The Dovekeepers

“Have you asked her how many men she’s slain?” I asked Wynn one day. The words had slipped out in jest, but he stared after Yael, wounded.

“One certainly,” he said.

I should have seen then he would be a fool on her account and try to convince her to flee with him. He was the sort of open man who could not hide himself, even if it meant he would be locked in irons.

It was Yael who brought him his meager provisions during the time he was locked away. She told us she could barely hear him speak. He was so weakened he could not rise from his pallet, a rough thing made from the chaff of the wheat. The cell was fetid, made the more filthy with his own waste. Still Wynn did not complain or curse his captors, but instead he spoke of the land of ice where he had been born. It was as though he were seeing it before his eyes. The heat dissipated as he spoke of his country, and he shivered as though he walked in snow. His people believed that a man would return home upon leaving this life. In the next world he would walk beneath the great yew trees of his homeland and once again be reunited with those who had gone before him.

One day he insisted he could see a stag outside the window. It was the animal that was so difficult to hunt, for it flew across the grass as the birds fly above us.

“What a beautiful creature,” he whispered.

Yael wept when she told us this, for there were no stags in our country, and no window in his cell.

It was a dark time. We had come to realize that our lives were here, so removed from the rest of the world we might as well have been in the World-to-Come. We would soon celebrate Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, in remembrance of the day Moses was given the Torah. In the past our people would make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem with sacrifices of bikkurim, the first fruits brought forth after seven weeks of working the fields, sacrificing the seven species of the harvest: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, dates.

Such was our tradition and our law, but there was no Temple to journey to, and we had little to celebrate and no place where we might offer a sacrifice. Our orchards were failing, despite the rain my mother had called down. There was so little grain that many of the storage jars were only half full. People wondered if demons had been at work. Indeed, now when it rained the sky hailed down upon us so strongly the rain itself might have been made of stone.

Although it was said that Masada could never fall, and that God had made this mountain for the purpose of our rebellion, allowing us to continue to give glory to Him, I wondered how long we could endure a siege should the Romans come. The storerooms of the king would not sustain us forever. Herod’s oil and wine and lentils had fed us, and we had depended upon them, but they were no more. There was a large oil press, but the olives on the trees were few and the oil produced was meted out in small jars. Now the rats ruled the storerooms. It was rumored they had been brought here by the Romans, purposely left behind in case our people ever took back this fortress, so that they might bring us disease, devouring what little we had left.

WORD HAD gone out that the Roman garrison had captured another Zealot stronghold in the desert. The fortress of Machaerus, east of the Salt Sea on the border of Moab, had fallen to the Tenth Legion, led by Lucilius Bassus, a general some people said was impossible to defeat. An oracle had declared that favor would always be his, and so it seemed to be. But although Machaerus’s very name meant sword, perhaps its inevitable defeat had been caused at the hands of its own people. There was a bloody history in that place, and it was rumored that a great teacher named John had been imprisoned and beheaded there when he refused to renounce his teachings.

It was also reported that when rebels at Machaerus arrived at their fortress, they wanted to destroy all that had belonged to cruel Herod and his sons. In their zealousness, they chopped down an enormous rue that had grown there for hundreds of years, a plant taller than any fig tree, a talisman said to hold the secret to our people’s freedom and success. With that one impulsive action, they had destroyed their chances at victory. Rue can save you or ruin you, it can bring luck or agony. Several warriors were said to be so haunted by their deed that they had tried to plant another herb in the same spot, but the roots always withered and refused to take.

When the Romans encircled them, one of their most beloved warriors had been trapped. He had been tortured in the open for all to see in ways too horrible for most decent men to imagine. His friends and loved ones were forced to watch as Romans cut off pieces of his flesh and filled him with burning thorn plants still alight, unwrapping his blistering skin from his soul. His fellow warriors pleaded for his freedom and the promise of their own safety, willing to surrender in exchange for the life of their brother. The bargain was made, and the rebels came down from their mountain. Their safety was assured but never granted. It came as no surprise to our people to hear that Lucilius Bassus was a liar. When our warriors thought of demons, they imagined his name. Each and every man at Machaerus was slain, their blood turning the ground black.