The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [114]
When they went into what was left of the orchards, those trees that had not been hewn for firewood and still bore fruit, the hawk followed, dedicated, not veering away from the mountaintop. I watched their shadows stretch across the field, then disappear as a cloud passed overhead. I felt sure this was the sign of disaster to come. Perhaps I no longer believed in kindness and mistrusted it. I had come to consider compassion a knife in the hands of the angels of disaster.
ONE SABBATH EVENING, the council announced they would no longer bring conscripts or slaves to the fortress after a battle but would instead slay them along with their owners. Several Roman conscripts had been captured and now worked with the donkeys who carried up barrels of water. There was little enough food for the residents, we hadn’t a surplus to feed more. What was a slave but a stone? people murmured. Exactly as I had said. I watched Yael carefully after that proclamation; she frowned and gazed at the council in alarm as the slaves among us were denounced.
“It’s a sin to keep people so,” she said to me with a naked flash of emotion as we left the plaza.
“I suppose you won’t listen to my advice,” I muttered.
She laughed and linked her arm through mine. “I’ll listen,” she assured me.
“And then you’ll do as you please,” I remarked.
We laughed together, then I fell silent, for I realized how much I feared for her in this wicked world. Although she was not my daughter, I fretted as if she were.
THE NEXT MORNING I saw that Yael had brought the Man from the North a bow and several arrows, one for each of the seven sisters that gather as stars in the sky. She had hidden them under her cloak, but I recognized the shape of the weapon from its shadow when she stored it beneath a pile of straw. The bow was one her brother had carried. When he found it gone, he would question his friends in the barracks and never once remember he had not seen it since his sister’s most recent visit. This was the shade I had spied in the field as the hawk drifted above them. She was willing to do too much for this man who was nothing on this mountain and should have been nothing to her as well.
“Don’t tell me when it will happen,” I overheard her say as she stood beside him. “I’ll arrive one morning and you’ll be gone.”
The Man from the North was aware that he had a rival, but unlike most suitors, he wasn’t jealous. Rather, he doted upon his competition, our little lion. He might have resented Arieh his mother’s joys and arms, instead he was happy to help amuse the child, lifting him up to see the hawk above us. He whistled in a way that brought the bird swooping, which made the baby throw back his head and laugh. The slave often listed the names of things in his own rough language, trying to teach Arieh how he might say dove and hawk and mother and snow, as though convinced the child might someday live in the slave’s cold land and speak as he did.
“You’re wasting your time,” I warned when he clasped Arieh in his arms, then tossed him in the air until the child melted with laughter.
Then one day he told the child his name. We worked in such close quarters that we all overheard. It was Wynn, a rough word that stuck in the throat. Shirah and Aziza exchanged a look, surprised that the slave would reveal himself. He had addressed Arieh in the manner in which a man might speak to his son. I knew then that the time of his leaving had come. A slave never speaks his name aloud; once he was captured, it was not to be uttered until he walked into the world beyond. His name was to be a word known only to his kinsmen