The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [187]
I pause on the edge of the cistern, where the stones have been covered with fine plaster. The white plaster dust clings to my flesh. I watch the shimmer of the heat over the water. It is said that the spirit of God hovers over the water, as it did on the first day of creation. I stand before the glory of what He has created. I remove my cloak, my sandals, my tunic. Other women purify themselves in the mikvah, but I need deeper waters. I dive in.
Some people say that this, the largest of the cisterns built by Herod’s stonemasons, is bottomless, and if we ever see the floor of this well, we will also see our doom. This pool is deep, but it is not endless. I know that for certain. All things end. I often dive to reach the depths, then keep myself from rising back up by holding on to the rocks piled at the foundation. They are sleek against my hand, smoothed by the endless lapping of the water against stone. I keep my eyes open even though the water is black. There are no fish, no flashes of light, but when I surface, my cousin Eleazar will be waiting.
It was he I saw in the water of the Nile when I spied the fish beside me.
From the beginning until now, that alone has never changed. He is my fate.
THE SOLDIERS of the Tenth Legion were led through the wilderness by Flavius Silva, the procurator of all Judea, the newly appointed Roman governor. The troops raised a dust storm so enormous it could surely be seen as far away as the Iron Mountain, where I spent so many years in the company of a husband who was twice my age and knew I did not love him, yet he still protected me. He never mistreated me, though he had the stony aloofness of many of the fierce people of Moab, along with a surprising tenderness with his children. His name was Sa’adallos, though I never called him that. If I had, I might have loved him in return. I might have been in Petra instead of at this fortress when the Romans arrived. I might have been walking through that red city with its miraculous carved columns of elephants and camels, enjoying its pool, rumored to be the size of a lake, and the gardens that hang from cliffs, causing men to look upon the mountainsides with awe, amazed to see date trees where in another country there would be only clouds.
Had I loved him, my children would have been safe, my future assured. Instead I brought them to be trapped on this perch from which there was no deliverance. Though the angels might hear us call to them, they could never reach us here on the periphery of the world, even if they wished to save us. I understood this when I threw the bones of the doves, for they prophesied that, just as there was no escape from what had already been written, there would be no escape from this fortress.
Our people gathered to watch six thousand of the legion approach, accompanied by more than a thousand of their slaves and followers. We trembled in silence. What terrified us was not only their number but their sheer determination. They had come for us from Jerusalem, though we were but a few hundred. They had found us as the jackals find their prey, encircling the weakness of their victims, biding their time, ready to leap when the moment is right.
In the dust storm they raised, birds fell from the sky, unable to take flight in the bursts of swirling gravel. Soon the ground was littered with ravens, more in number than the soldiers. The flightless birds transformed the ground into a mournful stretch of black, and all at once it seemed the reaches of the World-to-Come had been laid down before us in a road of flesh and feathers.
“I have seen this before,” Revka murmured to me, her face ashen. “We cannot escape from harm.”
There was only one reason why Rome should come