The Dovekeepers

I began to slip into an old tunic that had belonged to my brother. It was brown, dyed with walnut shells, soft from wear. Immediately, I felt comfortable. I braided my hair, then pinned it with a brass clasp beneath a head scarf, so that I might wander through the fortress, a nameless boy who was most grateful to be ignored.

For the first time since we had come here, I was myself.

AT THE DOVECOTE we worried about the Man from the North in his confinement. We had moved through the month of Iyar and were nearing summer, the month of Sivan, when the heat rose up from the center of the earth and fell down from the heavens. The Man from the North was nothing to us, a prisoner in a tower, a man who barely spoke our language, who was made of ice and was never meant to be among us. But more than six months had passed. Another man would have starved to death, but another man would not have had Yael and the rest of us to see to his needs. Perhaps we had forgotten he was a slave. His quiet restraint had caused us to befriend him, for he was not like other men to us. We feared neither his strength nor his judgment. In many ways he had surprised us, never more so than when he spoke his given name before he was arrested. The others were stunned by the intimacy of this admission, but I understood why he might have revealed such a private detail. Know a man’s name and he belonged to you. In return, no matter how you might deny it, you were his as well.

The first time Wynn spied me taking up the bow, in the month before his arrest, he knew I was more of a boy than a woman. He was a strong warrior, and he recognized the same in me. I should have been more cautious, but I was so accustomed to handling weapons, I couldn’t hide my joy or my skill. I knew from the Man from the North’s expression that he saw in me a brother, someone he might have hunted beside in another world and time.

“Good work,” he said to me, after I had tested the arrows I’d fashioned for Amram. The women had returned to the dovecote. I was gathering the arrows, pulling each from the target of the olive tree.

“Yes, they’re pretty,” I said politely.

He laughed then. He had a strange way with our words; they seemed cold when he spoke them, more to the point. “Pretty? I meant your aim. How many men have you slain?”

I lowered my eyes so he wouldn’t notice the gleam of the truth. “Do you think I attack my victims while I’m at the loom in the evenings?”

He took my hand and examined my calluses. “Those aren’t from the loom.”

He instructed me in his people’s method of weaponry as he might have taught a younger brother. Slaves do not betray one another, and although I was not in irons, I was a slave to the truth of who I’d been born. This man named Wynn was a fine teacher, patient, more than willing to share his secrets of warfare. When I wound feathers to the shafts of the arrows, binding them to the wood as his people did, they flew with greater speed. I spent hours behind the dovecote at practice. Once I felled one of our own doves, a bird so far away anyone might have taken it for a wisp of a cloud.

Wynn educated me in the art of the bow, how to take a breath before I pulled back the string, then to wait an extra heartbeat before letting go. Adding that extra beat proved to be a miracle; it gave the arrow life and breath and speed. He spoke about a creature like a deer in his country that was faster than the wind, faster than the leopards in the desert, so quick only the birds could keep pace with it. That was what we wished for our weapons: the feathers fashioned the arrows into birds that would stir the air. The extra instant before the shot was taken accounted for the way a bird dips, containing the power of its wings, before it lifts upward to race across the sky.

WHEN MY FINGERTIPS bled from my practice, I told Amram that I had pierced them on the looms. Unlike the slave, he believed me. He was blind to who I was. It was as though I were the one who possessed the cloak of invisibility his father was said to have worn in the courtyards of the Temple when he struck his enemies. Amram asked me to weave a cloak for him in his favorite shade of blue as a token of my love. I agreed, though I knew this was a gift I would never give to him. I did not know how to work the loom.

My arms grew stronger after my many hours with the bow, as muscled as a warrior’s, but I insisted my strength was honed from lifting the baskets that we carried into the field. For weeks afterward, Amram came to help me carry the baskets, imagining that the work was too heavy a burden for me. Behind his back Wynn grinned, and I grinned in return, for some secrets bring you closer in their sharing, just as others break you apart.

I DIDN’T WISH to know what was between Yael and the slave, though I could tell he burned for her. Once Yael had told me that whom I loved was my business, now I gave her the respect she deserved. All the same, I saw the way he watched her and knew she had left his irons unlocked.