The Book of Heaven: A Novel (32 page)

Azura's own work over these weeks had guided Rain into several of the different worlds that coexisted alongside each other, even here.

Azura was a prostitute, but her dancing was sacred. She was teaching Rain that the worlds were permeable. She showed Rain how to enter dancing into an inexplicable heaven where no one could follow her without her consent. Rain approached the chapel with studied nonchalance, but she was filled with hope that Azura, who had mastered a kind of half-freedom, would disclose a way to escape altogether.

She heard a sequence of clear, piping rhythmic sounds, like birdsong. At the entrance to the chapel, in the full sunlight, she saw a baby. The child glowed like a planet on a blue and silver quilt, rolling in the folds as if she were swimming, singing the infant songs that exist before speech.

Azura, seated in the shadows, was watching her daughter play. She could see that Rain looked at the baby with the face of spontaneous love, which has always the intensity of reunion. Rain searched deep into the child's eyes as if she recognized her, as if she wanted to evoke a memory in this child who couldn't yet speak, or as if she wanted to restore some memory of her own.

“Is it safe for you to bring her here?” Rain asked, kneeling by the child, delicately touching her head as if she were a cup of water to drink from. She had thought there was nothing but violence left in her, but her hand on the child's head, to her wonder, was infinitely gentle.

Love was possible, even here. She had a strange feeling, as if she had lived in some other world than the Peninsula. It was as if she were immersed in another larger self, surrounding her like a body of water.

The child seemed to have something to tell her. It had no words but prattle; still it had the gift of making her feel what it needed her to know.

Yet Rain grasped something like complete sentences, made of flesh. She understood with the speed of breath that there was a vast difference between a being like herself that had ceased growing, and a being like this one, whose size changed infinitely every minute, and in every direction, including its own perceptions. That rapid metamorphosis in space was lost to adults like herself, but became a capacity to metamorphose in time, from woman to child to aged invalid, from life to death and back again.

She looked at the child with marveling curiosity, and then at Azura questioningly.

The child sang and played with its own body, handling its nose and feet like toys. Azura did not interfere with its games, but stayed near, as a kind of bridge for the child to cross toward her or away from her. Together, mother and child were like the first letter of some unknown alphabet, a bridge-shaped curve with a movable round punctuation mark, never in the same position. They were the first pair of this kind that Rain had ever seen.

Azura had meant her to see this. No matter what happened to her, beings existed, and would exist, who had yet to be destroyed. There was some threshold she herself might cross. She could see that, enter, and find out if their fates meant anything to her.

Every day on the Peninsula was shaped to frame life as it had been ordained. Here, locked in the House of the Immortals, within the canonical certainty of the Immortals' dedication, Rain had discovered the unknown. She had discovered questions within a world made only of commands.

“I want her to see the sea. I want to teach her to imagine leaving.”

“Is that cruel?” Rain asked. “Since she will be a bride and die here?”

“Perhaps she won't,” Azura said, and then wrapped her arms around the baby as if she were building her a castle of flesh.

“Do you know of any children who were permitted to leave here?”

“Sometimes a way can be found. Everyone tells one story that is almost certain.” She leaned forward, and whispered, “They say Madam had a daughter, and that she managed to send her away. I believe it. It would have been very difficult for a child of hers to survive among the others in the House of Immortal Children. And even so, how could she have brought a child up here, in this fate?”

“She had a child?” Rain repeated, incredulous.

“The great governess and exemplary immortal bride. If I could find a way to prove it, the proof could force her to help my child leave the same way.”

She didn't need to ask Rain to search on the child's behalf. The thought of harming Madam was immediately as strong as starvation. She felt a strange new physical coherence, of eye, muscle, smell, implacable will, as if she were a stalking lioness.

The strange sense of overlapping selves disappeared. She was as single as a weapon is, a knife, an ax, a pike, a battering ram. There is nothing more individual, more alone, more single in nature and purpose, than a weapon. They are instruments that cannot be paired; they cannot express more than one thought.

The dance Rain performed on the night she debuted on the Immortal stage is a legend of the courtesan repertoire, though now known largely through drawings and rarely performed.

The ballet was a technically complex pas de deux whose subject was a man and a glass of wine. Rain was the glass of wine; through her, the man was enchanted, charmed, and delivered to a radiant, transcendent vision of God. Finally, staggering, intoxicated to the point of drunkenness, he willfully shatters the glass and wastes the wine that has given him such pleasure and revelation.

Rain wore an ingenious costume consisting of a net of crystals over a red silk tunic. Her pirouettes modeled all the facets of cut crystal caught in light. Her partner sipped from the cup of her rounded arms. Her partner's virtuoso steps on the very edge of balance during his drunken scene were admired and imitated long afterward.

Few forgot the moment when the flickering crystals scattered over the floor, and Rain seemed to flow into oblivion, in agonizingly slow arabesques, until she disappeared, bleeding a ribbon of red silk. The audience applauded relentlessly, until they succeeded in compelling the dancers to repeat the final scene. The stage was pelted with dark red roses.

Rain could be hidden away no longer; after their debuts as soloists, the dancers became recognizable, and were expected to join the guests after the performances. The dancers stimulated high payments among the guests excited by their brilliant work. Freshly bathed, they walked among the guests like fires freed from the confining hearth that had been the stage.

Rain emerged, and went to join Azura, feeling the bond of dancer and maker of dance, as well as the protection of her presence. Spontaneously, appreciatively, they clasped hands. Madam approached, flanked by clients. “You are not here to congratulate each other,” she said audibly, and roughly pushed their hands apart. “If there is anything to praise, God will praise it. Tonight, there was nothing to praise.”

Azura's face fell. She knew that Madam's insults were one form of calculated prelude to a sale.

They were designed to leave a bride so bruised and humiliated that she would willingly accept a kind gesture from any of the guests. And they were a signal to the guests who had paid the fee to claim their brides for the night.

Azura was led away: her work was not over for this night. She saw that Madam brought Rain toward a short gray-haired man who reached out to touch her bare arm.

It was the harbormaster whose criticism of Rain at her long-ago funeral dance had stung Jarre into the almost competitive burst of fury that had brought her here.

“Her dancing has greatly improved since I last saw her in public,” he said, daringly alluding to her existence prior to Immortality. “I congratulate you, Madam. I will drink my wine from this cup.”

So Rain began her descent into Hell.

Human beings have wondrous capacities: they are the only creatures who can transform metaphor into reality. Unlike simpler animals, they feed not only on flesh, but also on dreams that they make flesh.

They do not even need to die in order to cease to live. They need no underworld to construct a hell. It is a strange kind of immortality.

Rain was conducted by Madam as a ghost is led by a god, to an underworld in which she ceased to exist except as the shifting shadow of a client's desires. If a client wanted a daughter, she must be the girl. If the client wanted a dog, she must be the bitch. If a client wanted death, she must be even less than the corpse. She was to be the grave.

For years to come, she spent her days thinking of the night that waited for her, when nothing could be refused, any more than a dying man can refuse to stop breathing. If her own father had come as a client to the House of the Immortals, Madam would have provided her for him at his request.

At times, she would see Admiral Annan, her father's boyhood friend, in the audience at her performances. He was known to be a connoisseur of the dance; she thought that was perhaps why he had not attempted to possess her. Her art gave her the power to enter his thoughts, perhaps even to become part of what he could see.

He would look at her with a strange gravity, but never speak to her, as if he were seeing a monument or a painting. In any case, it was against the Rule of the House for past history or identity to be acknowledged in any way by those who had been removed from time, and by their clients.

The admiral always left the courtyard after the dance with the same bride, a dark-haired and silent girl to whom he had apparently bought exclusive rights, as only the very wealthy can afford. She lived in her own quarters, to which they retreated when he visited.

Annan was so powerful and a Crowned One of such limitless wealth that he even took this girl with him from time to time as part of his entourage when he traveled to other parts of the Peninsula. She was the envy of all the brides for this patronage, which made her even more withdrawn.

Sometimes, among the tributes of flowers, jewelry, and delicacies she received after a performance, all signed by aspirants, and carefully reviewed by Madam, ever a ruthless abacus, Rain found bouquets she imagined Annan had sent.

They were elegant arrangements of coastal flowers, such as beach roses, that she had grown up with, always with a simple card enclosed that read “In Gratitude.” Much more than the elaborate arrangements she received from greenhouses, they evoked for her the world outside the house, and in the most subtle floral code, the past.

Annan never offered for her, but a number of young men who had been acquainted with her as a daughter in the household of General Jarre bought her out of curiosity.

A portly bearded man bought her after an evening of folk dances, drawn from the dances every girl from the Peninsula was taught as a child. She realized that she had been purchased by her sister's pious husband. He did not acknowledge her, but made her kneel and serve God. He bought her at intervals over the course of a year, then he inexplicably disappeared.

He left her a sea-colored sapphire ring that she recognized as having belonged to Dolphin. Madam was scrupulous in delivering it—she never stole jewelry belonging to the Brides—though she divulged no information, if she had any, about why the ring was no longer on her sister's hand.

She was trained to speak only when she had divined what a client wanted to hear her say. For extra fees, the clients could make requests called prayers for particular needs or desires to be satisfied. They asked that Madam deliver Rain dressed in particular costumes, her face magnified through certain cosmetics, her skin whitened, or darkened, or rouged to the desired color. Once someone requested that she be painted gold, to represent a woman from another world in a popular fairy tale. Madam experimented with the shades of gilt on Rain herself, until she was satisfied that its radiance was sufficiently dazzling in candlelight.

Rain listened impassively as they spoke to her, and about her. She was schooled to understand that she was contingent, the client ultimate. The client had the power to tell her not only what she might say, but to declare what she was thinking, and force her to assent to the thoughts he created. She must never contradict. If she had other impulses or motives, she was to purify herself of them. Any well-brought-up girl of the Peninsula could manage that aspect of life in the house.

Sometimes clients wanted her as she appeared onstage; what excited them was to be with her in theater, not in reality. Fresh costumes were kept to answer prayers like these. She would be brought to them, bathed and newly attired in the duplicate costume, to give the illusion that she was the role they had seen her play.

Prayers were received from some who wanted her to be more beautiful than she was; others insisted that she be made more ugly. She was to be younger than they were—or older than they were. An aristocratic lady from the Old Monarchy to be debased, a peasant in local costume to be elevated, a mother, a battle talisman, they created her in their image.

The one thing that was never asked of her or of any other bride was the kiss on the lips, symbolic of shared love or of ultimate deceit. No man of the Peninsula would debase himself in this way, but a variety of superstitions was connected with the notion, fears of transformation, of losing the precious certainty of election, or even the power God poured into his Warriors.

They shed blood over her: the more absent and silent she was, the more rivals battled over the meaning of her gestures. Was a pause before she launched a whiplash series of steps significant? If one client felt she had singled him out with some look or hinted toward him with her hands, another felt slighted.

Something like a war developed between two factions of spectators who clashed fanatically over their opposite interpretations of a role she danced. This was a ballet in which she played the only female role, a young girl, who falls in love with a boy and runs away with him.

The third act is famous for its finale, a demanding, athletic trio in which the girl is pursued and killed by her father and brother. Rain took a last, abandoned, breathtaking leap directly into the audience, where the dancer playing her brother caught her in the air, and carried her back onto the stage to her death.