The Dovekeepers

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ALSO BY ALICE HOFFMAN

The Red Garden
The Story Sisters
The Third Angel
Skylight Confessions
The Ice Queen
Blackbird House
The Probable Future
Blue Diary
The River King
Local Girls
Here on Earth
Practical Magic
Second Nature
Turtle Moon
Seventh Heaven
At Risk
Illumination Night
Fortune’s Daughter
White Horses
Angel Landing
The Drowning Season
Property Of

FOR TEENS

Green Witch
Incantation
The Foretelling
Green Angel

FOR CHILDREN

Indigo
Aquamarine

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Alice Hoffman

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First Scribner hardcover edition October 2011

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Map copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey L. Ward

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011018099

ISBN 978-1-4516-1747-4
ISBN 978-1-4516-1749-8 (ebook)

Contents

Part One: Summer 70 C.E.

The Assassin’s Daughter

Part Two: Summer 71 C.E.

The Baker’s Wife

Part Three: Spring 72 C.E.

The Warrior’s Beloved

Part Four: Winter 73 C.E.

The Witch of Moab

Alexandria 77 C.E.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Let my burden be your burden, and yours be mine

Part One
Summer 70 C.E.

The Assassin’s Daughter

We came like doves across the desert. In a time when there was nothing but death, we were grateful for anything, and most grateful of all when we awoke to another day.

W
e had been wandering for so long I forgot what it was like to live within walls or sleep through the night. In that time I lost all I might have possessed if Jerusalem had not fallen: a husband, a family, a future of my own. My girlhood disappeared in the desert. The person I’d once been vanished as I wrapped myself in white when the dust rose into clouds. We were nomads, leaving behind beds and belongings, rugs and brass pots. Now our house was the house of the desert, black at night, brutally white at noon.

They say the truest beauty is in the harshest land and that God can be found there by those with open eyes. But my eyes were closed against the shifting winds that can blind a person in an instant. Breathing itself was a miracle when the storms came
whirling across the earth. The voice that arises out of the silence is something no one can imagine until it is heard. It roars when it speaks, it lies to you and convinces you, it steals from you and leaves you without a single word of comfort. Comfort cannot exist in such a place. What is brutal survives. What is cunning lives until morning.

My skin was sunburned, my hands raw. I gave in to the desert, bowing to its mighty voice. Everywhere I walked my fate walked with me, sewn to my feet with red thread. All that will ever be has already been written long before it happens. There is nothing we can do to stop it. I couldn’t run in the other direction. The roads from Jerusalem led to only three places: to Rome, or to the sea, or to the desert. My people had become wanderers, as they had been at the beginning of time, cast out yet again.

I followed my father out of the city because I had no choice.

None of us did, if the truth be told.

I DON’T KNOW
how it began, but I know how it ended. It occurred in the month of
Av,
the sign for which is
Arieh,
the lion. It is a month that signifies destruction for our people, a season when the stones in the desert are so hot you cannot touch them without burning your fingers, when fruit withers on the trees before it ripens and the seeds inside shake like a rattle, when the sky is white and rain will not fall. The first Temple had been destroyed in that month. Tools signified weapons and could not be used in constructing the holiest of holy places; therefore the great warrior king David had been prohibited from building the Temple because he had known the evils of war. Instead, the honor fell to his son King Solomon, who called upon the
shamir,
a worm who could cut through stone, thereby creating glory to God without the use of metal tools.