The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [209]
I gave her my blessing, casting powdered snakeskin into her short, black hair for her protection. I felt my love for her in the back of my throat. I could not say it aloud for fear I would bring her doom to her, but I embraced her and she knew what she meant to me, as she had known I’d depended upon her to help me bring Nahara into this world, as I’d had faith enough to allow her to ride with the men in Moab. Once I had given her a name that would help her to be fearless in a world commanded by fear. That was my greatest gift to her.
FORTUNATELY there was still a space between our cliff and the white ramp. Every time more earth was heaped upon it, the end of the ramp collapsed in a landslide. Although the slaves had brought up huge battering rams, as large as the trunks of date palms, those last few yards could not be forged, and therefore they could not break through the wall. Though King Herod had been wicked in many ways, we were grateful for the wall he had built and for the stones that bore his mark. We thought the legion’s inability to build the ramp to meet the king’s wall was an omen of our assured success, and we prayed and thanked the Almighty.
It would soon be the eve of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the day when our people were freed from slavery in Egypt. We thought of Moses in the desert, and how there had been faith even when there was no hope, how he had led his people despite their agonies. We thought our celebration would bring us fortune in the future. We did not understand that, much like the ninth of Av, when both Temples fell, when Moses broke the tablets, when sorrow reigned across our world, some days were meant to make us remember that the past was with us still.
The Romans were relentless, and a king’s wall was nothing to them as they worked for the glory of their Emperor. They threw up an enormous platform that rose to more than two hundred cubits. The wood had come all the way from Greece, shipped across the sea, hauled here on the backs of slaves; the timbers carried the scent of the forest. Revka said they had been fashioned from cypress, and she wept in remembering. We stood watching as the platform was completed and the soldiers scrambled upon it and called out curses, quickly letting go with volleys of burning torches. All we could smell then was fire; the fragrance of sweet cypress was like a dream that had once clung in the air.
When the platform was still not enough to breach the distance between the ramp and Herod’s mighty wall, the legion extended it with huge stones that fitted together. Then came the worst creation we had ever seen, one invented by Vespasian, then used by Titus, and now by Silva. It seemed this work of warfare had been fashioned in the demon world, and a thousand evil spirits had constructed it. We stood in awe and in despair. Even grown men had tears streaming down their faces. A metal-plated tower nearly a hundred feet tall had been set upon the wooden platform so the Romans could attack us yet be protected from our slingshots and arrows and darts. From this tower they were able to set forth huge boulders, striking the king’s walls that were meant to last for all eternity.
So it began. The mountain shook and the birds took flight, the ravens and the larks, the sparrows and hawks, every winged creature fled from us, save for the doves in the dovecotes, who had no choice but to remain. I felt the child inside me shift as I sat upon the rim of the fountain. All around me there was madness. Children of the ages of three and four were scraping the blood from spears that had been cast into a pile, pulled from the bodies of the slain. Our dead were so many they were brought into the field where the almond trees flowered with both pink and white blooms. There the dead were washed with rainwater and oil, then wound in sheets of linen.
When we had no more linen and still more dead, we used our own shawls to wind them in. Two of our young warriors, mere boys in armor, slipped through the gate to fight the soldiers on their own.