The Dovekeepers (66 page)

In the midst of our mourning, some among us looked down upon the valley. They saw that the lion had been freed from the chains of Rome to return to the cliffs of Judea. There were shouts and prayers. Crowds gathered, mystified, wondering if it had been Gabriel, the fiercest of the angels, who had brought this omen to us, for surely no man would have dared to approach a lion.

STILL THE ROMANS
built their white ramp, still it rose higher. Though we sent down hot oil, stones, arrows, they continued on, a machine of death intent on victory. In weeks, the ramp was a few arms’ lengths from our walls, and the damage their soldiers could now manage was great. We had many losses and fires occurred every day. Whatever they destroyed with stone and flame we rebuilt, but we hadn’t enough hands, and there were ruins all around us. No one dared to leave the fortress now, or even venture close to the wall. We huddled together in the wind. There was a
great silence over us. It was despair, and it passed from one to the other more quickly than a fever.

When Eleazar came to me at night, he did not speak. Though words had always bound us together, they were not enough to save us now. Below us, there was a blur of movement, faster all the time, more purposeful and more brutal. We were reminded of the way in which bees could create entire cities overnight in their hives. So, too, could the legion. Where there had been six thousand, ten thousand now stood before us. The Romans were like an endless swarm. You could not outfight them or outrun them. The only choice was to put salt on your skin, though it might pain you to do so, to cover yourself with a cloak, so that you might disappear.

My beloved cousin had told our people the Romans would move on once they understood a siege could not take us down. We had enough to sustain us, we would be hungry, but it was possible to live in poverty and survive for a year on rations, perhaps two. Surely Rome would tire of us and decide to use the legion’s power to a better purpose. Now that the ramp had risen so high on the western slope, my cousin no longer spoke of such things or gave us false hope. The Angel of Death has a thousand eyes and no man can outdistance him. There have been stories of men who have ridden all night to escape their fate, only to arrive in a far-flung village where the Angel waited, knowing his victim’s destination before the rider himself did.
Mal’ach ha-Mavet
would find his intended no matter how fast a victim might ride, even if his horse was as swift as my husband’s had been, the great Leba, who held the heart of a thousand horses.

Eleazar and I went to the cistern together after darkness fell, no longer caring who might accuse us of sin. As Death saw us, we saw him in return, even when we closed our eyes. In the water, I embraced my beloved in silence; he winced, for he was freshly wounded and had paid no attention to this injury. I wanted to dress the cut with
samtar,
but he told me there was no time. When he said
this I began to weep, as I had on the day in Jerusalem when it rained and he went to the market to find me the vial of perfume scented with lilies. That had been the last time we saw each other until he had called me to this mountain. Now I was losing him again.

“Don’t,” he said to me as I cried. “There’s no time for that either.”

He had been hardened by his years of fighting. He had been not much more than a boy when I first knew him, now he had killed so many that his hands were stained. Yet tears could undo him and remind him of how human we were. The suffering of the world weighed heavily upon him. I dried my eyes because he asked me to do so. I had always done as he asked, not because I was bound to do so by duty but because I saw the depth of who he was and how he himself suffered. When I gazed at him, I did not see the brutal face his enemies looked upon, or the heavy arms and back of a warrior who carried armor and steel, but the young man at the well who had seen beyond my henna tattoos. He had always known who I was.

Eleazar gathered my hair and lifted it so that he might kiss my throat. Without my amulets, I was unprotected. I felt myself burn. I believed myself to be safe with him. He who was so cruel in the field of battle, was still the boy he once had been, so eager for me that his wife and father and all the laws of Jerusalem could not keep him from me. He whispered that he would prefer to spend what little time we had left in each other’s arms.
Let us not speak, or tend to our troubles, let us lie together and forget the world, remembering only each other.

The Romans would find us, as bees did; they would swarm upon us and the salt would fall from our skin and we would be naked and defenseless before them, as we now were with each other.

WHEN WE
rose from our restless sleep, we found that the ramp on the western side of the mountain was already completed. It was a cool day, misty and blue. Already the month of
Nissan
was upon us, when our people celebrated their freedom. When we opened our eyes, it was as though the ramp had always been there, magicked into being, more real than the mountains that had stood since God created them.

On that same day the dust rose up along the desert floor when a group of travelers from the east arrived. I saw that many of their cloaks were blue. They belonged to the people of Nahara and Adir’s father, nomads from the hills of Moab. They had brought all manner of spices and treasures from Petra and had come to offer their help to the Romans, with whom they had a treaty of peace. When I regarded these men, my heart fell, for I knew how fierce they were and how difficult they would be to defeat.

My hair was damp from my night in the cistern, my arms ached from holding on to a man who always left me while I slept. I would awake on the edge of the well, beside the deep water, a scrim of plaster dust flecking my skin, and I would be alone. Despite my enlarged belly, I had grown thin. The man who had been my husband in Moab would have noticed, he would have been certain to feed me dates and figs, for he thought a thin woman was like a thin horse, too weak for the hills of his country. He had loved me, though he never said so. He had watched me all the while we were together, as if his eyes could not get enough of my form.

Eleazar had not noticed that my ribs could be viewed, or that the bones at my shoulders and backbone were rising through my skin. He did not see that the poor diet of roots and beans had caused my hair to be less glossy, for I plaited it into braids, then clasped it atop my head with two pins made of horn. To him I was the girl with the sheet of black hair at the well in Jerusalem, just as he was my beloved, the man who stood with me in the rain and took me to him, the one I had been pledged to throughout time.

*

WE NO LONGER
took note of the laws of men, only the laws of God. Day and night, prayers were said. The old men gathered in the synagogue, and by the flickering light of what little oil we had left, they begged for God’s forgiveness and His favor. Timbers had been laid into the Romans’ ramp to support the barrels of white earth the slaves continued to pour upon it. The ramp was now so close the Romans could speak to us, and Silva himself came to shout for Ben Ya’ir. Some of our men shouted back that our leader would never speak with demons, for a demon could take your soul from your words. It was true, we knew, for when we listened to the demon who commanded the Tenth Legion, he had brought us clouds of terror. We covered our ears, yet we could still make out Silva’s words.
Surrender now and we will let you go free.

Exactly what they had told the warriors of the fortress at Machaerus before murdering every one, leaving them for the jackals so that their bones were scattered through the forest, as if they had never been men at all but had come into this world as stones.

BEN YA’IR
gave no answer to Silva but instead sent a hail of arrows set aflame. I saw the finest archers upon the wall, my daughter among them. She used so many arrows that soon enough she had no more. That night she taught Adir how to fashion these weapons, how to keep the flint straight so he would not scrape his hands raw as he struck the thin metal tip against a stone, how to wind the sharpened tip to the wooden shaft with a thin strand of leather. Because Yehuda could not by faith touch an instrument of war, he collected feathers from the doves, to attach to the arrows so they might fly straight from the hands of my daughter to the hearts of the enemy.

Aziza took me aside before she returned to the wall with her
basket of newly made arrows. She looked so strong, her muscles fine, her face beautiful and harsh and dark. My daughter told me she would attempt any tactic to save our people, except for one. She would not shoot any man in a blue robe. One among them might well be the man who had been Nahara and Adir’s father, my husband once, who for a very long time had forgotten that Aziza was not his true-born son.

I gave her my blessing, casting powdered snakeskin into her short, black hair for her protection. I felt my love for her in the back of my throat. I could not say it aloud for fear I would bring her doom to her, but I embraced her and she knew what she meant to me, as she had known I’d depended upon her to help me bring Nahara into this world, as I’d had faith enough to allow her to ride with the men in Moab. Once I had given her a name that would help her to be fearless in a world commanded by fear. That was my greatest gift to her.

FORTUNATELY
there was still a space between our cliff and the white ramp. Every time more earth was heaped upon it, the end of the ramp collapsed in a landslide. Although the slaves had brought up huge battering rams, as large as the trunks of date palms, those last few yards could not be forged, and therefore they could not break through the wall. Though King Herod had been wicked in many ways, we were grateful for the wall he had built and for the stones that bore his mark. We thought the legion’s inability to build the ramp to meet the king’s wall was an omen of our assured success, and we prayed and thanked the Almighty.

It would soon be the eve of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the day when our people were freed from slavery in Egypt. We thought of Moses in the desert, and how there had been faith even when there was no hope, how he had led his people despite their agonies.
We thought our celebration would bring us fortune in the future. We did not understand that, much like the ninth of
Av,
when both Temples fell, when Moses broke the tablets, when sorrow reigned across our world, some days were meant to make us remember that the past was with us still.

The Romans were relentless, and a king’s wall was nothing to them as they worked for the glory of their Emperor. They threw up an enormous platform that rose to more than two hundred cubits. The wood had come all the way from Greece, shipped across the sea, hauled here on the backs of slaves; the timbers carried the scent of the forest. Revka said they had been fashioned from cypress, and she wept in remembering. We stood watching as the platform was completed and the soldiers scrambled upon it and called out curses, quickly letting go with volleys of burning torches. All we could smell then was fire; the fragrance of sweet cypress was like a dream that had once clung in the air.