The Dovekeepers

I had once believed I could control the rain as I could call upon it, but now, as I gazed upon our enemies, I saw I had been wrong. Only the angel Beree could contain the rain and make it serve him, and then only by the grace of God. What I had called for had enriched our enemies. The Romans bathed in the rainwater and gave thanks to their gods. The myrtle bloomed, and its scent filled the air. Herds of ibex came to lie down before the Roman camps to drink from the pools, though it meant they would be slaughtered, and it seemed that they, too, were a gift from the heavens.

THOUGH he was ailing, I left my son in the care of his sister and asked Yael to accompany me to the auguratorium. I had been saving the bones of sacrificed doves, drying them in the sun, so that I might now cast for the future.

We climbed the stairs to the tower. The month of Adar was beginning, the time of the blooming of almond trees, and the air was fragrant. From our perch we could see the Roman camp in its entirety, a circle of brutality. The bones I’d brought along in a silk bag had become so white they appeared incandescent in the gathering dark. I thought of the doves who had given their lives, how beautiful they were, how loyal to each other, how unafraid they were of us, their keepers, even when they were to be sacrificed.

Yael cleared the sand, then poured a circle of ashes that would contain the future so it would not spill into the present. She smoothed out the ashes with the knife she always carried in her tunic. As she did so, she recited a hymn to King Solomon. She had a beautiful voice; every chant I had taught her was far more lovely in her mouth than it had been in mine. The purity of her song carried across the valley, and for a moment our brethren who were slaves toiling below us looked upward, as if called by name.

I had taught Yael well, as I’d known I would from the moment I saw her enter the Snake Gate. Though she did not remember me, I had known her long ago. This was the reason I insisted she take the gold amulet my mother had given to me. Before I gave birth to my first daughter and was cast out of Jerusalem, before I was taken to the Iron Mountain by a man I never called by name, before Nahara entered this world, before I had a son who was named Adir, a name his father allowed me, for it means noble to my people, before the doves brought me here, Yael was my daughter, though she was not born to me, and I was her immah, her beloved mother, though I was little more than a girl myself.

In Jerusalem I’d whispered the songs of my mother to her long before either of us had ever heard of this fortress. I had combed her hair, and fed her, and watched over her, even though her father had instructed me to leave her hair unplaited and give her nothing but crusts, for he wished that she had never entered this world and blamed her for his grief.

I came to them as a servant, a simple girl with long black hair, so worthless that the assassin never glanced at my face, and knew neither my features nor my history. Had my mother known of my condition, she would have been shocked to discover I had become a housemaid, for I could read Aramaic and Hebrew and Greek and had been trained to speak with the most learned men in Alexandria. In fact, I was relieved to be gone from the house of her kinsmen, who had come to despise me. Eleazar ben Ya’ir’s mother was the one who sent me to be a servant. When I first came to her, she brought me to the mikvah, for she had the sense that I was tamé, impure. As I slipped out of my tunic, I made certain to stand in the shadows, but she saw me for who I was. She drew a deep breath when she spied my tattoos, then quickly murmured a prayer.

My aunt kept watch over her son after that, for she did not trust my upbringing. Soon enough her fear was realized. She knew what was between us from the glances we shared and quickly divined why her son no longer turned to his wife, though they had been wed only a short time. Though my aunt had promised my mother I would be safe in her home, she sent me away, hastily making plans without Eleazar’s knowledge, finding me work in a household where the mother had died. It was a place of ill fortune, and no one would work there. That was why I was accepted for the position, though I was a girl with little knowledge of household chores, so young and inexperienced I often cried myself to sleep because I missed my mother so.

Before she sent me away, Eleazar’s mother tied an herbal amulet to my cloak and told me it was good luck. I smiled and thanked her, but I knew it was nothing of the kind. She’d gone to a practitioner of keshaphim for a charm that would bind me to solitude and keep me from her son. My mother had taught me about such things, and I recognized the root of henbane. As soon as I was sent into the street, I plucked out the thread. I left the amulet in a gutter that ran with filth, for that was where it belonged. I said the prayer of protection, Amen Amen Selah, so that He our Lord, blessed be His name, would cast away my aunt’s ill will against me.