The Dovekeepers

“She wouldn’t let me go with her,” he told me.

I saw he had been tied to one of the date palms. His mother had done what I had wished to do in order to keep Nahara here. Now Yehuda was forced to remain with us, where Tamar hoped he would be safe.

Abba had decided that his people could not be party to our war. It did not matter that they did not directly engage in battle. Their eyes must not witness our storehouse of weapons. They could not abide here willingly if they knew it was our intent to fight the legion should we be attacked. And so it had been decreed, a message sent from God above. They could no longer eat the fruit from our orchards or drink the water from our cisterns or approve of us in any way. If there were children of darkness and children of light, and if there raged a constant battle between the two, then they had drawn a line between us, even though their foremothers, Rachel and Sarah and Rebecca and Leah, were ours as well, even though we prayed to the same God, He who had no equal. We could not claim the same world.

I untied Yehuda and brought him to Revka’s house. There were rope burns on his arms, for he had desperately tried to escape his bonds. I asked if Revka might tend to him in his grief. He was a dark-haired boy, with liquid eyes and a large, distinctive head, already straining to be a man, humiliated by his mother’s decision to leave him behind. Revka’s grandsons knew him well, and Yehuda seemed comforted to be with them, though his eyes still welled with tears.

I went on to the wall so that I might watch the treacherous path the Essenes had chosen. They were headed toward a cave perched on the mountain where the cliffs were all but impossible to navigate. Hyenas had lived there, and it would be filthy inside, rife with their leavings and scattered bones. A herd of ibex startled when the Essenes came upon them. The wild goats raced sideways in their effort to flee, rocks flung from under their hooves, a curtain of dust rising as boulders rolled into the valley below.

In the swirl of dust, I could have sworn I spied Domah, the angel of the grave, whose very name means silence, the one who visits the dead to ask for the soul’s true name before the spirit can travel on. But when the air cleared, I saw only the Essenes in their white robes, barefoot despite the harshness of the land, ignoring the thornbushes that grew there and the scorpions that rested beneath the rocks. I thought I could see Nahara following the men, a shawl covering her head, her eyes gazing upward, as if she trusted the path completely and had no fear that she might fall.

But it was another woman, one whose name I’d never learned, not my sister at all.

ON THE FIRST DAY of the month of Av, Yael came to our table. It was the time of year that brought us little more than tears and salt. We were all wary in the month when both Temples had fallen, on the same date Moses is said to have broken the tablets given to him by God when he came upon his people worshiping an idol, the ninth of Av, the Day of Calamity, when evil is released upon us. If ha-olam is the world, and le-olam is forever, then the two are intertwined. Yet in the month of Av the world that was meant to last forever seemed a fragile thing. Stone disintegrated, death haunted us, cities fell.

We did not speak of the slave’s disappearance. We still felt his presence, for the hawk had returned to perch on the sill of the dovecote waiting for the mistress who had so kindly fed him grain from her hand for some time afterward. But that kindness had bound him, and he was a wild thing. Yael chased him away. She did so again and again until he, too, vanished, flying north. On the day he disappeared, Yael left the door of the dovecote open, the way we do when someone dies, to let a spirit free.

Now that the slave was gone, Yael appealed for my mother’s help because she believed it was possible to bring Arieh back to his rightful home without fear of reprisal. Yael had her veil over her hair, the fabric clasped at her throat. I noticed the glimmer of the gold amulet, my mother’s precious gift to her, was gone.

“You continue to make bargains with dead women,” my mother said mournfully. “Have you not learned from the first ghost?”

“Channa is not dead,” I countered, confused.

I had seen her that very afternoon, walking in the plaza with Arieh in her arms, and she had been very much alive. People whispered that she had convinced her husband God had meant for her to have this child, even though she had been barren since their marriage day. She told Ben Ya’ir that the one who had borne him had come begging her to take him in. The boy had been a gift and a blessing from Adonai.

“She is dead to me,” my mother remarked coldly.

“I will do anything to get him back,” Yael vowed. “I thought it would be a small price, a few days apart. I had no idea what she intended.”