The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [118]
She would have gone on with her excuses and perhaps managed to send me away, but her eye caught on the baby in my arms. He grinned at her, the flame mark on his cheek hardly noticeable in the dim light of the doorway. It looked like the imprint of a kiss.
“Who’s this who’s come to call?” Ben Ya’ir’s wife asked, her interest piqued.
“This is a child whose mother needs your favor,” I replied.
Channa was aloof again. “I have no favor to grant. My husband is the one you want, not me.”
When she breathed in, I heard a rasping sound. I wondered if her labored intake of air was the reason she often locked herself away and was so rarely seen among other women. She turned and coughed, bringing up blood, which she hid from me in her scarf. But I had caught sight of the shadow of the stain. It was clear that she had a breathing disease, the sort that forced a person to forsake the open air. Each breath was trapped inside the cage of her ribs and could not be released. It lay there, rattling, like dry leaves caught in a net.
“Perhaps I have a favor to grant you,” I said.
My husband had often convinced customers to buy more loaves than they initially thought were needed. You will never go hungry, he told them. Your table will be the envy of all. Possibly there was a bargain to be struck. In the bakery this was always so, why not at the palace door?
Ben Ya’ir’s thin, dark wife eyed me, suspicious. Her lips were bright with blood. “No one can help me.”
I assured her that someone could. I would offer her proof that for every ailment there was indeed a cure. When I turned to leave, Channa called for me to bring the baby if I were to return. My prediction was correct. He was the key that would open a doorway so the Man from the North could escape his plight.
I WENT DIRECTLY to Shirah’s chamber and sat at her table. We shared a tea made of the dried root of the hyssop. The boiled water was tinted sky blue. There was a plate of dried fruit, raisins and figs. My grandsons were in the courtyard with Shirah’s son, Adir, along with the Essene boy, Yehuda, Tamar’s son, who had become their great friend, though he’d been commanded by his people to stay away and pay more attention to his studies. All were taking turns with the spinning top, so we had our privacy.
“Did she speak to you?” Shirah tried to be offhand about the matter, but her gaze was sharp. “She locks her door to most.”
I wondered how it was possible that others did not see the truth as I did. Did they not take note of the unusual color of Aziza’s eyes? The shade was not unlike the Salt Sea, changing with her mood, now gray, now green, now dark as stone. Only one other person had such eyes. At the mention of Ben Ya’ir’s wife, Shirah was struck with grief. When I spoke of Channa’s illness, however, she did not seem surprised.
“While the hyssop flowers, she can go out only at night, when the flower closes and the scent evaporates,” Shirah informed me. “She keeps the same hours as the rats.”
Shirah took a sip of her tea, made of the bloom that caused Ben Ya’ir’s wife such difficulty. She seemed to thoroughly enjoy its sharp flavor.
“I didn’t realize you knew her.”
Shirah laughed grimly. “I’ve never met her.”
I thought this over, how it could be possible for Shirah not to know this woman, yet still be acquainted with the most intimate details of her life. In our world a man who was married could lie with an unmarried woman and no one would think him the worse for doing so; he might be required to pay her family for her shame. But a woman who gave herself to such a man had no legal rights. Even her bones would be sentenced to lie alone if she was convicted of any wrongdoing; they would be cast out and unburied so that she would forever be unable to find rest among her own kind.
“Channa has the power to open the prison gate,” I reminded Shirah. “She might be willing to do so in exchange for a cure.”
“Then we pay the jailer,” Shirah said moodily. “Is that what you want of me?”
“Is that what