The Dovekeepers

“You hair is like fire,” he said.

He spoke our language strangely, the words frozen, cautious, yet he clearly knew it well, and perhaps had learned it before he’d been captured. Conscripts in the Roman army walked beside soldiers from many lands and found ways to communicate. This pronouncement about my hair, however, was not what I expected. I laughed despite myself. “Be careful,” I said. “You could get burned.”

After a silence is broken, there is often a torrent of speech. The Man from the North now told me that where he came from many of the women had red hair. Before he was conscripted by the Roman Legion, he had never been beyond the borders of his village, which contained perhaps two hundred residents, most of them his own kinsmen. His land was so cold that snow and ice lasted much of the year, the sky dark even during the day. For a brief time of the year, his world would become green, not as the desert blooms in clutches, in a mild haze, but in a curtain of deep, shuddering green, with grass as tall as olive trees and forests so wide it would take a month to find your way across.

The hotter our world became, the more I yearned to hear of his. We sat shaded by the fig trees in the blazing heat, unaware that the sun struck the earth so brutally. I listened, refreshed, to hear that in his land there were lakes as blue as lapis where the fish were the size of men. Warriors tattooed themselves with black ink and fought as fiercely as wolves; in combat they held shields that were stronger than anything we had, a metal that could not be broken with lances or axes. Such men could go an entire moon without sleeping so that they might keep watch over their women and their flocks, the sheep with hair so long it touched the earth, the goats the color of snow with eyes that were yellow orbs. If an enemy came up behind a warrior from this northland, he would quickly be slain with a single strike upon his throat.

“If all this is true, then why are you a slave?”

It was an insult to make such a remark to a man who had once been a warrior and then a soldier for the legion and was now the lowly slave of women. He might have taken offense, but he merely shrugged.

“Why are you?” he said simply.

I laughed. “I’m not.”

The Man from the North’s expression made it clear he disagreed.

“I’m not,” I insisted.

He gazed at me sadly. “You will be. I saw it in my own land.”

The Romans had captured his country, then had offered a way out of starvation for those who’d been conquered. The Man from the North had stood with his brothers and chosen to live. He was taken across the Cold Sea and brought to Rome before being sent out with the legion for Judea. While in Rome, he had seen miraculous things, baths where there was hot and cold running water, houses in which women and boys could be had for a small price, shops that sold monstrous creatures—elephants and eels and huge fish with lances attached to their heads. He had been to the Colosseum with the throngs who pushed and shoved through the cobbled gateways, watching gladiators battle. He could not believe all he’d witnessed; those vivid visions seemed like dreams to him still.

I asked if it was true that the Romans set men to fight against beasts. A man was no different from an animal in the Romans’ eyes, the slave told me, perhaps better sport because a man often called for his mother or his beloved in his last moments in the world, whereas an animal knew when to surrender.

I thought of Ben Simon and the mark on his face, and of the creature who had found him too bitter to eat. I asked the slave if he had seen men battle lions. He nodded, saying that gladiators feared lions more than any other creatures, even more so than the crocodiles who swam in huge tanks rolled into the center of the arena on logs, pulled by heavy ropes and chains by over a hundred men. Those water beasts could take a man in their mouths, dragging a victim into the deep to drown him, but it was possible to fight off a crocodile, to ram a knife into its eye and force a retreat. Some gladiators survived. But once a lion attacked, it would not back away. It would fight to the end, until there was a surrender and nothing was left but bones.

“Why do you ask about these beasts?” he wondered after I’d questioned him so thoroughly.

I shrugged, feigning no particular interest. “I dream about them sometimes.”

“Keep them in your dreams,” the Man from the North advised me, but I could tell from his gaze. He knew there was something more.

I TOOK TO listening to all of the slave’s stories. Some were so farfetched I barely believed him. He spoke about a creature called a stag, huge compared to the ibex that could be found in Judea. He could track one through the snow easily enough, even in a storm, for these deer rubbed their horns against trees and left their marks in this manner. In his world, the foxes turned white as snow was falling, then, when winter faded, changed back to red before your eyes. He vowed that the color of my hair was shared by all the most beautiful women in his land and, he added slyly, in mine. I laughed at some of what he told me, disbelieving that rivers could run silver, that the monsters in the ocean were so filled with water they spat into the air, that there were packs of wolves a hundred strong, calling to each other in the night with pure, cold voices.