The Dovekeepers

THE SENTRIES caught him one night in the month of Cheshvan when the air was glazed with cold. It was the beginning of the rainy season, the time of the year when we lived beneath the sign of the scorpion, which brought disorder and gloom, the time of the floods. Yet the sky hung over us like an empty bowl, throwing down darkness but nothing more. There had been no rain, and we all knew this was a sign that our people were not in God’s favor.

The guards fell upon him as he crossed the field where the trees lifted their boughs upward, desperate in their thirst. He was near the portion of the wall that circled past our chamber, the place where he’d left his mark of heat upon the stones on the night I’d spied him waiting, perhaps with patience, most certainly with desire.

We did not speak of it, but we all knew that if he’d been heading to the Snake Gate to make his escape, he would not have come in this direction. There was only one reason why he was apprehended in the garden of onions where the scorpion resided, and that reason was Yael. Perhaps he had convinced himself that, if he spoke to her once more, and if the words were strong enough, they might pierce through her resolve and she might be willing to leave us.

We didn’t know he had been captured until morning. There was a sharp breeze that carried the scent of myrrh, and also of fragrant cypress, reminding me of the valley where I had once lived. We usually had rain in this month, but so far none had fallen, though the priests were praying for such an occurrence three times a day. People were reminded of the stories of the great drought, when a sage named Honi called down the rains and saved our people. The situation warranted a miracle and the voice of someone who might be heard when calling out to God.

Upon discovering the news of the slave’s imprisonment, Yael leaned against the wall of the dovecote for support, so that it seemed she’d been struck and could go no farther. The baby was tied to her, and he stirred in his sleep and made a whimpering noise. Yael quickly stroked his dark hair to settle him. What might a baby dream of? Milk and love, the language of a mother’s care, the voice of a man who was born in snow? It is the sort of sleep we can never have again. Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.

No one told us where the slave was, but when we spied the hawk circling a tower, we knew where they’d taken him. They would have killed him, but it wasn’t worth the effort. If they left him be, locked up and forgotten, he would die on his own. I saw Shirah’s eyes flit over to Yael, who now forced herself to show no expression. No outsider would guess she felt more than the rest of us, unless they noticed she’d grown so pale that the freckled marks on her skin stood out like a scrim of blood.

We kept to ourselves that day, mourning the slave’s absence, on edge and waiting for worse news to come. I, for one, had not expected to miss him as strongly as I did. He was such a big man and had taken up so much space that the dovecote seemed quite empty without him. The birds were unsettled; there were few eggs to be found, and the ones we discovered in the straw had dark spots speckling the blue-gray shells, a bad omen. We ate our noon meal together in the garden behind the dovecote in silence, taking small bites of cold barley cakes with olive oil as we waited for what was to come next. It seemed a stone had been dropped into water, and every circle that fanned out moved the tide of our destiny along the course of some inevitable destination. Today was not like the day that had come before; by tomorrow we would be carried even further from the everyday world we’d grown accustomed to.

When the guards came to question us, as we knew they would, we said we were stunned by the slave’s disappearance. We had no idea that he had puzzled out the trick of unlocking his chains or that he’d learned to work the bolt on the door. Shirah found a thin twist of steel which she quickly bent to resemble a key. She handed it to the guards, suggesting perhaps this was the way the slave had escaped. Her glance went to Yael, whom she strove to protect against inquiry. Again, Yael’s face was blank.

We went on, saying more, clucking like chickens, insisting that we’d thought men from the north were steady and dumb, unable to plan an escape. “But see how clever he was,” Shirah said to the guards, shaking her head, “to make a key out of nothing.”

“He’ll starve to death soon enough,” one of the guards told us, perhaps believing that was news we wished to hear.

Shirah asked if one among us could speak with their prisoner, saying he had devised a rake that was helpful and we wanted to learn his methods so that we might make use of the tool ourselves. Yael glanced at her with gratitude, aware this dispensation was the single way food and water could be brought to the tower. There was only one person who might allow such a meeting, our leader, Ben Ya’ir.