The Dovekeepers

That was when I knew she was the one who had left the slave’s chains unlocked.

She was treating him like a man.

I said I had a stone caught in my sandal. I stopped to slip it out, stating that I could not walk with a stone any more than a slave could become one of us. I glanced at Yael and saw she was flustered, angered by my remarks.

“Do you think he’s less than we are? Is he nothing more than a stone?”

It was said that angels came to human beings for comfort. How lonely they must be, locked in the silence of their world. But a human burned in the embrace of the angels, his body set aflame, and the kindness of such creatures could become a curse. Here on this mountain, Yael’s indiscretion would be considered treachery.

“If they find him roaming, they’ll kill him,” I warned. “If you unlock him, you unlock his death. Do you think he’ll be happy to do our bidding once his chains are off? He’ll want more, like any other man.”

Yael softly admitted that the Man from the North had spoken of his plans to escape. He knew of others who had done so. Several of his fellow conscripts had deserted the legion before they’d crossed the Great Sea, still more had disappeared after reaching Jerusalem. I was silent, wondering if he might have known the beasts who had attacked us, perhaps had considered them friends.

When the Man from the North made his impassioned speeches about freedom, I suspected he was trying to convince Yael to flee as well. He insisted the Romans would soon enough be upon us—and it was true we more often spied scouts in the region. Before long we would be the slaves, the Man from the North had vowed. But perhaps he had forgotten that, when Yael left the dovecote, she was not alone. She had told me she would never return to the desert, where there were bones left beneath the piles of rocks, glinting in white heat, the remains of the man she had loved.

I knew about the lion who had bitten her and possessed her. She’d rambled about him when we paused on the steps so that she might draw breath on the night she labored to bring forth her child. Although she never spoke of it again, I knew she was not about to bring another lion into the desert. If the Man from the North was planning to escape, he would have to do so alone.

I made no further comment when I saw them working together. I turned away when she brought him a blanket and a goatskin bag of water. She was not my daughter, though I had allowed her to use the Baker’s possessions, the vials of coriander and cumin, the wooden spoons, the apron he had tied around his waist. I had wept over these things before and would again, whether or not Yael ruined what was left of her life ministering to the slave. She should have treated him as a mere stone in her sandal. Instead, she saw him as a man.

When they went into what was left of the orchards, those trees that had not been hewn for firewood and still bore fruit, the hawk followed, dedicated, not veering away from the mountaintop. I watched their shadows stretch across the field, then disappear as a cloud passed overhead. I felt sure this was the sign of disaster to come. Perhaps I no longer believed in kindness and mistrusted it. I had come to consider compassion a knife in the hands of the angels of disaster.

ONE SABBATH EVENING, the council announced they would no longer bring conscripts or slaves to the fortress after a battle but would instead slay them along with their owners. Several Roman conscripts had been captured and now worked with the donkeys who carried up barrels of water. There was little enough food for the residents, we hadn’t a surplus to feed more. What was a slave but a stone? people murmured. Exactly as I had said. I watched Yael carefully after that proclamation; she frowned and gazed at the council in alarm as the slaves among us were denounced.

“It’s a sin to keep people so,” she said to me with a naked flash of emotion as we left the plaza.

“I suppose you won’t listen to my advice,” I muttered.

She laughed and linked her arm through mine. “I’ll listen,” she assured me.

“And then you’ll do as you please,” I remarked.

We laughed together, then I fell silent, for I realized how much I feared for her in this wicked world. Although she was not my daughter, I fretted as if she were.

THE NEXT MORNING I saw that Yael had brought the Man from the North a bow and several arrows, one for each of the seven sisters that gather as stars in the sky. She had hidden them under her cloak, but I recognized the shape of the weapon from its shadow when she stored it beneath a pile of straw. The bow was one her brother had carried. When he found it gone, he would question his friends in the barracks and never once remember he had not seen it since his sister’s most recent visit. This was the shade I had spied in the field as the hawk drifted above them. She was willing to do too much for this man who was nothing on this mountain and should have been nothing to her as well.