The Dovekeepers

BY THE TIME night fell and my son-in-law returned from his prayers, I had slain all four beasts, slitting their throats for good measure, not out of mercy but to make certain I had accomplished the deed. I had washed my daughter’s body with clean water and wound her in the white linen shawl she had worn at her wedding. She’d brought the shawl with her on our journey, the single treasure she’d taken from home, whereas I had reached for poison. The choice you make about such matters reveals who you are deep inside. She was a good wife, while I was a creature who would do anything to protect what was mine. I gathered stones to place over her body so the jackals would not come for what was left of her. If the stones were heavy, I failed to notice. They were red and chalky and stained my hands. Perhaps that is how I became marked for the rest of my life and why, if anyone looked too closely, my hands would doubtless give my true nature away.

I must have appeared to be a demon myself. As soon as my son-in-law saw me, he sank to his knees. When he took in all that had come to pass in his absence, he beat on the earth; he wept and cursed and tore at his cloak. I wondered if he would run into the desert like a madman, forsaking us. This could not happen, even if he wished for a crude release from his agony. I refused to allow my daughter’s death to be the death of her children. I needed my son-in-law to help us get away. I took hold of his prayer shawl, though I should not have touched even the hem. This time I was the one to tell him what to do. I said to be quick about it, for time had shifted to become sand beneath our feet. I knew we must leave this place before anyone searched for the beasts at the pool.

While Yoav packed all that we had left onto the donkeys, I went to the waterfall, for that was where my treasure was stored. The boys stared at me with their dark, gleaming eyes, but they would not come out. I clapped my hands and called to them, but there was no response.

The sound of the falling water was deafening. I crept behind the waterfall, my feet slipping on the cool, wet stones. I was too large to fit into the crevice where they huddled against the damp rocks silvered with mica. They were only six and eight years old, and yet they had seen what no grown man on earth should see. I held out my hand and begged them to come to me. I told them that I carried their mother’s spirit inside me, and that we would take her with us wherever we went. We had to make haste. Their mother would want us to do so. After a while the boys grasped for me and followed me out from behind the water. They did not speak a word as we left that terrible place, or later when we made a hurried camp under the stars far from that waterfall. They have not spoken since.

WE HAD ENTERED the territory of silence, slipping inside of it the way shadows fold across the earth with the lengthening day. The wind was the only thing we heard unless we met travelers on the road who told stories of Herod’s palace and of the men from Jerusalem who followed the way of the curved knife, Zealots who now ruled the king’s fortress. Yoav listened to these stories of rebels, absorbed, his grave profile turned away from us. We made circles in the wilderness to keep our distance from the Roman garrison. With no destination, and no knowledge of the wilderness, we stumbled upon the road to the Salt Sea. As we journeyed, my son-in-law changed before my eyes. The world began to slip away from him, and it seemed that he already walked beside the angel Gabriel. That which we saw to be the earth below our feet, he saw as fire. At night he went off into the thornbushes, and I could hear him sobbing and my heart broke in two alongside his. But in daylight he was hardened, his eyes narrowed, his skin burned by the sun. He consumed only green herbs, and if none were to be had, he ate nothing at all. When we came to a nomads’ settlement, he traded the silver chalice he used for the wine blessing.

The old man in the settlement of goat-hair tents and unclothed children could not believe the good fortune of his trade. He was only too ready to give up his ax in return for pure silver. It was a heavy weapon, made for a woodsman rather than a warrior, much stronger than the one that had split my dear Zara in two. As we went on, I could hear Yoav practicing with it in the early-morning hours, when the sky was still black, turning to the ax as he had once turned to his prayers and his scrolls. He slept beside it, as he had once slept beside his wife.

My premonition that Yoav would run into the wilderness and forsake us in his grief had been correct, only not in the manner I had envisioned. He was with us, yet he had been summoned to another place entirely, the kingdom of vengeance. This was when his hair turned white overnight and grew long and tangled. His body became lean and strong. We heard little from him, except when he practiced the art of destruction, throwing his ax with such force that he grunted and groaned, like a man in his death throes. His own children, those sweet silent boys, shied from him. I realized that he looked like the madmen we sometimes spied in the desert, warriors, hermits, prophets, priests; men who saw only their own path and no one else’s.