The Dovekeepers

The Man from the Valley had come upon us. He was nearly unrecognizable, his countenance resembling a beast as much as a man. That was why the Almighty had given us prayer, to distinguish men from animals, to leave the beasts inside of us locked away, as demons are locked in lead jars. This warrior wore nothing but his metal bands of agony and a tunic that was sodden with blood.

But no matter his appearance, the Man from the Valley was indeed human, though he himself might deny it. When Uri reached for me again, grasping at my leg, the Man from the Valley shouted at me to dodge backward. He made a quick sweep to complete Uri’s death, so swift it seemed his ax was made of light. Perhaps Gabriel, who was the lord of fire and of vengeance, did indeed walk beside him.

After the Man from the Valley had slain the younger warrior, he knelt to sing our song for the dead, which many said was the only prayer he would offer up to God. He chanted, in a trance. When he rose, I saw that he had been marked with the letters of the Almighty’s name across his chest and arms, for he was the last of the ten, the one who must slay all of the death-givers and then bring upon his own death.

Once he had been a learned man and a scholar, he had been a man of faith. He had partaken of a lottery to see who would be the last man, and God had chosen him for this terrible last task. Of all the death-givers, he was the most fierce, for his rising indignation over the condition of his kind had left him without fear. He was inured to violence; whether it was inflicted upon himself or upon another made no difference to him now.

At that moment I was unsure whether he would be our murderer or our salvation. The children had stopped in their path, watching with horror. The boys knew their father and called out to him, but he did not answer. Instead he gazed at me, unguarded, and in that moment I saw the man he had been, the one he would be again when he walked into the World-to-Come and bowed before the Creator of all things.

“I leave my children to you,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Wherever they go my wife abides.”

Even now he could not forsake her, or lose her to the beasts who took her down. If he’d been another man, he might have come with us to hide from this mayhem, for I murmured that we were making our escape. But he had been searching for Death for so long he could not linger among us now. He was finally about to meet the one he had been waiting for, his ax ready to take up against Mal’ach ha-Mavet in the only way he could ever win this battle, against himself.

He breathed into his hand, then took my hand in his and told me what I must do.

I ran to those who awaited me. We hurried to the cistern and took the steps as quickly as we could. There was darkness before us, and the echo of the water beneath us. At the mouth to the cave, I paused to tell Revka she must kiss my hand, for this was what the Man from the Valley had commanded of me. When she did, I told her of her son-in-law’s gift to her. Neshamah, the breath of her daughter’s soul, was returned to her, to keep for all eternity and to take with us, wherever we might go.

Our footsteps pounded as we went down into the earth, but only to our ears, for there was no one else left to hear. We could feel the silence of the dead, but it did not follow us. There was only the languid echo of still water, splashing as rocks fell from beneath our footsteps. When we reached the bottom of the well, the white plaster ledge shone and led the way. It seemed that the stars had fallen underground.

We slipped into the water, and that was where we hid from death. We were there on the sixteenth of Nissan, as the day of Passover dawned.

The heat of the fires above us passed over us. As our people were saved when the Angel of Death passed over them when they were slaves in Egypt, so, too, had we eluded him. We slept at the mouth of the well, for we were exhausted and had spent hours in the water, paddling, holding on to the sharp plaster ledge until our fingers bled. We then had pulled ourselves from the cistern so that we might rest alongside the mouth of the well and not drown in our state of exhaustion. There we lay, spent, our hair trailing in the water, our fingers raw, our tunics drenched.

Perhaps we dreamed that those who had died lingered nearby, for they whispered to us in the night. We were so close to the dead we could hear them in the way it is possible to hear wind in a storm even when you are safely hidden away. When we woke, we marveled that we were still living. The black ash had been washed from us during our hours in the cistern, and we could see bands of light streaming from above, for it was morning, and another day had come.

We gazed up in alarm when we heard muffled voices. We thought they were the voices of the dead and perhaps we were among them and hadn’t recognized the World-to-Come, taking it to be the world we had always known before this murderous night had fallen. For all we knew, we, too, were among the dead and had not yet realized we had left our bodies, lingering as the dead often do before they can move on. Fainthearted, we bowed our heads.