The Dovekeepers (33 page)

“That’s a gift for a daughter,” she said to me of the necklace, her tone cold. “She’s letting me know she’s not saving it for me.” There was a good measure of hurt in her voice along with her scorn.

Nahara was unadorned, as Essene women were, her feet bare upon the cold, flat stones. The bracelets and charms she’d once worn had been given away. I’d seen children playing with them in the dusty garden beside the stone house, as though they were toys.

“Would you have taken such a gift if she’d offered it?” I ventured to ask, for Nahara had been the one to turn her back on her mother’s ways.

Nahara shrugged, knowing I was right. You cannot give a gift to someone who is bound to deny it. Nahara now spent her days caring for the Essenes’ goats, idly feeding them weeds as though she had been a goatherd all her life. I had spied her with the pious
women, dabbing water on her head before a meal, swaying in prayer, eyes closed in the ecstasy of the Almighty’s grace. We who worked in the dovecotes did not discuss what was evident: she would not be returning to us.

“What would you do with gold?” I went on, for I’d heard that the people she’d aligned herself with believed possessions were worthless, meant for this world alone. “I thought what belonged to one Essene belonged to all.”

Tonight Nahara been an equal partner to Shirah in bringing forth Yael’s child, yet she seemed consumed by a child’s jealousy as she gazed at Yael. “That shouldn’t include sharing one’s mother,” she remarked in a hurt tone, so that anyone might think she’d been the one who had been cast away when she alone had made her choice on the day of the salt rain.

EIGHT DAYS LATER,
I went with Yael when she brought her son to the synagogue to ask for the ritual every boy child must endure for his faith in our God. From the time of Abraham it had been this way, and so it continued, with many believing our male children were considered
tamim,
perfected, by this ritual. It was said that Domah, the angel of the grave, cannot burn or harass any man who has been circumcised when he enters the World-to-Come; the suffering in the here and now is said to prevent suffering for all eternity.

We stepped inside the doors of the synagogue but were allowed no farther. It was not for the elders to perform the ritual. The child’s father must make this covenant between his son and God, and if there was no father, that was not their concern. Yael clutched the baby to her, frightened that no man would stand up for her child because of the circumstances of his birth and that perhaps she, like Moses’ wife, Zipporah, would have to complete the deed. I knew Yael carried a knife, but she shied away from the very idea of cutting
her own son, vowing that her hand would be made unsteady by her devotion and her love.

At last her brother arrived, apologetic, his prayer shawl around his shoulders. Amram was clearly uncomfortable with the unfamiliar task of caretaking. I wondered how he would manage the covenant when he flinched even as Yael fitted the newborn into his arms. The baby caught the warrior’s glance and held it with his unblinking ember-colored eyes. There was a red mark on the left side of his face, one we were all hoping would fade. “I didn’t think he’d look like this,” Amram blurted.

“He looks like a baby,” I remarked matter-of-factly. There was no reason for this child to be viewed as one of the
mamzerim,
a bastard with no rights, not even the right of circumcision, although he would certainly be seen as what our people call a
shetuki,
a silent one, any child who does not know his father.

Amram laughed. “That he does.” He nodded to Yael approvingly. “He looks strong.”

I did not notice anyone else’s presence until Yael took a step back.

The old assassin was there in the shadows. He’d been there all along, a cold eye set on the baby.

“He’ll complete the ritual,” Amram said of their father.

Yael clutched her baby closer, uncertain, stunned that her father had agreed to participate. The last contact she’d had with him was when they’d quarreled bitterly over her condition, and he’d struck her, driving her from their home.

“Do you think I don’t remember how to use a knife?” the assassin asked when he saw her hesitation.

Yael raised her glance to him. “Oh no. I’m sure you do.”

Clearly that was her fear.

“Am I not your father?” the assassin said.

Yael gazed at him, unsure.

“Is that child not my grandson?”

Yael’s brother quietly urged her to have faith. It was he who had persuaded his father to come to the synagogue, and the two, who had turned away from one another, had made amends because of the birth of this boy. “This child belongs to us, and we to him, never more than on this day. He is not a burden, for he has brought us together.”

Only male relatives were allowed to be present at the ceremony when the child would be named. He was ready for the covenant, he had enough life and breath to shield him so that Lilith and her demons could not call to him as easily as they might have in the hours following his birth. Until this day he’d still had one foot in their world and the other in ours; now he was rooted, fed by his mother’s milk. This ritual would set the path for his entire life to come.

The assassin kept his head bowed as he waited for Yael’s decision, a sign of respect he had never offered to his daughter in the past.

“Take him,” Yael said. “But even when I’m not watching, God will be there.”

We waited nervously beside the western wall. Yael’s face was white. She refused to sit on a nearby bench and paced instead. When the baby cried out, she took hold of my arm.

“A cry is a good thing,” I reminded her, echoing Shirah’s words. “It’s silence we need to fear.”

Amram himself looked ashen when he at last carried the baby back to his mother. Yael’s worried expression broke into a grin when she saw her brother’s face, his usual swagger replaced by the weight of his immense responsibility to the newborn.

“You look worse than he does,” she teased.

“I think it was more painful for me,” Amram agreed.

Yael opened the child’s blankets. The cut was perfect, leaving only a slight flush of blood. The baby was already dozing in his mother’s arms, exhausted by his own cries and by the sudden flash
of pain he’d known, as well as by the wine that he’d been fed to dull that pain. The old assassin was standing in the threshold. Yael, still unsure in her father’s presence, at last nodded her gratitude, but Yosef bar Elhanan had already disappeared, as if he had never been present. I gazed into the plaza. There wasn’t even a shadow to be seen.

“Did he speak of the child?” Yael asked her brother, curious despite herself.

“He blessed him,” Amram said. “Let that be enough.”

WE KEPT
the wound clean, applying a balm of balsam and honey that would bring about healing more quickly. But there was more to be done to announce this child’s arrival in our world, later, and in secret.

We brought the baby into the field on a night when the moon was waning. Shirah was waiting for us. We three stood where the afterbirth had been buried to commit to a naming ceremony of our own. It was a starry night, but we avoided the light and gathered in the shadows so as not to be spied by the guards and questioned. Shirah had broken an eggshell into halves, onto which she had written the holy name of God as many times as could fit in tiny black letters, the ink drawn from crushed mulberries.

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.

We lit a small fire of green wood. Yael placed the baby in the grass. He whimpered, then dozed. She removed her head scarf and her robe to stand before God as she had been on the day her mother died, the day she was born, in this very same month of
Av.
Shirah began to chant words of protection under a screen of smoke.

Redeem this child and save him from all afflictions. Allow him to become a man and sing glorious songs of praise to our Lord and king, the mighty God who created us. Amen Amen Selah, may God keep you
from all evil and may He allow you to dwell in Jerusalem and in all holiness.

When the hymn was completed, Shirah buried the eggshells beneath the tree. The moonlight was yellow as it swept across the field. Already the afterbirth had disappeared, feeding the earth, giving gratitude to the Almighty. Yael took up her shawl and her tunic. She reached for her child and named him beneath the open sky, as he had been named earlier that morning by the men at the synagogue. She called him Arieh, the word for lion, even though he slept through our rejoicing as though he were a lamb.

WHEN OUR WARRIORS
next went into the desert, it was not to fight but to hunt, trying as best they could to satisfy our hunger. When the Romans returned to the place they had once marked with rocks, our men were forced to retreat, their foray cut short. They had no choice but to outrun the enemy, who had returned to spy on us. For their troubles, our warriors brought back partridges that were more bones than flesh and a stray baby ibex, left behind by the herd. It was
Tishri,
the time of the growing season, and we should have been rejoicing. Instead a silence swept over the mountain, a sense of foreboding.

In the dovecotes, we all felt Nahara’s absence. Aziza especially pined for her sister. She often went to the field near the Essenes’ camp, where she sat cross-legged in the grass for many hours, but Nahara never came to greet her. When Aziza followed the goats her sister cared for, Nahara was quick to lead them away. Hurt by her sister’s refusals, Aziza began to fashion arrows to fill her time and keep her hands busy. We had all been asked to help with the weaponry, and many women gathered in the evenings to shape stones for slingshots. All the same, Aziza hid her work from Shirah.

“She wouldn’t think it proper for me,” she confided.

As it turned out, Aziza had a light touch. The arrowheads she crafted were thin, beautifully made. Each was bound to a wooden shaft with linen twine. Shirah’s elder daughter was surprisingly well suited to such work, for metal was to her what cloth and thread were in the hands of other women. I saw in her what I had spied in the Baker each morning of his life, the love of fashioning something out of ingredients that would be nothing without a human touch, be it salt or wheat or iron that was transformed.

The Man from the North revealed that, in the country where he’d been born, each warrior’s arrows were decorated with the sign of his tribe, in his case a stag, the creature he had told us about but one we hardly believed in, for he said this deer’s shoulders were as tall as a man, its antlers spreading farther than the span of a vulture’s wings. From the time he was a boy, he assured us, every arrow he’d carried had been engraved with the image of that miraculous creature. “Tie feathers to the end of the shaft,” the slave told Aziza as she constructed her weapons. “That is how to make them fly.”

Because Amram was thought of as a phoenix, rising from every battle to fight again, Aziza crafted arrows that might be worthy of him, adorning each with hawk feathers dyed in a bath of madder root. Soon her hands were red; I overheard Yael teasing her, suggesting she was so consumed with passion that heat was rising from her skin in waves of scarlet.

When it came time to test Aziza’s handiwork, she sent Adir to the garrison for a bow. Adir returned soon enough, laughing, joking and making rude remarks, suggesting that his sister had best not touch the bow or she might shoot herself accidentally. Aziza grinned and sent him away with a push.

I sat with Yael, who had her baby resting in a sling made of finely spun wool. Arieh was a quiet boy, with dark, liquid eyes,
as calm as the sheep he’d appeared to resemble on the evening of his naming. Though only weeks old, he slept through the night, clutching the square of blue fabric Yael let him hold to settle him. He still had the red birthmark on his cheek, but it had been treated with a salve mixed from wheat, honey, and aloe, and had begun to fade. We imagined that his thick black cap of hair was a sign of his virility, marveling over the size of his hands and feet, and his small, manly penis, suggesting he would likely be able to lift a donkey above his head by his tenth year.

“Perhaps we should let Arieh test the arrows if he is already a warrior,” we teased, for we had no man among us.