I began to wonder if there wasn’t some merit in the field women’s stories about me, if perhaps what set me apart from all others wasn’t the life I’d led before I’d come here but was instead cast from the truth of who my father might be. Though he was not an angel or an incubus but a man who wrote upon parchment, I puzzled over his identity more often as time went on. I thought it odd that the messenger had known precisely where to meet us on the shore of the Salt Sea and that he had bowed his head to my mother, as though she were the wife of an important man. I wondered why, of all the places we might have gone in this world, we had come to this fortress and not another.
My mother would tell me nothing. She refused to divulge where she had sent the doves when she’d stood upon the Iron Mountain. She denied having ever received messages in return, though the words that had been sent to her had burned me and I still carried their scar. All she would say was that she had been a girl who had followed the path the Almighty had set out for her.
“Would I ever be so coarse and full of myself as to ask God why He set me upon one path and not another?”
When she said this, her face was young and innocent. For once she, who was always so fierce, appeared vulnerable. My mother had taught me much. Because of her I could read more languages than most learned men, yet I knew little about her or about myself. Ever since Moab, our secrets had resembled a spider’s web, one strand holding up the next. The words we did not say became the only things that mattered. We moved like spiders, circling one another, suspicious, waiting for whatever was to come next.
“Do I not have a path as well?” I asked, emboldened when she told me she had not questioned the direction in which God had led her.
She gazed at me thoughtfully. “One you must avoid at all costs.” That remark alone was enough to convince me I must find my own way.
AS OUR secrets forced us further apart, I kept to myself. Following my mother’s lead, I confided nothing. I stayed in our chamber when she went to assist women in their labor, or ministered to those afflicted by fevers, taking her pitcher and bowl and a soap made of fat and ashes, insisting that the ill wash their hands to purify themselves. I did not accompany her when she went at night to the synagogue, where she would dig in the dirt to bury amulets in holy places for the protection of those who came to her in need. When my mother asked me to venture beyond the gate with her, to gather rue and marjoram and the yellow apples of the mandrake used for pharmaka, I had little choice but to obey. But even when I tried to honor her wishes, I was of no use to her. My hands weren’t nimble. I tore at the leaves, and the fruit split apart in my hands. I hadn’t the touch for sorcery. I owned none of the skills a woman must possess.
It was little wonder Yael took my place. My mother had chosen her to join us the moment she walked through the gate, as Yael followed behind her father, her head bowed, her red hair tangled with salt. Perhaps my mother was moved by her plight, which she divined as soon as she saw the sway in Yael’s walk and the manner in which she covered her middle so carefully with her shawl. My mother had also been alone while she carried her first child into this world.
When Yael spoke her brother’s name in the dovecote, I’d felt my blood race, fearful that my hidden life could be read in my expression. Here was Yaya, the sister Amram had spoken of so often, his childhood protector and friend. I should have pulled her aside to beg for stories of his boyhood, but I remained distant. I had no reason to put any faith in her or to trust her with my secrets. When she spied me with Amram at our meeting place, I waited for her betrayal, expecting her to reveal the truth to my mother, with whom she shared so many confidences. But she never spoke of it. Instead she took me aside to whisper that her brother was a fine man. Who I loved was not her concern.
Still, despite her kindness to me, she had become my rival. On the brutal day when my mother was taken to the plaza in chains, accused of witchery, Yael was the one who went to her, not I. She rushed to my mother, wearing one of the gold amulets from within our family, a gift that had always been presented by a mother to her daughter. I could see them through the sheets of rain, their arms entwined. I turned away and said nothing, swallowing the bitterness of my own jealousy.
I couldn’t help wonder what else my mother had seen on the day I was born, if there had been an omen that had caused her to cast me aside, preferring a stranger to her own daughter.
THROUGHOUT the beautiful and mild month of Adar, Yael came to our chamber in the old palace kitchen in the evenings. She learned the spells my mother had been taught in Alexandria, along with Greek and Hebrew letters. They sat at the table, heads together, voices low so as not to wake Arieh, now nearly eight months old, who napped on the pallet where my sister had once spent her nights. I wasn’t offended when they didn’t think to include me. I had no interest in such matters. Keshaphim was nothing more than women’s work in my eyes, with its recipes and its herbal remedies, no different than cleaning up after the doves, or spinning wool, or keeping the pots simmering on the stove. I had used it to protect Amram once, when he led his first raid from this mountain. But afterward I had felt unclean and had gone to the mikvah to purify myself.