The Dovekeepers

Va’yees’sa va’ya’vo va’yett. In the name of I am what I am, the name of God, get out. You have journeyed and now you have arrived. Amen Amen Selah.

The woman had been wailing, but now the sound worsened. Jackals called to each other in this way, crying in the night. The poor servant woman was so far inside herself, at the deepest core, it seemed impossible she would ever surface again. I thought of my mother in her last moments, before the silence fell, how her voice might have called out against the brutality of her fate, how my father might have wept at the door as he cursed me.

The laboring woman spoke to those who were not there, praying to our God, Adonai, and to Abraxas, a god of the Egyptians, and to Ashtoreth. She made secret bargains, promising all she would be willing to sacrifice if only her torment would end, her life, her soul, her newborn child.

“Take them!” she cried out. “Take me as well!”

I was frightened that she would call the warriors to us with her wailing, or summon demons we could not repel, but Shirah said no, it was silence we needed to fear. Silence at a birth meant that the demons had won and that Lilith, the night creature from Babalonyia with long black hair and black wings who preys on other women, seducing their men and stealing their children, had prevailed.

Shirah wrote down the name of Obizoth, the demoness that strangles newborns, then burned the papyrus upon which she’d written that vile name. The smoke was scarlet, the color of blood. We were the defenders and we were in battle. I felt I could have taken a demon by the throat, should it dare to appear before us. The desert had taught me that we must destroy so that we might live. We had piles of salt to throw upon any creatures of the night that might venture close by. I took a handful and rubbed it across my abdomen, for unborn children were especially vulnerable to demons.

We remained beside the fire, the sweat from our own bodies stinging our eyes. As the fire flamed red and then blue, Shirah recited her devotion to Adonai so that the angel Raphael would thwart any attempt to do harm to the baby when at last it emerged. The mother-to-be began to have contractions. When I looked, I could see movement inside her; a storm was passing through her body. I found I was reciting Shirah’s incantation. I had learned the words and memorized them, for I, too, had come to believe this alone could keep us from harm.

Shirah had us move the woman away from the flames as soon as her liquid came in a rush. I realized that I was terrified the child might not follow, but Nahara, though she wasn’t more than thirteen, had no fear of what was to happen.

“Finally he arrives,” she said, overjoyed. She clapped her hands, then crouched down, ready. The baby came into her hands quickly, his sulky face twisted into a scowl. Nahara grinned, fearless, though blood was everywhere. I thought, She is a woman and I am not. She is already everything and I am nothing at all.

“What will happen to her now?” I asked Nahara, nodding to the new mother.

“She will return to the woman who is her mistress and say she found a baby in the cliffs.”

“And will she be believed?” I wondered.

“My mother will escort her. They’ll take her in. They’ll believe what they must so that the man of the household can have a new son.”

Shirah knelt and reached inside the woman, chanting as the afterbirth was coaxed from within. It would be buried in the orchard, where no one would discover it. What had once given this child life would bring good fortune to our crops.

The night had been a whirlwind. At last silence washed over us. We were slick and hot, too spent to cleanse ourselves. Now that the baby had been delivered and was bound in clean cloth, the mother grabbed for him and put him to her breast. I heard a sob and realized it came from my throat.

I understood the reason Shirah had wanted me here on this night. She had divined what was inside me. She came up beside me to whisper, so no one would overhear.

“Did you think you were the only lioness?” she asked now that our work was completed. “Did you think I wouldn’t know?”

MY BROTHER led a raid soon afterward. It was an honor for him to do so, a mark of his bravery and his favor in the eyes of Ben Ya’ir. Yet those who loved him wished he were not so honored. We feared his was an errand that would lead him to the World-to-Come. In the dovecote, Aziza was overwrought. Her hair was tangled down her back, a mass of black. She refused meals and spent her evenings by the wall, gazing at the emptiness of the white fields of stones God had set before us. It was still possible to see the footprints of the warriors who had ventured to the valley below, but they faded, and the dust blew them away, and soon enough it seemed that they had never taken this path.