The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [157]
Despite the fact that my mother had mourned my sister and now considered her among the dead, I brought pheasants to the Essenes whenever I could. Nahara was not dead to me. I often spied her among the modest, hardworking women. I thought of how she would follow me through the grass in our other life, how I would send her running home to our tent, swooping behind her like an owl, making her laugh. I thought of the years when we had slept on one pallet, often dreaming the same dream, so that even before our eyes were open we could chatter about our night visions. I had always yearned for her father to be my father so I might be her sister in every way. Now I was afraid she would run if I dared to speak to her and beg her to return.
After I presented the game birds, I went to sit beside Nahara on a wooden bench outside the goat house. Together we plucked the pheasants. Soon there was a circle of shimmering brown and green feathers at our feet.
“You can still hunt,” my sister said pointedly. The Essenes did not believe a woman should touch a weapon, or take a life.
“When no one’s watching.” I grinned, hoping she would join in the joke of who I used to be. Instead she shook her head. My sister, whose dreams I had shared, whose breath was the same as mine, whose true father was a secret to her people, found my actions shameful.
“The Almighty watches.”
I felt the stab of her judgment upon me. “I bowed to give my prayers to Him. He watches that as well.”
“We’re on the threshold of the end, yet you act as though the days will go on forever, one like the other.” It was as though my sister had become my teacher and I had failed to learn my studies. Nahara was convinced we were walking through the End of Days and, like her Essene teachers, believed it was foolish to be consumed with the details of daily life. Those who refused to accept the truth that the world as we knew it would soon be no more would shortly be apprised otherwise.
The fabric of my sister’s tunic and shawl was threadbare, for there had been no time to mend the weaving and, from what she said, no purpose in doing so. If it was the End of Days, then my sister’s tunic would be her funeral garment. She confided that her people no longer slept. There was too much work to be completed on their scrolls, which revealed God’s truth, and too little time to do so. Perhaps this was the reason she looked pale. She was so slim the bones below her throat seemed to be rising through the flesh. She said that her people often prayed throughout the night, waiting to see if the sun would rise again and if there would indeed be another morning.
We had blood upon us from readying the pheasants. The birds would be hung on a line so that the rest of their blood would be drained from their bodies before they were salted and cooked. Our people never consumed blood. It was one of God’s strictest laws. Still our hands were stained with the pheasants’ lifeblood. I took my sister’s hand in mine. She had betrayed me to our mother; nevertheless, I could not abandon her.
“What do these people offer you?”
“Everything.” Nahara withdrew her hand from mine, shaking her head, disappointed in me. “They offer a world of peace, Aziza.”
She gazed toward the barracks and the stock of weapons stored there. Children had been set to work fashioning stones into round rocks that could be dropped upon our enemy with great force should they be foolhardy enough to attack us. Nahara turned back to me, her eyes damp. She had always been softhearted in times of killing. She would close her eyes when we came upon a rabbit in a snare. Our people did not eat rabbits, they were considered unclean, but Nahara’s father’s people had no such laws. You do it, she would say to me as the poor creature shivered in its trap. I would take the rabbit and sever its throat, quickly, so that she didn’t have to see. I would do whatever she asked.
“You can’t think that’s the answer,” she said of the mounds