The Dovekeepers

As I did not wish others to speak of me, I turned away from the gossip concerning Shirah. If she was indeed a witch, I had no fear of her, for when she clasped my hand in hers, she took a portion of my burden upon her.

“Being human means losing everything we love best in the world,” she murmured as she released me. “But would you ask to be anything else?”

I WAS SILENT at the time, but afterward I wondered if I would indeed have preferred to be a snake rather than a woman, if I would have chosen to live my life beneath a rock, striking at dusk, devouring my sustenance, ravenous and alone in my cold skin. Did a snake love her children? Did she weep beneath her rock, yearning for arms with which to embrace them, for a voice with which to tell them stories, a heart that could be rended in two? Often I couldn’t sleep when I thought about such matters. These were the times when I saw Shirah walking at night. Perhaps she knew the answers to my questions, but I never asked, just as I never questioned where she was going or where she had been. If she had a box of sins kept under lock and key, as some people vowed, that was not my business. Once you have broken God’s laws, you are aware that He alone can judge us. You know that no man can understand what a woman may be driven to do.

WHEN YAEL first came to us, I was convinced she was a foolish, selfish girl who thought too well of herself to clean up after the doves or carry heavy baskets of dung into the fields. I would have never imagined she would come to live in my house, if one can rightly call a single chamber with a curtain as a divider from neighbors a proper home. And yet I myself had been guilty of those very same notions upon my arrival, bitter that I had been sent to work in the dovecotes. I’d held on to the position of my old life with an arrogance to which I had no right. I’d wept, convinced I’d been relegated to the lowliest position on the mountain, until my grandson showed me the truth of the doves. Now I understand the pride Shirah and her daughters show, a devotion which had puzzled me when I first walked through the carved wooden doors, a scarf tied over my face, afraid to draw a single breath because of the stench of the rich loam.

Without the doves, this fortress would have already fallen. The leavings scattered in the orchard have turned our world green and lush, nourishing the roots of the dates and olives, feeding the almond trees, causing them to burst into blooms of pink and white clouds. Without the doves, we would have starved long ago. It was outlawed to kill one, for without the Temple there could no longer be sacrifices; a man who took one out of greed risked being karet, turned out from God’s view, for such a deed was considered a crime against us all.

Each time I cut open a piece of fruit, I was grateful to the pale, pliant creatures we cared for. Whenever one was ailing, I brought it home to nurse it to health. I kept such birds in a wooden shelf beside my bed. I listened as they cooed, finding comfort in their song.

These were the only nights when I didn’t dream.

I BEGAN to change my mind about Yael, daughter of the famed assassin Yosef bar Elhanan, the murderer who people whispered had once possessed the ability to walk through walls and disappear in front of men’s eyes, sister of one of our young warriors. I noticed she could work her own brand of magic. All she had to do was reach out her hand, and the doves would come to her. She needn’t cluck her tongue or offer grain, tricks I used to call them to me. I was surprised by her abilities, struck by jealousy. I was always the first to unlock the door in the mornings, the one to feed the doves and nurse them back to health. It was I who threw stones when hawks came to light on our roof, ready to slip through the thatching and destroy the nests we tended so carefully, or to strike when we let the doves fly in the early morning, assured of their loyalty and their return.

Yet it was Yael they went to, not me. She stood in the dark and they flitted around her.

“Why do they prefer her?” I asked Shirah, for she had been among the doves for the longest time. I suppose envy shone in my eyes.

“She speaks their language.”

“Really? Of birds? What language is that?”

Shirah smiled in response. “You of all people should know.”

Then I understood. It was the language of silence.

I HAD GUESSED what Yael was hiding beneath her tunic and scarves, although she would not speak of it, and for good reason, even though we were far from the laws of Jerusalem, where women in her condition were called before a council of wise men and elders, then cast out to fend for themselves. Women who committed adultery and conceived were forced to drink bitter water and dust from the Temple floor, which some believed made the children within them fall away. This was the sotah ceremony, where their innocence or guilt would be proven by God when they were forced to drink His name written upon a piece of parchment and dissolved in a cup of water. People whispered that evil repelled God’s grace. Should the wicked attempt to take His name into their bodies, they would fall to dust.