The Dovekeepers

We celebrated the Feast of Unleavened Bread, but this year was unlike any other, for we could no longer bring sacrifices to the Temple. We feasted when our prayers were complete, but we kept an eye on the desert as we rejoiced in our freedom. In the evenings I had begun to accompany Revka to the looms. Working there kept our minds on the task at hand. But we could not avoid the gossip of other women, and although we didn’t join in, we couldn’t help but overhear. Often the women at the looms spoke of our leader, who was our hero and our only hope. They praised him, and there were those among them who wished they were his wife. Even married women spoke of this, and hid their eyes so no one would see that, although they laughed, they were serious in their envy of the one to whom he was wed. I hadn’t known Ben Ya’ir had a wife. Revka pointed her out. A quiet, dark woman in veils who kept herself apart. I’d seen her walking through the orchards without knowing who she was.

When I wondered what it would be like to be the wife of a great man like Eleazar ben Ya’ir, Revka laughed bitterly. “Take a good look the next time you spy her,” she suggested. “See if she seems happy with her fate.”

*

I THOUGHT OF how little we knew of our own fate when I went alone to the dovecote. There the Man from the North spoke to me of the threat that hung over us. He took my hand in his, which was reason enough to kill a slave, if you believed in slavery, or in murder, or in anything other than what I believed in now.

“If you think Rome won’t come here, you’re mistaken. They may have already begun their plans. They won’t let a single fortress stand in Judea. They want to show the world they’ve won.”

“Did they confide in you?” I teased. I took my hand from his. He looked like ice, but ice is known to burn. “Is that how you know so much? While you were carrying their weapons and saluting them, did the generals take you aside and tell you their plans?”

“I listened and I heard. That’s what I do.”

I had set to waving away the doves in order to gather their pale, speckled eggs.

The Man from the North came to stand beside me.

“I plan to leave before Rome comes here.”

He spoke straightforwardly, as if we were equals. He was admitting a crime before the action was taken, confiding his intended escape. Had I believed in attending to rules, I would have had to report his remarks to the council.

“That’s your plan? To walk home? How do you think you’ll accomplish that? You don’t know what it’s like to be in the desert on your own. You were protected and fed by the legion. You wouldn’t like what you found out there.”

“What did you find?”

What was inside me, the part no one knew, that which had been bitten by the lion.

“Something that will be apparent to all soon enough.” I had no sense of what caused me to talk in this intimate way.

“You think I don’t see you, but I do,” the Man from the North said.

Anyone would have expected his eyes to be cast down, but he was staring right at me. In the end, I was the one to look away.

THE MILD MONTH of Iyar had come to us. Nights were no longer black, as they had been. Instead, they turned a deep blue, like the threads of a prayer shawl. Light drifted through the oncoming dark, lengthening the evenings, keeping the dusk at bay. I spent many hours at the looms and had become a fine weaver. I dyed some of the wool myself, my arms tinted by the vats of color set out after the sheep had been sheared and the wool spun and cleaned. Saffron and sunflowers were used for yellow, green could be produced from stained lichen, red from madder root and from the peeled skin of the pomegranate, black from the mulberry tree.

I had begun a weaving that was not unlike the garment worn by the Man from the North. He had allowed me to take a piece of cloth from his tunic so I could study the unusual pattern. I kept it beneath my sleeping pallet, along with the last blue square that remained from the scarf my brother had given me. The token didn’t mean anything. I simply appreciated the intricacy of the weaving. As I worked, other women gathered around to offer praise. I showed them how I fed the loom with different strands until the sequence emerged, the thread crisscrossing, forming squares. Blue like the sea, white like a star, red like a ruby.

The Man from the North had taking to calling me Odeum, our word for ruby. The others in the dovecote soon overheard and were quick to determine that he spoke our language. Once he’d been found out, he was at their mercy. There was no way for him to pretend he didn’t understand their commands.

“Just like any man, he can talk when he wants to,” the women cried. Aziza and Nahara took to calling me Ruby as well, just to tease me. When anyone wanted the Man from the North to do something, they would laugh and call out, “Let Ruby tell him. He’s her slave.”