The Book of Heaven: A Novel (47 page)

The army functioned even more insidiously as a perfect system to ensure, without struggle, the submission of that other potentially rebellious group, the Zealot women. The forced incorporation of women as soldiers ensured their permanent subordination.

Since few could equal the men in combat, they could never rise in the structure of command. And there could be no dissent, since they were always under the orders of men of higher rank, and to disobey was treason to the collective. As never before, Zealot women could be used as their men saw fit. Their two highest ranks were as Soldier Breeders, and Justifiers, the spokeswomen whose serious, pretty faces, cleanly braided hair, and training in heroic rhetoric ennobled each action of the Zealot army.

For Sheba personally, the greatest change was the alteration in her mother, still known as the Queen of Sheba, but now the bitter, narrow-eyed wife of Uncle Kito, who had married her protectively. She no longer performed, except to sing strange lullabies to her new baby son, in which all the refrains about night and sleep and rocking cradles took on a foreboding air. Epic was lost to her now, even in the truncated form approved by the Zealots; she had lost the power to believe their cyclical patterns, or in the quests for love the epics described. She could sing only of premonition.

In the kingdom as it was under the Zealots, there was no more privacy. All rooms and lodgings were now lived in as barracks, subject to inspections at all hours. No subordinate woman, man, or child could refuse a visit, and all Shebans were considered subordinate, and perhaps would be for generations to come.

All locks were removed from the doors of anyone below the rank of officer; old trees were cut down in gardens and forests, even lilac and rose bushes were lopped to a height that could not provide cover for an assassin. Only those of high rank could sit under tall trees, behind high walls, roaming through orchards discreetly guarded by the patrols of women, in the Protector's gardens.

Now the commander roamed through the kingdom at night, entering random darkened houses whose sleeping inhabitants, abruptly roused, leapt from their beds to offer him a glass of wine and a plate of nuts and sweets, in terrified parody of their former spontaneous hospitality. He also began to make unpredictable but regular nocturnal visits to Sheba's quarters, often finding her lying in bed, learning the lines for the new Zealot roles she was to play.

“I want to ensure personally that you are resting well, and have everything you need,” he would say, and sit down on her bed, dismissing his guards.

Sometimes he entered the room after she was asleep, seated himself on the edge of the bed, and rhythmically stroked her shoulder until she awoke. She would have liked to be able to receive him formally, dressed, sitting in a chair, or standing, but his solid, armed body on her bed made an obstacle between her and the freedom of any other posture. In order to reach a chair, she would have to dislodge him, and even if that could be managed, he would see her undressed. As if he intuited her discomfort, his visits became later and later, so that he would almost always discover her asleep, as if he wanted to enter her dreams.

These visits seemed to unleash something necessary to him; he would stroke some part of her body absently, as if it were a body of water through which he was rowing, and tell her stories of his battles, and of his childhood.

He told her about his first two wives, or “conquests” in their language; they had lost their lives in police actions. He spoke about his third wife, with an expression of great pride; she was an extremely pretty girl who was training as a Justifier, one of the teams of women soldiers who met with civilians, explained the actions and customs of the Zealots to them, and clarified Zealot law.

As he spoke the stroking never stopped; once or twice when he was describing his first childhood Triggering, he gripped her shoulder violently. The Triggering was the beginning of military training for Zealot children.

At the age of three, each child was called into his parents' bedroom. There he was shown a picture of a woman or man who he was told was hunting him in order to kill him; and so the children learned their survival was in their own hands.

They were instructed in techniques of camouflage and outdoor survival, and how to escape traps and master the deadly weapons they would need to eliminate the killers.

Throughout their childhoods, trained adult soldiers dressed like the stalkers' pictures would suddenly cross their paths or loom behind them as they went to school. They were haunted by these specters, never realizing that the stalkers were carefully trained to terrorize them, but never to inflict physical harm.

The commander's Triggering, he told her, began with the apparition of the killer at his bedroom window; he now knew it was a soldier impersonator, but his career had begun that night, with rolling under the bed at lightning speed, and holding his breath, while he heard the killer's footsteps in the room.

He laughed now at his childish ineptitude; of course the impersonator had known exactly where he was hiding, but he could still taste his own blood in his mouth, where he had bitten his lip to force himself to keep his breathing quiet and to lie still.

Sheba never spoke during these visits, nor was she questioned or invited to speak; the commandant stroked her hair, her shoulder, at times the edge of her breast, during his monologue. Or he would take her hand, as if it were his own, and pat his knee with it, or his thigh, moving it close to his sex, but only rarely touching it.

“I want you to think of me as a father,” he told her one night, “to take the place of the father you have lost. I want to make up for that loss. I will be the father who never leaves you.”

Those words made Sheba fear him with an absolute, uncontrollable fear; she realized that he believed this; he believed as certainly in all that he felt, as a crowd believes a skillful orator. He had no doubt that he was showing her paternal affection. In that belief, he could absently kill her someday, and believe it was a fatherly act. His was a somnambulist's soul.

“Yours is a culture incapable of defending itself,” he said meditatively. “Yet I have learned much about the charms and grandeur of love here. It seems it is after all a force as irresistible as death. I am grateful to your uncle Kito for bringing me here.”

“My uncle Kito?” It was the first question, and also the last, that Sheba would ever ask of the commander.

“It was the maps your uncle sold to us from his remarkable collection that enabled us to secure the city and the outlying districts so quickly. He is a true man of Sheba; he gave everything for love. It was his only chance to possess your mother.

“He has taught me that a lover may be more like a warrior than I had ever understood. Your mother means more to him than life; like the great generals I have known, he would stop at nothing.” He patted her, patted and stroked her, lost in the contemplation of her uncle's love.

At last he stood up to leave, with a look of tender regret. “I would not have been capable of such feeling. It is not part of our culture. All our relations are tinged with strategy, with gaining or losing advantage through alliance. Your uncle had no strategy; your mother is all he gained. And she is all he wanted. I had heard of such things, but until now, I did not believe in them. It is remarkable.”

He fell silent for a moment, staring at nothing as intently as if it were a painting. “I will leave you to your own company. Dream of love, as you say here.”

It was that night she had her first dream of Noctis the Bridge. She saw her great teacher seated in her old armchair on the practice stage, her lips moving soundlessly. The sight of her longed-for face flooded Sheba with delight, a momentary return to the life before the Zealots had come. Within her dream, she felt an unbearable craving to see Far, and hoped that she could somehow call him into the dream. Noctis smiled at her with her old knowing affection, then said admonishingly: “Are you practicing every day?”

“Almost,” Sheba said. Noctis smiled as she used to do when she heard the truth confessed, with the expression of someone hearing a pleasing musical tone.

“But I don't spend a day without thinking of you,” Sheba told her. “Nothing here is the same. This is not the place where you and I lived. They are assigning me roles I am not suited to play.”

“Yes, like so many, you now find yourself body and soul in the wrong story. One sees so often rich people who are poor, and poor people who are rich, beauties who are ugly, and plain people who are really exquisite. History is full of provinces forced into alien nations. It is a terrible business for a comic actor like you to be trapped inside a tragedy. That is why you must leave this place. It is time for you to find a way to return to your own story, now, before it is too late.”

“And my mother?”

“Your mother's heart broke badly, and lost its brilliance. Her story is no longer your story. You cannot live if you will not leave her. I warn you, I am telling the truth.”

“How can I escape this? They will never let me cross the border.”

“You will leave three times. You will leave as an old woman, as a boy, and as a girl who is not you, but is very like you. Play these roles that belong to you well, and they will take you where you have to go. You were born under the Paradise Nebula, a constellation that vanishes and reappears. Its natives were born to reveal the truth of what is thought not to exist.

“Open your costume chest. The path across the border begins inside it.”

“If this is true, what about you?” Sheba asked Noctis, longing for her to say she would come back. “How can you return to your own story? You counsel me to play my own roles, but you were killed because you refused to play yours.”

“I have returned to my own story, my dear, and the great role—the greatest of my roles—that was waiting for me. After all, if you notice, I am a dead woman producing a perfect illusion of a living one, thanks to a lifetime of observation. And that, I say without modesty, is a role only masters are given to play.

“I do not know whether you or I will share a dream again. I can only tell you to leave here at the first opportunity. I wish you courage. I wish you luck. Dream of love.”

In the days that followed, an elderly woman, still vigorous despite her habit of sighing and clutching whatever part of her body suddenly gave her pain, offered her domestic services to several inns in the foreign quarter.

The foreign quarter was teeming with tradesmen from the various Zealot colonies, eager to find a foothold in the newest addition. None of the innkeepers had work for her, though one knew of five Philosophers living in a rented house while they studied Sheban thought and customs. These five might be glad of a personal servant, especially a woman of her age, who would pose no temptation to the men.

The Philosophers were ascetics whose lives were given over to thought and prayer; they were forbidden to have relations with women outside marriage, and to avoid marriage itself, if they were strong enough. In their youth, they studied in the Academy under their greatest thinkers, and they spent their young manhood wandering from country to country, learning as much as they could of the ephemeral world in order to grasp the eternal one. Paradoxically, the more their principles detached them from the temporal world, the more their education emphasized knowledge of the physical world; they had produced many important works of physics and a substantial number of respected naturalists.

The five young Philosophers knew a great deal about the seven heavens above earth, the mathematics of music, and all the beautiful hierarchies that ordered the cosmos, but they knew nothing of such mundane realities as how fevers were treated and food made edible. This knowledge they were encouraged to avoid, so as not to dilute the purity of their contemplation, and so as to cultivate indifference to physical comforts, and to the fate of the temporary body. They were glad to have the old woman bear the brunt of this sordid aspect of life on their behalf.

For several months, Sheba spent sporadic hours housekeeping for them, and perfecting her impersonation of an old woman.

The Philosophers were not demanding employers; they were all gaunt, eating only food sufficient for the mind to function. Sheba compelled herself to respect their sense of virtue, though she mischievously permitted herself to make their grains and vegetables temptingly palatable.

She enjoyed watching the tallest and most skeletal of them learn to taste food. The others ate absently and continued reading at the table. But this one tasted the unfamiliar food slowly, a questioning look in his blue eyes. She liked his willingness to think about everything, even this aspect of life he had been trained to dismiss. This one occasionally showed her his notebooks, and recorded her answers to his questions about Sheban life.

Sheba usually became old near the marketplace, where she bought their modest supplies of food. The double life was natural to her; it was how all Sheban people lived now.

She worked as she walked from the market on perfecting her elderly gait, suitable for the old woman she now was, rapid, but unbalanced, negotiating the invisible mountainous terrain on which all old people walked.

This morning, there were strange sounds coming from the Philosophers' house, which was usually quiet except for pages turning, and the lapping sounds of brushes against paper. She found the tall Philosopher hunched over the table where he usually worked, his arms limp as if he had fallen, his shoulders racked with his gasping sobs.

She leaned down to him, touched his shoulder with infinite gentleness, and made a soft sound that was not quite a word. He lifted his tear-marked face and spontaneously laid his head against her breast, nestling in her arms as a normal grief-stricken man of Sheba would, though he had probably not been this close to a woman since childhood.

A messenger had brought news an hour ago that his beloved and brilliant five-year-old brother, for whom he had replaced their dead father, had been killed by a snake's bite. The boy had leaned down to pick up a clutch of tiny eggs he'd found; the mother snake attacked him before he had time to close his hand around the charming miniatures.