Darkness was falling as I bathed in the pool. Stars would soon be appearing in the sky. When I heard the sound of sobbing, I pleaded with the ghost of my beloved’s wife to leave me be, certain that she was beside me, torn apart by all of her sorrow. Sia was the tender one, always ready to cry.
I was certain these were her tears that I wept, not mine.
BY THE END of Shevat the wildflowers were blooming with vivid color; the willows had filled with strands of tender green leaves. My father and I made do. We did not complain about our circumstances, or discuss the past. But each night I climbed to the cliff where the bones were. I knelt as the light floated away and the day ended. I was praying for something that could never be granted; another life, the one I had already lived and lost.
I was there late one day, watching the light fade into bands of pink and gray, when I spied two men coming across the desert. They were young warriors. I called to my father, and he scrambled up beside me, using a branch from the tamarisk that he’d smoothed into a staff to help him make his way. Together we stood on our perch, watching as the strangers approached, the plumes of dust rising before them like clouds.
“This is my dream,” my father said, his expression joyous. “Those are the clouds that will reveal where we should go. These men will lead us to the tower where Amram is hidden.”
We had been alone in the desert for a long time, our only company the bones beneath the rocks. But the bones spoke to me. They told me that my prayers would not be answered. I would never be forgiven. I would have to pay for my sins. I wanted to escape from the voice that sounded like Sia’s. If I went elsewhere, perhaps it would be rendered mute. I wanted to believe in my father’s dream. I was more cautious than he, yet I, too, felt my brother near to us.
“We cannot yet trust,” I said, and for once my father did not disagree. Dreams came to men for many reasons, both as oracles and as warnings.
I watched the men approach, curious, my shawl wrapped around me. My father prepared in case those who came forth were enemies pretending to be our saviors, ready to fight should they turn against us and prove his dream to be a false prophecy. He took hold of his dagger, then murmured a prayer asking God to be on his side.
The men stopped in the canyon below. They called out to my father, vowing they were Zealot warriors. My father answered their call. He was still holding the dagger concealed in his cloak. Though he was weakened and no longer young, he could throw a knife from a great distance and strike a man dead. I had seen him do as much when a soldier cornered him in an alleyway near our home. He had then walked away without a look back, as though he hadn’t taken a life.
The young warriors shouted that Hol had sent them. They knew the phoenix, the warrior who managed to rise each time another would have fallen. At the mention of the pet name known only to my brother’s closest friends, my father dropped his weapon. Tears brimmed in his eyes, and his weathered face, so aged since we had left Jerusalem, broke into a grin.
“Bring me to him,” he commanded.
I noticed that my father did not say bring us to him. I was nothing, as I always had been. Only when he needed me to guide him, to feed him, to be his only sustenance in the wilderness, did he remember that I, too, was his child.
The men who’d come for us were no older than my brother, young in years yet hardened by what they’d seen and done. I recognized one, Jonathan, from Jerusalem. He’d been a serious prayer student. People thought he would be a rabbi or a scholar, then he’d joined with my brother and picked up the knife. The other was called Uri, which meant light. He was a lumbering, warmhearted young man whose good humor dominated every discussion. I shied away, reluctant to make my presence known, but my brothers’ friends rejoiced in finding me and called me to join them. Amram had told them about me, the sister called Yaya, who had cared for him as a mother would, who had made his meals, sewn his tunics and his mantle, listened to plans so secret he hadn’t dared tell anyone else. The one called Jonathan took out a blue square of silk that the wind had carried to my brother’s path. This was how they’d found me.
WE WOULD take a route that would lead us to the southernmost part of the Salt Sea. I knew that, if I went, I could not look back. I would be abandoning Ben Simon, the only man who had ever known who I was. His bones would not be gathered on the anniversary of his death, as had always been our custom, to be secured in a stone ossuary. But if I stayed, the desert would claim me. I could not falter now, or give in to my impulse to lie down beside my beloved.
We would be going through the harshest part of the wilderness, a place of salt and sorrow, a land even more difficult to traverse than the valley where we’d found the Essenes. There were said to be troops from the Roman garrison scattered throughout, and we would need to take care to avoid their camps, backtracking when necessary. I thought of my poor little goat, whose milk was the only thing I could stand to drink. It is said there is a goat demon in the desert called the Sa’ir, but if anything I had found a goat who was an angel. She had saved our lives when we had nothing; she had been wild and I had kept her captive and she had forgiven me; she had been my only friend when I was alone.