The Book of Heaven: A Novel (29 page)

In any case, Jarre was impervious to her speech. All women's speech was a kind of instinctual lyric, as unrelated to reason as birdsong. If his wife cawed, her speech was simply a rougher version, an enhancement of the sweeter music of his daughters. Their son, already a junior minister, and still unmarried, lived in an adjacent seaside villa, when he was not abroad on mission.

They had twin daughters still at home, whose names were Dolphin and Rain. Like all Peninsulan girl children, they were given names drawn from the natural world, fruits, flowers, elements of landscape, as living prayers for grace and fertility, prophesies of their future embedded in their names.

And like all Peninsulan girl children, they were trained in the domestic arts, in dancing, music, and poetry—all that would make them both serviceable and delightful to men. The girls were approaching the momentous age of fifteen, the age at which a girl's future could first be decided. The Peninsulans adhered to a set of strict and highly ritualized customs in households with daughters.

They lived in a country with rich but restricted land and resources. Most of its revenues necessarily came from trade. However, there was precious little property to go around, and if death had not compelled periodic redistributions of properties, the country would surely have known great tensions, perhaps even civil wars. The cannier governors worked to conceal from the people that they lived on a deck of cards. The same cards were shuffled again and again—great change could come only from outside the Peninsula.

This economic situation made marriage portions a substantial share of a family's holdings. Therefore, what had originated as custom had become law: only one daughter of an oligarchy household, to be chosen by her father, could marry, to a husband also chosen by her father. One bloom would be plucked from the bouquet and laid in a husband's hand. This would be the daughter who, in her father's estimation, would secure the most advantageous marriage for the family.

Her sisters, if there were any, would be marked for a different destiny. These would be sent to the Houses of the Immortals, so-called because their occupants were removed from time. There they became perpetual brides.

The perpetual brides became, in effect, the property of the state, no longer members of their families. They were sent to a network of houses chosen for them, administered by respectable, often widowed, matrons. There, they entertained the men, local or foreign, who wished to purchase their services.

In a country where there was a constant flow of trade, and therefore of short-term visitors, it made eminent sense to secure the revenues of Houses of the Immortals for the state treasury. With this income, many of the finest public buildings of the Peninsula were built, many hungry families fed, and children educated. In addition, the brides polished the intricate silver of their former families, delivered to them weekly, and laundered their fine linens and laces. Through them, the state was cleansed.

The children of the perpetual brides, too, were of service to the state, often reared to take up a role among the Immortals, as only in this way could boys be furnished for the Houses. Or they were traded for goods, sent to other countries to serve the many uses to which children can be put.

Some of the Peninsulan mothers suffered for their daughters under the state system, but it had been so long in place that the suffering was anticipated, prepared for, accepted as inevitable. And the mothers lived in a strange emotional suspension; they could neither remember truly, nor truly forget, that they were wives and mothers at the expense of their lost sisters.

Every now and then, girls disappeared, rumored to have taken flight on a ship, or crossed the border into the old country, but most of the women were terrified of the world outside their sheltered lives, where, it was hinted, all women were held to be Immortals.

Many of the Peninsulan households were racked with tension and intrigue throughout their daughters' teenage years. Sometimes, a father made the decision early, so the other girls were spared the suspense over their futures, despite the bitterness that entered the household. But the bitterness was given by God, and must be blessed.

Often, though, there were secret family alliances, rumors spread, exhibitions of love for fathers that were as violent as duels, occasionally murders. This was the inevitable result of the double natures of females, the lovers of snakes.

None of this, though, was true in the domain of General Jarre, who was as famously impartial and impervious to influence in his household as he was on the field of battle. He had showed no hint of any preference. In fact, he often sat listening to music, the twins at his feet, his right hand smoothing the bright hair of one, his left hand of the other. It was a living sculpture of lordly tenderness.

Dolphin and Rain remained inseparable and loving sisters, each equally subject to the inescapable will of God and to the men who execute God's will, who for their own reasons, sometimes bring the wicked ones ashore and refuse the prayers of the drowning good.

No one can fathom an inexplicably happy fate. No one has ever understood what makes God hate one and love another. In General Jarre's case, as perhaps with God, it was the most subtle, unconscious, hairline infraction of his will that was decisive. The choice was made without deliberation, as on a stroll in the forest, a step will break a twig in half by chance.

Degrees of beauty were often the decisive factor between sisters, but Dolphin and Rain were equally gifted physically. Each danced like a seagull wheeling on currents of air. They were skilled in cookery and gardening, as befit those born under the sign of the Cauldron, or Savour the Provident, as it is known among polytheists.

Their manners were as disciplined as fired porcelain, and held as they were tested in their first participations in adult rituals. They wore their brocades to their first weddings, and sang with the correct, poignantly sensuous mixture of joy and restraint, their pendants representing the gold-harnessed birds of the Angel Flights rising and falling with their breath.

In mourning, by contrast, the Peninsulan women were supposed to give way to orgiastic sorrow, screaming, sobbing, raising their arms, falling to the floor as if Death himself were making love to them. It was a way of releasing the deceased for whatever awaited him in the afterlife. Mourning eased the weight of the icy dome of death, fragmenting it; its shards entered the mourning women, making the dead one able to proceed, to Heaven or to Hell. Groups of women were called on to provide this service at every funeral.

Dolphin and Rain, at fifteen, were eligible for the first time to join the seasoned women mourners. They were both apprehensive about performing the songs and dances of death in public for the first time, and awed by their responsibility to clear the path to the afterlife for someone who might otherwise be lost in death.

“What if we are the avenue to Hell? If we are the bridge to damnation?” Rain anguished when they were called to their first funeral. Dolphin lowered her eyes, and imperceptibly shook her head. The fear of Hell was ever present to the Peninsulans, most especially for women, who had ruined creation. The consciousness of their crime was a knife in the girls' hearts, each day. The idea that they could inadvertently be conduits for torment after death as well as in life was terrible for them.

Both acquitted themselves reasonably well at the grave. Dolphin tore her dress with admirable violence, though she was timid in striking her breast; Rain, while she sang a solo lament piercingly, remained subdued in her demeanor, dry-eyed and composed. Both girls were corrected, though leniently, and given exercises in mourning to rehearse at home.

Three months after their debut, they were summoned to an important funeral. The great chancellor Nunn, architect of Peninsulan education, and therefore of the continuity of the state, descendant of the first colonists, had died, rich in years. The Peninsulans did not conduct state funerals; it was for God to bestow honors. Nevertheless, the funeral would be attended by distinguished company, including General Jarre.

Women, save the ritual mourners, whose wild grief expressed the feelings not permitted to men, did not attend funerals. Even so, they often knew fragments of the funeral songs the ritual mourner societies so carefully rehearsed. Once a man's public stature was assured, the anecdotes of his life were sifted over the years by the ritual mourners, and his funeral opera composed even as he lived the prime of his life.

Once Nunn's family and friends had been seated, the songs and dances of death began. A cluster of women began a slow, weaving dance around the catafalque, as if they formed a collective womb, enfolding the dead man's body. One woman shuddered with a wail like wind on a rainy night, and the others took up her lament.

The poignant solos began, singing the stories of Nunn's life; Rain, who had an eloquent voice, sang a portrait of Nunn breaking his famous Smaraldian to the saddle, a virtuoso aria in which she sang both rider and mare. Then came the great choruses, an outpouring of lament by all in Nunn's life that would mourn him. From his bed to his wineglass to his oar, all that would be bereft of Nunn cried out for him through the women's voices.

It was at this point that the mourning women, almost in a state of hypnosis, began to rend their garments, and shudder with sobs, shattering the music. They began to fall, writhing as they lay on the ground.

Dolphin fell so forcefully that she cut herself; a ribbon of blood appeared on her cheek. Rain, though, was inspired to continue her clear pure lament, and neither sobbed nor dropped to the earth. She raised her arms as if reaching to God, and sent her notes upward like captive birds to freedom. When she finished, she stood absolutely still, her arms at her side. It was a spontaneous and scandalous departure from tradition.

As the notables left the graveside, the harbormaster, feared and respected for his power over both trade and security, greeted General Jarre. They exchanged some remembrances of Nunn privately, before other mourners approached to share in the conversation. The harbormaster turned away, but gave Jarre a keen look. “Our sorrow today did not reach perfection. I do not leave him in peace.”

Jarre felt an unfamiliar cramp, a pang; he, whose carriage was always martial, twisted sharply to free himself from it, his first sensation of shame. His unnatural twitch infuriated him further; he was insulted by the imposition of a feeling he did not command. He forbade it.

Annan, closer to him than any being in the world, put his hand lightly on Jarre's shoulder. “She is inexperienced. Yes, her tears should have flowed, she should have been prostrate, but with time she will master this art.” Jarre looked at him with the same keen look as the harbormaster's, as if he were passing the identical gaze in relay. “Her tears will flow. She will be prostrate. She will master this art.” He spoke as if he had closed the three doors Annan had left ajar.

When the girls had bathed and left their torn mourning costumes for the poor, they were called to the great salon that opened onto the marble seaside balcony from which they watched the Angel Flights. It was warm enough for the tall windows and doors to be open to the fresh sea breezes. Jarre and their mother were waiting for them, seated side by side. I stood behind his chair, as did the attendant on the lady.

Dolphin and Rain kissed their mother's hand, and genuflected before their father. They rose to their feet again; neither girl nor boy in the Peninsula was seated in the paternal presence without invitation. They continued to stand.

Jarre was still in his chair. He made no gesture. He spoke. His stillness gave his voice a disembodied power. “Dolphin,” he said, “you have begun to master the craftsmanship of grief. You were admired. You may be seated.”

“Rain.” For a full minute, he was silent, denying her the privilege of his speech. “You were not admired. Why did you stand and sing instead of weeping with your face in the earth?”

“I don't know,” she said.

“Did you think your gift of song was more important than doing the chancellor honor?”

“I don't know,” she said, though her left leg began to shake convulsively. There were no answers to these questions. She peered through her father's words as if through the bars of a cell. If one had been reading these questions in an illustrated manuscript, one would see that the hooked question marks served as locks.

“Do you think you are too fine to mourn like a Peninsulan woman? Are you some sort of queen?” The accusation was a dark and double insult.

Arrogance of any kind was the primal dishonor of women, and was ruthlessly crushed when it appeared. And while the Peninsulans had conquered the old monarchy generations ago, they were still stung in some vital way by the memory of their contemptible stature in the kingdom, still tormented by a jealousy they could never admit of the people who excluded them.

“I don't know, I don't know,” Rain could summon no other phrase. She was like a Smaraldian afraid of lightning, rearing and flailing in the stall, damaging herself against its walls in her desperation to be free of the terrible inexplicable fire.

Jarre himself wanted something from her that was obscure to him. He wanted her to cry in desperation, fall to his feet, as she should have at the funeral. His desire, secret even to him, had transformed her clumsiness into defiance, in his eyes. Perhaps he was not wrong to detect a shade of defiance in her, a pride he had identified before she herself was aware of it.

As with God sometimes, he conceived at that moment an unanswerable hatred for one of his children. Though in the case of man, hatred seems to be born of desire, a way to compel satisfaction from something that persists as unattainable and causes unbearable pain. The cause must be different for the Creator of all, to whom nothing is unattainable, except the goodness of man.

“Then I erase you from the history that you scorn. You are Immortal, Rain. Your father gave your life, and takes it.”