The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [138]
We began to meet in the dark, beside the fountain in the Western Plaza. Whenever I was with Amram, my sister vowed I was beside her. She was my shield, my key to freedom, the little dove who carried the words I wrote for her to say when she went to tell Amram the hour when we could safely meet. I had rescued my sister once, now she repaid me. She often crossed the plaza with me in the evenings. We held hands and whispered like children, but when we neared the fountain, there came a point when she masked her eyes and I went on alone. If she did not witness our meeting, she would not be forced to tell an outright lie when she assured our mother she had not spied me with any man.
We found places to be alone, storerooms, gardens, the field late at night. Once again, as it had been when I gave my sister life, someone’s breath belonged to me and mine to them. Amram swore he would keep our secret from my mother, and he was a man of his word. There were those who vowed that in Jerusalem he had been the most daring of the assassins, able to transform himself. His father, that great and fearsome assassin Bar Elhanan, was said to possess the ability to vanish while in plain sight. Perhaps he had shared this trick of invisibility, for Amram was able to slink past my mother, his presence little more than a cloud. We grew so brave we dared to meet in the cellar below our chamber, for there was a set of secret stairs in the floor of the old kitchen, and yet another that entered the cellar from the plaza. We slipped off our cloaks beneath the floor my mother stood upon. Perhaps I did so to spite my mother, to claim my life for myself and disprove her prophecy that love would only bring me anguish.
In our secret cellar, I tried my best to spy Amram in the dark scrim of shadows before he could see me. I could make out field mice in search of grain, and the drowsy forms of bats hanging from the ceiling, but Amram tricked me every time, grasping me before I knew he was there, sliding his hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t cry out. I could have eluded his grasp easily and raised a knife to his throat before he blinked, but I told myself this was the game we played, hiding our true natures. Though he did not see me for who I was, though I should have known better, I never denied him anything. And yet I was dissatisfied.
He did not see through my veils, and I did not reveal my deepest self to him. Perhaps it was only to defy my mother, but by the time Revka arrived to work alongside us in the dovecotes, I had promised myself to him. Not long after his sister, Yael, came to work alongside us, I was his.
PERHAPS SOME secrets are impossible to keep, for it seemed my sins were written upon me. I was unwed, yet I knew what brides knew, how men groaned with passion, how they sometimes wept with all they felt, how their desire could bind them as tightly as the clothes I wore in this life—shawls and veils and cloaks—tying me to who I had become. Men eyed me rudely at the market when I stood in line for our rations of wheat and millet. They watched as I carried baskets of dung into the field and made suggestions I ignored. I was not like a ewe, there to take on the burden of their desires. I shouted to them that they should run home to their wives or their mothers. The very idea that I would bow to any man who chose to speak to me in such a manner made me a warrior once more. I let the shawl slip from my hair and shoulders, allowing my arms to shine bare in the sunlight. That was when the other women first began to whisper that I was one of the sheydim, a creature no one could control. In that they were correct. I did as I pleased, even though my mother had forbidden me to do so, even though it was a sin.
I began to wonder if there wasn’t some merit in the field women’s stories about me, if perhaps what set me apart from all others wasn’t the life I’d led before I’d come here but was instead cast from the truth of who my father might be. Though