The Dovekeepers

When Amram was no more, the Man from the Valley cut off the dead man’s armor to further dishonor him, so that the ground was littered with silver scales, and it could be known to God that here lay a coward unworthy of being called a warrior. Then the Man from the Valley took off his prayer shawl and covered Aziza, as though she were a man, a warrior who had fallen in battle. Perhaps that was what he wanted to believe. He could not bear to see her as a woman he had loved, a girl made of flesh, not iron, who had loved him in return.

When that maddened warrior had slipped back into the turmoil of the plaza, I hurried to my children. I closed their eyes and prayed for their spirits. I washed their feet and hands with water from the pool, though ashes had turned the water black. I wound the spells I had carried with me through the strands of their hair, so that they might be protected, if not in this world then in the World-to-Come. I thought of the moments of their births: Aziza’s in a chamber in Jerusalem where the women who worked at keshaphim urged me on to bring forth her life. Adir’s in a tent on the Iron Mountain, where I waited for my husband to ride his horse from the eastern reaches of Moab so he might be there on the tenth day to see his son and to name him a king of his people.

THE TEN went on their murderous rampage for our honor and for the Glory of God, and in this they had succeeded. As I made my way up the stairs to the plateau atop the mountain, there were bodies everywhere, those who loved each other, those who despised each other, those who had believed there would be freedom in Zion, those who had followed a husband or a brother, those who had been born on this mountain, those who had dreamed they would die here, all in a jumble upon the stones. I saw the raven in a black shawl who had cast me into the wilderness curled up in her garden, and I wept for her spirit. I saw Yael’s father, the assassin who had killed so many in the courtyards of the Temple in Jerusalem, splayed out near the barracks, his blood as bright as any flower.

I went to the dovecotes and opened the doors of the first two, at last coming to the stone columbarium that was shaped like a tower, the place where my daughters had most often worked beside me, where Revka had come in her mourning, where Yael had called the birds to her without a single word, as I knew she would when we’d gone to the marketplace in Jerusalem and she’d begged for a dove’s freedom and in return had given her promise to do whatever I asked.

I chased the doves out, shaking my shawl, whistling, as the hawk does, forcing them from their roosts. They lifted into the blackened sky all at once, flecking the darkness with their radiance, delivering the message that there was a time to die and a time to rise up.

THE MAN I loved met me at the door to my chamber. No one else was there, only the two of us, as there had been on the day he took me into his bed, when I left a scrim of vermilion on the bedclothes, not henna but blood. The others had fled. Yael had kept her promise. She’d done as I’d asked.

I let go of everything but my beloved. I did not care if there was blood upon him. I didn’t want to know how many he had slain, or if he had embraced his wife before he made quick of her or even if he’d asked for her forgiveness after all this time.

“Death walks beside us, but not with us,” he said to me as he took me into his embrace.

I was glad he hadn’t seen his new daughter. Had he done so, it would have been too painful for him to leave her, and I never wanted to be the cause of his pain, as I knew he never wished to cause me any grief. My mother had warned me what love would do to me. I hadn’t cared then, and I didn’t care now.

His eyes were gray, like the dove, like the mist that cleared when the world was first begun on the day God gave us the word and we could speak and our words turned the world into what it has come to be. I could have howled at fate and covered my head. I could have begged for more time, pleaded with him to flee with me. But perhaps I had been granted all that I had needed in this lifetime. My beloved was a stubborn man, a true believer. He was more complicated than any man I had ever known and the only one who could have called me to cross the Salt Sea and leave behind my husband and the green hills of Moab.

That was what my mother meant when she told me love would be my undoing. Love made you give yourself away, it bound you to this world, and to another’s fate. I lay down beside Eleazar. We were together as we had been even when we were apart, for we were one person, wed by more than our desire.

We had our last moments of life in this world, but I would have died a hundred times to have had his love. I kissed him in a way I would never kiss another. His spirit entwined with mine as he entered me and took me to be his. If I wept, it was only because water was my element, what I yearned for and needed most of all. When he was done, I still wept to give him up, although it had been written that I must. I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered, Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.