The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [56]
Shirah gathered the dove droppings and set a fire using them as peat. She fanned the flame until there was a plume of smoke. The scent that emanated was bitter but also familiar. It seemed the doves had followed us to this place; we could hear their wings beating, fast as our breathing, fast as the birth must become if mother and child were to survive. After the laboring woman drank the bitter rue, retching as she did, Shirah had us take her by either arm. We forced her to stand above the fire. The air burned with heat, and we were all slick with sweat. I grabbed off my shawl, feeling I might suffocate. I could hardly see for all the ash and sparks. The world was made of salt and smoke, and there was no choice but to go forward.
We had entered into the deepest of places, the seat of the great goddess Ashtoreth, written of by the prophets, a goddess who was with us still, even though the wise men in the Temple had done all they could to destroy her. Neither could they defeat what many claimed was the female aspect of God, the Shechinah, all that was divine and radiant, the bride to Adonai’s groom. The Shechinah healed the ill, sat among the poor, embraced the wicked and the good alike.
The woman who was laboring sobbed in our grasp. As for me, I had stopped thinking and merely did as I was told. I didn’t know how I had been drawn here, woken from my dreams, dragged from my chamber into this dim night. I of all people, a harbinger of the Angel of Death, known to Mal’ach ha-Mavet before I was known to humankind, a murderer of my own mother, now stood guard for the Queen of Heaven.
The housemaid pleaded with us not to keep her positioned over the fire. She said she was burning alive, that the sparks were entering her, entwining with her blood and bones. I asked to be allowed to move her, but Shirah insisted the smoke was needed to open her womb. “Kindness can be a curse,” she said. She crouched beside the servant woman and began to chant.
Beshem eh’yeh asher eh’yeh tsey tsey tsey.
Shirah’s voice was hoarse and hot, the intonations rising. She spoke the words repeatedly, until the chant wound around us and we could hear only its tone and its desperation.
Va’yees’sa va’ya’vo va’yett. In the name of I am what I am, the name of God, get out. You have journeyed and now you have arrived. Amen Amen Selah.
The woman had been wailing, but now the sound worsened. Jackals called to each other in this way, crying in the night. The poor servant woman was so far inside herself, at the deepest core, it seemed impossible she would ever surface again. I thought of my mother in her last moments, before the silence fell, how her voice might have called out against the brutality of her fate, how my father might have wept at the door as he cursed me.
The laboring woman spoke to those who were not there, praying to our God, Adonai, and to Abraxas, a god of the Egyptians, and to Ashtoreth. She made secret bargains, promising all she would be willing to sacrifice if only her torment would end, her life, her soul, her newborn child.
“Take them!” she cried out. “Take me as well!”
I was frightened that she would call the warriors to us with her wailing, or summon demons we could not repel, but Shirah said no, it was silence we needed to fear. Silence at a birth meant that the demons had won and that Lilith, the night creature from Babalonyia with long black hair and black wings who preys on other women, seducing their men and stealing their children, had prevailed.
Shirah wrote down the name of Obizoth, the demoness that strangles newborns, then burned the papyrus upon which she’d written that vile name. The smoke was scarlet,