The Dovekeepers

Her long black hair was hanging down her back, wet and loose, the scent of lilies clinging to her. We stood in the half-light cast by the moon. I noticed that even a witch could blush, especially one who’d been discovered in the depths of a well. A flicker passed across Shirah’s dark face, not shame exactly but surrender.

“What is it you want from me?” she asked, resigned.

I thought of the doves, how they never met your gaze and always cast their glance downward. Unlike these shy creatures, Shirah was staring at me, eyes blazing, convinced, it seemed, that I might use my newfound knowledge against her.

“What you do is your business,” I assured her. “I won’t even remember tonight.”

I had come for a favor, and that was what I asked for. I bowed my head and took in the scent of lilies as I pleaded for the only thing my son-in-law wanted in this world. My grandsons’ voices returned to them.

“What makes you think I can do the work of God?”

Shirah was fearless even now when I knew enough to destroy her reputation and her life. Women who committed adultery were often cast out, their hair was shorn to the skull, their possessions confiscated, their children torn from them. Wasn’t her bravery proof enough of her strength? She was the reason the council left Yael alone. They had approached once, with questions concerning Arieh’s birth. Shirah had closed the door to the dovecote and she sang a prayer until they went away. If she could bring children into the world, fighting Lilith when she tried to claim them, then surely she could help two small boys find their voices. To convince her I would have to open my own silence. I did so, bowing my head as I told my story, keeping in mind the image of the Man from the Valley wrapped in thin strips of metal and marked by his own blood. As I spoke the past was drawn around us the way dark gathers at the corners of the world. There was the jasmine that grew beside the pool and the burn marks on my daughter’s skin. There rose the angel who’d whispered to me in the bakery, the demon who’d sifted inside me when I took up the soldier’s knife against my own dearest flesh and blood, the ghost of my husband, who’d assured me that every loaf of bread fed us in the way we needed to be fed.

Shirah sank back, her face ashen. Now only she and God knew the manner in which I’d killed the beasts who had fallen upon us, the delight I’d taken in watching them drink themselves to death, the terrible pleasure there had been in cutting their throats. I threw off my cloak, the better for her to see me and know what I had become. I was not a baker’s wife or a grandmother or a woman who cared for doves, feeding the ailing birds spoonfuls of barley water, tending to them through the night. I was a murderess. I held the lamp to my palm to let Shirah see exactly what was before her. The mark of death.

I was spent and exhausted. Words had done that to me, twisted my heart as they poured out, clattered like stones onto the cobbled ground. Perhaps my grandsons were lucky to be mute, protected against the stories of their own lives. Shirah drew me close, and in her embrace it seemed that I was the child who had seen too much, peering through the waterfall at the horror of what a beast could do to a human being and what a human being could then become.

“For every evil there is a cure,” Shirah said softly. “Any mother would defend her daughter. It would be a sin not to do so, a crime beyond any that are written. What you did, you did for love.”

Against my fevered skin, her flesh was delightfully cool. She confided in me that water was her element and had been since she was a child, that was why I had found her in the cistern. Her mother had brought her to a river, and she found she could swim without ever having been taught to do so. What was dangerous to one person was a mercy to another. My son-in-law’s wish was not an impossible task, she assured me, but the price was patience. Wait and have faith, she urged. Catch a demon and you will break the spell. Offer an angel gratitude and he might return the voices he’d taken to stop the children from crying out when they were hidden behind the waterfall. I was to pray every night to Beree, the angel of rain. This angel was silent, as my grandchildren were, so I should not expect an answer, at least not right away.

“I know what it is your son-in-law desires,” Shirah now said. “But what of you?”

“His wish is mine,” I assured her.

“No.” She was not convinced. When she gazed at me, I felt my throat tighten, perhaps to hold back the truth. “There’s something more.”

Shirah raised my hand to her mouth. Before I could think to pull away, she kissed the center of my palm. In that instant I let go of the truth, that which I’d kept from her and from God and from myself. I broke into a shuddering sob. The soldiers had been beasts and it had been a pleasure to kill them, but they had been men as well. They had walked on the earth and under the sky. The one who had pleaded with me was the one who had stayed with me, for he had begged for something I now longed for as well.