The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [104]
WHEN OUR WARRIORS next went into the desert, it was not to fight but to hunt, trying as best they could to satisfy our hunger. When the Romans returned to the place they had once marked with rocks, our men were forced to retreat, their foray cut short. They had no choice but to outrun the enemy, who had returned to spy on us. For their troubles, our warriors brought back partridges that were more bones than flesh and a stray baby ibex, left behind by the herd. It was Tishri, the time of the growing season, and we should have been rejoicing. Instead a silence swept over the mountain, a sense of foreboding.
In the dovecotes, we all felt Nahara’s absence. Aziza especially pined for her sister. She often went to the field near the Essenes’ camp, where she sat cross-legged in the grass for many hours, but Nahara never came to greet her. When Aziza followed the goats her sister cared for, Nahara was quick to lead them away. Hurt by her sister’s refusals, Aziza began to fashion arrows to fill her time and keep her hands busy. We had all been asked to help with the weaponry, and many women gathered in the evenings to shape stones for slingshots. All the same, Aziza hid her work from Shirah.
“She wouldn’t think it proper for me,” she confided.
As it turned out, Aziza had a light touch. The arrowheads she crafted were thin, beautifully made. Each was bound to a wooden shaft with linen twine. Shirah’s elder daughter was surprisingly well suited to such work, for metal was to her what cloth and thread were in the hands of other women. I saw in her what I had spied in the Baker each morning of his life, the love of fashioning something out of ingredients that would be nothing without a human touch, be it salt or wheat or iron that was transformed.
The Man from the North revealed that, in the country where he’d been born, each warrior’s arrows were decorated with the sign of his tribe, in his case a stag, the creature he had told us about but one we hardly believed in, for he said this deer’s shoulders were as tall as a man, its antlers spreading farther than the span of a vulture’s wings. From the time he was a boy, he assured us, every arrow he’d carried had been engraved with the image of that miraculous creature. “Tie feathers to the end of the shaft,” the slave told Aziza as she constructed her weapons. “That is how to make them fly.”
Because Amram was thought of as a phoenix, rising from every battle to fight again, Aziza crafted arrows that might be worthy of him, adorning each with hawk feathers dyed in a bath of madder root. Soon her hands were red; I overheard Yael teasing her, suggesting she was so consumed with passion that heat was rising from her skin in waves of scarlet.
When it came time to test Aziza’s handiwork, she sent Adir to the garrison for a bow. Adir returned soon enough, laughing, joking and making rude remarks, suggesting that his sister had best not touch the bow or she might shoot herself accidentally. Aziza grinned and sent him away with a push.
I sat with Yael, who had her baby resting in a sling made of finely spun wool. Arieh was a quiet boy, with dark, liquid eyes, as calm as the sheep he’d appeared to resemble on the evening of his naming. Though only weeks old, he slept through the night, clutching the square of blue fabric Yael let him hold to settle him. He still had the red birthmark on his cheek, but it had been treated with a salve mixed from wheat, honey, and aloe, and had begun to fade. We imagined that his thick black cap of hair was a sign of his virility, marveling over the size of his hands and feet, and his small, manly penis, suggesting he would likely be able to lift a donkey above his head by his tenth year.
“Perhaps