The Dovekeepers

The Witch of Moab

We were no different from the doves above us.

We could not speak or cry, but when there was

no choice we discovered we could fly. If you

want a reason, take this: We yearned for our

portion of the sky.

My mother taught me everything a woman must know in this world and all it was necessary to carry into the World-to-Come. By the age of eight I had learned that the leaf of a date palm boiled in water was a cure for a scorpion bite, that the nectar of the spiky blue flower of the hyssop dabbed on the wrist would ward off evil, that the burned, powdery skin of a snake would keep a man from harm. I had the tooth of a black dog strung around my neck as a protection against wild beasts and took care to recite an incantation when I dug around the roots of henbane, the holy plant, for I often buried my mother’s amulets as offerings to Ashtoreth, the goddess who watched over us in times of strife.

My mother trained me in the making of fever charms and victory charms, although she refused to deal in hate spells, used to undermine rivals, something that was lacking in my book of recipes. I knew how to cast charms that would dissolve a spell and those which would cure reptile bites. Bits of silver scrolls and scarabs were sewn into the hems of my garments by my mother’s quick and tireless fingers. Her great beauty was eclipsed only by her great knowledge. Her name was Nisa, and I thought it was the most beautiful word in any language. The word itself was like the rising of the fountain, the rhythm of rain.

At twilight, when the air in Alexandria grew softly blue, she instructed me in our garden, teaching me Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek, forming the letters in the dirt with a few thrusts of the pointed edge of a stick. No one saw what we did during these lessons, for we did not dwell among the townspeople but in the house of holy women who were available for the priests. In this way we were blessed as well, for the laws that applied to other women did not apply to my mother. Prayers were not forbidden to her, nor was an education, nor was the freedom to allow men into her private chamber.

The entranceway to our house was lined with lanky hedges of jasmine and scented rose trees. In the evening the city itself seemed to turn blue, as if casting our world underwater. Long shadows spread out upon the terra-cotta bricks of our pathway, so no one could make out who entered our door and who left in the middle of the dusky, fragrant night. These shadows served me as well, for I was as solitary as I was self-reliant. The only witnesses to my instruction and my education were the inchworms and beetles. Even as a very small child, I understood that women had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.

In the garden, where I learned my letters, there grew a variety of rare white water lily that gave off a perfumed scent at night. These blooms have been my favorites ever since that time. A single one is worth a barrel of balsam or myrrh. The wild red lilies of Moab, glorious as they may be, are weeds when compared to these blossoms, their scent mere air when considered alongside the lilies of Alexandria. My mother rubbed their perfume on her wrists, and because of this no man could deny her.

While other women were contained within the walled courtyards of their houses, venturing no farther than the marketplace — and then only accompanied by servants or kinswomen — my mother was allowed to do as she pleased. Every spring she made the journey to visit her family in Jerusalem during the Feast of Unleavened Bread. It was there in that city that my fate awaited me.

IT IS SAID THAT, after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, two angels offered to enter our world to teach humans the knowledge God would allow us. These angels have eaten meals with humans, fallen in love with them, had sexual relations with them, watched their children be born. Because of this, they can never return to the spirit world. They continue to walk the earth to this day, teaching the wisdom of sorcery to those who yearn to know it. My mother came from a line of women who were willing to listen when the angels began to speak. She kept her most private possessions in a box of carved ironwood, the key to which she wore around her neck on a strand of braided horsehair. The key had been formed into the shape of a snake. When I was a child, it seemed a living thing. Whenever my mother allowed me to hold it in my hand, I could feel it coldly inch across my palm.

Inside the locked box was a notebook of parchment upon which my mother had written the many secrets she had accumulated over the years. It was a recipe book for the human heart, for our people believe that all we know and all we have experienced is contained there.

THERE WERE SPELLS on every page of my mother’s diary: For Night Blindness. To Catch a Thief. For Headache. For Fever. For Loyalty. For Love. While other girls were playing with string or with carved wooden animals, I was learning what had been written by my mother, secrets passed down to me that I would one day entrust to a daughter of my own. The spells themselves were transcribed in code, so that no outsider might understand them or fully gauge their power.

There have always been ancient books of mysteries. Men who practiced magic were teachers who were called abba, fathers blessed by knowledge from The Book of Mysteries. Even Moses himself was said to have what magicians and great teachers call The Moon Book, a collection of magic so strong no other human has ever dared to open the pages, lest he be burned alive by the heat of the words within. There were those who said that Moses could make the sea disappear and that he could have destroyed the whole world had he wished to, or if God had called upon him to do so. Noah, too, had a book of incantations. The voice of an angel in The Book of Jubilees recounts that the angels themselves taught Noah all manner of secrets so that he might use the herbs of the earth to heal his sons. Among men it was rumored there was a priceless treasure called The Book of Watchers, which offered direct instructions from the Almighty, a mystical treatise so complicated, so hidden and wrapped within riddles, only the wisest sage could begin to understand its meaning.

This was the work of men, of scholars and priests. There were two schools of magic men were privy to, that which the priests practiced publicly, the exorcisms and curses and blessings, and the lesser works crafted by the minim, men, be they sages or magicians, who offered magic for payment outside the synagogues. Beyond that, in secret, in the dark, there was the magic women practiced behind locked doors, with our recipe books of pharmaka, our medicines, and philtrons, our love potions. Women had secret uses for ashes, green bay leaf, blood, sulfur, myrrh, musk, honey, oil and flowers, along with the roots of plants such as the mandrake, yavrucha, and that of the ba’aras, often called wondershine, red hot and aflame when pulled from the earth. At the Temple it had been decreed that no one should tolerate a sorceress, for such magic was said to be the work of harlots, their wickedness set beneath a mantle of wisdom they should not be allowed. There were ten varieties of wise men known but only two kinds of women who might hear the voice of the Almighty: prophetesses and witches.

For women who practiced in secret, there was no one but Him, our God, the radiant one, who was far greater than any magician. But we did not agree with the rules of men, and we ignored certain decrees, even though the sort of magic women such as my mother were known for was outside the law and therefore considered to be a sin.

We knew why this was so, and why our great goddess, Ashtoreth, both a warrior and a seer, had been defiled and warned against in writings that followed the Prophets. Ashtoreth’s presence was denied to us, the images of her form melted down into pools of silver and brass, the cakes we made in her image outlawed, the trees we decorated in her honor torn down long ago. The expulsion of the Queen of Heaven had occurred for the same reason that Samson had once lost every bit of his strength; it was the reason men burned their hair and nails, lest such tokens be used against them in any woman’s spell. Women who practiced keshaphim were considered witches and punished as such, cast out, burned, defiled. They were powerful and dangerous, and no man wanted such a creature near to him, except perhaps in his bed for a night before he rid the world of her.

Surely this is why women did not often write down their knowledge, to make certain it couldn’t be found out and used against them. We told each other our magical recipes, just as we confided the best ways to make a cake of figs, a broth of bones, a stew of apples and honey that would be sweeter than any other. We did not discuss our methods, or make our talents public, yet other women knew. The truth was written upon us, as they say men’s sins are written on their bones so that when they die their wicked deeds can be read as if written upon parchment.

We can offer women what they want most of all, cures for the most common ailments of this world. When a marriage is not blessed and demons have attached themselves to a household, a dissolution of the marriage can be found in a spell, which is a legal document of divorce. I drive you out of their houses, and you should not appear to them, not even in dreams, for I dismiss you and release you by deed of divorce, a letter of dismissal according to the law of the women of Israel.

When children are ailing or babies refuse to be born, when men are unfaithful, when the sky is empty of rain, when the amulets buried beneath holy walls upon instructions of the minim offer no solace and all entreaties to the priests for guidance fail, when the rituals they offer bring no comfort and no consolation, they come to us.

* * *

AS A GIRL in Alexandria, I often watched my mother leaf through her notebook when I was meant to be asleep on the pallet at the foot of her bed, which was worthy of a queen, raised off the floor and covered by a fine linen cloth, threaded with strands of purple and gold. My mother looked fierce in the half-light, her black hair falling down her back. In the evenings she burned balsam in an earthenware bowl. The smoke that spiraled up toward the ceiling was pale, much like the inner feathers of a dove’s wing. The scent was of lands far away, where the fields were always green and acacia trees grew. My mother had been chosen to go to Alexandria and live among a sect of Greeks and Jews because she was so beautiful and so learned. Because of this she wore secret tattoos imprinted on her skin, intricate designs fashioned with sharpened reeds that had been dipped in henna. These proclaimed her status as a kedeshah. After her initiation, she often kept herself hidden, for although her status was revered among many in Alexandria, the Temple in Jerusalem outlawed such practices.

The women who joined in this way of life believed that few were closer to Shechinah than the kedeshah. They embraced the feminine aspect of God, the Dwelling, the deep place where inspiration abided, for in the written words of God, compassion and knowledge were always female. This is why the lilies grew in my mother’s garden and why she was allowed knowledge of Hebrew and Greek and could converse with any man.

When the priests came to visit, I was sent from the house, and I would go into the garden. Among the hedges, there grew the white blooms of the henna flower that turned a mysterious, sacred shade of red when prepared as a dye. I often spent my time beside a small fountain fashioned of blue and white ceramic tiles. I was not pleased to be sent from my mother, but I occupied myself, a skill learned by children who must sometimes act older than their age. The water lilies rested on plump green pads that trailed pale, fleshy tendrils below them in the waters of the fountain. Birds came to drink, offering their songs in return for quenching their thirst. My mother had told me to be silent, and I did as she asked. I practiced until I could sit so still I became invisible to the birds that fluttered down from the pine trees. Often they would alight on my shoulders and on my knees. I could feel their nimble hearts beating as they sang in sheer gratitude for the shade and comfort of our garden.

Once, when I was little more than four, I was sent out for several hours in the burning-hot sun. I was so angry to have been cast out of our chamber into the brutal heat of noon that I threw myself into the fountain. The ceramic tiles were cool and slippery on my feet. In my childish fury, I leapt without thinking of the consequences. The instant I did, the heat of the day disappeared. I held my breath as I went under. With the green water all around me, I immediately felt I had found a home. This was the element I was meant for. The world itself spun upside down, and yet it seemed more mine than any other place. I wanted to close my eyes and drift forever. I saw bubbles formed of my own breath. All at once someone grabbed for me roughly. The priest ripped me out of the water. He shook me and told me that little girls who played with water drowned and that no one would feel sorry for me if this should be my fate.

But I hadn’t drowned, and I looked up at him, defiant and dripping with water. I could feel a new power within me, one that gave me the courage to glare at this holy man. I could see my mother’s glance focused on me in a strange manner, her gaze lingering on my drenched form from the doorway where she stood. Her hair was loose, and she was wearing only a white shawl wrapped around her naked body. The henna tattoos swirling across her throat and breasts and arms were drawn in honeyed patterns, as if she were a flower rather than a woman.

Not long after my dive into the fountain, my mother took me to the Nile. It was here, on the shore of the mightiest river, that Moses had inscribed God’s name upon gold, throwing it into the waters, begging the Almighty to allow the Exodus of our people to begin. It was a long journey to undertake, but my mother insisted we must go. Our servants brought us there in a cart pulled by donkeys. A tent was lifted over our heads to protect our skins from burning as we traveled. We set off in the middle of the night so that the voyage would be cooler. We rested during the heat of the next day, then set off once again. As I dozed I listened to the wheels of our cart and the drone of our servants speaking to each other in Greek, the language we all spoke publicly, whether we were Jews or Egyptians, pagans or Greeks. Our donkeys were white and well brushed, their gait even and quick. We had fruit in a basket to eat whenever we were hungry, along with cakes made of dates and figs. I wondered if I were a princess, and my mother a queen. The air gleamed with heat, but the closer we drew to the river, the cooler the breeze became.

Morning was rising, and people were already busy in the working world around us. The mass of life was noisy on the road to the river, the air scented with cinnamon and cardamom. There were pepper trees and date palms that were taller than any I’d seen before. I felt a shimmer of excitement, and great satisfaction at being alone with my mother. For once I did not have to share her. She allowed me to play with the two golden amulets she wore at her throat, and the serpent key that gleamed in the sunlight.

My mother wore a white tunic and sandals. She had oiled and braided her own hair and mine, as she would have had we been attending a ritual to make an offering. As we drew even nearer to the river, the hour was still early, the sky pink. There was the rich scent of mud and lilies. Women had brought baskets of laundry to wash and then dry on the banks, and men were setting out in narrow, flat-bottomed wooden fishing boats, their oars turning as they called to one another, their woven nets flashing through the air as they tossed them out for their catch.

My mother leaned down to whisper that we had arrived at our destination. She told me that, if water was indeed my element, I must learn to swim with my eyes open. I must control it or it would control me. To take charge of a substance so powerful, one had to give in to it first, become one with it, then triumph. We went through the reeds, though they were sharp as they slapped against us, leaving little crisscross serrations on our legs in a pattern of X’s. I saw herons and storks fishing for their breakfasts. Our feet sank in the mud, and as we went deeper our tunics flowed out around us.

The Nile always grew fat after the full moon in summer, its water a great gift in a time of brutal heat. I could feel how refreshing and sweet it was. I had never known the sense of true delight, how intense pleasure coursed through your body slowly, and then, suddenly, in a rush of sensation. All at once you possessed the river, as it possessed you in turn. I had the sense that I belonged to these waters and always had.

“Now we’ll discover who you will be,” my mother said to me, eager to see what her daughter might become.

I sank under, my eyes open. I would have blinked had my mother not told me to be vigilant. I trusted her and always did as she said. I made certain to keep my eyes wide. Because of this I saw a vision I would carry with me for my entire life. There was a fish as large as a man. He was luminous in the murky dark. He was enormous, a creature who needed neither breath nor earth, as I did, and yet I had no fear of him. Rather, tenderness rose inside me. I felt he was my beloved. I reached out, and he ventured close enough for me to run my hand over his cold, silvery scales.

I arose from the river with a sense of joy, but also with a melancholy I had not known before. It is not usual for a child to feel such sadness when nothing has changed and the world around is still the same. Yet I had a sense of extreme loss.

When I told my mother about the fish, she said I had seen my destiny. She didn’t seem at all surprised.

“Did he bite you?” she asked.

I shook my head. The fish had seemed very kind.

“Well, he will,” my mother told me. “Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away.”

I did not know what this meant, though I knew the world was a dangerous place for a woman. Still, I did not understand how a person whose element was water could stay away from fish.

THEY SAY that a woman who practices magic is a witch, and that every witch derives her power from the earth. There was a great seer who advised that, should a man hold a witch in the air, he could then cut off her powers, thereby making her helpless. But such an attempt would have no effect on me. My strength came from water, my talents buoyed by the river. On the day I swam in the Nile and saw my fate in the ink blue depths, my mother told me that I would have powers of my own, as she did. But there was a warning she gave to me as well: If I were ever to journey too far from the water, I would lose my power and my life. I must keep my head and not give in to desire, for desire is what causes women to drown.

* * *

IN THE DESERT, the air burns. Breathe and it flames inside you, for it is strong as iron, as unrelenting as the swirling dust that rises in a storm. Our water comes from the rain, and from aqueducts long ago built by Herod’s slaves, wide ceramic tubes which carry the rushing waters of the nechalim to us when they fill with sudden streams in the winter months. Still, it is not enough for me. The desert is overtaking me, my strength is dwindling. In water I float, but in the dry inferno of this wilderness, I can barely catch my breath. I dream of rivers and of silver fish. There are those who say our people themselves are like the fish in the sea, nourished by the waters of knowledge that flow from the Torah, and that is why we can survive in such a harsh and brutal land.

I often wake from sleep with a gasp, drowning in the pools of white light that break through the sky each morning. Women carrying new lives within them are especially susceptible to heat. I have felt so afflicted three other times. Once in Jerusalem when I was only thirteen, barely a woman myself. Twice on the Iron Mountain, which was little more than exile to me. And now here, again, in the place where I have found my destiny.

At night I go to the cisterns, led there by the scent of water. To me, this odor is more pungent than myrrh or frankincense. The single thing that can rival it is the fragrance of the white lily that can only be found in Alexandria. People say that I can call down the rain and that water is drawn to me, but they’re wrong. It is I who am in pursuit of water, as I have always been. When I dream, I dream of the Nile on that pink morning, and of my mother, whom I have not seen in so long she would no longer recognize me, if she has not already gone on to the World-to-Come.

The stars are reflected from within the black water in the cistern. I find comfort in the omen I glean from this: light in the darkness, truth when it seems there is none. This is the only place where I can be myself, the girl who fell into the fountain, the one who was not afraid of monsters, nor of deep water, nor of drowning. I walk down the hundred stone steps, the granite cool against my feet. I know where love will take me, for on the day we traveled to the Nile, my mother told me that it would bring me to ruin and that anyone I dared to love would be drawn down with me. But even as she spoke she knew, I had no choice but to follow my destiny.

I pause on the edge of the cistern, where the stones have been covered with fine plaster. The white plaster dust clings to my flesh. I watch the shimmer of the heat over the water. It is said that the spirit of God hovers over the water, as it did on the first day of creation. I stand before the glory of what He has created. I remove my cloak, my sandals, my tunic. Other women purify themselves in the mikvah, but I need deeper waters. I dive in.

Some people say that this, the largest of the cisterns built by Herod’s stonemasons, is bottomless, and if we ever see the floor of this well, we will also see our doom. This pool is deep, but it is not endless. I know that for certain. All things end. I often dive to reach the depths, then keep myself from rising back up by holding on to the rocks piled at the foundation. They are sleek against my hand, smoothed by the endless lapping of the water against stone. I keep my eyes open even though the water is black. There are no fish, no flashes of light, but when I surface, my cousin Eleazar will be waiting.

It was he I saw in the water of the Nile when I spied the fish beside me.

From the beginning until now, that alone has never changed. He is my fate.

* * *

THE SOLDIERS of the Tenth Legion were led through the wilderness by Flavius Silva, the procurator of all Judea, the newly appointed Roman governor. The troops raised a dust storm so enormous it could surely be seen as far away as the Iron Mountain, where I spent so many years in the company of a husband who was twice my age and knew I did not love him, yet he still protected me. He never mistreated me, though he had the stony aloofness of many of the fierce people of Moab, along with a surprising tenderness with his children. His name was Sa’adallos, though I never called him that. If I had, I might have loved him in return. I might have been in Petra instead of at this fortress when the Romans arrived. I might have been walking through that red city with its miraculous carved columns of elephants and camels, enjoying its pool, rumored to be the size of a lake, and the gardens that hang from cliffs, causing men to look upon the mountainsides with awe, amazed to see date trees where in another country there would be only clouds.

Had I loved him, my children would have been safe, my future assured. Instead I brought them to be trapped on this perch from which there was no deliverance. Though the angels might hear us call to them, they could never reach us here on the periphery of the world, even if they wished to save us. I understood this when I threw the bones of the doves, for they prophesied that, just as there was no escape from what had already been written, there would be no escape from this fortress.

Our people gathered to watch six thousand of the legion approach, accompanied by more than a thousand of their slaves and followers. We trembled in silence. What terrified us was not only their number but their sheer determination. They had come for us from Jerusalem, though we were but a few hundred. They had found us as the jackals find their prey, encircling the weakness of their victims, biding their time, ready to leap when the moment is right.

In the dust storm they raised, birds fell from the sky, unable to take flight in the bursts of swirling gravel. Soon the ground was littered with ravens, more in number than the soldiers. The flightless birds transformed the ground into a mournful stretch of black, and all at once it seemed the reaches of the World-to-Come had been laid down before us in a road of flesh and feathers.

“I have seen this before,” Revka murmured to me, her face ashen. “We cannot escape from harm.”

There was only one reason why Rome should come to try to defeat us when we were so few and their empire so great. They feared we rebels might serve as an ember to reignite the flame of freedom. Disgrace smolders, it burns when you least expect it to ignite. The Romans could not allow this. We were fish in a net, already drawn in upon the rocky shore; all they needed to do was cut us off from the water that sustained us. Already, coins had been printed in Rome to celebrate the fall of Judea. The image of a Roman legionnaire and a captive Jewish woman, humbled and enslaved beneath a palm tree, had been imprinted upon silver. As they had written it, so they wished it to be, as if they and not God alone could create matter out of words and will.

In a land where rebellion has been crushed, there cannot be a single warrior left.

IT WAS WINTER and the air was raw. We wore our cloaks drawn about us like armor, shivering in the wind, watching as our fate approached us. The rains had come, filling the valleys with torrents of water. Fish that had disappeared deep within the soil during the arid months appeared once again, magicked into life. Throughout the hills there were wildflowers and honeybees. The trunks of dead trees hummed as if they themselves had come alive. There were greens for the ibex, meat for the leopard. The desert had given the Tenth Legion the most favorable conditions for a crossing. Surely our enemies took this as an omen that they would be the victors. They were hungry, and they were fed. They were thirsty and needed look no farther than the streams that turned into waterfalls.

Perhaps those who were new to Judea wondered how it was that the desert had destroyed so many who had come before them, how the brutality of its fierce heat had changed those who had fought to stay alive in its arms. For this was the merciful time of the year, when birds began to return from Africa and Egypt, when there were herons rather than vultures and the land was plentiful. The army that came to our valley was made up of men from a dozen different lands, all speaking Latin, each one rewarded by Rome with provisions they had not dared to dream of in the poverty of their homelands, for they traveled with camels and donkeys loaded down with meat and dates and leather barrels with enough water to fill ten cisterns.

They approached our fortress with their strength intact, while we were eating grass and doves, sacrificing the sheep for which we no longer had grain, slitting the throats of the goats who no longer gave milk. We had water, what we always longed for, and the cisterns were full, yet we were poor and our hunger throbbed and reminded us of our poverty. So many of the doves had been taken for food and sacrifices, their waste no longer filled our baskets or fed the fields. The orchards failed us, the gardens were empty, the storerooms no longer sustained us. Now when we entered the dovecotes, there was a hush; in place of the song of the doves, there was only a faint cooing.

Our warriors were exhausted. They had been fighting for so long, without reprieve or rest, many of them young and untrained, mere boys, ten-and eleven-year-olds conscripted to stand in the place of the fallen. Yet they hid their fear. They shouted that the legion might bring all of Rome and still they could never scale the mountain to reach us.

But this was the army that had murdered twenty thousand of our people in Caesarea, so that not one had survived. They had dispatched the two other Jewish strongholds, Herodium and Machaerus, where they had slain those they had given a promise of reprieve. Having heard there were those who had managed to escape and were still in hiding, the Tenth Legion had cut down the Forest of Jardes, so there would not be a single tree for the escaped rebels to hide behind. There they killed three thousand more, their bodies left strewn on the field for the birds of prey without even a shred of cloth to cover their nakedness.

Flavius Silva then set his glance upon us. It was said that he was a man without regret, with violent moods and tempers, but with the gift of pure logic when he needed to advance on his enemy. I stood upon the wall with the rest of our people and watched our valley fill with columns of fighting men. Following were those who would bake the soldiers’ bread and cook their meals and mend their cloaks, along with the zonnoth, women who would be kept in tents for the soldiers’ pleasure, and the slaves who would build the camps, dragging enormous timbers from the north through the desert, along with the smiths with their carts of weaponry — spears and shields and thousands of arrows. But there was something more fearsome that arrived with the legion, the sign of our fate, for the Romans had brought a lion on a chain with them. We grew faint when we saw this beast. He, who had once been free in the desert and had ruled the wilderness from his cave, the symbol of the strength of the ancient tribe of Judea, now must do his keepers’ bidding. He gazed at us, and in his eyes we saw the Romans’ desire.

They meant to devour us.

They attached the poor creature to a metal post, constructed directly across from the palace that had belonged to King Herod. This was where Silva’s camp was to be built, in a location that would be an insult and a challenge every time we looked upon it. While they built, we heard the roaring of the vanquished beast.

Yael had confided to me that she dreamed of a lion. As she had feared this creature, so had she been drawn to it. She wept when she told me this, and I understood why she was torn by the meaning of her dreams. A lion may lie beside an ibex in the shade if his appetite is sated, they may even sleep together, their backs resting against each other, but on the next day, if the lion wakes with hunger, then he must serve himself.

Now Yael’s dream had appeared before us. She stood beside me and wept to see the lion subdued in his chains, trapped as we were, enslaved by those whose brutality was an affront to nature, and to our people, and to God. After the dust had settled, we could observe him clearly, for there was only the pale blue air of winter before us and the light was clear, the wind fresh. Many said it was possible to view heaven from this mountain of ours, but now we seemed much closer to the first gate of hell. What we heard and what awaited us did not come from the reaches of God. It was below us, in the roar of the lion.

SOON ENOUGH a village was constructed by camp followers, with tents and shacks set up overnight. The scent of food drifted over the valley, cooking meat, bread, spices. We watched, poverty-stricken, starving, like ghosts at a table laden with a great feast. The building went on without ceasing, with slaves working through the night. This was an endeavor that was meant to last; the Romans were settling in. They would not leave, and they would not admit defeat. They began to build twelve towers, set a hundred yards apart, rising so quickly it seemed they came into being before our very eyes. Once the towers had been constructed, any man wishing to break through to the eastern valley would be running a gauntlet, with guards atop the observation posts. He would never make it to the other side.

As the slaves were completing the camps, more were brought in from the north to give form to a wall of stones. This wall was no worry to us until it began to zigzag into the mountains in a strange design. We did not understand the Romans’ intentions, for it seemed a fool’s endeavor to set a thousand Jewish slaves to labor throughout the day and night, carrying boulders so heavy many of the workers fell prostrate on the ground. When these pitiful men could not rise again, they were slain and left in the dirt, for it was easier to dispose of them than to heal them. The Romans were intent on this wall they built. We assumed they meant to enclose their camps, thereby protecting themselves from us. Certainly our warriors had plans for raids, however perilous, already in the making.

As soon as he was told of this wall, Ben Ya’ir came to look down upon it. When he took note of the stones cutting across the cliffs, he saw that this was a wall meant to encircle us. It surrounded not only the Roman camps but the entire mountain. It was a siege wall, six feet thick. Our leader immediately understood that its purpose was not to protect the Roman camp but to keep us in.

Some of the warriors laughed at this, for the wall was not so high that a man couldn’t climb over beneath the cover of night. They had not yet realized there was another purpose to this endeavor. The Romans intended a crucifixion of the land that belonged to us, each rock in the wall serving as a nail in our flesh. They were telling us that we belonged to them, like the lion on the chain, like the slaves at their bidding, like the six hundred thousand they had slaughtered in their war against the Jews.

They wanted our fear, and that was what they received. Dread went through the fortress as though it was a fever. All at once the blue air seemed difficult to breathe. We had made a world here, one that mirrored the villages where we had once known freedom and the city we loved and hoped to return to. We minted our own pennies, the bronze poured into molds in the palace workshops, imprinted with our dream: For the Freedom of Zion. We had our marketplace, our bakers and wine merchants, the potters who fashioned jugs and cooking vessels from the clay that was found below in the nachal. As Adonai had created us in His image, so we had created Masada in the image of our past lives and the lives we hoped to live again, when we were free.

Now that the siege wall was in sight, people panicked, afraid that Zion would never rise again. They rushed the storerooms, greedy in their fear, thinking only of survival, as the jackal does in the middle of the night when the morning seems such distant territory. But even the jackal shares with his kind, and does not trample them, or forsake them. Our people were maddened by the deeds of the Romans and by their fear of what was to come during a siege that might last months.

Eleazar stood upon the fountain to stop the chaos. His followers had given to him a gold breastplate on which there were four gems of great worth. Although he had accepted this gift, he never dressed in it for battle, preferring instead to take up the same iron mail that his men used. Now, upon the arrival of the Romans, he wore the gold so that he might show the legion, even from a distance, that we were strong and unafraid and that we had been chosen by the Almighty to defeat Rome.

“We have one enemy,” he cried out.

People turned to him, as they might turn to a prophet. He was the one who had led them here, who had believed this fortress would be their salvation. The mountain had defended Herod in the time when Cleopatra sought to take this country from him, as it would defend us now. On that point he had never wavered.

“The wall is just a wall, made of stones. But the stones are the stones of Judea. They belong to us, and our enemy only gives us what is already ours. We will not starve, for there is still enough wine and oil for us to make do. Even in a time of siege, we will have enough to eat. Our cisterns are filled with water. Our God is everywhere, on both sides of the wall.”

Those who had panicked and been set to trample one another out of fear backed down. We could no longer hear the soldiers in the valley, for like a miracle the wind had shifted and those rough voices disappeared so that we could listen to our leader. The crowd stood close so they might hear the psalm Eleazar now spoke, the words of David, our great king of the past, a warrior who, like any other man, had walked with fear, as we did now, as all men must.

“Because of the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked: for they cast iniquity upon me, and in wrath they hate me. My heart is sore pained within me: and the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me.”

I remained in the latticework of shadows falling through the boughs of the olive tree in my garden, but my heart lifted to hear my beloved’s voice. This was what I had yearned for when I was cast out of Jerusalem, for the way he spoke was a miracle. With his words, he could approach the soul where it resided, a glory to God, for words were what the Almighty first created, after the silence of the world, and they were Eleazar ben Ya’ir’s gift as well.

I closed my eyes as though we were alone and those who stood between us were no longer in our path. The world was a river, and I had been led here on its currents, not out of hope but because it was my destiny.

* * *

WHEN I first saw him in Jerusalem, I was standing at a well, with a pitcher of water in my hands. I’d been sent to my mother’s kinsmen, for I had no father and no beit avi, family from my father’s line. Though she had to plead to have me taken in, my mother wanted me safely removed from Alexandria, where the kedeshah were being cast from their houses. There were no longer to be holy women for the priests, for the ancient laws of Jerusalem had filtered into Egypt. My mother and the other women I had always known as aunts were now called prostitutes and whores, like the women on the streets who had their prices etched into the soles of their sandals so that the men who followed them knew how much they must pay for favors. All at once, what had been honored was reviled. The henna tattoos that had proclaimed them as women of worth now marked them as worthless, and the priests for whom they had sacrificed themselves were the first to accuse them of their sins.

Before I left, my mother had clasped her prized gold amulets at my throat, whispering only my daughters should receive them. She brought out her book of spells from the ironwood box, wrapped the leaves of parchment in linen to disguise it, then gave it to me, filling the box with herbs I might need: black cumin, bay leaves, myrrh. That was when I realized she might not survive the turn against who she was. She who was once exalted was now forced to move through the city in a dark cloak, hiding the swirl of markings that had once convinced me she was a queen, the tattoos which now caused people to scorn her, hissing, as if they were snakes and she a dove, there for the taking. I had already begun the painful and tedious ritual of becoming tattooed before I was sent away, fortunately only on my back and chest, not on my face or arms and legs, as my mother had been marked. No one could see who I was meant to be.

I was twelve on the last day that I saw her, when she stood before me, her eyes welling with tears. That was my age when I went to the well in Jerusalem. I was drawn there because of my need for water, and because I remembered what I had seen in the Nile. My kinsman came to me, searching me out, for I was not allowed to go to the market unaccompanied. I saw that his eyes were silver, the color of the fish. He took the pail of water from my grasp. When he brushed my hand, he assured me that it didn’t matter, for we were of the same blood and were cousins. Therefore, as a brother who touched a sister, it was not a sin.

I listened as he bewitched me, for even then he had a way with what God had created first, and his words poured over me like water. But I had bewitched him as well. He was a husband, a young man of eighteen, and I was only a girl. All the same, I felt the power I had experienced when the fish came toward me of its own accord. It had no choice, for it had been written that my cousin and I would find each other, and that our love would ruin me, and that I would not care.

NOW, as I stood and listened to him speak King David’s words on the day of madness, when our people were transformed into jackals by their fear, I was again entranced. Like anyone else on the mountain, I was swayed by the splendor of his voice. But the others did not know him as I did. When he recited David’s song, I felt he spoke directly to me, for I was his beloved, and had been all this time.

“Oh that I had wings like a dove; for then I would fly away, and be at rest. Lo, then I would wander far off, and remain in the wilderness. Selah. I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest.”

From this mountain there was no longer an escape into the wilderness. The six Roman camps with their high towers blocked any passage through the ravines, or down the serpent’s path, or along the treacherous southern route of the cliffs on the back of the mountain. This stronghold was the only place where we might abide. Like the lion on his chain, we had no way to run from the force of our enemy. It had been written that we would make a stand here and that we would be the last to do so. The outcome would remain unknown until it was upon us, and all we could hope to do was follow God’s path.

“As for me, I will call upon God; and the Lord will save me. Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud: and He shall hear my voice. He hath delivered my soul in peace from the battle that was against me: for there were many with me.”

Afterward, when people had grown quiet, their faith restored, the women and children went to gather stones that they might fashion into weapons. These were then thrown down in a volley, like a hailstorm tossed upon the workers below. But the Romans seemed to worry little over the boulders that were catapulted into their midst. The building continued as they raised up their garrisons made of stone. If a slave at work on the wall should happen to die, there would be another to replace him. If a soldier should be wounded and falter, his brother would stand in his place.

In the quiet of twilight, we listened to the echo of the rocks that were lifted upon the wall, and we trembled despite King David’s words and Eleazar’s fierce confidence. This was the Romans’ method, to intimidate and terrify. That night when they fed the lion they gave him a donkey so that he might kill his own meal. We could hear the donkey’s screams above the endless clinking of shovels and picks and the raw voices of the men shouting below us. There was a great echo in the valley, and it seemed that the soldiers were speaking directly to us, as though we were the ones the lion had in its jaws.

I gazed down at the cliff to where my daughter was, hidden in the cave with the people she had chosen as her own. It seemed a cave like any other used by the wild ibex for shelter. If the Essenes’ presence remained unknown to the Romans, perhaps she would indeed be safer there. There was a bright flash; someone in the darkness of their cave had lifted a bronze bowl that glinted in the dark. I took it to be a message. I imagined it was her heart reaching out to mine. Despite everything, she was still the child I had struggled to bring forth into this world.

IN THE MONTH of Shevat, sheets of rain fell. Our people did not plant wheat or barley or flax or venture into the plaza to celebrate Rosh Chodesh, but instead peered up at the swollen sky from our doorways, unable to see the new moon and therefore unable to chart the true month, which begins with the moon.

My neighbors stood inside their houses and watched the flooding and breathed in the chill air. They shied from the rain, as I was drawn to it. I went to stand in my garden until I was drenched. I thanked Beree, angel of rain, who came to me when I searched for him, for I had called him to us in the hopes that the Romans would stop their building if the last of the season’s violent rainfalls disrupted them. Perhaps pools of mud, deep enough for mules and men to drown, would serve to slow them down.

But if anything the Romans worked harder at their task. Their world was appearing before us. Like the angels, we peered down to see what they were creating out of sand. More Jewish slaves had been brought to the valley, tied together with leather straps, treated as little more than sheep or goats. We could only watch as our brothers who had been enslaved called out for us to save them while they were mistreated and beaten. We heard their wailing, yet could do nothing to ease their suffering. They slept in pens, like the sheep, without shelter from the rain, while the soldiers resided with ease in large tents set upon stone foundations, protected by walls, with guards stationed at each camp’s four gates.

I had once believed I could control the rain as I could call upon it, but now, as I gazed upon our enemies, I saw I had been wrong. Only the angel Beree could contain the rain and make it serve him, and then only by the grace of God. What I had called for had enriched our enemies. The Romans bathed in the rainwater and gave thanks to their gods. The myrtle bloomed, and its scent filled the air. Herds of ibex came to lie down before the Roman camps to drink from the pools, though it meant they would be slaughtered, and it seemed that they, too, were a gift from the heavens.

THOUGH he was ailing, I left my son in the care of his sister and asked Yael to accompany me to the auguratorium. I had been saving the bones of sacrificed doves, drying them in the sun, so that I might now cast for the future.

We climbed the stairs to the tower. The month of Adar was beginning, the time of the blooming of almond trees, and the air was fragrant. From our perch we could see the Roman camp in its entirety, a circle of brutality. The bones I’d brought along in a silk bag had become so white they appeared incandescent in the gathering dark. I thought of the doves who had given their lives, how beautiful they were, how loyal to each other, how unafraid they were of us, their keepers, even when they were to be sacrificed.

Yael cleared the sand, then poured a circle of ashes that would contain the future so it would not spill into the present. She smoothed out the ashes with the knife she always carried in her tunic. As she did so, she recited a hymn to King Solomon. She had a beautiful voice; every chant I had taught her was far more lovely in her mouth than it had been in mine. The purity of her song carried across the valley, and for a moment our brethren who were slaves toiling below us looked upward, as if called by name.

I had taught Yael well, as I’d known I would from the moment I saw her enter the Snake Gate. Though she did not remember me, I had known her long ago. This was the reason I insisted she take the gold amulet my mother had given to me. Before I gave birth to my first daughter and was cast out of Jerusalem, before I was taken to the Iron Mountain by a man I never called by name, before Nahara entered this world, before I had a son who was named Adir, a name his father allowed me, for it means noble to my people, before the doves brought me here, Yael was my daughter, though she was not born to me, and I was her immah, her beloved mother, though I was little more than a girl myself.

In Jerusalem I’d whispered the songs of my mother to her long before either of us had ever heard of this fortress. I had combed her hair, and fed her, and watched over her, even though her father had instructed me to leave her hair unplaited and give her nothing but crusts, for he wished that she had never entered this world and blamed her for his grief.

I came to them as a servant, a simple girl with long black hair, so worthless that the assassin never glanced at my face, and knew neither my features nor my history. Had my mother known of my condition, she would have been shocked to discover I had become a housemaid, for I could read Aramaic and Hebrew and Greek and had been trained to speak with the most learned men in Alexandria. In fact, I was relieved to be gone from the house of her kinsmen, who had come to despise me. Eleazar ben Ya’ir’s mother was the one who sent me to be a servant. When I first came to her, she brought me to the mikvah, for she had the sense that I was tamé, impure. As I slipped out of my tunic, I made certain to stand in the shadows, but she saw me for who I was. She drew a deep breath when she spied my tattoos, then quickly murmured a prayer.

My aunt kept watch over her son after that, for she did not trust my upbringing. Soon enough her fear was realized. She knew what was between us from the glances we shared and quickly divined why her son no longer turned to his wife, though they had been wed only a short time. Though my aunt had promised my mother I would be safe in her home, she sent me away, hastily making plans without Eleazar’s knowledge, finding me work in a household where the mother had died. It was a place of ill fortune, and no one would work there. That was why I was accepted for the position, though I was a girl with little knowledge of household chores, so young and inexperienced I often cried myself to sleep because I missed my mother so.

Before she sent me away, Eleazar’s mother tied an herbal amulet to my cloak and told me it was good luck. I smiled and thanked her, but I knew it was nothing of the kind. She’d gone to a practitioner of keshaphim for a charm that would bind me to solitude and keep me from her son. My mother had taught me about such things, and I recognized the root of henbane. As soon as I was sent into the street, I plucked out the thread. I left the amulet in a gutter that ran with filth, for that was where it belonged. I said the prayer of protection, Amen Amen Selah, so that He our Lord, blessed be His name, would cast away my aunt’s ill will against me.

I WAS SENT to the house of Yosef bar Elhanan, where I was to sleep in the corridor alongside the child I was to care for. She was little more than a baby, forgotten on her pallet, while her brother had his father’s favor and a nursemaid of his own. I wiped away her tears when she called for her mother, much as I myself did when I woke from sleep and was startled to find that I was no longer in Alexandria, and that there was no courtyard and no fountain, no white lilies shimmering in the dark water.

Moved by my charge’s sorrow, I whispered that she could call me immah, even though I was twelve and should have thought of myself as her sister. I knew that in this world every girl must have a protector, for my mother had told me so and I believed all that she said. Although I longed for my mother’s wisdom and advice, I had to make my own decisions now. I took it upon myself to watch over this motherless child. I made a vow to protect her as she slept in the corridor that I swept each evening to ensure that the scorpions would stay in the corners.

When the father of the household had the cook leave out only crusts for us, little more than food for the rats, even on the eve of the Sabbath, I took matters into my own hands. I found a silver blessing cup and slipped it into my cloak. Although I knew thievery would bring a curse to me, I brought the chalice into the marketplace, trading it for a new tunic and cloak for the child, along with persimmons and pomegranates and grapes, as well as bedding for our corridor and a dove I planned to roast.

My little charge cried, clinging to me when she realized I meant to kill the dove, pleading with me to set it free. Though she was quiet, she was also fierce when she needed to be.

“If I do as you wish,” I warned before I set the bird free, “then you must abide by my wishes in return.”

This had been a bargain my own mother had often made with me when I yearned for her favor. Yael gave me her promise, and I released the dove. It disappeared into the sky above Jerusalem, and in doing so it bound us together for all eternity.

We did not have meat for our meal that night, but Yael was pleased. I was equally pleased to care for her, just as I was grateful to discover she was a good sleeper. She never woke when I slipped out at night to go to the well where I had first seen my cousin, so that I might be his. He would talk to me and I would listen — that was how it began. He spoke of his anger at the ways of the priests in the Temple, where there were divisions over who represented the true Israel. He could not abide that the Ark of the Covenant, God’s word to Moses, had once been hidden behind walls of gold, when it was meant to be enclosed in a simple tent, as Adonai had initially instructed. No wonder it had disappeared from men’s sight.

The home of our people was in the word of God, Eleazar insisted, not built of stone or gold. I listened and knew that one day others would listen to him as well, and that they would follow him, and that I would be among them. He was learned and sang the psalms of David, yearning to be in God’s favor. I was both his disciple and his cousin. I believed in him and no other, and soon enough I belonged to him. I gave myself away, as my mother had predicted I would.

When Eleazar’s wife went to visit her family in the north, near the shore of Galilee, my cousin brought me before a learned man so that we might wed secretly. Then he took me to his chamber where we were wed in deeds as well as words. I burned when I was beside him. I forgot Alexandria and the garden where I had studied with my mother. I never revealed I was learned in many languages, for it was only his voice I wished to hear, not my own. Another man might have questioned the tattoos set upon me and turned from me when he saw them. I told him the marks were the map that had led me to him, and that was enough for him.

He took me as I was.

* * *

AS A SERVANT in the house of my master, I was expected to know nothing. My lessons might have never happened, my knowledge turned to ashes. All that was required was that I sweep the floor and care for the child. That was not a problem for me. I was tender with Yael. I learned to be a mother from mothering her. Perhaps I’d sensed that I was with child myself, and that added to my tenderness. Eleazar promised he would tell his family of his love for me, but he could not bring himself to do so. He said his father was a tyrant, but I knew it was his mother he feared. In the night my heart beat too quickly and my blood did not come with the moon. I was hot and flushed, suffering from constant thirst, as I was to be every time I was with child, for each life that grew within me was a fire I had no recourse but to carry and let burn.

When I became so big I could no longer hide my size, Bar Elhanan sent me from his house. The dear girl who had been my daughter clutched my cloak and wept. I assured her that her brother would watch over her, warning him that he must always do so. Yael rushed after me, bringing me water. It was all she had to offer, but to me, in my loneliness, it seemed a great gift. I wept to leave her behind. I told her that if God was willing we would see each other in this world once more before we walked into the World-to-Come.

THE LAST TIME I met with Eleazar in Jerusalem rain was falling. Such a thing was a joy, unexpected and needed. The dust settled, the boughs of the trees lifted their arms to the sky. I became alive again, the girl in the fountain, the swimmer in the river, the one without fear of drowning. I stood in the street outside my aunt’s house until I was drenched. At last I saw him, shifting through the yard, liquid in his movements, becoming a part of the torrent that fell upon us, flooding the streets, forcing people to remain inside their homes.

He alone could quench my thirst.

I had called him to me as I had learned to call the rain. There was not a whisper and yet he had heard. I believed that he would divorce his wife and bring me into his home, convinced that, unlike other women who went to the practitioners of keshaphim, desperate, willing to pay any price for a charm, I would never have need of love spells.

But Eleazar had come to tell me that his wife insisted she had proof that I had been in his bed. She vowed that the pallet they slept upon had been tinted red from the henna on my skin. My aunt, who despised me, had told her of my tattoos, to forewarn her, and therefore she had looked beneath the blanket she had woven for her husband, and found my mark. My beloved had promised me that I was as much his wife as she was, but now I saw the truth in his expression, his longing for me entwined with sorrow. If the color red had been found in the place where we had lain together, then it had foreseen my fate and was indeed my blood, for my heart had begun to weep.

I was overcome with a kind of dread I hadn’t felt before, not even when I left my mother. I remembered what she had vowed on the day I saw my future. There was a part of me that wished I had remained by her side, though I knew our house had been taken from us. New tenants surely stood beside the fountain where the white lilies grew. I cried over those rare flowers when I wanted to cry over my fate. I said I could not live without them. I became frantic, uncontrollable. My cousin was beset by worry; he had me wait while he ran to the market and brought back a vial of perfume. The gift should have pleased me, for it carried the scent of lilies, but the fragrance had come from the red lilies of the fields of Moab, not the ones I had known as a child. I wept even more, for now I understood the loss I had felt when I was only a little girl, no older than Yael, and I saw my future in the Nile.

Eleazar promised he would plead with the elders of his family so that I might be allowed to join their household as his second wife. Such circumstances were fairly common, especially among the wealthy or in towns where there were too few men or if a first wife was unable to bring forth a child. My beloved was an honorable man but young; he not yet dared to defy his parents. He would learn this lesson well as he joined with the Zealots who defied the priests in the Temple, but for now he was at the mercy of his family.

I assured my cousin I would wait for him to come for me, and yet I knew he would not. The marks his wife swore had tainted their marriage bed had ruined me, and no man of any worth could take me for his wife. His family would not allow it.

I FOUND a chamber where I could stay behind a house of keshaphim. I’d noticed the dim shack as I went through the marketplace, for my mother had gone to such places in Alexandria, and I’d kept this in mind. She had instructed me that I might find refuge in times of trial among women who practiced magic. Three old women who were sisters lived there. They were unmarried, rumored to be witches who turned into dragons at night. In truth, they were kindhearted, poor, but wise in the ways of magic. In return for being allowed to sleep there, I cooked the meals and learned to bake bread in their small clay oven, making certain to always keep aside the burnt offering to sacrifice to God so that He would not forsake me. My cousin did not return. I dreamed about him for days on end, and then he disappeared from my dreams. Now when I woke from sleep I was gasping, drowning in my dreams in the river where my mother had taken me. For the first time I realized that, although the fish had come to me, he had also swum away from me. This had been the reason I was bereft as I stood knee-deep in the Nile.

I begged the sisters for a love charm, for one cannot complete such an amulet for oneself. They fashioned an incantation bowl from white Jerusalem clay, said to be the purest on earth. Before it was fired, I was to write upon it with a sharpened reed. Holy angels, I adjure you just as this shard burns so shall the heart of Eleazar ben Ya’ir burn after me.

But in the firing, the bowl broke. We collected the pieces, though they burned our fingers. It was a bad omen, but I took the shards and wrapped them in linen and soaked them with my own tears.

When my time came to bring a life into this world, the three sisters were my midwives. My firstborn’s birth was difficult. I was young and frightened. Since that time I have seen a hundred births, but my own blood terrified me, and the tearing heat inside me nearly broke me apart. I wanted to give up, and let the Angel of Death take me, but one of the sisters leaned close to urge me on.

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. In the name of I am what I am, the name of God, get out. You have journeyed and now you have arrived. Amen Amen Selah.

I named my child Rebekah and saw that she had her father’s eyes. That was all I would have of him. That was my punishment from God.

I WAS CALLED to stand before the elders who were to judge me in the ceremony of the sotah in their attempt to prove my guilt as an adulteress. My situation had become a legal matter, for his mother and wife had accused me of adultery and of having sexual relations with demons. They unbraided my hair and let it hang disheveled to shame me and show me as one of Lilith’s disciples. They seemed to forget I was only a child, for I had turned thirteen just days before. They wrote God’s name upon parchment, submerged in a cup of water so that the word might be erased into the liquid. I would be forced to drink the Almighty’s name. If I sickened, it meant my impurity would not accept what was pure. I would then be revealed to be an adulteress.

But water was my element, and it did not forsake me. I drank it all, yet stood before them unharmed and unrepentant. I proclaimed that I had not committed adultery, and that was the truth. Eleazar ben Ya’ir alone was a husband to me.

They held my child up to examine her. She was a small being, with a dark cap of hair. She looked exactly as I had when I was born, my image in nearly every way. Those who judged us were nearly satisfied that there was no proof of any wrongdoing. The dark girl child was mine. There was no sign of the father, whether he be human or some unspeakable creature, no wings, no horns, no demon’s mark. They almost let us go. Until they found their proof in the color of her eyes. “The eyes of a demon,” Eleazar’s wife testified, and perhaps at that moment she believed this to be true.

Eleazar’s father had him restrained so that he might not come to me. That night he managed to send a servant with two doves in a wooden cage, trained to return to him, devoted to each other as we were. I took the doves and my child into the cart they used to expel me from their sight. I left my beloved behind, but in my shawl I kept what was left of the incantation bowl. I brought the broken ceramic pieces to the Iron Mountain when I went with the man who paid for me with a few coins. I used turpentine gum to set the ravaged shards back in place. Then I waited. Years passed with waiting, a lifetime. When at last my beloved sent for me, I broke the bowl myself, certain I had no need of such charms anymore.

But when I threw the bones of the doves in the tower so that I might read what was to come, I knew I had been mistaken.

* * *

OUR WARRIORS went forth in small groups, with spears, in silence, invisible and deadly. They struck the slaves who built the wall on the cliffs behind us and the soldiers who oversaw them. But as soon as our enemies fell, others replaced them, as though they were not flesh and blood but mere stalks of wheat.

When our people stole weapons, however, those were not so easily replaced. The Romans’ anger was brutal at this offense, their retaliation fierce. They showed they would not tolerate our ways, capturing the warriors who had raided their storerooms, swarming upon them in such a great number that our people disappeared in their grasp.

The Roman slaves had set timbers deep in the earth and erected a platform for all to see. They crucified our people in our own valley, then they cut the heads from the bodies, so that our loved ones’ spirits would wander. They threw the heads upon the ground and rolled them to the lion. But the beast refused to take them. He lay down and would not touch a single one.

It was still Adar, the month of almonds and of good fortune, the time when Yael first came to the dovecote. Perhaps our people were still fortunate. A whisper went up among us that the beast that had been chained was our lion, on our side. Among the warriors a wager went out: whoever freed the lion would give the greatest glory to God. He who did so would be blessed and would bring God’s favor among our people.

NO MATTER HOW we might tear at our garments and sing lamentations, there was no end to our grief, for without bodies or bones, we could not honor our people. The families of the murdered shrieked and went to priests, begging for vengeance. There was not a man among us who would not have given his life in exchange for our people’s freedom, but a life was nothing to our enemies. We were like the locusts they could kill without effort, with a single slap.

My son tried to drag himself from his bed, using a crutch he’d fashioned from a fallen limb of the tree behind our chamber. He wished to fight alongside his brothers, but Aziza begged him to let her go in his place. She sat at our table and chopped off her long hair, then braided what little was left tightly, close to her head. She instructed her beast of a dog to stand guard and make certain Adir did not leave our chamber. At her command the huge mastiff stood beside the boy, growling, bits of foam flecking the corners of his mouth.

“Am I a prisoner?” poor Adir demanded to know.

He was still a child in my eyes, even though he was the age I had been when I was expelled from Jerusalem to find my way in the wilderness, when I had been judged as a woman and had already given away my innocence.

Yehuda could keep Adir company, watching over him to make certain he would not flee, for the Essene boy would not fight alongside our people, and though he remained with us, and Revka cared for him as if he was her own, he was set apart by his beliefs.

“Are you my jailer as well?” Adir asked his friend.

“I would never be that,” Yehuda replied.

The Essene boy rose up and opened the door so that Adir might leave if that was indeed his desire. But Adir was exhausted from our arguments; he leaned back on his pallet, his face ashy. His warrior life had been taken from him; only a part of him remained. Although I felt compassion, I was also relieved. Selfishly, I did not wish to risk my son’s life.

My daughter was another matter. She had been cast from iron.

OUTSIDE there was a rising madness. The Romans had begun an attack of fiery arrows that came to us in a blazing hail. A section of the orchard had caught fire, and even when the flames had been put out, our people hurrying to quench them with jars of precious water, the scent of burning fruit drifted everywhere. While our trees were destroyed, while our children breathed in smoke, while our garments singed and turned black with ashes, the Romans set up an arena for cockfights so that they might have some amusement in the evenings. When this bored them, they set their slaves against each other with spears and chains, for to the Romans, slaves’ lives were worth no more than the roosters’.

We turned away and did not look down upon them. We covered our ears so that we would not hear the slaves cry out for their mothers and their wives and for their God, who appeared to have forsaken them.

ON THE DAY my son was called to duty, as all warriors were, I walked into the yard with Aziza. Some might say I was wrong to give her up so easily and allow her to fight among the men, but her fate had already been written. Perhaps I might have prevented her call to war had I not changed her name, or perhaps this was her fate no matter what she was named. She was on the path of her element. She had always chosen metal, something cold and sharp. It suited her, as it had suited her to ride in the grasslands.

Before she left, I offered her the second gold amulet of protection that I wore at my throat, but she shook her head.

“I’m protected,” she assured me. “Have no fear.”

When she lifted her scarf, I noticed the silver medallion with the image of Solomon attacking a female demon. No woman would be allowed to wear such an amulet. Her courage brought me pride, as well as a cloud of regret.

“We should have stayed where we were,” I said ruefully.

I had begun to dream about the Iron Mountain. In my dreams there were forty acacia trees, and in each tree there were forty black birds. I was beneath their branches, and I found I could not move. My feet had become entwined with the roots of a tree, my arms the limbs that were covered with yellow flowers. The bees were called to me, and they swarmed about me, and I wept, for I could not taste the sweetness of their honey, though it was all around.

I had done what I could to stop my daughters from following my fate. None of it had prevented what my mother told me had been written before they were born, before I went to Jerusalem and stood at the well and did as I pleased even though I knew where it would lead me. Love would bring about my undoing. That was the reason I had tried my best not to love my children, so I would not bring my curse upon them. In that, I had failed.

“We were meant to be here,” Aziza assured me.

Her skin was burned by the sun. I noticed the scar that was beneath her eye shone white in her darkened face. She could have been a beautiful woman, instead she was a warrior. She could have been a boy who walked through the streets of the red city of Petra, instead she was my daughter, who had followed me to this fortress, and whom I loved despite the many ways I had tried not to do so.

When she went to the barracks, I thought of my mother, who had stood in the courtyard beside the fountain to watch me leave Alexandria. Now I understood she had known she would not see me again. My heart dropped because I had viewed my own future and what was to come in the bones I had thrown on the tower floor.

I would lose everything I had.

Something was ending, but it was also beginning. I could feel the life within me move and shift. Creation had begun at the Temple mount, and perhaps it would once again if everything else disappeared. Already, there were men speaking of a third Temple, one that would arise in the future, more glorious than any other. From destruction there would be light, and the first words would again be spoken out of a holy silence, for that is always the beginning.

I walked to the wall, my cloak around me. I rested my hand upon my abdomen, and upon my daughter who was not yet born. My beloved wished for a son, as all men did, but I knew I would have another daughter. I always carried a girl child in the same way, high, under my heart. I wanted another world for her, not this mayhem below us. There were still pools of rain on the valley floor. In any other time we would have been grateful. Wild goats and deer would have come to drink. Falcons and herons would have dropped from the sky to bathe, and the ravens, who had fed Elijah in the wilderness, would have come to us with plums in their beaks.

Now there was only the lion, whose chain allowed him to roll in the water. He was covered with mud, his huge paws leaving cleft marks in the damp earth. I forced myself to look away from this great beast, for I could not bear to see him so debased and tamed. I was reminded of the trained Syrian bears one could see in the alleys of Alexandria and Jerusalem, but this was much worse, for the lion had been humiliated in his own land, dispossessed as we were, the lord of nothing but stones.

I gazed down upon the sheer cliff in my grief. As I did, I spied a black goat along the mountainside, one that had escaped from the Essenes’ cave. He was scrambling among the rocks, lost and forsaken, unable to find the rest of his flock.

It was a sign of the darkness to come.

ONE ROMAN SOLDIER noticed the goat, but one was all it took. He told his comrades, and they went after the creature hastily, first in sport, then with the relentless fervor of hunters. In doing so they stumbled upon the camp of those who wanted only peace. Yehuda came to the wall to stand beside me as the Romans began their ascent to the limestone caves beneath us. It was as though his mother, still among her people, had called out to him, as my daughter’s heart had called to me. We were helpless to do anything other than watch as the soldiers climbed the cliff. One fell and I was quick to praise God, and I wondered what had become of me that I might pray for a man’s death on the rocks, rejoicing at the sound of his cries.

Those soldiers who managed to reach a plateau in the cliff then sent down ropes to ensure those who followed would have an easier time rising up. As it is said of the angels, we could see what was to happen before it occurred, but like them we were unable to change the outcome. If this was what the angels observed when they gazed upon our world, how we might murder each other and cause one another agony, then I pitied them as I pitied no others.

Our warriors came to send down a volley of arrows, but the arrows fell upon the rocks as if they were birds falling from the sky. Aziza, too, had rushed to the wall, but she was dressed like a woman and therefore helpless, though she could not be restrained from throwing down rocks and I heard the war cry of Moab escape from her. The Roman soldiers had entered the cave, and our weapons could not reach them there. Several of our warriors held Aziza back when she scrambled onto the wall in an attempt to leap into the fray beneath us, for a warrior such as my daughter could not stand idly by and was therefore restrained in ropes.

Although the murders were hidden from our sight, they were not hidden from our ears, and we were made to listen to the sound of death, so terrible to hear, all the worse when what you see is inside yourself, the thousand cruelties set upon those you love.

Aziza and I stood together and wept, not knowing if the screams we heard were the voices of those we loved or the pitiless shrieks of hawks above us. We could hold our hands over our ears, we could turn away, but that wouldn’t end the horror. The wailing of the dead can be heard in every corner of this world and in the World-to-Come. It does not stop when the sound is finished, it is within you, an eternal part of your being.

BECAUSE she could not be buried, and her bones were left ungathered, my daughter’s soul would remain beside her body, lost, desperately trying to reenter herself and become alive once more. The jackals would find her, but her soul would remain in the cave even when they took her in their jaws; she would watch as the beasts shook her into pieces, devouring her. Each of the agonies of the flesh would be hers in spirit. There would be no taharah, the purification that readies a body for the next world, no blessed water or oils or aloe to wash away the sins of life on earth. Still the pure of heart were said to be able to see the Shechinah as they were dying, they looked upon the most radiant and compassionate face of God. This was what I could hope for. That at the moment of her death she saw God’s light and nothing more.

I wished that the lie the Romans told about Nahara’s father’s people was indeed true and that her blood did run blue, so that when they cut her down a thousand more would arise in her place. I had nearly died giving birth to her, and would have, had Aziza not been such a fearless child. All of that agony spent only so that I might live to sing lamentations for her throughout the day and night. I tore my garments until my hands bled, keening as I did so. Though I had lost her when she defied me and married Malachi, I mourned her bitterly now. Her blood was on my hands. I did not blame Malachi or the Essenes, for I was the one who had led her to her doom, exactly as my mother had said I would, bringing ruin to all I loved and to anyone who might love me.

When my daughter of Moab was born, her father had waited ten days to see her, as was the custom of his people. He had wanted a son, but when he entered the tent, his face broke into a smile. It was good that a man could not see a child immediately, when an infant was still battered by birth, swollen and blue from the burden of coming to life. To her father’s eyes, this girl child was a radiant being. He was a man who did not hide what he felt. He chose her name, and I agreed to his choice, for Nahara meant the light that shone upon great beauty. We agreed on many things, but on this most of all. I wondered if, on the other side of the Salt Sea, my daughter’s father knew that she was lost, if he had been waiting all this time for us to return. I wondered if when he found me in the wilderness and took me with him I had been wrong not to love him. At the very least I should have been grateful enough to offer him my loyalty in return.

* * *

OUR PEOPLE went out to see the new moon at the time of Rosh Chodesh. We offered God our prayers, but we did not rejoice. There was no dancing. The Roman wall had been completed, encircling us like a viper. The camps had risen, several of them larger than most villages. Those who had not come from Jerusalem were stunned by what the legion had accomplished; below them there were more people than many had seen in their lifetimes, the six thousand wearing the white tunics of the legion, and thousands more enslaved to help them with their brutal tasks.

The Romans’ main camp, set directly across from the Northern Palace, boasted a tower that rivaled that of any garrison. There was another large camp behind us, guarding the treacherous eastern slope, and six more smaller camps set in a circle. Beyond Silva’s camp there was the village of followers, where people led their daily lives, raising chickens, taking women for their pleasure, praying to their gods. I considered each one to be the murderer of my daughter.

I went out at night to the wall where I had drawn spells before, and there I took a dreadful oath.

I invoke and beseech the Most High God, Lord of all spirits and of the flesh, against those who treacherously murdered or killed, who spilled innocent blood in an unjust fashion. Lord who oversees all angels, before whom every soul humbles itself, may you avenge this innocent blood and seek justice.

I wrote these words upon parchment, then burned them so they might rise up to the Almighty. I called down the angels of Chimah, the messengers of wrath and of vengeance. Chimah is also said to be the name of the stars in the sky that are the seven sisters, who look down upon us in times of sorrow. As I beseeched the angels, I took a knife to my flesh and sliced along the palm of my left hand, though our people were not allowed to cut ourselves, or harm that which God had created. I cut deeply as I offered myself in a bargain to keep my surviving children safe from every living thing, and from the demons who were so close by, and from the lion below us.

OUR ENEMIES studied our ways. To them, we were nothing more than a scorpion placed under glass. They wished to gauge when we would next sting. Each time they attempted to scale the serpent’s path, we poured boiling oil onto them. Our archers were perched in the olive trees and along the wall, ready to shoot down whoever might try to pass. The path was narrow, and the legion was wide, an easy target when they tried to scale the mountain.

We thought they would see how dangerous a scorpion could be, despite its small size. But if anything, the Romans decided that the best way to catch a scorpion is to crush it in its own garden. To destroy us, they needed to reach us. They began their own path, a wide ramp built at the western slope and rising toward the North Gate. Barrel upon barrel of earth was brought to raise up this ramp, which took the form of a white mountain. We thought they were mad to attempt to create what only God could form, a cliff reaching two hundred cubits from the valley from which they could pursue us. But there were so many slaves and the work was unceasing, and before our eyes the cliff appeared, so white it burned with brightness. At night it seemed the world had overturned, and the stars were beneath us, rising up to us, threatening to burn us with their light.

The men at the synagogue met to discuss whether or not it was truly possible for this ramp to reach our walls. But in the time it took for them to debate this matter, the ramp rose so high that we could plainly hear the workers. The Roman soldiers were able to swing javelins and spears that took several lives. We were stunned by what our enemies had accomplished, and how, like our Creator, they had built a mountain overnight.

* * *

IN JERUSALEM I had seen my rival only once, as I stepped into the cart on the day I was driven out of the city. The wooden cage of doves was in my hand and I carried my child, who wailed in my arms. They forced me to go barefoot, as was the custom; when my feet bled, one more sorrow would be added to my punishment. I remember that Ben Ya’ir’s wife was wearing fine sandals, made of goat leather, clasped with brass buckles. She wore necklaces of lapis and carnelian and turquoise, with gold bracelets on her arms. I had only a black scarf wound around myself. As my enemy watched me climb into the donkey cart meant for hauling ewes to the butcher, I thought not of the torments of the wilderness, nor of the vultures and ravens that would follow us. I was not occupied with the heat that would bring us low or the jackals that would not be content to wait for our death so we might be their meal. Instead I was ashamed of my bare feet.

Now, after all this time, she came to my door on the day the Roman ramp was completed. The ramp had fallen short, and for this we were grateful. But we shuddered to think of how the Romans might amend this, and how intent they were on reaching us, even if that meant they must float through the air.

The dog who watched over my son howled when Channa approached, as he might have had the Angel of Death knocked upon our door. Dogs are said to know of such visitations. In Alexandria I had witnessed a priest’s dog howl at the moment of his owner’s death; the grieving creature was then put to death himself so that his body might be buried beside his master’s. I held our watchdog by the neck and opened the door so that I might gaze upon my caller with loathing. I had already faced her once on this mountain, and she had no more power over me.

At least she knew well enough not to cross my threshold. I took in my rival, her pinched face, her sorrowful eyes, and in return she stared at me. By then there was no disguising I would soon bring another child into this world. But it was a world torn asunder. To me, birth seemed less like a gift to the soul I carried than it did a curse.

The dog pulled back his lips and showed his teeth to my visitor.

“I only want a minute,” Channa said hastily.

I loosened my hold on the dog, and he snapped his jaws. Perhaps Eleazar had once mentioned she was afraid of dogs. Perhaps that pleased me.

“I thought you wanted my life,” I remarked.

“No.” She shook her head. “I wanted my husband.”

“Then go to him,” I suggested.

She was hesitant. Not until I began to close the door did she speak out, her words flowing.

“Only you can grant me the protection of his life.”

We gazed at each other over the threshold. I wondered if it was possible that, even now, as Rome was besieging us, Channa might be trying to ensnare me, hoping to have me brought before the council and tried as a witch. Still I listened, for this woman and I had been tied together as the night is tied to the day, never knowing each other yet never eluding one another.

Perhaps I wanted to see her beg for something. The idea of her bleak pleas and her remorse was compelling. I sent the dog inside, then stepped into the yard. In any other year, this season would have meant the start of planting, but our fields lay fallow. There were no seeds and no men to work the plows and no beasts to assist them.

“I am not a magician,” I told my rival. “I can’t grant you anything.”

The almond trees were in full flower, and the hyssop bloomed. Channa had finished the cure I had sent to her and was once more prone to difficulty when she drew in deep breaths. I did not mention that hyssop grew nearby, along my wall. I let her puff and pant.

“Tonight the warriors are going out to try to stop the building of the ramp. They will not all return.”

I was resolved not to let her see how this news affected me. If she thought I was indifferent, she would not have the power to break my heart.

Channa went on when I was silent. “I dreamed he would return only with the help of a black bird.”

“I’m not a bird,” I said, though I was alarmed by this news, for I, too, had dreamed of a black bird, a raven, such as the one that had visited Elijah and fed him when he was lost in the wilderness and had no sustenance. “Why come to me?”

She was gazing at the child within me. “Is it a son?” Her voice was plaintive.

“Now you think I’m a witch and can divine God’s will. You think I’m many things, it seems. Did you ever think I was a girl who was sent into the wilderness? Did you see that my feet were bare and that the vultures followed me and that I was alone, sent to die? Maybe that was why your dream came to you. Perhaps you’re meant to choke on feathers.”

“Save him, even if it’s for yourself,” Channa said to me then.

She raised her eyes, and I saw the truth, that he was her husband and that she was willing do anything to rescue him. I took a step away. I knew then that she had power over me still, and that her power came from the fact that she loved him.

“I should have brought you into our home,” she went on. “Then your children would be mine as my husband was yours. We might have carried our burdens and joys together, as sisters.”

I marveled that she had the courage to speak to me in this manner, that she hadn’t been afraid to court my hatred of her and my spite. Because of this, I softened in a way I hadn’t thought possible. Perhaps it had been written that she would ruin her life and my own. Perhaps she, too, had no choice but to follow her fate.

“Don’t do this for me,” Channa said. “Do it for the one you love. Our husband.”

I watched her hasten away, following the wall, although arrows flew close by, some set on fire. She didn’t shrink from them; perhaps she no longer cared about matters such as her own safety. I noticed that her feet were bare, and that she had wound a black scarf around her shoulders, and that she was now in the wilderness herself, and that everything she had said was true.

I WENT to the Snake Gate and asked the guard to let me by. I understood why I had dreamed of forty acacia trees surrounded by bees. The dream had been given to me by the angels and by the Almighty. What had appeared to be a puzzle now formed itself into a path.

The guard might have refused me, but Amram passed near, and I turned to him to plead for help. He was arrogant and impatient, half-dressed in his silver-scaled armor. His hair was long and plaited, ready for war.

“No woman goes through the gate,” he told me coldly, girding himself for the coming night, when the warriors meant to attack the slaves who were building the ramp. He had no idea that I had known him as a spoiled and sweet child, favored in his father’s eyes. Now his demeanor was harsh, and I saw something dark within him, a blackness of spirit that wasn’t there before. Some whispered that the raids of our people had included the murder of women and children. They swore our warriors had no choice, that it was all for the cause of the true Israel and the one whose name can never be spoken aloud, I am I. But war brought such changes to all, and with those changes it brought a loss of lev, the true heart, especially for those who had betrayed God’s laws, and who knew that they did, and who told themselves they acted as they must.

“Perhaps you’ve come because your daughter has a message for me?” he asked.

Aziza had spurned this warrior without granting him a reason for her displeasure, and his hurt was evident. She would not speak of him and seemed to have no interest in him.

“Are you her messenger?” the warrior wanted to know.

He used the word mal’ach, which although it can mean messenger can also mean angel. Perhaps this was his way of calling her a shedah, as many before had, or perhaps he believed I had called the angels of wrath upon him, that it was my disapproval which had caused Aziza to turn from him.

Yael had spied us from the plaza. She wore a tattered gray cloak that was too large for her frame. She came forward, concerned, when she saw her brother’s bitterness. “Shirah is not the cause of her daughter’s actions,” Yael reminded him gently.

“Or am I, it seems,” Amram said in a heated tone. “She can no longer even see me.”

“Be patient,” Yael suggested. “She may return to you.”

Amram reached out to make a quick sweep of the chaos below us. “I have no time to wait.”

Yael had taken note of the basket I carried. She threw me a quick look, then asked her brother if we might gather herbs from the hillside.

Amram shook his head, for this was not allowed. “Not on this day.”

“My brother,” Yael teased, “must I remind you that I can remember when you slept with your thumb in your mouth and feared the scorpion in the corridor?”

“Yaya,” he said, shaking his head, smiling in spite of himself. “I cannot let you go.”

“We’ll be careful,” she vowed. “Some things are meant to be,” I heard her whisper to Amram. “I’ll look for an herb that will bring you luck.”

He was still her brother, willing to listen to her demands. He spoke with the guard, who let us slip out the gate. The daylight had stretched itself into long shadows, which allowed us to press ourselves against the cliffs and go forth unseen. I had meant to be alone, but now I had no choice in the matter. Perhaps it was fitting that Yael should accompany me, for she had learned the spells my mother had taught me and would have no fear of what we must accomplish.

We made our way along the hillside together, then slunk down toward a damp ravine between two caves. Once, gathering kindling nearby, I had spied bunches of fragrant pink blooms set upon spindly green limbs. They were wild cousins of the rhododendron, a flower my mother had pointed out in Alexandria so that she might warn me of its dangers. Like the ba’aras root, which could draw out an enemy’s soul, the leaves and roots of the rhododendron were forbidden but often used for pharmaka in matters of love and of revenge. Of all the parts of this toxic plant, the flowers were the most potent.

We crouched low and listened well, the mud of the nachal slippery under our bare feet. We were protected by the wind. It seemed we were in another world entirely, one in which we might remember how beautiful the wilderness could be. We would soon be approaching the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and the sun was strong for the season. The rhododendron flower was the potion I had come to find, one I did not need to concoct or create, for it was already part of creation. Spells and charms were not enough to protect my beloved. It was poison I needed.

I held up my hand so that Yael might bend her ear toward the echo that rumbled nearby. Beneath the never-ending noise of the Romans, rising up as they toiled with shovels and picks, was the sound of bees. In spring they often swarmed in these hills, traveling here from Egypt for the last flowering of the desert before the heat arrived. We followed the buzzing to a fallen log, wherein yellow honey was dripping forth, what some among us call debas, and others refer to as manna. The food of the bees was often salvation to those in the desert, praised by man and beast alike. But this honey was like no other, for it was gathered from the deadly pink flowers that grew in the ravine; only a small taste would drive a man mad for hours, perhaps for days.

I shrugged off my cloak and insisted Yael stand back. I alone was safe from the bees’ stinging wrath, for I had poured salt upon my skin, so that they would not light upon me as I reached inside the log to draw out the honeycomb. Before our warriors went to destroy the ramp of the Romans, the soldiers of the legion partaking of this tainted honey would be maddened. When evening fell, they would not be able to divine whether they were dreaming or if indeed our men had fallen upon them. In their confusion, like men made drunk, they would fail to draw their swords.

Yael and I huddled beside a cliff as bees circled around the honeycomb. I sprinkled salt upon it, forcing the bees to float away, back to the deadly pink flowers, where they gathered more nectar. When I described my intentions, Yael was not surprised. She admitted that she had come in search of me, for she had heard a voice calling to her, telling her what she must do. She was the one who would bring the poison to our enemy. That was the reason she had chosen to leave Arieh with her father, and why she’d dressed in the assassin’s cloak, slipping it from a hook in his chamber to serve as her armor, flimsy and thin as it might be. When she drew it over her head, she all but disappeared before me. The cloth was the color of the pale sky, and of the stones, and of the thin sunlight that fell upon us. Even her scarlet hair faded beneath the hood; her face disappeared and became a mist.

I had planned to deposit the tainted manna for the Romans, but Yael insisted the voice had spoken to her for a reason. I did not wish to let her go, or to be the cause of any harm that might befall her. I pleaded with her, but she would not listen. She believed she had been called to take the honey from my hands. In truth, I understood, for in my dream she had been beside the acacia trees. She had lifted her arms to heaven as she’d stepped into my place.

I appreciated why Yael had given the slave the gold amulet of protection; we were all comforted to think of him finding his way to his own country, where the snow was spiraling down. Still, she was in need of protection. I fastened the second gold amulet around her throat, despite her pleadings that she wasn’t worthy. I knew that she was meant to be sheltered by the sign of the fish, and by the promise of water, and by the grace of the Almighty.

I WAITED in the fading daylight as Yael went on alone. We had entered the hour that opens the heavens to our sight, a time when holy men insist it is possible for them to witness the throne of God. I saw only the cliffs that were before us. I dared not raise my eyes to the cave on the sheer cliff where the Essenes had died, for my daughter’s spirit lingered there, cold and alone. The wickedness of the world was a part of creation, I knew this, and the Angel of Death had been created on that day when life first appeared, yet I was embittered. I wept for what I had lost and what the world had lost and would yet lose again.

Yael was quick as she made her way down the mountain. I barely managed to observe her form beneath her cloak as she approached the white ramp that led to hell, for that is what we called the valley that had once been ours and had come to belong to Rome. When she neared the building site, she immediately left the honeycomb on a ledge of rock, placed carefully, so that the soldiers who oversaw the slaves would be sure to find it. The sweet scent would call to them, and they would devour the poison as our people enjoyed the bounty of manna when we were released from bondage in Egypt. Our warriors would then have a measure of safety when they attacked.

The curtain of night would soon be upon us, the honeycomb was in place, yet Yael tarried. I grew cold watching the stars appear, still she did not come. I began to worry and pace, for she seemed to have vanished. Though she wore the gold amulet of protection, God alone could protect her in this valley. As the hour grew late, I became frantic, nearly overcome with the fear of what might have happened to her. Then I saw a flicker of mist.

In the darkness, Yael had managed to slink down beside a rock and remain hidden as the Romans in the field practiced for the warfare to come, setting to with the swords and javelins they would use against us when the white ramp was completed. When the soldiers at last went to their barracks, Yael rose up from beside the rock. I couldn’t fathom the meaning of her movements as she left the safety of her perch and continued to go forth. I wondered if perhaps she had eaten from the honey and if she herself had gone mad to think she could enter the valley floor of the Romans and survive. Still she moved forward.

The pool of mud was before her, and beyond that lay the lion.

In all the valley this beast alone had spied her, or perhaps he had picked up her scent. Yael had gone to the mikvah that day, and when stench is everywhere, the scent of what is pure is most noticeable of all. The lion raised his head and gazed across the pool as Yael made her way, wading carefully. I could not abide the thought of seeing her torn apart, ravaged and devoured while I watched, the little girl I had loved as though she were my daughter when I was but a girl myself. My grief was enormous as I stood alone in the falling dark, weeping for all I had done in the world and the many people I had wronged. I thought that perhaps I was witnessing the End of Days and that the Essenes had been right all along, and we had been merely too foolhardy to listen. I thought of what the bones I had thrown had revealed, and the future I had seen and all I had yet to lose in this world.

Yael had come to stand before the lion. He could have easily reached to attack her, yet he did not move. His tail switched, nothing more. Yael drew closer still. I could see them through a layer of mist. A fierce creature, a pool of water, a woman who was unafraid. Perhaps because she had once been bitten by a lion, she imagined she was immune to any further bites, as some who are attacked by bees never again react to their sting.

No one in the Roman camp had paid attention to the lion for some time, or had even thought to feed him since their arrival. One donkey was all he’d been granted. He had been mistreated, half-starved, made to stay unsheltered from the burning sun, unable to flee the torrents of rain when they came. He had served his purpose, to frighten us, and now he was abandoned. Ravens came close, but he could not reach them. Ibex and deer and sheep had been roasted over the fires of the Romans, but the lion had not been granted a shred of their meat or bones.

He did not move as Yael approached, nor did he shrink from her. Perhaps he did not maul her because he had been broken, taken from his land, abused, unable to act like a lion. Or perhaps he was merely waiting for a messenger from God, as we wait for Gabriel.

Yael now came close enough to unhook the brass buckle which fitted the creature’s collar to his chain. I could not breathe or move. I imagined he would turn on her then and I would see her death before my eyes. Instead the lion rose to his feet and stood before her. He stared at Yael with his yellow eyes, more curious than ferocious. He may have thought she was one of his own kind and wondered if she meant to accompany him. He may have believed she was a dream, for if lions dreamed it would surely be this, freedom in the night, hands that unleashed you, the mountains before you.

Yael lifted her arms, as we do to bid the doves to take flight. The lion turned to run across the valley, disappearing into the cliffs, his dun color the cloak which allowed him to vanish before our eyes.

I knew then I had witnessed a miracle. I waited where I was, praying, offering gratitude to the Almighty, my faith renewed, while on the valley floor the bravest warrior among us made her way back to our mountain, invisible to all men beneath her gray cloak, but radiant in the darkness, a shining star before the eyes of God.

OUR WARRIORS went out that night to find the soldiers of the legion intoxicated, maddened and half-asleep, for they had mixed the toxic honey with wine to make a mead, and many had drunk from this poison. Our men killed as many as they could before the cries of the slaughtered brought hundreds of soldiers racing. By then the warriors of Masada had begun to climb back up the cliff. Several were lost in the fray and were carried upon the shoulders of their brothers. At least we had their bodies and could prepare their earthly forms for burial. In Jerusalem we would have taken our dead to the caves of our fathers, then a year later collected the bones to be stored in stone ossuaries. Here there was no time for such practices. Though the Romans had retaliated with a storm of burning arrows, we gathered in the plaza to sing lamentations and tear at our garments and lay the dead to rest.

In the midst of our mourning, some among us looked down upon the valley. They saw that the lion had been freed from the chains of Rome to return to the cliffs of Judea. There were shouts and prayers. Crowds gathered, mystified, wondering if it had been Gabriel, the fiercest of the angels, who had brought this omen to us, for surely no man would have dared to approach a lion.

* * *

STILL THE ROMANS built their white ramp, still it rose higher. Though we sent down hot oil, stones, arrows, they continued on, a machine of death intent on victory. In weeks, the ramp was a few arms’ lengths from our walls, and the damage their soldiers could now manage was great. We had many losses and fires occurred every day. Whatever they destroyed with stone and flame we rebuilt, but we hadn’t enough hands, and there were ruins all around us. No one dared to leave the fortress now, or even venture close to the wall. We huddled together in the wind. There was a great silence over us. It was despair, and it passed from one to the other more quickly than a fever.

When Eleazar came to me at night, he did not speak. Though words had always bound us together, they were not enough to save us now. Below us, there was a blur of movement, faster all the time, more purposeful and more brutal. We were reminded of the way in which bees could create entire cities overnight in their hives. So, too, could the legion. Where there had been six thousand, ten thousand now stood before us. The Romans were like an endless swarm. You could not outfight them or outrun them. The only choice was to put salt on your skin, though it might pain you to do so, to cover yourself with a cloak, so that you might disappear.

My beloved cousin had told our people the Romans would move on once they understood a siege could not take us down. We had enough to sustain us, we would be hungry, but it was possible to live in poverty and survive for a year on rations, perhaps two. Surely Rome would tire of us and decide to use the legion’s power to a better purpose. Now that the ramp had risen so high on the western slope, my cousin no longer spoke of such things or gave us false hope. The Angel of Death has a thousand eyes and no man can outdistance him. There have been stories of men who have ridden all night to escape their fate, only to arrive in a far-flung village where the Angel waited, knowing his victim’s destination before the rider himself did. Mal’ach ha-Mavet would find his intended no matter how fast a victim might ride, even if his horse was as swift as my husband’s had been, the great Leba, who held the heart of a thousand horses.

Eleazar and I went to the cistern together after darkness fell, no longer caring who might accuse us of sin. As Death saw us, we saw him in return, even when we closed our eyes. In the water, I embraced my beloved in silence; he winced, for he was freshly wounded and had paid no attention to this injury. I wanted to dress the cut with samtar, but he told me there was no time. When he said this I began to weep, as I had on the day in Jerusalem when it rained and he went to the market to find me the vial of perfume scented with lilies. That had been the last time we saw each other until he had called me to this mountain. Now I was losing him again.

“Don’t,” he said to me as I cried. “There’s no time for that either.”

He had been hardened by his years of fighting. He had been not much more than a boy when I first knew him, now he had killed so many that his hands were stained. Yet tears could undo him and remind him of how human we were. The suffering of the world weighed heavily upon him. I dried my eyes because he asked me to do so. I had always done as he asked, not because I was bound to do so by duty but because I saw the depth of who he was and how he himself suffered. When I gazed at him, I did not see the brutal face his enemies looked upon, or the heavy arms and back of a warrior who carried armor and steel, but the young man at the well who had seen beyond my henna tattoos. He had always known who I was.

Eleazar gathered my hair and lifted it so that he might kiss my throat. Without my amulets, I was unprotected. I felt myself burn. I believed myself to be safe with him. He who was so cruel in the field of battle, was still the boy he once had been, so eager for me that his wife and father and all the laws of Jerusalem could not keep him from me. He whispered that he would prefer to spend what little time we had left in each other’s arms. Let us not speak, or tend to our troubles, let us lie together and forget the world, remembering only each other.

The Romans would find us, as bees did; they would swarm upon us and the salt would fall from our skin and we would be naked and defenseless before them, as we now were with each other.

WHEN WE rose from our restless sleep, we found that the ramp on the western side of the mountain was already completed. It was a cool day, misty and blue. Already the month of Nissan was upon us, when our people celebrated their freedom. When we opened our eyes, it was as though the ramp had always been there, magicked into being, more real than the mountains that had stood since God created them.

On that same day the dust rose up along the desert floor when a group of travelers from the east arrived. I saw that many of their cloaks were blue. They belonged to the people of Nahara and Adir’s father, nomads from the hills of Moab. They had brought all manner of spices and treasures from Petra and had come to offer their help to the Romans, with whom they had a treaty of peace. When I regarded these men, my heart fell, for I knew how fierce they were and how difficult they would be to defeat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revka had confided that on the day of her beloved daughter’s death, her son-in-law vowed two things: As long as he was in the world he would not take another woman into his bed, and he would never again cut his hair. But one night when he came for his meal, Revka groaned when she saw him, then hurried away. She stood with her back to us, shaken. Her son-in-law had cut his hair, then shaved his head. I followed Revka and took her hand in mine as she wept. It was over, she told me, this life of ours on earth. Her son-in-law had shorn his hair because the time had come for him to leave this world behind.

That same night I saw my daughter embrace this warrior in our garden. He seemed a brutal being, covered with scars, metal strands embedded in his flesh, his only clothes made of metal scales. Yet in that single embrace I saw what I had never seen between my daughter and Amram. I saw that love had led her not to ruin but to her own destiny. I could never have hoped to stop the path she was meant to be on. The Man from the Valley had vowed not to love a woman, but he had never sworn such an oath about another warrior. In becoming a boy, Aziza had allowed him to love her.

This was why so many had believed my daughter was a shedah, for when she cast her arms around this man who bound himself with strips of sharp metal, it was as though she was one of the thousand messengers who watch over us, sent to take him in her wings. I turned away when I saw him weep, for I knew what Revka said was true. This world was vanishing.

It had already been written.

* * *

WHO CAN SAY at what hour Herod’s wall was breached, the wretched moment when the first stone fell? It had been raining, but as the rain cleared, there continued to be thunder. Then, all at once, we understood it wasn’t thunder, but the battering ram continuously crashing against the wall. We stood and watched as God abandoned us, and then we did the best we could. There was chaos as the men raced to the plaza to build another wall, quickly, with mad fury. My cousin wanted a wall that would stand behind the stone wall the legion had broken through, one made of mud and grass so that it might sway with the battering ram rather than break apart. In a storm a blade of grass can withstand the fury of winds that bring the palaces of kings to ruin. There wasn’t a person who didn’t assist in building this second wall, for terror stirred in us all. Even Yehuda, the Essene boy, and my son, Adir, on his crutch were there, eager to help.

It was God’s will that we should have rainfall, and therefore there would be mud, pools of it, quickly hardening once the sun came forth, forming the second wall. The children all were covered with mud, toiling among us despite the arrows set aflame that landed to singe our cloaks and set fire to our roofs and gardens.

Our every action seemed to occur in a dream that had descended. I saw a child catch on fire and die in his own mother’s arms, and men give up their lives without complaint. I saw the legion leap up like a beast made of metal, with no heart or spirit as the wall of mud was shaken, yet it did not fall, for it was stronger than Herod’s wall though it had been built by old men and children. I saw the Angel of Death perched beside my daughter as she lifted her bow, running his hand over her radiant flesh. I saw the ghosts of those who had been murdered in the Essene cave walking the paths of the cliffs like black goats, their souls rising before them. My cousin broke away from the crowd when he realized how many had died and must be laid out in the field. When I followed him, I found him sobbing in my garden.

In that moment I saw the prophecy that had come to me when I threw the bones in the tower. They had recounted that I would drown, exactly as the priest had warned I would when I was a child and had leapt into the fountain of my mother’s garden. Not in water but in my own blood.

* * *

FOR NIGHTS ON END I had dreamed of the child I carried. In my dream she was immersed in water, her eyes open, for water was her element, as it had been mine. If we were all to be slaughtered, and if I was to be among the dead, I wanted to make certain this child came forth before she entered the World-to-Come. That was the only way I could ensure she carried a name, which would allow God to call her to Him, unlike the unborn, unnamed souls who must wander without direction for the rest of time.

I knew it was time for my daughter to come into the world, for soon enough there would be no time left at all.

I boiled a tea of rue, meant to cause miscarriage, and quickly drank a cupful. This mixture would bring my child before her time. I walked the floor of my chamber while Adir and Yehuda and everyone with any strength worked feverishly to restore the damages to the second wall. I called Yael to me, for she had promised to help me in my time of need. She left Arieh in Revka’s care and brought me a basket of leavings from the dovecote to lay upon the fire. As I had taught her how to attend a birth, so she would now bring my daughter to life.

I stood over the smoke so that it might open my womb. Yael crouched down on her haunches, singing the infinite one’s name backward and forward until it formed a single letter in her mouth, rising and falling, a sound so ancient no man could understand its meaning. I focused on the image of Ashtoreth on the altar. I had brought her from my mother’s chambers, wrapped in linen along with her book of magical recipes, hidden in the doves’ cage beneath a handful of straw.

All that I needed I had been given by my mother. All that I knew, I knew because of her. But all that I sacrificed was for my daughter.

I had poured an offering of olive oil before Ashtoreth and covered myself with pomegranate oil and the perfume of the lily in her honor. It was the last of that fragrance in my possession. I knew there would be no more. I imagined the lilies beside the fountain in my mother’s garden. They appeared to grow up between the black and white mosaics that tiled my chamber’s floor. I concentrated upon them until I saw only those invisible blooms and the rest of the world fell away. I labored hard and did my best to make no noise, so that no one would be called to us. I bit down on my arm and drew blood. Despite the hour and the circumstances, I was alive, still able to give life.

As time went on and the child did not appear, I was afraid that the daughter I was about to bring forth would be weak because she was so early. There was a drum of panic beating at my throat. The council might decide to set her outside the wall to perish before she was named. I vowed this would never happen. There would be no wilderness for this child, no ravens, no unburied bones, no soldiers of the legion, no jackals appraising her with hunger. Her spirit would not be trapped in a cave or wander through the valley but would instead remain in God’s hands and under His careful watch. This was why I would bring her into this world before her time, so that she might know more than sorrow and bask in the Almighty’s radiance, in His favor and His wisdom, even if it was for only an hour or a day.

My daughter came at dawn, after many hours, and much blood. Too much, pouring out of me, but it was the price to be paid for her birth. Although she was early, she wasn’t weak. She cried out and my heart opened. Her eyes were gray, as her father’s were. Her hair was pale, much like the feathers of the dove. We took her into the field, so that we might bury the afterbirth, though the last of the almond trees had been chopped down for wood to build the wall. We thanked Ashtoreth and Adonai. I removed my cloak to stand naked before them, though I was exhausted, and seven days had not passed. We did not know how many days were left to us, and because of this I could not wait to name her.

I called her Yonah, for she had come into the world because of a message brought by a dove.

My wife, my beloved, my daughter, my world.

* * *

ALL THROUGH the night our people reinforced the second wall, our only defense against the abyss. They lashed together the boughs of the almond trees that had been hewn so hastily, chinking the open spaces with mud so that the new wall would be pliant, moving with the thrusts of the battering ram. The Feast of Unleavened Bread would be celebrated the following day. On all other such festivals, our people would have gathered together to give thanks for our freedom from Egypt. Now we did not have time for anything except the prayers we carried inside us.

But the wall that could not be broken could be burned. The scent of almonds rose in a bitter cloud. The Romans lit our wall on fire, and there was a ring of flame around us.

In my doorway, I gazed upon my daughter in my arms as I heard the men chanting, for the chants had lifted above the sound of warfare. I heard women crying. As I gazed upon our sorrow, I turned to take note of a shadow in my garden, a raven crouched down among the rows of vegetables I had grown, all burned to ash now, the mint and rue, the coriander and the hyssop mere twigs. I went into the garden that was no more.

Channa had come to see the child. She was gaunt, as we all were, but her face lit up when she spied the infant in my arms. She vowed that she had told no one about the birth, not even our leader, so as not to distract him. She whispered that the doves I had released had returned to tell her of the birth, the ones in the cage behind her house who had visited me in the land of Moab.

I signaled to her, and she came as a dog might, trotting over, head down. She was captivated instantly, her face eager as I lifted up the child for her to see. I watched as my enemy stood there weeping, not with sorrow but with joy.

She had sent me into the wilderness, but I did not remember how my bare feet had burned on the stones. She had disparaged me and ruined me, but I did not recall the words that had been used against me or remember the years I had spent in Moab. The garden was burning, the air sparked with specks of flame as they say it will be in the World-to-Come when we walk beside the angels and have no fear of their illumination or of their might.

I let her hold our daughter. We rejoiced together over the beauty of our husband’s child, for she was like a pool of water, still and beautiful. We were submerged, our thirst quenched, though there were fires and bursts of flame everywhere, on leaves and rooftops, falling upon us like rain. We sat there, our heads close, as others hid in their chambers or worked furiously to put out the flames. We were no longer thirsty, and no longer had any need of fury or revenge, for we were enemies no more.

HOURS LATER, the entire wall caught fire. It encircled us as a snake would, meant to devour us. We believed our time had come, but then God sent us the wind from the north, and the blaze blew back to the Romans. It burned their soldiers alive and caught their battering rams aflame. Our people came to watch and sank to their knees in gratitude.

But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God’s glory comes to us from His will alone. The rescue was temporary. The wind changed direction again; it came from the south and was our enemy once more. Our people ran, in fear for their lives. They soaked themselves with what little water they could find in an attempt to withstand the blaze of heat. Everyone could hear the Romans’ cheering and their bloodthirsty cries. They posted a thousand guards in the valley, so that none of our people might slip over Herod’s wall and escape.

We gathered in my chambers, covered with soot. Yael’s boy, with his dark and beautiful eyes, was quiet; he seemed to sense the terror that had come upon us and dared not cry. We poured water over our heads from a pitcher, in the hope no sparks would light upon us. I nursed my child and thought of how Nahara and Adir’s father had not seen his children for ten days after they were born, the practice of his people. Only now did I realize this law was not merely to prevent the father from seeing the child in a bruised condition, the price of the journey of being born. Rather it was to ensure that a father waited until it was more certain that his child would live. To be attached to what is bound to die made no sense to the fierce people from Moab, for they rode with death and pitched their tents with death. They knew that flesh was not lasting in this world.

I would follow their law now and keep my daughter from her father’s eyes so that he would not have to love something he was bound to lose. As I held her inside my cloak, two hearts beat against my chest. But no creature can contain more than one heart. I knew that one of us would live and one would die. I wept to think I would not hear my child call me mother.

THE SECOND WALL had been breached. That rough edifice we had built until our hands were ravaged and bleeding, until there was no longer a single tree standing in the field, had cracked under their battering ram, the dirt spilling out, the pliant limbs of the almond trees splitting, turning to dust. Our people had done all they could to fight the tide of what was to come, the soldiers that would climb through, the bloodshed and the torture and the murder on the day of our greatest feast. Eleazar came into the plaza. We were brought there by the sound of the ram’s horn, used to call us to prayer. I made my way among our people, though I was still weakened from childbirth, the infant hidden in my cloak. I left a trail of blood on the stones, which turned black as it fell away from me, an omen I understood well.

From my place on the edge of the crowd, I could see women whose children I had helped bring into the world. I saw my daughter with her bow, mud streaking her arms and legs, and my son, ruined by battle before he was a man, and my people in the throes of sorrow, and the man I had loved since I had first seen that he would come to me.

“We resolved not to follow the Romans and to follow God alone. Now the time has come for us to prove our faith. We cannot disgrace ourselves in the eyes of our Lord, or submit to slavery. If we fall into Roman hands, it is the end of everything, not only our lives but the life of Zion. We had the privilege to be the last stronghold, and as God has favored us so, let us return the favor and die nobly as free men.”

People began to panic at Ben Ya’ir’s words. It seemed that some might attempt to flee. But there was also a surge forward of the most loyal, those who had burned for freedom and could not turn back now.

“By daybreak, our enemy will be upon us, and we can hold them back no longer, but we are free to choose to die with honor, in the arms of those we love. We cannot defeat the Romans in battle here on this earth, but we can deny them a victory.”

Women wept on either side of me. I pitied Eleazar that he must speak these words.

“We have done everything to claim our freedom, and we cannot stop now. We do not know why God let His city burn to the ground, why He has let our people be chased into extinction, why we must die today. Our freedom is our winding sheet, and it is more glorious than any other. We will leave nothing behind for our enemies, and the taste of their victory will be bitter, and they will not be able to cut the heads from our bodies and leave them for the ravens.”

The women wailed, and some of the men joined in. The flames around us were a blessing, for they roared and made it difficult to hear the peals of agony and grief.

“Let our wives die unharmed, our children without the bitter mantle of slavery. Do you want them half-devoured by wild beasts, tortured by fire and whippings, enslaved? Let us make haste. Let us avoid the evils of mankind. We prefer death before those miseries. Let us go out of the world with our wives and children in freedom.

“Let our story bear witness that we perished out of choice, a choice we made at the beginning, to chose death rather than slavery.”

Warriors were sent to set fire to the storerooms. The heat was worsened so that it became an inferno. We seemed to have fallen headfirst into the month of Av, that time when the sorrows of our people blaze, when God tests our faith and our duty and our belief in His greatness.

* * *

WE LISTENED to Eleazar as we might listen to a dream, one we could not stop, one from which there was no waking. I felt my love for him so deeply I thought I might break as the boughs of the almonds had, my ardor the knife that pierced me. People began to run to their houses, not to escape but to gather their worldly goods so they might be destroyed rather than fall into the hands of the Romans. A great bonfire was begun, and all we owned was heaped upon it, garments and sandals and wooden bowls and yards of wool. The goats and sheep that were left had their throats slit, and their bodies were placed upon the fire as burnt offerings sacrificed to God, for there would be no need of meat or milk, only of God’s grace. There was no Temple standing and this would be our last sacrifice.

Eleazar’s men, his favorites, warriors who had fought beside him, men scarred by battle who had journeyed from Jerusalem to become hawks in this desert, came to him to encircle him. Some of them sobbed and were consumed by grief; others no longer felt the pains of the world, for they were in a state of sacrifice, as warriors were before they entered into battle. There were fifty or more, Amram among them, and these men brought broken pottery pieces, ostraca, upon which their names or initials were written. The weeping grew more furious as the lottery was begun. The priest and his learned men began to pray and chant, rocking back and forth with the passion of their prayers.

Ten men among them would be chosen. They would do the deed and dispatch with the rest of us. They would bear the burden as death-givers so that we did not have to carry the sin of harming ourselves, which was forbidden. When the time came they would slay each other, until only one was left. That man would hold the weight of all our sins, and would be commanded to enter through the three gates of Gehennom, the valley of hell, where he would suffer the torments of demons for all eternity.

“Why should we fear death when we do not fear sleep?” Eleazar cried out, in a frenzy, in such a pure rapture that none could look away. I saw him as he was at the well, furious with all of men’s wrongdoings, assured he could set things right in the name of God. “Death allows freedom to our souls. It takes true courage to find true freedom and to be called to God’s side. It would have been better if we had died before seeing Jerusalem destroyed. Now our hope has fled, but we can avenge the enemies of the holy city, and show kindness to those we love, and not see them led away in slavery and be witness to the torture and violence that awaits our wives and our children and our dearest friends.”

Husbands and wives were embracing, mothers had taken up their children, sons ran to search out their fathers so they might die side by side. The ten men were chosen, our saviors and our executioners. Ben Ya’ir took his sword to make his pledge upon the weapon he had used to fight for God, and for his nation, and for us.

“We were born to die, as are all who are brought into the world. This even the most fortunate among us must face. This is our fate, and our fate is now upon us.”

My fate was upon me as well.

I quickly signaled to Yael and Revka. We made our way back to my chamber, pulling Revka’s younger grandson, Levi, along, lest he be taken up by the crowd, with Noah following behind. Revka herself all but fainted in the crush.

Yehuda was in my chamber, wrapped in his white garment, reciting the prayer for the souls of the dead. Adir was nowhere to be seen.

“Where is he?” I was so distraught I caught the poor Essene boy by his prayer shawl. Revka, who had come to consider Yehuda as her own, came to coax the frightened boy into speaking.

“He was worried for Aziza. He said she was in his place, and he would find her and bring her back here.”

I ran to my cabinet for my mother’s book of spells, my two hearts stirring inside me. There were screams echoing from the plaza, for the death-givers had begun their work and some of the dying could not bear to see their families slaughtered, even at the hands of our own men, angels of mercy, the messengers of our fate. My hands were shaking. Perhaps it had been written that I would be redeemed. Perhaps love would not be my undoing but my salvation.

I cast my mother’s book into Yael’s hands and insisted that she must keep it safe. I noticed that she wore the collar of the lion twisted around her arm, and then I knew I had been right to choose her, for she was as fierce as she was loyal.

Revka was huddled with her grandsons, keeping Arieh on her lap. He was little more than a baby, but he was sensitive and knew when silence was needed. When Revka held a finger to her lips, he hushed and leaned against her. She then patted Yehuda’s shoulders as he wept, guilt-ridden for having allowed Adir to leave. He was only a boy, and his mother had left him in our care so that he might be safe from harm. They all huddled together on the tiled floor fashioned for a king’s kitchen, a room that had turned fetid, burning hot, like a grave in the sand.

The child who was my heart cried. I took her from beneath my cloak and gave her into Yael’s hands as I had given her the book of spells. I went to my ironwood box, which had come with me from Egypt, the one my mother had locked with a key in the shape of a snake, a snake I’d thought came alive to inch across my palm when I was only a girl. Inside the unlocked box were ingredients I had been storing for the worst of times: snakeskin for the black viper that sleeps between the rocks, ash from the fire of a sacrificed dove, crushed lapis from the stone that is stronger than all others, strings tied in precise knots, all of these meant to weave a web of protection. I took what I needed. I was going to find my children in the plaza, then I would go to Eleazar. Panic was beating inside me, for I knew, no matter what I did, I would indeed drown on this day. That was the fate that had been cast by the bones in the tower.

Yael put her hand on my arm, attempting to stop me as I went to the door, insisting it was too late for me to go.

“What would you not have done for the one you loved?” I asked her.

“I am doing that now,” she answered, as if she were indeed my daughter. “Don’t go to him.”

She had promised me once that she would do as I asked. I reminded her of this as I gave her the last piece of fruit I had saved, a pomegranate, the same fruit I had given her at our last farewell. She knew me then as the girl who had cared for her in Jerusalem. She threw her arms around me, and we might have wept if there had been time. Instead, I drew away and told her what she must do. I hoped she would obey me as she had when she was a child. If she saw a sign from the doves, she was to ask Revka where she first saw me as I am. She was to go there without hesitation.

THERE WAS chaos everywhere. I did my best to make my way. Those who say you cannot see Mal’ach ha-Mavet could not be more wrong. I have seen him standing right in front of me, his twelve wings blackened by fire, his thousand eyes seeing all that we are and all that we do. I was grasped in the grip of his darkness, a violation of God’s radiance and His glory. We must suffer in his presence, we must stand before him, but I was not ready to face him until I found my children.

The Romans had already begun to lay down planks so they might walk across our wall in the morning. It was the night before our forefathers’ escape from Egypt, the night when our death began. There were husbands and wives lying down side by side on the blood-soaked cobblestones so that they might find their death together; children lined up, wailing. The ten executioners were at their sorrowful work, going from house to house, as the Almighty had done on the night of Passover, when Jews painted their doors with bloodstained hyssop flowers allowing Adonai to know them as true believers and pass them by so they might live.

I went through the Western Plaza, then down the steps toward the Northern Palace. My chest was aching, and drops of blood fell from me, but I went on. Above the chaos, I heard my daughter’s dog barking. I ran, following the echo of that desperate beast, avoiding all men, staying to the shadows until I saw figures near the entrance to a small pool where the king had once bathed in cool water surrounded by white lotus lilies he had brought from Alexandria. There, on the stairs, Amram had come up behind my daughter. Her arrows had fallen around her as he grabbed her at her waist and slit her throat. In doing so he had her for himself at last, but while she gasped in his arms, he had seen the silver medallion at her throat. When I spied him he had clasped her to him, his grief enormous, for he knew her for who she was for the first time, the warrior who had fought beside him and saved him. He cried out for what he had done, mourning all that had died with her.

Adir came rushing at Amram as I watched. My son hadn’t a spear or a sword, only his crutch, which he used to beat Amram, for he had seen his sister murdered and was standing in her blood. Amram turned and pierced him through, then finished his work with one swift cut at my boy’s throat. He wore his prayer shawl, as all the death-givers did, the garment which was always to be made of linen with a single blue woolen thread to remind its wearer of heaven and of God’s commandments. But Amram’s prayer shawl was stained, and appeared brown as the blood upon it clung to the linen.

I watched in a dream, as if I had seen this all before and had come here as a witness so that my children would not be alone in the hour of their death. I prayed to God that they would be embraced in the Shechinah, the dwelling place of the Lord.

My son was no warrior, only a boy. My warrior was a woman who would not have expected an attack from someone who had loved her so well.

The dog was wild over the injury to his mistress, wailing as though he were a man rather than a beast. He would not stand down when Amram turned to shout at him; he straddled Aziza’s fallen body, protecting her still form, his jaws snapping, flecked with foam. Amram kicked at him, then charged, but the dog stood his ground. He was a beast who craved revenge, more loyal than the warrior who now stabbed him through, time and again.

The mastiff refused to die, the guardian of my daughter, who in her death revealed herself to be only a young woman who had shorn her hair and worn men’s garb. Her red feathered arrows fallen around her, her field of flowers, her last farewell. Though mortally wounded, the dog grabbed on to Amram and refused to let go, his teeth sinking into his enemy’s flesh. I watched the struggle in a haze of grief, until both dog and man were so wounded neither could go on, yet neither one would die.

The Man from the Valley should have been at his leader’s bidding, for he was one of the chosen ten. Instead, he had come for Aziza. When he saw what had happened, he slit the dog’s throat so that the beast could die with honor, thereby releasing him from pain and from his duties in this world. But the warrior stood over Amram and watched him in his throes, offering no solace and no assistance. The man who had been Revka’s son-in-law when his name was Yoav, when he still had compassion and faith, let my daughter’s murderer die in anguish.

When Amram was no more, the Man from the Valley cut off the dead man’s armor to further dishonor him, so that the ground was littered with silver scales, and it could be known to God that here lay a coward unworthy of being called a warrior. Then the Man from the Valley took off his prayer shawl and covered Aziza, as though she were a man, a warrior who had fallen in battle. Perhaps that was what he wanted to believe. He could not bear to see her as a woman he had loved, a girl made of flesh, not iron, who had loved him in return.

When that maddened warrior had slipped back into the turmoil of the plaza, I hurried to my children. I closed their eyes and prayed for their spirits. I washed their feet and hands with water from the pool, though ashes had turned the water black. I wound the spells I had carried with me through the strands of their hair, so that they might be protected, if not in this world then in the World-to-Come. I thought of the moments of their births: Aziza’s in a chamber in Jerusalem where the women who worked at keshaphim urged me on to bring forth her life. Adir’s in a tent on the Iron Mountain, where I waited for my husband to ride his horse from the eastern reaches of Moab so he might be there on the tenth day to see his son and to name him a king of his people.

THE TEN went on their murderous rampage for our honor and for the Glory of God, and in this they had succeeded. As I made my way up the stairs to the plateau atop the mountain, there were bodies everywhere, those who loved each other, those who despised each other, those who had believed there would be freedom in Zion, those who had followed a husband or a brother, those who had been born on this mountain, those who had dreamed they would die here, all in a jumble upon the stones. I saw the raven in a black shawl who had cast me into the wilderness curled up in her garden, and I wept for her spirit. I saw Yael’s father, the assassin who had killed so many in the courtyards of the Temple in Jerusalem, splayed out near the barracks, his blood as bright as any flower.

I went to the dovecotes and opened the doors of the first two, at last coming to the stone columbarium that was shaped like a tower, the place where my daughters had most often worked beside me, where Revka had come in her mourning, where Yael had called the birds to her without a single word, as I knew she would when we’d gone to the marketplace in Jerusalem and she’d begged for a dove’s freedom and in return had given her promise to do whatever I asked.

I chased the doves out, shaking my shawl, whistling, as the hawk does, forcing them from their roosts. They lifted into the blackened sky all at once, flecking the darkness with their radiance, delivering the message that there was a time to die and a time to rise up.

THE MAN I loved met me at the door to my chamber. No one else was there, only the two of us, as there had been on the day he took me into his bed, when I left a scrim of vermilion on the bedclothes, not henna but blood. The others had fled. Yael had kept her promise. She’d done as I’d asked.

I let go of everything but my beloved. I did not care if there was blood upon him. I didn’t want to know how many he had slain, or if he had embraced his wife before he made quick of her or even if he’d asked for her forgiveness after all this time.

“Death walks beside us, but not with us,” he said to me as he took me into his embrace.

I was glad he hadn’t seen his new daughter. Had he done so, it would have been too painful for him to leave her, and I never wanted to be the cause of his pain, as I knew he never wished to cause me any grief. My mother had warned me what love would do to me. I hadn’t cared then, and I didn’t care now.

His eyes were gray, like the dove, like the mist that cleared when the world was first begun on the day God gave us the word and we could speak and our words turned the world into what it has come to be. I could have howled at fate and covered my head. I could have begged for more time, pleaded with him to flee with me. But perhaps I had been granted all that I had needed in this lifetime. My beloved was a stubborn man, a true believer. He was more complicated than any man I had ever known and the only one who could have called me to cross the Salt Sea and leave behind my husband and the green hills of Moab.

That was what my mother meant when she told me love would be my undoing. Love made you give yourself away, it bound you to this world, and to another’s fate. I lay down beside Eleazar. We were together as we had been even when we were apart, for we were one person, wed by more than our desire.

We had our last moments of life in this world, but I would have died a hundred times to have had his love. I kissed him in a way I would never kiss another. His spirit entwined with mine as he entered me and took me to be his. If I wept, it was only because water was my element, what I yearned for and needed most of all. When he was done, I still wept to give him up, although it had been written that I must. I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered, Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.

Nissan the 15th, 73 C.E.

Alexandria 77 C.E

They call me the Witch of Moab.

So it was written in the Book of Life. Before I was born of a woman who was already dead, before I left Jerusalem and was bitten by a lion, before the Romans came to destroy us, it had already been determined that this would come to be.

Once I was certain I would never again know the pleasure of the simplest things: a loom, a table, a comb for my hair. I thought my life was over and the angel with a thousand eyes was at my door. But I was wrong. I have a house made of white stones. Workmen labored to build the fountain in the center of the courtyard deep within a walled garden where there are date palm trees and pots of jasmine and the white lilies that can be found in no other land, except, perhaps, in the fields of the world beyond our own.

When Mal’ach ha-Mavet came for me, flecked with the blood of my people, I was wearing the cloak of invisibility. I had journeyed so far down into the earth he would have had to have taken a hundred steps before he could spy me, though he possessed the vision of an army. Despite his gift of sight, I still would have been hidden from view, for it is said that Death must close his eyes when he enters into water, and I was submerged in a cistern, a well so deep there are those who believe that it has no bottom, that it reaches to the center of the earth, back to the foundation stone in Jerusalem, where creation began.

It was water that saved us, protecting us from the flames that flickered and from Death’s grasping hands. We had hurried down the stone steps, breathless in the dark, as Death surged above us, before we slipped into the water, as though we were fish, for our people are sister and brother to such creatures, and that is why we can endure where others are doomed to perish.

In Alexandria, the mornings are pale, the air so damp it seems a world of water until the sun breaks through in yellow bands of light. I can see the harbor as I prepare cups of black tea, sesame candies, sweet oranges cut in quarters. There are three black goats in the barn, a dozen sheep behind the fence, a white donkey who is so swift he raises clouds of red dust when he runs. There have been disruptions in this city for our people, but we have managed to remain.

Arieh and Yonah play in the garden after their lessons, hiding in the reeds beside a pond where herons come to feed. There is a white ibis who has laid claim to our fountain. She stands on one slim leg and drinks water, lifting her head to the heavens. Perhaps the one we left behind has come to us in the guise of this creature, for she observes us carefully, and with compassion.

Revka’s grandsons are no longer children but men whose shadows are so tall I am startled they belong to those who were once the boys to whom I told stories so they might sleep through the night. Now it is Revka and I who toss and turn as we dream of men who refused to surrender and women who were ruled by devotion. We remember everything they were fighting for and everyone they loved and were loyal to. We remember the way the world looked when it was ruled by war.

In the evening when the sky is struck with gauzy vermilion light, in the hour when the space between worlds opens before the inky blue night sifts down to earth, women come to the back gate to ask for the Witch of Moab. They wear their finest clothes, leather sandals that hush their steps, gold signet rings and bracelets adorning their slim fingers and wrists, black kohl rimming their eyes. They offer me gold and silver coins, strands of pearls. In return they ask that I throw the bones of birds to divine their futures. They ask for marjoram and rue, for amulets and potions, for good health, for children to be born and enemies to vanish. Always, they ask for love. I open the book where these recipes are written, the ink still fresh even though the parchment has turned brown, as if I held a sheaf of leaves in my hands.

The women who arrive call me clever, cunning, beautiful, wise. They tell me their secrets and speak of violations and of dreams. They confide what they would never admit to another even though I am a stranger. I do the best I can on their behalf. I have learned divination from a wise woman, but I learned how to listen from a ghost.

I often take the winding cobbled road to the harbor to watch the great lantern that is lit there in the evenings in the lighthouse on the island of Pharos, one of the seven wonders of the world. I look for the ships that come from Greece, blowing across the sea, their huge white sails filling with wind from the four corners of the earth. Water surrounds us. When the Nile overflows, the fields turn green and there are great celebrations, lanterns strung from trees, drumming all night long, dancers in veils and long skirts. The river runs every shade of blue that has ever been known to humankind: ink and turquoise and lapis, indigo, teal, cerulean, and ultramarine. Yet what I long for most is the desert. Ivory, alabaster, the rocks that caused my feet to bleed, the knife to mark off days, the man I loved. In the evenings the scent of that arid land comes across from Judea and reminds me of who I used to be. My hair is perfumed and braided, but at night I remove the pins and let it fall loose down my back.

When I sit in the darkness, the birds come to me. They still know me for who I am.

I am the girl in the desert, even though I am so far away.

I am the woman who was saved by doves, for when I saw them rise up in a cloud above Masada at the hour when darkness reigned, I knew that we must escape.

We were in the kitchen of the palace, waiting for Mal’ach ha-Mavet to walk through the door in the form of one of the ten death-givers who would come to us to slit our throats. Revka and the children were huddled together, listless, as dumbfounded as the sheep who edge toward the butcher when called and herded by bells. I paced the black and white mosaic floor, then went to the door, eagerly scanning the crowd. I was hopeful that Shirah would soon appear, returning to us with Aziza and Adir safely retrieved from the mayhem. But the more I watched the more I trembled, for bodies were piled up in the plaza and the blood was like a river, a tide that fed the olive trees and the date palms and the garden that had turned to ash. There was incessant wailing, but soon the echoing cries gave way to an uncanny silence. Shirah had once told me that silence was the only thing we had to fear. It was our true enemy, signifying that, like the footprints that were swept away in a storm, we had disappeared from God’s sight.

Yonah cried suddenly, breaking the silence with the sweet voice of one who demands to be fed. I still nursed Arieh, and when the newborn cried, I felt my milk come in. In that instant I knew that, despite the death that encircled us, I was still alive.

The fortress was burning from the inside out, ravaged by our own people. Every home had been lit aflame, every possession cast upon a bonfire that flared up with the wind and was quickly burning out of control, the sparks smoldering on rooftops and in the leaves of the few trees that had not been cut down to build the inner wall. Many bodies had already burned to ash, and those ashes rose up to bring about a night that was the darkest we had ever known. It was the eve of Passover, but there was no manna as our people had known in their escape from slavery in Egypt, only the black sky and a scrim of smoke. We breathed in the bones of our people — their desires, their petty differences, their faith — all martyred, vanishing into the dusky, murderous air.

There were no stars, and darkness reigned, as it did before the first day of creation. But then the doves lifted upward through the smoke, as though they themselves were stars. I wondered if manna had appeared in this way as our people wandered in the desert for forty years, if it had floated above the earth as a dove might, a message to let us know we were meant to survive.

Because birds do not fly at night, I knew the doves in flight were the sign Shirah had vowed she would send to me. She, who had cared for me when I was a motherless child in Jerusalem, once again watched over me. She had opened the doors of the dovecotes, as we were now to open the doors for ourselves.

I took Shirah’s daughter in my arms and held her along with my son. To me, they might have been twins, the one newly born, the other twenty months in this world, one no dearer to me than the other. I instructed Revka to stop weeping, for we must flee. We had no time for death, I told her, surprised by my fierce certainty.

Revka stared at me, thinking I had gone mad, for we were the captives of the Romans and of our own people and of fate. We had been told to be indifferent to the world we had no choice but to lose and to embrace death. But the children in my arms were squirming, alive, destined for something more.

We had been commanded to sacrifice rather than surrender, and I might have complied, if not for the children. Once I explained myself, Revka was quick to agree. We would do anything to save those in our care. Revka had done so at the waterfall when death stalked her grandsons. As for me, I was not about to lose another lion. I could not yield to our leader’s commands. If this was treachery, then I was a traitor indeed.

But I had broken laws before, and God, who had witnessed my sins, had forgiven me.

I hurried Revka and the children. Yehuda hesitated, for he had been taught not to combat violence but to accept it and was troubled to think he might disrespect his people. I spurred him on by reminding him that his mother had entrusted him to us so that he might live; that was her intention and he must honor her will above all other motives.

I raised a small rug to reveal a door that had been fashioned in the floor of the kitchen, meant for the escape of the king. Aziza had once confided to me that she’d used this exit in order to meet Amram. No one knew of this doorway but the king who had been gone for a hundred years.

We entered the space below the floor, hushed, slinking into the shadows. I pulled the door closed behind us, shutting out every glimmer of light. We took the stairs into the cellar. Holding hands, we moved in the dark, swiftly and in silence, as the rats do. Noah and Levi were used to silence, for it had become part of their nature. Yehuda was diligent and hushed. Even Yonah and Arieh seemed to sense that without their silence we would be caught up in death’s net. They did not whimper or cry but instead clung to me without complaint.

I could not help but think of my brother, one of the ten who had been chosen by our leader. I wondered if he still wore that square of blue silk on his armor, if he remembered the day I had come to him beneath the flame tree and begged him to put away his knife. Perhaps that knife was all he had now, the only thing he cared about or trusted or was loyal to. I said a prayer for him. I think I knew the answer to my questionings, because the prayer I murmured on his behalf was a lamentation sung in memory of the dead to bring peace in the World-to-Come.

We went through the stone chamber, breathing in the dank air, not stopping until we came upon another set of stairs, which would bring us to a heavy wooden door. That door, once pushed ajar, led us into the open air. There we stood, the bitter reek of smoke claiming us, the wind in threads carrying sparks of the fires that had been set, along with the writhing spirits of the dead.

Revka took my arm, and we gazed at each other, needing no words to understand the pact made between us.

We intended to live.

I kept Shirah’s newborn girl wound in my shawl so that she might remain quiet and unseen, while Arieh rode upon my hip, his dark eyes wide, his hands clutching tightly to my tunic. When we emerged into the night and the door to the tunnel had shut behind us, it was as though we had entered through the first gate to Gehennom, the doorway into the valley of hell. The scene we had stumbled upon hardly seemed like earth but rather a world that was aflame with punishments for the wicked. Or perhaps this was a test for the faithful. Could we face hell and walk through fire without hesitation, or would we sink to our knees and give up the life God had granted us?

We could not go back now. Our world was ravaged, it had disappeared from God’s grasp. Revka and the boys were reluctant to go on, for there were crowds all around and they were afraid we would be sighted. Stay in the shadows, I told them, for that was what I’d done in the wilderness when I wished to go unnoticed by the birds who came to me.

I asked Revka where she had first seen Shirah, for that was where Shirah had instructed me to flee. I assumed she meant for us to run to the dovecotes and hide there, or wait for her by the Snake Gate, but Revka whispered a location that surprised me: She had seen Shirah many times, but she had not clearly seen her for who she was until she stumbled upon her in a cistern, the largest one, situated in the deepest cave carved into this mountain, down hundreds of plaster steps, set in the farthest field. That was where Shirah meant for us to go.

We made our way through the madness around us. Edging around the barracks, we passed the bonfire that was flaming out of control. Bodies had now been heaped upon it, alongside provisions and the remains of animals, all that we had in our warehouses and storerooms. Though the smoke was acrid, I stopped, stunned, for it was there, beside the piles of weapons, that I saw my father for the last time, lying among the slain soldiers.

I went to him and knelt beside him so that I might close his eyes. From his expression I understood that he was now beside his beloved wife, the woman with the flame-colored hair who was also my mother. We had that, at least, in common. Beside him on the ground lay the gray cloak. He might have attempted to escape his fate, but he had taken off the cloak so that he would be seen for who he was, the assassin Yosef bar Elhanan, who had been my father and who would remain so for all eternity.

As I studied his face, serene for the first time, I recalled what he’d said about his talent of stealth. Men often failed to catch sight of what was right before them. They searched for secrets and for what was buried, but what was openly before them in the light blinded them so they could not see. A mouse who went quickly across the table was less likely to be caught than one that stationed itself in the corners of a room, where mice were expected to huddle. An assassin who walks into a room may easily look like any common man if he does so with confidence, with every right to do as he pleases.

I took my father’s cloak. The others followed, and we moved together as if we had formed a cloud, a mist, nothing human. Quickly, we made our way through the orchard where there had once been almond trees, where pink flowers had floated in the air when the kadim wind arose. Nothing remained here, not a branch, not a bough, although the ground was littered with sparks that glowed with the incandescence of white moths that had been set before us, fallen to the earth.

More than mere trees had been felled in this now barren orchard, with blood flowing rather than sap, and strands of hair rather than flowers. Corpse after corpse littered the field.

Revka told her grandsons and Yehuda to think of the dark shapes on the ground as fallen trees, not as men and women and children with their throats slit. The deeds of the death-givers were nearly completed; soon they would set upon one another, for they had stood beside the Water Gate and drawn lots to see who would be the last warrior, the man to take all of his brothers’ sins upon himself and finish the other nine before turning the sword on himself.

Yet there were still some among our people to be dispatched, and the violence was not completed. We saw a family with four children waiting on the steps of a burning storeroom, silent as ghosts, though they were still in the world of the living, bleary-eyed and trembling. The father of the family was the first to offer his throat to one of the death-givers, as if to teach his children, as he might instruct them on how to gather sheep, or shoot an arrow, or begin their morning prayers with the rising of the sun. But this was not a lesson of beauty or knowledge, only an ugly moment of horror. The children swarmed around their dying father, grasping at his cloak as though by doing so they could retrieve his spirit from the World-to-Come.

The death-giver was Uri, the warrior who had come for my father and me in the desert, the boy who had been my brother’s friend, a mild young man who had been so awed by this fortress as he described it to me in the greatest detail while we sat around a fire in the wilderness, eating a meal I had procured, a bird I had called to me.

He had told me of the frescoes of the seven sisters painted by the finest artists from Rome, the baths that were heated by ceramic pipes, the gardens that clung to the cliffs, the palace that faced north so that anyone who resided there would always be gazing toward Jerusalem. We had sat together in the desert in the dwindling light, the scent of the myrtle around us, watching the fire as though observing a fate we didn’t yet understand. We were young, and the desert loomed with its unearthly beauty, the stars glittering above us in such great number we grew dizzy with their light.

Now the stars were hidden by the rising billows of smoke. Uri murmured the prayer for the dead for the man he had killed. The slain man had been one of the bakers in our marketplace. Revka hesitated when she saw the white apron beneath his prayer shawl as it turned scarlet. It was as though a flag of despair had been waved at her. I grabbed her arm and forced her to follow me, as I followed the doves who were fleeing from the only home they had ever known. Already the baker’s children on the stairs were being dispatched by Uri’s knife; they had gathered together to oblige their slayer, for there was nowhere for them to run.

Perhaps Revka uttered a groan as she turned from that scene of death, perhaps one of the boys stepped upon a stone or Shirah’s daughter, who had been named for a dove, whimpered and cooed inside my cloak. I hushed her as I hurried the others along, but it was too late. The echo of noise caused Uri to spy us through the dark. He finished his business on the steps in haste — they were only young children, and once they were gone, their mother gave no fight but flung her cloak open so that she might be taken from this life.

Uri came after us, spurred on by his duty. We ran, urging each other on, the boys darting out in front. Our breath was hot, and we all gasped as we ran for our lives. Noah and Levi stopped when they realized their grandmother was no longer among us. Revka had fallen back, unable to keep up. She shouted for us to run on, insisting that we forsake her though Uri was upon her, already restraining her, pleading with her to accept what must be as she fought him off. I wondered if she had stumbled on purpose, to keep the young warrior from gaining on us.

I told the boys to go forward and handed the babies over to Yehuda before running back to Revka.

“Go on,” she shouted, waving her arms the way she might have if I were one of the doves who refused to leave the nest.

She hadn’t thought much of me when I had first come to the dovecote, and she’d been right to be suspicious of me. I hadn’t been anyone worthwhile. A thief who hadn’t known what love meant, a fool with no understanding of what a lion could do if you lay down beside him.

I’d been a girl from the desert willing to do anything to survive.

I ran up behind Uri as he held Revka in his grasp. I rushed at him so that I might come at him with more strength, but also so I would not have to see his face. I had the knife that had belonged to Ben Simon, the one he had used on behalf of Zion, given to me to protect myself when he knew that he would die, and that we had sinned, and that I must go on without him.

I used the dagger before I could consider the weight of my deed, before I could feel the heat of Uri’s blood. When I had trapped the doves in the desert, their deaths had seemed like drifts of white smoke, swift and silent. This was an inferno, an explosion of blood and heat. Uri released Revka and turned to me, stunned, his gaze fixed upon me, as if I were the murderess and he the bird in the net. He moved to grab me and take me down with him, but before he could grasp me, he was struck from behind and he stumbled, lurching forward. He seemed a pale sheaf taken from the furrows of the earth, cut down in harvesting. He fell to the ground like the almond trees in the orchard.

The Man from the Valley had come upon us. He was nearly unrecognizable, his countenance resembling a beast as much as a man. That was why the Almighty had given us prayer, to distinguish men from animals, to leave the beasts inside of us locked away, as demons are locked in lead jars. This warrior wore nothing but his metal bands of agony and a tunic that was sodden with blood.

But no matter his appearance, the Man from the Valley was indeed human, though he himself might deny it. When Uri reached for me again, grasping at my leg, the Man from the Valley shouted at me to dodge backward. He made a quick sweep to complete Uri’s death, so swift it seemed his ax was made of light. Perhaps Gabriel, who was the lord of fire and of vengeance, did indeed walk beside him.

After the Man from the Valley had slain the younger warrior, he knelt to sing our song for the dead, which many said was the only prayer he would offer up to God. He chanted, in a trance. When he rose, I saw that he had been marked with the letters of the Almighty’s name across his chest and arms, for he was the last of the ten, the one who must slay all of the death-givers and then bring upon his own death.

Once he had been a learned man and a scholar, he had been a man of faith. He had partaken of a lottery to see who would be the last man, and God had chosen him for this terrible last task. Of all the death-givers, he was the most fierce, for his rising indignation over the condition of his kind had left him without fear. He was inured to violence; whether it was inflicted upon himself or upon another made no difference to him now.

At that moment I was unsure whether he would be our murderer or our salvation. The children had stopped in their path, watching with horror. The boys knew their father and called out to him, but he did not answer. Instead he gazed at me, unguarded, and in that moment I saw the man he had been, the one he would be again when he walked into the World-to-Come and bowed before the Creator of all things.

“I leave my children to you,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Wherever they go my wife abides.”

Even now he could not forsake her, or lose her to the beasts who took her down. If he’d been another man, he might have come with us to hide from this mayhem, for I murmured that we were making our escape. But he had been searching for Death for so long he could not linger among us now. He was finally about to meet the one he had been waiting for, his ax ready to take up against Mal’ach ha-Mavet in the only way he could ever win this battle, against himself.

He breathed into his hand, then took my hand in his and told me what I must do.

I ran to those who awaited me. We hurried to the cistern and took the steps as quickly as we could. There was darkness before us, and the echo of the water beneath us. At the mouth to the cave, I paused to tell Revka she must kiss my hand, for this was what the Man from the Valley had commanded of me. When she did, I told her of her son-in-law’s gift to her. Neshamah, the breath of her daughter’s soul, was returned to her, to keep for all eternity and to take with us, wherever we might go.

Our footsteps pounded as we went down into the earth, but only to our ears, for there was no one else left to hear. We could feel the silence of the dead, but it did not follow us. There was only the languid echo of still water, splashing as rocks fell from beneath our footsteps. When we reached the bottom of the well, the white plaster ledge shone and led the way. It seemed that the stars had fallen underground.

We slipped into the water, and that was where we hid from death. We were there on the sixteenth of Nissan, as the day of Passover dawned.

The heat of the fires above us passed over us. As our people were saved when the Angel of Death passed over them when they were slaves in Egypt, so, too, had we eluded him. We slept at the mouth of the well, for we were exhausted and had spent hours in the water, paddling, holding on to the sharp plaster ledge until our fingers bled. We then had pulled ourselves from the cistern so that we might rest alongside the mouth of the well and not drown in our state of exhaustion. There we lay, spent, our hair trailing in the water, our fingers raw, our tunics drenched.

Perhaps we dreamed that those who had died lingered nearby, for they whispered to us in the night. We were so close to the dead we could hear them in the way it is possible to hear wind in a storm even when you are safely hidden away. When we woke, we marveled that we were still living. The black ash had been washed from us during our hours in the cistern, and we could see bands of light streaming from above, for it was morning, and another day had come.

We gazed up in alarm when we heard muffled voices. We thought they were the voices of the dead and perhaps we were among them and hadn’t recognized the World-to-Come, taking it to be the world we had always known before this murderous night had fallen. For all we knew, we, too, were among the dead and had not yet realized we had left our bodies, lingering as the dead often do before they can move on. Fainthearted, we bowed our heads.

Levi and Noah feared that demons awaited us, for they had seen such beings at work. They held each other, readying themselves for whatever terrors would next be inflicted upon them. Yehuda insisted that the End of Days had come, and that his people had arisen from their graves and from the mountain where their bones had been scattered by the jackals, and would soon come to join us. He began to pray, facing in the direction of Jerusalem, for though we were beneath the earth, he could divine the location of that holy city by the placement of the rays of light as the sun rose above the cistern.

Steps clattered down the stairs, down into the earth where we awaited whatever was to come. The noise made me think of the king’s horses, how they had fitted themselves onto the narrowness of the serpents’ path because they had no other choice, how they were blind to the dangers around them.

Four soldiers from the legion came to us, their faces registering shock when they saw us. One grabbed Yehuda and pulled him to his feet. I rose up with a shriek. My hair was the color of blood, and I was flecked with the blood-hued spots that had always marked me and by the bloody slaughter of my people.

The soldier stood back. Perhaps he believed in ghosts.

What are you? he said. He spoke in Latin.

I pretended not to understand.

Are you alive? he asked.

And then we knew we were, for he could see us and he was made of flesh and blood, clothed in the white tunic of the legion, carrying a spear that had been readied to use against us. But the spear had gone slack in his hand, for he knew not what we were, and ghosts could not be killed with weapons made by men.

If circumstances had been different, surely we would have all been slain, but now the soldiers’ expressions were confused, for they were unnerved by what they had witnessed on the mountain above us, the hundreds of charred bodies, the burning of all we had been and all we had owned.

What of all the others? the same soldier said.

I had assumed they had captured more survivors, those who had hidden in their chambers, or had crouched beside the wall.

We have searched everywhere and found nothing but the dead, he went on.

We realized that we were the only ones, and that we alone had the story to tell.

They lined us up and gazed at us, afraid that we were indeed ghosts, and they treated us as such, their respect fashioned from their fear. There was blood on the soles of our feet and on the palms of our hands. One of the soldiers had brought a rope to tie us with, but the one who had spoken to us first slapped the rope away.

Where would they go? he said. How would they escape?

We followed the soldiers, our eyes cast down. The day was chalky and dry, but we were still soaked from our time in the cistern, water streaming from our hair and our sodden tunics. We looked like creatures that had been brought up from the bottom of a river in a net, pale fish who had emerged from the waters of hell.

The stench of charred flesh made us dizzy and faint. Many of the soldiers covered their mouths and noses, many were ashen. Flies were swarming everywhere, and above us there were clouds of ravens and birds of prey. The Romans had been prepared for a battle, never imagining they would have to cross over a field of martyrdom. Nine hundred, burned, slaughtered. Worst were the children and the women and the babies in their mothers’ embrace, their pale, young bodies in clutches of blood, bees circling round as if their remains were sweetened by the honey of their youth. Such deaths were a disgrace to the legion, and the soldiers took no joy in this surrender. Men who feared spirits and ghosts stood on the periphery when we were brought to the plaza. Men who feared their gods imagined that it was a sin for them to walk upon this ground.

I bowed my head before the legion, not to honor them, not as their captive, simply because I could not bring myself to gaze upon the faces of those who had led the battle against us. The children did as I did, and after a moment Revka did so as well, though I knew it was a violation for her to bow before Romans. I hoped she would not judge me. Certainly, I would not judge myself. I left that to the Almighty. We had a reason to go forward and much to protect. We were still in this world, the one we knew, the one we clung to though it was filled with sorrow, the world our fathers had created.

Silva, the great general, came before us. The soldier who had found us gave a shout, and we sank to our knees.

We lowered our eyes to the dust. Still we saw Silva’s shadow; he was the force behind the siege, the commander who had built the wall and the ramp, the one who had murdered our people. It was impossible to interpret his demeanor, whether he intended to run us through himself or order our crucifixions or leave us to the jackals. Panic was beating in my throat. I felt chilled though the air had grown hot, bloodstained, moving in red waves as the sun rose higher.

My veiled eyes flickered over Silva’s form. He was a tall man, dark in complexion, stern in aspect. But he was more than muscle and sinew. He was the monster without mercy. All the same, the longer he took to study us, the more I came to believe that had he intended to kill us, he would have done so already. The general was not often seen by common people, and the fact that he had come to appraise us made me grasp the notion that we might matter more than I had dared to imagine. Perhaps we had something he wanted.

Revka held Arieh, and I had Yonah in my arms. The commander may well have thought the newborn girl to be an angel, the cause for our survival, for he commanded us to stand so that he might look at her more closely. She was only days old, not a winged messenger, only a human child with a cap of silver-blond hair. Silva’s eyes then went to me, the flecks of red on my skin, my hair the color of the flame tree, darkened by the water of the cistern until it seemed made from strands of flowing blood.

I returned Silva’s gaze. He reminded me of the leopard I had once seen in the desert, the one who might have slain me and devoured me had I not stood upon a rock and made myself larger than I was, waving my shawl in the air, growling as if I were a beast as well.

I heard one of Silva’s men suggest that we were nothing, whores and their whelps deserving any death they gave to us. The general’s man said although my hair was the color of the rose, I was a weed, to be plucked out and burned. He spat after that word, and his spittle fell on me. He spoke in Greek. I knew this because Shirah had taught me the language during our lessons. This soldier suggested that his men take care of us, not bothering to waste the nails and wood to crucify us, merely running us through. He would see to it himself, a servant to his general.

There is always a moment when something begins and something ends. I could feel the weight of Shirah’s daughter in my arms, a gift and a burden, my child now.

A weed feeds sheep far better than a flower will, I said in Greek.

My voice pierced through the men’s discussion. Silva turned to me, surprised by my knowledge of that language and my nerve to speak before him.

I continued in Latin, for Shirah had taught me the language of the empire as well. A flower lasts an instant, a weed can plague you for all eternity.

What happened to your people? Silva asked. Where is the man who led you?

I raised my chin and studied the general who had destroyed us. He was just a man like any other. What would he do if he had to stand before a lion without a spear or a sword to protect him? Here was my secret and my strength: I had spoken to the lion, and this was the reason I lived when I faced him. I had told him that I belonged to him. I had given him my name, and in return he was mine.

He is murdered, I said. Lying among the dead of our people.

How could he be murdered? Silva demanded to know. We had not yet come over the wall and the dead were already everywhere.

She knows nothing, his second in command remarked coarsely. What would she know of their leader or their plans?

This soldier cast his eyes over me. I could see he had an idea of what he might do before he murdered me.

I reached for Ben Simon’s knife. It flashed as I cut my flesh. I held my arm out and let my blood drip into the sand, staining it, claiming it. A murmur went up among the soldiers. I had always believed, if I were to be wounded, I would rather see to it myself. Now I realized when I had cut myself in the desert I had done so not merely to mark the days I had spent in the wilderness but to remind myself that I was alive.

Eleazar ben Ya’ir was my kinsman, I announced. I knew him as no other, for I am his cousin. I am Shirah, his closest companion. I alone can tell you the story of this fortress.

In that instant when I changed my name, I changed my fate.

I will give you the story, I promised. It will be the truth and you will be able to tell all of Rome what happened here today. I ask only for one favor in return.

There was laughter from the men. I could feel Death walking close by, peering at me with his many eyes. I can say with certainty that his eyes are cold and that his glance can freeze the heart. I drew the assassin’s cloak around myself so that I might vanish from Mal’ach ha-Mavet’s sight. I thought of the leopard I had chased off when I was only a girl in the desert, and the lion I had lain beside and the one I had freed when he was chained without mercy. Since that time I had worn the beast’s collar around my arm, as a bracelet and a token. There were those who vowed that lion’s blood provided the power of persuasion over princes and kings. I removed the collar and held it up, for the lion had struggled in his captivity and his blood was upon it.

Do you not recognize this?

Several of the men did indeed know the collar for what it was, and they stood back, stunned. Since the day the lion had been released, there had been talk of witchery.

Silva walked to me and took the collar, then returned to where he had stood on the wooden platform. He examined the collar and found it had been marked with the insignia of the Tenth Legion. I could see he was puzzled, though his expression was veiled. He signaled for me to come closer. I recognized his gesture, the same one my father had used when he wanted me to follow, as he might have signaled a dog. But a dog is often beaten once he has performed his task, so I stood in place, not yet willing to yield and approach the general.

I have need of your favor, I said. And you of mine.

Silva’s eyes flitted over my form. One favor, he agreed, perhaps imagining that I was only a simple woman with simple desires, and would ask for bread or water. Only one, he warned me.

I asked for him to let us have our lives.

He stared at me and remarked that he wished to know who I thought I was to ask for such a reprieve.

I said I was the Witch of Moab and that it was written that I should be here to tell the story of what had happened on this day in the world Adonai had created, while the doves flew above us. I told him that no one would know how Rome had come to us, and how we had trembled before the lion who was enslaved on his chain without the story I told.

You will say that you were unafraid, he responded, thinking of how my story would defame his empire. You will recount how you went to the lion and he bowed before you.

Only a fool would be unafraid of a lion, I assured him, remembering the man who had once escaped a lion that had slain nine men before him. I was simply too bitter for his taste, I said.

Silva nodded, compelled to hear more. Why should I grant what you want?

Though we were merely women and children, we were the only ones who had lived through this tide of death. We had heard Eleazar ben Ya’ir speak to his followers and had memorized his words. We alone would be believed when this night was spoken of, for we were the only witnesses. We had heard the cries of those who knew they had no chance of victory against Rome.

I bowed my head then, for I had said enough. A story can be many things to many people. I would give him the story he wanted, but like the scorpion who is hidden in a corner, my story would sting. I knew not to speak of how our people had chosen their death rather than be enslaved. Nor did I suggest that we would be strengthened by my story if I lived to tell it, and that Rome would be haunted by the ghosts of our people, and that a ghost could be stronger than an empire, for it could move people not only to tears but to action.

The general gazed at me. I knew he wanted to hear more of what had happened. How could our people slay themselves and everyone they loved? It was a puzzlement, and even fierce men can be intrigued by a puzzle, though once joined, the pieces may serve to defy them.

When he agreed to my bargain, I approached him.

He told me to speak, and I did exactly as he asked. I told him what he wanted to hear.

We came to Alexandria, because it was there the Witch of Moab belonged, the city she had yearned for when she dreamed of the great river and of her mother and of the white lilies that grew in this city’s gardens. We were brought before the legion in Jerusalem, so that our story might be recorded and written down and sent to Rome. We told it many times, and though we bowed to the strength of the empire, each time we told it a thousand more people learned of the night when we refused to be defeated. The story became a cloud, and the cloud a sheet of rain, and rain fell throughout the empire.

We were released outside the walls of Jerusalem. It had become a city we no longer recognized, and our people were not allowed inside its gates. I sold the gold amulet of the fish to pay for our journey. It had protected us, delivering us from our enemies, and in doing so had served its purpose. I thought of the slave from the north and prayed that his amulet had done as well for him so that he had found his way back to the land where the snow lasted most of the year, where stags that were as swift as the leopard ran across grasslands, where he could be free.

Yehuda traveled with us and lived in our house for several years, but when he became a man he was called to his people. The Essenes had gathered in the north, near Galilee. There were those left among his people who still believed in peace and in the principles of pure devotion to the Almighty. On the day he left us, Revka wept, for she loved him as though he was her own.

Noah and Levi soon enough became young men. Both had honey-colored skin and dark eyes; they were handsome, devoted to their grandmother as she aged. They might have become scholars, as their father had been before fate changed him, but instead they learned the trade of their grandfather. Every morning we were awakened by the scent of bread baking in the domed oven in a shed at the edge of the garden. There were times when I found people at the gate early in the morning, weeping, led here by the scent of bread that reminded them of the bread of their youth, when Jerusalem was ours. Now we are citizens of the world, and the brothers’ bread reflects this: the honey is collected from Egyptian honeybees, the coriander and cumin from Moab, the salt from the shores of the sea the Witch of Moab crossed because she was fated to do so.

As for my son, he is quiet and fearless. He is an excellent student, and speaks four languages, but he is plagued by nightmares. It is only to be expected after all he witnessed, though he would never complain about such things. I discovered his difficulty sleeping because there are nights when I rise to find him sitting in the dark. Sleep is still an unfamiliar country to me, as it is to my son. Perhaps his father speaks to him in his dreams, as mine comes to me. I still possess the assassin’s cloak, the one that is said to have been woven from spiders’ webs, which concealed him from all eyes. I have forgiven him, as I hope that in the World-to-Come he has forgiven me, for I was not blameless. If I was brought before him, I would honor him, for he gave me my life, and for that I will always be grateful.

Every year on the anniversary of the day when the fortress fell, I recount the part of the story I did not tell Silva, although my children know the tale by heart. How the soldiers captured the lion and kept him on a chain and tormented him, how he bided his time, lying in the mud until he was released, how he was set free into the desert, and how he is there still, alone and lonely.

I say that this lion is the king of nothing other than his own freedom. Whether or not the third Temple rises, whether men build palaces or bring cities to ruin, it is the lion who will have to fight for a land of stones. All things change, for that is the way of the world we walk through. But some things remain constant, even after they are gone. I tell my children that we once had a thousand doves and that we set them free, but if we look at the sky we can still see them, even though we are so very far away.

Each year, in the month of Nissan, Yonah and I go to the river on the night before the feast that records our people’s journey out of Egypt, a journey we hope to make again someday when Jerusalem is ours once more. It is a long voyage that we undertake. On this year we celebrate the Blessing of the Sun, for that glorious orb is in the exact same place as it had been during Creation, when God brought forth good and evil, imbuing our world with both at the same hour when he created the word and brought us out of silence, so we might make our own choices. We ride the white donkey we keep in the shed. Revka and I make certain this creature is well cared for, ready if we should ever need to depart suddenly. Our people never know when we may have to flee. Everything that is important we carry with us, whether or not it has been written down.

Yonah is a beautiful child, although with her pale hair and gray eyes she looks nothing like her mother. Still, she is called to the water. I could not keep her away if I tried. I have found her splashing in our courtyard fountain where we keep fish. They do not flee from her, but instead gather around her, as the doves once came to me. That is her element, one she shares with Shirah, who did everything she could to bring this girl forth into this world, even though it was not yet her time, far too early to do so with any assurance of safety. Shirah bled so badly after the birth she would not have survived even if the Angel of Death had not walked among us on that terrible night. We both knew this would come to pass as she drank the rue and stood over the smoke that would begin her labor. She gave her life so that Yonah would have hers. For those who say that the Witch of Moab never loved anyone, that she was selfish, concerned with her own fate alone, I can only say that she was ruined by love and delivered by it and that she left something glorious to the world, a child who loves to stand in the rain.

Our bare feet sink in the mud as we make our way into the waters of the Nile. The river is ink blue. There are sharp, green reeds, and the scent of balsam floats in the air. Women wash their clothes and leave them to dry on rocks along the shore. The men have pulled their boats in, lifting them upon their shoulders and carrying them up the sandy paths. We walk until there are shadows of silver fish darting close by. As the twilight sifts down, we set a candle on a lotus leaf that floats out with the current and watch as it disappears into the dark. This is the reason we are here, to give thanks to our mothers, who are watching over us in the place where we will join them one day, in the World-to-Come.