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By Root 1868 0

a combination that formed a demon. The women in the bath vowed that Aziza’s father was an angel sent to earth to teach sorcery to those evil women who yearned to know such secrets. Creatures like Aziza were born of these unions. It was difficult to measure who they were, for they could eat and drink as we could. They could have sexual relations and make men long for them; they could even die like mortals, but they were nothing like us. They could see the future in a cup of water and turn the pages of the Book of Life to view the names that were inscribed within. They flew from one end of the world to the other in the time it took for us to rise from our beds. They practiced patience, but they took what they wanted, entitled to all we had in this world; in that way they were the same as all messengers from heaven, a puzzlement to those of us who had no choice but to be bound by our human needs and desires.

I listened to such claims without comment or expression, but there was a shiver of unease along my spine. Everything I’d done since leaving Jerusalem was surely a sin in someone’s eyes. If the women from the field knew I had called to a lion and brought him to me and had never once turned him away, even during the time of the month when I was a niddah, what would they have said of me? What might they have thought had they caught sight of me in the desert, waiting on the cliff, wanting him more than I wanted purity or obedience or duty?

I turned away when they spoke badly of Aziza. I had seen her shoveling out the nests in the dovecotes until her hands were bleeding. It was hardly suitable work for an angel, any more than it was a calling for a witch.

“Watch her,” the women insisted. “She will never come to the baths. She won’t remove her tunic or scarves when anyone can see her body. There’s a reason for her modesty.”

They were jealous, envious that wherever Aziza walked men gazed at her, that her hair was the color of night, that her smile was sweet, that she would not have thought to speak about them with rancor as they now defamed her. Perhaps they, too, had seen her blush at the mention of my brother’s name. Several of the women clearly wanted my favor only because I was Amram’s sister. The one called Naomi drifted up beside me, so close I could feel the heat of her body in the cool water. Jealousy burned like that. I knew this only too well.

“Be careful around the witch’s daughter,” Naomi warned me. Clearly, she believed I was a woman who wanted a friend. “And never try to catch her. The sheydim have wings.”

Aziza’s wings were black, she went on, like those of a raven, and like a raven, it was said, she sang to announce the arrival of the Angel of Death. She perched on Herod’s wall each time our warriors went out, gazing over the landscape through silver-colored eyes.

“You’re mistaken,” I said humbly, not wishing to press the issue.

I knew that the Angel of Death was never announced. He came in silence and left in sorrow. He arrived when you imagined you were safe, as he had when we were following the path of blue flags through the desert, a cure for Ben Simon in hand.

Walking back to my chamber from the mikvah, my hair dripping wet, I felt cool and superior to those foolish women in the bath. But as I crossed the plaza, I saw a figure in the dark that seemed to resemble an angel, moving the way angels are said to do, in the corners of our sight.

For an instant I feared that Death was indeed near and the women in the bath had been right. I shivered to think his messenger had been let loose upon us. Or perhaps I had forgotten to lock the dovecote and the doves had escaped to conceal themselves in the branches of the olive trees, rustling the leaves. It was too dark to see clearly, so I stopped where I was, blinking back moonlight. I saw the glint of a girl’s shape sifting through the night.

It was then I spied my brother beside a small pool where a hundred years earlier King Herod had kept fish, small, glimmering creatures said to be made of pure gold. When a hawk plucked up one of the king’s treasured fish,