The Dovekeepers

The Warrior’s Beloved

You are my armor and my sword, my faith

and my treasure, everything I’m fighting for.

My sister, you are like the dove, so beautiful and so distant, the child I saw born into this world as I crouched beside our mother. You are the reason I refuse to witness another birth. The cord of life was wrapped around your neck, and when I looked into your eyes I saw the World-to-Come, a place so distant and vast no one alive should ever view its reaches. You were gasping, turning blue, a fragile creature drawn into our fragile world. I was only a child myself, unwanted, brought into the marriage between our mother and your father in the land of Moab, where the women wore blue veils and no one knew what our mother had been, or what she would become, though they feared her all the same.

Because our mother was a foreigner, none of the women we lived beside came to help when the time for you came upon her. They arrived at other times, when their own needs drove them to appear in the dark, searching for curses or cures. They brought delicacies of lamb and herbs and olives in beautiful pottery dishes, clay bowls decorated with dark red designs. These women came to beg for our mother’s magic when they needed it. She was kind enough to offer the barren among them love apples, the yellow fruit of the mandrake that ripens with the wheat, so that they might conceive. She gave them a healing poultice made from figs for rashes and boils and, in the most sorrowful cases, brought them her knowledge of tzari, the ancient Syrian cure used for leprosy, the illness wherein the flesh is consumed by demons and falls away from the bone. Yet when she was the one in need, the women of the camp hid themselves from view, terrified that our mother might bring another witch into the world, and that her power would double. Then, despite their aversion to her and their bloated grudging jealousy, they would all be forced to drop to their knees before her.

I was the only one to witness the occasion of your birth, and if the truth be told I, too, wished to run into the daylight, afraid less of witchery than of blood. There were pools of it, and the gushing heat of it terrified me. This liquid was alive, pulsing with the power of creation. I was too young, too innocent to be of help. But our mother cried out Save her, her words like stars, brilliant and stinging.

I did what I could. I unwound the cord. But that was not enough, so I breathed into your mouth and drew out the liquid that was drowning you. I tasted blood and salt, everything life is made of, and spat it upon the ground. It is a miracle when you know what you must do without any instruction, and that is what happened to me at the hour of your birth. This mysterious knowledge was granted to me by God in the time of my desperation, and for that I will always be grateful. I took your death and your life into myself. In that moment we became one being, sisters claimed by the same force. Because of this I will always look after you. Even if you try to break away, you will find you cannot leave me.

These days you turn from me in the fields where the almonds will soon flower. You insist you belong elsewhere, but I will not abandon you. I see you dressed in white linen, in the rocky field, tending to six black goats, your head bowed, your feet bare, and I weep to see you taken from me in your fervor and your desire for a man who can never know you as I do. Perhaps you do not wish for him to know you. You keep your back to me and will not speak, not even when I knock on the rough wooden door of the goat shed where you live beside the people you’ve chosen as your own. They are paupers whose only desire is to praise the Almighty with prayers for peace, even though outside the confines of our fortress the world snarls with war. You will not sit at our table, for our practices are not as strict as those you now revere, and our ways are unclean in your eyes.

I sent a dove to you, one that was pure white, a favorite of our mother’s, thinking this creature would fill you with remorse and you would follow him, but the bird returned to the dovecote with my message unread. Inside the tube I had attached to the bird’s leg I wrote your name and mine intertwined, as our fate intertwined at the moment of your birth. I cannot imagine whom I could ever love more in this world we walk through.

When I see you at the wall, at prayer with the Essene women at the hour when day becomes night, you don’t glance at me, though my breath is inside you and yours is a part of me. No matter how you refuse me, our spirits combine to form a single thread. Even if you never speak to me, or raise your eyes to me, even if you are ashamed of me and of our past.

You are mine and mine alone.

* * *

YOUR FATHER was a wealthy man, and he knew what he wanted. Had this not been so, had he not traveled to Jerusalem from the far shore of the Salt Sea, our mother and I would have perished, cast out on the day I was born. I had no sister to comfort me as you did on the day of your arrival in this world, only the taste of my own blood in my mouth.

The man who was to be your father had come such a great distance to trade the riches he had amassed, piles of black myrrh and balsam, spices in heaps of ocher and red, baskets of frankincense grown from the white star flower of Edom, salt from the sea, limestone from the cliffs. Perhaps an angel stopped him on the street and whispered in his ear, suggesting that he turn his head. He wore a long scarf and the blue robes of his people, which were dyed with the root of the ginger plant. Although he was far from young, his eyesight was sharper than a falcon’s and he took note of my mother’s great beauty. Among the men he rode with, he was known for seeing what others could not. That may be why he spied us in a cart meant for sheep brought to the butcher as we were driven into the wilderness. The Angel of Death was waiting for us—Mal’ach ha-Mavet, who has a thousand glinting eyes — but he was defeated when your father followed us.

Your father gave the driver a handful of coins that he himself deemed worthless. He was a man who believed what mattered came from the earth, not from the treasuries of a temple or the workshops of men. He took us with him that very day, destined for the east, the ancient land across the Salt Sea, where the mountain is made of iron and mounds of black asphalt float along the shore, setting themselves on fire when the heat rises. Your father’s people collected nets full of asphalt to sell at a high price to the legion so that the soldiers might forge paved roads in Alexandria and Rome.

Our mother confided that when she saw the black sea she didn’t know if we’d been rescued or forsaken by this fierce, silent man whose arms were ringed with blue tattoos and who marked his own face with scars he had cut with a thin knife to commemorate his many battles. She feared he was bringing her to Gehennom, the valley of hell. In fact we journeyed from Judea to Moab, a kingdom that had been ruined and deserted more than once but that was now in full flower. Many of the tribesmen of this land refused to stay in one place but instead called every corner of their country home. This was the land Ruth had come from when she followed Naomi into Judea, though her people had cursed ours. From her line our great King David was born, a gift to his people and to the world. The land here was green, the earth rain-spattered even when other countries were aflame with heat, the vistas lush with fields of grass. There were acacias in bloom, the tree God asked be made into the Ark of the Covenant so that its strong and fragrant wood might house His word to mankind. Myrtle bushes grew tall in Moab, and there were spills of wild cassis. The bursts of yellow iris made it appear as though sunlight had spilled across the land as a blessing.

Your father and his kinsmen lived in the hills, made wealthy not only by the sale of asphalt but by the treasures they seized from caravans that traveled the King’s Highway from Damascus to Egypt. Stolen goods some might say, but in the eyes of the tribesmen, these treasures were a simple payment, taken as their just due, for their homeland was the route connecting two nations. A robber is a king in his own land, that is what your father believed, the lord of his own mountain. Every man in this region was said to be born with a knife in his hand, a horse already chosen for him, and a prayer to offer to his God.

My mother was still bleeding from my birth when they stopped to make camp the first evening. All the same she wrapped me in cloth and laid me in a hollow, so that your father could make her his wife that night. To celebrate their marriage, he gave her a pair of earrings set with rubies. Anyone in Jerusalem would have known why she was marked by tattoos, a swirl of henna-red inkings upon her flesh. From the time she was a child, she had been trained to be a kedeshah in Egypt, a woman meant for the holy use of the priests, as her mother before her had been. But such things had become secret and outlawed. Our mother had been sent out of Alexandria, to be raised by her kinsmen in Jerusalem. She never managed to return to the city where her mother longed to see her again, waiting by her gate for her only daughter’s return.

Our grandmother whom we never knew gave our mother two gold amulets for protection. On one was written Chayei ‘olam le‘olam — Eternal life, forever—the gold imprinted with images of the sun and the moon. On the other the words I have placed the eternal always before me were inscribed; on the back of the medallion a fish had been engraved, to ensure that the wearer would always be near water, the most precious element, the giver of life.

Although our mother was sent to Jerusalem for her safety, she was repudiated for her sins there, accused of seducing a man who was married. It was claimed she had been wed both to him and to a demon. When the case was brought before the priests by the man’s family, my mother refused to admit any wrongdoing. The sotah ceremony was held, in which God’s name is written on papyrus, then slipped into a tumbler, where it is erased into the water and mixed with the dust of the Temple floor, to be consumed by the suspected adulteress. My mother drank God’s name and did not falter; still, those who opposed her considered her to be in league with the demons. She could deny her sin, but I was the evidence, held up by my heels before three judges. Perhaps when they examined me they were looking for proof that she had indeed slept with a demon, searching for horns or wings, to see if I was a shedah, the child of a watcher, an angel who had been called to earth by my mother’s beauty, or if I had simply been born of the flesh.

The tribesman from Moab who was to become your father did not care about such matters. Judgments made by our councils were meaningless to him. Our God was not his God. Our mother’s sin was not his interest. He knew what he wanted. He was simple in that way, yet he was complicated as well. As for me, I was little more than a mouse caught in a snare, a creature he allowed our mother to keep as a pet when they set off the next morning and she refused to leave me behind. The world was still dark on the day they left Judea, as the sea was, but before them the horizon was radiant, like a pearl. Our mother told me that, after they passed by the black mounds of burning asphalt in the Salt Sea, she was grateful we had not fallen into the fires of hell. She felt her heart lift at the sight of the mountains, which are green even when the rest of the world is dying of thirst. The lilies that grow there are red, and she still wears their perfume; a ceramic vial of their scent was one of the few belongings she took with us when we came to this fortress.

Perhaps when she wears the scent of the lilies she remembers the morning when we were given another life.

OUR PEOPLE believe that the world is split in two. On the side of goodness are the malachim, the thousand angels of light. On the side of evil there are mazzikim, demons who are uncountable and unknowable, uncontrolled even by the Almighty’s wishes. Your father was both combined. We made camp in the mountains, above the pass that overlooked the King’s Road from Damascus. Your father did not think twice before he swooped down with his men upon a caravan to take what he wanted, but he was shy with children and kind to our mother. Though he was a warrior, he could become flustered in the presence of our mother and hardly knew what to say to her. His eyes burned when he gazed at her, and he often sent everyone from our tent so he could be with her, even in daylight hours. He had other wives who lived in a far valley, women whose names we never heard spoken aloud. Perhaps he loved them, too. Surely he could not look at them in the way he gazed at our mother. She was his favorite. Because of this, we were safe with him.

Then on a night I can hardly remember, before you were born, bandits came into our tent, nomads who had no law and no gods. They came as thieves, but when they saw our mother, their purpose changed. She was so beautiful with her long black hair, still so young, and there were those who said she possessed the ability to hypnotize a man with one look, as she could heal the sick with a single word of prayer. She told me that, as they held her down, one of the intruders swept me up, though I was yet a little child, thinking he would have me as well, tearing off my tunic. I don’t remember the screams she vowed I cried, furious wails that recalled the shrill cries of a mouse when it is caught and struggling in a trap, but my throat hurt anew when she told me the story of that night. She disclosed this account only once, when we left Moab to travel to Masada. I tried to remember every word she said. I knew she would not tell me again.

Just as I knew that night was the reason for my fate and for who I had become.

YOUR FATHER, alerted by his kinsman that there were intruders, returned before he was expected, his blue scarf over his dark, scarred face. He was like a whirlwind. Our mother held me close, hidden in her robes, while your father killed each of the thieves. The crude, keening sounds he made were terrible, like the wind when it falls upon you. It was said people could hear him far to the south, where there was a city rising out of red rock, its great temple and carved columns a wonder to be seen. Many among us swore that he possessed the cry of a mazzik, a demon from another world.

After the struggle was over, your father was the only man left alive in our tent. My mother confided that outsiders often whispered that the blood of your father’s people runs blue, and indeed they were a tribe so fearsome even the Romans avoided them. But I remember that he knelt beside our mother with great tenderness, even though he was slick with blood. When he did so, he seemed like one of the thousand who watch over our world, an angel who had rescued us from the wilderness.

After that night our mother cursed what it meant to be a woman. Her life had been molded by all she could not do and all she never would be. But there was a gift she had as well, one no man would ever understand. Her mother had given her a book of spells, magical recipes that would offer her protection while they were apart. She carried that manuscript with her, the most precious of her belongings, along with the gold amulets she wore around her throat, preferring them to all other jewels she might be offered. No protection against evil was stronger.

But what was magic on that night? My mother had tried to bind the vile intruders by reciting an incantation, but we’d had need of another sort of protection, one made of iron, a man, a sword, a rescuer. Our mother offered thanks to the Queen of Heaven for our salvation. Still, her blood was hot and she was unsatisfied. She wished she had been the one to wield the knife so that she might have slain the robbers instead of merely standing mutely by to watch your father do so.

It was on that night that our mother decided to change who I was. She took me with her when everyone else was asleep. Even the horses were dreaming, quick, powerful steeds, left to stand in place without need of a rope, loyal to their riders until the day they could no longer run. Most people of Moab rode camels, but your father’s people owned the most beautiful and fierce horses, who were granted water only every third day so that they might have the great attribute of camels and be inured to thirst, their fortitude surpassing that of any of our enemies’ horses. Our mother chanted the song of protection, then she began the naming rites to Ashtoreth. When you change your name, you change your fate as well. The person you had been vanishes, and not even the angels can find you. We stood on the Iron Mountain, beneath the red moon. There was no afterbirth to mark this occasion, no sacrifice to give back to the earth. Instead our mother buried her own monthly blood. Then she cut my arm and let three drops fall into the earth as an offering to the Queen of Heaven.

My arm burned, and I might have wept, but my heart was full when our mother proudly said I was not to be like anyone else. From that time forward only my mother and God would know of my past life. My name had been Rebekah, but that name disappeared on the night of our blood. I never heard it spoken again. As for your father, he allowed our mother her wish, as he had allowed her to take me with them through the wilderness.

From then on, I was a boy.

SHE CALLED ME Aziza, a name of your father’s people. It can mean one who is beloved, but it also means one who is mighty and fierce. There are those who believe the name is an ancient word for archer, one who is never without a weapon, never at anyone’s mercy. That was what our mother wished for me. The people who lived on the Iron Mountain worshiped a great goddess among their gods; they saw the strength in their own women as well. Now when I witness my sister working in the field with the Essene people, adhering to their strict ways, crooning to the goats that she herds, a servant calmly waiting for the End of Days as if she was nothing more than a passive and beautiful ewe herself, I think that flesh and grass are one and the same, so fleeting, changing before our eyes. My sister was made in the country where the sky gleamed silver and the men were fierce. Had her own father spied her walking in the dust behind the Essene men, her head lowered, he would have been ashamed. But no matter how you might bow before others, my sister, the bond between us will last all eternity, until we meet again in a place where nothing can separate us, as it was on the night you were born, in your father’s tent, with my breath inside you and my life the thread that kept you in this world.

* * *

ALL THE WHILE you were growing up, I was your brother. You followed me as the dove follows the fields of grain. I dressed in blue robes, my hair caught up, then tightly braided in the fashion of young boys. Your father taught me to ride a horse, how to use a slingshot and a spear. I was a natural warrior, made for iron. It was my element from the start. Rather than frighten me, it brought me comfort. Metal was cold and heavy and reliable. It did as I asked. In return I was dedicated; there was never a day when I did not speak my gratitude to the sword I carried and the horse I rode.

Evil spirits have an aversion to metal, and there are those who whisper that the name of iron when invoking it before the Almighty is Barzel, what some believe is a combination of letters taken from the names of the matriarchs of Jacob’s family, Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah. Weapons are kept from women, but such a naming suggests that perhaps men fear our talents in war as well as our desire for peace. I was watched after by the grace of the foremothers of our tribe, Rachel and Leah, but I did not walk the same path they had traveled. I never learned what it meant to be a wife. I never worked a loom. I did not go with the girls to welcome births, and for that I was especially thankful. Your birth was enough for me.

I preferred to be your father’s son, waiting with the horses in silence while the men made their attacks. I held on to the reins as the warriors crept down on foot along the narrow pass to attack caravans traveling west toward Egypt, the carts and fearless horses laden with goods from the east. I helped carry piles of frankincense, strands of lapis and coral and jade, baskets of cardamom and cassia, purses filled with bars and coins of gold. I saw more blood on the ground than any of the girls witnessed at the birthings. I knew things they could not begin to understand: how it felt to ride through the hot night with a spear upon my back. How we swooped across the Iron Mountain, one creature, with one heart, hollering war cries, slick with sweat, darting beneath the moon. On these occasions it was possible to imagine that I had wings and was free as any bird of prey, fierce as any man.

My secret became my daily life. Our mother made certain that I bathed alone. When my breasts began to show, she bound them with a swathe of linen. That binding made me stand up straight, my full height, so that I might have been cast of iron rather than flesh. I could hit harder than the boys. I was faster, as well, and more nimble with a sword. In time your father grew proud of me, almost as if I was his own, as if our lie was the truth. At night our mother taught me to read and write. I learned Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew. There were girls who teased me and pursued me, as they did all the boys they admired. One kissed me during these games, and I laughed, thinking her a fool. I was above such matters. And yet I was confused, for when my friend Nouri pulled me away so we could flee from the girls, my blood raced. When he grabbed me, his fingers upon my arm stung, as though he’d burned me without meaning to.

I went to our mother and wept, like any other silly girl, as I told her what had happened. I fought the urge to be close to Nouri, but he drew me to him, as steel calls to steel. Our mother said it was time for me to understand I could never be like those heedless sheep who chased after boys. She told me she had seen my fate. Love would be my undoing. She whispered that she didn’t tell me this out of cruelty, but out of concern. She had thrown down stones on the day of my birth, and my fortune had appeared on the ground before her, a warning she now shared with me, as her mother had once shared the divination of her future with her. I was not to look at boys or think of them as anything but brothers. On the day that I did so, my fate and my undoing would claim me. There were tears in our mother’s eyes as she instructed me. I knew she wanted what was best for me and did not doubt her.

Not yet.

It was easy to give her my promise on that day. She embraced me and called me daughter, a dangerous slip of who I had been and was no more.

I AVOIDED Nouri after that, though he was clearly hurt that I had abandoned him. I didn’t think about his handsome features, the way his face broke into a sudden smile. He wasn’t as good a rider as I anyway; he would never have kept up with me. I was the best among the boys of my age, fearless. When I unbound my breasts to bathe, I felt the wings above my shoulders, twining through the bone, the secret of my gifts, a legacy from the one who was my father, whoever and whatever he might be. I half-believed he might be an angel, for there were such luminous divine creatures, winged, gliding messengers from God, who were said to become entranced with women on earth and visited them in the night, joining themselves to human flesh.

I rode with the cry of your people in my throat as I chased down rabbits and the shy hyrax who burrow in the rocks and prowl the thickets. I practiced my skill to impress your father, killing my first ibex when I was ten. He said nothing when the ibex stumbled and fell, but I could see what he felt in his expression as I helped to butcher the animal. It was Adar, the time when ibex calves are in the grasslands, but I had killed a huge male. Your father touched my forehead in a blessing for my skill. From a man of such silence, this was high praise.

I was glad to be a boy in this world of men and to be granted a great honor when your father allowed me to ride beside him. I burst into each day, my black hair braided, my cloak the indigo blue of your father’s people. But our brother had been born, and as he grew everything changed. It was Adir our father looked upon with pride. Perhaps he really had forgotten who I was for all those many years, and only now recalled it was a girl child my mother had refused to leave behind on the first night of their marriage, before we reached the land of Moab and changed who I was meant to be.

* * *

IN THE RAINY SEASON, when there were no caravans, the men journeyed back to other villages, other wives. Your father and his kinsmen never stayed in one place but instead rolled down their tents and set off across the land, leaving their families on the Iron Mountain, visiting other wives and children far from our camp. They rode so far their shadows could hardly be seen by humankind. We stayed behind with the goats and the white-fleeced sheep. There were hundreds in the flock, all adding to your father’s wealth, and they needed tending. The acacia trees were abloom with yellow flowers, and the fields of grass were so tall we could disappear and never be seen when we ran across the meadow. At night the bats flew together in one dark cloud, dropping down to the trees to drink the juice of the figs. The air was mild, and the rain turned the air the same shade of blue as the cloaks your people wore.

Our mother did not complain that we stayed behind on the Iron Mountain when your father went off. She had other attachments. When our mother was cast out of Jerusalem, I was not her only pet. She had also brought along two doves, and she was devoted to them. They perched inside a wooden cage and were fed grain and dates. When they drank water, they lifted up their heads as though praising God. Our mother sent them out one at a time, slipping messages into bronze tubes attached to their legs. The doves lifted into the western sky as she tossed them upward, vanishing in a blink. They always returned to her. In time their children and grandchildren did so as well, following the same mysterious route.

Our mother would wait for their return as dusk fell across the mountains in blue bands. She said the color of the sky reminded her of water, and of the land where she had been a child, before she was sent to Jerusalem. She yearned for the city of Alexandria, a place where the rivers were filled with miraculous creatures and monsters alike, where her mother had sung her to sleep with the same songs she offered us now. Throughout the years we were in Moab, she remained solitary. Perhaps she was thinking of the city of her birth. Perhaps that was why I often saw her weeping.

When one of the doves reappeared, our mother would become utterly absorbed. If you called to her, she would not hear your voice. If a bee lit upon her hand, she wouldn’t take notice. Unlike your father, who was satisfied, I understood that our mother yearned for something more. Still I couldn’t quite fathom her expression, not while I stood there barefoot, dressed as a boy. Only now do I understand. She was a woman in love.

Throughout the years we lived with your father, she was sending messages to another man, the one who was my father. Once I found a missive he sent back to her, written on a tiny scrap of parchment, smaller than a thumbnail. I knew then that an angel was not involved in the matter of my birth, for angels come to us in dreams and visions, not upon parchment. Our mother thought she had folded the note into her book of spells, but instead the message had dropped into my path. Perhaps the angels did indeed set it there, so I would know the truth about my origins, or perhaps a demon plucked it from between the pages. My true wife had been written. My mother had taught me the language of scholars, and because I could read Hebrew, I knew of her betrayal of your father, the man who taught me everything I knew, how to ride and how to hunt and how to be loyal to those I loved.

I tossed the parchment into the bonfire that night. As I did, it flew up like a wasp to sting me. There is a mark, beneath my left eye, that remains from that time. Because of this I can never forget what I found. Sometimes people imagine I am crying, they believe they’ve spied a tear, but they’re wrong. I spent the first part of my life without tears, as any boy would. The mark beneath my eye is made of fire. It’s the single element that can overwhelm iron.

* * *

WE STAYED until the summer when I turned fourteen. I knew that I bled even though the boys I ran with did not, but that did not change who I was, the fiercest among them, the rider with wings, Aziza, who carried both compassion and power within. I merely had to keep my blood secret, as I was to keep my body from view. The women here were not considered niddah when they bled, so I was not committing any true sin when I keep my secret and stayed among people during that time of the month. On hunting trips I insisted I was a restless sleeper and needed to make camp alone. When the others relieved themselves, I joked that I was a camel and could hold my water for days, waiting until I could sneak off on my own.

By then your father had given Adir a fine horse, the one I’d trained upon, no longer mine. Now I rode an old white stallion whose time had passed and who would never again win a race no matter how I might kick at him. Your father’s people were moving south, to Petra, giving up their traveling ways. The city that had arisen from the red rocks, taken from the edge of the deep, nearly endless ravine, had begun to call them to its great beauty and the settled life they might have there. There was a pool reputed to be larger than any lake and terraced gardens that were incomparable. It was said that every wanderer came home to this place, and that even these wild men who longed for freedom, who had spent their lives in pursuit of open grasslands, could not ignore the voice of Petra. And there was another reason — the Romans might attack our camp, despite their pledge of peace and their fear of the legendary courage of the tribesmen. There was a rumor that, should any blood be spilled upon the iron cliffs of Moab, a dozen men would spring from the blood of the first. Perhaps the men were tired from their shifting homes, their many wives, and were eager for a single residence and a life of ease.

My mother pleaded with your father to let us remain in the mountains when he and his brothers and uncles answered the call to Petra. We could camp with those who were stationed to guard against the legion, should the Romans change their peace with the tribesmen into war. She said her spirit could not be contained in a city, even one so glorious. She told her husband she had become accustomed to this tent and to these stars, but I knew that wasn’t the truth. There was something more. Something your father had not seen, though he had the keen sight of a falcon. Something only a woman would notice. In that way, I was still female enough.

On the day the women began to pack up the camp, pulling down the tents, gathering their kettles and their rugs, a dove arrived. I saw it float down among us as if it were a part of the sky that had wrenched away to plummet to earth. There was a violet chill in the air, and I gazed up in alarm, unsettled by the dove’s arrival. I had the sense that everything was about to change and that the past was already smoldering into ash. Our mother had asked to stay behind, but your father had refused her request. He wanted her with him. He told her to take all of the belongings that mattered to her, for she might never come to the Iron Mountain again.

Our mother went up to the mountaintop with the bird in a basket, so that she could be alone to read the words that had been sent to her. I don’t know what the message was, but when she returned to camp her expression was set.

We packed up, and it seemed we would be leaving for Petra in the morning, but my mother did not wait for the sun to rise. She woke me the instant your father set off with his brothers to ensure that the route to the city would be safe for the women and children who followed. As soon as he was gone, we readied Adir’s fast horse. We had my father’s great racehorse as well, for he had taken one of the mares, leaving his own steed behind for my mother, a mark of his devotion to her. The horse was called Leba, a name which meant heart. He was an animal so loyal he would never have gone with us had he not known me so well, but I had often fed and watered him. I’d always wished he would be mine someday, though I knew your father would never give Leba to me. Adir was the true son.

We took only the doves in their wooden cage and a single woven satchel of our belongings, along with a leather bag of water, and another bag of yogurt and cheese. I saw my mother reach for the book of spells from her mother and the ironwood box in which she kept the journal. She wore the gold amulets that had been given to her in Alexandria when fate seemed unlikely to bring her to Moab, and the earrings your father gave to her on their wedding day. She left behind all of the rest, masses of jewels your father had presented to her. There were jade necklaces, turquoise and gold bracelets, silver and lapis beads, gold rings set with precious gems none of us had seen before, some of which, rare opals, moved, incandescent, containing both water and fire within the stones. She laid out the jewels tenderly and with gratitude on the pallet where they had slept, but she showed no regret. Your father was the man who had rescued us but not the man she loved.

OUR MOTHER’S FACE was transformed all the while we rode west, as though she was young again. I had spent my entire life beside her; now she had become wholly unknown in a way I couldn’t define.

It was true that you and our brother did not want to go. Adir sulked and fussed, and you called out for your father. You might have gotten us killed with your cries, but we rode so quickly that the wind took your voice up to heaven. We left the horses at the shore of the Salt Sea, so they might return to their rightful owner. We weren’t thieves. Your father’s horse turned and raced back the way we had come. Adir’s horse followed. In a flash they were gone. Only their hoof marks in the sand remained, and even that disappeared as we stood watching, for it now seemed that our lives in the tents had been a dream. If we ran back the way we had come, surely we would find nothing on the mountain where we’d lived for so long, not even ashes.

The only mark of that time was the scar beneath my eye.

PEOPLE SAY that our mother walked across the water and that Lilith’s thirteen demons held the hem of her dress, but in fact we met a man with a flat boat. A simple, greedy man who wanted a high fee to take us across the water. He looked at my mother with his black eyes, happy to have her as his price. Instead, my mother traded the first jewelry your father had given her, the earrings she always wore. They were rubies from India, captured from a caravan of men who spoke a language no one had ever heard before. The rubies reminded me of your father, how pure they were, how elemental, so brilliant and red they seemed hot to the touch. I turned away, unable to watch this exchange. I had seen your father’s blood shed on many occasions. Despite the Romans’ rumors and stories, it had never been blue.

Before we left we gathered figs, along with a bundle of branches from the acacia trees. There was a storm rising, and the sea was filled with black lumps. They looked like stones set out to block our way. Our mother said not to worry. She swore that the water would heal and protect us; she had seen this as her own destiny. The boat rocked, and the man who rowed it uttered curses and fought with the sea. Still my mother was serene. Salt water splashed in our faces and threatened to blind us, but halfway across the sea turned calm, blue and then gray and then finally silver and still. The mountains of Judea were reflected in the water, floating before us. The vision made it appear that we had already reached our destination, though it was still a far journey. I caught the scent of fire and metal. My elements. My double life.

When we reached the other side of the Salt Sea, the boatman left us. In the silence around us, I felt I could hear the beating heart of the world, lev ha-olam, the center of creation in the distance of Jerusalem. We camped where we had been left, exhausted from our travels. At night, after you and Adir had fallen asleep on the damp sand, our mother motioned for me to follow. We made a fire from the acacia wood we had gathered on the other shore, the last acacia I would ever see that had taken root in Moab. My mother released her pet doves. Once they had disappeared, she added their cage to the fire and let it burn in a blur of flame.

Here in this emptiness, I could not stop thinking of the Iron Mountain and my life there, how I had imagined I was flying when I rode through the night with the troop of fearless raiders, how we had claimed everything we had come upon. I was fourteen, but I had killed several men. Afterward, I had burned the flowers of the acacia in tribute to each, as was the custom. Your father often brought back branches that were hung with hundreds of blooms for our mother. Although she thanked him, she wasn’t partial to those beautiful boughs. She didn’t appreciate the sweet nature of the flowers and how the bees were attracted to them. Those winged creatures understood the true essence of the acacia, the reason we burned it in honor of a soul. When acacia blooms are set aflame, they rise upward, in tribute to our God, who had made them.

The only thing that grew on this side of the Salt Sea was the Jericho balsam, a tree people say arose from the underworld that contains a flame inside an inedible fruit. Our mother took three of these fruits and cast them into the fire, and the flame turned yellow, like gold. She then told me to remove all of my garments. Because I dared not disobey, I did as she said.

I took off my leggings and tunic and then my cloak, along with the head scarf that was dyed the blue color of your father’s people. Our mother burned it all. The fabric sent inky sparks into the sky. She unplaited my hair and combed out the knots with her fingers. I didn’t complain, though it hurt. I said nothing and choked back tears. I had been told that at the beginning, when we first arrived, your father’s people had whispered that he had brought back a witch from Jerusalem and that our mother possessed the power to entrance him. It was best not to look her in the eye, the women of our camp said, or to go against her. Now I wondered if perhaps they’d been right. I feared my own mother on this night. I stood there naked on the salt, my feet burning as she chanted in a language I did not understand, mud from the Salt Sea covering her arms and throat and face so that she appeared to be a demon herself. I felt unmasked, my breasts unbound, my hair so long it reached past my waist in a black sheet.

Our mother carried her small woven bag of belongings. When she reached inside, I dreaded what might be revealed. Perhaps a snake or a scorpion, or a knife meant to mark me a sacrifice, as Abraham had been commanded to bring up his only son, Isaac, before God. It took a moment for me to understand what she intended even after she revealed what she had brought with her from Moab. It was a skirt and a cloak made of silk that your father had given to her, a treasure from India, spun by butterflies. I dressed, slipping on the unfamiliar garments, along with a pair of fine leather sandals. It was dark that night, which was a good thing. I would not have been able to look at myself. I had become a stranger in my own skin. I still felt the wings above my shoulder blades, yet they seemed bound in a way they never had when there was a sheet of linen wound around me, concealing them.

Our mother and I said prayers together, those that are recited when a child is born and a human soul has entered into our world. It was the night when I became a woman, though I kept my name. Aziza, the compassionate, the powerful. Aziza, the woman who knew what it was to be a man.

In the morning a messenger arrived from Masada. He had been made aware of exactly where we would be waiting. He gave us fresh water and food, then told us he was meant to lead us to safety. He looked at me in a way no man had before.

It was the first time in my life that I understood who I was to the rest of the world.

I made certain to lower my eyes.

* * *

EVEN NOW I am drawn to the ways of my old life. I spend as little time as possible inside the dovecotes. Doves do not interest me, no women’s work does. I cannot weave or sew without pricking my fingers. When I cook, I burn the flatbread. My stew is tasteless no matter what ingredients I might add to the pot. There is not enough salt or cumin in the world to make my attempts palatable. I am clumsy at tasks my sister could complete with ease when she was a mere eight years old.

I often find myself beside the barracks, pulled there especially on the evenings that mark the new month, Rosh Chodesh, when the women gather to celebrate, for it is not with them I belong but here, alongside the warriors. When I find arrowheads, I hold them in the palm of my hand, talismans from my past. The blades fit perfectly in my grasp. Their cold, flat weight is what I yearn for. Metal alone can reach the center of who I am.

I have been in this fortress for so long, but I still dreamed of that other time, though I told no one, not even Amram, to whom I have pledged myself, despite my mother’s warnings. Some things are meant to be kept secret, I learned that young, and I have kept our secret well. My mother may be flooded with doubts, but she has no proof that I have disobeyed. She’s piled salt outside our threshold, so that I might leave footprints, but I leap over, leaving no trace. She’s tied a strand of her hair across the doorway, but I merely crawl beneath it. I can outwit her at some things; all the same, I think of her prophecy every time I meet Amram. I am his, yet I know I have disgraced myself in keeping the truth from my own mother, the one who gave me life not once but three times.

From the start my sister was my accomplice. We had been here for nearly a year, working beside our mother in the dovecotes, when Amram first arrived. We spent days devoted to toil. The three dovecotes were like a family of goats — the father, built as a tower, then came mother and child, square and squat, small and then smaller yet again. They were my world then, as I avoided our neighbors and kept away from other women, afraid they would somehow see through to the differences between us.

When Amram arrived from Jerusalem at the beginning of the summer in the year the Temple fell, he was merely one more young man running from his enemies, convicted by his bloodline as well as by his actions, an assassin who could be seen as a murderer or a hero depending on who you were and where fate had placed you. I happened to be there, crossing the plaza. I was nearly sixteen, but still I kept to myself. I did not take note of any man until I saw Amram climb the serpent’s path. He did so easily, as though the rugged cliffs were little more than a field. What was steep and difficult for others was for Amram no different than air to the lark. It was clear he could conquer whatever came before him, man or beast, even the land itself.

Watching him, I was almost ashamed of how handsome I found him. He was the warrior I wished I had become, fluid and lean, sure of himself. I envied him and wanted to possess him and all that he had. I remembered the way the dusk fell on the other side of the Salt Sea in waves of deep blue on the day my mother warned me of the prophecy that I should avoid love at all costs. But I was born to disobey her. I knew this when I found I could not look away from Amram. I tried and failed, though I was iron and stronger than most in such matters. Aziza, the powerful, was somehow undone. Was there some angel or demon who remembered what my name had once been and now called me Rebekah from the reaches of heaven? I stood there like any other woman at the Snake Gate alongside all the rest who gathered there, charmed and seduced by Amram even before he reached us.

Perhaps the moment might have passed and I would have turned away and resumed my duties, if only he hadn’t seen me as well, if we hadn’t been transformed by a single glance that passed between us. I realized I had been caught from the moment I’d given in to my impulse to stand upon the wall to cheer him on. My intention was otherwise. Merely to view the sort of man I might have been in my second life. Instead, I became a woman in that instant. I gazed through the shimmering heat, watching his fate and mine twine together as he climbed the serpent path.

I WAS CURIOUS, drawn to him. When the rains came, I stood beside the armory, dripping wet, hoping to catch a glimpse of this man at the barracks. I circled the wall, in search of signs marking where he had walked: an arrowhead, a footprint, a strand of hair. When the dust rose I thought of him, when I gazed into the sky I was reminded of him, when I fetched water, ate my dinner, worked among the doves, all of it, no matter how trivial, brought him to mind. I would not have pursued him, but one day he stood in my path as my sister and I hurried to the dovecote. I raised a hand to shield my eyes so I could take him in and so that I might hide the mark beneath my eye. In that instant I was claimed yet again. He grinned, convinced he knew me, and I grinned back, knowing he did not.

Our mother was waiting for us. Had she been beside us, I would have been made to turn away. Perhaps everything that followed would have been different, but as fate would have it, she wasn’t there, and for that I was immensely thankful. Nahara threw me a look when I told her to go on, but she did as I asked.

“You come this way every day,” Amram remarked once my sister had gone.

“How would you know?” I spoke to him as I had once spoken to Nouri, as though I were an equal, not one who would bow before him.

“Because I watch you.”

I felt the way I had when I was in the mountains, myself once more.

“Not as often as I watch you,” I said, my grin widening.

Because I’d grown up among boys, I didn’t have the guile of a woman. Amram laughed, surprised by my honesty. I suppose when I first kissed him, holding nothing back, I did so as a man would, unwound by ardor. If he was surprised by that, he was not displeased.

THE WOMEN in the fields gossiped about us. I heard their words, but such comments were nothing to me, wasp stings, grains of sand in my shoe. I let the sparks of their rude jealousy fall to the ground. None among them had the courage to seek out my mother and risk her anger with stories of my misbehavior.

We began to meet in the dark, beside the fountain in the Western Plaza. Whenever I was with Amram, my sister vowed I was beside her. She was my shield, my key to freedom, the little dove who carried the words I wrote for her to say when she went to tell Amram the hour when we could safely meet. I had rescued my sister once, now she repaid me. She often crossed the plaza with me in the evenings. We held hands and whispered like children, but when we neared the fountain, there came a point when she masked her eyes and I went on alone. If she did not witness our meeting, she would not be forced to tell an outright lie when she assured our mother she had not spied me with any man.

We found places to be alone, storerooms, gardens, the field late at night. Once again, as it had been when I gave my sister life, someone’s breath belonged to me and mine to them. Amram swore he would keep our secret from my mother, and he was a man of his word. There were those who vowed that in Jerusalem he had been the most daring of the assassins, able to transform himself. His father, that great and fearsome assassin Bar Elhanan, was said to possess the ability to vanish while in plain sight. Perhaps he had shared this trick of invisibility, for Amram was able to slink past my mother, his presence little more than a cloud. We grew so brave we dared to meet in the cellar below our chamber, for there was a set of secret stairs in the floor of the old kitchen, and yet another that entered the cellar from the plaza. We slipped off our cloaks beneath the floor my mother stood upon. Perhaps I did so to spite my mother, to claim my life for myself and disprove her prophecy that love would only bring me anguish.

In our secret cellar, I tried my best to spy Amram in the dark scrim of shadows before he could see me. I could make out field mice in search of grain, and the drowsy forms of bats hanging from the ceiling, but Amram tricked me every time, grasping me before I knew he was there, sliding his hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t cry out. I could have eluded his grasp easily and raised a knife to his throat before he blinked, but I told myself this was the game we played, hiding our true natures. Though he did not see me for who I was, though I should have known better, I never denied him anything. And yet I was dissatisfied.

He did not see through my veils, and I did not reveal my deepest self to him. Perhaps it was only to defy my mother, but by the time Revka arrived to work alongside us in the dovecotes, I had promised myself to him. Not long after his sister, Yael, came to work alongside us, I was his.

* * *

PERHAPS SOME secrets are impossible to keep, for it seemed my sins were written upon me. I was unwed, yet I knew what brides knew, how men groaned with passion, how they sometimes wept with all they felt, how their desire could bind them as tightly as the clothes I wore in this life — shawls and veils and cloaks — tying me to who I had become. Men eyed me rudely at the market when I stood in line for our rations of wheat and millet. They watched as I carried baskets of dung into the field and made suggestions I ignored. I was not like a ewe, there to take on the burden of their desires. I shouted to them that they should run home to their wives or their mothers. The very idea that I would bow to any man who chose to speak to me in such a manner made me a warrior once more. I let the shawl slip from my hair and shoulders, allowing my arms to shine bare in the sunlight. That was when the other women first began to whisper that I was one of the sheydim, a creature no one could control. In that they were correct. I did as I pleased, even though my mother had forbidden me to do so, even though it was a sin.

I began to wonder if there wasn’t some merit in the field women’s stories about me, if perhaps what set me apart from all others wasn’t the life I’d led before I’d come here but was instead cast from the truth of who my father might be. Though he was not an angel or an incubus but a man who wrote upon parchment, I puzzled over his identity more often as time went on. I thought it odd that the messenger had known precisely where to meet us on the shore of the Salt Sea and that he had bowed his head to my mother, as though she were the wife of an important man. I wondered why, of all the places we might have gone in this world, we had come to this fortress and not another.

My mother would tell me nothing. She refused to divulge where she had sent the doves when she’d stood upon the Iron Mountain. She denied having ever received messages in return, though the words that had been sent to her had burned me and I still carried their scar. All she would say was that she had been a girl who had followed the path the Almighty had set out for her.

“Would I ever be so coarse and full of myself as to ask God why He set me upon one path and not another?”

When she said this, her face was young and innocent. For once she, who was always so fierce, appeared vulnerable. My mother had taught me much. Because of her I could read more languages than most learned men, yet I knew little about her or about myself. Ever since Moab, our secrets had resembled a spider’s web, one strand holding up the next. The words we did not say became the only things that mattered. We moved like spiders, circling one another, suspicious, waiting for whatever was to come next.

“Do I not have a path as well?” I asked, emboldened when she told me she had not questioned the direction in which God had led her.

She gazed at me thoughtfully. “One you must avoid at all costs.” That remark alone was enough to convince me I must find my own way.

AS OUR secrets forced us further apart, I kept to myself. Following my mother’s lead, I confided nothing. I stayed in our chamber when she went to assist women in their labor, or ministered to those afflicted by fevers, taking her pitcher and bowl and a soap made of fat and ashes, insisting that the ill wash their hands to purify themselves. I did not accompany her when she went at night to the synagogue, where she would dig in the dirt to bury amulets in holy places for the protection of those who came to her in need. When my mother asked me to venture beyond the gate with her, to gather rue and marjoram and the yellow apples of the mandrake used for pharmaka, I had little choice but to obey. But even when I tried to honor her wishes, I was of no use to her. My hands weren’t nimble. I tore at the leaves, and the fruit split apart in my hands. I hadn’t the touch for sorcery. I owned none of the skills a woman must possess.

It was little wonder Yael took my place. My mother had chosen her to join us the moment she walked through the gate, as Yael followed behind her father, her head bowed, her red hair tangled with salt. Perhaps my mother was moved by her plight, which she divined as soon as she saw the sway in Yael’s walk and the manner in which she covered her middle so carefully with her shawl. My mother had also been alone while she carried her first child into this world.

When Yael spoke her brother’s name in the dovecote, I’d felt my blood race, fearful that my hidden life could be read in my expression. Here was Yaya, the sister Amram had spoken of so often, his childhood protector and friend. I should have pulled her aside to beg for stories of his boyhood, but I remained distant. I had no reason to put any faith in her or to trust her with my secrets. When she spied me with Amram at our meeting place, I waited for her betrayal, expecting her to reveal the truth to my mother, with whom she shared so many confidences. But she never spoke of it. Instead she took me aside to whisper that her brother was a fine man. Who I loved was not her concern.

Still, despite her kindness to me, she had become my rival. On the brutal day when my mother was taken to the plaza in chains, accused of witchery, Yael was the one who went to her, not I. She rushed to my mother, wearing one of the gold amulets from within our family, a gift that had always been presented by a mother to her daughter. I could see them through the sheets of rain, their arms entwined. I turned away and said nothing, swallowing the bitterness of my own jealousy.

I couldn’t help wonder what else my mother had seen on the day I was born, if there had been an omen that had caused her to cast me aside, preferring a stranger to her own daughter.

THROUGHOUT the beautiful and mild month of Adar, Yael came to our chamber in the old palace kitchen in the evenings. She learned the spells my mother had been taught in Alexandria, along with Greek and Hebrew letters. They sat at the table, heads together, voices low so as not to wake Arieh, now nearly eight months old, who napped on the pallet where my sister had once spent her nights. I wasn’t offended when they didn’t think to include me. I had no interest in such matters. Keshaphim was nothing more than women’s work in my eyes, with its recipes and its herbal remedies, no different than cleaning up after the doves, or spinning wool, or keeping the pots simmering on the stove. I had used it to protect Amram once, when he led his first raid from this mountain. But afterward I had felt unclean and had gone to the mikvah to purify myself.

And yet, as I watched them at their studies, I thought how much easier it would be if only I could do as my mother asked, if I could be the one to sit beside her, if it had not already been written that I was bound to disobey.

* * *

WHEN NAHARA left us, I was convinced she would return. I was the rebel and she the good daughter, my dear and trusted sister. In time I was certain that the Essenes’ strict ways would grate upon her. Then she would remember she belonged to me.

But the season changed, the wheat grew tall, and still there was no word. There was Yael, in Nahara’s place at the table. There was Arieh, cooing, playing with his toes or with his rattle on her bed. My sister dropped her eyes when we passed each other, as though we had not crossed the Salt Sea together and slept in each other’s arms. She seemed not to hear when I called to her in the plaza. I thought she would come to me in her own time, but I was wrong. I should have realized that a ewe does not run through the open gate when her entire world consists of the pen in which she lives. Once such a creature has memorized the fence of thorns, she will not cross that marker, not even after it’s torn down, for it still rules the boundaries of her vision and her life.

When I spied Nahara in the field, tending to the black goats, urging them on with a bent stick, following the men of the tribe, her eyes trained on Malachi, I wondered if my mother had been mistaken in her prophecy when she said that love would bring about my undoing.

Perhaps she had seen my sister’s fate instead.

ON THE DAY of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, when we celebrate our people’s release from slavery, the kadim arose out of Edom. No good could come of this, for once the wind began, it was said to last for weeks. There was no way to escape its brutal heat or hide from its fury. For weeks the birds would not rise into the sky, their wings beaten back by the force of the gusts and by the will of our God, reminding us that we must bow before Him and offer thanks for our life on earth. Confusion would reign when men tried to speak to one another, and women’s intentions would be misunderstood.

In the dovecote, the birds were agitated and refused to lay. My mother drew the sign of the four winds on the earthen floor, then burned incense, a small pile of myrrh that caused the doves to quiet, though they still trembled. Yael took the birds onto her lap, and they were comforted, but the moment she went out the door, they began to worry and call.

When the Feast of Unleavened Bread was over and the bakers were once again at work at the ovens, using what little grain they had for their loaves, the wind was still with us, just as fierce. Petals rained down from the almond trees in a blinding hail. Lines formed at the storehouses, where our neighbors waited for their share of food. People had to shout in order to be heard; in the end they often walked away from each other, shaking their heads. The kadim had brought a whirlwind; there was dust and grit where we slept and where we ate and in the seams of our garments.

Fortunately there was a single hour when the wind eased and brought a stillness for which we were all grateful. It came to us when the blue light of evening began to fall. The color of the horizon was so wondrous even the blind vowed they could see it. It was beyn ha’arbayim, a time that is neither day nor night, when the veil of illusion is thinner and we can see things in the lilac-tinged light that cannot be spied at any other hour. It was the time when demons or angels could appear, when the sheydim had first come into existence.

One evening Yael did not come to our chamber alone for her visit with my mother. She brought her Essene friend to us during the hour when the kadim wind grew quiet. Tamar’s white robe appeared blue as it fell around her. The women approached us, eyes downcast. I shivered in the light and the wind. As for my mother, her face was haggard. She had seen a scorpion in a corner that morning. Ever since, she had been waiting for disaster to come to our door.

“Don’t blame Tamar for what she’s about to tell you,” Yael advised my mother, her voice filling with concern. Her hair shone scarlet in the fading light. “She came to me, as she now does to you, to offer the truth, not to cause you any hurt.”

Tamar’s boy, Yehuda, had become a friend to my brother. We had thought perhaps she had come in search of him, as was often the case. But Tamar wasn’t there for her son. It was my mother she wanted, yet oddly she came no closer. We were standing on one side of the doorway with Yael, who had joined us, while Tamar remained on the other side, as if to cross the threshold might bring a curse upon her.

It was a bad omen, to stand divided, yet no one moved.

“Once the Sabbath has come, there is no way to go backward to another day,” Tamar remarked, her eyes downcast. She was a gentle woman, one who had suffered greatly, and it clearly pained her to say more. Yael urged her to go on, so at last she told us. “They went to Abba for his blessing.”

My mother let out a sob upon hearing the news. She knew the Sabbath was often spoken of as a bride, for it was the seventh day of creation, and most beautiful of all. The bride in question was my sister, who had only just become a woman. She had married without my mother’s knowledge or permission.

“There was nothing you could have done,” Yael offered. “They were wed this morning.”

Tamar was murmuring an apology for the manner in which her people had disrespected us. Because we had no man of our family, Abba had given his approval with the grace of God. My mother was no longer listening. She had rushed to the cabinet where she stored talismans and herbs, desperate for a spell that would set things right. The oil of the lily, that holy, precious scent, spilled upon the altar as she did so. For an instant it seemed that we had returned to the fields of Moab, and it was summer, and every flower was red. I saw that my mother was crying. That alone was terrifying. I could not recall seeing her weep before, not even on the night when the robbers came to our tent, when she changed my name and thereby changed my fate.

I wished I were still a boy, gone to raid caravans alongside the men, sent with the warriors to search for provisions, leaving heartbreak such as this for the women to deal with. I stood there mutely, unable to cope with my mother’s grief. It was Yael who went to embrace her. Anyone might have imagined she was the daughter and I was no more than a guest, too awkward to do any more than watch as my mother mourned my sister’s rash decision.

“It’s done,” Yael soothed. “She belongs to them.”

My mother shook her head, indignant. Her black hair spilled down her back.

“You know as well as I do. What’s done can be undone.”

My mother hurriedly left our chamber. I clasped Yael’s arm when she went to follow. For once, I would be my mother’s daughter.

“Nahara is my sister,” I said coldly. “This doesn’t concern you.”

Yael gazed at me, surprised, then backed away. “Of course.”

I chased my mother across the plaza, my heart hitting against my chest. I heard the clatter of her footfalls on the stones. She was quick, but I caught up with her at the edge of the orchard. Our breath rasped as we stood there. The wind had returned. It shook branches and threw up dust devils. The time of the blue light was over and darkness began to spiral down. My mother was not surprised to see me. She knew my sister belonged to me.

“She’ll come back to us,” I said.

My mother shook her head. “Her father sent this as a punishment to me. This is how he seeks his vengeance.”

I didn’t believe that the man who had taught me all I knew would be so cruel.

“He wouldn’t do such a thing,” I ventured, my bitterness at how we had betrayed him rising with the gusts of the Ruach Kadim. “Unlike you, his love was true.”

My mother glared. She wound her cloak more closely around herself. “If it’s not a man who is responsible, then it is God’s will. If that is so, we cannot unwrite what is meant to be. So pray that it was her father’s curse.”

Beyond the field, there was a lamp burning on the Essenes’ rough-hewn table, illuminating the ragtag group that had gathered for their shared evening meal. Instead of the scrolls that were usually rolled out for the men to work upon, we spied a marriage feast of dates and wine, curds and sycamore figs. A tent had been set over the table as protection against the whirling dust.

My mother’s gaze was fixed on the leader of the Essene people.

“We’ll see if this is God’s hand at work or simply the greed of men,” she told me. “If they knew who her father was, they wouldn’t even consider her to be of our faith.”

She made her way toward Abba, the holy man who could no longer walk. Even nonbelievers bowed down to him to honor his great age and his favor from the Almighty, but my mother was not there to offer her respect. I noticed she had something in her hand, clutched tightly in her fist. The Essene men had taken note as well, and they stood blocking my mother, to prevent her from causing Abba any harm. I thought of how she had gone alone to the Iron Mountain, waiting for the doves. I understood why the women in Moab had been too frightened to look at her. As I had been on the shore of the Salt Sea, I found I was afraid of her as well.

“Elohim will protect me,” Abba assured his followers.

“Will he?” My mother raised her eyes to Abba. Her head was uncovered and she seemed dangerous. “All I want is my daughter.”

It was not a weapon my mother possessed but a handful of salt. And yet perhaps it was more fatal than a dagger, for it contained a curse she meant to set upon these people, a way to enclose evil so it could do her no harm.

The men shielded their eyes, lest they become entranced and transformed before her into monsters or goats. They murmured prayers, calling down God’s mercy. My mother paid no heed. She invoked the angels of heaven and the spirits of wrath, pleading with the Creator of the universe to bring affliction upon her enemies. I thought of the way the robbers Nahara’s father had murdered had fallen among us, like branches from the acacia tree, their blood like sap, so thick it took days for my mother to wash it away. As she did so she had cursed each one, the same curses she was uttering now.

The wind was shredding the garments the Essene women had strung on a wash line; it shook the marriage tent. As my mother raised her arms, the kadim seemed drawn to her. She called to the four directions of the universe. When she threw down her handful of salt, it rose like a pillar of smoke, there to do her bidding.

The sky turned black and we could not see a single star in the firmament, and it seemed that my mother had managed to close the curtain of heaven, hiding the Throne of Glory. I saw a look of wonderment and fear cross Abba’s face. He had realized that my mother was a learned woman, not a ewe in the field, there to be commanded. She would not be defeated by a fence of thorns or the indignation of a righteous man.

The Essenes were immobilized, as a mouse stands motionless before a black viper. One of their women, an old grandmother, thought to run for a pail of dirty wash water to pour over the salt my mother had cast at Abba’s feet. But there wasn’t enough water to wash it all away, and what remained settled in a pattern that resembled a snake, turning black as it filtered into the sand.

Abba, who could barely walk, now stood away from his chair. He recognized signs, but he read them to his own advantage. He believed that his people had been chosen by God and that peace was the only true way to honor the Almighty. The end of our world was upon us, and what had been written could not be unwritten or undone.

“You cannot fight what is meant to be with weapons or with curses.” As he spoke, his followers circled around for protection.

“I want her now,” my mother told him. “You cannot take what belongs to another.”

“She’s not your daughter,” Abba told my mother. “She’s the daughter of God.”

“Is that what you think?” my mother said.

Malachi came out of the house that had once been a goat barn, where his people dwelled together, eating from the same dishes, pouring water over their heads before each meal, living a life of prayer and of giving glory to God.

Abba gestured to him as he approached. “She belongs to this man.”

The boy my mother had sent away from the dovecote had heard the rising conflict and turmoil in the field and had left his marriage bed. There he stood. The bridegroom.

My mother faced him, chanting the curses from the book of spells her mother had bequeathed to her, the book that had come from Alexandria, and had traveled to the Iron Mountain and across the Salt Sea. If what had come to pass could be undone, it would unwind at this moment. The wind shifted in the direction of this settlement, throwing up leaves and rattling branches. The bridegroom knew what my mother was trying to do, attempting to unstitch fate.

“She’s already my wife,” he told her.

“We’ll see if she’s your wife or my daughter.”

No one dared interfere as my mother stalked past Malachi. Her cloak grazed him, and he flinched, fearful of the sin of touching a woman other than his wife. When I followed, I kept my eyes lowered even though Malachi beseeched me for help.

Nahara did her best to hold the door shut, but she was no match for us. At last she backed away. For an instant, as the door fell open, I imagined that my mother and I had become like the robbers in Moab, attempting to claim what belonged to another. I had a burning in my throat; every breath flared like fire. It was much like when I drew the hot liquid from my sister’s mouth on the day she was born so that she might take her first breath. Perhaps my mistake was to spit the watery blood on the floor rather than swallow the essence of her soul. Perhaps she had never belonged to me, and I had unwound us from each other at that moment.

My sister wore her simple white robe. Her hair, usually braided and covered by a shawl, was unplaited and loose, black as my mother’s hair, as long as mine. I had saved her, only to have her marry Malachi and live in this goat house. But wherever she went, however distant, she would be my sister.

“Come with us now,” our mother pleaded. “Before you belong to him.”

“Before?” Nahara raised her chin defiantly.

The room was hot, the scent of sweat and of sex lingering. There was blood on the pallet where the women of this sect had unrolled a sheet of white linen to capture the proof of my sister’s purity.

“If he knew your father was not of our people, he wouldn’t want you,” I said.

“But she won’t tell him.” Nahara nodded at my mother. “It’s too late. He’s had me and I belong to him.” Nahara seemed overcome with her power to hurt us. Her hands were on her hips, as if she were the queen of this stench-filled goat house. “If you want to save someone, save her.”

She nodded at me, my sister whom I loved like no other, who had now become my betrayer. I thought of how tenderly I had cared for her when we lived in the tent on the Iron Mountain. Whenever our mother was called to her husband, I had sung my sister to sleep. She’d always slept well, her thumb in her mouth, drowsing as soon as I began the first phrases of a song which told her that the stars were above her, watching over her. I promised to take tamarisk leaves and use them as a broom to sweep the night away so that morning could come again.

“You’re blind to all she does,” Nahara now said of me. She faced my mother without any attempt at respect. “She has been with Amram a hundred times and you haven’t seen a thing. Open your eyes now.”

My mother turned to me.

“What did you expect?” my sister went on. “A whore learns her business from the one who knows it best of all.”

When our mother reached out, I imagined she would grab Nahara and force her to leave with us. Instead, she slapped her. Our mother, who had never done anything but embrace us, had been driven to this.

I heard Nahara’s sharp intake of air. She raised her hand to her reddened cheek, but she didn’t cry. She smiled, more composed than before, more certain of what she wanted, her father’s daughter in this if nothing more, fierce and single-minded.

“You may try to silence me, but you don’t deny it,” she said to the one who had brought her to life.

Outside the desert wind had risen once more; the door of the goat house was thrown open with such force that the wood split apart. It was too late, just as Yael had warned. The wind would be with us for days, forcing us to cover our heads, to eat grit with our food, to listen to its wailing far into the night. I, who knew only iron, felt tears burning my eyes. Though she stood before me, my sister was no longer mine.

Our mother bowed her head, disgraced. I thought of the way she had labored to bring my sister into this world, for I had been her witness on that day.

Save her, she had commanded.

Never once Save me.

ON THE NIGHT that we left the Essenes, my mother tore at her cloak, as women did when they entered into mourning. There are those who say that our word for grave, kever, is also used to describe where a child dwells inside a mother, for life and death are entwined. The child my mother had labored to bring into this world was gone to her now. She would not tell the truth of who Nahara’s true people were, for Nahara would then be a dishonored woman. Instead, she gave her up. We did not speak of my sister again, although my mother chanted for her for seven days, as one chants for the souls of the dead, for that is how long the spirit lingers near the body, unable to part with its earthly form.

From that time on we lived side by side in our chamber, but as time passed, we rarely spoke. It was only the two of us, for my brother had moved to a tent near the barracks, to better serve the warriors but also to avoid the silence between my mother and me. A deep pool of distrust had come between us, a drowning place. Anyone with sense would stay away from such bitterness, and Adir was a practical boy.

I took to working in the smallest dovecote, set apart from the others. I couldn’t make amends. I had lied to my mother and deceived her. I had been with a man before marriage. What had been done could not be undone, for even in the hands of a witch, a ruined woman could not once more be pure.

AND YET, when I lay down to sleep, I was someone other than the woman I’d become. I often dreamed I was riding through the acacia trees. I thought of my old friend Nouri, and how I had betrayed him, pretending to be something I wasn’t, a creature cast from sinew and muscle rather than a woman of flesh and blood. I had pretended no such thing with Amram, but perhaps I kept from him what was most important. I never told him my given name. Because of this he didn’t know me and he never could, no matter how many times he might possess me, or how I might try to offer my love in return.

Because of this, even when I was beside him, I was alone.

He was not the one for me, for he would never accept the hidden part of me. He called me his sheep, his dove, his darling girl, but I was none of those things. I began to avoid our meeting place. He who had known me as a husband would, waited beside the fountain, burning for me. But I watched from the shadows, as angels watch our kind from their lonely distance. I longed for what I dreamed about, the freedom I’d once had. In my dreams I asked the father of my sister if he had seen the person I was at my core. He gazed at me sadly and did not answer, for he had lost us all and could not follow or respond, not even in a dream.

I began to slip into an old tunic that had belonged to my brother. It was brown, dyed with walnut shells, soft from wear. Immediately, I felt comfortable. I braided my hair, then pinned it with a brass clasp beneath a head scarf, so that I might wander through the fortress, a nameless boy who was most grateful to be ignored.

For the first time since we had come here, I was myself.

* * *

AT THE DOVECOTE we worried about the Man from the North in his confinement. We had moved through the month of Iyar and were nearing summer, the month of Sivan, when the heat rose up from the center of the earth and fell down from the heavens. The Man from the North was nothing to us, a prisoner in a tower, a man who barely spoke our language, who was made of ice and was never meant to be among us. But more than six months had passed. Another man would have starved to death, but another man would not have had Yael and the rest of us to see to his needs. Perhaps we had forgotten he was a slave. His quiet restraint had caused us to befriend him, for he was not like other men to us. We feared neither his strength nor his judgment. In many ways he had surprised us, never more so than when he spoke his given name before he was arrested. The others were stunned by the intimacy of this admission, but I understood why he might have revealed such a private detail. Know a man’s name and he belonged to you. In return, no matter how you might deny it, you were his as well.

The first time Wynn spied me taking up the bow, in the month before his arrest, he knew I was more of a boy than a woman. He was a strong warrior, and he recognized the same in me. I should have been more cautious, but I was so accustomed to handling weapons, I couldn’t hide my joy or my skill. I knew from the Man from the North’s expression that he saw in me a brother, someone he might have hunted beside in another world and time.

“Good work,” he said to me, after I had tested the arrows I’d fashioned for Amram. The women had returned to the dovecote. I was gathering the arrows, pulling each from the target of the olive tree.

“Yes, they’re pretty,” I said politely.

He laughed then. He had a strange way with our words; they seemed cold when he spoke them, more to the point. “Pretty? I meant your aim. How many men have you slain?”

I lowered my eyes so he wouldn’t notice the gleam of the truth. “Do you think I attack my victims while I’m at the loom in the evenings?”

He took my hand and examined my calluses. “Those aren’t from the loom.”

He instructed me in his people’s method of weaponry as he might have taught a younger brother. Slaves do not betray one another, and although I was not in irons, I was a slave to the truth of who I’d been born. This man named Wynn was a fine teacher, patient, more than willing to share his secrets of warfare. When I wound feathers to the shafts of the arrows, binding them to the wood as his people did, they flew with greater speed. I spent hours behind the dovecote at practice. Once I felled one of our own doves, a bird so far away anyone might have taken it for a wisp of a cloud.

Wynn educated me in the art of the bow, how to take a breath before I pulled back the string, then to wait an extra heartbeat before letting go. Adding that extra beat proved to be a miracle; it gave the arrow life and breath and speed. He spoke about a creature like a deer in his country that was faster than the wind, faster than the leopards in the desert, so quick only the birds could keep pace with it. That was what we wished for our weapons: the feathers fashioned the arrows into birds that would stir the air. The extra instant before the shot was taken accounted for the way a bird dips, containing the power of its wings, before it lifts upward to race across the sky.

WHEN MY FINGERTIPS bled from my practice, I told Amram that I had pierced them on the looms. Unlike the slave, he believed me. He was blind to who I was. It was as though I were the one who possessed the cloak of invisibility his father was said to have worn in the courtyards of the Temple when he struck his enemies. Amram asked me to weave a cloak for him in his favorite shade of blue as a token of my love. I agreed, though I knew this was a gift I would never give to him. I did not know how to work the loom.

My arms grew stronger after my many hours with the bow, as muscled as a warrior’s, but I insisted my strength was honed from lifting the baskets that we carried into the field. For weeks afterward, Amram came to help me carry the baskets, imagining that the work was too heavy a burden for me. Behind his back Wynn grinned, and I grinned in return, for some secrets bring you closer in their sharing, just as others break you apart.

I DIDN’T WISH to know what was between Yael and the slave, though I could tell he burned for her. Once Yael had told me that whom I loved was my business, now I gave her the respect she deserved. All the same, I saw the way he watched her and knew she had left his irons unlocked.

“Have you asked her how many men she’s slain?” I asked Wynn one day. The words had slipped out in jest, but he stared after Yael, wounded.

“One certainly,” he said.

I should have seen then he would be a fool on her account and try to convince her to flee with him. He was the sort of open man who could not hide himself, even if it meant he would be locked in irons.

It was Yael who brought him his meager provisions during the time he was locked away. She told us she could barely hear him speak. He was so weakened he could not rise from his pallet, a rough thing made from the chaff of the wheat. The cell was fetid, made the more filthy with his own waste. Still Wynn did not complain or curse his captors, but instead he spoke of the land of ice where he had been born. It was as though he were seeing it before his eyes. The heat dissipated as he spoke of his country, and he shivered as though he walked in snow. His people believed that a man would return home upon leaving this life. In the next world he would walk beneath the great yew trees of his homeland and once again be reunited with those who had gone before him.

One day he insisted he could see a stag outside the window. It was the animal that was so difficult to hunt, for it flew across the grass as the birds fly above us.

“What a beautiful creature,” he whispered.

Yael wept when she told us this, for there were no stags in our country, and no window in his cell.

It was a dark time. We had come to realize that our lives were here, so removed from the rest of the world we might as well have been in the World-to-Come. We would soon celebrate Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, in remembrance of the day Moses was given the Torah. In the past our people would make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem with sacrifices of bikkurim, the first fruits brought forth after seven weeks of working the fields, sacrificing the seven species of the harvest: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, dates.

Such was our tradition and our law, but there was no Temple to journey to, and we had little to celebrate and no place where we might offer a sacrifice. Our orchards were failing, despite the rain my mother had called down. There was so little grain that many of the storage jars were only half full. People wondered if demons had been at work. Indeed, now when it rained the sky hailed down upon us so strongly the rain itself might have been made of stone.

Although it was said that Masada could never fall, and that God had made this mountain for the purpose of our rebellion, allowing us to continue to give glory to Him, I wondered how long we could endure a siege should the Romans come. The storerooms of the king would not sustain us forever. Herod’s oil and wine and lentils had fed us, and we had depended upon them, but they were no more. There was a large oil press, but the olives on the trees were few and the oil produced was meted out in small jars. Now the rats ruled the storerooms. It was rumored they had been brought here by the Romans, purposely left behind in case our people ever took back this fortress, so that they might bring us disease, devouring what little we had left.

WORD HAD gone out that the Roman garrison had captured another Zealot stronghold in the desert. The fortress of Machaerus, east of the Salt Sea on the border of Moab, had fallen to the Tenth Legion, led by Lucilius Bassus, a general some people said was impossible to defeat. An oracle had declared that favor would always be his, and so it seemed to be. But although Machaerus’s very name meant sword, perhaps its inevitable defeat had been caused at the hands of its own people. There was a bloody history in that place, and it was rumored that a great teacher named John had been imprisoned and beheaded there when he refused to renounce his teachings.

It was also reported that when rebels at Machaerus arrived at their fortress, they wanted to destroy all that had belonged to cruel Herod and his sons. In their zealousness, they chopped down an enormous rue that had grown there for hundreds of years, a plant taller than any fig tree, a talisman said to hold the secret to our people’s freedom and success. With that one impulsive action, they had destroyed their chances at victory. Rue can save you or ruin you, it can bring luck or agony. Several warriors were said to be so haunted by their deed that they had tried to plant another herb in the same spot, but the roots always withered and refused to take.

When the Romans encircled them, one of their most beloved warriors had been trapped. He had been tortured in the open for all to see in ways too horrible for most decent men to imagine. His friends and loved ones were forced to watch as Romans cut off pieces of his flesh and filled him with burning thorn plants still alight, unwrapping his blistering skin from his soul. His fellow warriors pleaded for his freedom and the promise of their own safety, willing to surrender in exchange for the life of their brother. The bargain was made, and the rebels came down from their mountain. Their safety was assured but never granted. It came as no surprise to our people to hear that Lucilius Bassus was a liar. When our warriors thought of demons, they imagined his name. Each and every man at Machaerus was slain, their blood turning the ground black.

The Romans piled the pyres high with bodies — not only the dead were cast onto the flames but also the weak and the sick, those not worthy of being slaves. The sound of their cries echoed throughout Judea. Some women in our fields vowed there had been a rain of stones on that day, and when the last of the figs had been dashed to the ground, there had been ants inside the sticky fruit, destroying it from the inside.

There was a prayer meeting at the synagogue, and the men who gathered were stricken by the horror of the news. That evening we heard not only prayers but arguments. How could we avoid the fate of Machaerus? We could hear Ben Ya’ir’s low, steady voice. We knew it was he because when he spoke all others fell silent.

“We’ll never let our women and children die on pyres,” he told his warriors.

There was no choice for us, he cautioned, no retreat. It was apparent that our strength emerged from his courage; all the same, when I went into the fields I saw that the figs had indeed fallen; in what should have been the greenest time of the year, that golden fruit lay blackened on the ground.

* * *

YAEL WORRIED not only for Wynn but for her child as well. Arieh had served as the key with which to open the barred door in the tower. He had been presented to our leader’s wife for her amusement in exchange for permission to bring provisions to the slave. But some keys can be used for many locks and should never be lent or given away. Our leader’s wife had taken a dangerous liking to Arieh, and a new prison had sprung forth, one made from her arms and from the net of her desires.

I had spied this dark woman alone in the evenings, walking beside the wall that surrounded us, as though she were a shadow in search of the substance that would bring her to life. Perhaps the child was such a cure for the ailment our leader’s wife carried within her, her barrenness and her despair.

Ben Ya’ir’s wife had begun to withhold Arieh when Revka came for him at the end of the day, insisting on keeping the baby through the night, rocking him as though he were her own. She threatened that, if she could not keep Arieh with her, she could no longer offer the slave her protection. Why should the barbarian live and she have nothing for her efforts? She went so far as to go to the priest to choose an auspicious day for Wynn’s death.

Yael herself went to the small palace when she heard of this. She bowed her head to Channa, but told her in no uncertain terms this was to be Arieh’s last visit in exchange for the life of the slave. When she returned to retrieve the child that evening, the door was bolted. A guard was stationed outside, there at Channa’s bidding. He was a friend of Amram’s, Uri, who had brought Yael to the fortress, a good-natured young man who was liked by all. Yet he denied her entry.

“We do as we’re told,” he said apologetically. “She speaks with her husband’s voice as well as her own. You understand. I have no choice in the matter.”

Yael took to lurking around the palace, much as beggars roam the markets, hands outstretched. On nights when Revka kept vigil beside Yael, it was the older woman who wept, blaming herself for what had come to pass, for it was she who had fashioned the agreement with Channa. My mother had warned that nothing good could come from a bargain with Ben Ya’ir’s wife. She was dangerous, my mother said. More so than she appeared. I’d overheard Revka insisting that Channa’s interest in the baby was only a lonely woman’s attachment.

My mother had laughed coldly in response. “Then perhaps we should say a snake has an attachment to a dove when we speak of his hunger. Wait and see how much Channa is willing to devour.”

Now Yael came to my mother, tearful, desperate for a spell that would help her regain her son. “There must be something you can do,” she pleaded.

I was certain my mother would help her favorite. Instead, she shook her head sadly. “You shouldn’t have let her touch him. Now she has him in her claws.”

“Give me something to defeat the demon,” Yael begged.

“She’s not a demon, she’s a woman,” my mother said sadly. “In this case, that’s worse.”

I BEGAN to keep watch with the others. We had all come to despise Channa for the liberties she took, showing off the child, dressing him in a tunic she’d had woven for him. This woman, who had set herself apart for so long, whose servants toiled in her garden and kitchen while the rest of us went hungry, was now prideful, strutting through the plaza in the afternoons with the baby on her hip as though he were her own, chatting with the other women, who were quick to admire him, how handsome he was, how easily a smile came to him.

Revka’s grandsons acted as spies on our behalf, tracking Ben Ya’ir’s wife each day, reporting her activities to us. Noah and Levi had the ability to fade into the shadows, though their voices had come back strongly. People say that when you have lost something and it returns to you, it is doubly sweet, and so it was with Revka’s grandsons. When they spoke, their words captivated a listener. It seemed the conversations that had been silenced for so long could now be released in honeyed tones, and what they described they did artfully, their reports appearing before us as though written in the air.

“She stops where the black viper lives on the rocks and makes an offering,” they confided. “She feeds the baby from her fingers, filling him with figs and pomegranates and barley cakes as though he were a dove. She tells him he is so sweet the bees will follow him.”

The older boy, Noah, looked much like his father, the Man from the Valley, the warrior who kept to himself, a fighter I was curious about. Amram had told me this man could not be turned away by bloodshed, plunging into the fray when anyone else would have retreated, and wisely so. He took risks only a madman would take on, courting the Angel of Death, calling out, daring Mal’ach ha-Mavet to appear before him as he wielded his rough-hewn ax, the only weapon he had need of. His brothers in battle admired him, they spoke of him with respect, even awe, but they did not wish to stand beside him. They knew that he who is without a fear of death is the most dangerous man of all.

What makes a dangerous woman, however, was not always so apparent, for what is unnoticeable to the human eye is often the most deadly attribute. What is hidden can destroy you. Demons appeared in the dark, when you least expected betrayal, when your eyes were closed. Because my mother refused to confront Channa, I wondered what this dark woman’s power over her might be. I studied Channa, and still I saw a weak creature, but one who had woven a strong web.

“Our leader’s wife whispers to Arieh that she alone protects him,” Revka’s grandsons told us. “She warns him against the women who wait at the wall. She tells him he must never listen to the one named Yael, that she will tell him lies and will beseech him to think he belongs to her.”

Yael grew ashen upon hearing these slanderous words, the marks on her face standing out as though she’d been dashed with blood. Still she sent the boys to discover more. They crept through the garden beside the palace, making their way past the mint and marjoram and sage, slinking as close as they dared. The boys had spied Channa waiting for her husband at the door with the baby in her arms, as though Arieh was an offering.

“And what does her husband say to this?” Yael wanted to know when Revka’s grandsons told of the situation, her voice sharp.

“He walks past her,” Noah remarked. “He never looks at her.”

When Yael heard this, she nodded, pleased. She was thin and agitated, yet doing her best to convince herself that the child would be returned to her. “What’s done can be undone,” she told us.

I didn’t offer an opinion, but I had heard my mother say the very same thing upon my sister’s marriage day, and Nahara was still bound to her husband. I was not certain that our lives were so similar to thread, able to be unspooled, then gathered up again.

ONE EVENING as I kept watch along with Revka and Yael, we saw the great man himself entering his chambers. My mother refused to come with us; she had offered a warning and had been ignored. I noticed she turned pale when Channa’s name was mentioned. She was not among us when we recognized Ben Ya’ir’s broad shoulders and his prayer shawl and how proudly he walked, much as a king might, though in fact he cared to own nothing on this earth and had cast away his possessions when he observed the greed of the wealthy in Jerusalem. His wife might sleep in the palace, but Eleazar ben Ya’ir remained outside under the stars or went to the barracks to spend his nights there so that his warriors would know he was no different than those he commanded.

We decided it would be best to go to him so that he might learn of Yael’s plight. He was known to be fair; perhaps he would cast a judgment in favor of the true mother. But when the time came, the others were too nervous to face him, for the burden of our people was his. The weight of this fortress upon a single man was so heavy Revka and Yael feared they would seem like fools to plead for Arieh. How dare we engage our leader in such small troubles when Jerusalem had fallen and there were demons waiting for us all?

We were now the only fortress of rebels in Judea. All others had been conquered, and because we alone stood fast, Rome had become more interested in us. We were at first elated, prideful to show that we had not been vanquished and were firm in our resolve. But slowly we grew more fearful about the legion’s response now that they realized we alone had managed to survive.

Even Revka, known for her sharp tongue, refused to approach our leader with worries over a single child, though he was our beloved Arieh. Ben Ya’ir was too great a man, with too many concerns. But I had no such fears. Eleazar ben Ya’ir was a warrior like any other. A man was only a man, and I had killed my share in my other life. I had seen that they all gave up their lives to God in the same manner.

I offered to be the one to go.

Yael was as surprised as she was grateful. “My brother sees your beauty, as do I,” she said simply.

Lately I had come to believe that Amram looked only for a woman’s beauty, nothing more. All that I was had been masked by my sheet of black hair, the woman I appeared to be. I said nothing to Yael, merely accepted her gratitude, then made my way alongside the palace walls in the falling dark. I was quiet; I knew how to stalk prey and how to fold myself into the shadows.

When I reached a window, I stood on a pile of kindling and hauled myself up to the ledge so I might peer through. There was very little furniture in the chamber; most of it had been broken apart and used for firewood. But the marble floor and the frescoes amazed me. For a moment I was in thrall, thinking of the royals who had once lived here, without fear or poverty. I understood why it was said that the Queen of Egypt had begged Rome to grant her this fortress to call her own. Then I observed Channa, and caution ran through me. She sat on a bench by the fire, whispering to the child, holding him close. The delight she took in him was so evident I was glad Yael was not there beside me to see.

Near the oven there sat a cradle carved of acacia, crafted by a master woodworker from Jerusalem. An amulet of protection was tied above the place where the child’s head was to rest. The pallet itself was rich with a fine linen bedcovering, and there were bronze bells tied to the rockers, so that demons might be chased away by the sound. As for Arieh, he wore a purple tunic, as though he were the son of a king. It appeared that the child had no home other than this chamber, and that his every need had been seen to. At that moment I understood this woman had no intention of giving him back.

I thought of my sister’s father, how he could become a whirlwind against his enemies, how I might be equally fearsome should I so desire. But I had to hide that part of me, as I did with Amram. I could not climb through the window or reach for the knife set on the table so that I might take what I wanted. Instead, I knocked politely at the door.

I hadn’t expected the great man himself to answer.

“I’m here for the child,” I said softly, casting myself as a pretty woman and nothing more. I had burned half a dozen acacia branches in memory of the souls I had released. I had been covered with the blood of the ibex and felt its heat. Now I lowered my eyes. Still I had a glimpse of our leader, who gazed at me with such intensity I understood why Yael and Revka had been fearful of speaking to him directly.

“The child?” he said, confused by my presence and my request.

He seemed more powerful than most men, and I felt myself vanishing as I bowed my head. I forced myself to remember the person I had once been, the men I had killed, the nights that had belonged to me. I raised my eyes to his.

“His mother waits.”

Ben Ya’ir turned to see Yael, alongside Revka and her grandsons, as they perched upon the wall. They were not unlike the shades that remain on earth when those who are unfairly put to death are unable to find rest.

“He has a mother?”

His surprise made me realize his wife had told him otherwise.

“Doesn’t everyone?”

The great man’s face twisted into a smile. I was relieved. Perhaps I smiled as well.

“And a father?” he asked.

“Not everyone has that,” I was quick to say.

“Everyone has that,” he assured me.

He told me to wait, then closed the door. I looked at the garden that was tended by slaves. There was a stone fountain from the time of the king, dry now, the rim cracked, the finials broken into pieces on the ground. A wealth of herbs and mint grew in neat rows, and the scent that rose up was green and sweet. I heard the sound of birds, though it was dark and no birds flew after twilight, only the silent owls that lived in the caves across the mountain. Still, they sang, an odd event at this hour.

I edged behind the fountain. There, below a trellis of cucumber vines with their deep green leaves, sat a wooden cage. Inside, two doves huddled close, cooing.

I felt the spark beneath my eye, as if the message I’d once found on the ground burned me still. My heart felt heavy, so much so that I doubted I would be able to run away, though I wished I could now do so. I wondered if this cage of doves contained the messengers to the Iron Mountain, and if this was why my mother had refused to come to this house and risk Channa’s wrath.

Ben Ya’ir returned to the door, the baby in his arms. I could hear weeping echoing in the chamber behind him. I had made my way back through the garden, the scent of mint clinging to my garments, the sound of the doves a song I carried with me, one that had accompanied me from the far side of the Salt Sea, where the caged doves had eaten grain from my hand as they waited for my mother to set them free.

“Is this what you came for?” he asked, as he offered me the child.

When he spoke I understood why men would follow him even though they might die and never return, and why they would believe in him. Although I wanted to tell him I had stumbled upon the doves, I found I couldn’t say another word in his presence. He gave the baby up into my arms. I should have thanked him, but I could not speak. He waited for me to do so for so long that the silence itself spoke of what was between us.

Before he turned back to his chamber, Eleazar ben Ya’ir put his hand to my forehead, gently, as he might welcome a daughter. In that moment I knew he was the man for whom my mother had made such sacrifices, the reason she had been cast out of Jerusalem, why she had waited on the Iron Mountain day after day, until the dove returned with the message to come to him at last.

WHEN I WENT to our chamber that night, I did not ask my mother to speak my father’s name aloud. I saw her comb her long dark hair with a wooden comb made of acacia wood from the forests of Moab. I saw the tattoos on her flesh. She was the same, the woman who’d never wished to tell me who I was, who would not offer Yael help if it meant she would be forced to come before the enemy who had used me as evidence so that we might be set into the wilderness.

I gazed at my face as it was reflected in a bowl of water and saw my father’s eyes staring back at me. Now, when people said his name, they were saying mine as well. I walked alone at night, dressed in Adir’s tunic and mantle, seeking out those who spoke of my father, wanting to hear of his deeds in battle and his kindness to those in need. He insisted that all men were equal, whether they were servants or priests, and made certain all adhered to the law that stated we were not to collect the fruit from the four corners of our orchard, as God had commanded, to ensure that even the poorest among us could find mercy in their time of hunger.

I had the desire to speak to him, something I had been unable to do while I was in his presence. When I heard there was to be an archers’ contest among the warriors, I went, like the boy I’d once been, a scarf across my face, the bow I’d used to test my arrows set upon my back. Perhaps I would see my father and he would know me for who I was, as I now knew him. I waited through the day, watching the men, their strong arms and backs wrenching as they drew their bows. They cried out in brotherhood and rivalry, blaming the wind when they missed their mark, praising the best among them when their aim was true.

When it came time for Amram to take his turn, I saw the obvious admiration his brothers-in-arms felt in his skill. I, too, wanted to praise him, but there was something more. I felt the sting of jealousy, a wasp in my heart. Ben Ya’ir was among the warriors who cheered on the young men, and he praised Amram heartily. I thought of how he had blessed me and wondered if he was the reason I’d been born to the sign of metal, why I wanted more than other girls did. Even now, as I spied the throng of young women on the sidelines, I knew I could never watch alongside them and not burn to be among the men.

I might have slunk back to the silence of our chamber, but in the pale hours of the declining day I saw the hawk above us, the one whose feathers I’d used in fashioning arrows for Amram. I thought of the splashes of red dye on my hands from the madder root when I’d crafted them so carefully. I had intended the arrows as a gift, yet I’d never presented them. I at last understood that I’d wanted those arrows for myself all along. I had designed them not in honor of the phoenix that signified my beloved but in memory of the red lily that grows in the fields of Moab, as a reminder of the person I had been.

I carried them now, hidden beneath my cloak.

I found myself at the archer’s line, pushed there by a demon, or perhaps by my pride, an unknown boy allowed to compete, though clearly no one saw the competition within me. They didn’t bother to watch as the first arrow hit its mark. Perhaps the second arrow convinced them to turn and stare. Perhaps it was the third. I was concentrating on one thing alone: the precise moment when I drew back on the bow, waiting, as Wynn had instructed, so that the arrow might dip and rise as birds do. I gave not a single thought to the girl I pretended to be. I heard the wind and no other voice. I thought of both my fathers, the one who had taught me all that I knew and the one I wished to learn from now.

When I narrowed my eyes, I saw my path before me, straight as iron.

My arrows sliced through those which were already in place, casting the other warriors’ strikes to the ground. Those warriors were watching now. The red of the feathers were impossible to ignore, a field of lilies. By the time I was done, there was silence.

I saw Ben Ya’ir rise to his feet as the crowd let out a shout. My ears were ringing, as if a storm had settled upon me, a whirlwind from the far side of the Salt Sea. I murmured a whisper of gratitude to my sister’s father, and to the men I’d ridden with, and to Nouri, whom I had always bested. I stood there for an instant, my happiness complete, wishing I could keep this vision before me always. But a vision is like a dream, it dissipates as soon as you attempt to hold on to it, and my vision rose up to be claimed by He who should never be forgotten. All at once I could hear the truth of the moment. My eyes and ears were mine once more. The crowd was calling for Adir, proclaiming him the hero of the day.

They thought I was my brother, convinced he was the master archer. They cheered on, but I turned away. The warriors and those in attendance continued to call Adir to them, so that they might honor him, but I hastened to make my way through the Western Plaza, quick to take the steps, leaping as though my life was at risk. The world was there before me, in the cliffs and the valley below, but this world no longer belonged to me. I had given it to my brother.

I found my way to an abandoned garden behind the Northern Palace, a walled-in area where women came to look for garlic and herbs that had been planted long ago and had been forgotten. There were larks there, pecking at the greens, but they all fluttered up when I came upon them, my breathing hot and ragged. I took off Adir’s garments. They were nothing but a fool’s disguise. There was rosemary growing where I stood, said to be the herb of remembrance, a gate to the past. My heart hit against my chest, and my limbs shook. I wrapped myself in my scarf as I wept for who I was.

The hawk had followed me. Perhaps he was the one Wynn had trained to come to the dovecote window, a fierce bird of prey who was willing to bow his head and take crumbs from Yael’s hand. I scanned the sky. Watching him riding in the air above me reminded me what freedom was like. The past was with me whether or not I wanted it to be. I was myself despite how I might run from the truth.

Beneath my shawl, I still had the bow upon my back.

* * *

FROM OUR MOUNTAINTOP, residents often saw soldiers from the legion during the growing heat of Sivan. More and more exploratores were being sent to examine our mountain, gathering on the rocky floor below. They were reconnaissance soldiers whose only mission was to seek out enemies and report back to their generals. The Romans had long been aware that we were here, as they’d known about Machaerus and the other fortresses that were held by Zealots. We were far from Jerusalem, and so they had ignored us, but our fame had grown and stories about our glory had reached Roman ears. There had been more and more talk of our rebellion in the markets of towns throughout the region. Shir tishbohot, songs of praise, were offered for us, and those who celebrated us denounced Rome in whispers and then in louder tones. People said our mountain was invisible and that the Sicarii had used the Hebrew alphabet to call a curtain over us, a fabric constructed of air and vapor that separated heaven from earth. They said that the throne of our Lord could be seen from our towers. Any man who ruled here would rule the world.

Soldiers from the legion might come to survey us, but all they would see was how impossible it would be to mount an attack. Ben Ya’ir sent out word that, when the exploratores came, we should stay in our chambers so they could not count our number. Perhaps they would think we were stronger than we were, and possessed thousands of warriors, rather than a village left to old men and women and children each time our men went on raids. Let them look all they wanted. All they would see was the mountain where God’s glory had sent us, a rock so impenetrable they could never bring us down. Some of our boys sent stones falling, skittering down as a warning, and they laughed as the soldiers scattered below.

I did not laugh to see the white tunics of the Tenth Legion or the banner of the wild boar. I felt a chill come over me. In truth our people were no match for Roman soldiers, who had been trained for one thing, to be a machine of death. Our warriors were best when they slunk about like wolves, striking enemies in the dark. The rebels’ only hope of success was an attack that was unexpected, when thanks to God’s grace, their quickness and ferocity might win out over might. Against well-armored, organized troops, who had so much experience of warfare, our people were woefully unprepared. Our fathers and brothers were freedom fighters, not trained soldiers. Unlike my sister’s father, the men at Masada had not been warriors from the moment of their birth, each with a horse already chosen and a knife in his hand. They had been priests and bakers and scholars, their weapons knives and arrows and rocks, not bronze and iron. We were nothing against the relentless power of the Roman Empire.

WHEN OUR WARRIORS decided they would track a group of exploratores so they might discover how close the legion was to our mountain, Yael gave me a token to present to Amram, a slip of blue fabric, the color of heaven, and of God’s glory, and of His throne.

Amram laughed and slipped the fabric close to his heart. “We won’t be apart for long,” he said, recognizing the charm. “My sister has seen to that.”

He told me that the fabric would lead him to me no matter how far he might journey. He cupped his hands around my face and kissed me. In his arms I had a surge of fear, for what was between us was already over, despite the token. I went to the wall to watch him descend with the warriors. I had no idea that my brother planned to set forth with them until I found my mother there, beside herself with worry.

“He’s nothing but a boy,” she worried. She had looked ill of late, refusing her meals, keeping to herself. Now she was ashen. “Why would they do this? Why would he go?”

I was too guilt-ridden to answer. The warriors believed that Adir had been the archer at the contest and had therefore taken him on as their brother. That was why he now walked beside them, because of my red arrows. His fate was my burden, for I had caused them to look at him with esteem. My mother thought of Adir as her baby and was still tying amulets into his garments to protect him from evil. He tore such things from his tunic, laughing, saying our mother had no idea what it meant to be a man.

Adir was in his thirteenth year, but he was not ready. I had killed my first ibex when I was only ten, but I had been prepared for blood. I had ridden with men who were fearless. I had known to burn the acacia branches to honor the spirits of the dead. My brother thought being a man meant blindly following the path of the warriors, despite his lack of skill. He thought of great glory, not of pools of blood; surely he had not imagined the brutality he would witness when his comrades were cut down before him.

I prayed with my mother at our altar as she burned oil and chanted for Adir’s safe return. I cursed myself as I did so, for I should have been the one to take his place. My mother wrote the names of God on her arms, and then on mine, so that we might be heard in heaven, even though women were not allowed this practice. It was only for the priests to make such entreaties to the Almighty, but my mother was not afraid to break the law. We sacrificed a dove and wrote upon its feathers with its own blood, binding any demon that might follow my brother into the valley. We chanted softly so none would overhear, for we did not dare to reveal what we did in our chamber any more than I dared to reveal the truth of my brother’s leaving.

I proclaim the majesty of His splendor, to frighten all the spirits of the angels of destruction and those who strike suddenly and lead us astray. Destroy their evil hearts in the age of the rule of wickedness.

I spoke these words along with my mother, but I did not proclaim that I was the wickedness that had sent my brother into battle, and that I must be the one to make amends.

* * *

ON A CLEAR burning-hot morning, the nesting doves dropped to the ground without warning. We gathered them and held them close, trying to still their trembling bodies until they revived. Several died that day, for no apparent reason. Although we were hungry, we could not make them into a meal for ourselves or our warriors upon their safe return for the doves had died of some ailment.

Perhaps the hour when the doves fell marked the moment when Channa returned to the priest to choose a day for the slave to die. Certainly we all felt death close by; it passed as a shadow cast by clouds, and we grew cold. My mother took the doves to the altar in her chamber, she covered her head and whispered a prayer to keep away the Angel of Death, but the sacrifice was not enough. That same day a proclamation was posted. On the following afternoon, the guard would go to the tower and the world would be rid of the slave. We were not savages like the Romans, who crucified their enemies to cause the most pain a human could endure, stretching death out lengthwise, as a man might be stretched upon a wooden cross so he would linger in agony. Instead, the slave’s throat would be slit, the kindest death, the one we gave to even the most lowly of beasts, so that his breath would leave him in a single rush.

When evening fell, Channa was waiting by the wall near Revka’s chamber. She wore a cloak, but Revka’s grandsons spied her instantly, as they were said to perceive demons. Our leader’s wife had no fear, only the heat of her desire, which flamed hotter than the air around us. Arieh would soon be a year old; he was a quiet and dear child, already trying to walk. Channa had dared to come to Yael; she was heedless, as the desperate often are, more than willing to disobey her husband, who had warned her to stay away. But on this occasion Ben Ya’ir was among the warriors following the Romans and therefore could not judge her or punish her for her deeds. She was stronger than she’d once been, made so by my mother’s cures, strong enough to cause damage. She carried a sprig of hyssop, as though taunting the flower that had once caused her so much misery.

Revka wept at the sight of her. “It’s my doing. I called a demon upon us.”

“No.” Yael’s face was masked, but she sounded sure of herself. “It’s my punishment.”

“You’ve done nothing,”

Revka insisted.

“One thief knows another,” Yael murmured, resolved.

She packed up all of Arieh’s belongings, then went to the wall, the baby in her arms.

“A bargain is a bargain,” Channa said. “I’m not being too demanding, I merely want what I’m owed.”

They were near the garden where Yael had released the scorpion. It failed to show itself on this night, but it was still there. The children had seen it, and they knew that which you cannot see can be more dangerous than that which is before you. We were fighting a battle just to keep ourselves fed; perhaps the scorpion went hungry as we did. As for Channa, she was a rich man’s wife; despite her husband’s insistence that we were all worthy of God’s gifts, she took more than her share.

“You’ve done well in your care for him,” she said approvingly to Yael when she noticed the flame-colored spot on the baby’s cheek had all but disappeared. Yael had bathed the child in oils and rubbed a balm into his skin. “I’m sure we can agree as reasonable women.” When Channa stroked his face lovingly, Arieh smiled up at her. “He’s better off with me.”

YAEL DID NOT lock herself away, as some women might have. She had no time for such indulgences. The slave had been allowed to live. The bargain had been kept; still, anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.

After her chores in the dovecote were completed, Yael went out to collect firewood. She did so often enough that the sentries came to know her. The assassin’s daughter with red hair. She went late in the day, when the sun was dropping down. In the dim light she found twigs that would serve as kindling, deadwood that would keep our fires hot. She didn’t return until twilight washed across the pale sky. Sometimes she sat on the wall in the amber light, a basket of twigs beside her, the woven scarf on her hair slipping down, so that strands of her hair gleamed scarlet. She knew the guards watched, their glances lingering over her flesh. Because of this they allowed her to do as she pleased.

Each day she went farther down the mountain, finding paths few dared to take, except for the ibex, who had no fear of tumbling down the sheer cliffs. The head scarf she wore was woven in the pattern of the country in the north none among us would ever see, a land where the ice was as deep as a river, where a man could freeze in moments, where every warrior’s arrows were marked with the sign of the stag.

When Yael asked for my help, I went with her willingly, though by then we had more wood piled at our doors than anyone else on the mountain.

“I’m surprised you didn’t ask my mother,” I said.

“Your mother would make them suspicious. The guards will trust you.”

As we approached the sentries, Yael told me to pull my shawl away from my head so that I might allow the guards to see my long black hair. We were two young women gathering wood, cheerful, pretty. We waved a greeting. Every day, we made this journey. The guards never bothered to question us but only glanced at us, appraising our bare arms, which we allowed them to view and enjoy.

Yael said a prayer each time we passed a small cave. She whispered that a lion lived inside, but she swore he would watch over us. Sometimes she left him an offering of a dove, sometimes a few strands of her hair. She seemed convinced he was her guardian. All the same, I was relieved I had brought a blade with me, in case the creature she spoke of decided to turn on us.

The cool air of evening made it perfectly understandable when we began to bundle up beneath our cloaks. I wore an extra shawl, which made my appearance bulkier. My head scarf was tied tightly, nearly covering my face. One day Yael brought me a gray cloak. It belonged to her father, she said. I thought of her father’s talent and how he had instructed Amram in the secrets of invisibility. I knew it was possible for a man to become a cloud or a mist in the eyes of his enemy; I had seen Amram himself do so when we wished to defy my mother and meet in secret.

As soon as I slipped on the assassin’s cloak, the guards no longer noticed me. I disappeared before them, nothing worth looking at. They called out a greeting to Yael, whose shining red hair they so admired, but ignored me as I trudged behind, carrying a bundle of dry wood.

On the day it was to happen, I went to the tower at the hour Yael had chosen. After his meal, the guard posted there often fell asleep on his bench, his stomach swollen from his allotment of lentils and beans. In my pocket I had the key of twisted metal that my mother had fashioned to show how easy it would have been for the slave to escape the dovecote so the officials would not guess Yael had unlocked his chains. I kept the assassin’s cloak over my head. No one questioned me as I went along the corridor, then took the stairs. At the end of the hall, the guard was dozing, as Yael had assured me he would be. I let myself into the slave’s cell, stunned by the filth and stench that greeted me. The air was murky, yet I could see poor Wynn on his pallet of rags. He was so unclean no one would ever guess that the stubble of his shorn hair was pale as ice or that his skin had been the color of milk when he first came to us.

Despite the darkness, Wynn recognized me, rising to his feet to greet me.

“The warrior,” he said fondly.

His voice was thin, melting in his throat. His body was no longer strong, weakened from a lack of air and food.

“I’m someone else today,” I informed him.

“Who would that be?” He was thoroughly confused.

I grinned, then slipped off my cloak and stood before him. “I’m you.”

NONE of the sentries took note when two women went through the gate, one barely noticeable, cloaked in gray. They were accustomed to us leaving the fortress at this hour, when the dark was drifting across the sky, when the curtain between the day and night splits open to angels and demons alike. They failed to notice that when Yael brought back kindling she returned alone, lingering at the wall to gaze over the mountains, where the hawk soared, circling back as though he might return, before he disappeared into the falling dark.

In the tower, I waited until I knew Wynn would be free, repeating the psalm of protection. Shivitti Adonai l’negdi tamid. I have placed the Lord constantly before me. I was glad to know it was the season when wild onions grew, when rabbits would be venturing out to eat new grass. Perhaps he would manage to survive in the wilderness so that he might find his way back to the country of the stag.

No guard came to the door I’d unlocked for his escape. I left unnoticed, wearing the tunic I’d brought along so that I might once again be a boy, easily thought to be among those who helped guard the tower.

* * *

THE WAR came closer in the shimmering month of Tammuz, when we tended the grapevines and the air itself smelled sweet. Great flocks of birds flew overhead, returning from the grasslands of the south, pelicans and storks, swifts and kestrels. There were flocks of people as well, crossing the desert before they could be captured, a tide rushing in advance of the Tenth Legion. Some of the wanderers came to us. When they pleaded for mercy, they were allowed to set their tents in our orchards, and the fruit that fell in all four corners was allowed to them, as commanded by our common law. The stragglers were not the only ones who were famished. Fallen fruit and flatbread were barely enough to feed our hunger. I went beyond the wall and caught songbirds in nets made of string. When I grew tired of hunting like a girl, I took my bow and shot pheasants to place upon our table.

No one said a word when they saw me walking in the plaza with a bow on my back; perhaps they believed the weapon was my brother’s and that in his absence I was caring for what rightly belonged to him. Most likely they thought I only meant to clean the arrows I carried, for their tips were edged with blood.

Despite the fact that my mother had mourned my sister and now considered her among the dead, I brought pheasants to the Essenes whenever I could. Nahara was not dead to me. I often spied her among the modest, hardworking women. I thought of how she would follow me through the grass in our other life, how I would send her running home to our tent, swooping behind her like an owl, making her laugh. I thought of the years when we had slept on one pallet, often dreaming the same dream, so that even before our eyes were open we could chatter about our night visions. I had always yearned for her father to be my father so I might be her sister in every way. Now I was afraid she would run if I dared to speak to her and beg her to return.

After I presented the game birds, I went to sit beside Nahara on a wooden bench outside the goat house. Together we plucked the pheasants. Soon there was a circle of shimmering brown and green feathers at our feet.

“You can still hunt,” my sister said pointedly. The Essenes did not believe a woman should touch a weapon, or take a life.

“When no one’s watching.” I grinned, hoping she would join in the joke of who I used to be. Instead she shook her head. My sister, whose dreams I had shared, whose breath was the same as mine, whose true father was a secret to her people, found my actions shameful.

“The Almighty watches.”

I felt the stab of her judgment upon me. “I bowed to give my prayers to Him. He watches that as well.”

“We’re on the threshold of the end, yet you act as though the days will go on forever, one like the other.” It was as though my sister had become my teacher and I had failed to learn my studies. Nahara was convinced we were walking through the End of Days and, like her Essene teachers, believed it was foolish to be consumed with the details of daily life. Those who refused to accept the truth that the world as we knew it would soon be no more would shortly be apprised otherwise.

The fabric of my sister’s tunic and shawl was threadbare, for there had been no time to mend the weaving and, from what she said, no purpose in doing so. If it was the End of Days, then my sister’s tunic would be her funeral garment. She confided that her people no longer slept. There was too much work to be completed on their scrolls, which revealed God’s truth, and too little time to do so. Perhaps this was the reason she looked pale. She was so slim the bones below her throat seemed to be rising through the flesh. She said that her people often prayed throughout the night, waiting to see if the sun would rise again and if there would indeed be another morning.

We had blood upon us from readying the pheasants. The birds would be hung on a line so that the rest of their blood would be drained from their bodies before they were salted and cooked. Our people never consumed blood. It was one of God’s strictest laws. Still our hands were stained with the pheasants’ lifeblood. I took my sister’s hand in mine. She had betrayed me to our mother; nevertheless, I could not abandon her.

“What do these people offer you?”

“Everything.” Nahara withdrew her hand from mine, shaking her head, disappointed in me. “They offer a world of peace, Aziza.”

She gazed toward the barracks and the stock of weapons stored there. Children had been set to work fashioning stones into round rocks that could be dropped upon our enemy with great force should they be foolhardy enough to attack us. Nahara turned back to me, her eyes damp. She had always been softhearted in times of killing. She would close her eyes when we came upon a rabbit in a snare. Our people did not eat rabbits, they were considered unclean, but Nahara’s father’s people had no such laws. You do it, she would say to me as the poor creature shivered in its trap. I would take the rabbit and sever its throat, quickly, so that she didn’t have to see. I would do whatever she asked.

“You can’t think that’s the answer,” she said of the mounds of weaponry.

“What would your people have you do if we are attacked?” I wanted to know.

“Trust in Abba.” Her hands were folded upon her lap. She looked calm and beautiful, older than her years. I thought she meant the leader of her people, then I realized she meant God. She, like the other Essenes, claimed a personal relationship with the Almighty. She spoke of Him as if she were indeed His child.

“And if that means we are to die? What then? Lie down and let Rome trample us?”

Nahara gazed at me with compassion, as though I were the younger sister, too simple to understand. “Then we rise again.”

“Your father was a man of courage. Peace was something he fought to keep.”

She smiled gently at my remark. I saw within her some of the girl she’d been before she left us.

“You don’t fight for peace, sister,” Nahara told me. “You embrace it.”

“Not in the world of your father,” I reminded her.

Nahara laughed outright, for this was undeniably true. “That was long ago. You were another person then. As was I.”

“You cried for him when we left. We thought he’d hear you in Petra, that was how loudly you called to him.”

“I was a child.” Nahara shrugged her narrow shoulders. “My father was the only man I knew. Now”—she nodded to the long trestle table, where Malachi was at work on a text—“I belong to him.” I had heard it said that Malachi wrote so beautifully the angels came to watch, for words were the first thing God created out of the silence and were still the most beautiful of all His creations.

“Then I will be happy for you,” I said.

I walked away, leaving the pheasants with my sister, unable to tell her the truth. No matter what she did or whom she loved, I was the one who had given her life in this world, a world she was so eager and ready to leave, one in which there were acacia trees that called the bees to their blossoms, where there were endless fields of grass and cassis.

No matter what she said, she still belonged to me.

I WAS WALKING at night, as I had come to do so that I might relish my freedom as a boy, when I came upon the Essenes digging near the synagogue. The earth was rocky, white as the stars above. The hour was late, and there were clouds of bats in the sky, in search of the last of the sycamore fruit in the arid ravines below. The center of the hottest time would soon be upon us, and the air grew heavy with heat, thick as a curtain.

I crept closer, hiding behind a citron tree that no longer bore the etrog fruit. Though the tree was stunted and leafless, the bark still sent out a peculiar fragrance, sharp and sweet at the same time.

I saw that the men had hold of a large urn, formed of simple dun-colored ceramic, the kind in which they stored their scrolls. They buried it carefully, softly chanting, then were quick to replace the sanctified ground. Their chants brought them to a place of ecstasy, and they rocked back and forth, raising the strands of their knotted prayer shawls to the sky so that God might hear them take joy in their prayers.

I thought about the Essenes’ strange deeds for the rest of the evening. The next night I went back to sift through the shadows. Again they were at work, secretly burying yet another urn.

In the morning I asked my mother what it might mean for pious men to disturb holy ground in such a secret and heedless manner. My mother had been ailing for days, listless and pale, leaving the business of the dovecote to me and Yael and Revka, able to eat little but soup and water. She’d made a tea of bitter vetch and cucumber, green in color, very strong, which she sipped through the day. She could not bear the rising heat and poured water over her head, braiding her wet hair so that it stayed damp against her scalp.

“They’re burying their scrolls because they’re leaving.” She was quite sure of this, for she had studied the Essenes’ ways when they first came to us. Their scrolls were everything to them, the documents of their faith. “They want to make certain their word remains should they perish, and they trust none among us to keep them safe. It’s their way of packing up before they depart.”

“We have to stop her,” I cried, thinking only of my sister. The matter was urgent; we had to rescue her now. I would take a rope to bind her and a scarf to cover her mouth so she couldn’t call out as she had when we ran away from her father. I would ask Yael for the cloak of invisibility, the one she’d used to lead the Man from the North away, so that I might cover my sister from head to toe. If Nahara’s husband came to search for her, he would see only the dew in the grass.

My mother sadly shook her head when I suggested we take action. “It cannot be done. Do you think I didn’t see her fate as well as yours?”

My mother’s damp hair shone in the dark. Lately, she could not drink enough water and was parched throughout the day. She had taken to wearing a black shawl. Her hands and legs were swollen, and her skin was dull, yet still she was beautiful. Some men said the sky paled before her and that in the World-to-Come the angels would be hesitant to call her to their side for fear her beauty would blind them.

“The moment I met the Essene I knew he was the one who would tempt her with the path she must not travel. I saw her destruction as I saw yours. Why do you think I sent him from the dovecote?”

“I don’t understand.”

I felt a sort of fury inside me. All along my mother had told me that I was the one to be unwound by love, not Nahara. I had changed the direction of my life not once but twice, simply because she had told me to do so. I had done her bidding without question, without doubt. I thought of how we had burned my garments on the shore of the Salt Sea, how I had denied who I was, willing to do anything to please her. I had turned away from Amram. Unable to reveal my true nature, I now felt little for him.

“You told me I was the one who must stay away from love. Now you’re saying it’s also Nahara’s fate? And what of Adir? Has that been written as well?”

My mother glanced away, but I grabbed her arm. She winced and turned back to me. I realized I was stronger. I was no longer afraid of her powers. I wasn’t duty-bound to keep promises to a woman who had told me only lies.

“Tell me God’s truth, not yours. Is this the fate of all your children?”

“It was me,” my mother admitted. Her voice was hoarse; she seemed fragile and distracted. “It was my fate. Whomever I loved would be doomed.” The air was murky inside our chamber, as though we were underwater. “I tried not to love you.”

There were tears streaming down my mother’s face as she said this, yet I had no pity. She had destroyed the person I might have been had she not interfered with my destiny. My entire life had been based on her lies.

“You succeeded,” I said coldly.

“I wanted to protect you. From love and, also, from me.”

I thought she might be crying, but I didn’t care. “And did you try not to love Ben Ya’ir?” I remarked rudely.

“Oh, no,” she said. “In that matter I had no choice.” She lifted her eyes to me. For once she presented me with the truth. “I loved him too well.”

THE GOAT HOUSE was empty when I arrived. The field there was little more than rocks; the grass had dried into shreds, worthless yellow tufts. Unlike the day of Nahara’s marriage, when she’d held her body against the door to bar our way, the door now swung open easily. These people had not believed in locks, for the only key that mattered to them was the one Moses had used to unlock the many truths of Adonai.

They had so little to take with them, a few goats, the garments they wore, their writing utensils so that they might continue to praise God as the world around them broke apart. Inside, the floor had been swept. I wondered if the broom leaning against the wall had been in Nahara’s hands. I took it in my own hands for that reason, but the wood was cold. There was not a crumb to be seen; even the rats that had lately come upon us would have little reason to search in the corners of this chamber or beneath the neat beds of straw. In the yard, the clothesline was still strung between two date trees, a thick rope made of goat hair I might have used to tie my sister, binding her to us had I been quick enough to save her a second time.

From the corner of my eye, I spied a boy behind the tree. Tamar’s son, Yehuda, was weeping on the ground.

“She wouldn’t let me go with her,” he told me.

I saw he had been tied to one of the date palms. His mother had done what I had wished to do in order to keep Nahara here. Now Yehuda was forced to remain with us, where Tamar hoped he would be safe.

Abba had decided that his people could not be party to our war. It did not matter that they did not directly engage in battle. Their eyes must not witness our storehouse of weapons. They could not abide here willingly if they knew it was our intent to fight the legion should we be attacked. And so it had been decreed, a message sent from God above. They could no longer eat the fruit from our orchards or drink the water from our cisterns or approve of us in any way. If there were children of darkness and children of light, and if there raged a constant battle between the two, then they had drawn a line between us, even though their foremothers, Rachel and Sarah and Rebecca and Leah, were ours as well, even though we prayed to the same God, He who had no equal. We could not claim the same world.

I untied Yehuda and brought him to Revka’s house. There were rope burns on his arms, for he had desperately tried to escape his bonds. I asked if Revka might tend to him in his grief. He was a dark-haired boy, with liquid eyes and a large, distinctive head, already straining to be a man, humiliated by his mother’s decision to leave him behind. Revka’s grandsons knew him well, and Yehuda seemed comforted to be with them, though his eyes still welled with tears.

I went on to the wall so that I might watch the treacherous path the Essenes had chosen. They were headed toward a cave perched on the mountain where the cliffs were all but impossible to navigate. Hyenas had lived there, and it would be filthy inside, rife with their leavings and scattered bones. A herd of ibex startled when the Essenes came upon them. The wild goats raced sideways in their effort to flee, rocks flung from under their hooves, a curtain of dust rising as boulders rolled into the valley below.

In the swirl of dust, I could have sworn I spied Domah, the angel of the grave, whose very name means silence, the one who visits the dead to ask for the soul’s true name before the spirit can travel on. But when the air cleared, I saw only the Essenes in their white robes, barefoot despite the harshness of the land, ignoring the thornbushes that grew there and the scorpions that rested beneath the rocks. I thought I could see Nahara following the men, a shawl covering her head, her eyes gazing upward, as if she trusted the path completely and had no fear that she might fall.

But it was another woman, one whose name I’d never learned, not my sister at all.

* * *

ON THE FIRST DAY of the month of Av, Yael came to our table. It was the time of year that brought us little more than tears and salt. We were all wary in the month when both Temples had fallen, on the same date Moses is said to have broken the tablets given to him by God when he came upon his people worshiping an idol, the ninth of Av, the Day of Calamity, when evil is released upon us. If ha-olam is the world, and le-olam is forever, then the two are intertwined. Yet in the month of Av the world that was meant to last forever seemed a fragile thing. Stone disintegrated, death haunted us, cities fell.

We did not speak of the slave’s disappearance. We still felt his presence, for the hawk had returned to perch on the sill of the dovecote waiting for the mistress who had so kindly fed him grain from her hand for some time afterward. But that kindness had bound him, and he was a wild thing. Yael chased him away. She did so again and again until he, too, vanished, flying north. On the day he disappeared, Yael left the door of the dovecote open, the way we do when someone dies, to let a spirit free.

Now that the slave was gone, Yael appealed for my mother’s help because she believed it was possible to bring Arieh back to his rightful home without fear of reprisal. Yael had her veil over her hair, the fabric clasped at her throat. I noticed the glimmer of the gold amulet, my mother’s precious gift to her, was gone.

“You continue to make bargains with dead women,” my mother said mournfully. “Have you not learned from the first ghost?”

“Channa is not dead,” I countered, confused.

I had seen her that very afternoon, walking in the plaza with Arieh in her arms, and she had been very much alive. People whispered that she had convinced her husband God had meant for her to have this child, even though she had been barren since their marriage day. She told Ben Ya’ir that the one who had borne him had come begging her to take him in. The boy had been a gift and a blessing from Adonai.

“She is dead to me,” my mother remarked coldly.

“I will do anything to get him back,” Yael vowed. “I thought it would be a small price, a few days apart. I had no idea what she intended.”

My mother shook her head sadly. “If I go against her, I place my own child in danger. Is that what you expect of me in the name of our friendship?”

“I’m not afraid of her,” I said.

My mother gazed at me, then quickly looked away. That was when I knew. I was not the child she wished to protect. I understood what should have been evident for some time. There had been signs that my mother was with child, but I had simply failed to notice what I didn’t wish to see. Of course I knew who the father was. The man who still kept the doves he’d sent to her on the Iron Mountain. She still belonged to him.

“Did you think I was a witch and not a woman?” my mother ventured to ask.

Hurt beyond measure, I shrugged. “Another one for you to destroy with your love.”

Yael flashed me a warning look, then went to kneel beside my mother, begging for her help. “I will never ask for anything more. I swear it.”

“She’s already given you a precious gift,” I said, referring to the amulet. The charm’s absence had gone unnoticed by my mother. I wondered what she would think if she found her gift had been forsaken.

Yael exposed her throat to reveal that the amulet was gone. When she admitted she had given the talisman to Wynn for his protection, I felt shame to have confronted her so.

“Forgive me.” Yael bowed her head before my mother. “He needed it more than I. If you help me now, I won’t ask again,” she vowed.

“But I’ll come to you for something,” my mother confessed. “Trust is worth more than gold, loyalty is the best protection. If I do this for you, when the time comes, will you grant me anything I ask?”

“Anything,” Yael promised.

“Channa is not like the other woman who wanted your child,” my mother warned. “That woman had a heart, though she was dust. This one has none. Believe me, she would see your child murdered before she returned him to you. And she’ll put a curse on mine. Remember that when I come for what I want.”

They took the knife Yael carried with her at all times, and they cut their flesh, then let the drops of blood fall into a cup of oil to be burned before the image of Ashtoreth at our altar. My mother then brought forth a bowl of samtar, the poultice that heals wounds caused by arrows. She coated her body as a warrior might before battle. She took a heap of ashes and another of salt, and the precious balm of Gilead, made from the gum of the turpentine tree. When Yael went to accompany her, my mother stopped her.

Yael was puzzled. “You may need me.”

My mother shook her head. “Not you.” She looked at me, then nodded. “You.”

Though I no longer had any duty to this woman, the mother who had lied to me and betrayed me, there was a child’s fate at stake. And there was something more, something I would not have admitted aloud.

Despite the many ways she had betrayed me, I yearned to be the one she chose.

I covered myself with samtar, as my mother had done, and then with oil. I braided my hair and allowed seven knots to be tied inside my cloak, the number said to repel evil when witchery was before you.

“Do you think she’s a witch?” I wondered.

My mother laughed. “I know that she is.”

IT WAS DUSK when we went, the hour when dark and light are difficult to measure and all things are possible. My mother intended to perform an exorcism. Raphael himself occasionally came to help in such proceedings, and there were rumors that it was he who was so radiant who once instructed an exorcist to burn the heart and liver of a fish to drive away demons. My mother had such ingredients with her now, the dried organs of a fish that had miraculously appeared in a nachal on our travels to this mountain, its sole purpose the exorcism of evil. I shivered when I realized this was what my mother meant to do, for it was a truly dangerous act. Once this world was opened, the exorcist herself could fall prey to evil spirits. There were stories of exorcists who never spoke again, who had lost their hearts as a result of their attempts, found with nothing remaining of them save for a pile of dry bones.

We went along the wall, past the garden. The scent of mint was in the air. We could hear the doves calling. My mother didn’t hesitate when she heard them. A smile crossed her face as she went to kneel beside their cage. She opened the door and I thought she meant to stroke their feathers, as she’d often petted the doves she kept when we were in Moab. Instead, she shook the cage so they came tumbling out. She took one in each hand and raised them up. The moment she let go, they lifted into the sky.

“There’s no use for them anymore,” she murmured as we watched them vanish, as we had done years ago, in another life it seemed.

It came as no surprise when we saw that Yael had followed and was waiting by the wall. She wore a dark veil, as though to disguise herself, but we knew her immediately, and understood why she could not stay away. Perhaps her presence outside the palace would add to our strength.

We went to the door made of cypress wood. My mother leaned in close so she might whisper. I could feel the heat from her body and smell the oil she’d rubbed upon her throat and wrists. As the demon was chased out of the woman we were about to face, we must take the child. In that moment, and only then, would our enemy be powerless.

“She will try to terrify you with her claims, do not listen. She will heap misfortune on you, do not be afraid. There is a missing ingredient that she needs for her powers. It’s something only we have.”

I understood what that ingredient was. My father.

We had made certain to plait our braids tightly, close to our heads, so that the demon we were about to face would be unable to grab us by our hair. We had rubbed pomegranate oil on our arms and legs so that we might slip easily from its grasp. We chanted Abra k’dabra. I will create something from the word. Amen Amen Selah. For the word of our God was what would guide us and would protect us from evil. His song would be our only path, despite any sins we might have committed and any punishments we might deserve. What we believed in, and what we said aloud, we could create before His eyes and in His image.

My mother had streaked her eyelids with lapis and perfumed herself with myrtle and lilies. She lifted her shawl over her head, perhaps to appear modest in her rival’s eyes. Channa would be all the more dumbfounded when she discovered who had come to call.

My mother rapped on the door, lightly, as she might have if she’d had a basket of vegetables to offer, greens, perhaps, or cloves of garlic. We heard a scuffling, but there was no answer. My mother knocked again, more strongly now.

No one came to the door, and there was no longer any sound from inside.

I stepped onto the woodpile and drew myself up. In a corner, I spied the empty cradle. There were only shadows. But the fire was lit. A pot had been set on a metal post to hang above the flame, and the meal within was still cooking. I could smell the lentils and stewing meat.

I took from my cloak the key fashioned from a slip of metal wire. It had worked in the locked door of the tower so that Wynn could be released, perhaps it would once again. My mother stepped away so I might try. It fitted the lock perfectly. The door opened with a click. We went into the chamber where the evening meal that had been set upon the fire would soon enough burn and turn black, for it was bubbling, past readiness. My mother cast the innards of the fish into this stew, and the smoke that arose was a pale green, the color of envy and of betrayal.

Through the haze of the smoke we found a lamp, and although the glow was dim, it worked well enough so that we might find our way. We went along the hall, down the corridor where the frescoes of the seven sisters had been painted by masters from Rome. Each of the sisters was more beautiful than the next, yet none was as beautiful as my mother, not even the silver moon. She drew me to her, and we stood together beneath swatches of ocher and amethyst and sea green. She nodded toward a doorway, urging me to listen. She had done this when we were children, so that we might ascertain the difference between the approaching hooves of her husband’s great steed, Leba, and the sound of any other man’s horse. When my sister’s father was puzzled that we children had run out to greet him long before he arrived, we would tell him that Leba could speak to us, and that the language of horses was easy enough to divine.

Now, in the house of Ben Ya’ir, I heard what I thought was a beetle, the kind they say search for the dead. After a moment I realized it was the rhythmic rasp of someone’s breath. I tapped at my throat, and my mother nodded. We had found the one we searched for.

We followed the sound, pausing when it became more muffled, edging forward when it began again. The breath led us to a small chamber where oil and wine were stored, the tall jars among the last that had belonged to King Herod. The room was dark, but the lamp we carried cast enough light for us to make out the long furrows of shadows. One shadow was like a pool of water that bled toward us in the darkness. She had crouched behind the door, a raven in a dark tunic, hunched down as though she might evade us as easily as dusk fading into a field of blackened trees.

As if magicked, Arieh called out to us. Perhaps he knew his true mother waited nearby. The raven quickly reached to cover his mouth, but he cried out again. He had recognized us, and we took this to be an omen. God was watching over us.

“You have no right to be here,” Channa said when she had little choice but to face us. She stood up, proudly, as though she had not been cowering in the dark with the beetles, a shadow huddled behind a door. “When I call the sentries, you’ll be locked in the tower yourselves. Or perhaps I’ll see you set out in the wilderness. That’s where you belong. You were condemned, yet you think you can come into this house and treat it as your own.”

Channa was eyeing my mother as one might a demon that had crept in through an open window. My mother gave her no answer. She did not argue or respond to these evil words. She stood in the doorway so that Channa could not make an escape. It was too late to hide or shriek. My mother had already begun the exorcism. She spread down two circles of ash, then motioned to me. We stepped inside the circles as she began the Song of the Afflicted. My mother’s voice was lovely, pure and ethereal. At first Channa merely listened, falling under the spell. Perhaps she thought she was being praised, or she had convinced herself that my mother had come to pay tribute, to admit her wrongdoings and eat the salt she now threw toward her rival, as some were said to eat their sins. But our leader’s wife’s eyes opened wide as she heard the words my mother recited.

He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in Him will I trust. Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust: His truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

Perhaps the wings I had always imagined set upon my back had been placed there for my protection by the Almighty, for I felt sheltered, delivered from nets and traps. Whatever my mother said, I repeated with her. Whatever her sins, I forgave her.

Before us, Channa held the baby more tightly as she gazed at my mother in alarm. “You took what should have been mine. He was to give a child to me, not you! Thieves are murdered for their deeds, not forgiven. You can’t place a curse on me.”

My mother continued the song of the Almighty, praising Him and asking for His light.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day. Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.

I listened, enthralled. Amen Amen Selah. My voice rang out, echoing my mother’s. Channa turned to me. When she looked into my eyes, she saw her husband in my gaze. I took a step backward when faced with her meanness of spirit.

“Stay in the circle,” my mother warned.

Now Channa knew me for who I was. She crept closer, the better to see me. Here I was, the child she had set into the wilderness for the ravens to peck at and the jackals to feast upon.

“You should have been mine,” she told me. She threw my mother a brutal look. Her breathing was so labored it was difficult to hear her, but we heard enough. “You are the destroyer and the sin before God’s name.”

Her voice was hoarse, wrenched from inside her. Her words pierced me as no weapon could; still I did as my mother advised and kept within the circle. I refused to hear the poison set upon me by her envy. I heard only my mother’s song. I could see the words she uttered becoming visible in the air between us, incandescent, written by faith.

Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under thy feet.

Channa was beginning to reveal who she was and what wickedness she was willing to undertake. “Arieh belongs to me! A covenant was made with the mother, before God!”

She, who had sent us into the wilderness so that we might be taken into the arms of Death when my mother was thirteen years old and I only newly born, grabbed for a knife and held it at Arieh’s throat. I started toward the child, but again, my mother grabbed my arm.

Not yet, she whispered.

Channa was clutching Arieh so tightly he let out a hurt little yowl. I was grateful that Yael was not present and could not see the demon revealing itself to us. The moment would soon be upon us when she had no power at all.

“You haven’t taken enough from me that you need to take this child as well? I’ll see him in the World-to-Come before I see him with you.”

There was sweat upon my mother’s brow. Her lips moved as she repeated the song. No wonder men were transfixed by her and angels came to speak to her. No wonder the rain did her bidding and even the daughter she had betrayed would do anything she asked.

My mother’s black cloak fell open. It was the moment when we all became who we were in the eyes of Adonai. Channa was outraged to see that my mother was with child. Her breathing worsened, rasping, as though a hand was at her throat, keeping air from her as she had kept my father from us. A sound emanated from her that was without words, a wounded, bloody cry. It was the demon.

That was when I went forth on behalf of the stolen child, snatching him from her with such force that she stumbled, slipping in the place where my mother had piled the salt which would contain the evil within her. My mother had no fear in her expression as she watched her enemy falter.

Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore I will deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name.

“You witch,” the wife of our leader cried.

He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honor him. With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my salvation.

“Take him,” Channa said of Arieh, all but broken before us. “Do whatever you want with him. But you can’t have my husband.”

I took the child and ran with him so that his true mother might rejoice over him in the palace yard. Later, we would make a feast to celebrate and sing his praises, but now there was only one voice as I heard my mother dismiss our enemy. For it was she, neither an angel nor a witch, but a woman who was no longer afraid to speak, who faced her rival and proclaimed, “I’ve had him all along.”

* * *

TRADESMEN CAME to us from beyond the Salt Sea, bringing spices and incense, herbs and seeds. We were desperate for their wares, haggling over chicory and sorrel, trading silver coins and semiprecious stones for such condiments. One of the traders had with him a huge black dog, a mastiff from Asia. This creature went to the place where my brother often camped beside the barracks when he’d been an errand boy for the warriors, enthralled by their courage and their deeds. Now Adir was among the men, gone from us, yet something of his essence must have lingered here, for the huge, shaggy dog refused to be removed. He threw back his head and howled. The dog was an omen, that much was evident, good or bad I did not know.

I looped a rope around his large head so he would stop his howling, then led him to our chamber, where I tied him outside. The dog watched after me, yelping until I returned, offering water. When the tradesman to whom he belonged came for him, the black dog refused to go. He ran forward and bit his owner, then hid behind my legs, peering out, bowing his huge muzzle and head, whining.

“You’ve ruined my beast,” the tradesman shouted. “He was fierce, now he’s a sheep.”

The tradesman came from the eastern side of the Salt Sea. I knew the tones in which he spoke, the accent of my first father. The voice of Moab was beautiful to hear, even though the tradesman cursed me. When I answered him in kind, suggesting that the dog had made his choice and had perhaps been mistreated, the traveler was stunned at my knowledge of his speech. He accepted a few coins in exchange for the creature.

I did not wish to have a dog, yet he often accompanied me to the wall in the evenings as I kept watch over the valley with the other women, waiting for the warriors to return. I called him Eran, which means watchful, for the name suited this enormous and quiet creature. When I clicked my tongue, as I had for my horse in another world and time, he followed me. He did not bark or growl, nor did he beg at our table. I felt he would bring us luck; perhaps his fate and my brother’s were bound together. When my mother didn’t insist we be rid of him, though she disliked dogs and thought them little better than jackals, and when she set out a bowl of bread and milk, my brother’s favorite foods, I knew she agreed.

There came a night when Eran began to bark and would not be comforted no matter how I tried to silence him. Soon my mother awoke. We both had the same sense of dread and together went to the wall in the dark. There were other women there as well, many in tears, for they also had experienced omens. One had woken from a dream sent to her by the angel Gabriel, in which her dead father had ordered her to station herself beside the gate. Another had heard a bat, the sign of vigilance and of stealth, flirting through her chamber.

Near dawn we could make out the warriors returning; we saw the dust arise before we viewed their figures. When they began to climb the serpent’s path, our hearts lifted, then dropped. I was relieved to see Amram, but the slight figure he carried over his shoulder was my brother. I recognized his tunic and his cloak.

Our men had followed the Romans. There had been a skirmish, and our warriors had bested the modest troop of exploratores, whom they had outnumbered, sending them into retreat. Several of the unprepared soldiers of the legion had been slain despite the protection of their mail armor and bronze helmets. The rebels had done well, but Adir had been felled by a spear, and his wound was deep; he was aflame with fever. His dark hair was snarled, and his eyes, with their yellow flares, so like his father’s and Nahara’s, were runny and pale.

We took him to our chamber, where my mother bathed his listless body. His fever had turned him cold, as if Shalgiel, the angel of snow, had embraced him and brought him low. My mother told me to quickly burn Adir’s garments. We did this to protect ourselves from the demons who might spread disease, but we also burned the cloaks of the dead in this manner. Perhaps this was why I could not bring myself to do as I’d been told. Instead I washed my brother’s tunic and cloak in a bucket, then hung them on the clothesline behind the empty goat house where the Essenes had lived.

Our people cleansed their hands before every meal, before every cup of wine, before we cut a loaf of bread in two. We did so for good reason. Demons could enter an individual who was unclean, and the fire of a demon manifested itself as a fever. My mother instructed me to wear a scarf across my face when I tended to my brother. We washed our hands with a soap made of lye and ashes until our skin was raw. Every morning my mother brewed a tea of bay leaf, rose oil, and hot pepper. Although my brother made a face after a sip of the brew, he did as he was told and drank. A poultice of samtar, combined with reita, the cure made from wheat, was packed inside his cleaned wound.

My mother burned oil at the altar of Ashtoreth. She found a single lily growing in an abandoned garden, the rare bulb planted there a hundred years earlier by the gardeners of the king so that the petals and stems could be burned in a green flame for the glory of God.

Redeem this child and save him from all afflictions.

My mother took two doves from their nest that were so beautiful they themselves knew of their own beauty and proudly preened before their kind. She sacrificed them to the Queen of Heaven, though our people were no longer to make sacrifices, even to Adonai, now that the Temple was destroyed. She wiped the blood from her hands carefully to make certain there wasn’t a stain.

Allow him to become a man and sing glorious songs of praise to our Lord and king, our mighty God. Amen Amen Selah. May He keep you from all evil and allow you to dwell in Jerusalem in holiness and in peace.

Adir had been a boy who’d been eager for war; what he’d found was a grim surprise. He returned to us quiet and melancholy. Even after his fever passed, his leg remained affected by his wound. He could not stand steadily, and this especially brought him grief. The only one who could cheer him was the huge dog I commanded to stay at his side. Because of this, my mother insisted I wash the creature so that his filth might not bring demons to my brother in his current weakened state. I brought Eran into the plaza and threw handfuls of water at him, then covered him with lye soap while he stood there impassively, though he might easily have bolted from my grasp.

“Is this who took my place?”

Amram came behind me and surprised me with his embrace. I allowed his arms to encircle me, though I felt an odd reserve. As we stood together, the dog barked and growled.

“Stop,” I told Eran, but he wouldn’t be quieted, and this worried me, for he had never seemed so ferocious before. Whatever his reason, he did not like the man before him.

“My rival,” Amram teased. “If he bites me, I’ll have to bite him back.”

I tied the dog to the stump of a date tree, then pulled Amram aside so we might have some privacy.

“You must tell the warriors my brother can’t go out again.”

Amram laughed. “All warriors must go when they’re called upon. You know that. And he’s one of us now.” Amram then took from his tunic the blue square of fabric that was his token for luck. “At least you don’t have to worry for me. When I leave again, I’ll find my way back.”

I wanted to command him, but I knew Amram wasn’t a man who would do a woman’s bidding. It was I who must make certain my brother remained safe. I made a vow to myself as I stood there in the plaza, though I said nothing to Amram. Adir would not be among them when the next raiding party went out. I would make sure of it.

When Amram set out to fight, another warrior would walk beside him.

* * *

I ASKED for her favor, and Yael did not deny me, for I was the one who had placed her son back in her arms. I had snatched him from the sinister woman who wished so desperately to be his mother she had convinced herself that she was. Yael waited for me in the plaza, where heat waves rose from the earth, the baby at her hip. Since Arieh had been returned to her, she refused to let him out of her sight for long. If she needed help and Revka and I were at work at the dovecote, she would occasionally leave him with her father, who had taken a liking to the child. He had made amends with Yael in the way he cherished her son. Perhaps he thought he had a second chance to forge another warrior. I’d overheard Revka ask why Yael allowed this man to be included in her son’s life when he’d been so cruel to her. Yael said he was a changed man now, beaten down by the desert and by his age.

“When I see him with Arieh,” Yael admitted, “I see the man he might have been had he not lost the one he loved most in this world.”

Arieh’s safety was assured while he was in the care of a grandfather who had been among the great Sicarii of Jerusalem, for the assassin’s knife was still hidden within his cloak, even though he was now delegated to clean weapons. It was he I wanted to see, and I asked Yael to lead me to his chamber. The assassin had disapproved of me as unworthy of his son. Perhaps Yael imagined I wished to win him over. But a man such as he could not be easily convinced, and in fact I wanted no such thing.

“You remember Aziza,” Yael said to her father.

Yosef bar Elhanan looked up, appraising me with a cool glance. I wondered how many men he had murdered, if the rush of blood had ever humbled him or made him seek forgiveness. He took the baby on his lap, then nodded. “The shedah,” he said.

He meant to insult me, but I smiled prettily. Such things as smiles can be weapons as well.

Yael went to make tea, though she feared leaving me at her father’s mercy.

“I’m used to such men,” I assured her, for indeed I knew that among men words were not nearly as perilous as the ones women spoke.

The assassin ignored me and tended to the child with unexpected affection. I leaned forward so only Bar Elhanan would hear, for what I was about to say was far too intimate a request for anyone passing by to overhear.

“I want you to teach me to be invisible,” I told him.

The old man had been jiggling Arieh on his knees, much to the baby’s delight. I half-expected him to feign deafness when I informed him of what I wanted, but he was curious when I made my request and couldn’t resist knowing more. He stared at me rudely, giving me no more respect then he would a common zonah.

“Why would I do this?” he asked.

“So I can protect your son and my own brother.”

“My son is lost to me because of you.”

I knew distance still remained between Bar Elhanan and his son, but I wasn’t afraid to talk back to him and stand my ground. If I slunk away under the heat of his words, he would never respect me.

“If he’s lost to you, it’s because you’re too lazy to go and find him.”

The assassin chuckled and shook his head sadly. “True. I shut the door to him, and now I wonder why he doesn’t walk through it.”

I had hit upon his heart, for it turned out that he had one, so I dared to continue.

“I want to take my brother’s place, for it should have been my place to begin with.”

The assassin snorted a laugh. His weathered face showed only amusement. He seemed to believe I was there to entertain him with foolish tales. He would have begun to admonish me to keep to women’s work had I not learned what my sister’s father had taught me. You are only worthy of what you prove yourself to be. Before the assassin could dismiss me, I reached for the blade I carried. I leapt to stand behind him, placing the knife at his throat. Though it was forbidden to grab at me, Bar Elhanan had committed far worse sins. He ably grasped my arm and twisted it backward, nearly breaking it, all the while holding the baby on his knee. We were both breathing hard.

“For what cause did you come to murder me?” he demanded to know.

“That was not my purpose.”

He let go, and I faced him once more. He gazed at me, confused.

“Are you a woman?” he said thoughtfully, impressed and puzzled by my quickness with a weapon.

“Most of the time,” I answered.

Fortunately, he laughed. “I am nothing here,” he told me. “But if you want to learn to clean spears and armor, then I’m your man.”

“No. I want more,” I said. “I want to be invisible.”

By the time Yael had returned with the tea, her father had decided he would allow me to borrow his cloak. When we left, he suggested I visit him on the following day. I was interested in cleaning weaponry, he told Yael when she looked at him questioningly, and he had much to teach me.

ON THE DAY we were to leave we entered the month of Elul, a time of introspection before the holiest days come to us. I awoke in the dark while my brother, still healing, his leg bandaged, dozed on his pallet. I hurried to the goat house and dressed in his garments, burying my own beneath a pile of straw. I had been practicing weaponry daily with the old assassin, an uncompromising teacher. I was a puzzlement to him, but he was grateful that someone, even I, would ask to see his great skill. It bothered him not at all if I was harmed during our practice. His manner was remote, his methods cruel, but he had instructed me well.

The dog followed me while I retrieved my brother’s tunic and cloak, waiting patiently. I thought perhaps he was at my side because he imagined I was Adir, or perhaps he assumed I was gathering a meal for him. Yet when I shooed him away, he insisted on traipsing along to the barracks. In the dark I dressed in armor, a sheet of silver scales. I wore my head scarf tied low on my forehead so that my face was obscured and I might appear to be my brother in the other warriors’ eyes. Sure enough, a fellow named Uri came out and told me which spears to collect for the others. I did so willingly.

I had brought along only a small pack containing figs and pistachios and hard cheese, along with the gray cloak. The old assassin had taught me the tricks of invisibility, how to walk in shadow, how to step without making a sound, how to slip from the grasp of another’s attack in a blur of fog. At the end of our time together, he had proclaimed me a worthy student, although he assured me I would not make a good wife for Amram.

“They can say you’re a woman, but you’re something else.” The assassin was aging, but he was still clear-eyed, and his glance was piercing.

“A shedah?” I tried to make a joke of it.

He might have laughed, but he didn’t. “A warrior,” he said.

I bowed in gratitude, and left him there to clean other men’s weapons.

THERE WERE SIXTY of us who left that day, a raiding party led by Ben Ya’ir himself. My heart raced to think that I was now to be one of my father’s men, and that I was to follow him and perhaps bring some pride to him. I tied Eran to a post, but he shrank out of his rope and chased after me. Because he refused to leave my side, I used the huge dog as one might pack a donkey with belongings, enlisting a thick rope so I might tie spears onto either side of his body. Certainly, the beast was as strong as a donkey, and nearly as stubborn.

As we went through the gate, I was at the rear of the column. I could see the man who was my father in the lead and, behind him, Amram and his friends. I knew Amram even from a far distance, for he had attached the blue square to his armor. I could glimpse it as we made our way down the twisted path.

The heat was blistering, and the sky blazed white. I was unused to the armor I now wore, and the bulk of it made my gait awkward. The people of my sister’s father had never worn anything that might have weighed them down. The lighter they were, the more fleet, able to dart in and out of battle; only their horses were protected by metal masks and chest pieces, for the tribesmen knew the value of such creatures. I longed for the horse that had been given to my brother, or the great warhorse Leba, who could always find his way home and had no need of a bridle. On horseback I would have been flying; now I trudged along.

The footpath was treacherous for the careless. Dust rose into our faces, and the rocks slid out beneath our feet. I stayed to myself, Eran at my side, and let the other warriors interpret my demeanor as shyness. As we went along, several men applauded me for my willingness to set forth so soon after my wound. They praised Eran as well, saying that a man whose dog was loyal to him was one you wanted beside you in battle. I dipped my head in gratitude, giving thanks in silence. Whoever gives his true self away does so with words.

We were setting forth in the direction of Ein Gedi. West of that place there was said to be a band of travelers who had settled among the local people and had in their possession gold and gem-stones, oil and frankincense. On the mountain we were suffering from great poverty. When our walls fell down, we repaired them with mud and straw; when our lamps were without oil, we let them remain dark; when there was not enough wood, we used the waste of donkeys for our fires. We ate not stew or boiled meat but gruel, a thin mixture of barley flavored with the flesh of the few doves we had to spare for our meals. Our warriors had no choice but to take what they needed from villages and camps, so our people might live. It was no different than what I had done alongside Nahara’s father. This was our country, and we were its kings, and those who entered were wise to understand they were at our mercy.

We walked until we were tired, sleeping in the open. The night was brisk, and I was glad for the dog’s presence, for I lay beside him and he warmed me. I watched Amram from beneath the cover of my cloak and my armor, but I was careful not to reveal myself. I kept my head down so that he would not see the scar he thought was a teardrop. I used the tricks I’d perfected in Moab, going off alone to relieve myself, never shirking my duties, speaking rarely and, when I did, only in a dull voice. They all came to accept me as Adir.

As soon as I could, I went off to hunt. I shot a young ibex, and when the buck stumbled upon being struck by my arrow, I went to him and slit his throat so that his spirit might rise painlessly and with dignity. When I brought my kill back to camp, draped over my shoulders, Amram himself came to butcher the creature with me.

“You have good aim, little brother,” he said to me.

My heart was hitting against my chest. I was both afraid that he would know me and perhaps more frightened that he would not. I swallowed my words and nodded simply in reply. My hands shook because of his nearness to me, and my deceit. I felt at that moment I was so clearly a woman that I was announcing myself with every breath I took. But I was not recognized. He clapped me on the shoulder heartily and still did not feel how hard my heart was beating.

I couldn’t blame Amram for not recognizing me when I had taken such care to disguise myself. The old assassin had taught me that men never see what is right before their eyes. They look in corners and under rocks, but if you are standing in front of them, they will pass you by, believing you to be no more than an olive tree, a part of the landscape and nothing more. Bar Elhanan had learned this as he skulked through the courtyards of the Temple, searching out his enemies. Disappear into something, he instructed me. Become not what you are but what is around you. A stone, a shadow, one archer among many. Mice are unseen because they cloak themselves in the darkness so often that, when they do step out before you, they appear as shadows. A shadow is viewed with the mind, not the eye, he told me. That is how you convince those around you to see you as you wish to be seen.

I had taken to wearing the assassin’s cloak in the evenings when I walked with the dog. There were rock hyrax living in burrows, and the hoof marks of ibex traveling through, in search of the waterfalls nearby, the place where it was said King David once made his camp. It was there Moringa Peregrina, the orchid with pink-white blooms that appeared every spring, could be found. David is said to have written over three hundred songs, one for every day of the year. There were no orchids where I wandered; only scrubby myrrh grew on the limestone cliffs. I plucked some out and tucked it beneath my cloak, as women often do for the value of its fresh scent, making certain to avoid the sharp stems.

The others left me to myself, accepting my reserved demeanor, while they prepared for the battle to come, testing their weapons, drinking what little wine they had brought along to sustain them. I was not the only one who was withdrawn. There was another warrior who remained on the edges of camp, refusing to eat from the ibex I had brought down, choosing to fast instead. I stumbled upon him when I went off to relieve myself far from the camp, as I did every night. This warrior recoiled from human contact; he needed no comfort, no cloak to warm him, no brothers-at-arms.

The dog did not growl when we came upon the one they called the Man from the Valley, who wound his flesh with metal. Though this went against our laws, no one dared to condemn him for his savage ways. His white braids belied his youth and were so long they trailed down his back. The other warriors said that in battle God was able to lift him out of danger, grabbing on to his hair to keep him from harm. That was why he was able to walk into a raging conflict and walk back out again, when any other man would have been slain. His flesh was covered with scars, many untended and unhealed. The metal dug into his muscular arms and left bands of blue and purple wounds.

He was kneeling beside a thornbush when I came upon him, chanting the mourning song for the dead, holding on to the sharp branches that pierced his skin to cause himself more pain. I had never seen a man so open in his agony. I felt that I could weep at the sight of him; instead I ran away.

I grabbed Eran by his neck, and together we fled far from that place, racing as if we were horses. The dust rose up, and the hyrax in their burrows hid from us. The tawny owls rose into the air above the cliffs; rattailed bats shuddered up from the jujube trees in a cloud of flesh and wings, forsaking the orange fruit on the branches.

The next day the man I’d stumbled upon was staring at me. I knew that no warrior wished to fight alongside him, for he cared not at all for his own life. He wielded his ax and no other weapon, but that ax was said to be blessed and could not miss its target. I gazed away from him, not wishing to reveal my true nature, or in any way to set a light to the fire of his fearsome rage, said to be so violent and unquenchable his brethren whispered that he fought at the right hand of Gabriel, the fiercest of all angels.

That evening we prepared for the night raid. I’d been made dizzy with the heat and the weight of my own subterfuge, along with the heavy, silver-scaled armor. We stood in line for our share of water under the harshness of the fading sun. When I asked for a portion for my dog, the fellow in charge of our rations shook his head.

“He’ll have to drink the dirt,” I was told. “There’s not enough to give the beast his share.”

I went away, troubled. I shared the provisions I’d brought with my dog and had thrown him the bones of the ibex. Nahara’s father had taught me that you feed your horse before you feed yourself, but I had barely water enough for my own parched throat. I had come to be a warrior, now I found my greatest concern was a creature I had not wanted in the first place. As I was worrying over what I might do, the Man from the Valley approached. Again the dog failed to growl. The warrior put down his share of water in its cup. He nodded to Eran.

“He’ll be thirsty,” he said.

I mumbled some words of gratitude, then asked, did he himself not need to drink?

“Water doesn’t quench my thirst,” the Man from the Valley told me. And then, for no apparent reason, he said, “Don’t go tonight.”

Clearly he thought I was a callow boy; to him I was my brother, Adir, who’d been wounded and had little experience in battle. He need not have worried for me. “I’ve fought men many times,” I assured him. “And they’ve suffered because of it.”

He nodded. His glance didn’t meet mine. “But this is your first time among us. You haven’t been at war. You haven’t raided a village.”

That was true, the bloodshed I’d known on the eastern side of the Salt Sea had been on the grasslands, along the King’s Highway.

“It’s my duty to go,” I said simply.

I felt his glance upon me, but I looked away now to hide the truth of who I was.

“When the time comes,” the warrior all others avoided advised me, “stand beside me.”

A MIST had come up to cover the ground as my gray cloak covered me. This was considered an omen of good fortune, for it would allow us to surprise our enemies. My bow was readied as we came down upon the village where the travelers were. The air had cooled, but the ground was still burning from the heat of that day. The earth itself seemed to have a beating heart, and the thudding of my pulse met its rhythm. I saw Eleazar ben Ya’ir in the dark. He was saying a prayer, and he wore his prayer shawl, for he fought for the glory of God. He gathered us together a last time. Before him we resolved to be one in battle. We vowed we would never take slaves.

“We would not want our women and children enslaved,” Ben Ya’ir said. “We do the same for those we meet in battle.”

People said that our leader had seen those closest to him crucified in Jerusalem, brothers and friends, dying in agony before him. Afterward, the Romans had cut the heads from the bodies and tossed them into the road for the mourners, but without bodies there could be no lamentations, no burials, no peace. Ben Ya’ir spoke the words of our God.

Whoever is disheartened should go back home, for he might cause the heart of his fellows to melt as his does.

But our home was Jerusalem, and Zion had fallen, and not a single warrior turned away from the battle to come. I saw Amram lift his spear along with the others to cheer and honor our leader’s words. Only the Man from the Valley did not join them in prayer or in their fevered shouts. Perhaps he had already said prayers of his own. Perhaps the single prayer he recited was a song for the departed. He did not wear a prayer shawl or even a robe, merely a tunic and the metal he wound around his arms. He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.

We went in stillness as the moon began to rise. I followed near Amram, so that I might keep watch over him, the dog at my heels, the great beast as silent as we were. The heart of the earth was pounding. The world was shrouded in silence until we came upon the guards. Then there was a wild shout and instantly the frantic calls of men in the village. Quickly, the shouting became deafening and the fray began. I went to one knee and began to work my bow, doing my best to ensure the safety of those who went before me. I killed two men right away, and they fell before Amram. Perhaps he thought an angel was beside him, for he gave thanks to God right there.

My dog barked whenever the enemy neared. His warning allowed me to know in what direction I should aim, for there were men approaching from every angle and chaos all around. I might have panicked but for Eran, and I vowed to keep him close from then on.

Our warriors had the best of the townspeople before long; the bodies of the slain were everywhere. I spied the Man from the Valley, a whirlwind with his ax. In the midst of four of the enemy, he brought each one down, then stood among them, appearing to dare their corpses to rise again and battle once more. When yet another villager raced at him, leaping upon his back, he calmly drew his enemy from him and split him open with his ax. The Man from the Valley looked for the next to be slain, diving into the chaos with an intensity that belied the danger around him, his weapon readied. I could feel my blood racing and a kind of joy rising inside me as I shot a man who dashed toward him. I thought that, if my father knew how many had fallen to my arrows, he would be proud to take me to him as his son.

The night was hot with blood, the ground slick, the scent of death everywhere. There were locusts in the air, humming and rising before us. Because I wore silver-scaled armor beneath my cloak, my limbs ached and were heavy, and I was drenched with sweat. I used my head scarf to wipe the film from my eyes, rising from my knees.

In that moment when I lowered my bow, it was as if I had stepped outside the battle. Perhaps I watched as the angels did, removed and distant but holding the ability to see far more than the men who were embroiled in the fight. My hazy vision made me disbelieve what was before me. We had slaughtered the men who had come to defend themselves, along with the travelers in their blue cloaks, men from Moab who had journeyed here to trade spices and dried fruit. There were no acacia branches to burn in their honor, therefore their spirits would not wish to leave their bodies. I was pained to know they would be trapped in a netherworld, far from the Iron Mountain, for no other men would rise from the blood that had been spilled, blood that was as red as ours until it pooled blackly in the earth.

The night had become a dream. The battle now was to force myself to wake from what was before me, for beyond the piles of dead men was something far more terrible than the corpses of warriors. Our men had begun to kill the women who ran from the houses. It was impossible, we did not believe in such cruelty, yet I knew it was true because I heard the voices of the slaughtered. Theirs were the screams of women, and yet there was worse still. Beneath those screams, I heard the cries of children. When I spied Amram, he became a part of the dream, changing before me into a demon, his face a demon’s face, his deeds a demon’s doings.

Our leader had said there were to be no slaves taken. I had understood this to mean we would let the women and children be, but that was not how warfare was practiced in this sorrowful world. The dog was going mad, yelping and barking, distraught as no beast should be. I held him around the back of his neck and bade him stay, breaking my nails on his rough fur. I felt maddened, as he was, by the sights before me and the wild death calls of the innocent. I nearly leapt in, but on our enemies’ behalf, against my own people. I had the urge to fight the men I’d come here with, my brethren. Confused amid the rising bloodshed, I suddenly had no idea why we believed we had the right to take what these people had, other than the fact that we wanted it and assumed we were entitled to what belonged to others, as the robbers had once wanted me and my mother and all we possessed.

I stood there, encircled by the destruction, escaping my own death by the grace of God. I no longer cared to fight, nor had I the stomach for it. I closed my eyes and waited for Mal’ach ha-Mavet to come for me, as he was meant to do when my mother and I were sent into the wilderness. Perhaps I was never intended to live past that day when Eleazar’s wife disposed of us and had been wrong to elude my fate.

I would never know if the Angel of Death meant to approach on this night of battle, for the Man from the Valley gripped me by my cloak and pulled me after him, out of Death’s grasp. Eran and I went with him, even though I could barely breathe, my heart heavy inside me, beating much too fast. I bit my lip until there was more blood to come, until it was my own. I wanted the taste of it. I deserved it.

The warrior led me to a ridge where the haze of the evening had dissipated. He had many wounds from this battle, but he paid no attention to them, just as he made no mention of the fact that I wept. We could see the massacre from here. The houses in the village were made of stone; soon they would be emptied completely. Everything these people owned would belong to us. I took off my helmet and my bloodstained cloak. I understood now that the Man from the Valley had told me not to go because he had known what might happen. He would not murder women and children and refused to see their blood shed. He’d known I was a woman, yet he’d said nothing. He’d known what his commander wanted of him, yet he’d done God’s bidding instead.

Of all who were before me, he was the only one I wished to stand beside.

THEY LET the donkeys live, heaping them with the possessions that now belonged to us, the ginger and pepper, the gourds and leeks, all manner of wine and oil and wheat, small amounts of gold, earrings and rings taken from homes and from corpses, heaps of precious cinnamon, lamps, stacks of weaponry. They took the goats and the sheep and killed the chickens. They filled leather containers with water and cheese. Everything smelled like blood.

I went back to the village to gather my arrows. They were easy to find among the slaughtered, a field of red lilies I had left behind. All I needed was to pluck them one by one from the chests and backs of the fallen. I took nothing else. While others gathered the rings from cold fingers, the wine from the storerooms, I washed the blades of my arrows in a bowl of water taken from a rain barrel, reciting a prayer as I did so, entreating Adonai not to cause those who had died tonight to suffer any further torment, pleading for Him to keep them safe from the three gates of Gehennom, the valley of hell. I could not look into the faces of the slain women and children, but I began to search among the men from Moab for those I might know.

Amram came by, covered with sweat and dried blood. “Don’t bother,” he said to me as I turned over the bodies of my sister’s father’s people. “They’re all the same.”

BEN YA’IR spoke to the warriors as the last of the night settled around us. I could not abide to be among them. People said that he thanked God, then praised his men for their bravery. He instructed his warriors to say prayers for the souls of the dead and told them that, in another time and place, if our enemies from Rome had not forced us into starvation and poverty, we would have called our victims our brothers.

By that hour we had moved into the high desert, making haste so that we could not be found by any of the townspeople who might have been absent during the raid, returning with vengeance in their hearts. The warriors prayed to God and then killed a goat for their supper. To me the goat’s cries sounded like those of a woman. I huddled beside my dog, covering my ears, rocking back and forth on my haunches. The radiance of the Shechinah, the light and compassion of the Almighty, was nowhere near this campground. Here, we were surrounded by what some called the other side, the dark realm, for on this night we had wandered onto the evil side of the world that was also born from creation, that terrible region which could be found at the left hand of God and fed on human sin.

I had planned to lie beside Amram that night after our victory, to bring his hands beneath my cloak so that I might finally let him know who I was and give myself to him, but I did no such thing. I was sick to my stomach and sick at heart. I went into the desert and brought up everything I had eaten since I’d left my mother’s house. The taste was sour, as if I had spat out a demon. I was glad my brother had not been among us. Adir, who had such a gentle spirit, yet wanted nothing more than to be among the warriors, had been spared the sight of the cowardly actions of those he so admired.

The white cliffs were invisible in the dark. Everything was hidden. I now understood it was our duty as human beings to see behind the veil to the inside of the world, to the heart of things.

I glimpsed the Man from the Valley and went to stand beside him. There was a circle of thornbushes, and larks were sheltered in the cluster of branches. We heard the others’ voices singing, but their songs meant nothing to us. Every bit of the stained earth we walked upon seemed a part of the territory of transgression, where enemies were subdued at any cost. No acacias grew here. There was no way to help the souls of the dead find peace.

Today I had seen my beloved kill a child who could not have been more than four. It seemed nothing to him to do so, but everything to me. Other than the stars in the sky, I could not see any image but the face of the child who’d been murdered, for he now lived behind my eyes and would be a part of my vision forever-more. Every time I looked at Amram, it was that child I would see.

I wished I had been a woman and had stayed at home.

“Did you not think this was what the world was like?” the Man from the Valley said to me.

My dog lay at my feet. There was blood on his fur. By daylight flies would be swarming over him and he would look monstrous. Eran had never once deserted me in the bloody turmoil but had lurched toward anyone who approached me, snapping at them, baring his teeth.

I had never felt as vulnerable, or as flooded with shame. I had lost something so completely, I did not think I could get it back from anything that had been created on earth. I needed to look into heaven. The haze had vanished by this time, and the stars were bright. We saw some drift across the darkness in blasts of light, then vanish, invisible to our eyes. I was transfixed by the sight, and by the goodness of a dumb beast who had never once thought to flee from my side, and by the fact that both I and the warrior I stood beside were still alive.

“Is it not beautiful?” I said of the world around us.

“Is it not terrible?” the Man from the Valley countered.

He gazed at me, and all at once I knew that it was a question and that he needed an answer. I took his hand and pulled him to me, and had him lie down beside me. As he had rescued me, I did the same for him. For one night, when we could still smell the blood on each other, when the night was black and all the world was invisible, we were not alone.

* * *

ADIR’S WOUND had healed and his fever had ended, yet my brother limped and seemed frail. My mother worried over him and tried one cure after the next, sifting through her piles of herbs and her recipes for pharmaka. Still he was weak. Though she had disapproved of my actions in the past, she agreed I should again take Adir’s place when the time came for him to be called back to fight. This was as it should be. I was the better warrior, the one more likely to return. Once again, my mother and I shared secrets. It was a bond we didn’t deny, one that was meant to be, for our fate had always been entwined. Whatever bitterness had been between us had dissipated.

Perhaps my father was hoping for a son, as Adir’s father had, for Ben Ya’ir had grown reckless when it came to my mother, meeting her in the cistern nearly every night, delighted both with her and with the child that was to be. His own wife was confined, nowhere to be seen. People whispered that Channa was ill again, but I wondered if perhaps her husband had forbidden her to go among the other women. He would not tolerate her interference any longer, for he had given her most of his life. What little he might have left he now claimed for his own.

Ever since our arrival he had been practicing his own form of invisibility, not unlike the skills the old assassin had taught me. He had kept his yearning for my mother hidden right in front of other people’s eyes. Indeed, they had looked past what was so evident and seen nothing. He had the right to claim another wife when his own proved to be barren; still Channa had fought him and done her best to trick him, insisting that God had given her the child she stole from Yael.

Now, when it seemed that every day was a gift and another might not follow, as the Essenes had vowed, my father no longer bothered with subterfuge. I had spied him with my mother outside our door, in an embrace so deep it seemed they were drowning. There were evenings when he sat at our table, to join in the meager meal. At such times I remained outside the door, bringing my brother with me into the yard, though he had to lean on my shoulder merely to walk. We sat outside and ate dried fruit and flatbread from our hands. Perhaps my brother assumed I believed neither of us had the right to be in the presence of the great man. But I could not see Ben Ya’ir without my head swimming with the screams I had heard during the village raid. I felt that I had failed him in some way, and that he in turn had failed me. Perhaps it had been better to have viewed him from a distance, so that his flaws were left unseen. I had wanted him to know me in battle and acknowledge me as his own; now I felt invisibility suited me.

And yet one night, as he left our mother’s chamber, Ben Ya’ir stopped before us. I had warned my brother what to do if such an occasion should ever occur. We were both to lower our eyes in the presence of our leader.

“When you go into battle again, you may need this,” Ben Ya’ir said.

He laid a knife down before us. I spied that the hilt was set in bronze, beautifully decorated with a bower of leaves. Perac lavan was engraved upon it. White flower. He had carried this knife in honor of my mother and of the lilies she had loved as a girl in Alexandria. I did not agree with all that he did, or his ways in battle, but he was my father. The gift was for a warrior, so I elbowed my brother. Adir mumbled words of thanks, but when Ben Ya’ir left us, I was the one to take up his knife.

MORE AND more often, we had our meals in the yard so that my mother and Ben Ya’ir could have privacy. We were not the only ones who knew that our leader came to my mother’s chamber each night. Jealousy stalked my mother and mistrust had sifted down upon the mountain. She was a woman who had been in chains, who could call to demons and draw the kadim to her. One midnight a quartered dove was left outside our chamber, its beak and feet chopped off, the white feathers dusted black with a scrim of soot. I gave my mother Ben Ya’ir’s knife after that, so that she might rebuke any ill intentions. It was a gift from her beloved and therefore rightly belonged to her, for although I owed my mother my first life, I owed my second life to the Man from the Valley, not to Ben Ya’ir. I now felt I had been a fool to think my father had been one of the angels; my true father had been the man on the Iron Mountain, the one who had rescued us and taught me all I’d needed to know.

My mother took the knife, the token of Eleazar’s protection. I advised her to lock the door whenever I was gone, and to be more discreet, lest she be the cause of her own prophecy and be brought to ruin by love.

A GROUP of Roman exploratores stunned us all when they set up camp in the valley. It happened in our holiest month, Tishri, when we celebrate our new year and atone for our sins, the ones we are responsible for and the ones that are to come.

When the scouts arrived, we thought they would be like all the others; they would stand amazed at the position of our fortress, then move on to report we could not be conquered. But this group was different. These soldiers intended to stay. They’d brought urns of wine and oil, herds of camels, and most telling of all, bakers who had settled into their own camp. We could smell the scent of fresh bread baking in their domed ovens.

It was apparent that these soldiers were only the first of what would soon be a legion. Rome was amassing an army outside of Jericho with ten thousand soldiers, along with a thousand Jews who were enslaved and made to serve the Emperor. Our council proclaimed that women were no longer allowed to venture beyond the gates for any reason, to make certain they would not fall into the hands of our enemies. Men who journeyed away from the mountain did so at their own peril. The warriors still went out but more stealthily, taking the serpent’s path in the cover of dark or making their way down the back of the mountain, a climb so treacherous, several lost their lives upon attempting to return. Despite the danger, I lived for these nights when the owls glided above us. We made our way past our enemies as though we were mist, freed from our earthly forms.

At night I paced our chamber, wanting nothing more than to go beyond the gates. The only small joys we had were in celebrating Arieh’s many accomplishments. He was now fourteen months old. Even those who looked down on a fatherless child admitted he was unusual, handsome and large and respectful. He was so beloved among the women in the dovecote that, each time he ran on the cobblestones or spoke the name immah to his dear mother, we applauded as though he had climbed a mountain.

I sat with the women at the looms in the evenings. Though I could not weave, I helped to spin what little wool there was. Beside me, my dog put his head on my knee. Eran and I wanted the same thing, the freedom of the wilderness, but we needed patience. I yearned to be like the Man from the Valley, who slept beyond the fields. I did not see him, or search for him, but I knew he was there. Whenever we were called to go back down the mountain on raids, slipping past the Roman scouts, I made certain to walk beside him, for with him I did not have to pretend to be anyone other than who I was.

AMRAM had sent a girl to me to ask why I no longer met him at the fountain. He waited for me in the evenings, but I did not appear. Now he had taken a risk and engaged this child to do his bidding. The girl, not more than four or five, was the daughter of one of the warriors, a friend he trusted from his days in Jerusalem. The child’s braid was thick and black, her manner friendly. She reminded me of Nahara, with her bright, knowing eyes. I said to tell the man who’d sent her that a fever was upon me. I flushed with the burden of my lie, and perhaps I appeared aflame, truly overtaken by an ailment, for the child seemed to believe me. Quickly she backed away, then ran to deliver my message.

It was the time of Rosh Chodesh, and the priest who watched for the rising moon sounded the call of the ram’s horn for us to gather for the Blessing of the New Moon, Kiddush levanah, a prayer which grants us favor from God and invites the Shechinah, all that is compassion and wisdom, into our midst. Our people stood beneath the new moon to listen to the priests and the learned men. We rejoiced, celebrating the passage of time with dancing, our musicians taking up rattles and cymbals and bells in defiance of the Romans stationed in our valley. We prayed and danced together, but only the women would not work in the morning, for they were tied to the moon in ways men could not understand, closer to the female heart of creation.

I kept to the shadows so that Amram would not see me, for I had noticed him among his brethren. When I looked at him, I saw not his handsome features but the face of the murdered child from the village, no older in years than the girl who had brought me his message. There was no one with whom I could share the joy of the new month. I yearned for my sister and the way in which we had danced together in the country of her father, though his people did not count their days as we did. Our mother had taught us that when the moon was white, reappearing after its absence, it was showing us that what had been hidden could easily become whole again.

That night in my sleep perhaps I did become fevered, made ill by my sister’s absence. I yearned for her, the girl I had brought into this world. I dreamed that there were seven wolves on the mountain, and that each had brought forth a dove in its mouth, and that every one of the doves had seven wings and could fly farther than any others. Seven is the most powerful number of all. The first words of the Torah are seven in number, and the Sabbath is the seventh day, the most holy of all. Now my dream had come to me in sevens. This seemed to me a blessing and a calling, one I couldn’t ignore.

I went to the wall to watch for my sister.

I stood there much of the day, convinced my dream had been a pathway, a sign that God knew my sister still belonged to me and that we could never truly be parted. At twilight, the hour between worlds when one’s eyes can play tricks and it is easy to see what you wish to view rather than what is before you, I thought I spied Nahara. She was following the thin black goats as they searched in vain for tufts of grass on the sheer, rocky cliff. Below us, in their camp, the Romans would soon enough notice her as well if she went along the mountain while there was still light. Since the soldiers had made camp, the Essenes had not left their cave in daylight. But their provisions would last for only so long if no one came to their assistance. If they had no spring and no well, they would soon die of thirst.

Half of the doves had been taken from us, though my mother begged they be allowed to live. Instead, they had been used for meat. We had but a few baskets of their leavings to feed the earth, and the earth repaid us in kind for our lack of gratitude. In the orchards the leaves that unfurled were spotted; fruit came to us already withered. During our harvest, I gathered what I could for my sister. I could not look across the valley and watch her starve while we could still manage to feed ourselves, however meagerly. I packed dried beans and millet, a small jar of oil we had been allotted. I was willing to be a thief, as I had been willing to be a liar, and a pretender, and a murderer. But there was one offense I could not bring myself to commit. I, who had killed men and had tasted blood, could not bring myself to murder the doves we had tended. I went to Yael, to plead for her help, which she gave me without question.

Together we went to the dovecote. The pale moon watched over us and allowed us to slip through the plaza as nothing more than shadows. We went inside, then crouched upon the straw. I watched as Yael called the doves to her. She raised her hand up, and they were summoned. As each one came to her, Yael sat with it quietly, then broke its neck. She wept as she did so, such was her sacrifice on my behalf. Then she lay their limp bodies on her lap, stroking their feathers before she gave them to me.

She walked me back to my chambers, helping me carry the provisions I meant to bring to my sister. As I had helped her in her times of need, so she was now beside me. I would never have imagined that she who had once been my rival had become a sister to me. If anything, I had imagined she might become my sister through the laws of marriage. Amram and I had always planned to include her in the ceremony, but that time was over. The day after the little messenger girl told him I was ill, Amram came to our chambers and knocked upon the door. My mother was surprised that, as soon as I spied who the caller was, I slunk into the garden. I overheard him ask about my fever and heard her answer that it was my brother who had been ill, not I. Perhaps Amram had complained to his sister, for as we neared the barracks Yael murmured, “My brother says that he rarely sees you. He still wears the blue token.”

“That’s done in your honor.” I kept my eyes lowered. “Not mine.”

“Every man changes in war.”

From her tone I understood that she knew some part of her brother had been lost.

I DRESSED in my brother’s tunic and took a heavy pack upon my back, meant for my sister. Adir was still on his pallet because of his difficulty in walking. When he saw me dressed as him, he was amazed. He vowed he himself would think that I was Adir had he not known better. He hadn’t fully understood that he had managed to be a warrior though he still lay in a darkened corner of our chamber.

“They all believe I am you,” I admitted.

My brother accepted that I had taken his place and that I had honored his name. This was why the warriors left gifts of oil and myrrh at the door and why people came to offer their congratulations on the bravery of his deeds.

My brother lifted himself up on one elbow to study me. The dog stood beside me, a pack tied to his back, for he was mine when he should have been my brother’s.

“Have I done well as a warrior?” Adir wanted to know.

I nodded, embarrassed to have taken so much from him. But he seemed relieved.

“Have I slain many of the enemy?”

“Only when you needed to.”

Every time the warriors went out on raids, my brother, you were among them. We attacked at night, splitting into four sections, coming to our enemies in the dark from the four corners of the world. We went to let the Romans know that they had not destroyed us and that we had not disappeared despite their presence in our valley. We went to take what we needed to survive and because our people could not be contained nor denied their right to Zion.

During the nights when you, my dear brother, rested on your pallet, I had gone into the thornbushes and held the man who was unafraid of metal, who yearned for it, as I did, as I had done all my life. Though we were but halves of people, though we had lost ourselves, together we were one, and whole. This is why I was so impatient whenever I needed to remain on the mountain. He was the only one who knew me. He told me that, if I had been a woman, he could not have had me, for he had vowed never to be with a woman other than his wife. But I was something else, a warrior, as he was. We did not have to speak, as those who fight side by side need no words, but instead we knew each other in silence. In that way it was possible for each of us to foretell what the one beside us wanted, whether it was brutal or tender, whether it lasted all night or for but a brief burst of stolen time.

On the day when we repent for our sins, I had left this man to the heartache of his past. On the eve of Yom Kippur, he disappeared into the wilderness. I did not ask to share his sorrows, for that would not have been possible. I waited in the blue night, alone, as any comrade would. When he came back to me, there were strands of thorns fitted across his chest. I offered him water and a share of my supper, and I asked not a single question and made no demands. We had enough adversaries, we did not need to defy each other.

I was grateful, my brother, that you could not see what the world was beyond these gates, as I was grateful that I could close my eyes inside the bower of the thornbushes, that I could moan and thrash as I never did in battle, for in battle, my brother, your reputation was one of silence. You never cried out as you did at night, with only the dog to overhear you as you clung to the warrior beside you. You were young, the slightest among them, but you were a fine archer, perhaps the best of all, known by the red feathers on your arrows that quickened every shot, the weapons becoming birds seeking out our enemies and bringing them to their death. No wild goat could run from you, no rabbit was quick enough.

You often stood at the rear of a skirmish because your vision was so clear you could observe attackers from a distance and fell them before they came upon our men. Because of your skill, several warriors who might have been murdered lived. Amram was once stunned by the rock cast at him by a slingshot, and you, my brother, leapt out to slay his attacker from the hillock you stood upon, your armor burning hot in the sun, leaving red marks along your tender skin.

Afterward Amram came to give you thanks. He called you his little brother and offered you his loyalty. You merely lowered your eyes, as though too impressed by the honor he gave to you to speak, when the truth was you did not want him to see the color of your eyes, or guess at what was beneath the metal and silver scales you wore. All the same, you accepted the gift of his amulet, a silver disk of Solomon fighting a demon on the Temple floor, so as not to offend him. “I owe you protection,” he said on that day when you, younger and slighter, had saved him from the Angel of Death that had hovered so near. “My life is yours.”

You wore his amulet, so as not to offend him on the battlefield, but you hid it beneath a scarf at all other times. You hadn’t the heart to tell him his life was not what you wanted. All you wanted was your own life, the nights in the thornbushes, the days with the warriors.

My brother, your dog was always at your side, as quiet as you were, with a silence he might well have learned from the leopard. When a battle was begun, he broke his silence and roared beside you, for he had no fear of blood or of metal or of death. He was your companion, and slept with you, whether you were alone or with the man who knew who you were, understanding why you set yourself apart under the stars. Though you were dutiful enough when you were needed, willing to carry the other warriors’ double-edged swords, their slingshots, their spears, you did not mingle among them.

When you slipped out of your tunic, you disappeared beneath the moon. You vanished into the air and rested there, between the worlds.

That was when I came to take your place.

* * *

I STOLE out the South Water Gate with the dog so that I might go to my sister. I had wrapped myself in shawls, for the chill would soon be upon us in the nights. I had brought my sister to life once and would do so again. No guard would stop me, for I was Adir the brave, named for the kings of his father’s people, and those posted at the gate merely nodded a greeting to a fellow warrior. My bow was strapped to my back. The dark had begun to stretch across the horizon. Fading light had turned the cliffs red in the distance. Larks and brilliant blue songbirds were crossing the sky, catching the gnats that swarmed in the evening. I made certain to tread carefully, for a single rock might cause the Romans to notice me. I needed to make the perilous climb to the cave of the Essenes.

I was so focused on the Roman camp, I never thought I might be followed. I wasn’t prepared when I was grabbed and pulled from the path. I wished I had the knife my father had given to me. In such close battle, my bow was pointless. I turned to fight, but the man who held me was unafraid, as angels and demons are said to be. I battled with him until he overcame me. Perhaps this was not a man at all but one of the seven wolves in my dreams. If so, my dream had prophesied my defeat. I wept at my own weakness. I, who had always been so fierce, gave myself up to him, expecting to be consumed by either light or flames.

I knew him when Eran lay down as though at his master’s feet. I saw my follower for who he was, the man who owned nothing but the ax he carried. He said he would accompany me, and if he fell from the cliff we climbed, then it was meant to be, for he yearned for death and had no choice but to court it. If Mal’ach ha-Mavet came to him, then what now came to pass was only what he had wished for all along.

I did not wish to put him at risk for the sake of my sister, but in battle you cannot tell another when it is his time to enter the World-to-Come, nor is it possible to keep any man in this world when he wishes to leave it behind. I couldn’t argue with the Man from the Valley, that was something a woman might do, and he had vowed to never be with a woman other than his wife. I was his comrade, and as such I must respect his desire. I could not cling to him, for that would show me to be a woman as well. I wore Adir’s tunic and carried his bow, therefore I must step aside.

We tied the dog to a thornbush, then went on, the sound of our breathing echoing. The new moon shone with a thin, fine light, but soon clouds moved across so we could slink through the dark. I didn’t need to see the Man from the Valley to know he was there, for we were connected by something stronger than sight, and like the king’s horses we did not stumble on the sheer cliff. I had half-imagined I might capture my sister, tie her with ropes, and carry her back to the fortress. But had I done so, she would have cried out, as she had called for her father when we left the Iron Mountain. Her shouts would have brought the Romans upon us, and I did not wish to be the cause of my sister’s death.

I knew I must let her cause that herself.

Once, as I stared into the dark, my foot slipped and my companion grabbed me and held me close until I could regain my balance. Rocks rattled down into the valley, but in the dark we might well have been two ibex intent on scaling this cliff. As we went on we could distinguish three caves, one for the goats, one used as a storeroom, with another, larger cave in which the Essenes camped. We had no fear they might attack to protect themselves, for they had no weapons, and no desire for defense other than God’s mercy. The stench of the cave greeted us first, and I was astonished that it was worse than any barnyard. When I peered through the dark, I could hardly bear to witness the way in which they lived. The fires inside the cave had blackened their skins, and their linen garments were dusted with ash. Two men came to meet us, frowning, clearly resenting our intrusion into the midst. They were unclean, rail-thin, with the ravished gaze of hunger in their eyes. I recognized Malachi, though he did not know me and seeing my tunic took me for a boy.

“We’ve brought you provisions,” the Man from the Valley said. We set down our packs, the meager fruit, the doves, the flatbread, the grain, the skins of water.

“From the hands of murderers?” the older Essene man said as he considered the provisions we’d courted great danger to bring to them.

“From the hands of your brothers,” the Man from the Valley remarked. He was civil, but his tone carried a note of reproach.

I took a few steps forward while the men continued to speak. Through the murk I made out Abba’s form; the Essenes’ beloved teacher was prone on a ledge, so weak it seemed he’d already passed into the otherworld, though he still drew breath. I saw the women gathered together, gazing at us distrustfully, but I could not tell my sister from the others, nor did she recognize me. I took the scarf from my head and let my hair fall down my back so that she might see me for who I was, the sister she belonged to. Malachi immediately came to me once he knew me, so quick I might have been a black viper, the sort that winds itself around its prey in an inescapable grasp.

“Go now,” he said to me, though I had risked my life and the life of my companion to bring them provisions and water. “She cannot see you or think of that other life.”

I caught sight of her then, a woman in rags, my beautiful sister, surrounded by the other women, ewes in a pen, no more kin to me than the sheep behind our fences made from the scaly boughs of the thornbushes. All at once I understood Malachi’s fear. He had known what I planned to do before I did. For I now called out to Nahara, my voice so plaintive and wretched I barely recognized it as my own.

“Come with me,” I pleaded, intent on calling her to me. “You don’t belong to them. Leave with me and I’ll protect you as I did before you ever came to this place or knew this people.”

There was no response, other than the sound of my own cries, for my words fell like stones, they had wrenched tears from me. The Man from the Valley came up beside me. I expected him to admonish me for my actions, for I was nothing but a woman. Instead he leaned in closely and without judgment. “Let me try to speak to her,” he urged.

I waited at the mouth of the cave. I noticed there was a shallow pool of still water. Surely the Essenes drank from this pool, though it was not fit for human thirst. In the muddy earth there grew a small acacia tree. Little more than a twig, it was abloom. A thousand bees came to its branches. I closed my eyes and listened to the hum. For a moment I was in the other world, in the grip of my other life, riding over the grasslands. I dreamed that I made a fire and burned a hundred branches and that the sparks flew into the sky and stayed in the heavens to become stars.

I rose when the Man from the Valley approached. I was parched from our journey, but upon seeing him I felt as though something had been quenched. I stood by his side as he told me the Essenes had agreed to accept the provisions. He had been brought before Abba so that a prayer could be offered on his behalf. The ancient teacher could barely speak, for he was so weak that the thread that tied him to this world was wearing thin. My sister had managed to stand nearby. After Abba finished chanting, she had whispered to the Man from the Valley so that he alone would hear. He was to tell me that she remembered me, the fastest rider, her father’s favorite son, the sister she had belonged to once, in another time and world.

WE WALKED in silence, as we always did. Our burden was lighter, for we no longer carried fruit and water and millet, as I no longer carried my sister’s fate in my hands. I had left her there. Whether or not we were to meet again in this lifetime was not for me to decide. She had renounced the girl I had brought to life, and because of this we were no longer bound to each other. Yet I would think of her not as a woman huddled in a cave, eyes downcast, waiting for the End of Days, but as the only birth I had ever witnessed, God’s great glory and miracle.

ERAN was waiting for us. We stopped before we climbed up toward the gate. As comrades, we agreed to do so without a word being said. We knew Rome was approaching, and we understood what this would mean. We took this one night for ourselves, in case there should be no other. We went to the cave where Yael had once told me a lion lived. There was no such lion inside. We made a fire deep inside the mouth of the cave. We knew that others had done so before us, for there were piles of ashes and soot. Perhaps whoever had been here before us had longed for freedom from the mountaintop, as we did. Perhaps they had wished for other worlds and times.

I put my arms around my warrior and drew him near to me and gave myself up to him. I hadn’t the strength for battle anymore. I wanted a world that was beautiful, and on this night, he was tender with me in a way he hadn’t been before, perhaps because he had seen me weep before my sister. He treated me not like a warrior but like a woman. I knew this was his way of telling me that the world was terrible and that I should prepare myself for what was to come. But I had decided to disregard such fears, as I had cast away my mother’s warning that love would undo me. None of that mattered now. We were both wounded, disbelievers in everything we had ever known and seen. We had killed together, and buried the fallen together, and chanted prayers meant only for men to recite. We had been together as animals were, desperate and driven by fierce need, and as lovers for whom the rest of the world falls away.

When we left the cave, morning had opened the far corners of the sky. Dust was rising as the Roman Legion approached. There was a column from the north and another from the east. When the troops joined together, the rising clouds formed not the shape of the boar, the symbol they carried on their banners, but the figure of a lion, the symbol of the ancient tribe of Judah and of the wilderness around us.

“My name is Rebekah,” I told him as we stood there together.

As he was Yoav, the Man from the Valley, the love of my life.

Autumn 72 C.E.