The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [146]
WHEN MY FINGERTIPS bled from my practice, I told Amram that I had pierced them on the looms. Unlike the slave, he believed me. He was blind to who I was. It was as though I were the one who possessed the cloak of invisibility his father was said to have worn in the courtyards of the Temple when he struck his enemies. Amram asked me to weave a cloak for him in his favorite shade of blue as a token of my love. I agreed, though I knew this was a gift I would never give to him. I did not know how to work the loom.
My arms grew stronger after my many hours with the bow, as muscled as a warrior’s, but I insisted my strength was honed from lifting the baskets that we carried into the field. For weeks afterward, Amram came to help me carry the baskets, imagining that the work was too heavy a burden for me. Behind his back Wynn grinned, and I grinned in return, for some secrets bring you closer in their sharing, just as others break you apart.
I DIDN’T WISH to know what was between Yael and the slave, though I could tell he burned for her. Once Yael had told me that whom I loved was my business, now I gave her the respect she deserved. All the same, I saw the way he watched her and knew she had left his irons unlocked.
“Have you asked her how many men she’s slain?” I asked Wynn one day. The words had slipped out in jest, but he stared after Yael, wounded.
“One certainly,” he said.
I should have seen then he would be a fool on her account and try to convince her to flee with him. He was the sort of open man who could not hide himself, even if it meant he would be locked in irons.
It was Yael who brought him his meager provisions during the time he was locked away. She told us she could barely hear him speak. He was so weakened he could not rise from his pallet, a rough thing made from the chaff of the wheat. The cell was fetid, made the more filthy with his own waste. Still Wynn did not complain or curse his captors, but instead he spoke of the land of ice where he had been born. It was as though he were seeing it before his eyes. The heat dissipated as he spoke of his country, and he shivered as though he walked in snow. His people believed that a man would return home upon leaving this life. In the next world he would walk beneath the great yew trees of his homeland and once again be reunited with those who had gone before him.
One day he insisted he could see a stag outside the window. It was the animal that was so difficult to hunt, for it flew across the grass as the birds fly above us.
“What a beautiful creature,” he whispered.
Yael wept when she told us this, for there were no stags in our country, and no window in his cell.
It was a dark time. We had come to realize that our lives were here, so removed from the rest of the world we might as well have been in the World-to-Come. We would soon celebrate Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, in remembrance of the day Moses was given the Torah. In the past our people would make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem with sacrifices of bikkurim, the first fruits brought forth after seven weeks of working the fields, sacrificing the seven species of the harvest: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, dates.
Such was our tradition and our law, but there was no Temple to journey to, and we had little to celebrate and no place where we might offer a sacrifice. Our orchards were failing, despite the rain my mother had called down. There was so little grain that many of the storage jars were only half full. People wondered if demons had been at work. Indeed, now when it rained the sky hailed down upon us so strongly the rain itself might have been made of stone.
Although it was said that Masada could never fall, and that God had made this mountain for the purpose of our rebellion, allowing us to continue to give glory to Him, I wondered how long we could endure a