The Dovekeepers (5 page)

Once again the fires that had been set created a smoke screen and this helped in our escape. For that we were grateful, despite the smoldering heat. The air was thick and gray. I held my scarf to my mouth and tried not to breathe in sparks. I guessed that my
father had killed someone that night and that was why his robe was spattered red. I was thinking about such matters when Ben Simon’s wife, Sia, came to walk beside me. She pitied me because I followed behind in the clouds of dust that had been stirred up. She was perhaps ten years older than I, with a mass of black hair set into coils. Her eyes were dark with gold flecks. She might have been beautiful had she not been the devoted wife of an assassin, worn down by fear. Assassins should not marry, I decided then, or have daughters, or allow anyone to love them.

“Would you like to ride with my sons for a while?” Ben Simon’s wife suggested.

I could see she was tired, and I was used to walking. I thanked her and said no, I was happy to follow. I hoped she would leave me alone.

“I’m so glad to have you here,” she blurted. “Leaving would be so much worse without another woman beside me.”

I glanced at her, wondering what she wanted of me. She smiled, taking my hand, and then I understood. She wanted a friend.

I urged her to return to her sons. She should leave me to tread last, as I was invisible to most people, even without a cloak such as the one my father wore. Perhaps I had inherited that ability, or perhaps I had learned its secrets from watching my father. Either way, the Romans who searched for us would see only a swirl of dust wherever I walked.

Sia wouldn’t hear of it. “You’re wrong,” she remarked. “You would be the first one they’d see. Your hair is so beautiful it makes me think of flame trees.”

I wondered if her words were a curse, for I had been standing beside a flame tree when my brother admitted he was an assassin. It was not possible for her to know, but on those rare occasions when I dreamed of my mother, she came to me as a flame tree, and in my dreams I bowed my head before her and wept.

When I studied Sia, I could see that her intention was to be
kind on a night pierced by danger and uncertainty. We walked close, drawn together by the peril around us. We were journeying through the Valley of Thorns, under a sky hung with so many stars they made me think of stones in the desert, countless, too white to look upon. They say the face of our Creator is like that, so bright that a single glance brings blindness. I kept my eyes downcast. I would have preferred to walk alone, but Sia set her pace with me, her arm linked through mine.

She confided that my father and her husband had killed an important Roman general and that was why we had made haste to flee. She herself had cleaned the blades of their knives, washing the metal in pure water, reciting a prayer as she did. She was obliged not to ask questions, and to do as her husband demanded, but she had an urge to confess that she had handled a knife streaked with human blood, a confession made to me as we trudged after the men. Her voice broke as she spoke of it.

“How will God punish me?” she murmured.

I hushed her—women were not to speak of such matters—but it was too late. Ben Simon had overheard and turned to glare at us. He was a tall, imposing man, with dark olive skin, fearsome, a deep scar etched across one side of his face. Once again I gazed at the ground in an attempt to avoid him. He called sharply for Sia to be quiet.

“Let us not speak of this,” she said then. “Sometimes it’s better not to know what men must do.”

WHEN WE
could walk no farther, we stopped at a resting place, an oasis the assassins’ friends had spoken of in glowing terms. Every Zealot had a plan should disaster come, a direction in which he would run if need be. This was the first stop, a small green space where camels who had run off during the chaos had gathered. The beasts ran when we approached, kicking up dust, afraid that we
would throw ropes around their necks, as unwilling to be slaves as we were. There was a citron tree growing there. The fruit of the tree is called
pri etzhadar,
the lemony
etrog
that is made into a jam. These specimens were bruised, sour without honey to sweeten the taste, but we didn’t care. We were starving and thirsty. We ate in silence, wolfing down our meager supper. In the distance, we could see Jerusalem burning. The smoke rose up in a funnel cloud, then disappeared. I counted stars, so bright above us. Sia sat beside me and whispered. She insisted it was a good omen to find the citrus on the first night of our journey, and although I did not argue with her, I knew otherwise. This bitter tree was nothing more than a key to a door and that door opened into the desert.

I had overheard my father speaking with Ben Simon. We were not headed toward Alexandria, or toward Cyprus. Instead we were taking the ancient route that led toward the Salt Sea, the route of the doomed. In the month of
Av,
the birds were unable to fly where we were going, even at night. It was too hot, the air unrelenting, an oven. You could bake bread on a stone. We would roam as far into the desert as we could, for it was there my father believed we would find the Zealots and their fortresses, my brother among them.

On the night we fled, as the Temple burned and the sky was ringed with fire, there was a light breeze. This would be the coolest time we would know before we entered into the wilderness. But there was to be something more that cast me into a burning world on the night we left Jerusalem. I walked down to a well that had been abandoned long ago. There was no longer any water. That wasn’t really a surprise. People often lied about water, promising pools where there were none, dreaming of water in a world composed of dust. All the same, if someone crouched on hands and knees to dig, it was possible to find mud. Drained through clenched fingers, water would well up, there for whoever was willing to sink to her knees. I wasn’t too proud to do so.

Determined to get what I wanted, I managed to fill half a jug
with silty water, strained first through my fingers, then through the fabric of my blue scarf. When I was done I rose, greedy with thirst. I turned away from the well, then gazed up in alarm. I didn’t see the night sky filled with stars, or the fires of Jerusalem, only the other assassin, Ben Simon, who had been watching me. My arms were covered with mud, my tunic cast open. I felt myself flush with heat. I didn’t understand why he had appeared out of the dark or why he stayed. He didn’t even know my name. I thought he would turn away, but he stared at me for a long time, the way a man looks at a deer to gauge if it’s too far away to chase, or just near enough to catch. He nodded, and then I knew. I wasn’t invisible after all.

I COUNTED OFF
the days in the desert by cutting my leg with a sharpened rock. Our people were not allowed to injure ourselves; that was the practice of pagans and nomads in their time of mourning.
Do not cut your bodies to mourn for the dead, nor tattoo any marks on you,
the Lord commanded us in the Fourth Book of Moses. But I heard only the voice of the desert, not the words of the Almighty. I hid the cuts beneath my shawl. In the life we led, pain was something to get used to, to inure yourself against. I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.

It was the first time I broke our laws. After that, the rest came easily to me.

I was thrown together with Sia and her children when I would have preferred to be alone. Still, she was kind to me and I became accustomed to her. Because she was older and married, I thought she would expect me to be deferential, but instead she considered me a sister, and I grew to enjoy her company. There were days when we laughed and made our rough life into a game, even though the men threw us sullen looks. We worked well together, collecting
the few greens we could find, making stews of our dwindling supply of oil and olives, dried figs and lentils. We cooked bread on the hot stones of our fire, covering the loaves with ashes so they might bake. Sometimes the men went off to hunt, bringing back an occasional partridge, which we added to our stews.

I was deeply affected by what a good mother Sia was to her sons, how uncomplaining when they clamored for her attentions. Her boys were little more than babies, and she sang them to sleep every night, determined not to relinquish all of the loving-kindness they’d known in the world we had left behind. Each time she sang I thought of the girl from Alexandria who had cared for me when I had no mother. I often fell asleep beside the children, imagining that Sia’s lullabies were meant for me. My new friend had tirelessly combed out the ashes that had fallen into my hair during the burning of Jerusalem. When we found a shallow pool, we rushed into it as soon as we spied the glittering water, able to forget, however briefly, what our circumstances were, splashing each other as if we were indeed sisters.

Secretly, I continued to record my time in the desert by etching each day into my flesh. I kept to myself, but I couldn’t help but be aware of Ben Simon, taking note of the scar on his face. Whenever I saw him watching me, I quickly covered my leg. I didn’t want him to know who I really was, a neglected, ugly girl with callused hands. And yet something connected us, perhaps because we were both scarred. Clearly he saw me as no one else ever had. I could see his face transform as he stared at me; there was something burning and reckless in his glance. It came to be that the only time I felt alive was when he looked at me. His very presence was like bee stings, riveting my attention. I began to brood over him, wondering how he had been scarred and what dark matters he had attended to in Jerusalem. I had persistent, slow-burning thoughts of him jumbled inside my head, ones that embarrassed me and made me feel that I was a traitor, though I’d done nothing wrong.

Once, when there was a pale moon, I went to the pool where Sia and I had bathed. During my time of monthly bleeding, I had sequestered myself away as was our custom. Now it had ended and I needed to cleanse myself. In Jerusalem, we had gone to the
mikvah
to bathe. Here there was only the pool in the
nachal,
the ravine where birds came to drink in the evenings, flocks of ravens, larks, and huge griffon vultures, the strong, fearless creatures we called
nesher
that nested in the cliffs. I found that the water was fast disappearing with the rising heat of
Av
. Still, I took off my tunic and splashed myself and felt some relief. I heard a rustling in the tamarisk trees, a variety that can be found growing in the harshest of places. Quickly, I drew on my cloak, fearful that one of the leopards whose territory we had entered might be stalking me, hungry enough to consider me his prey.

There was an echo of footfalls, and I froze until they vanished. I returned to our camp, cleansed but on edge. Everyone was sleeping inside our small goatskin tent, which was fastened to the ground with bolts made of horn. Only Ben Simon was awake. He seemed restless. I flushed to think perhaps he had seen me at the pool. He called me to him, and I went, my eyes lowered.

“It’s dangerous,” he warned.

He had never spoken to me before. I didn’t know if he meant there was danger in walking in the wilderness alone or in raising my eyes to meet his. I felt outraged that he might think he could tell me what to do, treating me as he would a child, or worse, his slave, and yet I felt a flicker of pleasure when I noticed the spiky green leaves in his hair. They were from the tamarisk that grew by the pool, a tree that lifted its boughs toward heaven in a place where nothing else could survive.

TWENTY-ONE CUTS
and then the night when it happened. Afterward I wondered if I had been marking off the time until it did.
Was that what I was waiting for? Was that where my desire had led me? Perhaps I had peered into the Book of Life, which metes out fate, and while in the depth of my slumbers I had seen his name written there. Or perhaps it was only that I was an envious girl who had nothing, and was therefore willing to take what belonged to another woman, one who was my only friend.

I was building a fire to cook our meal of lentil cakes on the griddle I’d brought with me from Jerusalem. He crouched down next to me. The sky paled with heat. The larks were flying in the dim light, and great colonies of bee-eaters were calling, their brilliant blue feathers slicing through the hazy air. Jachim ben Simon was more commanding than most men and I could feel the heat of his presence beside me. He didn’t look at me this time. Instead he reached down and ran his hand along my leg, lingering over the cuts I had made until my skin seemed on fire.