The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [35]
The fortress was impenetrable, they said, the surrounding land so fierce no attack upon them would prove successful. The retreat had once been a palace built by King Herod, a place of unearthly beauty concealed by clouds. I knew of that king, whose cruelty was so legendary it was said he had once slit open a hedgehog, then turned the poor beast inside out to place upon an enemy’s face so that he might blind his foe. He had betrayed those around him and been responsible for the murder of his wife, Mariamne, whom he accused of trading in philtrons and pharmaka—medicines and love potions and spells. She was so beautiful the Roman general Marcus Antonius became maddened at the sight of her and was desperate to have her. Because of this Herod sentenced her to death. Soon after, his son was accused of having a poison concocted from the venom of asps, prepared by a woman from Edom who was a practitioner of keshaphim. The son’s execution followed his mother’s.
Every betrayer knows his fate is to have the misery he once doled out to others returned to him in kind, yet Herod had dreams of outrunning the page on which his fate was written. He built his stronghold on the western slope of the mountain called Masada, completed a hundred years before our time. The Queen of Egypt wanted Judea for herself, pleading with Anthony and with Rome to grant her this desert as a gift, for she yearned for the treasures it possessed: the route to the sea, the fields of salt, the balsam forests that lay beyond in Moab, troves of myrrh and frankincense, riches beyond measure.
Those who awaited us at Masada were said to be more than nine hundred strong, three hundred of them warriors. Five winters ago they had taken Herod’s great fortress from the hands of a small group of Roman soldiers lodged there. They had done so easily, in the cover of night, winding along the back of the mountain, a feat the Romans had thought impossible. Nothing was impossible, they had discovered. They had managed to climb into the sky, closer to God.
I thought it was a dream when my brother’s friend vowed that the old king’s Northern Palace was more beautiful than the hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the wonders of mankind. The black and white columns had been transported from Greece, lashed onto boats that crossed the open sea, then hauled by ropes and pulleys across Judea on the backs of slaves. The glimmering mosaics had been brought into the wilderness from Italy to be laid down one tile at a time by the finest masons. The baths, heated by ceramic columns set beneath the floor, were made of quartz of such high quality the stones shone with red light when the sun was high. Floors were patterned in shades of rose and green and black, and frescoes had been painted by hundreds of Italian artists using the finest pigments from Rome, aquamarine and sapphire and carnelian, gemlike, gleaming as jewels do. The only colors I knew now were those of the white desert, the black night, the red stain of my own blood on the soles of my feet as we climbed over stones.
As the men spoke of such wonders, we huddled in damp caves where scorpions gathered, seeking shelter from the raging windstorms. I thought of the scorpions which had nested in the hallway when I was a child. They were so still they might have been an illusion until they suddenly leapt to attack their prey and prove otherwise. Guilt was like that, I had discovered. Remote, until it struck. I heard her still, the friend I’d had, the woman I’d betrayed. When I slept I could feel the curve of her hip against mine. I’d heard that demons could attach themselves to a person. Once this was accomplished, it was impossible to leave them behind or dismiss them. At night they closed their hands over yours with a predatory ownership. They whispered a single word in your ear: Mine.
Remorse engulfed me in this wasteland, as did my silence. It had risen around me as the thorn trees grew, wild, their