The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [174]
Today I had seen my beloved kill a child who could not have been more than four. It seemed nothing to him to do so, but everything to me. Other than the stars in the sky, I could not see any image but the face of the child who’d been murdered, for he now lived behind my eyes and would be a part of my vision forever-more. Every time I looked at Amram, it was that child I would see.
I wished I had been a woman and had stayed at home.
“Did you not think this was what the world was like?” the Man from the Valley said to me.
My dog lay at my feet. There was blood on his fur. By daylight flies would be swarming over him and he would look monstrous. Eran had never once deserted me in the bloody turmoil but had lurched toward anyone who approached me, snapping at them, baring his teeth.
I had never felt as vulnerable, or as flooded with shame. I had lost something so completely, I did not think I could get it back from anything that had been created on earth. I needed to look into heaven. The haze had vanished by this time, and the stars were bright. We saw some drift across the darkness in blasts of light, then vanish, invisible to our eyes. I was transfixed by the sight, and by the goodness of a dumb beast who had never once thought to flee from my side, and by the fact that both I and the warrior I stood beside were still alive.
“Is it not beautiful?” I said of the world around us.
“Is it not terrible?” the Man from the Valley countered.
He gazed at me, and all at once I knew that it was a question and that he needed an answer. I took his hand and pulled him to me, and had him lie down beside me. As he had rescued me, I did the same for him. For one night, when we could still smell the blood on each other, when the night was black and all the world was invisible, we were not alone.
ADIR’S WOUND had healed and his fever had ended, yet my brother limped and seemed frail. My mother worried over him and tried one cure after the next, sifting through her piles of herbs and her recipes for pharmaka. Still he was weak. Though she had disapproved of my actions in the past, she agreed I should again take Adir’s place when the time came for him to be called back to fight. This was as it should be. I was the better warrior, the one more likely to return. Once again, my mother and I shared secrets. It was a bond we didn’t deny, one that was meant to be, for our fate had always been entwined. Whatever bitterness had been between us had dissipated.
Perhaps my father was hoping for a son, as Adir’s father had, for Ben Ya’ir had grown reckless when it came to my mother, meeting her in the cistern nearly every night, delighted both with her and with the child that was to be. His own wife was confined, nowhere to be seen. People whispered that Channa was ill again, but I wondered if perhaps her husband had forbidden her to go among the other women. He would not tolerate her interference any longer, for he had given her most of his life. What little he might have left he now claimed for his own.
Ever since our arrival he had been practicing his own form of invisibility, not unlike the skills the old assassin had taught me. He had kept his yearning for my mother hidden right in front of other people’s eyes. Indeed, they had looked past what was so evident and seen nothing. He had the right to claim another wife when his own proved to be barren; still Channa had fought him and done her best to trick him, insisting that God had given her the child she stole from Yael.
Now, when it seemed that every day was a gift and another might not follow, as the Essenes had vowed, my father no longer bothered with subterfuge.