Alice Hoffman - The Dovekeepers

The warriors seemed like boys when they teased me about my hunting skills; all the same, I tried to make myself invisible, as I had been in Jerusalem. Boys became men at night, when their pulses beat and the forbidden seemed possible. Though I had no gray cloak, I knew how to vanish. I could make myself disappear and seem like nothing as I hunched over cleaning the cooking pot with sand, my eyes elusive. But in the firelight my scarf slipped from my head, and my brother’s friends saw that my hair was red. They could tell I wasn’t a girl anymore. They looked away, uneasy, shamed by their own thoughts. They should not even have been sitting at the fire with a woman who was not their mother or their sister or their wife, let alone taken food from my hands. I was considered a niddah, impure and unclean, for there was no mikvah, not even a silty pool of water. But we were in the desert, and they had little choice. They ate the birds I killed, they helped me up the cliffs, they led me toward my brother. As they did so, they recounted stories of the fortress they had commandeered, tales I found preposterous.

The fortress was impenetrable, they said, the surrounding land so fierce no attack upon them would prove successful. The retreat had once been a palace built by King Herod, a place of unearthly beauty concealed by clouds. I knew of that king, whose cruelty was so legendary it was said he had once slit open a hedgehog, then turned the poor beast inside out to place upon an enemy’s face so that he might blind his foe. He had betrayed those around him and been responsible for the murder of his wife, Mariamne, whom he accused of trading in philtrons and pharmaka —medicines and love potions and spells. She was so beautiful the Roman general Marcus Antonius became maddened at the sight of her and was desperate to have her. Because of this Herod sentenced her to death. Soon after, his son was accused of having a poison concocted from the venom of asps, prepared by a woman from Edom who was a practitioner of keshaphim. The son’s execution followed his mother’s.

Every betrayer knows his fate is to have the misery he once doled out to others returned to him in kind, yet Herod had dreams of outrunning the page on which his fate was written. He built his stronghold on the western slope of the mountain called Masada, completed a hundred years before our time. The Queen of Egypt wanted Judea for herself, pleading with Anthony and with Rome to grant her this desert as a gift, for she yearned for the treasures it possessed: the route to the sea, the fields of salt, the balsam forests that lay beyond in Moab, troves of myrrh and frankincense, riches beyond measure.

Those who awaited us at Masada were said to be more than nine hundred strong, three hundred of them warriors. Five winters ago they had taken Herod’s great fortress from the hands of a small group of Roman soldiers lodged there. They had done so easily, in the cover of night, winding along the back of the mountain, a feat the Romans had thought impossible. Nothing was impossible, they had discovered. They had managed to climb into the sky, closer to God.

I thought it was a dream when my brother’s friend vowed that the old king’s Northern Palace was more beautiful than the hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the wonders of mankind. The black and white columns had been transported from Greece, lashed onto boats that crossed the open sea, then hauled by ropes and pulleys across Judea on the backs of slaves. The glimmering mosaics had been brought into the wilderness from Italy to be laid down one tile at a time by the finest masons. The baths, heated by ceramic columns set beneath the floor, were made of quartz of such high quality the stones shone with red light when the sun was high. Floors were patterned in shades of rose and green and black, and frescoes had been painted by hundreds of Italian artists using the finest pigments from Rome, aquamarine and sapphire and carnelian, gemlike, gleaming as jewels do. The only colors I knew now were those of the white desert, the black night, the red stain of my own blood on the soles of my feet as we climbed over stones.

As the men spoke of such wonders, we huddled in damp caves where scorpions gathered, seeking shelter from the raging windstorms. I thought of the scorpions which had nested in the hallway when I was a child. They were so still they might have been an illusion until they suddenly leapt to attack their prey and prove otherwise. Guilt was like that, I had discovered. Remote, until it struck. I heard her still, the friend I’d had, the woman I’d betrayed. When I slept I could feel the curve of her hip against mine. I’d heard that demons could attach themselves to a person. Once this was accomplished, it was impossible to leave them behind or dismiss them. At night they closed their hands over yours with a predatory ownership. They whispered a single word in your ear: Mine.

Remorse engulfed me in this wasteland, as did my silence. It had risen around me as the thorn trees grew, wild, their limbs a tangle of treacherous sticks. There were hyenas where we camped; we heard them calling. At night we saw them forming a circle in among the stark black trees. We picked up stones, ready should the beasts’ hunger cause them to attack. My hands were filthy, my scarves shredded as if by knives. I held on to the single square of blue. It was all I had left of my brother and the life I had led before I’d come to this place.

I found it impossible to imagine that if we journeyed deeper into the wilderness we would come upon frescoes that could rival any in the empire and the palace of a king. Still my brother’s friends swore on the name of Yehuda of Galilee, the man who had begun the Zealot way of life and the rebellion against the priests who bowed to Rome, that ahead of us there were a thousand oil lamps to light up the night, all burning so fiercely they equaled the stars in the sky. When I asked how long it would take to reach this miraculous place, they laughed and said it would take time, for the fortress could only be found at the end of the world, and we must be careful not to stray. One step and we might fall off the edge of all eternity.

Mild air washed over us. Fortunately it was winter, so we didn’t roast alive. From the west the cold sea wind called Ruach Hayam came to us in clouds, and we shivered in its chilly grasp. The wind flew inside my tunic and reminded me of things it would be best to forget. The touch of Ben Simon, the way we were one, how he had possessed the ability to see me when I was crouched in the darkness. Though I listened to the stories of Herod’s palace, I was not compelled by thoughts of the future and of miracles. I longed for what I’d once had, all that I’d lost in the space of a single day, the hour when he was taken from me.

My life in the wilderness had been turned to ash. I had the punishment I deserved. Just as I had not let go of her husband, Sia would not let go of me, no matter how far we might journey. I thought I could leave her behind, but if anything, the distance had helped her ghost to grow stronger. Her spirit wrapped itself around me every time I tried to eat, pecking at me. I couldn’t swallow more than a mouthful of food. If I did manage a bite, I would have to run off and bring it up again. When I closed my eyes to sleep, she was there, waiting. She gazed at me with the same doleful look she’d had when she asked if I would take care of Ben Simon, though she knew what we did together in the dark and what he was to me. It was he I longed for, but it was she who wrapped her arms around me, who slid her fingers over my skin, who whispered in my ear. I could feel her fever all over my flesh.

* * *

ONE NIGHT we were so near to the Salt Sea I rose from sleep to discover that salt had wound through my hair and turned the edges hard and white. I had been dreaming of a path of stones and a snake so huge it could devour a city. I tried to talk to the slithering creature, pleading for it to go away and leave us in peace, but the serpent wouldn’t hear of it. Come closer, it whispered. I longed for the lion in my dreams. I missed him and yearned for him, despite the danger in doing so. I reached for the snake, but it disappeared, leaving me with a handful of black dust.