The Dovekeepers

“Don’t tell me when it will happen,” I overheard her say as she stood beside him. “I’ll arrive one morning and you’ll be gone.”

The Man from the North was aware that he had a rival, but unlike most suitors, he wasn’t jealous. Rather, he doted upon his competition, our little lion. He might have resented Arieh his mother’s joys and arms, instead he was happy to help amuse the child, lifting him up to see the hawk above us. He whistled in a way that brought the bird swooping, which made the baby throw back his head and laugh. The slave often listed the names of things in his own rough language, trying to teach Arieh how he might say dove and hawk and mother and snow, as though convinced the child might someday live in the slave’s cold land and speak as he did.

“You’re wasting your time,” I warned when he clasped Arieh in his arms, then tossed him in the air until the child melted with laughter.

Then one day he told the child his name. We worked in such close quarters that we all overheard. It was Wynn, a rough word that stuck in the throat. Shirah and Aziza exchanged a look, surprised that the slave would reveal himself. He had addressed Arieh in the manner in which a man might speak to his son. I knew then that the time of his leaving had come. A slave never speaks his name aloud; once he was captured, it was not to be uttered until he walked into the world beyond. His name was to be a word known only to his kinsmen who awaited him and to whatever God he revered.

Only a free man would take such a risk.

In the evenings I waited, holding the baby, while Yael ducked back inside the dovecote and unlocked his chains. It was a simple lock; the key was hung on a hook hammered into the dovecote wall. And yet it took some time before Yael emerged, smoothing down her hair. No one else would have spied her shadow, or known how it drew her back to this man, but shadows were my gift. Because she was not my daughter, I stood with the baby and sulked and said nothing.

This was the time of year when night came earlier, washing across the sky to flood the corners of the horizon. Each night when Yael left the slave, her expression was dark.

She erupted one evening when an edict went out that rations would be halved and there would no longer be clean water for animals or slaves. “No one should be treated this way.”

“Would it have been better if they’d killed him?” I asked.

“When men act like beasts, they become so,” she countered.

I couldn’t deny this, so I let it be. “This is the world we live in,” I murmured, and she took my hand, as if she were indeed my daughter.

YAEL WASN’T ALONE in her unhappiness. We all felt the constraints of the mountain, the lack of food, the petty jealousies. Many of the sheep and goats that we valued for their milk were being butchered out of need. People were going hungry. Cucumbers on the vine shriveled in the last bursts of heat, turning to ash, as the fruit was said to do in the blighted city of Sodom.

The council allowed a group of travelers to camp in the far field, beyond the Essenes’ goat house. They were nomads who dyed their hands blue and spoke in their own tongue, but they brought with them livestock to share with us, although we would have nothing to do with the swine they kept. They, too, had been driven off by the Romans. Some of their women, the ones who had been violated by soldiers, cut deep gashes into the palms of their hands and soles of their feet to allow the sorrow to rise out of their bodies.

When they left to return to the wilderness, their flocks in need of grasslands, we found a baby who had come from a union a Roman soldier had forced upon one of their women. The baby had been suffocated, then placed beneath an almond tree, knees to his chest, his small arms folded, as though asleep and in peace, rescued from the harshness of the world. Yael stood beside me and wept. She had seen two child-brides from this tribe buried in this way in the wilderness. She said they had held hands so they might walk together into whatever world awaited them.

There were many among us who wished we could flee and find our way back to cities and towns. But there was nothing to return to. Our houses were burned, our towns destroyed. I wondered if Yael wished she could escape and make her away across the desert, over the Great Sea, to the world where snow was an everyday occurrence rather than a miracle.

I could see my grandsons playing near the wall much like shadows sifting across the gathering dark. My throat closed up as it often did when I gazed upon them. I thought of the baby, smothered, then carefully and lovingly laid to rest. Yael put her arm through mine, for we spent every evening together. The first star had appeared above us, the one they say is Ashtoreth’s lantern, which burns so brightly it allows her to cross the sky when all others are trapped in the dark.