The Dovekeepers

“Yes, of course you will,” she murmured. She didn’t sound angry, rather she appeared to be a woman who had surrendered and no longer needed to bother with the details of those who would remain on earth, except to make certain that the husband she loved would be loved in return.

After that I couldn’t look at her, my only friend who’d been so kind to me. I helped as best I could, crouching beside her with a dampened rag to cool her burning skin. I boiled a tea of nettles and mint, but she couldn’t drink. I made a broth from the bones and meat of a partridge, but she shook her head and turned me away. I had never nursed anyone, nor had I attended to the ill or the dying. She lay there uncomplaining, as did the children, who moaned softly. In Jerusalem the minim could be paid to come with their secret chants. They would pray for cures from the Infinite One, and as masters of pharmaka they had access to medicines that could cure blindness, headaches, fever. The root of the peony could be crushed and digested by those who had seizures; hot wax could stop bleeding. The minim wrote the Almighty’s name a thousand times, the scroll slipped inside a roll of leather, prayers with mysteries so private they could only be whispered to God alone. If I could have, I would have gone to one of the women in the alleyways such as the one I’d turned to for Amram’s amulet, for they often had access to darker spells and could bring back a life the Angel of Death seemed poised to snatch away.

But we had no one to whom we might plead for a cure. We had nothing but dust. Time passed, but the fevers did not. Even I knew a body could contain such demons for only so long.

One evening Ben Simon did not come to me. I went to the place where the tamarisk grew. The rocks I’d placed so carefully had been jumbled up, perhaps by wild camels or by jackals making a den for the night. Either way, the spell had been broken. I came back to camp and found him holding his children, weeping. Now I knew I had been wrong. A person could indeed cry in the desert, even one marked by the bite of a lion. At that moment I understood who I was to him. I did not come first, or second, or even third.

It did not diminish the way I felt or who he was to me.

But I knew.

There was only one thing I could do to please him. When I told Ben Simon I would journey to search for a cure, he embraced me. I drank in his gratitude as though it were water. I wanted to set forth alone, but he not would allow it. A woman in the desert was like a bird in a snare, there for anyone to catch. He insisted my father go with me, and although my father thought little of me, he agreed to be my companion, perhaps only to flee from those who were so ill.

Ben Simon gave me his knife, the one he had used to murder so many. There were rusty stains upon it, but the silver blade was so sharp that when I grazed my hand against it blood sprang from my thumb. I kept the knife in my tunic, wrapped inside a flat piece of wool, tied with a string made of my goat’s threaded hair. Ben Simon made certain I took my pet along, so that her milk would give us sustenance if we found nothing else. He gave me the flask in which he carried water and the last of the barley cakes. I took these things, though I was seized with the impulse to give it all back. As a gift marked a beginning, so, too, did it signify an ending. Something was happening as we said good-bye. He was giving me all he had, and yet a curtain had been drawn between us. I could feel my throat closing up, my heart hitting against my chest. I looked upon my beloved’s face, but he no longer saw inside me. I had become transparent, no more to him than air. It was as it had been on the day we left Jerusalem, before he spied me sifting through the mud for water, before he knew my name. I thought perhaps this was the way an assassin said farewell, fiercely and with dignity. I had no idea that he could already read what had been written.

WE LEFT when the morning was dark and there were hawks spiraling across the sky.

My father and I went without knowing how long it might take to find a cure or if there was indeed anything for us to find. Mistrust was everywhere, and for good reason. We were as likely to be murdered as we were to reach a settlement. Bands of robbers occupied caves all across Judea. There were escaped slaves, thieves, rebels with nothing more to lose. The wilderness was enormous. Every limestone cliff resembled ones we had already passed. We circled, lost, for several days to avoid soldiers from the Roman Legion, the goat that I led mawing to warn us of our mistake. There were those who wandered here for all eternity, who were never seen by civilized people again. I had heard stories from the women at the well in Jerusalem of a lost young girl who lived with the hyenas, who would run with them, and eat carrion, and sleep among them, and who, when she was found, had sharpened teeth, for she was no longer human.