The Dovekeepers (46 page)

My mother faced him, chanting the curses from the book of spells her mother had bequeathed to her, the book that had come from Alexandria, and had traveled to the Iron Mountain and across the Salt Sea. If what had come to pass could be undone, it would unwind at this moment. The wind shifted in the direction of this settlement, throwing up leaves and rattling branches. The bridegroom knew what my mother was trying to do, attempting to unstitch fate.

“She’s already my wife,” he told her.

“We’ll see if she’s your wife or my daughter.”

No one dared interfere as my mother stalked past Malachi. Her cloak grazed him, and he flinched, fearful of the sin of touching a woman other than his wife. When I followed, I kept my eyes lowered even though Malachi beseeched me for help.

Nahara did her best to hold the door shut, but she was no match for us. At last she backed away. For an instant, as the door fell open, I imagined that my mother and I had become like the robbers in Moab, attempting to claim what belonged to another. I had a burning in my throat; every breath flared like fire. It was much like when I drew the hot liquid from my sister’s mouth on the day she was born so that she might take her first breath. Perhaps my mistake was to spit the watery blood on the floor rather than swallow the essence of her soul. Perhaps she had never belonged to me, and I had unwound us from each other at that moment.

My sister wore her simple white robe. Her hair, usually braided and covered by a shawl, was unplaited and loose, black as my
mother’s hair, as long as mine. I had saved her, only to have her marry Malachi and live in this goat house. But wherever she went, however distant, she would be my sister.

“Come with us now,” our mother pleaded. “Before you belong to him.”

“Before?” Nahara raised her chin defiantly.

The room was hot, the scent of sweat and of sex lingering. There was blood on the pallet where the women of this sect had unrolled a sheet of white linen to capture the proof of my sister’s purity.

“If he knew your father was not of our people, he wouldn’t want you,” I said.

“But she won’t tell him.” Nahara nodded at my mother. “It’s too late. He’s had me and I belong to him.” Nahara seemed overcome with her power to hurt us. Her hands were on her hips, as if she were the queen of this stench-filled goat house. “If you want to save someone, save her.”

She nodded at me, my sister whom I loved like no other, who had now become my betrayer. I thought of how tenderly I had cared for her when we lived in the tent on the Iron Mountain. Whenever our mother was called to her husband, I had sung my sister to sleep. She’d always slept well, her thumb in her mouth, drowsing as soon as I began the first phrases of a song which told her that the stars were above her, watching over her. I promised to take tamarisk leaves and use them as a broom to sweep the night away so that morning could come again.

“You’re blind to all she does,” Nahara now said of me. She faced my mother without any attempt at respect. “She has been with Amram a hundred times and you haven’t seen a thing. Open your eyes now.”

My mother turned to me.

“What did you expect?” my sister went on. “A whore learns her business from the one who knows it best of all.”

When our mother reached out, I imagined she would grab
Nahara and force her to leave with us. Instead, she slapped her. Our mother, who had never done anything but embrace us, had been driven to this.

I heard Nahara’s sharp intake of air. She raised her hand to her reddened cheek, but she didn’t cry. She smiled, more composed than before, more certain of what she wanted, her father’s daughter in this if nothing more, fierce and single-minded.

“You may try to silence me, but you don’t deny it,” she said to the one who had brought her to life.

Outside the desert wind had risen once more; the door of the goat house was thrown open with such force that the wood split apart. It was too late, just as Yael had warned. The wind would be with us for days, forcing us to cover our heads, to eat grit with our food, to listen to its wailing far into the night. I, who knew only iron, felt tears burning my eyes. Though she stood before me, my sister was no longer mine.

Our mother bowed her head, disgraced. I thought of the way she had labored to bring my sister into this world, for I had been her witness on that day.

Save her,
she had commanded.

Never once
Save me.

ON THE NIGHT
that we left the Essenes, my mother tore at her cloak, as women did when they entered into mourning. There are those who say that our word for grave,
kever,
is also used to describe where a child dwells inside a mother, for life and death are entwined. The child my mother had labored to bring into this world was gone to her now. She would not tell the truth of who Nahara’s true people were, for Nahara would then be a dishonored woman. Instead, she gave her up. We did not speak of my sister again, although my mother chanted for her for seven days, as one chants for the souls of the dead, for that is how long the
spirit lingers near the body, unable to part with its earthly form.

From that time on we lived side by side in our chamber, but as time passed, we rarely spoke. It was only the two of us, for my brother had moved to a tent near the barracks, to better serve the warriors but also to avoid the silence between my mother and me. A deep pool of distrust had come between us, a drowning place. Anyone with sense would stay away from such bitterness, and Adir was a practical boy.

I took to working in the smallest dovecote, set apart from the others. I couldn’t make amends. I had lied to my mother and deceived her. I had been with a man before marriage. What had been done could not be undone, for even in the hands of a witch, a ruined woman could not once more be pure.

AND YET,
when I lay down to sleep, I was someone other than the woman I’d become. I often dreamed I was riding through the acacia trees. I thought of my old friend Nouri, and how I had betrayed him, pretending to be something I wasn’t, a creature cast from sinew and muscle rather than a woman of flesh and blood. I had pretended no such thing with Amram, but perhaps I kept from him what was most important. I never told him my given name. Because of this he didn’t know me and he never could, no matter how many times he might possess me, or how I might try to offer my love in return.

Because of this, even when I was beside him, I was alone.

He was not the one for me, for he would never accept the hidden part of me. He called me his sheep, his dove, his darling girl, but I was none of those things. I began to avoid our meeting place. He who had known me as a husband would, waited beside the fountain, burning for me. But I watched from the shadows, as angels watch our kind from their lonely distance. I longed for what I dreamed about, the freedom I’d once had. In my dreams I asked the father
of my sister if he had seen the person I was at my core. He gazed at me sadly and did not answer, for he had lost us all and could not follow or respond, not even in a dream.

I began to slip into an old tunic that had belonged to my brother. It was brown, dyed with walnut shells, soft from wear. Immediately, I felt comfortable. I braided my hair, then pinned it with a brass clasp beneath a head scarf, so that I might wander through the fortress, a nameless boy who was most grateful to be ignored.

For the first time since we had come here, I was myself.

AT THE DOVECOTE
we worried about the Man from the North in his confinement. We had moved through the month of
Iyar
and were nearing summer, the month of
Sivan,
when the heat rose up from the center of the earth and fell down from the heavens. The Man from the North was nothing to us, a prisoner in a tower, a man who barely spoke our language, who was made of ice and was never meant to be among us. But more than six months had passed. Another man would have starved to death, but another man would not have had Yael and the rest of us to see to his needs. Perhaps we had forgotten he was a slave. His quiet restraint had caused us to befriend him, for he was not like other men to us. We feared neither his strength nor his judgment. In many ways he had surprised us, never more so than when he spoke his given name before he was arrested. The others were stunned by the intimacy of this admission, but I understood why he might have revealed such a private detail. Know a man’s name and he belonged to you. In return, no matter how you might deny it, you were his as well.

The first time Wynn spied me taking up the bow, in the month before his arrest, he knew I was more of a boy than a woman. He was a strong warrior, and he recognized the same in me. I should have been more cautious, but I was so accustomed to handling
weapons, I couldn’t hide my joy or my skill. I knew from the Man from the North’s expression that he saw in me a brother, someone he might have hunted beside in another world and time.

“Good work,” he said to me, after I had tested the arrows I’d fashioned for Amram. The women had returned to the dovecote. I was gathering the arrows, pulling each from the target of the olive tree.

“Yes, they’re pretty,” I said politely.

He laughed then. He had a strange way with our words; they seemed cold when he spoke them, more to the point. “Pretty? I meant your aim. How many men have you slain?”

I lowered my eyes so he wouldn’t notice the gleam of the truth. “Do you think I attack my victims while I’m at the loom in the evenings?”

He took my hand and examined my calluses. “Those aren’t from the loom.”

He instructed me in his people’s method of weaponry as he might have taught a younger brother. Slaves do not betray one another, and although I was not in irons, I was a slave to the truth of who I’d been born. This man named Wynn was a fine teacher, patient, more than willing to share his secrets of warfare. When I wound feathers to the shafts of the arrows, binding them to the wood as his people did, they flew with greater speed. I spent hours behind the dovecote at practice. Once I felled one of our own doves, a bird so far away anyone might have taken it for a wisp of a cloud.

Wynn educated me in the art of the bow, how to take a breath before I pulled back the string, then to wait an extra heartbeat before letting go. Adding that extra beat proved to be a miracle; it gave the arrow life and breath and speed. He spoke about a creature like a deer in his country that was faster than the wind, faster than the leopards in the desert, so quick only the birds could keep pace with it. That was what we wished for our weapons: the feathers fashioned the arrows into birds that would stir the air. The extra
instant before the shot was taken accounted for the way a bird dips, containing the power of its wings, before it lifts upward to race across the sky.

WHEN MY FINGERTIPS
bled from my practice, I told Amram that I had pierced them on the looms. Unlike the slave, he believed me. He was blind to who I was. It was as though I were the one who possessed the cloak of invisibility his father was said to have worn in the courtyards of the Temple when he struck his enemies. Amram asked me to weave a cloak for him in his favorite shade of blue as a token of my love. I agreed, though I knew this was a gift I would never give to him. I did not know how to work the loom.

My arms grew stronger after my many hours with the bow, as muscled as a warrior’s, but I insisted my strength was honed from lifting the baskets that we carried into the field. For weeks afterward, Amram came to help me carry the baskets, imagining that the work was too heavy a burden for me. Behind his back Wynn grinned, and I grinned in return, for some secrets bring you closer in their sharing, just as others break you apart.

I DIDN’T WISH
to know what was between Yael and the slave, though I could tell he burned for her. Once Yael had told me that whom I loved was my business, now I gave her the respect she deserved. All the same, I saw the way he watched her and knew she had left his irons unlocked.

“Have you asked her how many men she’s slain?” I asked Wynn one day. The words had slipped out in jest, but he stared after Yael, wounded.

“One certainly,” he said.

I should have seen then he would be a fool on her account and try to convince her to flee with him. He was the sort of open man
who could not hide himself, even if it meant he would be locked in irons.