The Dovekeepers (55 page)

“We would not want our women and children enslaved,” Ben Ya’ir said. “We do the same for those we meet in battle.”

People said that our leader had seen those closest to him crucified in Jerusalem, brothers and friends, dying in agony before him. Afterward, the Romans had cut the heads from the bodies and tossed them into the road for the mourners, but without bodies there could be no lamentations, no burials, no peace. Ben Ya’ir spoke the words of our God.

Whoever is disheartened should go back home, for he might cause the heart of his fellows to melt as his does.

But our home was Jerusalem, and Zion had fallen, and not a single warrior turned away from the battle to come. I saw Amram lift his spear along with the others to cheer and honor our leader’s words. Only the Man from the Valley did not join them in prayer or in their fevered shouts. Perhaps he had already said prayers of
his own. Perhaps the single prayer he recited was a song for the departed. He did not wear a prayer shawl or even a robe, merely a tunic and the metal he wound around his arms. He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.

We went in stillness as the moon began to rise. I followed near Amram, so that I might keep watch over him, the dog at my heels, the great beast as silent as we were. The heart of the earth was pounding. The world was shrouded in silence until we came upon the guards. Then there was a wild shout and instantly the frantic calls of men in the village. Quickly, the shouting became deafening and the fray began. I went to one knee and began to work my bow, doing my best to ensure the safety of those who went before me. I killed two men right away, and they fell before Amram. Perhaps he thought an angel was beside him, for he gave thanks to God right there.

My dog barked whenever the enemy neared. His warning allowed me to know in what direction I should aim, for there were men approaching from every angle and chaos all around. I might have panicked but for Eran, and I vowed to keep him close from then on.

Our warriors had the best of the townspeople before long; the bodies of the slain were everywhere. I spied the Man from the Valley, a whirlwind with his ax. In the midst of four of the enemy, he brought each one down, then stood among them, appearing to dare their corpses to rise again and battle once more. When yet another villager raced at him, leaping upon his back, he calmly drew his enemy from him and split him open with his ax. The Man from the Valley looked for the next to be slain, diving into the chaos with an intensity that belied the danger around him, his weapon readied. I could feel my blood racing and a kind of joy rising inside me as I shot a man who dashed toward him. I thought that, if my father knew how many had fallen to my arrows, he would be proud to take me to him as his son.

The night was hot with blood, the ground slick, the scent of death everywhere. There were locusts in the air, humming and rising before us. Because I wore silver-scaled armor beneath my cloak, my limbs ached and were heavy, and I was drenched with sweat. I used my head scarf to wipe the film from my eyes, rising from my knees.

In that moment when I lowered my bow, it was as if I had stepped outside the battle. Perhaps I watched as the angels did, removed and distant but holding the ability to see far more than the men who were embroiled in the fight. My hazy vision made me disbelieve what was before me. We had slaughtered the men who had come to defend themselves, along with the travelers in their blue cloaks, men from Moab who had journeyed here to trade spices and dried fruit. There were no acacia branches to burn in their honor, therefore their spirits would not wish to leave their bodies. I was pained to know they would be trapped in a netherworld, far from the Iron Mountain, for no other men would rise from the blood that had been spilled, blood that was as red as ours until it pooled blackly in the earth.

The night had become a dream. The battle now was to force myself to wake from what was before me, for beyond the piles of dead men was something far more terrible than the corpses of warriors. Our men had begun to kill the women who ran from the houses. It was impossible, we did not believe in such cruelty, yet I knew it was true because I heard the voices of the slaughtered. Theirs were the screams of women, and yet there was worse still. Beneath those screams, I heard the cries of children. When I spied Amram, he became a part of the dream, changing before me into a demon, his face a demon’s face, his deeds a demon’s doings.

Our leader had said there were to be no slaves taken. I had understood this to mean we would let the women and children be, but that was not how warfare was practiced in this sorrowful world. The dog was going mad, yelping and barking, distraught
as no beast should be. I held him around the back of his neck and bade him stay, breaking my nails on his rough fur. I felt maddened, as he was, by the sights before me and the wild death calls of the innocent. I nearly leapt in, but on our enemies’ behalf, against my own people. I had the urge to fight the men I’d come here with, my brethren. Confused amid the rising bloodshed, I suddenly had no idea why we believed we had the right to take what these people had, other than the fact that we wanted it and assumed we were entitled to what belonged to others, as the robbers had once wanted me and my mother and all we possessed.

I stood there, encircled by the destruction, escaping my own death by the grace of God. I no longer cared to fight, nor had I the stomach for it. I closed my eyes and waited for
Mal’ach ha-Mavet
to come for me, as he was meant to do when my mother and I were sent into the wilderness. Perhaps I was never intended to live past that day when Eleazar’s wife disposed of us and had been wrong to elude my fate.

I would never know if the Angel of Death meant to approach on this night of battle, for the Man from the Valley gripped me by my cloak and pulled me after him, out of Death’s grasp. Eran and I went with him, even though I could barely breathe, my heart heavy inside me, beating much too fast. I bit my lip until there was more blood to come, until it was my own. I wanted the taste of it. I deserved it.

The warrior led me to a ridge where the haze of the evening had dissipated. He had many wounds from this battle, but he paid no attention to them, just as he made no mention of the fact that I wept. We could see the massacre from here. The houses in the village were made of stone; soon they would be emptied completely. Everything these people owned would belong to us. I took off my helmet and my bloodstained cloak. I understood now that the Man from the Valley had told me not to go because he had known what might happen. He would not murder women and children and
refused to see their blood shed. He’d known I was a woman, yet he’d said nothing. He’d known what his commander wanted of him, yet he’d done God’s bidding instead.

Of all who were before me, he was the only one I wished to stand beside.

THEY LET
the donkeys live, heaping them with the possessions that now belonged to us, the ginger and pepper, the gourds and leeks, all manner of wine and oil and wheat, small amounts of gold, earrings and rings taken from homes and from corpses, heaps of precious cinnamon, lamps, stacks of weaponry. They took the goats and the sheep and killed the chickens. They filled leather containers with water and cheese. Everything smelled like blood.

I went back to the village to gather my arrows. They were easy to find among the slaughtered, a field of red lilies I had left behind. All I needed was to pluck them one by one from the chests and backs of the fallen. I took nothing else. While others gathered the rings from cold fingers, the wine from the storerooms, I washed the blades of my arrows in a bowl of water taken from a rain barrel, reciting a prayer as I did so, entreating
Adonai
not to cause those who had died tonight to suffer any further torment, pleading for Him to keep them safe from the three gates of Gehennom, the valley of hell. I could not look into the faces of the slain women and children, but I began to search among the men from Moab for those I might know.

Amram came by, covered with sweat and dried blood. “Don’t bother,” he said to me as I turned over the bodies of my sister’s father’s people. “They’re all the same.”

BEN YA’IR
spoke to the warriors as the last of the night settled around us. I could not abide to be among them. People said that he
thanked God, then praised his men for their bravery. He instructed his warriors to say prayers for the souls of the dead and told them that, in another time and place, if our enemies from Rome had not forced us into starvation and poverty, we would have called our victims our brothers.

By that hour we had moved into the high desert, making haste so that we could not be found by any of the townspeople who might have been absent during the raid, returning with vengeance in their hearts. The warriors prayed to God and then killed a goat for their supper. To me the goat’s cries sounded like those of a woman. I huddled beside my dog, covering my ears, rocking back and forth on my haunches. The radiance of the Shechinah, the light and compassion of the Almighty, was nowhere near this campground. Here, we were surrounded by what some called the other side, the dark realm, for on this night we had wandered onto the evil side of the world that was also born from creation, that terrible region which could be found at the left hand of God and fed on human sin.

I had planned to lie beside Amram that night after our victory, to bring his hands beneath my cloak so that I might finally let him know who I was and give myself to him, but I did no such thing. I was sick to my stomach and sick at heart. I went into the desert and brought up everything I had eaten since I’d left my mother’s house. The taste was sour, as if I had spat out a demon. I was glad my brother had not been among us. Adir, who had such a gentle spirit, yet wanted nothing more than to be among the warriors, had been spared the sight of the cowardly actions of those he so admired.

The white cliffs were invisible in the dark. Everything was hidden. I now understood it was our duty as human beings to see behind the veil to the inside of the world, to the heart of things.

I glimpsed the Man from the Valley and went to stand beside him. There was a circle of thornbushes, and larks were sheltered in the cluster of branches. We heard the others’ voices singing, but
their songs meant nothing to us. Every bit of the stained earth we walked upon seemed a part of the territory of transgression, where enemies were subdued at any cost. No acacias grew here. There was no way to help the souls of the dead find peace.

Today I had seen my beloved kill a child who could not have been more than four. It seemed nothing to him to do so, but everything to me. Other than the stars in the sky, I could not see any image but the face of the child who’d been murdered, for he now lived behind my eyes and would be a part of my vision forever-more. Every time I looked at Amram, it was that child I would see.

I wished I had been a woman and had stayed at home.

“Did you not think this was what the world was like?” the Man from the Valley said to me.

My dog lay at my feet. There was blood on his fur. By daylight flies would be swarming over him and he would look monstrous. Eran had never once deserted me in the bloody turmoil but had lurched toward anyone who approached me, snapping at them, baring his teeth.

I had never felt as vulnerable, or as flooded with shame. I had lost something so completely, I did not think I could get it back from anything that had been created on earth. I needed to look into heaven. The haze had vanished by this time, and the stars were bright. We saw some drift across the darkness in blasts of light, then vanish, invisible to our eyes. I was transfixed by the sight, and by the goodness of a dumb beast who had never once thought to flee from my side, and by the fact that both I and the warrior I stood beside were still alive.

“Is it not beautiful?” I said of the world around us.

“Is it not terrible?” the Man from the Valley countered.

He gazed at me, and all at once I knew that it was a question and that he needed an answer. I took his hand and pulled him to me, and had him lie down beside me. As he had rescued me, I did the same for him. For one night, when we could still smell the blood on
each other, when the night was black and all the world was invisible, we were not alone.

ADIR’S WOUND
had healed and his fever had ended, yet my brother limped and seemed frail. My mother worried over him and tried one cure after the next, sifting through her piles of herbs and her recipes for
pharmaka.
Still he was weak. Though she had disapproved of my actions in the past, she agreed I should again take Adir’s place when the time came for him to be called back to fight. This was as it should be. I was the better warrior, the one more likely to return. Once again, my mother and I shared secrets. It was a bond we didn’t deny, one that was meant to be, for our fate had always been entwined. Whatever bitterness had been between us had dissipated.