Free The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman Page A

for fear the Romans would find us. The goat had not had water for so many days, she could no longer give milk. She huddled beside me. There were stones in her hooves which I did my best to pluck out. All the same, when I insisted we go on, I thought I heard her crying.
We had come so far that a single small section of my scarf remained. Behind us a map of blue charted our way through the wilderness, back to Ben Simon. Our journey seemed hopeless, for we could see nothing more than the white cliffs before us. My father scowled, vowing he could have predicted as much, for I brought only bad fortune. But then we came to the top of a cliff and spied a sight in the distance that made our hearts lift. It was the Salt Sea, a horizon of vivid azure. The water was changeable; one moment it was blue and then green and then a flat slate color. When clouds approached, the surface turned black, so that the Romans called it Lake Asphaltitis, for it threw up black clusters of tarlike asphalt. But for us, it resembled heaven, so blue we had to blink back tears.
The sea appeared to be so close I imagined I could reach out and touch it, but my father said it was a walk of several more days. He warned that distance was an illusion that had tricked many men, even great sages, into walking to their death. They were certain they were moments from the sea and started off beneath the brutal sun on a course that would bring them directly to Mal’ach ha-Mavet, the Angel of Death who was said to have a thousand eyes, never losing sight of a single one of his victims.
Days slipped away under the burning sun as we remained on the ancient path that led toward the sea. We passed the ruins of a settlement where it was possible to see the moon doubled when it was reflected in the Salt Sea. The settlement had been destroyed by the Romans. It was intended to be paradise built by the Yahad, a group of believers from the Essene sect, Jews who practiced strict codeswith fixed hours of prayer. It was said that our people had been cut into four quarters, each with their own philosophy, and then cut up four more times for good measure. Truly righteous, the Essenes had indeed cut themselves off from all others.
The Yahad’s name for their oasis was Sechacha, our word for cover, for their houses were domed with the broad leaves of the date palm trees. They had come to the desert as true believers, forsaking their comfortable lives in Jerusalem. They had foreseen the fall of the Temple and had fled here to await the End of Days, so that they might spend their last hours in chanting, their scribes at work on rolls of parchment to assure that their truth would not be lost when this world ended. The Essenes forbade idols, as we did, but they were far stricter in their practices and would not even touch a coin with an imprint upon it. They believed no man should be king. Still they would not lift up arms or fight their oppressors. We were in the hands of Adonai, they insisted, therefore arrows and spears were meaningless. There were children of darkness and children of light and the true battle on earth was to remain in the light and praise the one who knows all, Elohim .
We saw the crumbling ruins of their aqueduct, and the dam under a waterfall, which we drank from deeply, though the pool was cluttered with the remnants from the settlement the Romans had destroyed: oil lamps and broken glass vessels, clay inkpots, piles of ostraca —broken pottery shards used for writing upon. There were still tall oaks and laurel trees to offer dappled shade, but anything made by human hands had been crushed. Fallen wooden beams hewn from palm trees and the leaves used for roofs were in brown, crinkled heaps. I wandered through the scriptorium, a library whose shelves and columns littered the ground. Bits of torn scrolls on goatskin or papyrus lay in the dirt, rotting and falling into shreds. I went along the cobblestones to see the ritual baths lined with wide plaster steps. There