The Dovekeepers

They meant to devour us.

They attached the poor creature to a metal post, constructed directly across from the palace that had belonged to King Herod. This was where Silva’s camp was to be built, in a location that would be an insult and a challenge every time we looked upon it. While they built, we heard the roaring of the vanquished beast.

Yael had confided to me that she dreamed of a lion. As she had feared this creature, so had she been drawn to it. She wept when she told me this, and I understood why she was torn by the meaning of her dreams. A lion may lie beside an ibex in the shade if his appetite is sated, they may even sleep together, their backs resting against each other, but on the next day, if the lion wakes with hunger, then he must serve himself.

Now Yael’s dream had appeared before us. She stood beside me and wept to see the lion subdued in his chains, trapped as we were, enslaved by those whose brutality was an affront to nature, and to our people, and to God. After the dust had settled, we could observe him clearly, for there was only the pale blue air of winter before us and the light was clear, the wind fresh. Many said it was possible to view heaven from this mountain of ours, but now we seemed much closer to the first gate of hell. What we heard and what awaited us did not come from the reaches of God. It was below us, in the roar of the lion.

SOON ENOUGH a village was constructed by camp followers, with tents and shacks set up overnight. The scent of food drifted over the valley, cooking meat, bread, spices. We watched, poverty-stricken, starving, like ghosts at a table laden with a great feast. The building went on without ceasing, with slaves working through the night. This was an endeavor that was meant to last; the Romans were settling in. They would not leave, and they would not admit defeat. They began to build twelve towers, set a hundred yards apart, rising so quickly it seemed they came into being before our very eyes. Once the towers had been constructed, any man wishing to break through to the eastern valley would be running a gauntlet, with guards atop the observation posts. He would never make it to the other side.

As the slaves were completing the camps, more were brought in from the north to give form to a wall of stones. This wall was no worry to us until it began to zigzag into the mountains in a strange design. We did not understand the Romans’ intentions, for it seemed a fool’s endeavor to set a thousand Jewish slaves to labor throughout the day and night, carrying boulders so heavy many of the workers fell prostrate on the ground. When these pitiful men could not rise again, they were slain and left in the dirt, for it was easier to dispose of them than to heal them. The Romans were intent on this wall they built. We assumed they meant to enclose their camps, thereby protecting themselves from us. Certainly our warriors had plans for raids, however perilous, already in the making.

As soon as he was told of this wall, Ben Ya’ir came to look down upon it. When he took note of the stones cutting across the cliffs, he saw that this was a wall meant to encircle us. It surrounded not only the Roman camps but the entire mountain. It was a siege wall, six feet thick. Our leader immediately understood that its purpose was not to protect the Roman camp but to keep us in.

Some of the warriors laughed at this, for the wall was not so high that a man couldn’t climb over beneath the cover of night. They had not yet realized there was another purpose to this endeavor. The Romans intended a crucifixion of the land that belonged to us, each rock in the wall serving as a nail in our flesh. They were telling us that we belonged to them, like the lion on the chain, like the slaves at their bidding, like the six hundred thousand they had slaughtered in their war against the Jews.

They wanted our fear, and that was what they received. Dread went through the fortress as though it was a fever. All at once the blue air seemed difficult to breathe. We had made a world here, one that mirrored the villages where we had once known freedom and the city we loved and hoped to return to. We minted our own pennies, the bronze poured into molds in the palace workshops, imprinted with our dream: For the Freedom of Zion. We had our marketplace, our bakers and wine merchants, the potters who fashioned jugs and cooking vessels from the clay that was found below in the nachal. As Adonai had created us in His image, so we had created Masada in the image of our past lives and the lives we hoped to live again, when we were free.

Now that the siege wall was in sight, people panicked, afraid that Zion would never rise again. They rushed the storerooms, greedy in their fear, thinking only of survival, as the jackal does in the middle of the night when the morning seems such distant territory. But even the jackal shares with his kind, and does not trample them, or forsake them. Our people were maddened by the deeds of the Romans and by their fear of what was to come during a siege that might last months.