The Book of Heaven: A Novel (34 page)

People lined the streets to see them as they paraded through the streets each night, singing songs of love, in diaphanous costumes as for the marriage bed, their faces and bodies painted with gold, covered with their collections of jewels.

Each dancer was crowned with lit candles set in a golden three-branched candelabra referring to the Angel Flights; a smaller candelabra was attached to left and right hand by a bracelet. On the fifth count of every song, they pirouetted with extraordinary precision, molten planets in orbit, surrounded by the changing foliage of shadows the candles cast.

When they arrived at the house that had commissioned them, they surrounded the waiting young wife-to-be at the door and ushered her inside. They paraded past the hostess and the cluster of matrons supervising the children too young to be left alone, indulging themselves in the lacy betrothal pastries and rose-colored wines, and reminiscing about their own Fiançailles. The dancers and the season's fiancées moved into a reception room in which a stage had been improvised.

There, the girls, blushing, gorging themselves on pastries, were seated in a circle around the stage. Songs and dances instructed them in the postures, caresses, and rhythms of marriage, the wall-climbing vine, the rising sun, the sweeping torrent, the leaping doe, the coral diver, the stalking tigress, the thousand waves, the moonlit cloud, the serpent-charmer, and the rest of the anthology, illustrated by the dancers, singly and in pairs.

Afterward, the girls rejoined the matrons, and the dancers filed past them, catching the eyes of former sisters, mothers, cousins, into the streets for the final nocturne. They rested in their quarters or walked by the sea under light guard until it was time for the next evening's entertainment.

It was toward the end of the month that Rain saw her sister among the matrons after performing at a seaside villa in which the stage was set up on a lavishly decorated and canopied dock, the fiancées ferried out in gondolas. The entertainment was made more dramatic by a sudden tempest.

As the dancers made their way back through the reception hall crowded with matrons holding drowsy babies or performing sleep rituals for toddlers, Rain suddenly had the odd sensation that the sapphire stone on her finger had expanded, as if she were not wearing the gem, but the blue night itself; the feeling connected her to the gaze projecting it.

She followed the angle of the invisible attention, and saw her sister in the act of realizing that she had seen her own sapphire ring, her husband's bridal gift, on the finger of a dancer. Dolphin recognized the ring before she recognized Rain. The ring seemed to hover over them; they met inside the sapphire.

Dolphin was holding a little girl who suddenly screamed like a butchered lamb. She held the child closer, to soothe its fear at the sight of the burning, otherworldly dancers. But the child screamed more heartrendingly, and fought her. She struggled in Dolphin's arms, trying to reach the dancers, and began to cry out “Rain! Rain!” The child was Ocean, Azura's daughter.

At that instant, these sisters understood their story simultaneously, as if they were angles trapped in their positions within a parallelogram of sapphire light. One sister held the child of the perpetual bride who had killed herself; the other held the ring of her sister's husband who had tried to father a blood child on her to take for her barren sister. Now Rain could not return the ring, any more than Dolphin could return the child, who wailed with a despair more hopeless and primordial than either sister had yet known, for her life.

The sisters looked at each other. Their own suffering had for a moment miraculously ceased; as they exchanged gazes, each became the other. Rain lived her sister's imprisonment as wife within an orthodoxy of marriage she must always fail, Dolphin knew herself the sacrificed bride who absorbed the violence of desires, and defended the world from destruction. Together with the unprotected child, they were a trinity, each alive as a self, each alive as the other, entrapped in infinite compassion and freed through infinite compassion.

Revelation came to them as revelations do, briefly, and in the form of disbelief.

They understood, yet without knowing, that there are no separate lives; each life and individual character exists in relation to every other life, dead, living, yet to live. They were like crystals, rotating within a lattice that extended in all directions.

The presence of Azura refracted through them, and through her the gleaming meshes of other geometries, other thousands of unknown bonds. Spontaneously, furtively, they clasped hands, feeling the symmetry and relationship of hand and hand, flesh and bone. It was the last time they saw each other.

Returning to the house after a month in the capital felt not only painful for the brides, after the excitement and quasi-freedom of the Fiançailles, but also unnatural; returning to nights of clients and governance by Madam after a month of physical integrity was to be forced back into some perverse infancy.

Madam had already drawn up new schedules for the returning dancers. “You won't like it,” she said to Rain, “but I've assigned Azura's regular clients to you. They will spend at the same level for someone in the same style. I will have her clothes delivered to you. You will wear her dresses when entertaining her clients.”

Rain had nearly forgotten Madam's sustained enjoyment of force-feeding misery like disgusting food, watching the face of someone struggling to choke it down. She was of the genus that finds human suffering desirable.

Madam had the added relish of orchestrating a subtle and certain double failure: Rain would disappoint Azura's circle by not being Azura, while she would be constantly grieved by remembering her friend through the clients. She wondered if Madam, cunning in small cruelties, was capable of savoring any other pleasures than this.

Madam was remarkable for her steady hostility to any semblance of human happiness. Her contempt seemed to add to her power—she could administer misery in calibrated doses, with predictable results. She needed to know nothing particular about any person under her roof in order to produce a conflict between wish and obedience.

To concern herself with the well-being of her charges would mean cultivating personal knowledge, making mistakes. The study of humanity too often ignores how much people hate personal failure; they receive it like a whiplash. Madam was infallible in the provision of misery; she had perfected it.

Rain was reminded of the stories she'd heard from trading clients about a country where the feet of highborn women were rendered porcelain ornaments by binding. This crippled them, but also contained them, and made their fates more bearable for being known; what would happen if they could walk? If the way they lived came from both inside and outside them, what might happen then?

Dressed as Azura that night, she waited to undertake a client who might be furious that she was not her dead friend. When the door opened, a young man entered. She had seen him irregularly, but often with Azura; he was the son of a prominent ship owner, and was often traveling. The jewels he had brought Azura, now the property of the state, came from many countries, the fruits of the many voyages he had already undertaken.

Rain stood up, displaying the courtesy due to clients, and waited in impeccable silence, with lowered eyes, for his orders. She was by this time a well-known dancer, with a fame that drew visitors from the Old Monarchy into the Peninsula to see her perform in her Immortal cloister. Now it was all the more important for her to exhibit the gestures of obeisance; nothing awakened more brutality in the men of the Peninsula than the pretensions of women.

She kept her eyes hidden, though long practice in staring out into an audience and pretending not to see them enabled her to look at the client unobserved. He was staring at Azura's dress, and not at Rain at all. Then she saw something she had never seen in her life, or even heard of. The young client sank into a chair, put his face into his hands, and wept. Rain stood correctly motionless, waiting to be told how to respond.

“I loved her,” he said, when he was at last able to speak. “I thought the little girl might be mine.”

They talked all night. Only their voices touched, colliding occasionally in questions and answers.

Since they could never marry, Enarch told her, he had planned to steal Azura and the child from the house, and settle them on one of the islands off the coast of the Old Monarchy. The rescue was to have been carried out two days from now. Azura and the little girl were to have been spirited out in a trunk placed among the luggage of the dark-haired bride who always traveled with Admiral Annan.

Rain tried to console him. “You would have taken an impossible risk. She would surely have been discovered.”

“No. They had agreed to it, Annan and his daughter. She had persuaded him to help us.”

“Whose daughter?”

“Admiral Annan's. The dark-haired girl he pays for permanently is his daughter. He never wanted her to end her life here. He does the only thing he can, and pays for her as if she were his lover. No one has ever touched her.”

He began to sob again. “It's too late. Too late even for the little girl. There will never be justice.” He tore a pillow apart with his bare hands, substituting it for the table he wanted to overturn and splinter. “I despise this world—which will be ruled forever by those I despise.”

Then Rain spoke perhaps the first honest words she had spoken to a man in the house. She said, “It's not too late for the others. For the children of this house. And for the Immortal children in the other houses.

“Yes, I believe there will be no justice that we don't create. There will be no salvation unless we save each other. The question for us who suffer is not why we suffer, but what suffering we inflict?

“Who would we kill?

“Can we be just to someone trying to kill us?

“Can we save someone who is killing us?

“Whose suffering do we choose?

“Whose suffering do we ignore?

“Is there anguish that we need?

“Whose pain do we accept?

“Can we be just to someone who is trying to kill us?

“Can we save the innocent—and the guilty?

“How?”

Out of her questions, their conspiracy was born.

They planned first to make a census count of the children in all the Houses of Immortal Children, since neither knew how many there were, or how to plan the scope of the rescue. They could not hope to liberate all the women as well; children by their nature were easier to smuggle, but who would accompany them, and what would the mothers left behind be risking?

An intricate pattern of knowing and not knowing might determine who would die and who would live, according to which details each could give at the interrogations that would surely follow the rescue. And the rescue would have to be successful, because the act of failure is itself already a full and detailed confession.

Over the months, they made a count of the number of children in each house. Enarch would find several pages inside his map books, covered with small idle sketches of wingless birds in the landscapes where the houses were positioned. They had only to count the number of birds in each landscape to have a rough count of the children in each house, barring the new ones who were being born, and the others who passed into the service of the house each season, and were much more closely guarded.

Admiral Annan's daughter, Grail, with her freedom to travel with her father, provided this and much other useful information. Enarch was wealthy enough to be able to pay for costly nights of planning with Grail, despite the exclusive arrangement Madam had made with her father. And Admiral Annan, the connoisseur of Peninsulan dance, succumbed to a passion for Rain, and bought nights with her as well as his dark-haired girl. Such betrayals were always possible for a price; the house was expensive to manage, and the treasury of the Peninsula was steadily refilled with the revenues earned by the Immortals.

Madam managed these transactions discreetly. Her finesse in betrayal blinded her. It never occurred to her she might herself be betrayed. When it happened, as it turned out, she was both betrayed and betrayer.

On a spring evening, seeing to the service of wine to the guests in the first courtyard, she suddenly put her hand to her forehead, dropped her glass, and fell forward so abruptly that no one had the presence of mind to catch her before her head struck the ground. The body needs no partner to be unfaithful; Madam had had a stroke.

She was carried to her rooms, where she lay unconscious, cared for by shifts of her Immortal brides. Among them was Rain, who volunteered for the hours just before dawn. God had at last given her the chance to kill, that human desire that precedes sexual lust and often outlives it.

Rain stared at Madam, now defenseless in her bed, her mouth open, her breath rasping like a saw in wood. Remembered scenes of Madam slapping, insulting, seizing children, and distributing them like rations of wheat, Madam criticizing an evening's flower arrangements while girls screamed in rooms behind closed doors poured through her mind like a hemorrhage.

The life of the house had been conducted according to Madam's creed, her luxurious array of cruelties, her dream of God. Now Rain would be Madam's God brought to life.

All the lives Madam had harmed would, in a fatal ecstasy, be transformed into a sacrament of death. Rain's only desire was to eradicate this being of pure and absolute evil, and send her to the hell she had made for others; her desire erased the reality of the children, the work of the rescue, the escape from this house into life. She was far beyond the principle of the general amnesty that is given to the sick and wounded.

Rain had entered eternity; she had found the timeless perfect justice, the godly power, and the absolute innocence that all murderers possess. For it is the nature of that dark miracle that at the moment of murder, no killer feels a trace of guilt. Murderers give death to those who do not deserve to live.