The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [92]
“The world is many things to many creatures,” she told the children as we all surveyed the walled garden, what was surely a forest for a small creature that had been torn from its home. The scorpion had scuttled out of sight. “We are considered giants by some and ants to be stepped upon by others.”
PEOPLE were whispering about Yael, wondering who the father of her child might be and speculating about the night the assassin Bar Elhanan had cast out his own daughter. My grandsons, however, had already grown to adore her. Although I kept my distance, I became accustomed to her as well. If people spoke poorly of her in my presence, I glared at them, and that was the end of it. Though I preferred to keep to myself, there was a way in which I was comforted to have Yael in my home, to hear her breathe easily in her sleep, as my own daughter might have done had she still been with us.
Admittedly, I was grateful for help with the household chores. Even in her state, so big with the child that was to come, Yael was far from lazy. She cooked our meals, crouching over the fire pit to fry our food on a grill which fitted over the ring of stones. She went to the storehouses to collect our daily allotment of beans and grains, and made certain there was firewood, all to repay me for taking her in. But the stories she told were the only repayment we needed. The boys’ eyes brightened when they listened to her at bedtime, mesmerized. In all of the scorpion’s exploits, silence was an asset and a gift, not a flaw but a virtue. The scorpion could do what others could not: he could see in the dark, hear a fly buzzing on the far side of the mountain, sense danger while the rest of the world slept.
“Did your mother tell you these stories?” I asked one evening when Yael and I went to the plaza. We had taken to working at the looms on a regular basis. We kept ourselves removed from the other women, but it was a pleasure to weave and our garments were tattered; we had need of shawls and cloaks. When we busied ourselves in this manner, it was possible to forget the dust that rose in clouds all around us and to distance ourselves from our hunger. If we had nothing else, then at least we had the sheep’s wool and the work of spinning and weaving.
“I had no mother.” Yael kept her eyes downcast.
We reached the looms, where we settled, bringing forth our lengths of carded, dyed wool. Yael was working on a pattern everyone praised. Even those gossips who whispered about her were impressed. There were intricate threads of color forming a line of continuous blocks of multihued squares. I noticed it was the same pattern as the cloth the slave wore.
“Every human has a mother,” I insisted as we worked.
“Are you sure I’m human?” Yael said, her chin tilted, teasing me.
I had never seen a woman with hair so red, or one with so little fear that she was willing to grasp a scorpion between her fingers. Others might whisper she was possessed by a demon and swear she was unlike other daughters and wives. But I had seen her on the night when her father cast her out, when she huddled in a corner like any other beaten woman. And I had taken note of the expression on her face when she stood beside the Man from the North.
She was human.
WHEN THEY thought they were alone, I heard what I should not have pass between them. Yael was fortunate that