The Dovekeepers

There were seven hawks circling above me, echoing the seven sisters, stars that gather in the sky. I wore the white garments of a dovekeeper. Perhaps they thought I was ready to take flight and considered me a sacrifice. I climbed onto Herod’s wall, balancing on the thick stone blocks edged with the mark of the king. I lifted my arms straight out. The wind went through me. It shook me to my core. There was nothing but emptiness before me, yet I was not alone.

Spring 71 C.E.

Part Two

Summer 71 C.E.

The Baker’s Wife

There was only one language we understood, one prayer we remembered, one path we walked upon, so far from the throne of heaven we could no longer hear your voice.

They say that women cannot know the ways of our God, but I have seen His truth with my own eyes. Our God knows all and sees all and has as much compassion for the sparrow as he does for the hawk that hunts it across the sky. Before Him, everything disappears in the wind. If you place a handful of grain on a rock and turn your back, it will fly away. If you leave a sparrow in a tower, it will not be there when you return. If you ask a hawk for mercy, your words will be rendered mute.

That is what happened in my life: I turned my back. I could no longer hear the voice of the sparrow. I asked for kindness from a creature who knew only cruelty. I didn’t understand what the wind was capable of and how we must bow before it, grateful no matter where it may take us.

*

AS A girl I lived in a village north of Shiloh, where it was said the spring water could prevent miscarriages and bring children to barren women, such was the pleasure of God in this land. We settled in the Valley of the Cypresses, where the fields were green and there were five black goats in every shed. I married when I was a young woman, too inexperienced to know there was evil in the world. I was happy and I thought happiness lasted. On my door I kept an intricately decorated mezuzah, a symbol that brings happiness and luck. Each time I passed by I felt fortunate, assured that God would deliver us from evil. I uttered my thanks to Adonai without thought and with the foolhardy conviction that wickedness would never come near. At night my bed was filled with straw so soft that I fell asleep as soon as I closed my eyes. My house was made of stone with beams fashioned of local cypress cut in the woods nearby. My husband was kind and good-hearted, yet still I was granted more. When my daughter was born, she was so beautiful people stopped in the marketplace to congratulate me on my good fortune. I should have begun to worry then, for as fortune comes to you, so does it slip away.

AS THE YEARS drifted by, my dreams were rich with the scent of bread, for below our sleeping chamber my husband had his bread ovens, the kind we called a tannur, made of mounds of rounded clay. The pale smoky clay glowed with orange heat when the ovens were stoked before daybreak. Throughout the years the fire that burned below our rooms ensured our warmth. There was a millstone in our courtyard, and two donkeys to pull it, grinding the wheat we stored in a tall, wooden granary.

My husband had learned the art of baking from his father, as he had from his father before him. No baker’s bread tasted the same as another’s, that was what my husband told me, for a baker’s life went into each loaf. Some baked with piety, some with prayers, some with the intent to create more than mere sustenance, raising their craft into an art, entranced by the beauty of the flame of the tannur and by the art of the challah.

My husband was all three, pious and filled with prayer but also intent on the mystery of the rising loaf, the miracle of the manner in which wheat and water became alive in his hands. The bread he baked was so delicious wayfarers often found us by following its yeasty odor through the village, guided by a map of rich fragrance sent into the air expressly for those driven by hunger. My husband left out a dough offering to honor Adonai every morning as he said the blessing. In return his blessings rose to God and we had all that we wanted in this world.

My husband had his secrets, as all bakers do. I was privileged to learn from him over the years simply by watching him work. He kneaded the dough longer than most, and the yeast he used to give the bread life was a secret recipe kept in cool stone jars, left to ferment for the best part of a year. He dusted the dough with cumin and coriander and salt before he slid the loaves into the oven on flat wooden boards. Perhaps most important, he made his mark on the dough, the letter R scrawled in honor of my name, Revka, for after so many years I was still his bride, the girl to whom he’d pledged his life.

When the days were without haze, we could see to where snow sometimes fell in the highlands. The vista I saw from my own house was the only one I ever wished to survey. I would never have believed I would come to live in a king’s fortress where the wind engulfs us and claims us, making it clear we are nothing more than a moment in time. A hundred years earlier, Herod walked across the same plaza I must cross each morning on my way to the dovecote. Now there are poor men sleeping in his chambers, but these poor men draw breath while the king who murdered his own wife, Mariamne, and his sons, and anyone else who stood in his way, is nothing but dust. Warriors sharpen their knives in what had been the royal stable, a huge, cavernous place that once housed a hundred horses, each said to possess the ability to climb the serpent’s path in the dark. Blindfolds were slipped over their eyes so they could not see how treacherous the ground they trod upon truly was. Had they been aware of the staggering heights, surely they would have panicked and tumbled into the abyss, one after the other, as if falling from the sky. The same holds true for us. If any among us who reside in this stronghold paused for a moment to tear the blindfold of faith from our eyes, we would see how perilous our perch was, how shattering a fall would be.