An idea began to form inside me.
“Will you deny us?” the leader said. He had a smile on his treacherous face, as though asking a favor from a neighbor. “Surely you can cook.”
I was no longer a woman, but I was still a baker’s wife. I thought of what my husband had said to me in my dream. At last I understand his meaning. I told the beasts I could do more than simply cook a meal. I could bake bread, enough for them to carry into the desert to make certain their hunger would be satisfied for many days to come. I would feed them in the way they deserved to be fed.
“You had better not be lying,” the one who wanted to kill me remarked.
I took out the griddle and my husband’s wooden spoons. I tied his white apron around my waist.
“What do I look like?” I said to them. “This is my life’s calling.”
I must have looked like a beaten-down old woman, but one who knew the mysteries of bread, for they urged me to continue with their meal. They dozed in the sun. The scorched scent of death didn’t bother them, as it never bothered the hyenas, who stalked their prey from the hills, or the jackals, who lived in ruins, feeding off the bones of the slain. While the beasts were subdued, their drowsy eyes closed, I baked beetles into the loaves and filled them with curses. I found the coriander dashed onto the ground as they had pawed through our belongings and took some for seasoning so they would not suspect that what they ate was anything more than bread. At last I spied the vial of the ingredient the angel in my kitchen had bid me to take. Not a grain had spilled. I mixed it with the water and the last of the flour, added a portion of yeast from the cool earthenware jar, then set the mixture under a swath of fabric to help the dough rise in the dark.
Before the loaves were ready, the beasts awoke. They had more damage to do in the world. They were running from service to their Emperor, anxious to flee, but I was slow, tending to my portion of vengeance and despair.
“We can’t wait,” they told me. “Hurry,” they shouted.
I had no choice but to cook the bread directly over the fire before it was finished rising. I expected it to be thick and flat, like crackers, the way griddle bread is, or be dusted black, as ash bread becomes, but it rose into perfect loaves. I knew then that the angel that had been beside me in my kitchen was beside me still, helping to form the dough.
The dark pulse of grief was in my throat. I was thankful I wasn’t asked to speak, only to serve. I could hear the ravens above us. I thought of the feathers on the road and of the many signs the angel had given me and how I had failed to pay attention. That would never happen again. I cut the loaves with the bloody knife, burning my fingers as I then tore the bread into pieces, and I served it to the beasts who looked like men. They were wearing the insignia of the legion, though they were traitors to their own kind, and were therefore still decorated with the sign of the wild boar. I thought how fitting that pigs should eat this bread. I smiled as though I were a woman who hadn’t witnessed all I had seen on this day, a mother whose daughter’s body hadn’t been kicked into a ravine where the jasmine grew.
I was the other thing now, the thing I’d become.
They wolfed down what I had baked, eating more bread than any men I’d seen before. Their violence and the days of stalking others had caused them great hunger. I served them again and again, as if they were my masters. In their eyes I appeared to be a woman and their servant, nothing more. Then, stomachs full, they went to fill their flasks as well as two large barrels from the pool so that they might take enough water for their journey. They stood so near the waterfall I grew dizzy, fearing they might spy my hidden grandsons and murder them for sport should the children dare to call out. I did not know that the angel had permitted me one last favor. He had taken the boys’ voices so they couldn’t give themselves away. When they opened their mouths to scream and sob, not a sound came out.
By then the beasts were crouched by the pool, their faces in the water like dogs, suddenly possessed by an unquenchable thirst. I breathed in my grim success, knowing this was a sign that the poison had claimed them. They could not stop their desire for water even though they clutched at their bellies, which were overly full, nearly ready to burst. I watched cold-eyed as they drank themselves to death. That was what happened to the rats in my husband’s bakery. We often found them drowned in a bucket after they took the bait, dying from the terrible thirst the hemlock brought on.
One of the men came to me on all fours, begging for mercy. He choked out that he had a wife and children waiting for him. He claimed to be a good man in the life he’d led before, but his words, like all things in the desert, were carried away by the rising wind. In truth, I was someone who no longer listened to such entreaties. I had no pity inside me, only my daughter’s last breath.