The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [208]
On that same day the dust rose up along the desert floor when a group of travelers from the east arrived. I saw that many of their cloaks were blue. They belonged to the people of Nahara and Adir’s father, nomads from the hills of Moab. They had brought all manner of spices and treasures from Petra and had come to offer their help to the Romans, with whom they had a treaty of peace. When I regarded these men, my heart fell, for I knew how fierce they were and how difficult they would be to defeat.
My hair was damp from my night in the cistern, my arms ached from holding on to a man who always left me while I slept. I would awake on the edge of the well, beside the deep water, a scrim of plaster dust flecking my skin, and I would be alone. Despite my enlarged belly, I had grown thin. The man who had been my husband in Moab would have noticed, he would have been certain to feed me dates and figs, for he thought a thin woman was like a thin horse, too weak for the hills of his country. He had loved me, though he never said so. He had watched me all the while we were together, as if his eyes could not get enough of my form.
Eleazar had not noticed that my ribs could be viewed, or that the bones at my shoulders and backbone were rising through my skin. He did not see that the poor diet of roots and beans had caused my hair to be less glossy, for I plaited it into braids, then clasped it atop my head with two pins made of horn. To him I was the girl with the sheet of black hair at the well in Jerusalem, just as he was my beloved, the man who stood with me in the rain and took me to him, the one I had been pledged to throughout time.
*
WE NO LONGER took note of the laws of men, only the laws of God. Day and night, prayers were said. The old men gathered in the synagogue, and by the flickering light of what little oil we had left, they begged for God’s forgiveness and His favor. Timbers had been laid into the Romans’ ramp to support the barrels of white earth the slaves continued to pour upon it. The ramp was now so close the Romans could speak to us, and Silva himself came to shout for Ben Ya’ir. Some of our men shouted back that our leader would never speak with demons, for a demon could take your soul from your words. It was true, we knew, for when we listened to the demon who commanded the Tenth Legion, he had brought us clouds of terror. We covered our ears, yet we could still make out Silva’s words. Surrender now and we will let you go free.
Exactly what they had told the warriors of the fortress at Machaerus before murdering every one, leaving them for the jackals so that their bones were scattered through the forest, as if they had never been men at all but had come into this world as stones.
BEN YA’IR gave no answer to Silva but instead sent a hail of arrows set aflame. I saw the finest archers upon the wall, my daughter among them. She used so many arrows that soon enough she had no more. That night she taught Adir how to fashion these weapons, how to keep the flint straight so he would not scrape his hands raw as he struck the thin metal tip against a stone, how to wind the sharpened tip to the wooden shaft with a thin strand of leather. Because Yehuda could not by faith touch an instrument of war, he collected feathers from the doves, to attach to the arrows so they might fly straight from the hands of my daughter to the hearts of the enemy.
Aziza took me aside before she returned to the wall with her basket of newly made arrows. She looked so strong, her muscles fine, her face beautiful and harsh and dark. My daughter told me she would attempt any tactic to save our people, except for one. She would not shoot any man in a blue robe. One among them might well be the man who had been Nahara and Adir’s father, my husband once, who for a very long time had forgotten