Alice Hoffman - The Dovekeepers

My hair was damp from my night in the cistern, my arms ached from holding on to a man who always left me while I slept. I would awake on the edge of the well, beside the deep water, a scrim of plaster dust flecking my skin, and I would be alone. Despite my enlarged belly, I had grown thin. The man who had been my husband in Moab would have noticed, he would have been certain to feed me dates and figs, for he thought a thin woman was like a thin horse, too weak for the hills of his country. He had loved me, though he never said so. He had watched me all the while we were together, as if his eyes could not get enough of my form.

Eleazar had not noticed that my ribs could be viewed, or that the bones at my shoulders and backbone were rising through my skin. He did not see that the poor diet of roots and beans had caused my hair to be less glossy, for I plaited it into braids, then clasped it atop my head with two pins made of horn. To him I was the girl with the sheet of black hair at the well in Jerusalem, just as he was my beloved, the man who stood with me in the rain and took me to him, the one I had been pledged to throughout time.

WE NO LONGER took note of the laws of men, only the laws of God. Day and night, prayers were said. The old men gathered in the synagogue, and by the flickering light of what little oil we had left, they begged for God’s forgiveness and His favor. Timbers had been laid into the Romans’ ramp to support the barrels of white earth the slaves continued to pour upon it. The ramp was now so close the Romans could speak to us, and Silva himself came to shout for Ben Ya’ir. Some of our men shouted back that our leader would never speak with demons, for a demon could take your soul from your words. It was true, we knew, for when we listened to the demon who commanded the Tenth Legion, he had brought us clouds of terror. We covered our ears, yet we could still make out Silva’s words. Surrender now and we will let you go free.

Exactly what they had told the warriors of the fortress at Machaerus before murdering every one, leaving them for the jackals so that their bones were scattered through the forest, as if they had never been men at all but had come into this world as stones.

BEN YA’IR gave no answer to Silva but instead sent a hail of arrows set aflame. I saw the finest archers upon the wall, my daughter among them. She used so many arrows that soon enough she had no more. That night she taught Adir how to fashion these weapons, how to keep the flint straight so he would not scrape his hands raw as he struck the thin metal tip against a stone, how to wind the sharpened tip to the wooden shaft with a thin strand of leather. Because Yehuda could not by faith touch an instrument of war, he collected feathers from the doves, to attach to the arrows so they might fly straight from the hands of my daughter to the hearts of the enemy.

Aziza took me aside before she returned to the wall with her basket of newly made arrows. She looked so strong, her muscles fine, her face beautiful and harsh and dark. My daughter told me she would attempt any tactic to save our people, except for one. She would not shoot any man in a blue robe. One among them might well be the man who had been Nahara and Adir’s father, my husband once, who for a very long time had forgotten that Aziza was not his true-born son.

I gave her my blessing, casting powdered snakeskin into her short, black hair for her protection. I felt my love for her in the back of my throat. I could not say it aloud for fear I would bring her doom to her, but I embraced her and she knew what she meant to me, as she had known I’d depended upon her to help me bring Nahara into this world, as I’d had faith enough to allow her to ride with the men in Moab. Once I had given her a name that would help her to be fearless in a world commanded by fear. That was my greatest gift to her.

* * *

FORTUNATELY there was still a space between our cliff and the white ramp. Every time more earth was heaped upon it, the end of the ramp collapsed in a landslide. Although the slaves had brought up huge battering rams, as large as the trunks of date palms, those last few yards could not be forged, and therefore they could not break through the wall. Though King Herod had been wicked in many ways, we were grateful for the wall he had built and for the stones that bore his mark. We thought the legion’s inability to build the ramp to meet the king’s wall was an omen of our assured success, and we prayed and thanked the Almighty.

It would soon be the eve of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the day when our people were freed from slavery in Egypt. We thought of Moses in the desert, and how there had been faith even when there was no hope, how he had led his people despite their agonies. We thought our celebration would bring us fortune in the future. We did not understand that, much like the ninth of Av, when both Temples fell, when Moses broke the tablets, when sorrow reigned across our world, some days were meant to make us remember that the past was with us still.

The Romans were relentless, and a king’s wall was nothing to them as they worked for the glory of their Emperor. They threw up an enormous platform that rose to more than two hundred cubits. The wood had come all the way from Greece, shipped across the sea, hauled here on the backs of slaves; the timbers carried the scent of the forest. Revka said they had been fashioned from cypress, and she wept in remembering. We stood watching as the platform was completed and the soldiers scrambled upon it and called out curses, quickly letting go with volleys of burning torches. All we could smell then was fire; the fragrance of sweet cypress was like a dream that had once clung in the air.

When the platform was still not enough to breach the distance between the ramp and Herod’s mighty wall, the legion extended it with huge stones that fitted together. Then came the worst creation we had ever seen, one invented by Vespasian, then used by Titus, and now by Silva. It seemed this work of warfare had been fashioned in the demon world, and a thousand evil spirits had constructed it. We stood in awe and in despair. Even grown men had tears streaming down their faces. A metal-plated tower nearly a hundred feet tall had been set upon the wooden platform so the Romans could attack us yet be protected from our slingshots and arrows and darts. From this tower they were able to set forth huge boulders, striking the king’s walls that were meant to last for all eternity.

So it began. The mountain shook and the birds took flight, the ravens and the larks, the sparrows and hawks, every winged creature fled from us, save for the doves in the dovecotes, who had no choice but to remain. I felt the child inside me shift as I sat upon the rim of the fountain. All around me there was madness. Children of the ages of three and four were scraping the blood from spears that had been cast into a pile, pulled from the bodies of the slain. Our dead were so many they were brought into the field where the almond trees flowered with both pink and white blooms. There the dead were washed with rainwater and oil, then wound in sheets of linen.

When we had no more linen and still more dead, we used our own shawls to wind them in. Two of our young warriors, mere boys in armor, slipped through the gate to fight the soldiers on their own. Their heads were cut from their bodies and thrown up to us by catapult, their eyes still open. These boys’ mothers tore at their own flesh, horrified, caught in the nightmare that was our waking life.

Revka and her grandsons had come to stay with me, along with Yael and Arieh, for their chamber was too near the wall; their neighbors had been killed as they slept when an arrow soared through the slit in stone that had served as a window, setting their pallets on fire. Certainly, we had room enough. My daughter Aziza had set a tent in our yard. She no longer wished to sleep indoors and, like the warrior that she was, stayed beneath the stars. The Man from the Valley came to take his meals with her, and they sat there like brethren, not speaking, yet not lacking for comfort. This man’s sons, Noah and Levi, peered out at this grave warrior, for he had become more a legend than a man to them. Once I noticed his glance flicker over to them. His expression softened and something seemed to stir within him, but he turned away, attending to the meager meal of beans and lentils Aziza had cooked for them to share.