The Book of Heaven: A Novel (48 page)

The Philosopher was too distraught to make arrangements to travel to the funeral. Sheba promised she would act for him, and offered to go with him.

That evening, she made a bundle of her costumes and stage cosmetics, along with the few jewels she had been able to keep, and dismantled her Sheban oar, concealing it among the clothes. Her father used to say that song was a more certain living than farming, since it was unaffected by drought, storm, or season. Now she would put his maxim to the test.

She went to her mother's rooms to say good night, hoping that she might somehow find a way to speak the truth to her. But her mother looked up from the eerie lullabies she was singing to Kito's unwanted son, and stared at Sheba with the opaque general loathing she felt now for the world itself. She was finished with further truths.

Sheba said a good-night her mother ignored as if she had been a stranger, absorbed in her incessant songs. Sheba never saw her again. A year after she had crossed the border into Ellusha, a report circulated that the woman who had been Queen of Sheba had killed that child, and then herself.

Sheba and the Philosopher crossed the border without incident; the Zealots were not particularly concerned with the comings and goings of the elderly, and elderly women were the most negligible of all, having exhausted their animal and military value.

Traveling had its odd narcotic effect in which strangers talk as they have never talked with intimates, telling unrepeatable truths. At least the Philosopher did, during the three days' journey to the Ellushan capital; Sheba kept her own counsel, but asked him question after question, not only out of caution. She began to realize as he answered her that he needed the questions; the only way for a Philosopher to heal his grief was to think.

He spoke of his dead brother, and of the supreme pleasure he had taken in giving him his first lessons, in botany, music, and physics; “as if I saw a soul being born in the house of flesh,” he said.

He described some of those lessons to Sheba; and as surely as if she had a special optical instrument, she saw him through the child's eyes. Perhaps a fragment of the boy entered into her own soul.

The Philosopher showed her worlds that had always existed all around her, that she could never have discovered without him. The undifferentiated flights of birds overhead became real and specific, as he showed her the different rhythms of the wing beats, the sublime collaboration of bone, wing, and current of air. It was a rare gift he gave her with this knowledge—a piece of the world he loved, as real as a key or a lamp.

He sketched the ascent and descent of a gliding sea bird, showing her how the wings themselves changed shape each time the bird rowed in the air. The Philosopher made her imagine what it would feel like if her body changed its very shape each time she took a step.

He gave the old woman the sketch to keep; an access to the freedom and mobility that had once been hers.

Sheba prized the tactful generosity hidden in the gift of the sketch; whenever she brought it out to look at afterward, she felt the rush of wings. That soaring and swiftness later entered her voice as she sang the epics, hovering, floating, and gliding fleetly and delicately from note to note.

They dismounted to walk through fields of sunflowers that were taller than Sheba. For Sheba, entering the forest of green and gold flowers was a world of surreal beauty.

The Philosopher, though, had a different view: “You do not see flowers if you see them only as fragile and beautiful. These flowers are male and female fused, as most of them are. You are at the center here of the sheer force of breeding. We breathe it. We eat it. The whole world exists to seduce us.” With this knowledge, he gave her something he feared.

At night, as they camped under the stars, he asked her to sing passages from the epics, and she did, as old people do, revealing the anatomy of the passages, but failing the notes and quavering poignantly on certain phrases. He questioned her about Sheban teachings on love, and compared them to the Philosophers' ideas on the subject.

“We think of human love itself as a hopeless quest,” he explained to her. “Though we are not among those who are taught to avoid love on the grounds that women are flawed men.”

“I should hope not,” Sheba said. “Because by that logic, men can only be perfect women.”

“I don't understand,” he said, “how your people have so much faith in the illusion of human love. How can you believe so much in an impulse that fails more often than it endures?”

“We don't have faith in it. We don't believe in it. Remember, we are trained from childhood to spend our lives on stages, making imaginary people exist. We create it.”

He gestured toward the sky. “In all the history of humanity, not one pair of lovers has ever been united in Heaven. Only the perpetual hunters and their hunted, warriors, and rapists glitter there, separated lovers, the unfaithful shamed through light, women turned into animals through the shame of seduction.”

“Not true,” she said. “Have you never seen the Lovers' Cluster? It is faint at this season, but you can make it out.” She led him away from the fire, searching for an advantageous perspective from which to view the constellation. “There, look up,” she said, and showed him the lovers in their shimmering embrace at the heart of the constellation. “Can you see them?”

“Yes, I think so. Though they could be wrestlers or combatants.”

“I suppose they could be, if that is what you have in your eye.”

Sheba concealed the sadness she felt when they reached the city; she knew that she would accompany him no further. As the Zealots had no use for an old woman, the Philosophers had no use for a young one. In pleasure-loving Ellusha, she could make her living singing and playacting, though she had heard from her Ellushan mother that they did not always appreciate listening to songs more complex than the ones belonging to the national repertoire.

Just before dawn, Sheba dressed and tied her small parcel to her back. The Philosopher was sleeping soundly in the room above. She quietly closed the door behind her, and taking deep breaths of the fresh dawn air, set out to see if she could find her way back into her own story in Ellusha.

By late afternoon, it was clear that she had vanished. The Philosopher questioned the proprietor of the house where they had rented rooms, but neither he nor anyone in the quarter had seen an old woman on the street early that morning, though someone thought he had seen a fifteen-year-old boy he didn't recognize, carrying a pack.

The Philosopher could discover nothing more, and could wait no longer to return to the road. He traveled on alone, carrying not only the weight of his brother's death, which increased as he neared home, but a galling sense of failure: there had been something profoundly important he had not understood, and that was a sharp torment to Philosophers.

It was not hard at all for Sheba to find work tavern-singing; the Ellushans loved their wine and their entertainments, though they were not the kind of audience she had been used to; they listened sometimes, but sometimes hummed and sang with her, as if this charming fresh-voiced boy was simply an echo of all their collected voices.

Only one man truly listened intently, and he began to appear with a regularity that worried her. He might be a lover of boys, in which case she could only disappoint him; or he might be a Zealot scout, a bounty hunter lying in wait for escaped Shebans.

She joined him apprehensively when he sent her an invitation to take a glass of wine with him at his table.

“Thank you for meeting me,” he said. He had an oddly distinguished face, for someone who spent time and money watching simple tavern singers.

“I have been admiring your singing since I discovered you, as you may have noticed.” He leaned toward her intently. “But I can perhaps find you work that would suit you better than tavern-singing.”

She froze defensively, setting her wineglass down. She could not afford to be courted by this man, and she could not afford to tell him the truth. “The voice is good,” he said. “But I want to make a man of you.”

She stood up to leave the table, crafting an expression of polite regret. He pulled her firmly back into her seat. “Oh, not that way, my girl,” he said. “Your mother's work as a boy was much better than yours when she wore this costume, playing the Prince Horizon, the year I was made King of Sheba.”

“Are you Caspar?” she whispered. She thought now that she could see a resemblance to the plaster casts of Caspar in his exemplary roles that Noctis the Bridge had used when she taught.

“Yes,” the man replied, “I am. I escaped the butchers by playing a side of beef, and I have brought many more fine carcasses across since then.

“The Zealots can't tell an actor from a steer. They think a prison is the same thing as a country, and that a theater is a place to make war. They are confident that they can kill our epics along with our land.”

He doubled over, laughing angrily. “Poor brutes. We have made the only heroes who can die but never be killed, the women and the men of the Tellings. In the end, we will put the Zealots into our songs, and they will be no more than coarse adjectives.

“For the moment, I am the only living King of Sheba. But there are enough of us to make a troupe. And if you join us, I can make you a Queen as great as your mother was, Queen Sheba.”

So Sheba joined the troupe of King Caspar, training by day, and playing by night, sometimes in houses, sometimes in parks—the performances were never held in the same locale, to protect the troupe from Zealot retaliation.

Caspar did not allow her to play women's roles: “You don't understand enough about boys' and men's roles to play the girls well,” he said, “but it will come with time.”

The troupe rapidly gained a following; it was a novelty at first to hear the stumbling rebirth of the true Tellings of Sheba, but the superficial Ellushans actually developed a taste for the epics; favorite passages were hummed in the marketplace, and even the tavern singers attempted versions.

The Sheban refugees began to give lessons in building the oars, and playing them. It became fashionable for Ellushan children to be trained in the Sheban arts. The songs were quoted, the songs were sung, and scenes from the Tellings were played again. The songs moved across borders faster than flame; the formidable troops of the Zealots were outmaneuvered by not only men, but women—the heroines and heroes of the Tellings, who were bringing the world of Sheba back to life.

So young Sheba remained a boy, and it was in one of her masculine roles that the Philosopher first saw her play on his return to Ellusha, a place that continued to haunt him. He had been given permission to make a study of Ellusha, though he also admitted to himself that he longed to learn something simpler; he wanted to understand what had happened to him there.

The Philosopher had heard a rumor of a Telling to take place on a ship in the Ellushan harbor; he made his way to the port, where he was unwittingly, rapidly, and expertly tested by a small network of passersby, before he was approved and allowed to pay to be rowed from the quay to the ship. He took a seat on the deck, and as dusk fell, the performers took their places to enact the seventh book of the Horizon.

The Philosopher was absorbed and intrigued by the unique tones the Sheban instruments produced, but it was Sheba's recitation, costumed as Horizon, in the prince's red velvet tunic, and the turban clasped by a pomegranate-shaped and -colored jewel, that shocked him. He fell into a rapt concentration beyond even thought, as he had never before experienced.

To be carried beyond thought frightened him. He found himself entering an entirely new world, as he had done the night the old Sheban woman showed him a constellation he had never seen.

The Philosopher dutifully took notes, recorded interviews, and learned the language of Ellusha during the days, but at night, he no longer studied.

Instead, he made passionate efforts to find out where the Tellings were being presented, and if the marvelous boy was playing in that night's performance. Like many inexperienced spectators of theater, he confused the performer with her roles. Soon he began to seek her out after performances, to try to talk with her, or at least to hear her talk.

When she caught sight of him, Sheba recognized him at once. He was waiting for her to emerge from a wine cellar where that night's performance had been held. He sent a bottle of wine to the players' table with his compliments for the boy who had recited Horizon. She thanked him as she was leaving, and he invited her to take another glass with him so courteously and with such disciplined eagerness that she could not refuse.

Besides, she was overjoyed at the utterly unexpected appearance of the man who had unwittingly saved her life without realizing it. It was as if she had found a talisman she had lost.

He now appeared regularly at her Telling evenings, and as regularly waited to spend an hour with her afterward, or two if he could get two. Now the days when they did not see each other lacked savor. Soon the days when they did not see each other lacked purpose. It was when the days that they did not see each other began to seem to gamble with the nature of reality that each of them became privately terrified.

Sheba knew that it was a matter of luck that he followed only the Tellings in which she played a boy; on other nights, he would have had the chance to see her play the old woman who had been his servant in the capital of Sheba. And there would be no end to that confusion.

As to the Philosopher, the growing danger that life and thought could be affected absolutely by the mere presence of another person was exactly what he had been warned against, a snare and a risk to immortal life. He was at least lucky that they were of the same sex. The Philosophers were expected to mentor and educate boys in a fraternal and paternal fashion, to conduct new generations across the boundaries of time into immortality, as his own great teacher had led him.