The Book of Heaven: A Novel (39 page)

He followed and hid and opened the doors of rooms when no one was there. He threaded his way from the attics to the underground storerooms, but it was always as if someone had just closed the door and left the room he was on the verge of entering.

He found nothing unexpected—the most personal possessions in this house were the toys and furniture of the missing children, collections that functioned unsurprisingly as shrines. The brides guarded them jealously, refusing to share their children's possessions with the refugee families.

Sometimes whispering, otherworldly music could be heard, at no fixed hours of day or night—the women apparently still sang lullabies to the lost children. He couldn't make out the words. He listened as he walked among the other courtyards, but the only music he heard from them was song or ballet, in rehearsal for performance. The music from the House of Immortal Children had a more personal and primitive quality—by some acoustical trick, it seemed to be coming from beyond the building itself.

Pekrin formed another strategy. He would disappear for a few days, to let any habits that had been suppressed while he was there reappear. He would return at an unpredictable day and late hour, and walk the compound like a thief to see if the darkness had anything to reveal.

The courtyards were quiet, melancholy, debased with cooking utensils, laundry, and makeshift shelters. Luxury required an assumption of stability, the abundance of being granted more than one's own life, unlike these survivors who had been left with nothing more.

He still had nothing to report, other than Sheaf's confession to him—the testimony of one bride implicating the others in the escape of the children. The others could just as easily reverse her story.

Frustrated, he turned to me at last for advice. “You are looking outside,” I said, “when you should be looking inside. If you want to find where the secret is, look inside. In this way, you will become a part of the secret you don't know. And you will find the truth, because once you are a part of the secret you will not be able to hide from yourself.”

Pekrin began to hide himself: he hid in the shadows of the Pagan Chapel, in wardrobes, in random rooms. This was something he did not like. The tension of a person in hiding has a primal desperation, whether that person is the hunted or the hunter. He realized, though, that before, he had been looking only for what he expected. No one will ever make a discovery if he is not afraid of what it is he might find.

Pekrin found what he was not looking for in a long sealed-off underground passage that linked a cluster of dusty storerooms.

Its walls were lined with stone compartments carved with now faint names and clusters of grapes. He looked inside a compartment. He was standing inside a vast cupboard of bones. He recognized that he was inside an ancient pagan catacomb, of a type not unknown near the coast.

He opened the door of a storeroom. Its walls were covered with frescoes of small miniature portraits, the famous pagan “faces of the blessed.” It had clearly been a pagan chapel, as had the second storeroom, though it also contained beds, chests, and trunks packed with old clothes and theatrical costumes. Three trunks were stacked in the center of the room. Suspended above them on a thin silk cord was a painted clay bird without wings.

He went close to it. There was nothing out of the ordinary. It was a common child's toy, although a child would have thrown away a bird once broken, not hung it from the center of a room. Pekrin began to look for an alcove within the scattered furniture to serve as a hiding place.

It was dull to wait, after the initial sense of triumph in coming across the icon of the rebels. He wondered if it had simply been abandoned here, if they had felt watched and moved elsewhere. He fell asleep. He was unsure whether it was still day or night, when he heard a hushed choral chant, and footsteps in the corridor. He saw them as they entered, eight of the brides, the first carrying a crystal pitcher of water, the others holding single candles. Some men and women who he was sure must be refugees were present, too.

The celebrant set the water in the center of the trunks, which, he now saw, served as an altar. The others ringed the pitcher with their candles, so that the images of the flames wavered in the trembling water. The wingless bird swayed overhead.

“We are parched,” the first woman began the ceremony. The others sang the phrase, in soft repetitions, like lapping water. “We are parched, we are parched. We thirst.” Then a mesmerizing chant began, one word pronounced by each singer: “Rain. Soften. Our. Souls. Rain. Make. Our. Salt. Tears. Spring. Sweet. Rain. Make. Stone. Ground. Flower. Wash. Death. From. Us. Falling. Rain. From. Heaven. Rain.”

He recognized some of the strange, distant strains of music he had overheard, he realized now, from underground, the rhythms transforming each word into a single, delicate drop of rain. They sang the chant perpetually and softly, during the brief liturgy that followed.

The woman presiding, with a priestly gesture, lifted a candle from the table and held it high with both hands.

“Beloved. You, the betrayed, and raped, hunted and tortured, silenced and murdered, you seekers of revenge, pilgrims in Hell, may the Storm refresh your souls.

“Know now what she knew: Our souls wander barefoot in the magmas of hatred as well as the gardens of love. She was seared. Our palms burn too with the blood we would spill. We walk with her through the crucible of hatred, and come to know, as she did, that we are neither perpetually wronged, nor delivered by wrong to perpetual righteousness.

“Rain, wingless bird, your fall renews the world. Help us to see by our darkness as well as by our light. Make the suffering we inflict as clear to us as the pain we endure. Let our hatreds not destroy us, or those we hate, but illuminate us, with them, like this flame.” She set the candle down. The full light on her face allowed him to see her features in detail. The priest was the former vineyard mistress, now the acting governess.

Two brides brought twelve glasses from a battered cupboard against the wall. The priest held the crystal pitcher high above the flames of the candles. The other women and men circled with the glasses in their hands, and paused before her as she poured water for each.

When all had received the water, the priest raised her own glass and said: “May those who hate know the kiss of grace, lucid and perfect as water; may those who love know the kiss of grace, lucid and perfect as water.”

After they drank their glasses, rinsed them, and removed them to the cupboard, they circled the makeshift altar again. One woman pulled a dark red rose from her dress, and laid it on the table. The priest sprinkled it with water drops that jeweled it in the candlelight.

“Rain and fire shape the flower. O wound become the offered rose.”

Then they left the room quietly, but no longer furtively, touching each other affectionately, with a hand on a cheek or a caress on a shoulder. Their expressions were serene and glowing, as if they believed themselves in Heaven.

Most of the people's faces were obscured by the shadows, but Pekrin saw the priest clearly and unmistakably. He waited until he could hear neither murmur nor footstep. Then he stepped from the cavern the furniture had made for him, and moved toward the trunk that had been the altar. He reached up and ripped the wingless clay bird from its silk cord. He had their toy, and now he would compel these catacomb women and men to confess to him whatever it was they were playing at.

I did not make it my affair, though Pekrin correctly informed me of his discovery. He could scarcely conceal his wish for his first authority, his first success. His discipline in offering me a share of the victory he longed to claim uncompromised was a measure of his self-mastery and his iron patriotism. It was the boy's first real opportunity to distinguish himself among his generation in the service of his country, and to prove himself to his father.

I offered only one piece of guidance—that he must at all costs uncover the truth about this ring of women, but I stressed that it was as important to learn the identities of any men involved with them.

Pekrin let two days and the morning after pass without action, allowing the house to go about its business unsuspectingly. I took the opportunity to assemble for him, dispersed into the lower-lying towns, a small group of soldiers to have at hand if needed. The roads were still difficult, with washed-out sections, and stretches strewn with debris, so the extra time to bring the men up was welcome.

On the afternoon of the third day, Pekrin asked Madam to arrange an appointment with the acting governess. He watched her as she walked with her air of crisp purpose across the courtyard.

A concealed person watching someone he expects coming toward him is like a world the other is entering unawares. Pekrin watching and waiting in the shadows in his little anteroom felt he had a fatal knowledge of this woman, as if he were in the act of creating her. He was standing as she entered, and able to see in detail how her face distorted with the surprise of seeing him instead of Madam. She recomposed her features quickly and rather brutally, like an artist dissatisfied with a sketch.

Then he stepped aside, to administer the second surprise. She saw the wingless bird he had taken after her ceremony hanging from a silk cord above the table, swaying slowly in the circles of its impossible flight.

Pekrin found her demeanor at that moment fascinating. Her gaze had the splintered look of a person a split second from death, as if the soul were glass breaking into a thousand fragments. Then she closed her eyes and, bizarrely, smiled, as if she had just heard the voice of someone she loved.

“Sit down,” Pekrin said. “I see you recognize this toy.”

“It would serve nothing to pretend that I don't. The question is how do you recognize it?”

“I saw you praying to it three nights ago. You and eleven other women.”

“I assure you, we were not praying to the clay bird.”

“You hung it above a simulated altar, and performed some sort of ritual. You seem to address it. We have also been following for some time the appearance of images like this one in the port.”

“Of those I have no knowledge.”

“I doubt that very much. But first, I want to know what the toy means to you. You say you don't pray to it. But you—and others, whether you know them or you don't—apparently accord this bird some reverence. Do you think it has some magical power?”

“Absolutely not. That would be unthinkable for us. We are not practitioners of magic. It is a symbol for us, a memory, a relic, an inspiration, a reminder of what God asks of us.”

“And what does God ask of you?”

“To fly without wings. To do what seems impossible. To cling to our loves through the rapids of our hates. To know that God charges us with the task of making these miracles. They exist between person and person, as flame goes from candle to candle. To know that all we can know of right or wrong is through the way our acts are revealed in the lives of other people. There is no other way to see God. It is not given to us.”

“These are not the beliefs of the Peninsula.”

“They are indeed. She was born here, after all.”

“She? Who are you talking about?”

“Rain.”

“The traitor, the plotter against the Peninsula, is the source of these beliefs? The abductor of children?”

“No. God is. Rain was no traitor. She was God.”

Pekrin realized from his sharp intake of air that he had been holding his breath as if he were underwater. The sacrilege was so appalling that he felt a kind of exhausted pity for her. He would have to see this woman executed, even though she was mad. It would bring him all the honor of killing a rabid dog.

He gave her another chance. He poured her a glass of water.

“Drink this,” he ordered her. “Compose yourself. Now think carefully of what you really mean to say. You cannot mean that Rain was God our only Sovereign.”

“No, I did not mean that Rain was God our only Sovereign.”

He was relieved. He might after all guide this babbling lunatic back to safety. Women never understood the grandeurs of doctrine; they were natural conduits of ceremony and ritual. Their skills were best used in repetition; in rocking the cradle, not in studying the science of reproduction.

“Then why did you call her God?”

“Because God is not a sovereign. God refuses power. God came to us incarnate in Rain to experience hate and love.”

“God is all-powerful.”

“Love is impossible without the relinquishing of power.”

“God is all-loving.”

“God made us incapable of experiencing love without experiencing hate, as the chisel shapes the jewel. God suffered both as we do. She submitted herself to our blindness, our uncertainty, our precarious humanity.”

“So you think God appeared as a mortal girl, sequestered and used by men in whatever way they desired, and then executed?”

“That, Lord Pekrin, is exactly what I think.”

“And she did nothing to defend herself, your God? Used not one of her infinite powers in her own behalf? Gave no command to her followers?”

“God does not command. God asks. We do not overcome evil through orders, but through questions. Rain said, ‘We do not overcome evil through “you shall not,” but through “why do you?”'

“It has always been for us to protect God—and we fail. God asks for us to protect, to shelter, to feed, to embrace Her as if She were mortal. As if She were a child. Rain said, ‘A child has no power, but a child is not weak.'

“She asks us to contemplate each mortal person as if they were infinite. As if they were dying. As if they were divine.

“We cannot see God. We cannot speak in God's behalf. We cannot do God's will. God is invisible. We can know God only through our own acts and their consequences. Like all of us, you are blinded by your own face when you look at God. And you don't see mine. But your soul is reflected in my face, as mine is in yours. Rain said, ‘We are metaphors describing God, each life. And how we treat each other is how we treat God.'