The Dovekeepers

It was then I overheard him say, “You’re not like them, Yael. You’re not like anyone.”

I wasn’t certain if he meant his words to be a compliment or an insult, but then he took her hand and kissed it, at her wrist, the place where what someone needs and what she desires cross each other to become one.

YAEL WAS NOT my daughter, but she lived in my home, and that prompted me to be concerned. I knew that a woman at the end of her term might look for solace in curious places. Being with child could cause confusion, and kindness in a cruel world might coax Yael into forgetting that the Man from the North was not one of us. On the blanket where she lay at night, she tossed and turned, uncomfortable in the heat. In the mornings she brooded, her eyes filled with sleep. I wondered if she dreamed of her baby to come, as I had long ago, if she had already seen her child’s face and had perhaps chosen a name, though it was best not to do so. Naming the unborn alerted demons a child was about to come into the world. Hand over a child’s name and that newborn might be more easily called into the darkness. I had done so, tempting fate. Perhaps the night demons had followed my daughter ever since I called her Morning.

WE DIDN’T complain about our work at this brutal time of the year, for the dovecote was cool, its plaster walls giving some relief. We were sheltered from the season’s unforgiving fever. Below us the valley sizzled in a pink haze. The world beyond our gates glared with light, and we wore our head scarves pulled down to shade our eyes. There was not a single green shoot to be seen; even the fierce leaves of the thornbushes had shriveled as if made of parchment. We could hear the jackals crying at night, and we shivered at the sound. Huge flocks of birds flew above us, abandoning our barren land, searching for water and sustenance in far-off places, flying to the mountains in the north or east to Moab where the fields were said always to be green.

Each day the Man from the North set out a line of grain on the window ledge for the hawk. When he spoke in his language of unearthly grunts, the creature seemed to understand, a glint in his yellow eyes. The bird had a red head, and because of this the slave called him Odeum, ruby, which was also his name for Yael. Yael grinned when he did so, knowing he was provoking her. She teased right back and said only a fool would keep a hawk so near to a dovecote. Eventually we would arrive to find that the hawk had slaughtered all of our charges. She had fed the bird of prey a few grains out of pity, but the slave had gone much too far, making a pet of a wild thing. Could he not understand his mistake? Here was a creature no one could ever trust.

“You’re wrong about him,” I heard the Man from the North say. “He’s at your beck and call.”

“A hawk is always a hawk,” I informed them both, unable to hold my tongue any longer.

After I made my remark they were quick to fall silent and return to the tasks at hand. How could they argue with me? They knew my statement to be true. You cannot change a hawk’s nature any more than you can teach a dove to kill. And yet later in the day, when I saw the slave and Yael bringing baskets of dung into the fields to feed the ravished, heat-struck earth, the hawk glided above them as though he were a dog, tame and subservient. I thought perhaps I had been wrong, too quick to judge the essence of a being by its appearance, still not fully understanding that, in the world God has given us, all things must change.

FOR NOW the one constant was that the days fell heavily, all with the same hypnotic, unrelenting heat. Heat waves rose up in shimmering curtains of light. There were lines of exhausted, baffled women at the storehouses, each waiting for her family’s share of water and food. I felt immobilized inside the month of Av the way I had once lingered inside my dreams as I slowly awoke to the yeasty odor of baking in my old life, on those precious mornings when the countryside was green and the scent of the cypress drifted in the air. I had been caught up in time then, as I was once again, but one tableau was a treasure chest, the other a cage.

We had so little here on the mountain, but at least we were safe. In the world outside ours, the violence against our people had only grown worse. There were rumors that the dead were heaped upon the main roads throughout Judea, that the Jordan River was so rife with bodies you could walk across on dead men’s backs as if they were stepping-stones. News came to us that another Essene settlement had been decimated. I’d heard of their people, those who called themselves the Children of Light and who had occupied the settlement known as Sechacha. One day a small, impoverished troupe appeared in our valley. We saw dust rising as they approached. Their white linen garments glinted brightly as they crossed over the rocks. Our warriors went down the serpent’s path to meet these visitors and bring them to us. It was well known that the Essenes abhorred warfare, and we were a fortress. Still, like the rest of us, when they had no options and no place else to go, they came to this mountain.