The Dovekeepers

PEOPLE were whispering about Yael, wondering who the father of her child might be and speculating about the night the assassin Bar Elhanan had cast out his own daughter. My grandsons, however, had already grown to adore her. Although I kept my distance, I became accustomed to her as well. If people spoke poorly of her in my presence, I glared at them, and that was the end of it. Though I preferred to keep to myself, there was a way in which I was comforted to have Yael in my home, to hear her breathe easily in her sleep, as my own daughter might have done had she still been with us.

Admittedly, I was grateful for help with the household chores. Even in her state, so big with the child that was to come, Yael was far from lazy. She cooked our meals, crouching over the fire pit to fry our food on a grill which fitted over the ring of stones. She went to the storehouses to collect our daily allotment of beans and grains, and made certain there was firewood, all to repay me for taking her in. But the stories she told were the only repayment we needed. The boys’ eyes brightened when they listened to her at bedtime, mesmerized. In all of the scorpion’s exploits, silence was an asset and a gift, not a flaw but a virtue. The scorpion could do what others could not: he could see in the dark, hear a fly buzzing on the far side of the mountain, sense danger while the rest of the world slept.

“Did your mother tell you these stories?” I asked one evening when Yael and I went to the plaza. We had taken to working at the looms on a regular basis. We kept ourselves removed from the other women, but it was a pleasure to weave and our garments were tattered; we had need of shawls and cloaks. When we busied ourselves in this manner, it was possible to forget the dust that rose in clouds all around us and to distance ourselves from our hunger. If we had nothing else, then at least we had the sheep’s wool and the work of spinning and weaving.

“I had no mother.” Yael kept her eyes downcast.

We reached the looms, where we settled, bringing forth our lengths of carded, dyed wool. Yael was working on a pattern everyone praised. Even those gossips who whispered about her were impressed. There were intricate threads of color forming a line of continuous blocks of multihued squares. I noticed it was the same pattern as the cloth the slave wore.

“Every human has a mother,” I insisted as we worked.

“Are you sure I’m human?” Yael said, her chin tilted, teasing me.

I had never seen a woman with hair so red, or one with so little fear that she was willing to grasp a scorpion between her fingers. Others might whisper she was possessed by a demon and swear she was unlike other daughters and wives. But I had seen her on the night when her father cast her out, when she huddled in a corner like any other beaten woman. And I had taken note of the expression on her face when she stood beside the Man from the North.

She was human.

WHEN THEY thought they were alone, I heard what I should not have pass between them. Yael was fortunate that I was accustomed to silence, and therefore held my tongue. A gossip would have been unforgiving, making quick use of the intimate encounter I’d stumbled upon. A hawk had been circling the largest dovecote for several days, intent on taking our doves for his dinner. We set out sticks tied together with rope that looked like a child’s toy; when the breeze stirred, the sticks whirled and frightened the hawks away. But one hawk was fearless; he wouldn’t be chased off. He looked underfed and seemed intent on having his supper. Hunger struck everyone in the desert at the same time.

When the hawk lit on the window ledge, Yael found some grain and reached out to him. I was stunned to see the creature eat from her hand, as if he were a dove himself. I was not the only one to take notice. The Man from the North had come up beside her. I overheard him say that in his country hunters trained hawks to strike down prey and bring back partridges and doves. Their sharp yellow beaks were wound with strands of leather, clamped halfway closed so they couldn’t devour their kills; they had to learn to wait patiently when they brought back their prey, hungering until the hunter tossed them a bit of meat.

It usually took months to gain a hawk’s trust. The slave was astounded by how easily Yael had called this one to her. He said she must possess magic. He sank to his knees and bowed his head, only half in jest, declaring she had bewitched him as well. Yael laughed at his remarks—I remembered because I had not heard her do so before. It was a lovely, surprising sound. She said that women with red hair had the ability to tame wild creatures. Since the slave had come from a country where many of the women looked so, he should have known this to be true. He got to his feet, though he had to shift his tall body just to be near her.