The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [190]
Some of the warriors laughed at this, for the wall was not so high that a man couldn’t climb over beneath the cover of night. They had not yet realized there was another purpose to this endeavor. The Romans intended a crucifixion of the land that belonged to us, each rock in the wall serving as a nail in our flesh. They were telling us that we belonged to them, like the lion on the chain, like the slaves at their bidding, like the six hundred thousand they had slaughtered in their war against the Jews.
They wanted our fear, and that was what they received. Dread went through the fortress as though it was a fever. All at once the blue air seemed difficult to breathe. We had made a world here, one that mirrored the villages where we had once known freedom and the city we loved and hoped to return to. We minted our own pennies, the bronze poured into molds in the palace workshops, imprinted with our dream: For the Freedom of Zion. We had our marketplace, our bakers and wine merchants, the potters who fashioned jugs and cooking vessels from the clay that was found below in the nachal. As Adonai had created us in His image, so we had created Masada in the image of our past lives and the lives we hoped to live again, when we were free.
Now that the siege wall was in sight, people panicked, afraid that Zion would never rise again. They rushed the storerooms, greedy in their fear, thinking only of survival, as the jackal does in the middle of the night when the morning seems such distant territory. But even the jackal shares with his kind, and does not trample them, or forsake them. Our people were maddened by the deeds of the Romans and by their fear of what was to come during a siege that might last months.
Eleazar stood upon the fountain to stop the chaos. His followers had given to him a gold breastplate on which there were four gems of great worth. Although he had accepted this gift, he never dressed in it for battle, preferring instead to take up the same iron mail that his men used. Now, upon the arrival of the Romans, he wore the gold so that he might show the legion, even from a distance, that we were strong and unafraid and that we had been chosen by the Almighty to defeat Rome.
“We have one enemy,” he cried out.
People turned to him, as they might turn to a prophet. He was the one who had led them here, who had believed this fortress would be their salvation. The mountain had defended Herod in the time when Cleopatra sought to take this country from him, as it would defend us now. On that point he had never wavered.
“The wall is just a wall, made of stones. But the stones are the stones of Judea. They belong to us, and our enemy only gives us what is already ours. We will not starve, for there is still enough wine and oil for us to make do. Even in a time of siege, we will have enough to eat. Our cisterns are filled with water. Our God is everywhere, on both sides of the wall.”
Those who had panicked and been set to trample one another out of fear backed down. We could no longer hear the soldiers in the valley, for like a miracle the wind had shifted and those rough voices disappeared so that we could listen to our leader. The crowd stood close so they might hear the psalm Eleazar now spoke, the words of David, our great king of the past, a warrior who, like any other man, had walked with fear, as we did now, as all men must.
“Because of the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked: for they cast iniquity upon me, and in wrath they hate me. My heart is sore pained within me: and the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me.”
I remained in the latticework of shadows falling through the boughs of the olive tree in my garden, but my heart lifted to hear my beloved’s voice. This was what I