The Book of Heaven: A Novel (36 page)

In the end, they settled on a natural disaster to draw the guards from the Gate of Immortals and as many people of the house as possible away from the children's quarters. They set a date for a fire in the vineyards, to be lit, as she said with a tired smile, by Rain. She was sure that the endeavor was hopeless, but she readied herself to carry it out, and light the flame. She kept her despair to herself, so as not to infect the others, and suspected them of doing the same.

Even in this house of rape, though, there were miracles. She had seen love; she had seen hate.

And by a miracle she had consented to protect someone she despised; in doing so, her loathing was transformed, not into love, but into an honorable and enlightened hatred, a hatred confined to reason, its hot light showing her clearly the features of what she hated, without possessing her own heart. Without hope, she was still able to remember that she was surrounded by more than she could see; she was like a figure in an icon, unable to see beyond the frame.

Beyond the frame, the earth shook.

In the afternoon, Rain was practicing dances set to traditional love songs, which had a special intensity on the Peninsula, as the combined practices of forced marriage and love slavery ensured that all loves were unrequited. Men and women who would never know the fulfillment of their desires had an insatiable appetite to hear songs about the invincibility of true love.

Rain soared up, turned in the air, and as she dropped and touched the floor with both heels, the earth trembled, as if her leap had shaken it to the core. She thought the leap had made her dizzy, that she had imagined the tremor.

She took a deep breath and practiced the leap again. This time there was a rattling sound, and the walls of the practice room took on a slow, strange elasticity, as if they were about to change places with each other.

She heard screams, and ran outside into the courtyard, where the tiles of the pavement had cracked, and the walls of the galleries were shivering. There was another series of slow, deep convulsions, but the buildings surrounding the dancers' courtyard held. The men and women who had poured into the courtyard wept and sank to the pavement in shock.

Rain and two dancers who were mothers raced through the arches, and up the hill past the Pagan Chapel to the House of Immortal Children. Grail was already there, urging the children and mothers into the small field where they played. She touched tear-stained faces as she counted. One wing of the house had been so damaged that it looked as if it might crumble through a careless footstep. They gingerly guided older and carried younger children through the ruined section, until the sixty were accounted for.

“The children are terrified,” Rain said to Grail. “Nothing will soothe them if they sleep near buildings that could fall down and crush them.” Grail understood.

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes searched Rain's for certainty as she described her guess at Rain's improvised plan. “Until we know which buildings are secure, they will be safe only if they sleep outside the walls. Madam is in no condition to make the decision, but the acting governess will understand we cannot take risks with the children.”

Rain nodded. “If the guards agree, under these extraordinary circumstances, we will bring them bottles of wine—as much as they can drink—and entertain them.”

They repeated their dialogue for each of the five mothers who would escort the children, who began to organize them into the small clusters, the units they had planned when rehearsing the escape. The repetition was designed to teach the four what to quote if they were asked. If all went well, they would be outside the walls at sunset, and the guards would be blind drunk by dark.

They were to wait in the garden by the Pagan Chapel until Grail and Rain came to conduct them outside the walls. If permission was refused, the children were to wail and scream at the gates until no one could stand it, and the guards gave in. Many of the children were genuinely afraid, and others relished the chance at playacting tantrums. When they reached the port, they would be transformed into a group of shelterless refugees, fleeing the ruins of their houses. They would disperse in four groups around the capital, and wait for Grail to bring word from Admiral Annan that the ship was ready to board.

There were two things the Immortal brides protected in their house: their jewelry, which was their only safety, and the children who lived there, the only innocence in the house. Rain and Grail met little resistance to their plan; it was even given the flourishes of a pleasure outing, with pitched tents and picnic food.

They sent out bottles of wine to the guards, and climbed to the Pagan Chapel quickly, eager to get the children beyond the gates as naturally and quietly as possible.

Rain moved down the vineyards to the lowest terrace to see if she could get any sense of how much the port had been damaged. It was then she saw it. It was the black wall of love-killing water that nothing on the face of the earth could stop.

The shapeless sea became a fortress, stronger than any stone battlement, and hurled itself at the land. As the water poured over the sea walls, she saw one of the port's great docks set free; a portion of it slammed into a cargo boat moored nearby. The sea devoured a customs house, and lapped up the buildings on the shore like a beast with a thousand black tongues. Then she heard it, too, an orchestral roar of waters, the percussion of buildings cracking and collapsing, the choir of human screams, the symphony of death.

If she had killed Madam in her vulnerability as she had intended, she would have felt one with this destruction. If she had carried out the murder, she would have become of the nature of this wave, which damned all in its path.

She walked gravely and purposefully back to the waiting women and children. She described what she had seen to Grail. The tragedy might in the end work in their favor.

Grail was above all to gather the children just outside the gates and wait for her. She would watch from the terrace until she saw the waters recede; then they would make their way down the mountain and profit from the chaos of the town to get the children on board Enarch's ship. It was only then the two looked at each other, and realized that the wave might have taken both Enarch and his ship.

Rain returned to her perch among the vineyards. She put her hands in her pockets for warmth, and remembered that she had slipped her wingless clay bird in one for luck. She joined her heart for many hours with the ones in the water, wondering if her sister and the little girl, her brother, her former parents, were rising and falling in the floods. For a day and a night, she watched, she herself a wingless bird, unable to carry herself or anyone else to safety, until the waters receded.

She found another kind of flood in the courtyard, and outside the gates, a human flood of refugees who had fled their houses in the lower villages for higher ground. The guards had gone in the opposite direction, once they heard from the first dazed arrivals what had happened. They had families in the lower villages, and were frantic to find them. Already there were exhausted survivors camped in the courtyards, and outside the gates, and streams of people moving up and down the paths.

Hidden within the horror was a God-sent opportunity for the children of the house—they wasted no time. They set out in small, seemingly unrelated groups to descend to the port. Grail, a baby in her arms, was to lead the group to Admiral Annan's villa, where they would shelter. Rain, with a baby in her arms, brought up the rear. No one noticed anything questionable about a group of homeless refugees moving toward the capital for shelter, hoping to be reunited with their lost husbands and fathers.

For the first hour of descent, there was an eerie trace of holiday feeling within the little group. The children felt an exuberant thrill at being outside the walls for the first time, distracted by new landscapes, and the strangeness of the day's events.

As they approached the lower villages, though, their progress was hampered with fallen trees and thick mud. The river was high and running fast, and pieces of houses were streaming through the waters to the sea. Rain saw a head roll over and over in the waters, its gold earrings flashing in the sun when it turned faceup. Central streets were strewn with beds, forks, lamps, and other domestic paraphernalia. There were patches of brilliantly colored mud, from carpets whose dyes had soaked into the earth. The disaster had stripped houses of their facades, turning them into theater sets, households of the dead.

Occasionally, disembodied voices would call out from above them—people high in trees, either still afraid to come down, or waiting for help, having climbed too high to descend unassisted. But many others were roaming the streets and the outskirts, searching for neighbors, or possessions, or scavenging, oblivious to little bands of orphans and women on their way to the capital for relief. The women and children followed the route nearest the river, cautiously avoiding notice as best they could.

Rain heard a wild series of screams as they approached a thick stand of trees downstream. A man was lying on the bank, with one foot still in the river, while his new widow slapped him, screaming with each slap. An elderly couple stood over them, protectively embracing two children, so that their faces were turned from the inert man and the woman striking him.

Rain was possessed by a bizarre impulse. It was as if she had seen a picture of a group of mourners, and then her own figure had been sketched into the scene with swift, irresistible, ecstatic strokes. She, who had never kissed a man, ran to this one, and lay down on him, pressing her lips to his, passionately healing him.

She poured her breath into him, as someone blows on the embers in a hearth to restart a fire. She who had never given birth gave life. The breath she had not taken from Madam had been saved for this man.

She breathed into him with a transfigured violence; the force of the murder she had not committed added itself to creation, so strong and changed that it healed instead of killed. As if a dive could be reversed, the man soared upward from the depths back to the surface of the earth.

A person again, he turned on his side, his body curled like a baby's, and vomited feebly, until the air tasted sweet to him again.

A knot of people had gathered around Rain and the now-living dead man. The man's widow lifted the baby Rain had been carrying back into her arms, and touched her lips to Rain's. They would not let her go until she kissed each one who had witnessed her immortal kiss. And the healing kiss was taken through them up and down the mountains, and along the shores, and others who had died that day lived, they say. There is a legend that the breath Rain gave this man still brings life to people who have never heard of that flood. I do not know whether this is true.

I do know that Rain and her charges reached the capital, and rejoined the other Immortal children, waiting in the grounds behind Admiral Annan's villa on the bluffs. There Grail gently gave her the news that her sister and brother, with all their households, had been killed; the little girl—who might have been Enarch's daughter—the child awarded to Dolphin to live among the Elect had instead been delivered to her death.

Both Rain's parents had survived, though General Jarre was gravely injured. The port had sustained severe damage; the only way to reach or leave shore was by dinghy. No one knew whether Enarch's ship with the figurehead of the wingless bird had been crushed along with many other ships driven into each other, or against wharves and bridges.

The women waited with the children, refugees whom the wealthy and magnanimous Annan family sheltered at their own expense behind their locked gates. On the second afternoon, Rain heard the key turning in the lock. She and Grail exchanged a look and got to their feet. The somber, drawn face they saw was Enarch's, followed by Admiral Annan's.

He had been far out at sea on the rescue ship when what was to become the killing wave passed unnoticed deep beneath the
Wingless Bird;
they felt no more than a strong swell. As is so often the case in human life, they sailed serenely, ignorant of the suffering of others, unaware of the devastation that had reached the port before them. Enarch was still in a state of disbelief; the capital he had sailed away from was barely recognizable.

Enarch took Grail and the first group of children to the dinghy; if they were challenged, they would say they were making use of the ship for housing these orphans until permanent shelter could be found. He and Annan would alternate escorting the children in small clusters until all were aboard. Then the brides would join them, with as much speed as they could manage discreetly. He dared not delay the sailing. All must be aboard ship by two o'clock.

Enarch led them with watchful, animal attention, as if he were a lioness transporting cub after cub to safety from a marauding predator. Group after group departed, until at last all sixty were aboard.

Then it was the turn of the five brides who were to make their way to the port, and board the waiting dinghy. Rain would leave with them, and take her own path back to the house, claiming that she had been separated from Grail and the children in the midst of the chaos.

The bluffs were crowded with makeshift camps of refugees. Rain guided the other women down along the paths she had known as a girl, until they reached a magnificent stone staircase, damaged, but still intact, flanked by houses on either side, descending some three hundred feet to the port. Men and boys were collecting stones that had fallen during the earthquake, while others had already begun repairs of their houses. Two men at work on reinforcing a house that was listing to the left side looked up reflexively at the women as they passed.

One elbowed the other. “Isn't that the dancer from the Fiançailles?” he asked. He had been one of Rain's guards during the betrothal month.

His companion looked at them, and nodded bitterly. It was bad luck to see an Immortal outside the walls of the houses, except during the Fiançailles. No wonder the killing wave had come.