Before we left, I let her free. I tied a string of red around her throat and led her to the highest cliff. “Go on,” I said as I cut the strand that bound her. She was so accustomed to following me, she didn’t flee back into the wilderness. My pet merely stood there, looking at me. I smacked her rump to get her moving. I thought of Ben Simon’s dark eyes, his olive skin, the curl of a smile whenever he spied the goat trailing behind me so meekly. “Stay away from me,” I insisted, waving her on.
I knew that although I was shouting at the goat, I was speaking to Sia’s ghost.
AT THE START of our journey, the cliffs were so high the men had to tie ropes around my waist, and around my father’s waist as well, then help pull us up the sheer sheets of limestone. Because of the season there were herbs and wild asparagus sprouting in the nechalim between the cliffs. The air was scented with mint and tangy scallions. Every bit of green was a delight to see. There were the yellow blooms of mustard as well, like fallen stars upon the ground. The sycamore fruit had turned bright orange, and wasps were drawn to its ripening odor. We relished the sound of such abundant life, but soon enough we went on, higher, to where the air was pale, shimmering. We tramped across fields of rocks so sharp even the ibex could not run here. Our feet were bleeding by the second day.
At twilight, no matter where we were, I went to sit quietly by myself. In this way I would procure our evening meal. Each night I would watch for birds. Once I discovered the delicate lattice of twigs where they nested, I sat nearby in silence. They came to me, thinking I was cast of stone, seeing me as a part of the desert and nothing more. I covered their eyes when I broke their necks. I should have let their breath rise all at once and given them a clean death with a single knife stroke. I always carried Ben Simon’s knife in my tunic, kept close to my skin, but I didn’t use it unless I turned it on myself to mark my leg. I held the birds close and listened to their hearts beating, and then I did what the desert had taught me.
We roasted the birds over a fire the warriors had made. They applauded me as they ate the food I cooked. They said I had a talent. I was a huntress, they joked. My father glared when they sang my praises. “It was nothing,” I insisted. “The birds came to me.”
The warriors seemed like boys when they teased me about my hunting skills; all the same, I tried to make myself invisible, as I had been in Jerusalem. Boys became men at night, when their pulses beat and the forbidden seemed possible. Though I had no gray cloak, I knew how to vanish. I could make myself disappear and seem like nothing as I hunched over cleaning the cooking pot with sand, my eyes elusive. But in the firelight my scarf slipped from my head, and my brother’s friends saw that my hair was red. They could tell I wasn’t a girl anymore. They looked away, uneasy, shamed by their own thoughts. They should not even have been sitting at the fire with a woman who was not their mother or their sister or their wife, let alone taken food from my hands. I was considered a niddah, impure and unclean, for there was no mikvah, not even a silty pool of water. But we were in the desert, and they had little choice. They ate the birds I killed, they helped me up the cliffs, they led me toward my brother. As they did so, they recounted stories of the fortress they had commandeered, tales I found preposterous.
The fortress was impenetrable, they said, the surrounding land so fierce no attack upon them would prove successful. The retreat had once been a palace built by King Herod, a place of unearthly beauty concealed by clouds. I knew of that king, whose cruelty was so legendary it was said he had once slit open a hedgehog, then turned the poor beast inside out to place upon an enemy’s face so that he might blind his foe. He had betrayed those around him and been responsible for the murder of his wife, Mariamne, whom he accused of trading in philtrons and pharmaka—medicines and love potions and spells. She was so beautiful the Roman general Marcus Antonius became maddened at the sight of her and was desperate to have her. Because of this Herod sentenced her to death. Soon after, his son was accused of having a poison concocted from the venom of asps, prepared by a woman from Edom who was a practitioner of keshaphim. The son’s execution followed his mother’s.
Every betrayer knows his fate is to have the misery he once doled out to others returned to him in kind, yet Herod had dreams of outrunning the page on which his fate was written. He built his stronghold on the western slope of the mountain called Masada, completed a hundred years before our time. The Queen of Egypt wanted Judea for herself, pleading with Anthony and with Rome to grant her this desert as a gift, for she yearned for the treasures it possessed: the route to the sea, the fields of salt, the balsam forests that lay beyond in Moab, troves of myrrh and frankincense, riches beyond measure.