The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [199]
“We were meant to be here,” Aziza assured me.
Her skin was burned by the sun. I noticed the scar that was beneath her eye shone white in her darkened face. She could have been a beautiful woman, instead she was a warrior. She could have been a boy who walked through the streets of the red city of Petra, instead she was my daughter, who had followed me to this fortress, and whom I loved despite the many ways I had tried not to do so.
When she went to the barracks, I thought of my mother, who had stood in the courtyard beside the fountain to watch me leave Alexandria. Now I understood she had known she would not see me again. My heart dropped because I had viewed my own future and what was to come in the bones I had thrown on the tower floor.
I would lose everything I had.
Something was ending, but it was also beginning. I could feel the life within me move and shift. Creation had begun at the Temple mount, and perhaps it would once again if everything else disappeared. Already, there were men speaking of a third Temple, one that would arise in the future, more glorious than any other. From destruction there would be light, and the first words would again be spoken out of a holy silence, for that is always the beginning.
I walked to the wall, my cloak around me. I rested my hand upon my abdomen, and upon my daughter who was not yet born. My beloved wished for a son, as all men did, but I knew I would have another daughter. I always carried a girl child in the same way, high, under my heart. I wanted another world for her, not this mayhem below us. There were still pools of rain on the valley floor. In any other time we would have been grateful. Wild goats and deer would have come to drink. Falcons and herons would have dropped from the sky to bathe, and the ravens, who had fed Elijah in the wilderness, would have come to us with plums in their beaks.
Now there was only the lion, whose chain allowed him to roll in the water. He was covered with mud, his huge paws leaving cleft marks in the damp earth. I forced myself to look away from this great beast, for I could not bear to see him so debased and tamed. I was reminded of the trained Syrian bears one could see in the alleys of Alexandria and Jerusalem, but this was much worse, for the lion had been humiliated in his own land, dispossessed as we were, the lord of nothing but stones.
I gazed down upon the sheer cliff in my grief. As I did, I spied a black goat along the mountainside, one that had escaped from the Essenes’ cave. He was scrambling among the rocks, lost and forsaken, unable to find the rest of his flock.
It was a sign of the darkness to come.
ONE ROMAN SOLDIER noticed the goat, but one was all it took. He told his comrades, and they went after the creature hastily, first in sport, then with the relentless fervor of hunters. In doing so they stumbled upon the camp of those who wanted only peace. Yehuda came to the wall to stand beside me as the Romans began their ascent to the limestone caves beneath us. It was as though his mother, still among her people, had called out to him, as my daughter’s heart had called to me. We were helpless to do anything other than watch as the soldiers climbed the cliff. One fell and I was quick to praise God, and I wondered what had become of me that I might pray for a man’s death on the rocks, rejoicing at the sound of his cries.
Those soldiers who managed to reach a plateau in the cliff then sent down ropes to ensure those who followed would have an easier time rising up. As it is said of the angels, we could see what was to happen before it occurred, but like them we were unable to change the outcome. If this was what the angels observed when they gazed upon our world, how we might murder each other and cause one another agony, then I pitied them as I pitied no others.
Our warriors came to send down a volley of arrows, but the arrows fell upon the rocks as if they were birds falling from the sky. Aziza, too, had rushed to the wall, but she was