The Dovekeepers

Your father and his kinsmen lived in the hills, made wealthy not only by the sale of asphalt but by the treasures they seized from caravans that traveled the King’s Highway from Damascus to Egypt. Stolen goods some might say, but in the eyes of the tribesmen, these treasures were a simple payment, taken as their just due, for their homeland was the route connecting two nations. A robber is a king in his own land, that is what your father believed, the lord of his own mountain. Every man in this region was said to be born with a knife in his hand, a horse already chosen for him, and a prayer to offer to his God.

My mother was still bleeding from my birth when they stopped to make camp the first evening. All the same she wrapped me in cloth and laid me in a hollow, so that your father could make her his wife that night. To celebrate their marriage, he gave her a pair of earrings set with rubies. Anyone in Jerusalem would have known why she was marked by tattoos, a swirl of henna-red inkings upon her flesh. From the time she was a child, she had been trained to be a kedeshah in Egypt, a woman meant for the holy use of the priests, as her mother before her had been. But such things had become secret and outlawed. Our mother had been sent out of Alexandria, to be raised by her kinsmen in Jerusalem. She never managed to return to the city where her mother longed to see her again, waiting by her gate for her only daughter’s return.

Our grandmother whom we never knew gave our mother two gold amulets for protection. On one was written Chayei ‘olam le‘olam—Eternal life, forever—the gold imprinted with images of the sun and the moon. On the other the words I have placed the eternal always before me were inscribed; on the back of the medallion a fish had been engraved, to ensure that the wearer would always be near water, the most precious element, the giver of life.

Although our mother was sent to Jerusalem for her safety, she was repudiated for her sins there, accused of seducing a man who was married. It was claimed she had been wed both to him and to a demon. When the case was brought before the priests by the man’s family, my mother refused to admit any wrongdoing. The sotah ceremony was held, in which God’s name is written on papyrus, then slipped into a tumbler, where it is erased into the water and mixed with the dust of the Temple floor, to be consumed by the suspected adulteress. My mother drank God’s name and did not falter; still, those who opposed her considered her to be in league with the demons. She could deny her sin, but I was the evidence, held up by my heels before three judges. Perhaps when they examined me they were looking for proof that she had indeed slept with a demon, searching for horns or wings, to see if I was a shedah, the child of a watcher, an angel who had been called to earth by my mother’s beauty, or if I had simply been born of the flesh.

The tribesman from Moab who was to become your father did not care about such matters. Judgments made by our councils were meaningless to him. Our God was not his God. Our mother’s sin was not his interest. He knew what he wanted. He was simple in that way, yet he was complicated as well. As for me, I was little more than a mouse caught in a snare, a creature he allowed our mother to keep as a pet when they set off the next morning and she refused to leave me behind. The world was still dark on the day they left Judea, as the sea was, but before them the horizon was radiant, like a pearl. Our mother told me that, after they passed by the black mounds of burning asphalt in the Salt Sea, she was grateful we had not fallen into the fires of hell. She felt her heart lift at the sight of the mountains, which are green even when the rest of the world is dying of thirst. The lilies that grow there are red, and she still wears their perfume; a ceramic vial of their scent was one of the few belongings she took with us when we came to this fortress.

Perhaps when she wears the scent of the lilies she remembers the morning when we were given another life.

OUR PEOPLE believe that the world is split in two. On the side of goodness are the malachim, the thousand angels of light. On the side of evil there are mazzikim, demons who are uncountable and unknowable, uncontrolled even by the Almighty’s wishes. Your father was both combined. We made camp in the mountains, above the pass that overlooked the King’s Road from Damascus. Your father did not think twice before he swooped down with his men upon a caravan to take what he wanted, but he was shy with children and kind to our mother. Though he was a warrior, he could become flustered in the presence of our mother and hardly knew what to say to her. His eyes burned when he gazed at her, and he often sent everyone from our tent so he could be with her, even in daylight hours. He had other wives who lived in a far valley, women whose names we never heard spoken aloud. Perhaps he loved them, too. Surely he could not look at them in the way he gazed at our mother. She was his favorite. Because of this, we were safe with him.