The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [83]
“Why do they prefer her?” I asked Shirah, for she had been among the doves for the longest time. I suppose envy shone in my eyes.
“She speaks their language.”
“Really? Of birds? What language is that?”
Shirah smiled in response. “You of all people should know.”
Then I understood. It was the language of silence.
I HAD GUESSED what Yael was hiding beneath her tunic and scarves, although she would not speak of it, and for good reason, even though we were far from the laws of Jerusalem, where women in her condition were called before a council of wise men and elders, then cast out to fend for themselves. Women who committed adultery and conceived were forced to drink bitter water and dust from the Temple floor, which some believed made the children within them fall away. This was the sotah ceremony, where their innocence or guilt would be proven by God when they were forced to drink His name written upon a piece of parchment and dissolved in a cup of water. People whispered that evil repelled God’s grace. Should the wicked attempt to take His name into their bodies, they would fall to dust.
But perhaps on this mountain, with so much danger before us, there was little time to search out sin and little reason to do so. Did my neighbors not wonder what sins of their own had brought them to this place, why our people must suffer so, why God’s ways were so mysterious, why He had forsaken us on this mountain?
The constant howling of the wind drove some people mad; many among us cursed the fortress and were brought lower than they’d ever imagined. There were women who wept during the windstorms until tears streaked their faces with lines of salt. Did they not ask why they had been forced so far from Jerusalem and everything they had known and loved? In their darkest hours, as they huddled with their children in the dwindling light, their shawls their only protection from the sandstorms, they clearly wondered what we were fighting for.
I never asked that question. I gazed out at the land beyond the serpent’s path and thought of the many forms a beast could take. There were those who revealed themselves at noon, squarely setting their feet upon the earth, and those who sifted inside your dreams. There were those who came from Rome, the beasts I despised more than any others, their claws beginning to show as they crossed the Great Sea, for salt repels demons. When I thought of such wickedness, I could not sleep. To protect myself I chanted the incantation Shirah instructed me to recite when I tossed and turned at night. I ban and make an oath against destroyers and demons and plagues and afflictions and terrors and nightmares.
Still I lay awake, unable to close my eyes.
There were occasions when I spied my son-in-law climbing the path, set apart from the other warriors as they returned from missions meant to protect us or when they attempted to locate the provisions we needed from the world outside our walls. I did not wish to think about the mournful deeds they had committed, the blood that had been drawn, the lives taken.
The Man from the Valley who would not walk beside his brethren no longer had a resemblance to the scholar he’d once been. He was never without the ax for which he’d traded his most precious chalice, carrying the weapon so near his torso that it seemed a part of him, threaded to him with invisible red silk. His hair that had turned white overnight was so long that people said God was able to grab him away from danger. This was the reason he still lived, though he placed himself in peril time and time again. He was known to be furious in a skirmish, willing to forge into battle with little thought to his own life. I understood why he did this, for I knew what he was fighting for; in that he was no different than I. Anguish such as ours is fed on bones and blood. We had no more choice than the wind does as to where we must go and where we belonged. I was grateful for this quiet time on the mountain. Here, at last, my grandsons