The Dovekeepers

I listened to such claims without comment or expression, but there was a shiver of unease along my spine. Everything I’d done since leaving Jerusalem was surely a sin in someone’s eyes. If the women from the field knew I had called to a lion and brought him to me and had never once turned him away, even during the time of the month when I was a niddah, what would they have said of me? What might they have thought had they caught sight of me in the desert, waiting on the cliff, wanting him more than I wanted purity or obedience or duty?

I turned away when they spoke badly of Aziza. I had seen her shoveling out the nests in the dovecotes until her hands were bleeding. It was hardly suitable work for an angel, any more than it was a calling for a witch.

“Watch her,” the women insisted. “She will never come to the baths. She won’t remove her tunic or scarves when anyone can see her body. There’s a reason for her modesty.”

They were jealous, envious that wherever Aziza walked men gazed at her, that her hair was the color of night, that her smile was sweet, that she would not have thought to speak about them with rancor as they now defamed her. Perhaps they, too, had seen her blush at the mention of my brother’s name. Several of the women clearly wanted my favor only because I was Amram’s sister. The one called Naomi drifted up beside me, so close I could feel the heat of her body in the cool water. Jealousy burned like that. I knew this only too well.

“Be careful around the witch’s daughter,” Naomi warned me. Clearly, she believed I was a woman who wanted a friend. “And never try to catch her. The sheydim have wings.”

Aziza’s wings were black, she went on, like those of a raven, and like a raven, it was said, she sang to announce the arrival of the Angel of Death. She perched on Herod’s wall each time our warriors went out, gazing over the landscape through silver-colored eyes.

“You’re mistaken,” I said humbly, not wishing to press the issue.

I knew that the Angel of Death was never announced. He came in silence and left in sorrow. He arrived when you imagined you were safe, as he had when we were following the path of blue flags through the desert, a cure for Ben Simon in hand.

Walking back to my chamber from the mikvah, my hair dripping wet, I felt cool and superior to those foolish women in the bath. But as I crossed the plaza, I saw a figure in the dark that seemed to resemble an angel, moving the way angels are said to do, in the corners of our sight.

For an instant I feared that Death was indeed near and the women in the bath had been right. I shivered to think his messenger had been let loose upon us. Or perhaps I had forgotten to lock the dovecote and the doves had escaped to conceal themselves in the branches of the olive trees, rustling the leaves. It was too dark to see clearly, so I stopped where I was, blinking back moonlight. I saw the glint of a girl’s shape sifting through the night.

It was then I spied my brother beside a small pool where a hundred years earlier King Herod had kept fish, small, glimmering creatures said to be made of pure gold. When a hawk plucked up one of the king’s treasured fish, he would sink to earth immediately, weighed down by greed. I saw a girl run to Amram, flying into his arms. There was no need of a spell to bind him, he was bound in the knots of his own desire without the use of the slightest bit of sorcery. He had walked into this net of love and tied the ropes himself, not because Aziza was an angel but rather because she was flesh and blood.

A SUDDEN cold wind surprised us all in this mild month. When it had gone, fruit fell from the trees and scattered across the stones. Some women vowed the remains of the figs dashed onto the ground formed the shape of the red hawks that circled above us, waiting to claim our fortress for their own. There was a hurry to take the scythes into the fields of emmer and wheat, and collect what could still be of use before the stalks turned brown. Our people said a prayer, led by the wise men and the members of the council. The highest of our priests, usually cloistered inside the synagogue, where he studied and gave advice, now came to stand upon the wall and lead the men in prayer. His name was Menachem ben Arrat, and he was known to be one of the five most learned men in Judea. People said he had heard God’s voice on the mountaintop. The situation was dire, so he now revealed himself, for without the orchards we would have no sustenance and without the doves there would be no orchards. I had learned to appreciate the cooing of the birds, a call so beautiful King Solomon’s great glory Song of Songs celebrated it as though it was the voice of one’s beloved. O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice, for sweet is thy voice; and thy countenance is comely.