The Dovekeepers

The Baker’s Wife

There was only one language we understood, one prayer we remembered, one path we walked upon, so far from the throne of heaven we could no longer hear your voice.

They say that women cannot know the ways of our God, but I have seen His truth with my own eyes. Our God knows all and sees all and has as much compassion for the sparrow as he does for the hawk that hunts it across the sky. Before Him, everything disappears in the wind. If you place a handful of grain on a rock and turn your back, it will fly away. If you leave a sparrow in a tower, it will not be there when you return. If you ask a hawk for mercy, your words will be rendered mute.

That is what happened in my life: I turned my back. I could no longer hear the voice of the sparrow. I asked for kindness from a creature who knew only cruelty. I didn’t understand what the wind was capable of and how we must bow before it, grateful no matter where it may take us.

AS A girl I lived in a village north of Shiloh, where it was said the spring water could prevent miscarriages and bring children to barren women, such was the pleasure of God in this land. We settled in the Valley of the Cypresses, where the fields were green and there were five black goats in every shed. I married when I was a young woman, too inexperienced to know there was evil in the world. I was happy and I thought happiness lasted. On my door I kept an intricately decorated mezuzah, a symbol that brings happiness and luck. Each time I passed by I felt fortunate, assured that God would deliver us from evil. I uttered my thanks to Adonai without thought and with the foolhardy conviction that wickedness would never come near. At night my bed was filled with straw so soft that I fell asleep as soon as I closed my eyes. My house was made of stone with beams fashioned of local cypress cut in the woods nearby. My husband was kind and good-hearted, yet still I was granted more. When my daughter was born, she was so beautiful people stopped in the marketplace to congratulate me on my good fortune. I should have begun to worry then, for as fortune comes to you, so does it slip away.

AS THE YEARS drifted by, my dreams were rich with the scent of bread, for below our sleeping chamber my husband had his bread ovens, the kind we called a tannur, made of mounds of rounded clay. The pale smoky clay glowed with orange heat when the ovens were stoked before daybreak. Throughout the years the fire that burned below our rooms ensured our warmth. There was a millstone in our courtyard, and two donkeys to pull it, grinding the wheat we stored in a tall, wooden granary.

My husband had learned the art of baking from his father, as he had from his father before him. No baker’s bread tasted the same as another’s, that was what my husband told me, for a baker’s life went into each loaf. Some baked with piety, some with prayers, some with the intent to create more than mere sustenance, raising their craft into an art, entranced by the beauty of the flame of the tannur and by the art of the challah.

My husband was all three, pious and filled with prayer but also intent on the mystery of the rising loaf, the miracle of the manner in which wheat and water became alive in his hands. The bread he baked was so delicious wayfarers often found us by following its yeasty odor through the village, guided by a map of rich fragrance sent into the air expressly for those driven by hunger. My husband left out a dough offering to honor Adonai every morning as he said the blessing. In return his blessings rose to God and we had all that we wanted in this world.

My husband had his secrets, as all bakers do. I was privileged to learn from him over the years simply by watching him work. He kneaded the dough longer than most, and the yeast he used to give the bread life was a secret recipe kept in cool stone jars, left to ferment for the best part of a year. He dusted the dough with cumin and coriander and salt before he slid the loaves into the oven on flat wooden boards. Perhaps most important, he made his mark on the dough, the letter R scrawled in honor of my name, Revka, for after so many years I was still his bride, the girl to whom he’d pledged his life.

When the days were without haze, we could see to where snow sometimes fell in the highlands. The vista I saw from my own house was the only one I ever wished to survey. I would never have believed I would come to live in a king’s fortress where the wind engulfs us and claims us, making it clear we are nothing more than a moment in time. A hundred years earlier, Herod walked across the same plaza I must cross each morning on my way to the dovecote. Now there are poor men sleeping in his chambers, but these poor men draw breath while the king who murdered his own wife, Mariamne, and his sons, and anyone else who stood in his way, is nothing but dust. Warriors sharpen their knives in what had been the royal stable, a huge, cavernous place that once housed a hundred horses, each said to possess the ability to climb the serpent’s path in the dark. Blindfolds were slipped over their eyes so they could not see how treacherous the ground they trod upon truly was. Had they been aware of the staggering heights, surely they would have panicked and tumbled into the abyss, one after the other, as if falling from the sky. The same holds true for us. If any among us who reside in this stronghold paused for a moment to tear the blindfold of faith from our eyes, we would see how perilous our perch was, how shattering a fall would be.

If we lost our faith, we would become like the clouds that swell across the western sky when the wind pushes them into the desert, promising rain but empty inside.

IN THE MORNING, I always had a moment to myself before my grandchildren arose. For me, it was the best time of the day. I watched the boys sleeping next to me, their faces serene. I imagined they were in their own beds at home, that their mother was outside the door readying their morning meal, that they hadn’t lost their voices in the desert, stolen by a demon, grabbed from their throats and stored in a locked box in the World-to-Come.

I tied threads knotted into the wool of their garments for protection while they slept. This was permitted until they turned nine, then I would have to give them over to the will of Adonai, or so people said. I was grateful for the amulets Shirah offered me. I paid no attention to those who claimed she was a witch, whispering that her presence on this mountain would bring us to ruin. I had seen what was wicked in this world, and it wasn’t the woman I worked beside. Inside my grandsons’ tunics I bound small pouches which held salt to keep away Lilith, who steals the breath of children, a shell from the red sea as a gift for the angel called Michael, the root and seeds of the mandrake, which would chase away the terrors that came with dreams, for there were surely terrors for the three of us that remained of our family, as certainly there were for the fourth among us who survived, the man who no longer spoke to us, who lost himself when he lost his faith.

I leave Noah and Levi their morning meal before slipping into the predawn. Small pressed cakes of almonds and figs so they would know sweetness, dates that grew wild on the cliffs so they would taste the fruit of the desert, flatbread I fried in oil on a griddle, sprinkled with coriander and cumin and salt, so they would remember the taste of their grandfather’s bread. On some mornings I took note of Shirah’s son, Adir, racing along the path where mint grows wild. He’s a charming boy, wild, with black hair and yellow-flecked, slanted eyes. He recently turned twelve, but I knew that inside his tunic were dozens of knots. It is written that one has to rely on Adonai without the use of magic, and so it should be. But our boys were valued highly. The mother of a boy was considered impure only for seven days after she gave birth, while she who delivered a girl was considered teme’ah for twice that time.

I understood why Shirah would do anything necessary to guard her only son.

I did not listen to what others said about her, but once, when she was ailing and I brought her soup made of turnip broth, I spied a hidden altar to the goddess. I had entered the chamber without waiting for a reply after rapping on her door. Shirah quickly closed the cabinet where the altar was concealed, but I saw the spark in a lamp lit before an offering of honey and oil that had been set out to honor alabaster terafim. One, the small, luminous figure of a woman, had her arms upraised. I recognized Ashtoreth, the mother and warrior, whose presence has long been outlawed. We were not to have idols, nor were we to give thanks to the goddess. Those women who did made certain to close their altars so the lamps that burned were never revealed.

Shirah thanked me for the soup. We did not speak of matters some might claim to be sorcery, and I did not raise my eyes to her altar again. I had compassion for her, for I had often spied worry spreading across her striking, fine-boned face. Try as she might to keep him a child, Shirah’s son was already straining to be a man. She called out cautions, but Adir hurried to the garrison, determined to be among the men he admired. When the wind is so strong that we women know we will choke on the rising dust if we fail to tie our scarves across our faces, boys will always ignore the elements and race through storm clouds, dreaming of glory. Even a witch can’t stop her son from becoming a warrior. There is no spell great enough for that.

* * *

BEFORE YAEL CAME, I was the new woman in the dovecotes. I thought I would be sent to the baker, for my husband had taught me much about the mysteries of bread. But I was wearing my white mourning shawl when I arrived at the fortress, and perhaps the council members were reminded of doves as I stood before them, head bowed in defeat. The moment I entered through the carved wooden doors of the largest dovecote, a circular tower with flaps for light in the roof, I was certain a curse had befallen me. I couldn’t understand why the original dovekeeper and her beautiful daughters took such pride in what they did. They assured me I had been honored, and they welcomed me with wreaths of flowers, which I quickly cast away. I thought that doves were filthy things, good for a stew or perhaps a few fresh eggs, nothing more. I had now sunk even lower than these simple creatures, for it was I who was commanded to collect their leavings into barrels. I was a slave to their waste and their filth, disgraced in the eyes of the Lord. Such was my station in life. Such was my fate.

I CRIED the first night after I worked in the dovecote, a woman my age who should have known better, embarrassed to find myself in tears, my back turned to my grandsons so they wouldn’t know of my humiliation. We had arrived at the mountain only days before. Our feet were still aching, our skin sunburned, our silence thick in our throats. Everything seemed new and strange — the men in silver armor, the women toiling in the fields under almond trees. I should have given thanks for our salvation, instead I wept like a child in despair.

Although I tried to hide my sorrow, I could not. My grandsons’ small hands patted my shoulders for comfort, and I felt the concern in their touch. They could not speak, and perhaps their affliction allowed them to divine what others ignored, the true nature of the world. They could catch a moth in the dark by taking note of the soft, fluttering rhythm of its wings. They could gauge whether the wind had traveled from the west or if it arose in the east simply by the sound. Perhaps these abilities were miracles.

Where there was one miracle, surely, there would be more.

I cried myself to sleep and awoke early after an unsettled night. My eyes were red and puffy. I expected the boys to still be asleep, but my younger grandson, Levi, who had just turned seven, was crouched beside me, waiting for me to wake, his gaze trained upon me. He took my hand and led me outside, my guide through the dim light. I felt that I was still in a dream, but the dust and the sound of goats in their pens were real enough. We were here inside this fortress, so far from everything we knew, the fields of poppies and thistle, the cypress groves, the blooms of pomegranates, whose bell-shaped, scarlet flowers would turn to fruit before our eyes.

Levi led me to the wall that overlooked the white cliffs which stretched on as far as we could see. We watched the doves fly. Let loose at this hour so they might stretch their wings, they turned the entire sky white. They rose and disappeared, then returned again, drawn back to their nests. They were devoted to their mates. Therefore, couples were never allowed to fly together; the loyalty of one brought it back to its partner time and time again, despite the lure of freedom.

I understood what my grandson was telling me in bringing me to see the beauty of their flight. It was an honor to work with creatures who lived in the sky, so close to Adonai. If it was my fate to do so, it was not a burden but a gift. I turned and kissed Levi’s forehead and whispered a prayer of gratitude for all I still had.

THERE HAS BEEN talk about us ever since my son-in-law brought us here. People gazed at us trying to guess at the catastrophe in our family, convinced that even among the unfortunate, we deserved their pity because of my grandsons’ inability to speak. They know nothing more, only that we were driven out of our home, as they were, and that we chose to come here. We could have gone north toward Nazareth or Galilee, where the air was said to always be cool, where we might have begun a new life, searching out a village where no one knew of our bad luck. But my son-in-law was no longer a man who could live that way, settled into the practical matters of daily life. He was not about to herd goats, or find us a house made of stone in a town where we would walk to the well and cook our meals and forget what we had been through. He wanted revenge, nothing less. At Masada he had found what he was searching for, the company of men willing to die for what they believed in.

I don’t know how much time passed in the wilderness after God deserted us. Blessed is He who spoke, and the world came into being. Just as creation began with words so, too, did our world come apart in silence. None among us spoke. The boys because they could not, my son-in-law because he would not, myself because there were no words worth speaking aloud. The world was broken, and there was only one road that remained, splayed open before us as if made of bones.

I understood that by making this mountain our destination, we were headed for a no-man’s-land, a place from which there was no return. We had been banished from the world as we’d known it. We had seen too much and lost too much to walk into another town and unload the few belongings we still had and start anew.

Here my son-in-law is called the Man from the Valley; he needs no more of a name than that. He lives in the barracks, but even his own brethren fear him. He will go headfirst into any battle, unafraid and unyielding, with the grim expression of one who is determined to face down the Angel of Death. He wields an ax, the only weapon he needs. He eschews armor. Take me down, he goads the angel, Mal’ach ha-Mavet. Take me if you can.

Some people say the Man from the Valley sleeps with his ax, that he loves it the way another man might love a woman, or a father adore his child. He, who was once a scholar called Yoav, is now as brutal and merciless as the angel Gabriel is said to be, for Gabriel stands at the left hand of God, the side of the righteous. His sword is made of fire, and his eyes are fire as well. If he appears before you, you can sink to your knees and beg for mercy, but you will most certainly burn.

My son-in-law has not cut his hair since our time in the desert. He vows he never will again. He braids it into plaits that fall down his back. Already his hair has turned white, though he is a young man. Brambles and thorns are threaded through the strands as they are in the wool of sheep and goats, but he doesn’t notice, for he lingers in the world of grief, not in ours. Thorns mean nothing to him. Brambles are all he expects from the world. Some children whisper that he can breathe fire, like Gabriel, who is said to possess the ability to destroy entire cities with a single breath. When they see this Man from the Valley, the children run from him. He has no friends, takes no woman to his bed, keeps no one’s confidence. What happened has turned him into something that is like the wind — you cannot see him, but you know he is there, ready to do damage.

When I think of my son-in-law, I cannot help but recall the story of the rebel Jew some call Taxo. King Herod’s men chased him into a cave in the time when our fortress was still a palace, but this man would not bow to the will of the king. He would not offer his sons to be conscripts and refused to pay his share of taxes. The king could not allow rebellion, for such things breed as swarms of insects do, erupting into stinging fury, the one becoming the many, gathering strength.

When Herod’s soldiers were lowered from the tops of the cliffs on thick ropes, dressed for battle and ready to defeat him, the rebel cut the throats of his seven sons, one by one. He then slashed the throat of his wife before he followed, leaping into the ravine where he’d scattered his sons’ bodies. He would not allow those he loved to be subjected to the torture and cruelty of the king. Instead he left this world alongside them, even though it is written that none of our people may harm himself. As Taxo cast himself upon the rocks, perhaps he imagined God would blame the rocks for his death and he would be forgiven in the World-to-Come.

Though our law states that no man may wound himself, Yoav has destroyed the father he had once been to his sons, and in doing so he has destroyed himself. My son-in-law never comes to see the boys, for when he lost himself, he lost them as well. Should he happen upon the children in the alleyways or the orchards, he walks on the way a blind man might. At first the boys ran to him and clutched at his legs, but it did no good. Yoav does not blink, or stammer, or even gaze upon them, not if they throw themselves at him, desperate for his attentions. All that is good in this world is concealed from the man who was my son-in-law. The glinting water in a cup is sinister in his eyes, the clear sky is an affront, and his children have become nothing more than reminders of how flesh can burn and be turned to dust.

People take his negligence as proof that something is wrong with the children. Why would their own father disown them, even though they are so beautiful, with golden hair and dark eyes, reminiscent of their mother’s? There are those who whisper that the boys are possessed and this has caused their silence, but I understand that words aren’t necessary. The doves have taught me that. It is possible to speak without words, to know another creature’s wants and desires though there is only silence. That was my lesson to learn, my fate all along.

Each morning when I arrive, the doves know me; their song rises and falls with pleasure and acceptance. It is always there, a river of sound. Someone who isn’t accustomed to such noise might cover her ears and run outside. Yael did exactly that on her first day with us, hiding her head in alarm. We laughed and teased her, calling out that if mere birds could frighten her so, she had best never face a fierce beast. And yet the doves go to her as if she could speak their language. Though she doesn’t seem to care for them, they fly to her as if charmed. It’s her silence that draws them in and comforts them.

As for me, I’m grateful for my work in the dovecotes. The more distracted I am, the more possible it is for me to go on for another day. The sun streams in, and I begin to feed my charges their grain. I chase the nesting ones away to search for eggs. Most flutter up, but if they refuse to leave their nests, I shake my apron at them. How is it that I can feel sorrow for the doves, so much so that when I take their speckled eggs and place them in a basket I often weep, and yet when I dream of the men I killed, I feel nothing at all.

* * *

BEFORE WE came here we believed that our village in the Valley of the Cypresses was heaven, or perhaps we imagined it was not unlike the heaven we would someday enter. We should have known it would be taken from us. Nothing in this world is lasting, only our faith lives on. One day soldiers from the legion arrived, six across, walking down roads my own father had helped to build. First the legionnaires came, trained in Rome, decorated with chain mail and helmets; then the fierce auxiliary troops arrived, many of them tribesmen, wearing leather tunics, carrying long broadswords and lances. They wanted any riches they could find. From that morning when they entered our village, our land belonged to them and our lives did, too. They killed a white cockerel on the steps of the synagogue. In our law, that is a sin. They were well aware of this doctrine. The bird’s blood defiled us. This initial act of violence announced what the future would bring, if only the priests had bothered to read the signs left behind by the rooster’s bones. A hundred of our people went to rally against the legion and demand an apology. These were men who paid taxes and had homes and families, reputable, honest men who were certain this day would end with an apology from Rome.

They could not have been more wrong.

We did not see beyond the cypresses that grew with fragrant twisted bark set within a wood that had been there for so long we thought it would last forevermore. Outrage howled from ruined villages nearby for those who could hear, but we turned a deaf ear to their misery. For those who breathed deeply, there was the stink of war, but it was also the season when the oleander’s pink blooms sent out their fragrance and perfumed the air. Our land had been conquered many times, the sweet groves and fields drawing outsiders to us just as surely as the baker called to his customers with the rich scent of his loaves. But that was in the past; we wanted to believe that our lives were settled. My husband paid no attention to what was happening. In that he was indeed single-minded, as well as hardworking. The wise men and rabbis bowed to the legion, accepting taxes so high we could barely survive, but as long as there was wood for his ovens, my husband was happy. He cut the logs himself, and there was a pile as tall as a mountain in our yard. My husband asked only for a blessing from Adonai for what he was about to bring forth into this world each day, the mystery of the challah. He had white powder in the creases of his skin. Each time he kissed me he left a white mark, a baker’s kiss. He assured me that, if we paid no attention to what was around us and did no harm, we would be safe. People always needed bread.

He left our home determined to bring the first round loaves to the synagogue as an offering, as he always did. He had vowed to avoid trouble, but on this day it found him. Our neighbors had collected in a beleaguered group on their way to plead their case so they would not lose their homes to the Romans. My husband was convinced to go with them. He had his tray of offerings, the loaves covered by a prayer shawl that had been so finely spun gold threads were braided among the purple fringes. He was ready to go to the rabbis, but when his neighbors scolded him and said all men must make a stand, he was compelled to make his mark with the others. The letter R fashioned into the crusts of the loaves he baked should have been enough of a mark for him, my name his inspiration and his shield. Instead, he joined those men who wanted more.

I KNEW something was wrong when I smelled smoke. There were loaves in the oven. I checked them, but they weren’t yet burning. Why did he go on this day of all days? Why on this morning was he not single-minded when at all other times he saw nothing but his own bakery? The barley, the salt, the coriander, the cumin, these were the ingredients that made up his world. Until now the only difficulty that had plagued my husband was that rats slunk through the windows; like many bakers, he often had to lay down hemlock to turn them away from the flour bins. Now there was peril in every corner of our world. The demons had flung open the doors to our village. They had declared us to be victims as they stood on a dark ledge and rubbed their hands together gleefully. What you are given, they declared, we now take away.

As the hours passed, I began to pace back and forth in alarm. The baker had expected to return before the loaves in the slow-burning oven were brown. Does a man go off and disappear like that? He’d told me to remove the loaves when the sun was in the center of the sky if he hadn’t yet returned. I didn’t. What had he meant by that? Had he had some idea of the trouble to come? Noon came and went. I gazed out in alarm as I saw the shadows lengthening, the smoke drifting over courtyards and roofs.

I thought if I waited to remove the loaves, my husband would smell the bread and know it was burning and run back home. At worst he would be cross with me for not doing as I was instructed. But he still hadn’t returned when the sun had begun to drop down in the direction of evening. By now the loaves were charred, the crusts black with soot.

I had one thought, and that was to find my husband. I could be single-minded, too, perhaps that was what had bound us together for so many years. I opened the door, frantic to begin a search for the Baker, ready to dart into the street though it was now teeming with our neighbors, many of them stained with their own blood and with the blood of their fathers.

As I was readying myself to leave, I found my son-in-law, Yoav, in my doorway. He wasn’t a fighter then, not yet the warrior who would vow to never again cut his hair. Instead, he was a gentle man who longed to run from trouble. He had the panicked look of a scholar who is suddenly faced with the brutalities and the vile concerns of life. Like my husband, he had been dedicated to his work, concerned with his studies and with the will of Adonai. I had already wrapped my head scarf close to my skull, possessed with the intention to search for my husband, but my son-in-law stopped me. He warned I must prepare myself for what he had to say.

I raised my chin, ready to push past him, not willing to listen. What could stop me from going to my husband? What excuse could my son-in-law offer that might compel me to give up my search? My son-in-law, who was devout and would never touch a woman other than my daughter, his wife, placed his hand on my arm.

“There is a reason I tell you not to go out there,” he murmured. There could be only one reason. A world that had unraveled so completely that the man I’d spent a lifetime with had been lost. I could see the truth in my son-in-law’s eyes when he began to speak. He confessed he had seen the husk that had been my husband in the center of our town, cast upon the plaza with dozens of our neighbors, broken like a branch in the wind. It was too late to retrieve the body. If I tried, I would only lose my life as well.

Despite his report, I tried to push past the place where my son-in-law had planted himself in my doorway. He was stronger than I imagined, or perhaps I was weakened by regret.

“Listen to me,” Yoav insisted. He said it in a way that gave me no choice but to hear. “There is no other way for me to say this, and no time to reason with you. Your husband is already in the World-to-Come.”

There was no map to lead the living there. I could not reach him. The Romans were already piling up bodies in the street. They had lit the fire which had alerted me to the misery of the day. Now I realized it was not bread I smelled on the waves of smoke pouring through town but the bitter odor of flesh.

Yoav was a young rabbi who was respected and learned; because of his rank he’d had to think twice before taking a baker’s daughter as his bride. Most rabbis searched out other rabbis’ daughters in marriage, for like congregated with like, as the birds in the sky gathered with their own kind. But of course Yoav had wanted my daughter. Zara was beautiful beyond measure. No wonder he had courted her, ignoring the more suitable girls who chased after him. My daughter’s name meant beautiful morning, and she truly was brighter than anything in this world, her skin golden, her hair like wheat, her countenance made even more lovely because her black eyes were a reminder of night before morning broke through, a time when the world was a mystery and shadows were all we had.

I’d often wondered if perhaps Zara had been given to me by an angel. How else could a plain woman such as I be blessed with a daughter who resembled a queen? I took great pride in her, and for good reason.

I never once stopped to consider that what you are given can also be taken away.

WE HAD BEEN flattered when Yoav came to live in our house. My husband always cut a piece of the loaf offering for him every morning, the first of the bread baked that day. Now this learned young man we had so honored with our pride and respect had been turned pale, quaking with fear. As I leaned against him, sobbing, he was no different than any other frightened man, no better certainly, perhaps more terrified than many. He insisted I hurry and pack. I hesitated until he informed me that my daughter and her boys were already awaiting us.

Something compelled me to pack a few extra ingredients. You would think I would take up my finest robes or my marriage bracelets, those special, valued items I kept in the cabinet beside the bed, hidden where no thief could reach them. Instead I took what had belonged to the Baker: a wooden bowl, a clutch of heavy spoons, the white cloth he tied around his waist while he was at work, the garment he wore so that no evil would come upon us as long as he was dressed in his prayer shawl. At the last moment I collected several of the vials he kept beneath the stove: coriander and cumin and salt. A jar of the fermented dough which caused the loaves to rise.

I knew that the dead did not leave us so quickly, so I whispered to my husband as I packed. Look at us now, I said to the man I’d lived beside for so many years, as if he was beside me still. Look what we’ve become.

We were like rats, scurrying away before the flood of death overtook us. I grabbed the burned bread from the oven, scalding my hands. Blisters would rise on my fingers, but at least I made certain we had the last loaves of the Baker’s bread to sustain us. Yoav took my arm to lead me away. I knew we dared not linger. But I believe my son-in-law was not the only one with me in the bakery that day. I am convinced there was an angel standing beside me, whispering Take this, not that.

At the last moment I reached for the small jar of the hemlock my husband used on vermin.

Perhaps the angel had given me what I needed most of all.

PEOPLE we had known our whole lives were swarming out of the village, some carrying all they owned. Chaos had overcome us, and our lives were like stones thrown in a game of chance, cast up into the air, only to fall and scatter upon the ground. Broken pottery littered the road, and many tossed away belongings they soon discovered were too heavy to bring on such a hurried, frantic journey. There were stray dogs barking and the echo of babies crying. Everywhere there were flames as people set their own homes on fire rather than allow the Romans to sack them after they’d been abandoned. People wanted to ensure that their enemies couldn’t enjoy what they had labored a lifetime to possess. By the next day not a brick would remain, our world having been snatched away overnight. There were women in the street sobbing, but the wind had come up, the merciless wind from the sea that in time would bring us winter, and no one could hear these women’s voices. No one could determine if they uttered oaths or prayers.

I followed at my son-in-law’s heels, intent, as he was, on making certain that my daughter and her children were kept safe. I wept as we went on, certain I’d bring a curse upon us by not preparing my husband’s body. I was meant to sit beside him all night and help him travel into the World-to-Come with lamentations and prayers. At any other time I would have remained with the husk that had once housed his spirit before the body that had contained him was left in the cave beside the bones of our people. I thought of our forefathers fleeing from Egypt, of their children who stumbled in the sand as they made their way out of bondage, of the waters that rose and then parted before them. Their agony had never been more real to me. I felt I might weep on their behalf.

I draped a white shawl over my own shoulders, already in mourning for a man who had baked my initial into every loaf of bread. I slipped on the color of the garments of the dead, as though I had passed from this world along with my husband. For a moment, I thought I should stay behind, give up my life at the hands of the Romans and allow my spirit to join with his. But I had a vision of my daughter and of her children, dearer than any treasure, and I knew what I must do. I prayed for my husband, but I left our village that evening. Like the rats, I fled what was tumbling down around us, forsaking the lives we had led that were now destroyed.

BY NIGHTFALL we were journeying toward the wilderness. It was the month of Tishri, when we celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the festival marking the time the Almighty begins to write down the names of those who belong in the Book of Life and will live for another year. I had no idea that we would still be wandering during Yom Kippur, the time to atone for our sins, and that the book would be closed on that day, then sealed. The names that had not been written on its pages were those who would not live into the next year.

We were prepared for a long journey. My son-in-law had brought along the two donkeys and the cart that had pulled sacks of emmer and wheat to the bakery and turned the millstone to grind flour. I carried the last five loaves of my husband’s bread, tokens of what had brought us our good life. My daughter had packed jars of olives and oil and had brought along cheese wrapped in cloth and leather canisters of water. We ran, and the donkeys ran with us. Above us there were huge flocks of birds, all fleeing the billows of smoke issued by the many fires set in the village. We slept huddled together, in the open, unused to the cruel way of the wilderness, yearning for the scent of baking bread and the softness of our own beds. My son-in-law wore the long tunic of a scholar. He looked distraught when my daughter embraced him and told him we would be lost without him, perhaps frightened that the faith she had in him to lead us was misplaced. He was more at home with his scrolls and prayers than he was guiding us through the wilderness.

At night I dreamed of my husband. He was with me as the dead often are before they move on. They say those who have left us don’t change who they are even in the World-to-Come. My husband was kneading bread, working hard, as if he was still in our world. He seemed the same, a kind and serious man intent on his baking, just as he’d always been, but he was using ingredients I didn’t recognize. The dough was red, and the spices were ground from the petals of black flowers and from the sharp stingers of honeybees. I heard him speak then. He said, Every loaf of bread feeds you in the way you need to be fed. My husband had been a simple man and had used words only when necessary. Now, in my dreams, I felt certain he was telling me something I needed to hear. I awoke wishing he had said more.

In the morning, the flocks of birds fleeing over the hillsides were so enormous they blotted out the sun. I held my tongue, though I was certain this was a bad sign. The white cockerel who’d been murdered on the stairs of the synagogue was following us, that was what I believed, sending his messengers to pursue us. The birds passed us, their flight faster than we would ever be, and that told us something as well.

If we had paid attention, we would have understood there are some things in this world you cannot outrun.

* * *

THE DAYS PASSED, and before long we had eaten nearly all we had, the bread, the olives, the cheese. We began to ration our food. My son-in-law’s plan was simple, the tactics of a logical man. We would wait out the Romans, then return to our village and start anew. I didn’t say what I knew, that there’d be nothing to return to. We would have only blood and broken bricks. I saw that my son-in-law was intimidated by the wilderness before us and our place in it. The desert loomed, a harsh landscape even for those experienced in surviving its dangers. In all his hours of study, Yoav had never built a fire from twigs with the use of a flint, never hunted with a bow, never found water or made his way over limestone boulders and rocks so harsh they set our feet to bleeding. He was an important man in the village, but here he was nothing. Before long we were lost. Each thorn tree looked the same to us, ravaged, black. Each hillock led to yet another. Only the sky changed, flushing pink at twilight, and then sifting into a dove gray light before the darkness overcame us.

Yoav began to pray, hour after hour, as if that could prompt him as to what to do next. I had tried and failed to make bread in a griddle over our small fire. I could only make crackers that hadn’t the strength to rise. I finally was able to cook bread on hot stones that I placed beneath burning kindling. The boys called the black, risen loaves ash bread; it was as bitter as it was satisfying. The goatskin bags of water were less heavy, drained by our thirst, and the rains hadn’t yet come. Yoav promised that Adonai would lead us, and we had no choice but to accept his decree. Secretly, I wished we could find a guide among the tribesmen in their blue robes that we sometimes spied heading toward Moab. I would give them all I had if they could help us navigate a trail.

Though our village was gone, I still thought there was a world for us to return to.

I kept my eye on the heavens. There were more birds all the time. Each day their numbers increased. I tried to count them, but it was impossible, they were as numerous as the stars, and in the end I gave up. I still felt the Baker was with me, and that brought me comfort. I spoke to him under my breath, trying to amuse him with my descriptions of the many sorts of winds we encountered: the billowing kind, the howling sort, the soft, warm wind from the south, the stark, blue wind that arrived at nightfall and abruptly departed at daybreak, the violet wind of despair. I chattered to my husband whenever no one could overhear.

Then one day I awoke and he was gone. I felt his departure as surely as if I had seen his spirit rise. All at once, my aloneness settled deeply, a stone inside of me, hard and sharp. While I slept, my husband’s spirit had been claimed by the World-to-Come. He was utterly gone. When I spoke of the hissing, rain-spattered wind that would come to us when winter arrived, he made no reply. When I described the sunstruck wind of the drifting dust funnels, I was speaking to no one but the dust itself. There were only black birds above us now, a bank of feathers and flesh that roiled across the sky like storm clouds. I waited till dark to weep, holding my grief inside, for there was no point in sharing my sorrow.

We had no choice but to go forward, as only emptiness was around us. The following day we did so. I had to leave that unmarked place, abandoning the last of my husband’s essence. I carried my loss as my burden; it weighed me down and made me slow. I could not keep pace with the tired donkeys who bleakly made their way. The boys ran back to me and grabbed my hands and urged me on. Because of them I continued, but God must have known it had crossed my mind to stay behind. I wanted to lie down beside the rocks and dream of the Baker, to call for him to come back to me, even if it meant giving up this world. Perhaps that was the sin I committed. I forgot that even the worst of lives is a treasure.

WE WANDERED to a small oasis. There was a waterfall flowing from a cliff, pouring over the rocks to form a pool of fresh water. We felt blessed, overjoyed by our good fortune.

“I told you to have faith,” my son-in-law chided. “God has done exactly as I said He would.”

There were date palms and a jumble of fragrant jasmine. Reeds on fleshy stems grew along the banks of the pool. White flowers drifted in the green water, each forming the shape of a star. There was a cluster of wild mulberries where wasps and dragonflies gathered, their drone like music. The air was cool and sweet when the breeze stirred. I could have described that breeze to my husband if his spirit was still beside me, a wind so calm it inspired envy in all other winds in every corner of the world.

My son-in-law thought we could wait out the Romans here, in this mild place. We should have known that in such cruel times it was best not to be attached to a single location, even if there was water and the air was refreshing. Envy is envy, both for the wind and for men on earth. The better the place, the more others covet what you have. Be a pauper, a wanderer, a secret in the darkness of night. Once you possess something others do not, you are a target for the wicked. It would have been better if we’d made our camp in one of the caves beyond the oasis, or perhaps gone farther into the wilderness, following the trampled paths beaten down among the thornbushes by bands of wild camels. But my son-in-law feared the heart of the desert and intended for us to stay where we would be safe. I had a rush of fear, a premonition. I saw the speckled shadows beneath the palm tree form the shape of a viper; it slithered along the sand, stopping at my feet.

My daughter hushed me when I spoke of my fears, suggesting we move on. There were people who had entered the wilderness that spread out before us never to be seen again, she whispered. Wanderers who were abandoned or devoured by beasts, defeated by hunger and thirst, kidnapped, enslaved by the tribesmen who wore blue cloaks. Here we had everything we might ever need; to leave would be an ingratitude in God’s eyes.

“Think of the children,” Zara urged. “They’re happy here.”

When I looked at the boys, cheerfully shouting as they played together in the shade of the date palms, I put away my fears. We stayed where there would be water, the most precious element of all, even though hyenas came to drink in the twilight, drawn to water, as all beasts in the desert are. These fierce creatures stayed close, their eyes gleaming as they stalked the donkeys, another omen we ignored. At night these ungodly spotted animals made a wailing sound, for they desired what little we had, or perhaps they wished to convince us they were tame, like dogs, longing for our company, when what they really wanted was our flesh.

We saw few people during this time, only stray travelers who filled their water flasks, then moved on, too wise to make camp in such uncertain times. We were told that Zealots from Jerusalem had taken over several outposts nearer the Salt Sea, including Herod’s fortress, that marvel of a palace perched on white cliffs, built by a king so cruel he murdered anyone who opposed him. One old man, a hermit with his feet bound in cloth and his tunic shredded by the wind, warned that, although the desert might appear vacant, it was teeming with life. What looked empty was full, much like water in a cup. What was most important was invisible to the eye.

THE BIRDS had remained with us, like a plague hovering in the sky. Even I, a simple woman, knew this foreshadowed evil. One day there were so many we hid in the tent where we slept, frightened by such extreme darkness in the middle of the day, a world blackened by ravens. When we went out the next morning, the road that led to the east was strewn with feathers. Birds had fallen from the sky, stricken by some unknown disaster. Zara and I were busy foraging for twigs to make a fire so we could take our noon meal. Before I could stop them, my grandsons had gathered feathers and begun to play with them, adorning themselves, pretending they’d been turned into ravens. My daughter and I exchanged a look. All at once we had realized it was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when we ask God to forgive our sins. In the wilderness every day was much like the next, and we had forgotten the divine aspect of the day until that very moment. We had not been meant to work or eat, only to beg for forgiveness.

It was said that in the Temple there was a scarlet rope hung at the altar; at the close of Yom Kippur, after fasting and sacrifice and many prayers, it would turn white when God forgave us our transgressions. Now we had ignored the most holy of days, and in doing so we had turned our backs on our God. The boys were dancing in the sand, covered with feathers, clucking to each other like birds. It was the sort of mistake that calls demons from their hiding places. I wondered if we had taken the wrong path in our journey and had heedlessly turned to the left, the side that gives rise to all evil.

My daughter’s husband was furious when he saw the boys romping like savages. Compelled to make amends, he ran to pray, pacing into the desert, the wind hitting against him, leaving its mark like whips. He shouted through that ferocious wind that he would make things right and beg for forgiveness, he would pray for God’s mercy, even if it took him all day and all night. But my daughter and I knew what we had done could not be righted. We had forgotten Adonai. We’d thought only of ourselves and our own trifling human needs. For that, we would suffer. Our sins would grow and swallow us whole.

I had named my daughter after morning’s radiance, but morning has two meanings, and perhaps I called down a curse when I chose to call her so. Now I wondered if I had foretold what was written even though learned men insist no woman can foresee what will come to be. They can say what they like. I knew nothing good would come to pass in the desert on the Yom Kippur that we forgot. My daughter’s husband could pray for forgiveness until his throat was dry. I could tell by the rising wind, the one without mercy, that there would be none.

* * *

THAT TERRIBLE DAY would still continue to overtake my every thought if the racket in the dovecotes did not distract me with a constant stream of sound. A clatter of noise mirrors silence, for one is alone in both situations. I often noticed Shirah watching me as I worked. I wondered what she made of me. I was not afraid to get my hands dirty, and did not overstep my bounds. When she had her eye on me in the dim air, I bowed my head to hide what resided within me. There was a single stream of sunlight that poured in the roof, and I avoided walking through it, afraid the brightness would reveal the truth of my mourning. But one day, not long after my arrival, Shirah suddenly took my hand in hers. I was startled by her action, and before I could think to pull away, she gazed into my rough palm. Her touch was like water, cool upon my skin. Afterward, I could tell that she knew. I had a murderer’s hand. It burned at night, in the dark. Other women looked at the moon as it rose to see their fate reflected, but I peered into the palm of my hand to see what was written and what I had done.

As I did not wish others to speak of me, I turned away from the gossip concerning Shirah. If she was indeed a witch, I had no fear of her, for when she clasped my hand in hers, she took a portion of my burden upon her.

“Being human means losing everything we love best in the world,” she murmured as she released me. “But would you ask to be anything else?”

I WAS SILENT at the time, but afterward I wondered if I would indeed have preferred to be a snake rather than a woman, if I would have chosen to live my life beneath a rock, striking at dusk, devouring my sustenance, ravenous and alone in my cold skin. Did a snake love her children? Did she weep beneath her rock, yearning for arms with which to embrace them, for a voice with which to tell them stories, a heart that could be rended in two? Often I couldn’t sleep when I thought about such matters. These were the times when I saw Shirah walking at night. Perhaps she knew the answers to my questions, but I never asked, just as I never questioned where she was going or where she had been. If she had a box of sins kept under lock and key, as some people vowed, that was not my business. Once you have broken God’s laws, you are aware that He alone can judge us. You know that no man can understand what a woman may be driven to do.

WHEN YAEL first came to us, I was convinced she was a foolish, selfish girl who thought too well of herself to clean up after the doves or carry heavy baskets of dung into the fields. I would have never imagined she would come to live in my house, if one can rightly call a single chamber with a curtain as a divider from neighbors a proper home. And yet I myself had been guilty of those very same notions upon my arrival, bitter that I had been sent to work in the dovecotes. I’d held on to the position of my old life with an arrogance to which I had no right. I’d wept, convinced I’d been relegated to the lowliest position on the mountain, until my grandson showed me the truth of the doves. Now I understand the pride Shirah and her daughters show, a devotion which had puzzled me when I first walked through the carved wooden doors, a scarf tied over my face, afraid to draw a single breath because of the stench of the rich loam.

Without the doves, this fortress would have already fallen. The leavings scattered in the orchard have turned our world green and lush, nourishing the roots of the dates and olives, feeding the almond trees, causing them to burst into blooms of pink and white clouds. Without the doves, we would have starved long ago. It was outlawed to kill one, for without the Temple there could no longer be sacrifices; a man who took one out of greed risked being karet, turned out from God’s view, for such a deed was considered a crime against us all.

Each time I cut open a piece of fruit, I was grateful to the pale, pliant creatures we cared for. Whenever one was ailing, I brought it home to nurse it to health. I kept such birds in a wooden shelf beside my bed. I listened as they cooed, finding comfort in their song.

These were the only nights when I didn’t dream.

I BEGAN to change my mind about Yael, daughter of the famed assassin Yosef bar Elhanan, the murderer who people whispered had once possessed the ability to walk through walls and disappear in front of men’s eyes, sister of one of our young warriors. I noticed she could work her own brand of magic. All she had to do was reach out her hand, and the doves would come to her. She needn’t cluck her tongue or offer grain, tricks I used to call them to me. I was surprised by her abilities, struck by jealousy. I was always the first to unlock the door in the mornings, the one to feed the doves and nurse them back to health. It was I who threw stones when hawks came to light on our roof, ready to slip through the thatching and destroy the nests we tended so carefully, or to strike when we let the doves fly in the early morning, assured of their loyalty and their return.

Yet it was Yael they went to, not me. She stood in the dark and they flitted around her.

“Why do they prefer her?” I asked Shirah, for she had been among the doves for the longest time. I suppose envy shone in my eyes.

“She speaks their language.”

“Really? Of birds? What language is that?”

Shirah smiled in response. “You of all people should know.”

Then I understood. It was the language of silence.

* * *

I HAD GUESSED what Yael was hiding beneath her tunic and scarves, although she would not speak of it, and for good reason, even though we were far from the laws of Jerusalem, where women in her condition were called before a council of wise men and elders, then cast out to fend for themselves. Women who committed adultery and conceived were forced to drink bitter water and dust from the Temple floor, which some believed made the children within them fall away. This was the sotah ceremony, where their innocence or guilt would be proven by God when they were forced to drink His name written upon a piece of parchment and dissolved in a cup of water. People whispered that evil repelled God’s grace. Should the wicked attempt to take His name into their bodies, they would fall to dust.

But perhaps on this mountain, with so much danger before us, there was little time to search out sin and little reason to do so. Did my neighbors not wonder what sins of their own had brought them to this place, why our people must suffer so, why God’s ways were so mysterious, why He had forsaken us on this mountain?

The constant howling of the wind drove some people mad; many among us cursed the fortress and were brought lower than they’d ever imagined. There were women who wept during the windstorms until tears streaked their faces with lines of salt. Did they not ask why they had been forced so far from Jerusalem and everything they had known and loved? In their darkest hours, as they huddled with their children in the dwindling light, their shawls their only protection from the sandstorms, they clearly wondered what we were fighting for.

I never asked that question. I gazed out at the land beyond the serpent’s path and thought of the many forms a beast could take. There were those who revealed themselves at noon, squarely setting their feet upon the earth, and those who sifted inside your dreams. There were those who came from Rome, the beasts I despised more than any others, their claws beginning to show as they crossed the Great Sea, for salt repels demons. When I thought of such wickedness, I could not sleep. To protect myself I chanted the incantation Shirah instructed me to recite when I tossed and turned at night. I ban and make an oath against destroyers and demons and plagues and afflictions and terrors and nightmares.

Still I lay awake, unable to close my eyes.

There were occasions when I spied my son-in-law climbing the path, set apart from the other warriors as they returned from missions meant to protect us or when they attempted to locate the provisions we needed from the world outside our walls. I did not wish to think about the mournful deeds they had committed, the blood that had been drawn, the lives taken.

The Man from the Valley who would not walk beside his brethren no longer had a resemblance to the scholar he’d once been. He was never without the ax for which he’d traded his most precious chalice, carrying the weapon so near his torso that it seemed a part of him, threaded to him with invisible red silk. His hair that had turned white overnight was so long that people said God was able to grab him away from danger. This was the reason he still lived, though he placed himself in peril time and time again. He was known to be furious in a skirmish, willing to forge into battle with little thought to his own life. I understood why he did this, for I knew what he was fighting for; in that he was no different than I. Anguish such as ours is fed on bones and blood. We had no more choice than the wind does as to where we must go and where we belonged. I was grateful for this quiet time on the mountain. Here, at last, my grandsons were safe, able to rest without danger while the doves at my bedside hushed them to sleep. As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished only for my waking life, the hours when I didn’t see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become.

* * *

THERE WERE MANY who were leaving cities and villages when we fled. They were mostly good people, but there were also those who veered to the left of the road, the side of the wicked. Before the Baker slid the last loaves in the oven on the huge wooden breadboard he always used, before I knew he wasn’t coming back, before black feathers fell onto the road, it had already been written that we would meet those who were evil and that they would come upon us late in the day, when the sky flared blue and the air was scented with jasmine.

They came for the donkeys, which they spied from the cliff. They came for the cool water that glittered in their eyes. But they stayed when they saw Zara tending to the fire. They saw her brightness, so beautiful it appeared that morning was breaking before them, and their intent changed. They forgot the donkeys and the pool of water and the Tenth Legion, the Roman regiment they had deserted, fearing punishment from their superiors, the canes of the generals broken upon their backs in exchange for misdeeds and grudges.

They were already beyond the line that divides us from the creatures of darkness. They crossed the worn path left by the pack of hyenas who had been stalking us, crying in the night, trying to gain our favor with their sorrowful yelps, hoping for scraps before they came to devour us. Four Roman soldiers who had lived without water or food or hope ventured down the hillside, their chain-mail armor weighing upon their frames, men once but no more. It was easy for them to become beasts; one step and their humanity was an illusion. Beneath the armor there was only teeth and claws, hunger and thirst. It was the Sabbath, and Yoav was gone into the desert to pray, his prayer shawl thrown over his shoulders. The wind was rising, so he didn’t hear any of what happened to us. He was committed to God and to the sound of his own voice. Ever since Yom Kippur he had been absent all day and into the evening, praying for our deliverance. When the first star appeared in the sky, we would light the Sabbath lamp with the last of our olive oil, and he would return to us. That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness.

I spied the soldiers as you might spy a demon, a shadow in the corner, melting across the ground. I didn’t wait to think further. I sent the boys running. It was as though a key had unlocked the future and for one brief instant I saw through to the other side.

“Go quickly and don’t venture forth,” I told my grandsons. “Not until I come for you. Even if the night falls, even if the sun is eaten by the moon, no matter what you hear, even if someone calls you by name. Don’t answer. Don’t talk.” I looked into their eyes as I instructed them. “Above all else: Stay hidden.”

I sent them to the ledge behind the waterfall where they sometimes played. The children were small enough to slip inside a crevice that had been formed where the rocks met. The water was a curtain as it rushed past. I thought if anything went wrong the boys wouldn’t be able to see through the water and God would protect them.

But water is clear, like an open window, and their eyes were open as well.

THE MEN fell upon Zara at the fire. I heard her voice the way you hear a bell, it rings and sounds above all other noises. I ran to her, and one of the intruders threw me to the side, for to him I was no more than a dried locust, good for nothing other than a raven’s dinner. I could taste blood brimming in my mouth. I charged at them, screaming, but they were four, and brutally strong, and I was a woman and unused to fighting. While two of them held Zara, tearing at her garments, the other two made quick business of me. The world grew dark when they took a rock to my head. I could feel the heat of my own blood washing across my forehead. Everything was black as night inside of me. To my shame I didn’t see what my grandsons saw, I only understood when I saw the broken shell Zara had become. But the boys observed it all: how the soldiers took turns with their mother, how she tried to fend them off, how when they were finished they tortured her with fire and with burning rocks and sharp sticks for no reason other than the sake of their own wickedness.

When I came out of the darkness and awoke again to this world, it was too late. The beasts were going through the meager possessions that were stored in our tent. I went to Zara even though I knew that we had entered the realm of demons and that each demon who walks the earth has the strength of a thousand men and that I was only a woman, made old in these few hours, an ancient, worthless thing. I dragged myself through the sand.

One moment we had all the time in the world stretching out in front of us, and in the next instant my beloved daughter was dying in my arms. She was whispering for me to finish it and let her go to the World-to-Come. She pleaded with me as her blood washed over us, the blood I had labored to bring forth into this world. It was not enough for them to use her for their pleasure and then leave us be. It was not enough for them to take all that we owned — the donkeys, the water, the tent, the provisions — and abandon us to the hyenas who were already circling. They were the angels of destruction, I saw that clearly, though they appeared to be Roman soldiers. They had come to us from the dark side of the world, where no light can penetrate. Zara’s skin was blackened where they had held burning sticks and rocks against her. They had put the rocks inside her just to hear her scream. I snatched those rocks away, but it did no good. She was already speaking to those in the World-to-Come, already broken. Now I saw that she had been split in two with an ax, and all that was contained inside her body had spilled into the earth.

In that moment, as I crouched beside her, I turned into something that was not a woman.

The beasts had tossed their weapons and armor and brass helmets onto the ground. I took up a knife they’d cast aside, slick with blood. I did as Zara asked, though it was a crime against God and against our laws. I whispered in her ear that she would be free now and that she should close her eyes. Then I did what no mother should ever have to do. I took the knife and cut her throat. I did it the way a sacrifice is made, for even a beast of burden is sent from life in this way, with compassion, in a single swift slash, completed without pain. As I did so, I leaned over and placed my mouth on my daughter’s bruised lips. Her last breath entered me, and I held her spirit inside me as I had before she was born.

The evil ones took what they wanted. They laughed when they saw me lying beside Zara. When I went after them, roaring, wielding the knife, one of the soldiers grabbed it from me and held it to my throat. I was grateful when he did so. This was what I wanted. I asked him to kill me. “Go ahead,” I said. “My death will be your gift to me.”

If he couldn’t completely understand my language, he most surely knew the meaning of the words. I could no longer endure the agonies of this earth we walked upon. But the one who was their leader told his cohort to wait. The soldiers were hungry from their wickedness. Like animals, they wanted more. They commanded me to cook for them over the fire where they had killed my daughter. The smoke carried the scent of the perfume she wore, a mixture of cinnamon and ginger oil, a cloud of fragrance arising from the ashes.

An idea began to form inside me.

“Will you deny us?” the leader said. He had a smile on his treacherous face, as though asking a favor from a neighbor. “Surely you can cook.”

I was no longer a woman, but I was still a baker’s wife. I thought of what my husband had said to me in my dream. At last I understand his meaning. I told the beasts I could do more than simply cook a meal. I could bake bread, enough for them to carry into the desert to make certain their hunger would be satisfied for many days to come. I would feed them in the way they deserved to be fed.

“You had better not be lying,” the one who wanted to kill me remarked.

I took out the griddle and my husband’s wooden spoons. I tied his white apron around my waist.

“What do I look like?” I said to them. “This is my life’s calling.”

I must have looked like a beaten-down old woman, but one who knew the mysteries of bread, for they urged me to continue with their meal. They dozed in the sun. The scorched scent of death didn’t bother them, as it never bothered the hyenas, who stalked their prey from the hills, or the jackals, who lived in ruins, feeding off the bones of the slain. While the beasts were subdued, their drowsy eyes closed, I baked beetles into the loaves and filled them with curses. I found the coriander dashed onto the ground as they had pawed through our belongings and took some for seasoning so they would not suspect that what they ate was anything more than bread. At last I spied the vial of the ingredient the angel in my kitchen had bid me to take. Not a grain had spilled. I mixed it with the water and the last of the flour, added a portion of yeast from the cool earthenware jar, then set the mixture under a swath of fabric to help the dough rise in the dark.

Before the loaves were ready, the beasts awoke. They had more damage to do in the world. They were running from service to their Emperor, anxious to flee, but I was slow, tending to my portion of vengeance and despair.

“We can’t wait,” they told me. “Hurry,” they shouted.

I had no choice but to cook the bread directly over the fire before it was finished rising. I expected it to be thick and flat, like crackers, the way griddle bread is, or be dusted black, as ash bread becomes, but it rose into perfect loaves. I knew then that the angel that had been beside me in my kitchen was beside me still, helping to form the dough.

The dark pulse of grief was in my throat. I was thankful I wasn’t asked to speak, only to serve. I could hear the ravens above us. I thought of the feathers on the road and of the many signs the angel had given me and how I had failed to pay attention. That would never happen again. I cut the loaves with the bloody knife, burning my fingers as I then tore the bread into pieces, and I served it to the beasts who looked like men. They were wearing the insignia of the legion, though they were traitors to their own kind, and were therefore still decorated with the sign of the wild boar. I thought how fitting that pigs should eat this bread. I smiled as though I were a woman who hadn’t witnessed all I had seen on this day, a mother whose daughter’s body hadn’t been kicked into a ravine where the jasmine grew.

I was the other thing now, the thing I’d become.

They wolfed down what I had baked, eating more bread than any men I’d seen before. Their violence and the days of stalking others had caused them great hunger. I served them again and again, as if they were my masters. In their eyes I appeared to be a woman and their servant, nothing more. Then, stomachs full, they went to fill their flasks as well as two large barrels from the pool so that they might take enough water for their journey. They stood so near the waterfall I grew dizzy, fearing they might spy my hidden grandsons and murder them for sport should the children dare to call out. I did not know that the angel had permitted me one last favor. He had taken the boys’ voices so they couldn’t give themselves away. When they opened their mouths to scream and sob, not a sound came out.

By then the beasts were crouched by the pool, their faces in the water like dogs, suddenly possessed by an unquenchable thirst. I breathed in my grim success, knowing this was a sign that the poison had claimed them. They could not stop their desire for water even though they clutched at their bellies, which were overly full, nearly ready to burst. I watched cold-eyed as they drank themselves to death. That was what happened to the rats in my husband’s bakery. We often found them drowned in a bucket after they took the bait, dying from the terrible thirst the hemlock brought on.

One of the men came to me on all fours, begging for mercy. He choked out that he had a wife and children waiting for him. He claimed to be a good man in the life he’d led before, but his words, like all things in the desert, were carried away by the rising wind. In truth, I was someone who no longer listened to such entreaties. I had no pity inside me, only my daughter’s last breath.

BY THE TIME night fell and my son-in-law returned from his prayers, I had slain all four beasts, slitting their throats for good measure, not out of mercy but to make certain I had accomplished the deed. I had washed my daughter’s body with clean water and wound her in the white linen shawl she had worn at her wedding. She’d brought the shawl with her on our journey, the single treasure she’d taken from home, whereas I had reached for poison. The choice you make about such matters reveals who you are deep inside. She was a good wife, while I was a creature who would do anything to protect what was mine. I gathered stones to place over her body so the jackals would not come for what was left of her. If the stones were heavy, I failed to notice. They were red and chalky and stained my hands. Perhaps that is how I became marked for the rest of my life and why, if anyone looked too closely, my hands would doubtless give my true nature away.

I must have appeared to be a demon myself. As soon as my son-in-law saw me, he sank to his knees. When he took in all that had come to pass in his absence, he beat on the earth; he wept and cursed and tore at his cloak. I wondered if he would run into the desert like a madman, forsaking us. This could not happen, even if he wished for a crude release from his agony. I refused to allow my daughter’s death to be the death of her children. I needed my son-in-law to help us get away. I took hold of his prayer shawl, though I should not have touched even the hem. This time I was the one to tell him what to do. I said to be quick about it, for time had shifted to become sand beneath our feet. I knew we must leave this place before anyone searched for the beasts at the pool.

While Yoav packed all that we had left onto the donkeys, I went to the waterfall, for that was where my treasure was stored. The boys stared at me with their dark, gleaming eyes, but they would not come out. I clapped my hands and called to them, but there was no response.

The sound of the falling water was deafening. I crept behind the waterfall, my feet slipping on the cool, wet stones. I was too large to fit into the crevice where they huddled against the damp rocks silvered with mica. They were only six and eight years old, and yet they had seen what no grown man on earth should see. I held out my hand and begged them to come to me. I told them that I carried their mother’s spirit inside me, and that we would take her with us wherever we went. We had to make haste. Their mother would want us to do so. After a while the boys grasped for me and followed me out from behind the water. They did not speak a word as we left that terrible place, or later when we made a hurried camp under the stars far from that waterfall. They have not spoken since.

WE HAD ENTERED the territory of silence, slipping inside of it the way shadows fold across the earth with the lengthening day. The wind was the only thing we heard unless we met travelers on the road who told stories of Herod’s palace and of the men from Jerusalem who followed the way of the curved knife, Zealots who now ruled the king’s fortress. Yoav listened to these stories of rebels, absorbed, his grave profile turned away from us. We made circles in the wilderness to keep our distance from the Roman garrison. With no destination, and no knowledge of the wilderness, we stumbled upon the road to the Salt Sea. As we journeyed, my son-in-law changed before my eyes. The world began to slip away from him, and it seemed that he already walked beside the angel Gabriel. That which we saw to be the earth below our feet, he saw as fire. At night he went off into the thornbushes, and I could hear him sobbing and my heart broke in two alongside his. But in daylight he was hardened, his eyes narrowed, his skin burned by the sun. He consumed only green herbs, and if none were to be had, he ate nothing at all. When we came to a nomads’ settlement, he traded the silver chalice he used for the wine blessing.

The old man in the settlement of goat-hair tents and unclothed children could not believe the good fortune of his trade. He was only too ready to give up his ax in return for pure silver. It was a heavy weapon, made for a woodsman rather than a warrior, much stronger than the one that had split my dear Zara in two. As we went on, I could hear Yoav practicing with it in the early-morning hours, when the sky was still black, turning to the ax as he had once turned to his prayers and his scrolls. He slept beside it, as he had once slept beside his wife.

My premonition that Yoav would run into the wilderness and forsake us in his grief had been correct, only not in the manner I had envisioned. He was with us, yet he had been summoned to another place entirely, the kingdom of vengeance. This was when his hair turned white overnight and grew long and tangled. His body became lean and strong. We heard little from him, except when he practiced the art of destruction, throwing his ax with such force that he grunted and groaned, like a man in his death throes. His own children, those sweet silent boys, shied from him. I realized that he looked like the madmen we sometimes spied in the desert, warriors, hermits, prophets, priests; men who saw only their own path and no one else’s.

* * *

MY FIRST SIGHT of the fortress took my breath away. A mirage emerged from the stone, a miracle appearing beneath the midday sun. We paused in the valley, spellbound. It was the season of the winds, the time when the Ruach Kadim, the hot and furious wind that arose from Edom, brought us clouds of dust. My grandsons were wrapped in capes, staying close to each other for comfort. Perhaps they spoke to each other through their dreams, for they seemed to communicate and could clearly understand each other without the use of language. They refused to be separated and slept beneath the same blanket, just as they ate from the one plate and drank from a single cup. I thought the sheer cliffs leading to Masada would frighten them and they would hesitate. I expected that their father would have to tie ropes around their waists to help them navigate the cliffs, but the younger one, Levi, was the first to start up the spiraling snake path, scrambling like a goat, and Noah applauded his brother’s sure-footed bravery and was quick to follow.

I then had the vision that the boys would never have a father again, and that this perilous climb would be the last time we would be with the Yoav we had known before this other man, the one who would not be separated from his ax, took his place completely. The sun struck against the earth as it had when the beasts in the oasis had fallen upon us, emboldened, without mercy. My grandsons were climbing up, the clouds of dust rising behind them, carried by the wind in little whirls that disappeared before our eyes. I placed my hand on my son-in-law’s arm before he began his ascent. Yoav turned to me, but his eyes were hooded. He was like the hawk, seeing only what he must to survive. All he wanted was revenge, but I gave him more. I told him I had bent to take Zara’s last breath. Neshamah, our word for soul, means breath, and so she was with us still.

A sob escaped from my son-in-law when he heard this. He shook his head and turned from me. “I can never hear her name again,” he insisted. “Don’t speak it in my presence.”

I had come to realize the depth of his love for her. Everything else about him had changed, but in this he was constant. He was the only one who could understand what it meant to lose Zara. Because of our mourning, we were bound together despite the silence and the wind and the man he had become. I signaled for him to lean down, and he did so. I then did the second most terrible thing a mother could do, in some ways worse than burying her beneath the stones. I breathed my daughter’s last breath into his mouth. I gave her to him so that her spirit would belong to him and he could carry her with him, so that he could still be a man with a soul, even though he had lost everything else.

MY ONLY CONCERN was for my grandchildren. They were my world, my present and my future. I vowed to pay attention to our daily life, nothing more. Once we came to this fortress, we moved into our small chamber, built in to the king’s wall, a mere curtain dividing our residence from that of another family. At night we could hear our neighbors, the children laughing, the parents arguing or making love. In our room, there was only silence. That was the way our life was now. We no longer needed language; there weren’t words for what we had witnessed. The boys watched me with their dark, night-flecked eyes. I insisted we were safe and made every attempt to show them this was so. I put a thread across the threshold so no one could pass without my knowledge. I slept with a knife beneath my pallet. I turned each day into a ritual of sameness hoping the children would be comforted by the small tasks and duties of everyday life. In their presence I was calm and patient, the practical grandmother they could depend upon at all times and in all things, but my smile went slack whenever I was alone. Each morning I went to the dovecotes. Each evening I returned to cook dinner. But each night I wept.

MONTHS PASSED this way. We became accustomed to the dry air of the mountain and the scent of salt carried from the sea below. We began to know other people in the settlement, all of whom had come to this fortress when there was nowhere else for them in Zion. We were all in God’s hands, and in that way we were brothers and sisters, no matter where we had come from. There were warriors and assassins, rebels who had committed crimes and those who insisted crimes were committed upon them. There were learned men and tanners, potters and goatherds, simple men and those who could read Aramaic and Hebrew, as well as Latin and Greek. There were those who had been cast out of Jerusalem and those who’d run from the burning of Jericho, as well as refugees from small villages like my own.

Many of the women wanted to befriend me and asked me to join in the group that met at the looms in the evenings to discuss the day’s events. They meant well, but I kept my distance. I could not tolerate their chirping good humor any more than I could abide their faith. Though I pretended otherwise, the past had not melted away. It was all I had, and I clung to it and savored it, for my daughter was in that land of grief. My sorrow filled me, leaving little room for anything else. I was squinting out at the world from behind the barricade I’d placed between myself and all others just as surely as there was a curtain draping down to separate our chamber from our neighbors’ home. I understood that fate could not be eluded forever; it came on leathery wings, swooping through the darkness like the bats in the orchards.

We heard rumors of Roman scouts who had set up a camp not far from our fortress. Our warriors went to confront them, but there were too many of the enemy, and in the end our men had to slink away and wait for the Romans to break camp. Our enemies left little behind but the bones of pigs and piles of their own waste. But they also had left behind a tower of rocks. Those rocks were terrifying, for they marked the place as one to which they intended to return.

Still I was determined that, for the sake of my grandsons, our lives should continue without event for as long as possible. I was resolved that we should keep to ourselves. No friends, no enemies, only the three of us. I did my best to prevent any disruptions. Then one night there was a knock at our door. I felt a lump in my throat. I had known all along that at any moment the world might barge in upon us. No door could prevent every intrusion. No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time. The chaff beaten from the wheat rises into the air and is carried by the wind to another place, whether to a green field or a stretch of barren land was dependent on God’s will.

I prayed for the rapping to stop, but there it was again. My grandsons were stirring. Their hearing was so attuned they had heard the knocking the moment it fell upon the door. I held a finger to my lips as I went forward.

I feared what was to come and stood there shivering, like a tame bird who shies from the opened door of the cage. I wanted our small, quiet existence to remain constant, for every day to shine as a mirror image of the one before. I reached for my knife. Our chamber had once been used as a storehouse. Mice often came here, searching for grain. Now they scurried off, dodging my footsteps as I ventured to see who might visit at such a late hour. I peered through a hole between the stones.

Yael was there in the dark. No soldiers, no beasts, just a woman with long red hair. She had a basket of belongings with her, so little she might have owned nothing.

I considered sending her away, that was my inclination, but I could see she was desperate. I relented and let her come in. She sat on the pallet where I slept. I didn’t ask what was wrong; I didn’t have to. Her face was ashen, except for a dark blue ribbon of a bruise on her cheek where someone had recently struck her. I had compassion for the silence she carried and found myself drawn to her, as the doves were.

She was uncomplaining, only murmuring that she was sorry to disturb me. She and her father had argued. I’d seen him in the plaza, and he seemed a cold and selfish man, one who thought himself superior to those around him. I’d seen such men look down upon my husband because he was a baker, the same ones who thought Yoav was too good to live under our roof. I set a place for Yael to sleep, gathering a blanket I had woven and died hyssop blue in memory of my daughter, who had loved the color of that flower. Yael had come here in search of shelter though I had been cold to her, remote since the day she arrived in the dovecote. She was my daughter’s age. She was alive when Zara was not, and I had held that against her, pecking at her, resentful. I winced to think of what I’d done. Still, she had seen something in me that had brought her here. She knew that I understood the language of silence. I would no more ask Yael to surrender her past than I would offer to tell her what I myself had done.

IN THE MORNING, we walked to the dovecotes together as though our days had always begun this way. The bruise on her face where her father had lashed out had already begun to fade under the balm I used to treat it, a poultice made of honey and figs. We did not discuss her father’s cruelty, or the fact that the child within her would soon arrive, a reality she could not hide despite the shawls she wore to cover herself. Instead we spoke of the heat and of the failure of the almond crop. The pink blossoms had burned this season in the last days of Tammuz, as if someone had set them on fire, singeing the edges of the petals with a powdery, black film. Much of the fruit of the trees had never formed, puckering instead into ruined bunches that exploded into ash when plucked. There was gloom everywhere, and worry. The initial mantle of freedom we’d experienced on arriving at the fortress diminished as crops began to fail. We were so isolated from the rest of mankind I could not help but think of the angels, how removed they were from us; so far away that, even when they attempted to catch us as we faltered, they were too distant to truly understand our sorrow.

“I always dreaded Av,” Yael said of the month we were about to enter. “But not this year.”

She sounded fierce, ready to fight the blaze of the season. Av was the month when her child would enter the world. I’d assumed she would be weakened now that she’d been cast out of her father’s house, but that was not the case. Her strength seemed renewed. She stared down those who gazed at her with curiosity, exactly as I’d done when people whispered about my grandsons’ inability to speak. In that we were alike, branded by what we had done but prideful when it came to our children, even when God had deserted us.

Usually I was the first to arrive to care for the doves, but on this day we had tarried while I introduced Yael to my grandchildren. Shirah and her daughters were already at work; they stared when we entered together, as puzzled by our new alliance as they were by the mark on Yael’s face. I had done nothing but complain about Yael since her arrival, true enough. But a woman can change her mind.

“I needed help with my grandsons,” I said, indicating that our being together was a simple matter, despite the bruise which clearly signified more had transpired. “I’m too old to play games.”

That was that, no need for further explanation. A good thing, since none would be forthcoming. Women were hurt every day and kept the cause to themselves. Yael threw me a grateful look and quickly set to work. I took note of the slave’s expression when he spied the injury upon her face. Had he owned his freedom, I imagined he might have been seized with the need to go in search of whoever had harmed her. I signaled for him to pay attention to his duties. He did so, but all the rest of the day he was attentive to Yael’s every move. It was odd to see him behaving as though his loyalty tied him to a woman who carried another man’s child.

“Leave her be,” I told him when no one would overhear. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. “She has troubles enough, she doesn’t need yours.”

“What makes you think I have troubles?” he asked in the hesitant way he spoke our language.

I paused and took him in as he worked with the rake he had invented to gather dung, a warrior the doves no longer feared. I had thought of him as an oddity because of his fair coloring and his great height, which forced him to crouch down in the dovecote. Now I saw that he was indeed handsome, broad-shouldered, with appealing features and huge, rough hands that were surprisingly tender when he cared for the doves.

“You’re not a man?” I said, implying that every man in this world had troubles of his own.

“I was,” he said. “Once.”

I wasn’t so old that I didn’t understand his meaning. Despite the bonds of slavery, he would become so again.

EACH DAY we could hear our warriors preparing for raids. Our storerooms were low on supplies, our stomachs empty. Summer was always a time when our lives were lean, but this year was worse than others. At the evening meal I ate half of what was on my plate — a few chickpeas, some pressed dates — to ensure that the boys and Yael could have more. We had each been given one of the ostraca, a bit of stone with our name or initial carved upon it, and that mark would grant us only so much food and water and firewood each week. It was a troubling time for everyone. The heat of the summer was fully upon us, the billowing air so dry that we wore scarves over our mouths to cool our breath. The water in the cisterns had already reached a low mark, and we were just entering the month of fire.

Yael and I did not speak of our arrangement, but she continued to stay in our small chamber. My grandsons were shy with her at first, but one day she called them to her. Although the boys were hesitant, they gathered near when Yael pointed out a scorpion in a shadowy corner. When she was a little girl, she told them, she would watch such creatures in the hall where she slept but was always careful not to touch them. She warned Levi and Noah, they, too, must never disturb a scorpion, staying a respectful distance away, appreciating not only the deadly sting of such a creature but its cunning silence.

My dark-eyed grandsons watched, mesmerized, visibly delighted as Yael caught the fearsome intruder in a jar. She nimbly pinched him up between her fingers. I wondered what else she had done that had called for such bravery, or if, like mine, her courage sprang from sorrow. The less you had to lose, the easier it was to pick up the knife, the sword, the scorpion. When she carried the deadly creature out to the terraced gardens nearby, the boys followed at her heels, thrilled by her daring. Seeing them so lighthearted and filled with interest made my throat tighten, and I felt I might lose my voice as well. Marked by grins and deep concentration, the boys appeared no different than any other children; no one would have taken them for two boys who had lost the power of speech in the web of a demon. They were fascinated, crouching on their knees in a patch of Syrian radishes to watch openmouthed as Yael allowed the scorpion to go free in a shady nook among a cluster of onions.

“The world is many things to many creatures,” she told the children as we all surveyed the walled garden, what was surely a forest for a small creature that had been torn from its home. The scorpion had scuttled out of sight. “We are considered giants by some and ants to be stepped upon by others.”

PEOPLE were whispering about Yael, wondering who the father of her child might be and speculating about the night the assassin Bar Elhanan had cast out his own daughter. My grandsons, however, had already grown to adore her. Although I kept my distance, I became accustomed to her as well. If people spoke poorly of her in my presence, I glared at them, and that was the end of it. Though I preferred to keep to myself, there was a way in which I was comforted to have Yael in my home, to hear her breathe easily in her sleep, as my own daughter might have done had she still been with us.

Admittedly, I was grateful for help with the household chores. Even in her state, so big with the child that was to come, Yael was far from lazy. She cooked our meals, crouching over the fire pit to fry our food on a grill which fitted over the ring of stones. She went to the storehouses to collect our daily allotment of beans and grains, and made certain there was firewood, all to repay me for taking her in. But the stories she told were the only repayment we needed. The boys’ eyes brightened when they listened to her at bedtime, mesmerized. In all of the scorpion’s exploits, silence was an asset and a gift, not a flaw but a virtue. The scorpion could do what others could not: he could see in the dark, hear a fly buzzing on the far side of the mountain, sense danger while the rest of the world slept.

“Did your mother tell you these stories?” I asked one evening when Yael and I went to the plaza. We had taken to working at the looms on a regular basis. We kept ourselves removed from the other women, but it was a pleasure to weave and our garments were tattered; we had need of shawls and cloaks. When we busied ourselves in this manner, it was possible to forget the dust that rose in clouds all around us and to distance ourselves from our hunger. If we had nothing else, then at least we had the sheep’s wool and the work of spinning and weaving.

“I had no mother.” Yael kept her eyes downcast.

We reached the looms, where we settled, bringing forth our lengths of carded, dyed wool. Yael was working on a pattern everyone praised. Even those gossips who whispered about her were impressed. There were intricate threads of color forming a line of continuous blocks of multihued squares. I noticed it was the same pattern as the cloth the slave wore.

“Every human has a mother,” I insisted as we worked.

“Are you sure I’m human?” Yael said, her chin tilted, teasing me.

I had never seen a woman with hair so red, or one with so little fear that she was willing to grasp a scorpion between her fingers. Others might whisper she was possessed by a demon and swear she was unlike other daughters and wives. But I had seen her on the night when her father cast her out, when she huddled in a corner like any other beaten woman. And I had taken note of the expression on her face when she stood beside the Man from the North.

She was human.

WHEN THEY thought they were alone, I heard what I should not have pass between them. Yael was fortunate that I was accustomed to silence, and therefore held my tongue. A gossip would have been unforgiving, making quick use of the intimate encounter I’d stumbled upon. A hawk had been circling the largest dovecote for several days, intent on taking our doves for his dinner. We set out sticks tied together with rope that looked like a child’s toy; when the breeze stirred, the sticks whirled and frightened the hawks away. But one hawk was fearless; he wouldn’t be chased off. He looked underfed and seemed intent on having his supper. Hunger struck everyone in the desert at the same time.

When the hawk lit on the window ledge, Yael found some grain and reached out to him. I was stunned to see the creature eat from her hand, as if he were a dove himself. I was not the only one to take notice. The Man from the North had come up beside her. I overheard him say that in his country hunters trained hawks to strike down prey and bring back partridges and doves. Their sharp yellow beaks were wound with strands of leather, clamped halfway closed so they couldn’t devour their kills; they had to learn to wait patiently when they brought back their prey, hungering until the hunter tossed them a bit of meat.

It usually took months to gain a hawk’s trust. The slave was astounded by how easily Yael had called this one to her. He said she must possess magic. He sank to his knees and bowed his head, only half in jest, declaring she had bewitched him as well. Yael laughed at his remarks — I remembered because I had not heard her do so before. It was a lovely, surprising sound. She said that women with red hair had the ability to tame wild creatures. Since the slave had come from a country where many of the women looked so, he should have known this to be true. He got to his feet, though he had to shift his tall body just to be near her.

It was then I overheard him say, “You’re not like them, Yael. You’re not like anyone.”

I wasn’t certain if he meant his words to be a compliment or an insult, but then he took her hand and kissed it, at her wrist, the place where what someone needs and what she desires cross each other to become one.

YAEL WAS NOT my daughter, but she lived in my home, and that prompted me to be concerned. I knew that a woman at the end of her term might look for solace in curious places. Being with child could cause confusion, and kindness in a cruel world might coax Yael into forgetting that the Man from the North was not one of us. On the blanket where she lay at night, she tossed and turned, uncomfortable in the heat. In the mornings she brooded, her eyes filled with sleep. I wondered if she dreamed of her baby to come, as I had long ago, if she had already seen her child’s face and had perhaps chosen a name, though it was best not to do so. Naming the unborn alerted demons a child was about to come into the world. Hand over a child’s name and that newborn might be more easily called into the darkness. I had done so, tempting fate. Perhaps the night demons had followed my daughter ever since I called her Morning.

WE DIDN’T complain about our work at this brutal time of the year, for the dovecote was cool, its plaster walls giving some relief. We were sheltered from the season’s unforgiving fever. Below us the valley sizzled in a pink haze. The world beyond our gates glared with light, and we wore our head scarves pulled down to shade our eyes. There was not a single green shoot to be seen; even the fierce leaves of the thornbushes had shriveled as if made of parchment. We could hear the jackals crying at night, and we shivered at the sound. Huge flocks of birds flew above us, abandoning our barren land, searching for water and sustenance in far-off places, flying to the mountains in the north or east to Moab where the fields were said always to be green.

Each day the Man from the North set out a line of grain on the window ledge for the hawk. When he spoke in his language of unearthly grunts, the creature seemed to understand, a glint in his yellow eyes. The bird had a red head, and because of this the slave called him Odeum, ruby, which was also his name for Yael. Yael grinned when he did so, knowing he was provoking her. She teased right back and said only a fool would keep a hawk so near to a dovecote. Eventually we would arrive to find that the hawk had slaughtered all of our charges. She had fed the bird of prey a few grains out of pity, but the slave had gone much too far, making a pet of a wild thing. Could he not understand his mistake? Here was a creature no one could ever trust.

“You’re wrong about him,” I heard the Man from the North say. “He’s at your beck and call.”

“A hawk is always a hawk,” I informed them both, unable to hold my tongue any longer.

After I made my remark they were quick to fall silent and return to the tasks at hand. How could they argue with me? They knew my statement to be true. You cannot change a hawk’s nature any more than you can teach a dove to kill. And yet later in the day, when I saw the slave and Yael bringing baskets of dung into the fields to feed the ravished, heat-struck earth, the hawk glided above them as though he were a dog, tame and subservient. I thought perhaps I had been wrong, too quick to judge the essence of a being by its appearance, still not fully understanding that, in the world God has given us, all things must change.

FOR NOW the one constant was that the days fell heavily, all with the same hypnotic, unrelenting heat. Heat waves rose up in shimmering curtains of light. There were lines of exhausted, baffled women at the storehouses, each waiting for her family’s share of water and food. I felt immobilized inside the month of Av the way I had once lingered inside my dreams as I slowly awoke to the yeasty odor of baking in my old life, on those precious mornings when the countryside was green and the scent of the cypress drifted in the air. I had been caught up in time then, as I was once again, but one tableau was a treasure chest, the other a cage.

We had so little here on the mountain, but at least we were safe. In the world outside ours, the violence against our people had only grown worse. There were rumors that the dead were heaped upon the main roads throughout Judea, that the Jordan River was so rife with bodies you could walk across on dead men’s backs as if they were stepping-stones. News came to us that another Essene settlement had been decimated. I’d heard of their people, those who called themselves the Children of Light and who had occupied the settlement known as Sechacha. One day a small, impoverished troupe appeared in our valley. We saw dust rising as they approached. Their white linen garments glinted brightly as they crossed over the rocks. Our warriors went down the serpent’s path to meet these visitors and bring them to us. It was well known that the Essenes abhorred warfare, and we were a fortress. Still, like the rest of us, when they had no options and no place else to go, they came to this mountain.

There were seven men and three women, along with four children. The men carried their belongings in packs tied onto their backs with thick ropes of woven flax. The women followed behind, simply dressed, barefoot, unadorned. It was the women who toted the goatskin containers of water and cheese and led a flock of scrawny goats tied together with leather strands forming a ribqâh, so that from a distance the animals appeared to be one creature with five heads. There were also two black donkeys laden with tall ceramic vases; inside were the rolled parchment scrolls of the Essenes’ teachings. The men were learned, holy in their aspect, especially one elderly man, who was perhaps the most ancient I had ever seen. They had been traveling ever since the Romans destroyed their settlement, living in caves, leaving behind their writings whenever possible to ensure their beliefs would not be lost should they be the next to be slaughtered.

When the visitors entered through the Snake Gate, a crowd had already gathered. The survivors appeared dazed, alarmed by the fortified conditions of Masada. They gazed with grim faces at the parapets our warriors had readied, the piles of armor, the spears with sharpened bronze tips kept beside the synagogue so that wise men could bless them. The Essenes had stumbled into a province made for war and war alone, where weapons were stocked in the manner that other villages might store oil and wine, where every stone had been rounded with a chisel, ready to be used as a weapon should the battle come to us.

We gazed at each other in the presence of these gentle people, made aware that blood and vengeance coursed through us as if we were barbarians. It was war that roused us from our dreams in the morning and sang us to an unquiet sleep at night. Some among us cast our eyes downward, stunned by what we’d become. Others glared at a group they considered fools, unwilling to fight for Zion.

The oldest of the Essene men, whose people called him Abba as a term of respect, was carried by his followers. He was weak in his body but strong in spirit. His people lifted him high upon their shoulders so he could call out to us.

“We all belong to our Lord. All that is now and ever shall be originates with God. Before things come to be, He has ordered their design. His glorious plan fulfills our destiny, a destiny it is impossible to change. We have come because we were meant to be here though we are as different from you as night from day.”

I didn’t know if our people would accept Abba’s proclamation, or if shame and fury would make that impossible. There was a tension, shown in a great and echoing silence; then Yael ran up to one of the women in the group and embraced her. Their joy at seeing each other broke through the silence. We learned this was her friend Tamar, who had once had four sons and now had only one — the others, along with her husband, had been slain in the raid upon her settlement by the legion. Now all this Essene woman had left was a boy of ten, one named Yehuda, whom she clung to as if he alone held her to this earth she walked upon.

Ben Ya’ir himself allowed the Essenes to stay. He came to speak with their leader, this learned man who was both father and priest, who wore pure white linen and was barefoot, whose face was unlined even though he was so very old. They sat together beneath an olive tree, speaking for hours. They then sat with Menachem ben Arrat, our great priest. At the end of that time the word went out — no one was to trouble the group of outsiders, no matter how different they might appear. Their customs were their own, allowed within our walls while they stayed among us.

All fourteen of the Essenes wished to live together in one abode, as was their practice, for what belonged to one belonged to all. They were granted a small stone barn on the far side of the orchard that had in the past been used to shelter goats ready to bring forth new kids. They would eat their meals together, sharing what little they had beneath the same tree where their leader and ours had spoken and come to terms. They bathed with cold water before each meal and offered their prayers fervently before any food passed their lips. Three times a day — at dawn, and noon, and again after the first three stars appeared — we could see the men at their prayers, facing toward Jerusalem. The six men who were faithful students of Abba set up long tables fashioned from planks of hardwood in order to roll out their scrolls, the documents stored in the ceramic vases that had been carried through the wilderness on the backs of their lumbering donkeys. They made their marks with an ink drawn from walnut oil and the gum of the turpentine tree.

Yael and I brought them olives and cheese and an allotment of wheat. Nahara came with us, bringing flasks of water and oil that her mother sent. A young Essene man, often at Abba’s side and clearly his favorite, came to help Nahara carry the water. In order for him to do so, Nahara needed to place the flasks upon the ground, for the young man could not risk taking them from her hand; all she had touched might be considered tamé.

He murmured a prayer as he carried away the flasks, for among his people he had the power of blessing even though he was no more than seventeen.

The Essene women were grateful when presented with our gifts, yet the reflection of the slain shone in their eyes. Nahara stood aside with the young Essene man; she was too young and pure to hear of brutalities served upon the Essenes. But Yael and I sat with the women as they told us in matter-of-fact voices how their children had been murdered. They didn’t cry out or swoon with grief, for they believed their children would rise again at the End of Days. At that time mothers would once again embrace their sons and daughters, and husbands and wives would again be one.

Tamar was quieter than the other women, her face pinched with sorrow, achingly pallid. When we went to leave, she placed a hand on Yael’s arm, drawing her near. “I won’t lose this one,” I heard her say. Her boy, Yehuda, was sprawled in the grass, looking upward as the first stars began to appear in the darkening sky. The Essene men had gathered in the field, and we could hear them chanting in deep, luminous tones. It was so hot that every movement of the air was like a plume of flame, every star a lantern in the night. “Promise you’ll help me, as I once helped you,” Tamar whispered. Everything about the Essene woman seemed bruised; even her tone was an incantation which sprang from her affliction. She nodded at Yael’s swollen middle. The baby would come any day now. “I knew when you wanted a fever charm it was a man you wanted to save. I could see it written upon you.”

Yael glanced at me. I quickly looked away so it wouldn’t seem that I’d overheard their conversation. When I saw Yael embrace her friend, I knew her promise had been given. As we walked back I didn’t ask why she would grant the fervent wish of this woman who belonged to a group so different from us, who clearly looked down on our ways. I didn’t question which man’s life she had tried to protect, or why she had been willing to cross the desert on his behalf no matter the sacrifice. I merely added these bits of information to my list, ready to offer them up should Yael and I ever disagree and I needed to prove that she was, indeed, human.

* * *

WHEN THE MONTH of Av was upon us in all its force, and the moon was as red as the sun, Abba sent the young Essene man to the dovecotes to work among us to thank us for the rations we brought to them. Because his people were so strict, and men were not allowed to touch women outside their own families, this young man, named Malachi ben Aaron, often worked in the small dovecote alone. Yet soon enough he was befriended by Nahara, and before long these two were engaged in long conversations. Malachi ben Aaron was only a few years older than Nahara herself. He was strongest among his kinsmen, and extremely well spoken. Because of this he was granted great respect, and he seemed to regard himself as a man of honor. We who worked beside Nahara still thought of her as a child; perhaps it was merely that we wished to see her as such. We were surprised to see that two who had so little in common often sat together on the wall during the noon break. Malachi spoke and Nahara listened, rapt, as if every tale he told was an illumination. Some of his words wafted toward us. He spoke of the End of Days and how his people were preparing, confessing their sins, following the path of light, offering their life on earth to Adonai. They would not fight the Romans because this world we walked through was not the end for them; they would arise after death and shine in God’s favor.

Since my arrival at the mountain, I had known Nahara to be a serious girl, older than her years in ways of learning and responsibility. Her mother had taught her to read Aramaic and Hebrew. As he instructed her, Malachi was surely impressed with her — for good reason; not only was she bright but she was lovely and pure. Before long they both began arriving earlier at the small dovecote so their discussions could begin as soon as Malachi had finished his morning prayers. They whispered in the breaking light, and those whispers became a bridge between them.

Like others of his household, Malachi wore only white, his hair braided. He eschewed sandals and went barefoot in the dust, for his people believed they must walk into heaven barefoot and wait there in the mist for the world to be resurrected after the End of Days. Malachi was quiet, a hard worker, a scholar who was not afraid to get his hands dirty. He had been sent to the dovecote because Abba believed that hard work and praise to God went hand in hand. Though Malachi was young, he wrote upon the parchment scrolls with his elders, and it was said that his letters were so beautifully wrought that the angels came to observe them as they formed; he was so righteous, the walnut oil ink he used turned to blood and appeared red upon the page. It had already been decided that Malachi would take Abba’s place when the time came, and the two often sat with their heads together, deep in conversation and prayer.

Despite Malachi’s virtues, after only a short time Shirah began to seem displeased with our new helper. Though he was often sent to the far dovecote, where there was room only for one, Shirah had discovered that Nahara could be found working beside him in that small space. We could not help but wonder if their shoulders brushed or their hands touched. When he prayed at noontime, making a holy place beside the twisted olive tree, kissing the strands of his prayer shawl and then offering his kiss to God, did he pray to clear his head of earthly thoughts and desires? Shirah watched him closely, eyes narrowed, a dark cast over her face.

One noontime while Nahara went home to fetch our meal of lentils and olives, Shirah sent Malachi away. The rest of us stepped back to watch; in many ways these were Shirah’s dovecotes; she had been here the longest, and we deferred to her in everything.

“You can leave right now,” she told the Essene. “There’s no reason for you to stay through this day.”

Three perfect doves had been chosen to be brought to the synagogue for the priest’s dinner, and I was plucking out their feathers. I bowed my head, but I listened to the conversation.

“Is my effort not good enough?” Malachi asked, bewildered. Among his people he was not challenged, and now a woman was dismissing him. He raised his eyes to hers, a flicker of mistrust in his stare.

“There’s nothing wrong with your work,” I heard Shirah respond. “You’re just not needed here.”

Shirah must have taken note of my expression, for I was confused as well. Malachi had lightened our workload, and I saw no need to have humiliated him by sending him away. The Essenes had sent us their best man, but not in Shirah’s opinion. When we were alone, she confided, “If she was your daughter, you would do the same.” She feared the attraction between the Essene and Nahara, and I understood why she would not want him for her daughter. Malachi was too pious to see anything but God and himself, that much was true; the woman he chose would not walk beside him but would follow behind, head bowed.

When Nahara returned with our meal, she was astonished to find Malachi gone, her face flushing as she gazed around for signs of him. She glared at her mother with bitterness, and I heard her say to Aziza, “She sent him away to spite me.”

“I’m sure she has her reasons,” Aziza responded, which was true enough.

“She’s cruel,” Nahara remarked, her voice sharp. “That’s the reason. She is devoted to what she wants. You of all people should know that. You’re wise to keep your secrets.”

Aziza lowered her eyes. “She’s our mother.”

Nahara was grim. “One who doesn’t care about our happiness, as you well know.”

I thought Nahara was mistaken about her mother’s intent. Malachi was not suitable for her; he was known to pray until the first brightening of the star-strewn night. Aziza seemed to agree.

“Look at the way they live,” she told her sister when Nahara complained to her. It made sense that a mother would did not want the fate of an Essene woman for her child, one of service and poverty and sacrifice.

But although Malachi had been sent from the dovecote, his presence lingered. There were times when those around you can see your fate but you yourself are blind, stumbling toward a coil of mistakes. This was such a time for Shirah’s young daughter. We could all see her future if she chose one path rather than another, but she could not see it herself. She sulked out, slipping past the heavy wooden door though her work was not completed. Shirah went after her, but it was too late. In an instant Nahara was nowhere to be seen. It was as though she’d been snatched from the earth and all that remained was her shadow. Perhaps she had already followed Malachi to the stone goat barn of the Essenes, removing her sandals to walk barefoot among the women. She had been an obedient girl, but now her duty seemed to lie beyond her mother’s domain. I stood in the doorway beside Shirah. At this moment she hardly seemed a fierce practitioner of keshaphim, only a mother who could easily be broken by a child’s heedless actions.

“She’ll be back,” I offered hopefully.

Shirah stared into the empty plaza. She shook her head. She’d seen love a thousand times before. She had fashioned charms to induce it and amulets to sever its ties; she had recited spells to bind lovers together and others to break them apart. She was sufficiently practiced in love’s ways to recognize its web, even in the dim light of the dovecote.

“Unfortunately, you’re wrong,” she said to me, her soft voice breaking with regret. “She’s already gone. And if he knew who she truly was he would never want her.”

I could feel a sudden chill in the blistering air. I thought this was what we had wanted, for there had been daily gatherings so that we might all pray for rain. Now a light rain had begun, unexpected fortune at this arid time of year. But the rain was strange, falling in bleak bands of white from the slate-colored sky. I licked my lips and realized it was laden with salt. It was a rain from the Salt Sea, a strange occurrence that sometimes took place when the wind arose and carried a cloud of dust. The furious, hot blasts had also picked up water and salt, and dumped those elements upon us. It was a bad omen, for what appeared to be rain was only seawater. A salt rain could poison orchards and contaminate cisterns. Men with wounds would weep in pain tonight; women would be unable to light fires and cook their families’ evening meals. The goatherds would find the fresh milk we called halab turned to salty curds in the milking pails.

It would have been better to have no rain at all than to have this.

Shirah had begun to recite a spell as we ducked back inside to elude the downpour. She stunned us all when she grabbed one of the doves. She took up the knife we used for our meals. As though possessed, she made a gash across the dove’s throat, then turned the bird so that its blood dripped onto the stone floor. The murder of a dove was a crime punishable by law. Certainly none were to be taken for the darker uses of keshaphim.

Aziza turned away when she understood what her mother intended, to come between Nahara and the Essene she had chosen. The Man from the North averted his eyes as well, so that he would not witness a deed that seemed far too intimate for him to behold. As for Yael, she alone stood rapt, drawn to the feathers falling, the blood on the floor. I noticed she was quick to murmur the words of the chant along with Shirah, as though she hoped her voice might give strength to the spell.

As they chanted, the rain from the Salt Sea splashed over the doorway and washed away the blood. In time I came to believe this was what dissolved the spell, turning it worthless before it was begun. Aziza and the slave tried to quiet the doves, who were flapping toward the ceiling, frightened by the rain pelting like stones rattling above us, and even more disturbed by the sudden murder of one of their own kind. I spied Shirah’s grave expression as she tried to sweep away the salt, to no avail. My heart went out to her. Even the witch people so feared, one who knew magic better than most learned men, could not stop a girl who was utterly determined to have her way.

I hurried home to see to my grandsons, stepping widely to avoid the shifting piles of salt that had gathered on the mountain from this wicked rain. Across the field, I spied Nahara walking with the Essene boy. Their women had presented her with one of their fine white shawls, now draped over her hair. Seeing her beside Malachi, sheltered by a length of the purest linen on earth, I knew before Nahara herself did.

She had become one of them.

* * *

AS THE RED MOON of Av pulsed, a new life ripened, pushing out the water inside Yael with the heat of his imminent arrival. She was kneeling at the fire where we cooked our meals when her skirts were suddenly drenched. I saw terror flare in her eyes. I hastily sent my grandchildren to Shirah, so she would know Yael’s time had come. Her son, Adir, could watch over the younger boys while we gathered to welcome the newborn child.

Yael and I began to make our way to the storerooms, stopping when she needed to yield and draw a breath. Her father had not once called for her during the last days of her pregnancy, when she’d been confined to our chamber, too heavy and uncomfortable to move. But her brother had visited. He had murmured an apology for disturbing our household, then had gone to kneel beside Yael, still in his silver armor, so that he shimmered in the half-light. I had heard them speaking of Jerusalem, occasionally bursting into laughter as they remembered the house in which they’d grown up, the flame tree that had stood in the marketplace. He came frequently after that, growing comfortable in our household, allowing my grandsons to climb over him and play at being warriors. Yael often teased her brother about Aziza, calling him a lamb who followed blindly after his beloved.

“Does she feed you hay?” Yael asked, and laughed. “Does she lock you in a pen at night?”

“Are you trying to anger me, Yaya?” Amram said with a grin, using her childhood name.

Yael brought out a scrap of blue, the bit of scarf he had given her that still remained. She waved the token to remind him that she kept it for luck, tucked beneath her sleeping mat. I’d seen it there myself. She failed to mention, however, that the swatch of cloth from the slave’s garment was hidden there as well.

During Amram’s visits, they didn’t discuss the baby to come, but the warrior once brought a rattle he had carved, with plum pits inside that clacked together when the toy was shaken. Yael was pleased, relieved that her brother had accepted her situation, whoever the father of her child might be.

“I blame myself,” I overheard him say to Yael one day. I imagined then that the father had been a comrade to him. “Never give something precious into the hands of another.”

“What I am about to bring into the world is precious,” Yael assured him. “So if you are to blame, then you are the one to whom I offer my gratitude.”

NOW THAT the time for the baby’s arrival had come, we walked through the evening light to the abandoned storeroom where we would meet Shirah. My arms were looped around Yael for support, allowing her to lean against me when the pains burst upon her. We paused on the stairs, where she doubled over, gasping, astonished by the force of the child within her.

“This is what he’ll do to you for the rest of his life, so be prepared,” I warned.

Yael tried to smile, but her pangs were too strong to allow it. She began to ramble in a low voice about a lion she had lost in the desert, a man she had loved, the price she must pay for her sins. I did my best to hush her. Her face was flushed with discomfort and heat. “I gave him back,” she murmured. “Isn’t that enough?”

I had no idea if she was speaking about the man or the beast or the child who was about to come. She seemed in the grip of a delirium. I was relieved to see Shirah hurrying across the field. She had called for Nahara, who had agreed to accompany her despite their falling-out. Nahara was barefoot, the white shawl of gauzy linen draped over her head. Her hair was braided in a single plait, in the fashion of the Essenes. Nahara and Shirah did not speak as they walked side by side, their faces dark and serious, their differences obvious in the distance they kept between them. When they reached us on the steps, Shirah quickly felt Yael’s middle. She nodded, satisfied, then urged us inside, where we could build a fire and boil a pail of water, making certain to drive out any demons who might have fallen into our cisterns.

Before she would agree to go any farther, Yael gestured to Shirah, her upturned face a tangle of emotion. I heard her whisper. “If there’s a choice, make sure to take the child. Let me go.”

“Yes, yes,” Shirah agreed. She threw me a look to let me know this was the time to agree to anything. We helped Yael into the storerooms, then down a long hall, pausing when the pangs became overwhelming, continuing again each time they eased.

“This is where the demon rolled on the floor,” Yael murmured warily.

“She was a housemaid, not a demon, and her child is large and healthy,” Shirah said to assure her that all was well.

Soon enough the fire was lit and the water boiled, all done quickly and in silence. Nahara and Shirah worked together as if their intimacy had not been severed. I noticed that Nahara was praying while Yael began to labor and that she glanced, disapproving, at the figure of Ashtoreth that Shirah had placed on a stone shelf so there could be an offering made of the blood of childbirth.

The baby was nearly ready before we were; it seemed he couldn’t wait to enter our world. Yael sobbed and asked us to make a single vow: we would make certain she would see his face. She spoke as though she were on her deathbed and would have only a single opportunity to witness the life she was about to bring forth. She continued to plead, insisting she would be willing to walk into the World-to-Come if she could but once see her child, unlike her own mother, who had given birth with closed, unseeing eyes.

“Nonsense. You’ll see him every morning and night,” Shirah promised, advising the mother-to-be to attend to the task at hand.

“I want to know the color of his hair, and if his eyes are dark or light,” Yael went on.

“Yes, yes,” we all were quick to agree, for the air had shifted; it was dense and thick. The time had come. Blood brimmed where Yael had bitten down on her lips, and her face was ashen.

There was a birthing stool to crouch upon, but Yael could not focus on it, nor would she do as she was told. She begged Shirah to raise the child as her own if need be, making certain he would not be turned out the way motherless infants sometimes were in times of strife, left in the wilderness for the jackals. Shirah managed to calm the panicked creature with a torrent of promises. Nahara brought water to soothe her fevered forehead and lips.

Once begun, it was a surprisingly easy birth. Yael now bore down when she was commanded to do so; she was fierce, all the more so when Shirah urged her on. “A woman who wails, labors well. It’s only silence we must fear. So go on, roar,” Shirah instructed.

Yael did so. She was indeed well spoken in fury, and it seemed this wordless rage was her true language. She pushed with all her might, her face straining and flushing. Once, twice, and then the baby’s head appeared. Yael was exhausted and said she could do no more. Shirah and Nahara set to work with oil and hot water and entreaties. At last, the mother-to-be gathered her strength and bore down a third time. The child entered this world, falling into Nahara’s hands as though he wished to be no woman’s burden. He was a large, handsome, dark-skinned boy. We quickly wrapped him in linen and placed him in his mother’s arms.

I went to take in some fresh air after the child had safely arrived, exhausted by the labor I had witnessed and by the sheer emotion of the night. I had been thinking of my own child, that beautiful girl I had lost, how it seemed only moments had passed from the first breath she had drawn to her last. To my surprise I found the Man from the North on the steps. Like a ghost he’d unclasped his manacles, then slipped from the dovecote to climb over the living hedge of thorns that kept the goats and sheep secure in their dusty pastures. If anyone had seen him, he would have been killed, taken for an escapee and a threat to us all. He shrank into the shadows as I drew near. When he recognized me, he instantly approached to ask after Yael.

“You really are a fool,” I said, “to come here and pace as if you were the father.”

“I’m no one’s father,” he said regretfully. He gazed at me, his face transformed by worry. “I’m not here for that. I’ve come because of her.”

“Double the fool,” I said, “since she’s not your wife.”

Despite my words, I was moved by his determination. I assured him that Yael was well and already mending. Still, he pleaded to see her, unsettled until the sight of her face could convince him that she was safe and well. He swore she had called to him, insisting that her voice had brought him here. He’d heard its fevered pitch and the agony she’d been burdened with, even though she’d been in a dungeon of a chamber, surrounded by stone, and he’d been locked in the dovecote. He was so sincere I led him inside, urging him to be quiet. No man was to see the workings of a birth, but he was a slave, and hardly a man. I had taken pity on him, unusual for me. Perhaps we had grown close as we worked side by side in the dovecote. Perhaps it was the manner in which his eyes shone when he spoke of the child’s arrival.

As we ventured forward, I could hear his steady breathing behind me. We stopped at the threshold to the chamber. From here we could view the flickering lamp Shirah had lit before the figure of the outlawed Ashtoreth, Queen of Heaven, giver of life.

The baby was in his mother’s arms. The Man from the North nodded, relieved to see for himself that Yael had indeed journeyed into childbirth and passed through unharmed. She appeared to be entranced by the infant in her arms, her eyes vivid and glimmering, her complexion glowing with sweat. When she laughed, enchanted by the child’s expression, I saw the slave grin as well, proudly, as if the boy was indeed his.

The Man from the North gripped my arm and gave me thanks, then left us to our business. Nahara was pouring boiling water on the stones to cleanse them. She seemed an outsider already, unwilling to speak with us, present only for the time she was needed, and now ready to retreat. She kept her eyes lowered. She was on her hands and knees, scrubbing at the blood. When I offered help, she smiled lightly.

“God’s help is everything I need,” she murmured, devout and beautiful and pure, but no longer the girl she had been.

Shirah was crouched beside Yael. Their heads were close together. When Nahara gazed up, I saw her take note of this. Shirah had slipped off one of the gold amulets she wore for protection. She presented it to Yael, promising it would bring good fortune and keep her safe from harm. One side of the disk honored our true king, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, I am who I am, the nameless One with a thousand names. Ha-nora ha-gibbor, the mighty One, the hero. On the other side, Hebrew letters were mixed with Greek. Chayei ‘olam le-‘olam. Eternal life, forever.

These golden amulets had come from Egypt, for there was the form of the moon and the sun stamped upon the one she granted Yael, signifying the power of the Queen of Heaven. Our people were not allowed such images, but Yael strung the amulet around her throat, pleased. It was a gift from one mother to another, accepted with gratitude. The women kissed each other to celebrate the new life. A son cannot be named until he is circumcised, and so Yael simply called him boy as she held him to her breast, the word as loving as any name might be.

Nahara gathered the afterbirth in a cloth. She would bury it in the orchard, as was our custom, beneath the drooping trees, allowing the essence of this new life to refresh the blighted earth. She stopped beside me, her white tunic splashed with blood. She had always seemed older than her years, now she seemed a full-grown woman. She coolly assessed the amulet her mother had fastened at Yael’s throat.

“That’s a gift for a daughter,” she said to me of the necklace, her tone cold. “She’s letting me know she’s not saving it for me.” There was a good measure of hurt in her voice along with her scorn.

Nahara was unadorned, as Essene women were, her feet bare upon the cold, flat stones. The bracelets and charms she’d once worn had been given away. I’d seen children playing with them in the dusty garden beside the stone house, as though they were toys.

“Would you have taken such a gift if she’d offered it?” I ventured to ask, for Nahara had been the one to turn her back on her mother’s ways.

Nahara shrugged, knowing I was right. You cannot give a gift to someone who is bound to deny it. Nahara now spent her days caring for the Essenes’ goats, idly feeding them weeds as though she had been a goatherd all her life. I had spied her with the pious women, dabbing water on her head before a meal, swaying in prayer, eyes closed in the ecstasy of the Almighty’s grace. We who worked in the dovecotes did not discuss what was evident: she would not be returning to us.

“What would you do with gold?” I went on, for I’d heard that the people she’d aligned herself with believed possessions were worthless, meant for this world alone. “I thought what belonged to one Essene belonged to all.”

Tonight Nahara been an equal partner to Shirah in bringing forth Yael’s child, yet she seemed consumed by a child’s jealousy as she gazed at Yael. “That shouldn’t include sharing one’s mother,” she remarked in a hurt tone, so that anyone might think she’d been the one who had been cast away when she alone had made her choice on the day of the salt rain.

EIGHT DAYS LATER, I went with Yael when she brought her son to the synagogue to ask for the ritual every boy child must endure for his faith in our God. From the time of Abraham it had been this way, and so it continued, with many believing our male children were considered tamim, perfected, by this ritual. It was said that Domah, the angel of the grave, cannot burn or harass any man who has been circumcised when he enters the World-to-Come; the suffering in the here and now is said to prevent suffering for all eternity.

We stepped inside the doors of the synagogue but were allowed no farther. It was not for the elders to perform the ritual. The child’s father must make this covenant between his son and God, and if there was no father, that was not their concern. Yael clutched the baby to her, frightened that no man would stand up for her child because of the circumstances of his birth and that perhaps she, like Moses’ wife, Zipporah, would have to complete the deed. I knew Yael carried a knife, but she shied away from the very idea of cutting her own son, vowing that her hand would be made unsteady by her devotion and her love.

At last her brother arrived, apologetic, his prayer shawl around his shoulders. Amram was clearly uncomfortable with the unfamiliar task of caretaking. I wondered how he would manage the covenant when he flinched even as Yael fitted the newborn into his arms. The baby caught the warrior’s glance and held it with his unblinking ember-colored eyes. There was a red mark on the left side of his face, one we were all hoping would fade. “I didn’t think he’d look like this,” Amram blurted.

“He looks like a baby,” I remarked matter-of-factly. There was no reason for this child to be viewed as one of the mamzerim, a bastard with no rights, not even the right of circumcision, although he would certainly be seen as what our people call a shetuki, a silent one, any child who does not know his father.

Amram laughed. “That he does.” He nodded to Yael approvingly. “He looks strong.”

I did not notice anyone else’s presence until Yael took a step back.

The old assassin was there in the shadows. He’d been there all along, a cold eye set on the baby.

“He’ll complete the ritual,” Amram said of their father.

Yael clutched her baby closer, uncertain, stunned that her father had agreed to participate. The last contact she’d had with him was when they’d quarreled bitterly over her condition, and he’d struck her, driving her from their home.

“Do you think I don’t remember how to use a knife?” the assassin asked when he saw her hesitation.

Yael raised her glance to him. “Oh no. I’m sure you do.”

Clearly that was her fear.

“Am I not your father?” the assassin said.

Yael gazed at him, unsure.

“Is that child not my grandson?”

Yael’s brother quietly urged her to have faith. It was he who had persuaded his father to come to the synagogue, and the two, who had turned away from one another, had made amends because of the birth of this boy. “This child belongs to us, and we to him, never more than on this day. He is not a burden, for he has brought us together.”

Only male relatives were allowed to be present at the ceremony when the child would be named. He was ready for the covenant, he had enough life and breath to shield him so that Lilith and her demons could not call to him as easily as they might have in the hours following his birth. Until this day he’d still had one foot in their world and the other in ours; now he was rooted, fed by his mother’s milk. This ritual would set the path for his entire life to come.

The assassin kept his head bowed as he waited for Yael’s decision, a sign of respect he had never offered to his daughter in the past.

“Take him,” Yael said. “But even when I’m not watching, God will be there.”

We waited nervously beside the western wall. Yael’s face was white. She refused to sit on a nearby bench and paced instead. When the baby cried out, she took hold of my arm.

“A cry is a good thing,” I reminded her, echoing Shirah’s words. “It’s silence we need to fear.”

Amram himself looked ashen when he at last carried the baby back to his mother. Yael’s worried expression broke into a grin when she saw her brother’s face, his usual swagger replaced by the weight of his immense responsibility to the newborn.

“You look worse than he does,” she teased.

“I think it was more painful for me,” Amram agreed.

Yael opened the child’s blankets. The cut was perfect, leaving only a slight flush of blood. The baby was already dozing in his mother’s arms, exhausted by his own cries and by the sudden flash of pain he’d known, as well as by the wine that he’d been fed to dull that pain. The old assassin was standing in the threshold. Yael, still unsure in her father’s presence, at last nodded her gratitude, but Yosef bar Elhanan had already disappeared, as if he had never been present. I gazed into the plaza. There wasn’t even a shadow to be seen.

“Did he speak of the child?” Yael asked her brother, curious despite herself.

“He blessed him,” Amram said. “Let that be enough.”

WE KEPT the wound clean, applying a balm of balsam and honey that would bring about healing more quickly. But there was more to be done to announce this child’s arrival in our world, later, and in secret.

We brought the baby into the field on a night when the moon was waning. Shirah was waiting for us. We three stood where the afterbirth had been buried to commit to a naming ceremony of our own. It was a starry night, but we avoided the light and gathered in the shadows so as not to be spied by the guards and questioned. Shirah had broken an eggshell into halves, onto which she had written the holy name of God as many times as could fit in tiny black letters, the ink drawn from crushed mulberries.

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.

We lit a small fire of green wood. Yael placed the baby in the grass. He whimpered, then dozed. She removed her head scarf and her robe to stand before God as she had been on the day her mother died, the day she was born, in this very same month of Av. Shirah began to chant words of protection under a screen of smoke.

Redeem this child and save him from all afflictions. Allow him to become a man and sing glorious songs of praise to our Lord and king, the mighty God who created us. Amen Amen Selah, may God keep you from all evil and may He allow you to dwell in Jerusalem and in all holiness.

When the hymn was completed, Shirah buried the eggshells beneath the tree. The moonlight was yellow as it swept across the field. Already the afterbirth had disappeared, feeding the earth, giving gratitude to the Almighty. Yael took up her shawl and her tunic. She reached for her child and named him beneath the open sky, as he had been named earlier that morning by the men at the synagogue. She called him Arieh, the word for lion, even though he slept through our rejoicing as though he were a lamb.

* * *

WHEN OUR WARRIORS next went into the desert, it was not to fight but to hunt, trying as best they could to satisfy our hunger. When the Romans returned to the place they had once marked with rocks, our men were forced to retreat, their foray cut short. They had no choice but to outrun the enemy, who had returned to spy on us. For their troubles, our warriors brought back partridges that were more bones than flesh and a stray baby ibex, left behind by the herd. It was Tishri, the time of the growing season, and we should have been rejoicing. Instead a silence swept over the mountain, a sense of foreboding.

In the dovecotes, we all felt Nahara’s absence. Aziza especially pined for her sister. She often went to the field near the Essenes’ camp, where she sat cross-legged in the grass for many hours, but Nahara never came to greet her. When Aziza followed the goats her sister cared for, Nahara was quick to lead them away. Hurt by her sister’s refusals, Aziza began to fashion arrows to fill her time and keep her hands busy. We had all been asked to help with the weaponry, and many women gathered in the evenings to shape stones for slingshots. All the same, Aziza hid her work from Shirah.

“She wouldn’t think it proper for me,” she confided.

As it turned out, Aziza had a light touch. The arrowheads she crafted were thin, beautifully made. Each was bound to a wooden shaft with linen twine. Shirah’s elder daughter was surprisingly well suited to such work, for metal was to her what cloth and thread were in the hands of other women. I saw in her what I had spied in the Baker each morning of his life, the love of fashioning something out of ingredients that would be nothing without a human touch, be it salt or wheat or iron that was transformed.

The Man from the North revealed that, in the country where he’d been born, each warrior’s arrows were decorated with the sign of his tribe, in his case a stag, the creature he had told us about but one we hardly believed in, for he said this deer’s shoulders were as tall as a man, its antlers spreading farther than the span of a vulture’s wings. From the time he was a boy, he assured us, every arrow he’d carried had been engraved with the image of that miraculous creature. “Tie feathers to the end of the shaft,” the slave told Aziza as she constructed her weapons. “That is how to make them fly.”

Because Amram was thought of as a phoenix, rising from every battle to fight again, Aziza crafted arrows that might be worthy of him, adorning each with hawk feathers dyed in a bath of madder root. Soon her hands were red; I overheard Yael teasing her, suggesting she was so consumed with passion that heat was rising from her skin in waves of scarlet.

When it came time to test Aziza’s handiwork, she sent Adir to the garrison for a bow. Adir returned soon enough, laughing, joking and making rude remarks, suggesting that his sister had best not touch the bow or she might shoot herself accidentally. Aziza grinned and sent him away with a push.

I sat with Yael, who had her baby resting in a sling made of finely spun wool. Arieh was a quiet boy, with dark, liquid eyes, as calm as the sheep he’d appeared to resemble on the evening of his naming. Though only weeks old, he slept through the night, clutching the square of blue fabric Yael let him hold to settle him. He still had the red birthmark on his cheek, but it had been treated with a salve mixed from wheat, honey, and aloe, and had begun to fade. We imagined that his thick black cap of hair was a sign of his virility, marveling over the size of his hands and feet, and his small, manly penis, suggesting he would likely be able to lift a donkey above his head by his tenth year.

“Perhaps we should let Arieh test the arrows if he is already a warrior,” we teased, for we had no man among us.

Aziza handed the bow to the Man from the North, even though it was a crime to place a weapon in the hands of a slave. He took up the bow, grateful for the trust. Each of Aziza’s arrows made its mark when the slave turned to his target — a knob on the stump of the ancient olive behind the dovecote. He stood in the threshold so no one else would take notice. When we called out praises, he bowed. He noticed the intent expression on Aziza’s face, her gaze fixed on the bow in his hands.

“Let me teach you,” he suggested. “Then you can see for yourself the worth of what you’ve crafted. These arrowheads are among the finest I’ve ever used.”

Aziza backed away, shaking her head, her eyes masked. Still, there was something resembling desire etched across her face.

Women were not to touch weapons, such was our law, but we had already broken the law by handing the bow over to a slave. We who had already sinned did not question or condemn. We stared back at those who whispered about Yael and her baby until they were the ones forced to lower their eyes.

“Try what you’ve made,” I urged, if only for our amusement.

“Fine.” Aziza nodded. “But only to please you.”

The slave showed her what she must do, and she listened carefully. She held the bow with ease, a broad smile bursting upon her face. Her very first arrow hit the mark. I could see the surprise on the slave’s face.

“You have a warrior inside you!” he remarked.

“Pure luck.” Aziza dropped the bow and went to gather the fallen arrows, admiring her handiwork, making certain each feather was in place. “The phoenix always prevails,” she said. “Whoever Amram strikes will fall before him.”

Shirah had remained inside the dovecote. Now she came to the doorway. Her expression was trancelike, difficult to read. She had changed since Nahara’s departure, becoming more wary and withdrawn. Some people whispered she had the ability to see through our world into the next. If this was indeed true, then for Shirah the future was not a distant place. We, who had no idea what was to be, sat in the courtyard enjoying ourselves, applauding as Aziza hit the target again and again, her agility and grace a revelation to us all.

As for Shirah, she only watched, the way one might keep a wary eye on a swarm of bees already in flight, when it was too late to wave them away or return them to the hive. When the damage had already been done.

* * *

BEFORE LONG the new year was upon us, a time for celebration. But we entered into the holiday of Rosh Hashanah frugally and without joy. Our tables were set with simple things, gourds and leeks, a few thin partridges, lentil salads, yogurt cheese. Yael brought some of this meager feast to her friend Tamar. The Essene woman was grateful, and in return her son, Yehuda, a dreamy boy who was often climbing trees in the orchard when he should have been at his studies, surprised my grandsons with the gift of a carved spinning top. The children were delighted with their present; they were happy enough with so little. They didn’t notice how Yehuda stared at them, curious once he’d discovered they didn’t possess the power of speech. Noah and Levi seemed to accept their plight, however. They made the best of things, ignoring the stares that greeted them in the plaza from the curious who tried to guess what had caused them to become mute. The boys enjoyed the new baby in the house, spending hours entertaining Arieh with his rattle, or with gourds made into flutes, and now with the clever little top Yehuda had fashioned.

Arieh seemed drawn to my grandsons’ sweet silence, his eyes following them around our chamber. We catered to our little lion, who threw back his head to laugh when my grandsons made shadows dance on the wall. Already when they played a hiding game with him, ducking behind a length of fabric, he called out for them with a shout, chortling and cooing until my grandsons silently reappeared, so still they might have indeed been shadows rather than flesh-and-blood boys.

This new year was especially bitter for me. Every piece of fruit I cut in half possessed a flavor I couldn’t abide. What was sweet, I had grown to despise. I ate bitter greens, and was accustomed to the taste of salt on my tongue. I went to the synagogue and stood with the women in the back. Men must not be distracted by women, but what of women who were distracted by their own thoughts? I recited the prayers I knew by heart, but my voice was hesitant, listless.

I had grown so pale that Yael asked if I had fallen ill. I said no, but I could no longer bring myself to go to the dovecotes in the morning. Instead I chose to remain on my pallet, my face to the wall. I saw shadows as my grandsons passed in and out of the threshold. I saw all that had happened in the desert every time I closed my eyes.

A year had passed since my daughter’s life had been taken. On the Day of Atonement, I went to the synagogue to say the prayers of lamentation, but my loss was like an arrow piercing through me, and these rituals were not enough to dull the pain. Melancholy was around me like a shroud, my sorrow sewn to me with the black thread demons are said to use. When I went back into the plaza, people avoided me. They could see the darkness I carried. Even my grandsons shrank from me, preferring to sit beside Yael and hear her stories. There was only one individual who might understand me, one who’d walked the same path and stood beneath the same sky.

Surely, Yoav was somewhere in a darkened corner, aching as I did.

IT WAS EVENING when I went to the barracks. I had not left my chamber for several days, other than to pray in the synagogue. If you do not leave your bed, you become unused to walking. If you do not forgive yourself, you cannot forgive anyone else. I had disposed of the beasts at the oasis, but they had disposed of me as well. The woman I had been, she who had awoken to the scent of bread baking, who swept the steps each morning with complete certainty that the new day would be like any other, had vanished. I was a shell, a beetle, a shock of flesh stitched through with demon thread.

The warriors were at prayer on this evening. I noticed an enormous pile of rocks had been chiseled into smooth, hard balls, to be used in a catapult should we be attacked. These rocks were piled high where before there had been lengths of wood. Now the wood was used up, and there was little enough of it to be found on the surrounding cliffs, only a few stray sunstruck bushes with bleached, scaly bark that smoldered rather than burned when tossed upon a fire. It was the planting season, but the air smelled like an oven in which bread had burned for days. No one worked the fields; protection from the elements and from our enemies occupied us all. I wondered what my husband would have thought of a world that was too hot for bread, too brutal for human kindness.

I waited beneath the remnants of a mulberry tree not far from the barracks. The leaves rustled in the dark. The sound echoed like a rattle, or perhaps it was more like a snakeskin shaken in the wind. I sat on the stump of a tree whose bounty had once fed a king. Soon the young warriors returned from their prayers. They took up their work even on this holiest of days. I spied the great assassin of Jerusalem, Bar Elhanan, cleaning the flat bronze blades of spears with rags and sand as though he were a slave himself. He had come to my home several times, only mumbling a greeting to me but lighting up when he saw Arieh, whom he sat upon his knee. I glimpsed Yael’s brother as well, out in the field where he vied with his friends in a contest to see whose eye and aim were best and who among them could shoot an arrow through one of the narrow windows set into stone, made for pouring hot oil and boiling water onto enemies should they be foolish enough to try to breach the wall.

I waited so long I began to hear the echoes of owls in the caves. The warriors retreated to the barracks. As the assassin crossed the plaza, I saw the age in his step, the heaviness of his burden, for he carried all the cruelty he’d been party to on his shoulders. I had resented his desire to come to my chamber because he had taken to visiting his grandson, but in that moment I felt I could not judge his actions in this world, not after all I’d done.

The moon was in the center of the sky watching over me, lonely, cold. Still I stayed. At last my son-in-law came through the plaza, his ax in hand, his expression brooding. He was still a young man, though his hair was white. His arms were bare beneath his prayer shawl. I saw that he had wrapped several thin lengths of sharp-edged bronze around his muscled forearms; the fierce, bloodied twists were meant to turn every move he made into excruciating self-punishment. Such abuse was not allowed; it was the mourning practice of nomads and barbarians. Still, he had done as he pleased, breaking our laws. There were bands of bloody scars where he had cut directly into his flesh with a knife, a row of injuries set above his dark blue veins. The self-inflicted marks were the blue of the hyssop when it bloomed, my daughter’s favorite flower. Around them arose bruises that were the gorged color of plums, her favorite fruit.

When I called his name, Yoav narrowed his eyes as though I had uttered a curse. But I gestured to him, and he recognized me and approached. He stood beneath the dry leaves of the mulberry tree, half-dressed in his silver armor. I wondered if he slept in it, if he dreamed of battles and blood or of my daughter’s beautiful face.

“It’s the day of sorrow,” I reminded him, thinking we might pray together or light a lamp in memory of Zara.

He snorted. I thought of the blindfolded horses of the king, set upon a path they could not see. Some must have protested; they must have reared up, furious to be sightless in the brutal grasp of the serpent that led up the mountainside.

“Every day is that,” said the Man from the Valley, who was still my son-in-law even though I had no daughter. “What should I pray for?”

He seemed both ashamed and furious; there was scorn in his voice at the mention of prayer. Of course he knew the day. He had counted every moment since he’d found her beneath the heavy rocks I’d placed over her so that she might be protected from any other creatures of prey.

“You have two sons,” I reminded him. “They have your wife’s dark eyes.”

Yoav stunned me with a roar of grief. I drew back, uncertain of who was before me, this Man from the Valley who confided in no one and slept with his back to the wall, ax in hand, ready to fight while he was dreaming. “I told you not to speak of her,” he admonished me.

“Or of the boys?”

He faced me, defiant. “This world is nothing to me. Why would you think I care about such things?”

“I came to you because you carry her with you,” I said, reminding him that I had offered him her last breath. He had taken it and now she belonged to him. In exchange for this great gift, he needed to respect me still, no matter how bitter he had become. He nodded, recognizing the bond between us and the sacrifice I’d made. He restrained his temper and listened to reason. The man who was still my son-in-law came to sit beside me under the black mulberry tree. He had never asked how I’d managed to kill those beasts, how I’d lured them to their deaths with bread. Perhaps he resented me, for I had performed the deed of vengeance he was likely ashamed not to have committed himself. But back then he was a man who knew only prayer, while I had already become a torrent of fury.

“There must be something here for you still,” I insisted, trying to speak to the man he’d been, not this violent warrior intent on torturing himself. “The air you breathe, the water you drink, waking each day to see the sun. There must be something you still want from this world.” There was so little that remained of him, but when I looked down into the dust, his shadow seemed the same.

Yoav laughed and shook his head. “You’re asking what I want?”

For a moment I saw the scholar who had come to the Baker to ask for our daughter’s hand, the young bridegroom so overwhelmed on his marriage day that even after the legal contract, the ketubah, had been drawn up and agreed upon, he seemed stunned to realize that Zara was indeed his. When he caught sight of the beauty of his bride, he was speechless, and his friends teased him, vowing he’d been mesmerized.

“Their voices,” he said.

We could hear the warriors who had gone in to their evening meal, breaking their fast, the raucous conversation of young men, some too young to know the horrors they would encounter when they ventured into the desert to defend us. Most of those young warriors looked away when they saw the Man from the Valley, with his scars and his bands of metal, easily convinced they would never become like him, a death-giver maddened by war.

“Can you give me that?” Yoav asked. “I want my boys to speak like any others. Can your God do that?”

It was my wish as well, one I had prayed for to no avail. We were so alike it was painful, two people who had drowned in the same pool. We observed the night and the stars above us in silence. I could not promise him that God’s grace would prevail.

Yoav shrugged when I had no answer. “Exactly,” he said. “Come back to me when they can speak. When the innocent aren’t burdened by a curse, then find me. Until that time, I have no faith. If there ever was a God, He has forsaken us and is no more.”

We sat together with that terrible and reckless thought. The chill light of the falling moon filtered down.

“I’ll fight until there is no one left for me to go up against. Then I’ll lie down knowing I had no God.”

When I left that place, Yoav was still there, beneath the sun-bleached boughs of the ancient tree. All the while we’d made our way to this mountain, he’d possessed the unrelenting brooding of a man stalked by sorrow. Now he was searching for death, wanting to confront it and be done with this world. I knew what he dreamed about, and it was not my daughter. Such a dream would have broken him in a thousand ways. A vision of Zara would have been endlessly more painful than the sharp strands he strung around himself in self-punishment.

I did not look back as I made my way from the garrison, or pay attention to the owls who glided across the sky at this hour. I had an errand and didn’t dare delay. I made a vow to get this man the one thing in the world he still wanted, the sound of his children’s voices, a reason to believe.

I WENT to the synagogue to beg for an amulet that might cure my grandsons. I humbled myself, my eyes on the ground, my voice pleading. But the great man, Menachem ben Arrat, only shook his head. He reminded me that he had the fate of our people to pray over and therefore could not be concerned with the troubles of two small boys. He dismissed me as if their plight was meaningless, as perhaps it was for him, and had me escorted out.

Despite the priest’s denial, one of the scholars gave me an amulet in which there was a rolled prayer for forgiveness. I buried it beside the temple, as was the custom, but as I wiped the dirt from my hands, I wasn’t convinced that a scholar’s charm was strong enough for my needs. I was already headed in another direction.

Evening was falling, and the women were at work on the looms set up in the plaza. The men were coming to prayer, called by the blast of the ram’s horn which was sounded from the ramparts on the wall, passing me by as I went to the opposite end of the fortress. I neared the barracks, where I spied Aziza acting as a willing audience for her brother while he practiced with a bow, showing off all he’d learned. Adir had become the pet of some of the younger warriors. Although he was a decent student, he had no idea that his sister was the one who had revealed herself to be an expert marksman. We had not told him because such things were forbidden; Adir might not understand if he learned we had ignored the law. Any weapon touched by a woman, even by accident, must be cleansed with both water and prayer so that her essence would not linger, diverting the warrior who might use it next, for even the faintest touch could bring lust to that man’s heart. Perhaps that meant a woman who was well trained in arms would be the superior warrior, her attention never wavering from her task. Aziza’s shoulders and face were sunburned from her hours of practice behind the dovecote under the guidance of the slave, her lean body finely muscled from the effort of working the bow. Still she applauded her brother as his arrows rose, then fell with a clatter upon the stones.

I WENT on across the Western Plaza in search of Shirah, relieved to think I might find her alone. When I came to her door, however, there was no answer. I peered inside to see that the chamber was dim. A scrim of smoke lingered, for incense had been burned before the altar. On the table there was a jar of eye paint made of crushed lapis stone, a palette for mixing paints and rouge that was made of a flat, opalescent white shell, brought from the Red Sea. A small ceramic vial of oil scented with lilies was opened, as though someone had left with great urgency. Lilies were associated with the Shechinah, what some called the Dwelling. It was the feminine aspect of God, that which was hidden and touched only by the truest of believers in a veil of knowledge and ecstasy. It was God’s compassion, and those who died in the Shechinah’s embrace were said to be favored by the angels.

I myself had heard only whispers of such things; still, I recognized the odor of the divine, extremely female in its essence, a mixture of purity and defilement, sweet and sour drawn in one breath. I slipped out of Shirah’s chamber, for the scent led me on, through the plaza. I crossed toward the western wall. I peered over to the palace beneath me. At this hour, under the darkening sky, the ruined Northern Palace yoked to the cliffs was surrounded by a haze of lilac light. The fragrance of perfume was faint, yet it was stronger than the bitter odor of the barren valley below us.

The shops were closed, the tannery and winery shuttered, the bakery dark. Several strong men worked in the bakery, feeding the huge ovens first with cut wood, and, now that we were running out of logs, planks torn from the floors of the inner chambers of the palace were used to feed the flames. I had avoided these ovens ever since I’d walked past one morning to see the men at work, bare-chested, covered by their white aprons, sweltering in the heat the ovens cast. I was fainthearted at the sight of the bakers. For a moment I imagined I saw my husband among them.

Before I swooned, I realized it was someone else entirely, someone who didn’t resemble my husband at all. The man working at the bakery waved at me when he noticed me staring. I hurried away. Ever since that time, I had cooked my own flatbread, flavored with the last of my husband’s coriander. I did not wish to come to this place and stand in line with the other women, waiting for the fresh loaves, or be reminded of the scent of my own household in the Valley of the Cypresses.

Now, in the dark, I saw a shadow cross the bakery floor. A rat.

I went on to search for Shirah, coming to the entranceway that led into the earth. I continued, though I was made dizzy by the way the path careened down hundreds of tilted steps, many crumbling in decay. Members of the king’s court had glided down these stairs, and not long after, Roman soldiers had patrolled here before our warriors overtook them to claim this fortress as their own. I went so deeply into the earth I seemed to be entering another world entirely, one that was dark and damp despite the arid landscape up above.

Although we’d had no rain for several months and the world around us was parched and aching, I heard water. At first the promise of water was like a dream, as it had been when we’d come to the oasis. I felt stunned by the lilting sound of its echo, by the very idea, as though I’d long forgotten what water was like, how it could be so cold and sweet, with white petals floating on the surface, how it could easily drown someone, taking the unsuspecting bather into the circle of its pale, unrelenting arms.

I continued on, drawn to the unexpected promise of water as rats are drawn to grain in the bakery, my hand set against the cool stone wall to help me keep my balance on the twisting stairs. The steps became smaller as I ventured down, each more tiny than the one before. I had to turn sideways so as not to fall. At last I realized where I was. I’d come to the largest cistern, a well so enormous fifty men could stand across it shoulder to shoulder and still have room to stretch. In winter this well filled from Herod’s aqueducts to become a lake used to supply our baths and water vats. Now, however, the level was dangerously low. There was only a small, concentrated green pool collected in the center of the well, rimmed by sharp rocks. A single lamp had been set upon a stone, and the melting oil floated like liquid amber. I squinted through what was shadow and flickering light in equal measure. I felt so strong a chill I might have drifted into the land of ice the Man from the North so often spoke of, a place where a warrior could freeze through to his bones in moments.

There was the glitter of flesh in the water and the roiling movements of sexual frenzy. I shivered and thought of monsters, for who but crocodiles would slip into the water to take their pleasure? But surely monsters did not embrace each other with such passion, nor kiss one another on the mouth, nor wear the flesh of men and women. The two in the water were both dark, their darkness joining as they became one. When they pulled apart from each other, I could only observe the man’s back and broad shoulders, but I could see that the woman wore a gold amulet around her throat and that her eyes, so dark in the water, were streaked with the powder of the lapis stone, a shade some people vowed was the color of heaven.

I stood against the wall and tried not to draw breath. I had stumbled into something it was best to leave be. Now I stumbled even farther as I edged toward the stairs in an attempt to flee. A rock fell and splashed into the water. The ripples went out in a shimmering circle as the falling rock was devoured by the pool. The woman in the cistern drew her beloved to her. As she did, I saw her throat and breasts. She was marked by henna-colored tattoos, a practice our people were not allowed, unless a woman was a kedeshah, one who was anointed, willing to offer her body as a sacrifice and as a blessing to her priests.

The swimmer turned and glared in my direction, seeing through the shadows. We caught each other’s glance, as a gazelle might gaze into the eyes of a hunter, although which was the prey and which the hunter I could not say. Quickly, I backed deeper into the corner. My grandsons had taught me the language of silence. I didn’t need words to tell me that the Witch of Moab was just like any other woman. She embraced her lover closely, her arms cast around him protectively to ensure I wouldn’t see his face. It didn’t matter. I knew who he was from the way the light fell across his back, as though it had been drawn to the light inside of him, that which shone and made men follow him as if they had no other choice.

I wished I could erase what I had seen. I had only wanted to ask Shirah’s favor, and I’d discovered far more than I’d bargained for. I took the stairs as quickly as I could. Though I was no longer young, I fled as a young woman would have. It crossed my mind to run all the way home, but our eyes had met; there was no hiding from one another after our encounter. If you do not face something, it will follow you anyway. If I had learned anything from my time in the desert it was that once you ran, you could never stop.

I waited at her door, anxious as to what would happen next. Enemies had been formed for far less reason than knowledge such as mine, and a woman who practiced keshaphim was not an easy enemy to face. I knew too much, yet I knew nothing. Perhaps that made me the more dangerous of the two of us at this moment. If I had any gift at all, it was my ability to see shadows. I spied one now crossing the plaza; if I half-closed my eyes, I saw a raven, one who wished to fly but who was trapped, earthbound.

Her long black hair was hanging down her back, wet and loose, the scent of lilies clinging to her. We stood in the half-light cast by the moon. I noticed that even a witch could blush, especially one who’d been discovered in the depths of a well. A flicker passed across Shirah’s dark face, not shame exactly but surrender.

“What is it you want from me?” she asked, resigned.

I thought of the doves, how they never met your gaze and always cast their glance downward. Unlike these shy creatures, Shirah was staring at me, eyes blazing, convinced, it seemed, that I might use my newfound knowledge against her.

“What you do is your business,” I assured her. “I won’t even remember tonight.”

I had come for a favor, and that was what I asked for. I bowed my head and took in the scent of lilies as I pleaded for the only thing my son-in-law wanted in this world. My grandsons’ voices returned to them.

“What makes you think I can do the work of God?”

Shirah was fearless even now when I knew enough to destroy her reputation and her life. Women who committed adultery were often cast out, their hair was shorn to the skull, their possessions confiscated, their children torn from them. Wasn’t her bravery proof enough of her strength? She was the reason the council left Yael alone. They had approached once, with questions concerning Arieh’s birth. Shirah had closed the door to the dovecote and she sang a prayer until they went away. If she could bring children into the world, fighting Lilith when she tried to claim them, then surely she could help two small boys find their voices. To convince her I would have to open my own silence. I did so, bowing my head as I told my story, keeping in mind the image of the Man from the Valley wrapped in thin strips of metal and marked by his own blood. As I spoke the past was drawn around us the way dark gathers at the corners of the world. There was the jasmine that grew beside the pool and the burn marks on my daughter’s skin. There rose the angel who’d whispered to me in the bakery, the demon who’d sifted inside me when I took up the soldier’s knife against my own dearest flesh and blood, the ghost of my husband, who’d assured me that every loaf of bread fed us in the way we needed to be fed.

Shirah sank back, her face ashen. Now only she and God knew the manner in which I’d killed the beasts who had fallen upon us, the delight I’d taken in watching them drink themselves to death, the terrible pleasure there had been in cutting their throats. I threw off my cloak, the better for her to see me and know what I had become. I was not a baker’s wife or a grandmother or a woman who cared for doves, feeding the ailing birds spoonfuls of barley water, tending to them through the night. I was a murderess. I held the lamp to my palm to let Shirah see exactly what was before her. The mark of death.

I was spent and exhausted. Words had done that to me, twisted my heart as they poured out, clattered like stones onto the cobbled ground. Perhaps my grandsons were lucky to be mute, protected against the stories of their own lives. Shirah drew me close, and in her embrace it seemed that I was the child who had seen too much, peering through the waterfall at the horror of what a beast could do to a human being and what a human being could then become.

“For every evil there is a cure,” Shirah said softly. “Any mother would defend her daughter. It would be a sin not to do so, a crime beyond any that are written. What you did, you did for love.”

Against my fevered skin, her flesh was delightfully cool. She confided in me that water was her element and had been since she was a child, that was why I had found her in the cistern. Her mother had brought her to a river, and she found she could swim without ever having been taught to do so. What was dangerous to one person was a mercy to another. My son-in-law’s wish was not an impossible task, she assured me, but the price was patience. Wait and have faith, she urged. Catch a demon and you will break the spell. Offer an angel gratitude and he might return the voices he’d taken to stop the children from crying out when they were hidden behind the waterfall. I was to pray every night to Beree, the angel of rain. This angel was silent, as my grandchildren were, so I should not expect an answer, at least not right away.

“I know what it is your son-in-law desires,” Shirah now said. “But what of you?”

“His wish is mine,” I assured her.

“No.” She was not convinced. When she gazed at me, I felt my throat tighten, perhaps to hold back the truth. “There’s something more.”

Shirah raised my hand to her mouth. Before I could think to pull away, she kissed the center of my palm. In that instant I let go of the truth, that which I’d kept from her and from God and from myself. I broke into a shuddering sob. The soldiers had been beasts and it had been a pleasure to kill them, but they had been men as well. They had walked on the earth and under the sky. The one who had pleaded with me was the one who had stayed with me, for he had begged for something I now longed for as well.

I wished to be forgiven.

“It was always so in the eyes of God,” Shirah told me.

She let her robe slip from her shoulders so that I could take in the full measure of the forbidden red tattoos on her skin that I had spied in the cistern. I knew what they represented: loyalty to the goddess, a life given in service, a woman’s deepest sacrifice, scorned by our own people.

“Should I judge myself?” she ventured to ask. “Or should I leave that to the Almighty, who forgives us all for being what He made us?”

Beneath the mulberry tree I had nearly been moved to renounce my faith alongside my son-in-law. Who was there to look down upon my trials and my transgressions? Who could heal a wound that might never be closed? Shirah had tasted my sorrow and had trusted me enough to reveal herself to me in return. If she could, and if God would allow it, my son-in-law would be granted his heart’s desire.

Perhaps then I could forgive myself.

I PRACTICED patience throughout the month of Tishri, for this virtue did not come easily to me. In truth, patience had never served me well in the past. If I’d had patience, my grandsons would have been beside the pool of green water when the renegades came to us, waiting like sheep to be slaughtered. If I’d had patience, my daughter’s murderers would still be walking this earth. I thought of my husband and how he had waited for the dough to rise, never rushing the loaves into the oven. He’d known the exact moment to take the linen cloths from the rising loaves, when to slide the wooden board into the red-hot oven. It was as if he was the challah as well as its maker, and therefore understood its mystery from the inside out.

I began to study the slave. He, too, was a deeply patient man. He waited without complaint every evening, settled upon the stones of the dovecote until Yael’s return the following day, as calm as the doves who waited for our return. But I took note of the heat in his pale eyes; he couldn’t hide that. Even his patience would last only so long.

It was a difficult season, and the heat had not dissipated. Sleep did not come easy to me, although the others beneath my roof slept well, including Arieh, who was more than two months old, a healthy, quiet little boy. There came an evening when I was tidying our chamber, setting new straw into our sleeping pallets, when I looked out to see movement beside our door. I noticed a shadow, as I had at the oasis when the darkness of the soldiers crossed the sand. That was my talent. I could observe what was only half there: the beasts on the ridgetop, the rat in the corner, the woman meeting her lover, the vial of poison behind the spice jars, the lanky form of a man lingering outside our chamber. I thought it was a spirit who had risen to walk among us, having left his slumbering body behind. But, no, he was flesh and blood.

WHEN I recognized him, I understood that the Man from the North was not as patient as I had imagined. Perhaps this was true for all men. I now remembered there had indeed been days when the Baker cursed the ovens for being slow, when he pulled the loaves from the racks before they were fully cooled. Even the most patient among us has a breaking point. On this evening when I saw the figure slinking along the wall, I knew such a time had come for the slave. He wore a head scarf to disguise himself, but anyone could tell he wasn’t one of us. His fair hair shimmered. You would think a man from the world of ice would hold little feeling, but that wasn’t the case. How hot ice could be, how impatient, ready to melt.

The Man from the North was fortunate that I alone spied him. Anyone else would have set upon him immediately, and even if he was quick to surrender, whoever might have chosen to murder him would have been within his legal rights. I waved him away, clapping my hands, as I would to chase off rats. He slipped back against the wall, falling into the dark, disappearing, as a dream might. But unlike a dream, he left his mark. When I went to the wall in the half-light and ran my hand over the stones, I found them hot to the touch in the place where he had waited, cast by the impatience that was evident in any man in love.

The following morning, as Yael and I walked through the field, she kept her eye on the dovecote where the shadow who had stalked her was kept. My walk was slower than hers, and I saw her impatience when she bade me to hurry.

“The doves can’t wait?” I asked.

She flushed and began to fuss with the baby she carried at her hip. “Dear heart,” she said, masking her eyes, rubbing the soft skin under Arieh’s chin.

“Is there a reason you’re so impatient?” I pressed her.

She looked up at me, hesitant. I could feel her lie forming before it was declared. “No hurry,” she answered, but her gaze said otherwise.

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.

“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.

* * *

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.

“Tell him our wish,” Shirah said without hesitancy. “He will be generous to us.”

But Ben Ya’ir had gone into the wilderness with his warriors, leaving no second in command other than the elders, and they would surely not listen to Shirah’s pleas or even allow her to come within their doors.

We were told there was but one person who might convince the authorities that the Man from the North deserved a visitor — Ben Ya’ir’s wife, Channa, the dark woman who lived in the lower section of the Western Palace, a villa in which the frescoes had been created by master painters from Rome. She held some of her husband’s authority when it came to domestic matters, hearing complaints about living space or work allotments among the women. She was revered even though she set herself apart from all others. For days at a time she refused to open her door; her ration of food was brought to her, then left outside her gate, her water set beside her garden in buckets and goatskin flasks. She ventured out at night and was sometimes seen in the Western Plaza, flowing scarves wrapped around her that resembled a shroud, her sharp face set in mourning, although she had lost no one. She was a mystery and a shadow, but shadows were what I understood most of all.

When we stated our plea, the guard asked who among us would visit Ben Ya’ir’s wife. I could feel the others’ hesitation, and even Shirah turned away, wary of such an encounter. I found myself offering to go. I was the eldest, and because of this it was my duty. But there was more. I was the diviner of shadows who had learned not to show what was inside. I could pretend to be a baker’s widow, a simple woman, and held a talent of disguise that would help with this task. The other women looked upon me, grateful for my offer, each with her own reasons for not wanting to go to the palace.

As I was to leave, on impulse, I decided to bring Arieh with me. I had a premonition. I thought I heard a voice say his name. Perhaps the angel who had stood with me in the bakery was beside me again. Perhaps he who had instructed me to take up the vial of poison now murmured that this child might be the key to unlock a prison door.

“Who could deny a smile to Arieh?” I said to Yael. “What harm can it do?”

Ben Ya’ir’s wife might take an interest in the welfare of the dovecotes if she took an interest in the baby. If so, she might allow us to visit a man who was nothing more than a stone, but who all the same had entrusted us with his name.

WHEN I RAPPED upon the palace door, the great man’s wife was quick to call Go away. I set to knocking once more. I’d often needed to call upon customers who had forgotten to pay the Baker; I did not give up easily when told to leave. The door of this grand house was made of red cypress, which I took to be a good omen. Our town in the Valley of the Cypresses was said to have been blessed by the angel Michael; perhaps the wood used for this door had come from our forest and had therefore been blessed as well. My mother’s great-grandmother might have walked beneath this very tree’s branches before King Herod’s builders cut it to the ground.

Arieh squirmed in my arms. A wind was blowing and all at once I had a chill. Perhaps I’d made a mistake to bring the baby, for he was usually so good-natured and calm. Now, in the light of the dwindling day, he fussed as never before. I wondered how a woman could ever know if it was an angel who urged her on, or if one of Lilith’s demons was whispering in her ear.

Though I fretted and worried that I had made a mistake, I knocked yet again. There were no shadows because of the clouds rushing past; perhaps that was what led me astray. I could read shadows far better than I could read flesh and blood.

Eleazar ben Ya’ir’s wife opened the door a crack to peer out. She was thin and dark with a restless expression. “I have no time for you,” she told me.

She would have gone on with her excuses and perhaps managed to send me away, but her eye caught on the baby in my arms. He grinned at her, the flame mark on his cheek hardly noticeable in the dim light of the doorway. It looked like the imprint of a kiss.

“Who’s this who’s come to call?” Ben Ya’ir’s wife asked, her interest piqued.

“This is a child whose mother needs your favor,” I replied.

Channa was aloof again. “I have no favor to grant. My husband is the one you want, not me.”

When she breathed in, I heard a rasping sound. I wondered if her labored intake of air was the reason she often locked herself away and was so rarely seen among other women. She turned and coughed, bringing up blood, which she hid from me in her scarf. But I had caught sight of the shadow of the stain. It was clear that she had a breathing disease, the sort that forced a person to forsake the open air. Each breath was trapped inside the cage of her ribs and could not be released. It lay there, rattling, like dry leaves caught in a net.

“Perhaps I have a favor to grant you,” I said.

My husband had often convinced customers to buy more loaves than they initially thought were needed. You will never go hungry, he told them. Your table will be the envy of all. Possibly there was a bargain to be struck. In the bakery this was always so, why not at the palace door?

Ben Ya’ir’s thin, dark wife eyed me, suspicious. Her lips were bright with blood. “No one can help me.”

I assured her that someone could. I would offer her proof that for every ailment there was indeed a cure. When I turned to leave, Channa called for me to bring the baby if I were to return. My prediction was correct. He was the key that would open a doorway so the Man from the North could escape his plight.

I WENT DIRECTLY to Shirah’s chamber and sat at her table. We shared a tea made of the dried root of the hyssop. The boiled water was tinted sky blue. There was a plate of dried fruit, raisins and figs. My grandsons were in the courtyard with Shirah’s son, Adir, along with the Essene boy, Yehuda, Tamar’s son, who had become their great friend, though he’d been commanded by his people to stay away and pay more attention to his studies. All were taking turns with the spinning top, so we had our privacy.

“Did she speak to you?” Shirah tried to be offhand about the matter, but her gaze was sharp. “She locks her door to most.”

I wondered how it was possible that others did not see the truth as I did. Did they not take note of the unusual color of Aziza’s eyes? The shade was not unlike the Salt Sea, changing with her mood, now gray, now green, now dark as stone. Only one other person had such eyes. At the mention of Ben Ya’ir’s wife, Shirah was struck with grief. When I spoke of Channa’s illness, however, she did not seem surprised.

“While the hyssop flowers, she can go out only at night, when the flower closes and the scent evaporates,” Shirah informed me. “She keeps the same hours as the rats.”

Shirah took a sip of her tea, made of the bloom that caused Ben Ya’ir’s wife such difficulty. She seemed to thoroughly enjoy its sharp flavor.

“I didn’t realize you knew her.”

Shirah laughed grimly. “I’ve never met her.”

I thought this over, how it could be possible for Shirah not to know this woman, yet still be acquainted with the most intimate details of her life. In our world a man who was married could lie with an unmarried woman and no one would think him the worse for doing so; he might be required to pay her family for her shame. But a woman who gave herself to such a man had no legal rights. Even her bones would be sentenced to lie alone if she was convicted of any wrongdoing; they would be cast out and unburied so that she would forever be unable to find rest among her own kind.

“Channa has the power to open the prison gate,” I reminded Shirah. “She might be willing to do so in exchange for a cure.”

“Then we pay the jailer,” Shirah said moodily. “Is that what you want of me?”

“Is that what she is?” When Eleazar ben Ya’ir’s wife had peered out from behind her door, she had seemed like a prisoner rather than a jailer to me. “I pity her.”

“Don’t be fooled,” Shirah admonished me. “Is what we see on this earth all there is? You understand there is a shadow world. Can you not spy a demon in the corner even though you cannot see her or feel her breath upon your skin?”

Shirah was convinced to find a remedy, for there was no other recourse. She went to the shelf where she stored herbs. There were brown sheaves wrapped in cord and containers of powders, thistle and garlic, wormwood and cinnamon. When she returned she held out a leather pouch of crushed myrrh. Her instructions were simple: I was not to let the fire flame too brightly or to add other ingredients to the mix when I presented it to our leader’s wife. Cures such as this were strong and therefore dangerous. Death could occur if care wasn’t taken.

“If she breathes in sparks, she may never breathe again,” Shirah remarked as she closed the cord of the bag. There was a certain delight in her tone.

I reached for Shirah’s hand in order to gaze into her palm. I was not educated in such matters, yet there was one sign I knew quite well. The brand I carried, the one that signified a murderer, a mark that had twisted into my flesh on the day I’d become the thing I was now. I was relieved to find that Shirah’s hand was clear of such an abomination.

“Did you think you’d see her blood on my hands?” Shirah demanded, drawing away. She laughed, well aware of what I had been searching for. “If I’d wanted to accomplish that, I could have done so when I was a girl.”

This was unexpected. “You knew her then?”

“I didn’t know her then any more than I do now.” Shirah led me to the door. “If you want her to accept this cure,” she murmured, handing me the precious herb, “don’t tell her where you found it. If she had my life and I hers, she would have done exactly as you imagined of me. If you want to look at someone’s hand for the mark of death, search hers.” Shirah nodded at Arieh now, dozing in my arms. “Bring him to Yael before you return to the palace.”

“Why wake him? I’ll carry him with me.”

Shirah gazed at me. She could see inside me, and she knew there was more to my reasoning. I admitted that Channa had asked me to return with him. “Who could not be charmed by him?” I said, for our lion brightened all of our lives.

Shirah was troubled. Usually she appeared to be a girl, no older than Aziza, but at this instant she seemed her true age, a woman who had crossed the desert not once but twice, who had brought three children into the world and been marked with forbidden tattoos when she was little more than a girl herself.

“Bring him if you must. But whatever you do,” Shirah warned, and in this she was very clear, “do not let her hold him.”

I RETURNED to the palace and stood at the fine-grained door. This time, Channa unhooked the lock before I rapped on the wood, already waiting, curious, eyes glinting. Her breath was rasping, and she clutched at her chest, in the grip of her ailment. Still she warmed at the sight of the sleeping child and was quick to invite me in.

I stepped over the threshold of our leader’s house, humbled. I was relieved that Ben Ya’ir was in the desert with his men so that I did not have to bow before his greatness or risk that in his wisdom he might see me for the murderess I was.

I followed my hostess past the frescoes, highly praised by all who saw them, and for good reason. They were painted upon plaster in glorious tones of orange and red and gold. Although faded, they were clearly the work of a master. The seven sisters that the Greeks believed moved through the sky in a burst of stars had been set upon the wall, lifelike in their human guise, along with the moon, the most beautiful woman of all, in a dress of silver with strands of gold leaf running through her garment; so present it seemed real thread had been stitched through the painted fabric. Lamps lit the darkened hallway, and there was the scent of pure olive oil burning. The chamber we entered was well appointed, furnished with tables and benches left by the king’s household. I thought of our straw mats, our coarse cloth blankets, our dirt floors.

I asked my hostess to fetch a dish and some kindling. When she did so, I brought forth the myrrh Shirah had given me. Arieh was still dozing, so I laid him upon a small woven rug. Then I lighted the kindling with my flint. When the fire caught I told Channa what she must do. She would lean her head over the smoke and I would cover her in fabric so none could escape. She was to breathe deeply and keep the smoke inside her for as long as she could without taking another breath.

Channa recoiled, afraid she would choke to death on the fumes. She feared me, perhaps sensing the crimes I had committed. But I wasn’t there to do harm. I lifted Arieh back into my arms, and I hid the brand of my sin, slipping my hand inside the sleeping baby’s tunic, hoping I would not taint him merely by my touch.

“Breathe in and the way will be clear,” I promised.

Ben Ya’ir’s wife looked at me reproachfully, then did as I said. Though she didn’t trust me, she was desperate for air, willing to take the chance that the cure might be worse than the disease. She leaned forward, and I covered her head with a beautiful woven shawl. I sat watching as her shuddering gasps eased during the time she breathed in smoke. When the myrrh had burned to ash, I removed the fabric from her head. Channa drew a deep intake of air without any rasping. Her color had turned from sallow to rosy. The scent of myrrh clung to everything, a bitter fragrance in its purest form. We studied each other while the baby woke and happily began to play with a twig that had fallen from the kindling pile.

“I’ll talk to the guards about a visit,” Channa said thoughtfully. I had the impression, however, that her thoughts were truly on other matters. “I’ll do what I can for your slave.”

She led me back down the hall, past the orange light and the seven sisters on the wall. When I left she asked me for a promise to bring her more of the herb, so she would have access to the medicine should another attack begin. I said I would try my best to locate what she needed.

“I think you know where to find it,” she remarked.

She smiled grimly, clearly aware that I was not the one who possessed the knowledge regarding such remedies.

“Tell the witch I’m grateful,” she said.

YAEL WAS ALLOWED to visit the Man from the North, bringing a basket of food and a goatskin of water. She was instructed to speak to him through the door, but she had a glimpse of him when they unlocked the cell to shove the provisions inside. She saw that they had cut off his beard and his hair and had left whip marks on him with their ropes and chains.

“Go back to the palace,” Yael insisted after returning from this terrible visit. Her face was swollen with fury. “Talk to Ben Ya’ir’s wife again. Convince her to insist that the guards allow another visit. They’ll kill him soon enough. The least I can do is bring food and water, and see if I might heal his wounds.”

I said I’d have more luck with Ben Ya’ir’s wife if I took the baby with me.

Yael was cautious. In this way she was far wiser than I. “Why would she care about a baby whose name she doesn’t even know?”

“She’s lonely, friendless. There’s nothing to worry about. She’s taken a liking to him. Who can blame her?”

Yael accepted the compliment. She ran her hand over Arieh’s black hair and held him close. She could hardly bear to let him go, even for a few hours.

“It’s hard to say no to a face like his,” I reminded her.

“For an hour,” she said. “No more.”

The following day Yael watched over my grandsons while I went to Shirah for more of the breathing cure. Shirah and Aziza had already begun to cook their evening meal, but Shirah rose and went to her collection of herbs. This time she gave me both myrrh and frankincense — burned together they would be twice the remedy. Perhaps if the cure lasted longer, Channa would not ask for more. It was best to keep our distance from this woman, Shirah murmured. The wife of a man in power could become hungry for power of her own.

“Did she say anything about me?” Shirah asked.

I thought it best not to reveal the bitterness inside the truth. “Nothing. She only sent her gratitude.”

Shirah laughed, but her dark eyes revealed her worry. “Her gratitude is a curse. Remember that.”

I WENT DIRECTLY to Eleazar ben Ya’ir’s house. From where I stood, I could hear the men at work in the fields even though the light was fading into pink bands that struck the white, dusty earth, turning it red. The men had brought buckets of water from the cisterns, attempting to save the crop of wheat, for still there had been no rain. The bees in the hives were usually swarming at this time of year; they dove through the air searching for blossoms, white narcissus and pink cyclamen. But this season they found none. Channa let me in when I arrived and quickly took the cure from me. I told her that she must never add to the mixture, and that the flame must be kept constant; too much heat would take away the strength of the cure. In return, she promised she would speak to the guards. Then she hesitated.

“Is the slave the child’s father?” she wanted to know.

“This child has no father,” I said.

She motioned for me to turn the child into her arms, but I held tightly to the baby as I stood inside the hallway that was intricately patterned with black and white tiles. Voices echoed here. Annoyed, Channa motioned to me again. I knew what she wanted. I thought of Shirah’s warning, but I understood what it was like to long for a child. How could Channa bewitch us or harm us? She was a slight, weak woman who lived under a cloud of illness. I didn’t think it would hurt to please her for a moment. I placed Arieh in her arms. Instantly, she was overcome by his charm. “Perhaps he needs a father,” she said with yearning.

I quickly took him from her, shifting him back into my arms. “He has a mother,” I informed her. “He needs nothing more.”

Channa smiled then. “Everyone needs more.”

THOUGH WE ALL joined in to gather what little food we might spare, it was decided that Yael should be the one to continue to visit the Man from the North.

“He was always your slave,” Aziza decreed.

Yael looked up, hurt. “No man should be so.”

The next time she went to the tower they unlocked the door and allowed her to sit beside him. She was flooded with anger, appalled at the crude, filthy conditions of his incarceration. She would not say any more other than that when he leaned his head into her lap, and she stroked him where they had shorn his hair in such a cruel fashion, there were still beads of blood along his scalp. She brought a poultice of aloe and honey, the same remedy she had used for Arieh’s mark, and if the salve did not ease his pain, at least it brought him the knowledge that someone had wished to do so.

Channa had kept her part of the bargain, she was honest enough in that. I hoped the slave’s well-being was worth the price that was being paid, for every time in this month of the scorpion when Yael went to see the slave I brought the baby to Ben Ya’ir’s house and let Channa hold him in her arms. I was wary and careful. I never once let him out of my sight. Each time I reminded Ben Ya’ir’s wife that this child had a mother.

I told myself she was listening to me, but in truth, she hadn’t heard a word.

* * *

OUR WORLD was punished by thirst. At this time of year, in the month of Kislev, we expected a greening of the land, fields that were seeded and watered, melons and gourds already growing on the vines, figs pollinated by Egyptian wasps. This season was different. There would be no cumin or coriander or leeks or anise. The fruit trees were bare and black.

Though the days were bleak and we wore our cloaks, there was no sign of the much needed rain. It was time to scatter seeds for the spring, then plow the fields to bury them, the donkeys pulling metal blades across the earth. The men ordinarily cut down the barley, which would then be tied into sheaves and spread in the field so that the livestock could walk over the stalks to thresh them. But without rain, what good would this do? To winnow the barley, the wind was needed to blow the chaff off the grain, and the air now was lifeless and dull. Seed must be set down during times of rain so it would be trapped in the earth rather than dry up and shrivel before it could take root.

The men from the synagogue called for public atonement and fasting in the hope that their sacrifice might cause the rain to fall. We were summoned to the plaza to pray for forgiveness. The women stayed in the back, so we could care for the children and the animals if need be. The men gathered together, forsaking their duties and chores, a sea of prayer beneath the unrelenting sky. The high priest, Menachem ben Arrat, usually cloistered inside the synagogue, where he studied and gave advice, now came to stand upon the wall and lead the men in prayer. But as learned as he was, he could not make it rain, not even when he buried twelve lead jars with ceramic stoppers beneath the synagogue walls to keep demons from escaping into our midst.

It was decided that our people would fast until God sent relief to us. The drought became a hammer, and our people’s thirst was a nail beneath that hammer. Some of the older men were so weakened by hunger by the second day of the fast that they fell to their knees, but they continued to pray even then, their shawls around their shoulders, chanting to a heaven that would not answer their prayers but gave them only dust in return.

The fast was called off after three days. Nothing had changed. We had no choice but to wait for God to see our plight. The leaves of the grapevines curled up. The olives grew white then dropped from the trees, clattering onto the stones. People began to whisper about the water the Essenes used for their rituals. Guards were posted near the goat house to see what rites performed there might call for water. So as not to bring attention to themselves, our guests asked for no more. Instead they took to reusing their water until the drops they laid upon their heads to purify themselves were as black as the feathers of ravens.

When Yael thought no one noticed, she pilfered some of the water we were to use for the doves. Some she gave to the slave, the rest I helped her carry to the stone house to place in her friend Tamar’s hands. We brought some withered fruit and olives as well. Nahara approached us shyly. Shirah’s younger daughter appeared to have become a grown woman, serious, dressed in white, her hands hardened by work. She asked after her sister but said nothing of her mother. I noticed that she glanced at the gold amulet Yael wore at her throat, then just as quickly looked away.

In return for the gifts of sustenance we had brought, Tamar gave us a length of the pure white linen their women had woven. We covered our table at the Sabbath with the fabric when we lit our lamp and said the Sabbath prayers. Once we had arranged the linen on our table, we could almost believe our poor chamber was a home like any other.

ONE EVENING as I made my way to the looms, I saw Ben Ya’ir walking in the orchard through a white mirage of billowing dust. He had returned from his journeys into the desert, his warriors bringing back nothing but wild birds they had trapped with nets, as young girls might have. Our provisions were lower than they’d ever been, our people distraught. I could see the weight our leader carried on his shoulders from his posture, the fate of us all resting upon his words and deeds.

Where another might have seen only darkness, I noticed the shadow of Ben Ya’ir’s wife, watching. I had begun to know her from my visits with Arieh, when we sat together exclaiming over his charms. She made the baby laugh with a show of silly faces while she bounced him on her knee. I had come to understand that Channa had a wall around her meant to keep others out. Yet every now and then, I saw the curl of a smile upon her lips. When she spoke Eleazar ben Ya’ir’s name, her face transformed, and I could imagine her as the girl she had been. Her love for her husband was evident, though she seemed as far away from him as the rest of us.

I realized that, as he walked, Ben Ya’ir was gazing in the direction of Shirah’s house. He was drawn there as the hawks were drawn to the dovecotes. It seemed he had called to her, for Shirah stepped into the liquid heat of the evening. She wore no veil, and she lifted up her hair as though to cool herself. When Ben Ya’ir went to her, he placed his hand upon her throat, for she clearly belonged to him. They stood in deepest confidence, heads together.

If I could see what was between them, surely Channa could as well. I turned to her, but in the instant I had looked away, she’d vanished from the plaza. She ran so fast that her shadow was left behind. I followed it as the shade chased after its mistress, slinking over the cobblestones. At last I spied our leader’s wife winding her way back to her chambers, the palace where Herod’s son had lived once, a son the king had murdered when it suited him to do so, when he placed his needs before all others, as men in power often do.

As she reached a hillock, I saw Channa glance back at Shirah’s house. Her eyes were bitter and black. She held one hand at her chest, for once again she could not breathe. Yet she remained there, though it was the season when she was known to lock herself away, for the hyssop was blooming — it was the single flower that could survive a season without water. In that instant, as her shadow fastened itself to her flesh, I realized that Channa was the sort of woman who was willing to do anything to keep her husband.

It came to me that, of all the spells known on earth, a child was the one ingredient that could bind a man to a woman in ways only the angels could understand.

WHEN I NEXT went to see Ben Ya’ir’s wife, I did not bring Arieh. I had rethought our bargain and realized my error. Channa’s face registered disappointment. Her eyes flashed as they had when I’d seen her on the hillock without her shadow.

“He was cranky,” I told her. “A tooth is coming in.”

If anything this news made her even more eager to see him. “Poor thing,” she whispered. “If only I could hold him, I could soothe his pain.”

I felt a chill when I saw her expression. I wondered if the pact I’d made with her had given too much away in order to help the Man from the North. The next time I went I told her Arieh was too heavy for me to carry, he was growing so fast, and I could not bring him with me again. She said nothing. Not even good-bye. She showed me to the door and closed it behind me. I heard the lock clack shut.

Not long after, I saw her prowling along the wall near our chamber. It was dark, but I recognized her. I was surprised to see her there, she who kept to herself and usually avoided the plaza. But such things are known to happen; what is sweet draws out what is sour, as the good, in all their innocence, beckon the wicked. They say that Lilith has thirteen demons to assist her when she wishes to steal a baby. One of them is the Night herself, cloaked in starry black, able to vanish in an instant in the breaking light of day, yet still lingering without a shadow outside the door.

AT LAST Shirah fashioned the charm for my grandsons. I had been patient, and my patience was rewarded. Now that the time had come, I was anxious, for this was my last hope. Beyond that hope lay a cliff, and then nothing more than the unforgiving air. The charm was an incantation bowl, a beautiful, delicate piece of pottery, the making of which had been taught to Shirah by an ancient Babylonian woman. Upon the dried clay the names of God in Aramaic and in Hebrew had been written. In the center of the bowl there was the black image of a snake-headed demon with wings, shackled with ropes constructed from the letters of God’s name.

This amulet shall gather voices and bind demons and set angels free to do what they must. In praise of God. Amen Amen Selah.

She had written these words inside a circle of angels, their wings pitch black, the feathers of ravens.

To protect and to heal, to return what belongs to the children, to reverse the effect and render the demon without a voice and without power.

“Place this under the bed and wait. Have patience still,” she instructed me. “One ingredient is missing. Because of that this bowl is powerless. I myself cannot say what is missing, but when it appears, you’ll know. Be quick to add it into the bowl and your son-in-law will have his wish.”

I was nothing but a baker’s wife, a mother without a daughter, a fool who had placed a baby in an envious woman’s hands. How could I possibly recognize the most important ingredient of all?

“You’ll know because it will come on the day I am in irons,” Shirah told me.

* * *

THE MEN who practiced magic took to the plaza one dusty day. It was the end of winter and the drought continued. Our people seemed cursed. The priest and the rabbis had failed, and now the minim who practiced outside the laws of the Temple claimed that by casting arrows they could divine the cause of the drought. People believed them because there was little else to believe. They were parched, beaten down, desperate for water. Surely someone was to blame for our anguish. The crowd gathered around those practitioners who claimed to have access to God’s truth. The men circled near, and behind them came the women, and then the children with sticks and stones in their hands. There was a line of fury on the ground, slithering forth. Someone would be blamed, we all felt that. Our people wanted more than a demon. They wanted flesh and blood, someone to turn against, someone on earth.

Many have said that the angel of rain comes to women in their dreams. It is Beree who causes them to cry when they feel they have nothing left inside, no soul, no tears. Perhaps this is why Shirah did not appear at the dovecote on this day. Beree had visited her before and now he had returned to whisper that she should prepare herself. The morning came and went, still Shirah remained in her chamber. She plaited her hair, drew on her black cloak and her veils, slipped on her amulets. Barefoot, she did not eat or drink or speak all that day. She sat at her table readying herself for the vision that had appeared to her when she first came to the fortress. She had seen herself in chains, in a season when the rain refused to fall.

The arrows thrown by the minim pointed directly to what had once been the kitchen of the king. The house of the Witch of Moab. She was waiting for the diviners at her threshold, her cloak held close. Exactly as she had predicted, she was shackled and led away.

I knew this was the day when the incantation bowl would be complete, for Shirah had vowed the missing ingredient could be added only when she was in chains. I could not attend to the spell, however. I fled the dovecote with Yael and Aziza when we heard news of Shirah’s captivity. Together we rushed to the plaza. There was a crush of people, and the flare of overheated rage striped the air. People wanted a reason which might explain why God had turned against us, why the leaves on the trees were singed, why the olives were white and unripened, why we had only thirst until we were gasping, like fish upon the shore. They believed they now gazed upon that reason.

Watching the crowd engulf her mother, Aziza had to be restrained to guard that she wouldn’t rush to Shirah’s side and perhaps be held to blame as well. Yael grasped one of her arms, and I the other. She was stronger than I would have ever imagined, but Yael managed to calm her.

“Have faith,” she urged, whispering to Aziza so no one could overhear and accuse them of plotting. The gold talisman glinted at Yael’s throat, and her face was serene despite the chaos.

They say a witch’s enemies must hold her in the air and separate her from earth if they wish to undercut her power, but when the minim tried this, Shirah laughed at them. The men lowered her and backed away, confused. They had no idea that water, not earth, was her element.

“There is no one but Adonai,” Shirah declared to those who had accused her of bringing God’s wrath down upon us. Her voice carried. We who had come from the dovecote faced her and were convinced she was speaking directly to us. Children in the crowd quieted. Several women Shirah had helped in their time of need glanced away, embarrassed not to offer their assistance in return. People whispered that Menachem ben Arrat, the high priest, had come to his doorway but had feared the witch’s powers so that he came no farther and neither condemned her nor joined in the fray. Beside me Aziza shivered, but there was a proud cast to her eyes.

Eleazar ben Ya’ir appeared out of the crowd, on his way from the barracks, at first puzzled by the scene before him, then understanding when he saw Shirah in chains. He commanded she be allowed to go free. When the men who held her hesitated, he shouted, “Are you made to attack one of our own? A woman of my own family? We have real enemies who would like nothing better than to have us murder one another.”

There was a moment when it seemed the crowd would not comply with his command. That moment passed, and at last one of the elders went forward with the key, but the threat of chaos had been there, hanging in the air, the instant when our people might have turned against their leader. An angry mob was not easily controlled, and a serpent sent by rioters offered a bite for which there was no healing.

This fortress would have fallen in the fever of that dishonorable instant had it not ended as coal fire is quenched by water. Our enemies would have had no further need to destroy us had the mob not backed away, for we would have destroyed ourselves. There had been several sightings of Roman soldiers nearby in the past weeks. The legion knew we were here, and they knew how well defended we were in our protected site. But they had no idea that we could so easily turn on one another, and that Ben Ya’ir’s will was all that held us together, keeping us one.

I saw the great man’s wife watching from where she stood beside the hyssop. It was Channa who had directed the minim to the witch. If she was disturbed to see that her husband now acted as Shirah’s protector, she didn’t let on. Her face was dark and impassive. Perhaps she had expected as much. Her breathing, usually so ragged, was perfectly even, and there was a flush of health in her face. I imagined she was gazing at the one who had cured her, but she was looking past Shirah, past her husband, to the child in Yael’s arms. I felt a chill along my spine.

Now that she had been freed, the shackles loosened, Shirah grabbed for a stick and formed a circle in the dust.

“You wanted me here,” I overheard her say to Ben Ya’ir. “Was it not for this, cousin?”

She stood within the circle, then reached inside her cloak to bring forth ashes, which she sprinkled on her head, chanting as she did so in a low, even tone. The crowd strained to hear and were frightened by a language they didn’t understand. Many among them believed she was bringing a curse upon us and hung back, drawing their children near to protect them from evil.

It began all at once, before we understood what was happening. The sky paled and turned incandescent. Rains begin in different ways, but this was a torrent that had no equal. One moment the earth was dust, and the next lakes were forming. The world became wet and luminous, brimming with sheets of water. I had never before noticed that rain contained every color within itself, green as the fields, blue as heaven, white as a lamb, yellow as my daughter’s hair.

Men sank to their knees, raising the fringes of their prayer shawls to their lips and then to the heavens to offer praise to God and to the mystery of life. We could hear the goats and the sheep in their pens. Before our eyes the living fence of thorns that held back the livestock gave forth buds, and then, as if commanded by the Almighty, those buds unfurled to become leaves.

People whispered this was the reason the Witch of Moab had been able to walk across the Salt Sea without drowning. She, who had slipped down a thousand steps into the cistern to bathe in the dark, was our salvation. I blessed her for this as I raced through the blasts of wind, hurrying to our chamber for the incantation bowl she had cast. I was only a simple woman, but I recognized the missing ingredient exactly as Shirah had assured me I would.

I brought the bowl outside and held it above my head, chanting to the Almighty, singing His praises though the wind was in my face, its roar filling my ears. The bowl overflowed, and my heart did as well. I could hear my grandsons calling to each other as I stood there dripping with rain, as joyful as I’d ever been. Their voices had been caught inside the waterfall all this time, stored in a vessel by the angel who had protected them from evil. Now those voices had been released, drawn toward the prayers in the bowl as the angel Beree rained down upon us. Later, I would bring them before their father, and although the children would shrink from his fierce form, when I urged them to speak a greeting, I would see the Man from the Valley weeping in gratitude. Perhaps his faith would be restored by this gift, as mine was.

I heard the voice of God all around me, but I was unafraid. I should have trembled before the Almighty and hid myself from sight. I should have taken a knife to my own flesh to cut away the mark of my past deeds. But now I understood that, although words were God’s first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.

I listened to the wind that had risen in the desert to follow us here.

I heard what it had to say.

Winter 71 C.E.