The Dovekeepers (50 page)

The cool air of evening made it perfectly understandable when we began to bundle up beneath our cloaks. I wore an extra shawl, which made my appearance bulkier. My head scarf was tied tightly, nearly covering my face. One day Yael brought me a gray cloak. It belonged to her father, she said. I thought of her father’s talent and how he had instructed Amram in the secrets of invisibility. I knew it was possible for a man to become a cloud or a mist in the eyes of his enemy; I had seen Amram himself do so when we wished to defy my mother and meet in secret.

As soon as I slipped on the assassin’s cloak, the guards no longer noticed me. I disappeared before them, nothing worth looking at. They called out a greeting to Yael, whose shining red hair they so admired, but ignored me as I trudged behind, carrying a bundle of dry wood.

On the day it was to happen, I went to the tower at the hour Yael had chosen. After his meal, the guard posted there often fell asleep on his bench, his stomach swollen from his allotment of lentils and beans. In my pocket I had the key of twisted metal that my mother had fashioned to show how easy it would have been for the slave to escape the dovecote so the officials would not guess Yael had unlocked his chains. I kept the assassin’s cloak over my head. No one questioned me as I went along the corridor, then took the stairs. At the end of the hall, the guard was dozing, as Yael had assured me he would be. I let myself into the slave’s cell, stunned by the filth and stench that greeted me. The air was murky, yet I could see poor Wynn on his pallet of rags. He was so unclean no one would ever guess that the stubble of his shorn hair was pale as ice or that his skin had been the color of milk when he first came to us.

Despite the darkness, Wynn recognized me, rising to his feet to greet me.

“The warrior,” he said fondly.

His voice was thin, melting in his throat. His body was no longer strong, weakened from a lack of air and food.

“I’m someone else today,” I informed him.

“Who would that be?” He was thoroughly confused.

I grinned, then slipped off my cloak and stood before him. “I’m you.”

NONE
of the sentries took note when two women went through the gate, one barely noticeable, cloaked in gray. They were accustomed to us leaving the fortress at this hour, when the dark was drifting across the sky, when the curtain between the day and night splits open to angels and demons alike. They failed to notice that when Yael brought back kindling she returned alone, lingering at the wall to gaze over the mountains, where the hawk soared, circling
back as though he might return, before he disappeared into the falling dark.

In the tower, I waited until I knew Wynn would be free, repeating the psalm of protection.
Shivitti Adonai l’negdi tamid. I have placed the Lord constantly before me.
I was glad to know it was the season when wild onions grew, when rabbits would be venturing out to eat new grass. Perhaps he would manage to survive in the wilderness so that he might find his way back to the country of the stag.

No guard came to the door I’d unlocked for his escape. I left unnoticed, wearing the tunic I’d brought along so that I might once again be a boy, easily thought to be among those who helped guard the tower.

THE WAR
came closer in the shimmering month of
Tammuz,
when we tended the grapevines and the air itself smelled sweet. Great flocks of birds flew overhead, returning from the grasslands of the south, pelicans and storks, swifts and kestrels. There were flocks of people as well, crossing the desert before they could be captured, a tide rushing in advance of the Tenth Legion. Some of the wanderers came to us. When they pleaded for mercy, they were allowed to set their tents in our orchards, and the fruit that fell in all four corners was allowed to them, as commanded by our common law. The stragglers were not the only ones who were famished. Fallen fruit and flatbread were barely enough to feed our hunger. I went beyond the wall and caught songbirds in nets made of string. When I grew tired of hunting like a girl, I took my bow and shot pheasants to place upon our table.

No one said a word when they saw me walking in the plaza with a bow on my back; perhaps they believed the weapon was my brother’s and that in his absence I was caring for what rightly
belonged to him. Most likely they thought I only meant to clean the arrows I carried, for their tips were edged with blood.

Despite the fact that my mother had mourned my sister and now considered her among the dead, I brought pheasants to the Essenes whenever I could. Nahara was not dead to me. I often spied her among the modest, hardworking women. I thought of how she would follow me through the grass in our other life, how I would send her running home to our tent, swooping behind her like an owl, making her laugh. I thought of the years when we had slept on one pallet, often dreaming the same dream, so that even before our eyes were open we could chatter about our night visions. I had always yearned for her father to be my father so I might be her sister in every way. Now I was afraid she would run if I dared to speak to her and beg her to return.

After I presented the game birds, I went to sit beside Nahara on a wooden bench outside the goat house. Together we plucked the pheasants. Soon there was a circle of shimmering brown and green feathers at our feet.

“You can still hunt,” my sister said pointedly. The Essenes did not believe a woman should touch a weapon, or take a life.

“When no one’s watching.” I grinned, hoping she would join in the joke of who I used to be. Instead she shook her head. My sister, whose dreams I had shared, whose breath was the same as mine, whose true father was a secret to her people, found my actions shameful.

“The Almighty watches.”

I felt the stab of her judgment upon me. “I bowed to give my prayers to Him. He watches that as well.”

“We’re on the threshold of the end, yet you act as though the days will go on forever, one like the other.” It was as though my sister had become my teacher and I had failed to learn my studies. Nahara was convinced we were walking through the End of Days and, like her Essene teachers, believed it was foolish to be consumed
with the details of daily life. Those who refused to accept the truth that the world as we knew it would soon be no more would shortly be apprised otherwise.

The fabric of my sister’s tunic and shawl was threadbare, for there had been no time to mend the weaving and, from what she said, no purpose in doing so. If it was the End of Days, then my sister’s tunic would be her funeral garment. She confided that her people no longer slept. There was too much work to be completed on their scrolls, which revealed God’s truth, and too little time to do so. Perhaps this was the reason she looked pale. She was so slim the bones below her throat seemed to be rising through the flesh. She said that her people often prayed throughout the night, waiting to see if the sun would rise again and if there would indeed be another morning.

We had blood upon us from readying the pheasants. The birds would be hung on a line so that the rest of their blood would be drained from their bodies before they were salted and cooked. Our people never consumed blood. It was one of God’s strictest laws. Still our hands were stained with the pheasants’ lifeblood. I took my sister’s hand in mine. She had betrayed me to our mother; nevertheless, I could not abandon her.

“What do these people offer you?”

“Everything.” Nahara withdrew her hand from mine, shaking her head, disappointed in me. “They offer a world of peace, Aziza.”

She gazed toward the barracks and the stock of weapons stored there. Children had been set to work fashioning stones into round rocks that could be dropped upon our enemy with great force should they be foolhardy enough to attack us. Nahara turned back to me, her eyes damp. She had always been softhearted in times of killing. She would close her eyes when we came upon a rabbit in a snare. Our people did not eat rabbits, they were considered unclean, but Nahara’s father’s people had no such laws.
You do it,
she would say to me as the poor creature shivered in its trap.
I would take the rabbit and sever its throat, quickly, so that she didn’t have to see. I would do whatever she asked.

“You can’t think that’s the answer,” she said of the mounds of weaponry.

“What would your people have you do if we are attacked?” I wanted to know.

“Trust in Abba.” Her hands were folded upon her lap. She looked calm and beautiful, older than her years. I thought she meant the leader of her people, then I realized she meant God. She, like the other Essenes, claimed a personal relationship with the Almighty. She spoke of Him as if she were indeed His child.

“And if that means we are to die? What then? Lie down and let Rome trample us?”

Nahara gazed at me with compassion, as though I were the younger sister, too simple to understand. “Then we rise again.”

“Your father was a man of courage. Peace was something he fought to keep.”

She smiled gently at my remark. I saw within her some of the girl she’d been before she left us.

“You don’t fight for peace, sister,” Nahara told me. “You embrace it.”

“Not in the world of your father,” I reminded her.

Nahara laughed outright, for this was undeniably true. “That was long ago. You were another person then. As was I.”

“You cried for him when we left. We thought he’d hear you in Petra, that was how loudly you called to him.”

“I was a child.” Nahara shrugged her narrow shoulders. “My father was the only man I knew. Now”—she nodded to the long trestle table, where Malachi was at work on a text—“I belong to him.” I had heard it said that Malachi wrote so beautifully the angels came to watch, for words were the first thing God created out of the silence and were still the most beautiful of all His creations.

“Then I will be happy for you,” I said.

I walked away, leaving the pheasants with my sister, unable to tell her the truth. No matter what she did or whom she loved, I was the one who had given her life in this world, a world she was so eager and ready to leave, one in which there were acacia trees that called the bees to their blossoms, where there were endless fields of grass and cassis.

No matter what she said, she still belonged to me.

I WAS WALKING
at night, as I had come to do so that I might relish my freedom as a boy, when I came upon the Essenes digging near the synagogue. The earth was rocky, white as the stars above. The hour was late, and there were clouds of bats in the sky, in search of the last of the sycamore fruit in the arid ravines below. The center of the hottest time would soon be upon us, and the air grew heavy with heat, thick as a curtain.

I crept closer, hiding behind a citron tree that no longer bore the
etrog
fruit. Though the tree was stunted and leafless, the bark still sent out a peculiar fragrance, sharp and sweet at the same time.

I saw that the men had hold of a large urn, formed of simple dun-colored ceramic, the kind in which they stored their scrolls. They buried it carefully, softly chanting, then were quick to replace the sanctified ground. Their chants brought them to a place of ecstasy, and they rocked back and forth, raising the strands of their knotted prayer shawls to the sky so that God might hear them take joy in their prayers.

I thought about the Essenes’ strange deeds for the rest of the evening. The next night I went back to sift through the shadows. Again they were at work, secretly burying yet another urn.

In the morning I asked my mother what it might mean for pious men to disturb holy ground in such a secret and heedless manner. My mother had been ailing for days, listless and pale, leaving the business of the dovecote to me and Yael and Revka, able to eat little
but soup and water. She’d made a tea of bitter vetch and cucumber, green in color, very strong, which she sipped through the day. She could not bear the rising heat and poured water over her head, braiding her wet hair so that it stayed damp against her scalp.

“They’re burying their scrolls because they’re leaving.” She was quite sure of this, for she had studied the Essenes’ ways when they first came to us. Their scrolls were everything to them, the documents of their faith. “They want to make certain their word remains should they perish, and they trust none among us to keep them safe. It’s their way of packing up before they depart.”