The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [94]
“You’re wrong about him,” I heard the Man from the North say. “He’s at your beck and call.”
“A hawk is always a hawk,” I informed them both, unable to hold my tongue any longer.
After I made my remark they were quick to fall silent and return to the tasks at hand. How could they argue with me? They knew my statement to be true. You cannot change a hawk’s nature any more than you can teach a dove to kill. And yet later in the day, when I saw the slave and Yael bringing baskets of dung into the fields to feed the ravished, heat-struck earth, the hawk glided above them as though he were a dog, tame and subservient. I thought perhaps I had been wrong, too quick to judge the essence of a being by its appearance, still not fully understanding that, in the world God has given us, all things must change.
FOR NOW the one constant was that the days fell heavily, all with the same hypnotic, unrelenting heat. Heat waves rose up in shimmering curtains of light. There were lines of exhausted, baffled women at the storehouses, each waiting for her family’s share of water and food. I felt immobilized inside the month of Av the way I had once lingered inside my dreams as I slowly awoke to the yeasty odor of baking in my old life, on those precious mornings when the countryside was green and the scent of the cypress drifted in the air. I had been caught up in time then, as I was once again, but one tableau was a treasure chest, the other a cage.
We had so little here on the mountain, but at least we were safe. In the world outside ours, the violence against our people had only grown worse. There were rumors that the dead were heaped upon the main roads throughout Judea, that the Jordan River was so rife with bodies you could walk across on dead men’s backs as if they were stepping-stones. News came to us that another Essene settlement had been decimated. I’d heard of their people, those who called themselves the Children of Light and who had occupied the settlement known as Sechacha. One day a small, impoverished troupe appeared in our valley. We saw dust rising as they approached. Their white linen garments glinted brightly as they crossed over the rocks. Our warriors went down the serpent’s path to meet these visitors and bring them to us. It was well known that the Essenes abhorred warfare, and we were a fortress. Still, like the rest of us, when they had no options and no place else to go, they came to this mountain.
There were seven men and three women, along with four children. The men carried their belongings in packs tied onto their backs with thick ropes of woven flax. The women followed behind, simply dressed, barefoot, unadorned. It was the women who toted the goatskin containers of water and cheese and led a flock of scrawny goats tied together with leather strands forming a ribqâh, so that from a distance the animals appeared to be one creature with five heads. There were also two black donkeys laden with tall ceramic vases; inside were the rolled parchment scrolls of the Essenes’ teachings. The men were learned, holy in their aspect, especially one elderly man, who was perhaps the most ancient I had ever seen. They had been traveling ever since the Romans destroyed their settlement, living in caves, leaving behind their writings whenever possible to ensure their beliefs would not be lost should they be the next to be slaughtered.
When the visitors entered through the Snake Gate, a crowd had already gathered. The survivors appeared dazed, alarmed by the fortified conditions of Masada. They gazed with grim faces at the parapets our warriors had readied, the