The Dovekeepers

I knew I must let her cause that herself.

Once, as I stared into the dark, my foot slipped and my companion grabbed me and held me close until I could regain my balance. Rocks rattled down into the valley, but in the dark we might well have been two ibex intent on scaling this cliff. As we went on we could distinguish three caves, one for the goats, one used as a storeroom, with another, larger cave in which the Essenes camped. We had no fear they might attack to protect themselves, for they had no weapons, and no desire for defense other than God’s mercy. The stench of the cave greeted us first, and I was astonished that it was worse than any barnyard. When I peered through the dark, I could hardly bear to witness the way in which they lived. The fires inside the cave had blackened their skins, and their linen garments were dusted with ash. Two men came to meet us, frowning, clearly resenting our intrusion into the midst. They were unclean, rail-thin, with the ravished gaze of hunger in their eyes. I recognized Malachi, though he did not know me and seeing my tunic took me for a boy.

“We’ve brought you provisions,” the Man from the Valley said. We set down our packs, the meager fruit, the doves, the flatbread, the grain, the skins of water.

“From the hands of murderers?” the older Essene man said as he considered the provisions we’d courted great danger to bring to them.

“From the hands of your brothers,” the Man from the Valley remarked. He was civil, but his tone carried a note of reproach.

I took a few steps forward while the men continued to speak. Through the murk I made out Abba’s form; the Essenes’ beloved teacher was prone on a ledge, so weak it seemed he’d already passed into the otherworld, though he still drew breath. I saw the women gathered together, gazing at us distrustfully, but I could not tell my sister from the others, nor did she recognize me. I took the scarf from my head and let my hair fall down my back so that she might see me for who I was, the sister she belonged to. Malachi immediately came to me once he knew me, so quick I might have been a black viper, the sort that winds itself around its prey in an inescapable grasp.

“Go now,” he said to me, though I had risked my life and the life of my companion to bring them provisions and water. “She cannot see you or think of that other life.”

I caught sight of her then, a woman in rags, my beautiful sister, surrounded by the other women, ewes in a pen, no more kin to me than the sheep behind our fences made from the scaly boughs of the thornbushes. All at once I understood Malachi’s fear. He had known what I planned to do before I did. For I now called out to Nahara, my voice so plaintive and wretched I barely recognized it as my own.

“Come with me,” I pleaded, intent on calling her to me. “You don’t belong to them. Leave with me and I’ll protect you as I did before you ever came to this place or knew this people.”

There was no response, other than the sound of my own cries, for my words fell like stones, they had wrenched tears from me. The Man from the Valley came up beside me. I expected him to admonish me for my actions, for I was nothing but a woman. Instead he leaned in closely and without judgment. “Let me try to speak to her,” he urged.

I waited at the mouth of the cave. I noticed there was a shallow pool of still water. Surely the Essenes drank from this pool, though it was not fit for human thirst. In the muddy earth there grew a small acacia tree. Little more than a twig, it was abloom. A thousand bees came to its branches. I closed my eyes and listened to the hum. For a moment I was in the other world, in the grip of my other life, riding over the grasslands. I dreamed that I made a fire and burned a hundred branches and that the sparks flew into the sky and stayed in the heavens to become stars.

I rose when the Man from the Valley approached. I was parched from our journey, but upon seeing him I felt as though something had been quenched. I stood by his side as he told me the Essenes had agreed to accept the provisions. He had been brought before Abba so that a prayer could be offered on his behalf. The ancient teacher could barely speak, for he was so weak that the thread that tied him to this world was wearing thin. My sister had managed to stand nearby. After Abba finished chanting, she had whispered to the Man from the Valley so that he alone would hear. He was to tell me that she remembered me, the fastest rider, her father’s favorite son, the sister she had belonged to once, in another time and world.

WE WALKED in silence, as we always did. Our burden was lighter, for we no longer carried fruit and water and millet, as I no longer carried my sister’s fate in my hands. I had left her there. Whether or not we were to meet again in this lifetime was not for me to decide. She had renounced the girl I had brought to life, and because of this we were no longer bound to each other. Yet I would think of her not as a woman huddled in a cave, eyes downcast, waiting for the End of Days, but as the only birth I had ever witnessed, God’s great glory and miracle.