The Book of Heaven: A Novel (35 page)

She cut Madam's throat with her eyes. It would be a fitting death, a silence exchanged for all the screams she had muffled, the rapes that she had assisted as a poisonous midwife. God permits.

She opened a drawer, searching for a pair of scissors, or a knife. She found a fine knife with an image of the Angel Flights damascened on its blade, and gripped it tightly in her hand. Then, to her shock, she heard a child's voice in the room, and quickly, protectively, slid the weapon back inside the drawer, out of sight, but ready. She could never bear to see a terrified child in the presence of violence.

The little girl said, in her crystalline child's soprano, “I have some strawberries. Would you like me to give you some?”

Rain peered through the shadows. The child must be too shy to come into the room without permission. She needed to accept the gift, and with gentle authority send the girl home to her mother, far from what was about to happen here.

She went to the door, already somehow less tall, assuming the instinctive stoop of an adult about to miniaturize herself for a child. The hall was empty.

“You can feel how warm they are from the hot sun. I picked them for you,” the child chattered.

The little girl had slipped inside. Rain turned again, peering into the corners of the room. But there was only one other person inside. The little girl speaking was speaking from Madam. Her eyes were open, but clear and soft, as Rain had never seen them. Madam had become another self, somewhere else. She said with melting, uncalculated sweetness, “I want you to have some of the strawberries too, Mama.”

Later, Madam sang nursery rhymes, and begged for Rain to hold her hand. She spoke confidingly of her life at home—her passion for the family vanilla cake, how she hid her fear of her father.

Until dawn broke, Rain was both the killer with her hand on the knife of justice, and the resurrected mother of the lost, adorable, chattering girl child who had been Madam, and was alive again in her. She struggled to kill, and she struggled not to kill. If she stabbed Madam to the heart with the knife she held, she would also be killing a lost child.

Rain left when the next watcher bride arrived, and walked through the cloisters toward the Pagan Chapel, as the clients breakfasted. She was exhausted, but alive in a new way, with a strange new sense of power, the power of refusing, as she had never been able to refuse a client.

She had passed the night in the company of death, for murderous hatred brings a distinct physical sensation of being killed; of burning, of drowning, of being suffocated. Her lust to kill Madam had not left her—but she could not harm the child wandering lost inside the monster.

She had not killed Madam, though she had been given the perfect opportunity, even though Madam was entirely guilty of all she had done. Rain tried to understand why she had not done it.

She had not been afraid. She had wanted to give death. “But,” she thought, “murder is, in the end, impossible. It can never achieve our aim. Human actions can never be so precise. The murder, it seems, is never of just one person.

“I could not kill one without risking taking the lives of others I don't know, from her past, from now, or from years to come. So then, we always kill the innocent with the guilty. She was a child tonight, intact in her childhood. Even our evil cannot ever eradicate all traces of our innocence. And there, too, I would have killed the innocent with the guilty. We cannot separate them.

“She may have a daughter, somewhere, missing her, imagining her, without knowing what she is. The nature of murder, like love, is that it spills over unpredictably into other lives; and if the death ricochets through so many bodies, the murderer herself might eventually die of it. Every murder is a genocide.”

She spoke of it during the evening hours purchased by Admiral Annan, who had fully expected her to kill Madam, and had felt helpless to stop it. He was both relieved and made curious by her description.

“Then did you spare her out of love?” he asked.

“No, out of hate. And out of futility. I understood that if I murdered her, she would not live, but she would not die either. I would have rendered her immortal. God is an ironist. For those we kill enter us, and inhabit us like children we can never deliver. They never leave us; the murdered take our lives.

“I spent the hours with her in temptation. My hands ached with killing strength. I was torn through and in and beneath hatred as if it were a landscape surrounding me. It was like being struck by lightning. I saw strange things, rocks convulsing, dark clouds that were contorted human faces. They spat rain contemptuously. They shouted obscenities. The clouds screamed for me to kill them, and disappeared when I raised the knife. They mocked my powerlessness.

“This is what else I saw. I saw last night that we cannot escape hating, or being hated. These bodies expose us to it, as they expose us to love. But hatred can either strike us dead, like lightning, or illuminate us. It shocks us into seeing what is hidden in the landscape.

“Hatred can be confined to reason, but kept from the heart. You look at me skeptically, but we must hate with wisdom.

“We must not pretend we don't hate.

“I will hate Madam wisely, for what she has done. My hatred is a record of it all. There exists a true hatred as well as a true love. I am not sure, but I think without knowledge of hatred, our love will be an illusion?”

She studied a map he handed her of routes that led through the mountains down into the capital. She looked up at him and said, “It is clear how to mourn someone beloved: the questions that are not answered are how to mourn someone you did not love: how to mourn someone you hated.”

The four conspirators debated intensely, while Madam was bedridden, how to initiate the rescue. Enarch had many contacts in the Old Monarchy, where the beliefs and practices of the Peninsulan colony were largely condemned. Raiding parties might save the most children and even women, and at the same time, divert suspicion from the Peninsulan collaborators. But were they risking igniting a war that would cost the lives of many more than sixty children? They discussed whether a fire, judiciously set, would be too hard to control.

Still, enough chaos and general evacuation could cover the rapid, coordinated disappearance of the children down the mountain roads, and onto Annan's ship, waiting in the port. They would identify the ship by its carved wooden figurehead of a wingless bird. Every alternative taught them a truth about the nature of risk: that every rescue plan carried with it the possibility of a failure that might cause more harm than the original situation.

“We can only hope to deliver the children from our own house,” Rain concluded, and told them both separately. “The more ambitious plan is likely to risk more and save fewer. We have to hope that we inspire the others, that they will find their own ways.”

When both Grail and Enarch protested, separately, Rain gave them both the same reply, in her characteristic manner of speaking, which advanced through questions that washed over one another like waves. “I have learned that I am no Messiah. I was born under the sign of Savour the Provident, who planted seeds so each of us might feed the other.

“We stand to fail all if we try to save many; it is dangerous enough for us all to try to do what is to hand. And we need to consider what will happen to these children once they are rescued, when their lives are beyond ours. That is something we should think about in our salvation fever. What good can come of salvation followed by abandonment? Salvation itself can be a form of sin, a drunken ecstasy, a lust for reverence. We are always admonished to fear God, but we would be wiser to fear ourselves.”

Now, when Enarch spent nights in conference with her, he left with a jewel from her now substantial collection—each jewel would be an income for a child, whose mother had consented to the rescue. Jewel by jewel, they purchased a life to be returned to a child.

Rain acquired even more valuable gems through the spectacular success of her new ballet, in which she played two roles, one of athletic virtuosity, the other of flowing contemplative grace. No dancer ever again performed both roles, though naturally, the spectacular role of the first half was the more coveted.

The curtain opened, it seemed, on nothing. Then the wavering light that appeared unevenly onstage revealed the elements of a landscape, a miniature world of small hills, no higher than a child's knee, rivers on which boats glided, overlooked by houses and gardens studded with fruit trees and flowers. Finally, the light dawned slowly in the foreground and revealed, on her back, her arms and legs rippling like silver thread, Rain, a spider larger than the world.

She launched herself into the air with a backflip, and danced over the world, supporting herself in arabesque on the small trees, playing with the shadow she cast on the tiny rivers, balancing on point next to a house smaller than her foot. As she reached the opposite corner of the stage, she began a series of pirouettes, spinning diagonals punctuated by leaps, suggesting the form of the letter “X,” as if she were trying to write an alphabet. When the sequence was finished, she glided backward.

The audience was silent for a moment; then it applauded loudly. She had danced a glittering, silver web over one half of the stage.

With a great leap, she flung herself into the center, and began what some thought the most memorable part of the dance, a pas de deux with her web.

She slid and darted and trembled in the silver orb, sometimes embedded in it, sometimes with limbs arcing independent of the web, while her hands caressed the silk. She used the web as a fresco, and moved inside and outside it, as we secretly wish the figures in paintings could do. But only God could inspire the painted shepherdess on canvas to lift her crook, and walk over the hill.

Rain, in this dance, found the great secret of theater art—the audience must see the performer revealed as only the eye of God can see her, the painting come alive, known intimately as God would know the unfolding of a life.

She revolved in the air, dancing with herself, and came to rest in the center of what she had spun, tenderly laying her cheek against her own web, in an ecstasy of self-love.

Then she tossed a shining filament upward; it drew her up to the ceiling, where she hovered, then floated down, her arms held overhead like a coronet, spinning five precise counts to the right, five to the left, crowning the air itself. She stood still when she descended, and held her position while the lights extinguished her. When they came back up, the audience roared its appreciation. One man stood up and tossed an emerald necklace into the web, where it caught and sparkled like a handful of stars. Others, delighted with the effect, hurled more jewelry into the web, until it shivered, studded with precious stones.

When the music began in the second act, a child emerged from the miniature village, and began a playful dance based on children's skipping games. Rain noiselessly descended from the web, and began to shadow all the child's movements, skipping when she skipped, mimicking her delicate chain of steps from behind her. Rain dangled a shining ribbon over the girl's right shoulder; the fascinated child seized the ribbon; then over her left shoulder, a second ribbon undulated. She took that in her hand, too, and Rain began to move her arms up and down, as if she were a marionette.

Rain amused herself by inventing the steps the child was now forced to dance, unaware that she was being partnered. Then Rain forced her to pirouette with increasingly dizzying speed, until she was tangled in the silver threads, and dragged up by them into Rain's arms, trapped in her embrace, to the music of a lullaby.

Then followed, to the sounds of horns, and traditional huntsman's chorales, one of the robust set pieces for male dancers that were often part of Rain's ballets. There was a comic trio of dogs, played by boys from the children's classes, and a vigorous flight and chase ballet, which subtly contrasted the masculine style of hunting, and the feminine style, as exemplified by the spider. For men hunt by pretending to be the brothers of the prey they seek, and women hunt by impersonating the mothers of their prey.

In a second act finale that equaled the first in daring, one of the hunter's arrows inadvertently passed scathingly close to Rain, casually destroying the foundation of her web. The freed child leapt into the wings, while the spider, with a series of steps that alternated falling and rising, caught a silver rope from the fragments of the web, and rose to the rafters clinging to it, doubled over.

There was some controversy over the third act, as some felt it conventional, and not the equal of the first two. The curtain opened on a new set, easily recognized as the landscape of the first act, with river, hills, gardens, and houses, the country of the miniature world now full scale. There a pair of lovers, Rain as the woman, performed a series of dances in a formal garden, using its statues and benches as partners, as well as each other. The dances were almost a conversation, teasing, intimate, tender. At the end of the act, the woman and man leave the stage, then return, having forgotten her wrap on a bench. The man lifts the garment and delicately drapes her in it. Her shawl is the cobweb, studded with jewels, which trails behind her as they leave the stage, arm in arm.

I listened to the criticisms of the third act, its lack of drama, its poverty of ambition. I did not agree. Admiral Annan passionately defended it. He argued that this act had been nothing less than Rain's introduction of love into the brutal milieu of the surroundings. I had no strong view of that, but I did notice something quietly and unmistakably radical. From the miniature landscape of the first acts to the restored full scale of the last, Rain had altered the proportions of the world.

With the jewels that had been showered on her with this dance, the four conspirators could now purchase the entire island where Enarch had planned to take his dead lover and her child, and settle the rescued innocents there. Annan's daughter Grail would sail with them, along with the five mothers escorting them. Annan would bear the disgrace of her disobedience with convincing indignation. Rain must remain in the house, so that only two of the conspirators would be exposed. He would then transfer his protection to Rain. At least if they could find no way to free her, he could offer her a privileged life within her prison, as he had done with Grail.