The assassin kept his head bowed as he waited for Yael’s decision, a sign of respect he had never offered to his daughter in the past.

“Take him,” Yael said. “But even when I’m not watching, God will be there.”

We waited nervously beside the western wall. Yael’s face was white. She refused to sit on a nearby bench and paced instead. When the baby cried out, she took hold of my arm.

“A cry is a good thing,” I reminded her, echoing Shirah’s words. “It’s silence we need to fear.”

Amram himself looked ashen when he at last carried the baby back to his mother. Yael’s worried expression broke into a grin when she saw her brother’s face, his usual swagger replaced by the weight of his immense responsibility to the newborn.

“You look worse than he does,” she teased.

“I think it was more painful for me,” Amram agreed.

Yael opened the child’s blankets. The cut was perfect, leaving only a slight flush of blood. The baby was already dozing in his mother’s arms, exhausted by his own cries and by the sudden flash of pain he’d known, as well as by the wine that he’d been fed to dull that pain. The old assassin was standing in the threshold. Yael, still unsure in her father’s presence, at last nodded her gratitude, but Yosef bar Elhanan had already disappeared, as if he had never been present. I gazed into the plaza. There wasn’t even a shadow to be seen.

“Did he speak of the child?” Yael asked her brother, curious despite herself.

“He blessed him,” Amram said. “Let that be enough.”

WE KEPT the wound clean, applying a balm of balsam and honey that would bring about healing more quickly. But there was more to be done to announce this child’s arrival in our world, later, and in secret.

We brought the baby into the field on a night when the moon was waning. Shirah was waiting for us. We three stood where the afterbirth had been buried to commit to a naming ceremony of our own. It was a starry night, but we avoided the light and gathered in the shadows so as not to be spied by the guards and questioned. Shirah had broken an eggshell into halves, onto which she had written the holy name of God as many times as could fit in tiny black letters, the ink drawn from crushed mulberries.

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.

We lit a small fire of green wood. Yael placed the baby in the grass. He whimpered, then dozed. She removed her head scarf and her robe to stand before God as she had been on the day her mother died, the day she was born, in this very same month of Av. Shirah began to chant words of protection under a screen of smoke.

Redeem this child and save him from all afflictions. Allow him to become a man and sing glorious songs of praise to our Lord and king, the mighty God who created us. Amen Amen Selah, may God keep you from all evil and may He allow you to dwell in Jerusalem and in all holiness.

When the hymn was completed, Shirah buried the eggshells beneath the tree. The moonlight was yellow as it swept across the field. Already the afterbirth had disappeared, feeding the earth, giving gratitude to the Almighty. Yael took up her shawl and her tunic. She reached for her child and named him beneath the open sky, as he had been named earlier that morning by the men at the synagogue. She called him Arieh, the word for lion, even though he slept through our rejoicing as though he were a lamb.

WHEN OUR WARRIORS next went into the desert, it was not to fight but to hunt, trying as best they could to satisfy our hunger. When the Romans returned to the place they had once marked with rocks, our men were forced to retreat, their foray cut short. They had no choice but to outrun the enemy, who had returned to spy on us. For their troubles, our warriors brought back partridges that were more bones than flesh and a stray baby ibex, left behind by the herd. It was Tishri, the time of the growing season, and we should have been rejoicing. Instead a silence swept over the mountain, a sense of foreboding.

In the dovecotes, we all felt Nahara’s absence. Aziza especially pined for her sister. She often went to the field near the Essenes’ camp, where she sat cross-legged in the grass for many hours, but Nahara never came to greet her. When Aziza followed the goats her sister cared for, Nahara was quick to lead them away. Hurt by her sister’s refusals, Aziza began to fashion arrows to fill her time and keep her hands busy. We had all been asked to help with the weaponry, and many women gathered in the evenings to shape stones for slingshots. All the same, Aziza hid her work from Shirah.

“She wouldn’t think it proper for me,” she confided.

As it turned out, Aziza had a light touch. The arrowheads she crafted were thin, beautifully made. Each was bound to a wooden shaft with linen twine. Shirah’s elder daughter was surprisingly well suited to such work, for metal was to her what cloth and thread were in the hands of other women. I saw in her what I had spied in the Baker each morning of his life, the love of fashioning something out of ingredients that would be nothing without a human touch, be it salt or wheat or iron that was transformed.