The Dovekeepers

I CRIED the first night after I worked in the dovecote, a woman my age who should have known better, embarrassed to find myself in tears, my back turned to my grandsons so they wouldn’t know of my humiliation. We had arrived at the mountain only days before. Our feet were still aching, our skin sunburned, our silence thick in our throats. Everything seemed new and strange—the men in silver armor, the women toiling in the fields under almond trees. I should have given thanks for our salvation, instead I wept like a child in despair.

Although I tried to hide my sorrow, I could not. My grandsons’ small hands patted my shoulders for comfort, and I felt the concern in their touch. They could not speak, and perhaps their affliction allowed them to divine what others ignored, the true nature of the world. They could catch a moth in the dark by taking note of the soft, fluttering rhythm of its wings. They could gauge whether the wind had traveled from the west or if it arose in the east simply by the sound. Perhaps these abilities were miracles.

Where there was one miracle, surely, there would be more.

I cried myself to sleep and awoke early after an unsettled night. My eyes were red and puffy. I expected the boys to still be asleep, but my younger grandson, Levi, who had just turned seven, was crouched beside me, waiting for me to wake, his gaze trained upon me. He took my hand and led me outside, my guide through the dim light. I felt that I was still in a dream, but the dust and the sound of goats in their pens were real enough. We were here inside this fortress, so far from everything we knew, the fields of poppies and thistle, the cypress groves, the blooms of pomegranates, whose bell-shaped, scarlet flowers would turn to fruit before our eyes.

Levi led me to the wall that overlooked the white cliffs which stretched on as far as we could see. We watched the doves fly. Let loose at this hour so they might stretch their wings, they turned the entire sky white. They rose and disappeared, then returned again, drawn back to their nests. They were devoted to their mates. Therefore, couples were never allowed to fly together; the loyalty of one brought it back to its partner time and time again, despite the lure of freedom.

I understood what my grandson was telling me in bringing me to see the beauty of their flight. It was an honor to work with creatures who lived in the sky, so close to Adonai. If it was my fate to do so, it was not a burden but a gift. I turned and kissed Levi’s forehead and whispered a prayer of gratitude for all I still had.

THERE HAS BEEN talk about us ever since my son-in-law brought us here. People gazed at us trying to guess at the catastrophe in our family, convinced that even among the unfortunate, we deserved their pity because of my grandsons’ inability to speak. They know nothing more, only that we were driven out of our home, as they were, and that we chose to come here. We could have gone north toward Nazareth or Galilee, where the air was said to always be cool, where we might have begun a new life, searching out a village where no one knew of our bad luck. But my son-in-law was no longer a man who could live that way, settled into the practical matters of daily life. He was not about to herd goats, or find us a house made of stone in a town where we would walk to the well and cook our meals and forget what we had been through. He wanted revenge, nothing less. At Masada he had found what he was searching for, the company of men willing to die for what they believed in.

I don’t know how much time passed in the wilderness after God deserted us. Blessed is He who spoke, and the world came into being. Just as creation began with words so, too, did our world come apart in silence. None among us spoke. The boys because they could not, my son-in-law because he would not, myself because there were no words worth speaking aloud. The world was broken, and there was only one road that remained, splayed open before us as if made of bones.

I understood that by making this mountain our destination, we were headed for a no-man’s-land, a place from which there was no return. We had been banished from the world as we’d known it. We had seen too much and lost too much to walk into another town and unload the few belongings we still had and start anew.

Here my son-in-law is called the Man from the Valley; he needs no more of a name than that. He lives in the barracks, but even his own brethren fear him. He will go headfirst into any battle, unafraid and unyielding, with the grim expression of one who is determined to face down the Angel of Death. He wields an ax, the only weapon he needs. He eschews armor. Take me down, he goads the angel, Mal’ach ha-Mavet. Take me if you can.

Some people say the Man from the Valley sleeps with his ax, that he loves it the way another man might love a woman, or a father adore his child. He, who was once a scholar called Yoav, is now as brutal and merciless as the angel Gabriel is said to be, for Gabriel stands at the left hand of God, the side of the righteous. His sword is made of fire, and his eyes are fire as well. If he appears before you, you can sink to your knees and beg for mercy, but you will most certainly burn.