The Book of Heaven: A Novel (52 page)

“And all I know is that I don't want you to be lost in some story different from mine. My two years here are nearly finished. Will you let me travel home to ask my teacher for permission to marry you?”

“Are you sure?” she asked, knowing that marriage would mean that he could never be inducted into the Academy.

He kissed her hand; Sheba said her irrevocable “yes.”

Now an elegiac period began for King Caspar's troupe, during these last months before Sheba's Philosopher returned from his own country to marry her and bring her to the house near the Academy he had gone to prepare for her. There were large audiences for her last performances, which ran very late, since the news of Queen Sheba's departure had spread. She was kept onstage by call after call for encores of favorite passages from the epics. People watched with minute attention, memorizing every intonation and gesture, straining to keep true pictures for themselves about how this last Queen of Sheban art chiseled her phrases like the gems the people of the kingdom had so loved.

The troupe itself was packing away costumes and props, and readying for its own journey onward.

Caspar's beloved plants, the link with his lost estate in Sheba, were carefully packed for transport. Caspar had become increasingly uncomfortable being situated so near the Sheban border; he had decided to take up an unexpected and opportune offer to accompany a grand court returning from a seasonal trade expedition on its celebratory journey home.

As the epic players used to do, Caspar and the players of his troupe would entertain the court as it crossed the mountains, and then to sea, to its country. If the players pleased King Melchior, there was a chance of establishing a permanent theater in his capital. His was a country of lengthy summers, which was always an advantage for actors, who were in steady demand as storytellers during the golden nights when the sun did not set.

Word came from a first rider that the Philosopher was two days away, then from a second rider that he was a day away, then from a third that he was waiting for Sheba at their familiar pavilion on the lagoon, where they had first declared their love.

The sun glittered on the water as it had the first day. Sheba saw him looking toward her, tall and elegant, slender as the columns on which the Philosophers loved to perch as they confronted all that existed in the cosmos.

She wound her arms around him, and held him close. He returned her embrace, but strangely, weightlessly. She drew away, and looked into his eyes with the question. Even his eyes were different; the color of water, they changed like water, but now they were opaque as stone.

“I see you already realize what I have realized.”

“What have you realized?” she asked.

“That this is impossible. And always was.”

“But why? It has been possible for nearly two years. No, it was greater than possible—it was true. What makes it impossible now?”

“Perhaps your skin, the color of your skin.”

“You have always loved the color of my skin.”

“I was reminded at home that we marry the fair. How would it be for you to be the only visible exception?”

“Look at the boat on the lagoon.” He gazed in the direction she pointed out.

There was a fishing boat on the water, motionless in the blinding brilliance of the sun. In the great confluence of the torrent of light, the boat was black, as were the figures of the fishermen, and their darkness made every detail of their shapes as achingly precise as sculpture.

“It is inside this amount of radiance that they are revealed as dark,” she said. “Besides, I don't believe any Philosopher would refuse love for the sake of the way the flesh catches light. No matter what color my skin is, in any case, one day it will disappear, as I will. What is the real reason for your change?”

“You are right, it has nothing to do with your skin, but something far deeper and more absolute. My teacher at the Academy, the teacher who is to me what Noctis the Bridge was to you, spoke to me with all the force of his wisdom.

“I am the son of his soul, and he spoke to me as a son. He reminded me that among us, great Philosophers do not marry. We are for what is immortal alone. We sacrifice the cosmos we would make sacred if we choose profane love instead of divine love. The body crumbles our great structures of thought into dust.”

“And you are sure that it is our love for each other that is profane?”

“There is no doubt about it.”

Then Sheba's heart broke utterly and cleanly as the gemstones she had seen as a schoolgirl. It broke with such force that it catapulted her beyond despair to some other vantage point in the world. From this perspective, she could see not only the Philosopher, but also watch herself looking up at him. She could see herself as if she were a director observing a player enact a life.

Her broken heart seemed to break her into many selves, like the facets of a gem, as the geometress had said it would. Feelings she did not recognize emerged, as if freed from some ancient prison, a strange sensation of selflessness, without effort or deprivation, as if she had died.

The new emptiness in her made her every thought and feeling resonant, like the acoustics of a grand concert hall. There seemed nothing left in her but the mysterious space of the future that lay before her, without him, the bearable, permanent sorrow of facing that life, and her astonished, passionate wish that whatever he loved would be full and true for him.

Her heart had broken, her life's wish unfulfilled, but she could still feel love. It was as if her unbroken heart had had a touch of stone, and served to contain more love than she knew was possible. Now it lay in fragments, swept outward by the feelings it had held back. They flowed freely beyond her, beyond her, beyond the Philosopher, surging into the world. No, she had not died; she had outlived herself.

She had loved the man in curiosity, detail, delight, and passion; her love was now this concentrated wish for him to live, with her or without her.

“I must hurry back to the troupe,” she said, “and inform King Caspar that Queen Sheba is still a traveling player. May the life you choose bring you joy and all you truly prize.”

They embraced in the new way, as if they were clouds colliding. Sheba was overcome with a wave of exhaustion, and she left quickly. The Philosopher watched her walk away, his smile radiant and fixed, a greeting to the new life he had won.

The annual journey toward Melchior's kingdom was particularly festive that year, and the itinerant court especially brilliant. King Melchior was a gourmand of knowledge, and of art, always willing to prolong a journey or make a detour to see something of value.

Every night King Caspar's troupe performed songs during dinner; after dinner, the troupe would set out the great terra-cotta urns containing the Sheban herbs from Caspar's lost garden. They were leafless bushes at this time of year, but their appearance was always the sign that the comedies or scenes from the epics of the Tellings were about to be performed.

If the landscape of a day's traveling was not particularly interesting, Melchior and selected guests would ride behind an elephant that carried a flat wooden platform mounted on its back, a portable theater, on which the actors played for them. Melchior delighted in saying that he was not only traveling home, but also straight into the epic tales he followed as he rode.

These royal homecomings were always furnished with a company of botanists, zoologists, and selected court painters who recorded every step of the journey, and every wonder encountered on the way with sketches and paintings. The sketches did a second service; some were sold at each halt to replenish their supplies of food.

It was through these sketches that the Philosopher was able to trace her footsteps as he followed Melchior's court; he recognized the images of Sheba dressed in the costumes in which she performed the lost Prince Horizon—the first stage role in which he had seen her. He had renounced her in order to become a great thinker; now he could think only of her. He set out to find her, in a desperate quest to recover the sacred love he had been taught to believe profane.

Now King Melchior had gotten word of a marvelous newborn child who was performing miracles quite beyond the miracles that all newborn children can perform. And consistent with his reputation, he could not resist changing the court's route to witness a reputed beauty or a wonder of the world. He had never regretted making a pilgrimage for such a purpose.

So Melchior turned his retinue north, and out of their way, toward the snowy country where he had heard the child could be visited. Some of the party grumbled, impatient to reach their own temperate shores instead of being dragged deeper into winter. The artists, botanists, and zoologists, though, were delighted at the prospect of sketchbooks filled with views never before seen, and recorded the journey with redoubled energy and delight.

The Philosopher followed the sketches they left behind at each stop, navigating by the images of Sheba as a sailor does by the stars. He turned north when they did, and traveled by night as well as day to overtake them.

When Melchior's party reached the icy pass that should lead them across where the miraculous child and his parents were lodged, they found it impassible. Melchior was extremely disappointed to have taken his court so far for nothing, but he was not willing to risk the lives of his followers, even for a miracle. He asked Caspar to use his trained, resonant voice to call out their greetings, and their regrets. Slowly and gingerly, the court made ready to retrace the arduous path by which they had come.

They could hear voices calling from high above them, and Melchior held up his hand to halt the retreat. They saw a couple above, a man and woman who were without coats, apparently oblivious to the cold that had Melchior's court shivering.

The woman was carrying a child, whose face glowed with a radiance that lit the darkness above them; she held up the child as if it were a living candle, and the ice and snow melted away from the path in smooth ribbons.

Melchior and his company ascended the alp, following the lightly dressed couple to a cavern in the mountainside.

All along the meadow, there were pilgrims, some camped by firelight, others moving toward the cavern where the child sat on his mother's lap. Inside the cavern, though it was bitter cold outside, people were warming themselves by the child as if he were a hearth fire. An old peasant couple, which had clearly never known comfort in winter for all of their lives, held their knotty hands near the infant's head, luxuriating in the warmth.

Melchior's group dismounted, and King Caspar signaled to the troupe to sing for the pleasure of the pilgrims. Noticing that all the pilgrims who were filing before the child carried some gift of a trinket, a cheese, a pear, Caspar trudged to the packhorse and broke off a branch of the herb native to his country.

Melchior caught sight among the theater properties of a gold paper crown, studded with sequins. He asked Caspar if he might take it; he was an experienced grandfather, and knew its glitter would please a child. Sheba followed the two kings, taking the incense clock that was the only thing suitable in her luggage. The court painters hurried behind, clutching their notebooks, brushes, easels, and crayons in hand.

The wonderful baby could already sit upright, barely supported by his mother's gentle hands; his face was indeed miraculously beautiful, because of the effect it had. No one could look at this child without his heart dissolving with tenderness, even people who didn't ordinarily care for children.

Melchior handed him the gold paper crown, which he turned over in his hands, as amused as the old king had known he would be. He touched the baby's cheek, and drew himself up to speak a word of congratulations to his father. Caspar put the branch of herbs into the baby's tiny fist, and joined Melchior at his father's side.

Queen Sheba knelt before the child, looking into his eyes with the peculiar intimate reciprocal delight some women share with babies. The baby fingered the incense clock she set before him; though she thought it was not her most precious gift. That was still the love the Philosopher had made her able to feel. It endured.

Her ebony face glowed under her golden turban, its changing tones, and the contours of her natural, poignantly involuntary smile, brought out by the light of the child. It is a moment captured by many of the court painters and their successors; perhaps the familiar image of this precise moment explains why so many confuse Queen Sheba with the young prince Balthazar, the son she later bore who resembled her so much.

The child's father touched the elbows of Melchior and Caspar, who had fallen into conversation. He gestured toward his wife, the child's mother, who held out an offering to Melchior; the gilt paper crown transformed to solid gold, its cheap sequins now precious gems.

In the baby's left hand, the dry branch of herbs was covered with silvery green leaves and blue flowers. His mother took the branch, and returned his gift to Caspar. Under the baby's right hand, clouds of incense from the clock suffused the cavern, as if he had touched it with an invisible flame. Balthazar, the child Sheba had conceived with the Philosopher, stirred faintly inside her.

It was then that the Philosopher emerged from the shadows. He came toward Sheba slowly, and she slowly rose and went to him. They embraced, the pale tall Philosopher, and the dark, small Queen Sheba, meeting like the tall and small hands of a clock, at midnight, or at noon, when the hour is fulfilled and perfect, on earth for a moment as it is in Heaven, in the constellation of the Lovers' Cluster.

Sheba took off her turban, and her long hair tumbled down to her waist; she lifted her face to kiss the Philosopher. They came to life through each other, each incarnate through the other's kiss.

Then all over the mountainside, pilgrims turned to one another's kisses. The old peasant held his wife's face in his hands and warmly kissed her; the baby's father kissed his mother's lips. Father kissed son, brother kissed brother, sister kissed sister, stranger embraced stranger, as if each were simultaneously, tenderly newborn to each other, or as if each had restored a treasure long lost to the other.