The Dovekeepers

“My name is ugly,” I assured her. “Unlike yours.”

We walked together across the Western Plaza, which had been paved with huge stones brought across the sea from Greece. Nahara kept pace beside me. “I have to call you something,” she insisted. She was a serious, quiet girl, but stubborn, set between an older sister and a younger brother, accustomed to making her own way.

There were those who believed if you knew the name of something you had access to its essence. Most parents would not reveal a male child’s name after birth, not until he was circumcised eight days later, so he could gather his strength and not be as vulnerable to demons who might call to him. Nahara shrugged when I said every name was a secret known only to Adonai. She insisted I probably had a beautiful name, for I had the most beautiful hair she had ever seen. All the women in the settlement were talking about it, she told me. They said I had been burned in a fire and that was the cause of the flecks on my skin and my flame-colored hair.

“They should be careful I don’t breathe on them,” I warned. “I could be a dragon. They might be covered by sparks.”

Nahara laughed, then confided that her mother had spied me in the auguratorium and thought I had a special talent. “That’s why you’ll work with us in the dovecotes. She chose you when she saw you in the tower.”

My heart sank. There were so many places I would have preferred to be sent, nearly anywhere would have been an improvement: the olive groves, the bakers’, even the goat barns. There were three columbaria, the Roman-style dovecotes, where I was to work. Two were built as oblongs, but the third was a circular tower with a platform on the top floor used for observation. The windows of all were covered by screens, so prying hawks couldn’t enter. All three buildings were made of stone and covered with white plaster, raised from the ground so that snakes in search of eggs couldn’t slither inside. Thousands of birds were kept, and each of the niches carved into the white walls housed a pair of doves, mated for life.

During the time when the Roman garrison occupied Masada, the shelves had been used as funerary chambers, to store the ashes of the dead, but now they once again housed nesting turtledoves. Whatever the Romans had corrupted during their time here after King Herod’s fall, our rebels took back for their own usage. What they had used for death had been transformed into life in the beating hearts of the doves. We did not believe in turning flesh to ash but rather in honoring the bones of our forefathers returning the body to the earth, from whence it came in the days of creation. What had housed the dead during the Roman occupation was once more filled with song, the cooing tirr tirr I had learned to imitate in the wilderness so that the doves might come to me and consider me one of their own.

Among the abominations the Romans had committed was to use the synagogue for their stables. People said it had taken weeks to clean out the excrement and cleanse the area. Even now there was said to be the smell of horseflesh when the rains came, so incense was lit every morning. But no incense could disguise the rich, moist odor of the doves’ leavings, which assaulted me when Nahara led me into the stone dovecote. Of the three, this was the largest, filled with the stench of the birds. Even worse was the noise. When we entered the murk through heavy wooden doors, the sound was overwhelming, for together the doves shared one voice. I stopped, shaken by the fluttering of wings, once again yearning for the silence I had known in the wilderness.

Nahara smiled when she saw my reaction, her face upturned. “They don’t bite,” she promised. “You’ll become accustomed to them.”

She picked up a bird that had fluttered to the floor, holding it gently. We were to care for them, feed them, collect their eggs. Most important, we were to gather their excrement, used to fertilize the fields. That was why such beautiful groves arose on this cliff, where the soil was little more than limestone covered with a thin dusting of earth, and why the air smelled like almonds. The doves’ leavings turned the fields fertile; their waste was the secret to creating a garden in the wilderness.

There were three other women in the dovecote, all busy until our arrival. Now they turned to me. One would imagine such nasty business would have been the last sort of work anyone would have wanted, but these women seemed proud of what they did. One, an older woman whose name was Revka, gazed at me disapprovingly, as though I had stumbled uninvited into her domain and she had already gauged me as unworthy. The others were Nahara’s elder sister and mother, each more beautiful than the other. Aziza was sixteen, composed, with dusky olive skin. As she stood beside her mother, I could hardly tell them apart. But it was Shirah, the mother, who had chosen me.