The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [61]
I asked if it was true that the Romans set men to fight against beasts. A man was no different from an animal in the Romans’ eyes, the slave told me, perhaps better sport because a man often called for his mother or his beloved in his last moments in the world, whereas an animal knew when to surrender.
I thought of Ben Simon and the mark on his face, and of the creature who had found him too bitter to eat. I asked the slave if he had seen men battle lions. He nodded, saying that gladiators feared lions more than any other creatures, even more so than the crocodiles who swam in huge tanks rolled into the center of the arena on logs, pulled by heavy ropes and chains by over a hundred men. Those water beasts could take a man in their mouths, dragging a victim into the deep to drown him, but it was possible to fight off a crocodile, to ram a knife into its eye and force a retreat. Some gladiators survived. But once a lion attacked, it would not back away. It would fight to the end, until there was a surrender and nothing was left but bones.
“Why do you ask about these beasts?” he wondered after I’d questioned him so thoroughly.
I shrugged, feigning no particular interest. “I dream about them sometimes.”
“Keep them in your dreams,” the Man from the North advised me, but I could tell from his gaze. He knew there was something more.
I TOOK TO listening to all of the slave’s stories. Some were so farfetched I barely believed him. He spoke about a creature called a stag, huge compared to the ibex that could be found in Judea. He could track one through the snow easily enough, even in a storm, for these deer rubbed their horns against trees and left their marks in this manner. In his world, the foxes turned white as snow was falling, then, when winter faded, changed back to red before your eyes. He vowed that the color of my hair was shared by all the most beautiful women in his land and, he added slyly, in mine. I laughed at some of what he told me, disbelieving that rivers could run silver, that the monsters in the ocean were so filled with water they spat into the air, that there were packs of wolves a hundred strong, calling to each other in the night with pure, cold voices.
Revka often watched us in the fields. Sometimes when we walked back to the dovecote with our empty baskets, she would shake her head, scowling. Despite her ill will, I wasn’t about to stop listening to the Man from the North. When he spoke, I didn’t think about the desert, or the past that beckoned to me, or the sins I had committed, only the land I would never know, the drifts of snow, the bands of men with black tattoos who lashed flat branches to their feet so they might walk through the snow as bears do, with ease.
The slave trusted me enough to recount the details of his capture, though he was taut with rage as he recalled that event. When the Roman garrison was sacked by our warriors, he and his kinsman had fallen to their knees, vowing that they had no allegiance to the Emperor and would never lift a hand against us. He couldn’t raise his eyes when he spoke of this humiliation. Our people had allowed them to live because they made an oath against Rome and because they had been stolen from their homeland. Everyone else was slain, though some of the soldiers were little more than boys who pleaded for their lives and cowered at the sight of a knife.
That night the blood of the Romans who had been killed welled up into the clouds and turned into a rain. The blood rain followed our warriors into their tents, streaming down in rivers. Our men panicked and were about to run away, but Ben Ya’ir instructed them not to flee. He could do that to his warriors, the slave had seen it firsthand, make them yield beneath his gaze. He boldly informed them that a rain of blood was not a curse but a promise. It was the future they had to face, as all men must face death eventually. They could do so