thin woman was like a thin horse, too weak for the hills of his country. He had loved me, though he never said so. He had watched me all the while we were together, as if his eyes could not get enough of my form.

  Eleazar had not noticed that my ribs could be viewed, or that the bones at my shoulders and backbone were rising through my skin. He did not see that the poor diet of roots and beans had caused my hair to be less glossy, for I plaited it into braids, then clasped it atop my head with two pins made of horn. To him I was the girl with the sheet of black hair at the well in Jerusalem, just as he was my beloved, the man who stood with me in the rain and took me to him, the one I had been pledged to throughout time.

  *

  WE NO LONGER took note of the laws of men, only the laws of God. Day and night, prayers were said. The old men gathered in the synagogue, and by the flickering light of what little oil we had left, they begged for God’s forgiveness and His favor. Timbers had been laid into the Romans’ ramp to support the barrels of white earth the slaves continued to pour upon it. The ramp was now so close the Romans could speak to us, and Silva himself came to shout for Ben Ya’ir. Some of our men shouted back that our leader would never speak with demons, for a demon could take your soul from your words. It was true, we knew, for when we listened to the demon who commanded the Tenth Legion, he had brought us clouds of terror. We covered our ears, yet we could still make out Silva’s words. Surrender now and we will let you go free.

  Exactly what they had told the warriors of the fortress at Machaerus before murdering every one, leaving them for the jackals so that their bones were scattered through the forest, as if they had never been men at all but had come into this world as stones.

  BEN YA’IR gave no answer to Silva but instead sent a hail of arrows set aflame. I saw the finest archers upon the wall, my daughter among them. She used so many arrows that soon enough she had no more. That night she taught Adir how to fashion these weapons, how to keep the flint straight so he would not scrape his hands raw as he struck the thin metal tip against a stone, how to wind the sharpened tip to the wooden shaft with a thin strand of leather. Because Yehuda could not by faith touch an instrument of war, he collected feathers from the doves, to attach to the arrows so they might fly straight from the hands of my daughter to the hearts of the enemy.

  Aziza took me aside before she returned to the wall with her basket of newly made arrows. She looked so strong, her muscles fine, her face beautiful and harsh and dark. My daughter told me she would attempt any tactic to save our people, except for one. She would not shoot any man in a blue robe. One among
them might well be the man who had been Nahara and Adir’s father, my husband once, who for a very long time had forgotten that Aziza was not his true-born son.

  I gave her my blessing, casting powdered snakeskin into her short, black hair for her protection. I felt my love for her in the back of my throat. I could not say it aloud for fear I would bring her doom to her, but I embraced her and she knew what she meant to me, as she had known I’d depended upon her to help me bring Nahara into this world, as I’d had faith enough to allow her to ride with the men in Moab. Once I had given her a name that would help her to be fearless in a world commanded by fear. That was my greatest gift to her.

  FORTUNATELY there was still a space between our cliff and the white ramp. Every time more earth was heaped upon it, the end of the ramp collapsed in a landslide. Although the slaves had brought up huge battering rams, as large as the trunks of date palms, those last few yards could not be forged, and therefore they could not break through the wall. Though King Herod had been wicked in many ways, we were grateful for the wall he had built and for the stones that bore his mark. We thought the legion’s inability to build the ramp to meet the king’s wall was an omen of our assured success, and we prayed and thanked the Almighty.

  It would soon be the eve of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the day when our people were freed from slavery in Egypt. We thought of Moses in the desert, and how there had been faith even when there was no hope, how he had led his people despite their agonies. We thought our celebration would bring us fortune in the future. We did not understand that, much like the ninth of Av, when both Temples fell, when Moses broke the tablets, when sorrow reigned across our world, some days were meant to make us remember that the past was with us still.