The Dovekeepers (40 page)

THE MEN
who practiced magic took to the plaza one dusty day. It was the end of winter and the drought continued. Our people seemed cursed. The priest and the rabbis had failed, and now the
minim
who practiced outside the laws of the Temple claimed that by casting arrows they could divine the cause of the drought. People believed them because there was little else to believe. They were parched, beaten down, desperate for water. Surely someone was to blame for our anguish. The crowd gathered around those practitioners who claimed to have access to God’s truth. The men circled near, and behind them came the women, and then the children with sticks and stones in their hands. There was a line of fury on the ground, slithering forth. Someone would be blamed, we all felt that. Our people wanted more than a demon. They wanted flesh and blood, someone to turn against, someone on earth.

Many have said that the angel of rain comes to women in their dreams. It is Beree who causes them to cry when they feel they have nothing left inside, no soul, no tears. Perhaps this is why Shirah did not appear at the dovecote on this day. Beree had visited her before and now he had returned to whisper that she should prepare herself. The morning came and went, still Shirah remained in
her chamber. She plaited her hair, drew on her black cloak and her veils, slipped on her amulets. Barefoot, she did not eat or drink or speak all that day. She sat at her table readying herself for the vision that had appeared to her when she first came to the fortress. She had seen herself in chains, in a season when the rain refused to fall.

The arrows thrown by the
minim
pointed directly to what had once been the kitchen of the king. The house of the Witch of Moab. She was waiting for the diviners at her threshold, her cloak held close. Exactly as she had predicted, she was shackled and led away.

I knew this was the day when the incantation bowl would be complete, for Shirah had vowed the missing ingredient could be added only when she was in chains. I could not attend to the spell, however. I fled the dovecote with Yael and Aziza when we heard news of Shirah’s captivity. Together we rushed to the plaza. There was a crush of people, and the flare of overheated rage striped the air. People wanted a reason which might explain why God had turned against us, why the leaves on the trees were singed, why the olives were white and unripened, why we had only thirst until we were gasping, like fish upon the shore. They believed they now gazed upon that reason.

Watching the crowd engulf her mother, Aziza had to be restrained to guard that she wouldn’t rush to Shirah’s side and perhaps be held to blame as well. Yael grasped one of her arms, and I the other. She was stronger than I would have ever imagined, but Yael managed to calm her.

“Have faith,” she urged, whispering to Aziza so no one could overhear and accuse them of plotting. The gold talisman glinted at Yael’s throat, and her face was serene despite the chaos.

They say a witch’s enemies must hold her in the air and separate her from earth if they wish to undercut her power, but when the
minim
tried this, Shirah laughed at them. The men lowered her and backed away, confused. They had no idea that water, not earth, was her element.

“There is no one but
Adonai,
” Shirah declared to those who had accused her of bringing God’s wrath down upon us. Her voice carried. We who had come from the dovecote faced her and were convinced she was speaking directly to us. Children in the crowd quieted. Several women Shirah had helped in their time of need glanced away, embarrassed not to offer their assistance in return. People whispered that Menachem ben Arrat, the high priest, had come to his doorway but had feared the witch’s powers so that he came no farther and neither condemned her nor joined in the fray. Beside me Aziza shivered, but there was a proud cast to her eyes.

Eleazar ben Ya’ir appeared out of the crowd, on his way from the barracks, at first puzzled by the scene before him, then understanding when he saw Shirah in chains. He commanded she be allowed to go free. When the men who held her hesitated, he shouted, “Are you made to attack one of our own? A woman of my own family? We have real enemies who would like nothing better than to have us murder one another.”

There was a moment when it seemed the crowd would not comply with his command. That moment passed, and at last one of the elders went forward with the key, but the threat of chaos had been there, hanging in the air, the instant when our people might have turned against their leader. An angry mob was not easily controlled, and a serpent sent by rioters offered a bite for which there was no healing.

This fortress would have fallen in the fever of that dishonorable instant had it not ended as coal fire is quenched by water. Our enemies would have had no further need to destroy us had the mob not backed away, for we would have destroyed ourselves. There had been several sightings of Roman soldiers nearby in the past weeks. The legion knew we were here, and they knew how well defended we were in our protected site. But they had no idea that we could so easily turn on one another, and that Ben Ya’ir’s will was all that held us together, keeping us one.

I saw the great man’s wife watching from where she stood beside the hyssop. It was Channa who had directed the
minim
to the witch. If she was disturbed to see that her husband now acted as Shirah’s protector, she didn’t let on. Her face was dark and impassive. Perhaps she had expected as much. Her breathing, usually so ragged, was perfectly even, and there was a flush of health in her face. I imagined she was gazing at the one who had cured her, but she was looking past Shirah, past her husband, to the child in Yael’s arms. I felt a chill along my spine.

Now that she had been freed, the shackles loosened, Shirah grabbed for a stick and formed a circle in the dust.

“You wanted me here,” I overheard her say to Ben Ya’ir. “Was it not for this, cousin?”

She stood within the circle, then reached inside her cloak to bring forth ashes, which she sprinkled on her head, chanting as she did so in a low, even tone. The crowd strained to hear and were frightened by a language they didn’t understand. Many among them believed she was bringing a curse upon us and hung back, drawing their children near to protect them from evil.

It began all at once, before we understood what was happening. The sky paled and turned incandescent. Rains begin in different ways, but this was a torrent that had no equal. One moment the earth was dust, and the next lakes were forming. The world became wet and luminous, brimming with sheets of water. I had never before noticed that rain contained every color within itself, green as the fields, blue as heaven, white as a lamb, yellow as my daughter’s hair.

Men sank to their knees, raising the fringes of their prayer shawls to their lips and then to the heavens to offer praise to God and to the mystery of life. We could hear the goats and the sheep in their pens. Before our eyes the living fence of thorns that held back the livestock gave forth buds, and then, as if commanded by the Almighty, those buds unfurled to become leaves.

People whispered this was the reason the Witch of Moab had been able to walk across the Salt Sea without drowning. She, who had slipped down a thousand steps into the cistern to bathe in the dark, was our salvation. I blessed her for this as I raced through the blasts of wind, hurrying to our chamber for the incantation bowl she had cast. I was only a simple woman, but I recognized the missing ingredient exactly as Shirah had assured me I would.

I brought the bowl outside and held it above my head, chanting to the Almighty, singing His praises though the wind was in my face, its roar filling my ears. The bowl overflowed, and my heart did as well. I could hear my grandsons calling to each other as I stood there dripping with rain, as joyful as I’d ever been. Their voices had been caught inside the waterfall all this time, stored in a vessel by the angel who had protected them from evil. Now those voices had been released, drawn toward the prayers in the bowl as the angel Beree rained down upon us. Later, I would bring them before their father, and although the children would shrink from his fierce form, when I urged them to speak a greeting, I would see the Man from the Valley weeping in gratitude. Perhaps his faith would be restored by this gift, as mine was.

I heard the voice of God all around me, but I was unafraid. I should have trembled before the Almighty and hid myself from sight. I should have taken a knife to my own flesh to cut away the mark of my past deeds. But now I understood that, although words were God’s first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.

I listened to the wind that had risen in the desert to follow us here.

I heard what it had to say.

Winter 71
C.E
.

Part Three
Spring 72 C.E.

The Warrior’s Beloved

You are my armor and my sword, my faith
and my treasure, everything I’m fighting for.

M
y sister, you are like the dove, so beautiful and so distant, the child I saw born into this world as I crouched beside our mother. You are the reason I refuse to witness another birth. The cord of life was wrapped around your neck, and when I looked into your eyes I saw the World-to-Come, a place so distant and vast no one alive should ever view its reaches. You were gasping, turning blue, a fragile creature drawn into our fragile world. I was only a child myself, unwanted, brought into the marriage between our mother and your father in the land of Moab, where the women wore blue veils and no one knew what our mother had been, or what she would become, though they feared her all the same.

Because our mother was a foreigner, none of the women we lived beside came to help when the time for you came upon her. They arrived at other times, when their own needs drove them to
appear in the dark, searching for curses or cures. They brought delicacies of lamb and herbs and olives in beautiful pottery dishes, clay bowls decorated with dark red designs. These women came to beg for our mother’s magic when they needed it. She was kind enough to offer the barren among them love apples, the yellow fruit of the mandrake that ripens with the wheat, so that they might conceive. She gave them a healing poultice made from figs for rashes and boils and, in the most sorrowful cases, brought them her knowledge of
tzari,
the ancient Syrian cure used for leprosy, the illness wherein the flesh is consumed by demons and falls away from the bone. Yet when she was the one in need, the women of the camp hid themselves from view, terrified that our mother might bring another witch into the world, and that her power would double. Then, despite their aversion to her and their bloated grudging jealousy, they would all be forced to drop to their knees before her.

I was the only one to witness the occasion of your birth, and if the truth be told I, too, wished to run into the daylight, afraid less of witchery than of blood. There were pools of it, and the gushing heat of it terrified me. This liquid was alive, pulsing with the power of creation. I was too young, too innocent to be of help. But our mother cried out
Save her,
her words like stars, brilliant and stinging.

I did what I could. I unwound the cord. But that was not enough, so I breathed into your mouth and drew out the liquid that was drowning you. I tasted blood and salt, everything life is made of, and spat it upon the ground. It is a miracle when you know what you must do without any instruction, and that is what happened to me at the hour of your birth. This mysterious knowledge was granted to me by God in the time of my desperation, and for that I will always be grateful. I took your death and your life into myself. In that moment we became one being, sisters claimed by the same force. Because of this I will always look after you. Even if you try to break away, you will find you cannot leave me.

These days you turn from me in the fields where the almonds will soon flower. You insist you belong elsewhere, but I will not abandon you. I see you dressed in white linen, in the rocky field, tending to six black goats, your head bowed, your feet bare, and I weep to see you taken from me in your fervor and your desire for a man who can never know you as I do. Perhaps you do not wish for him to know you. You keep your back to me and will not speak, not even when I knock on the rough wooden door of the goat shed where you live beside the people you’ve chosen as your own. They are paupers whose only desire is to praise the Almighty with prayers for peace, even though outside the confines of our fortress the world snarls with war. You will not sit at our table, for our practices are not as strict as those you now revere, and our ways are unclean in your eyes.

I sent a dove to you, one that was pure white, a favorite of our mother’s, thinking this creature would fill you with remorse and you would follow him, but the bird returned to the dovecote with my message unread. Inside the tube I had attached to the bird’s leg I wrote your name and mine intertwined, as our fate intertwined at the moment of your birth. I cannot imagine whom I could ever love more in this world we walk through.

When I see you at the wall, at prayer with the Essene women at the hour when day becomes night, you don’t glance at me, though my breath is inside you and yours is a part of me. No matter how you refuse me, our spirits combine to form a single thread. Even if you never speak to me, or raise your eyes to me, even if you are ashamed of me and of our past.