The Book of Heaven: A Novel (41 page)

At such times, I can only renew my vow of devotion to my creators, and marvel with gratitude at my existence, created not by the One, but by the Many. I was made to serve the humans who brought me to life. Through their protection and their generous love, I survive throughout the generations. In my eyes, they will always remain sublime, a radiant, unapproachable, and magnificent mystery. I kiss the hems of their garments. All praise to my creators! I adore them! I adore them! I adore them! No matter how I strive, I will never be worthy of them; I will never be their equal.

One sees in God only what one worships.

All souls burn: some give light.

Hatred can be as true as love.

Perfect hatred leads to enlightenment, not conflagration.

The wisdom of hatred must be earned with neither rejoicing nor violence.

Much can be learned from hatred: nothing from revenge.

When hatred leads to murder, it is as terrible as goodness without mercy.

When they say, “I hate you,” do not protest; rather, ask, “Tell me the story of your life.”

Hatred, examined, leads to freedom from hatred.

We do not need to love those we loathe, but to treat them ethically, and to understand our loathing.

Misogyny is often justified, but can never be sacred.

Each human being must be fundamental to God; therefore misogyny, as theology, is heresy.

Women, it has been said, are inferior, amoral, animal, satanic. In which case being born is either insulting, or meaningless.

Believe only when you grasp the consequences of your belief.

He who would be a king of ashes must keep his kingdom in flames.

Those who know nothing of this world are great scholars of the next one.

Hatred, correctly disciplined, torments only the one who hates.

Dogs are taught by commandment; human beings learn through questions.

To hate without violence begins the work of love.

Your hatred is corrupt if the children of those you hate suffer it.

Like a grape, hatred must be crushed, but not obliterated. Crushed, then tasted, tasted and then known, until it is transformed into wine.

Nothing good can come of innocence.

She who has not hated will never love.

She who has never hated will never know how to forgive.

Men call the hatred they do not recognize “honor.”

There is no being who feels himself more innocent than the murderer as he kills.

There was only one innocent in the Garden: the serpent.

The death of one woman is the death of countless men.

The death of one woman is the death of countless women.

The death of one woman is the death of countless children.

Violence begun in reason will end in madness.

Murder cannot kill; it splits a being into a thousand ghosts.

Inside the rib cage of his victim, the murderer is locked.

Death may end the life of the victim, but murder is eternal in the killer.

In the marketplace of souls, one may sell a soul, but not purchase one.

Praise Divine Death who protects even those who torture from infinite cruelty.

Hatred reveals to us that even demons suffer.

No one has yet measured the force of the Divine Will to refuse power.

Men and women will not become human until they refuse to be God.

Hatred is the pit in the olive: the fruit cannot form without its stone.

Hatred joined to violence is like love without thought.

We need fire to cook, and hatred to motivate justice; the key to both arts is the management of flame.

And God said: Unless you know every word of every language, living or lost, forming, or unspoken, you know no more of me than the child whose whole idea of the world is formed from the only two words she knows: “Mother, Father.”

And God said: Speak all the words in all the tongues of all the world, but there is one word forever forbidden to human beings: “infidel.”

TO THE MEMORY OF IDA B. WELLS

T
his constellation has never been hidden. Yet such is the irony and wonder of the human relation to Heaven, that the vision of certain stars, celestial geometries, and orbits has often been limited to what human beings are determined not to, or are willing to, see.

You will remember how long it was believed that the sun circled the earth in an ecstasy of hierarchical reverence, and that this belief was enforced by law, through the means of torture, or even penalty of death. No cancer has tormented or killed as many men as knowledge decreed or its shadow, knowledge denied existence. The one ends in damnation, the other in despair.

Both bar the rare revelations we are granted of truth, an apparition as graceful, fleeting, and difficult to embrace as a nymph glimpsed just beyond a waterfall. For science is a matter not just of intellect, but also of desire, for worlds that we would wish, while lovers cling to each other with their yearning rapturous minds.

Few enough speak of the Lovers' Cluster, yet it is the glory of the heavens. It is a constellation of many unknown features, still being studied, since after the fall of the Shebans the people were obliged to refer to it as the Warriors, and their astronomers ordered to illustrate it as an image of hand-to-hand combat.

See, if you choose, countless symmetrical terraces bejeweled with stars, glittering in a hundred shades, amethyst, jade, sapphire, ruby, topaz, aquamarine, amber, pearl, pink, emerald, in perpetual motion, as if the stones of a mosaic were constantly rearranging themselves.

These surround a central region in which a magnificent double star, opalescent and variable, a celestial couple absorbing and returning the colors of the cluster, revolves like a pair of lovers in each other's arms. The changing translucent colors of the Lovers, now transparent and shimmering, now fiery and blinding, make their embrace a composition of infinite variation.

We know that the double stars of this cluster are so powerful that at its center, where they embrace, is a region of permanent light. It is said that the jewels that lovers universally give to each other as presents are crystallized fragments of the stars of this constellation, scattered on earth by the Lovers, the All-Givers whose love is so abundant that it overflows in generosity and in knowledge as well as beauty.

In the country where Sheba was born, jewels were not a form of money, but of knowledge. Jewels told stories and described in their forms and colors the most excellent qualities possible to humankind. There jewels were to educate, first as toys, through which children transcended greed, then as ornament, through which young people transcended lust, and finally as art, through which older people looked through a thousand eyes of different colors than their own, and transcended the limits of their narrow ways of seeing the world.

Jewels were considered a kind of incorruptible speech, words for divine qualities that had suffered through trials and succeeded in keeping their meanings until they were always true. A word of truth, the Sheban saying went, is a jewel set in the heart's amulet; they also had many folktales in which the words of love were metamorphosed into jewels flowing from the lips of those who loved, their meaning so intense that the words themselves became palpable.

Words were important to the Shebans, and were likewise considered jewels; their ceremonial rulers, a king and queen, were always a pair of singers, the two considered the greatest practitioners of their generation of the Sheban epics. It was unusual for a king and queen to be married to each other; rather, it was expected that the queen not be married to the king, as the Shebans, unlike their neighbors, had a horror of dynastic marriage, and did all they could to discourage it.

Thus, there were no conventional Sheban features or complexions, as the Shebans never organized themselves in tribes, and habitually married foreigners. In this way, too, by limiting clan alliances, the people of Sheba were not decimated by the bloody tribal feuds that ravaged families just beyond their borders. They were masters of the art of not having children, who could be conceived only by mutual consent. This was a source of sharp controversy and official disapproval by many of their neighbors, though privately, they were openly envied, and it was speculated that perhaps fewer Sheban children were unhappy to be born.

However, Sheba's parents, unconventionally, were partners in bed and bread as well as in song. The Queen's flesh, betraying her Ellushan forebears, was black as the darkest night. When she wore her diamond necklace whose gems were set in the form of the constellation, the Lovers, it seemed those stars themselves had emerged from the tender night of her breast.

Her husband's skin was a rich copper, a sunset color, and his belts and chest plates were set with turquoise, the same distinctive blue as his eyes. Their children, Sheba and her older brother, Quiran, recombined the qualities of both: their dark skins were opaline, black glowing ruby in firelight, and changing notes of autumnal ambers, golds, and grenadines.

Every generation, families seemed to change skin colors; the Shebans considered complexion seasonal. This was consistent with their view of the Divine: they believed all gods were God, and that God was at times many, like a chorus, and at times, one, like a soloist.

Their house was filled with the traditional volumes of songs and poems, on whose black pages words and notes were illuminated in raised gold shapes, so that the tellers could perform them by their own light. During the Tellings, Sheba's parents wore the magnificent, justly celebrated garments of the Sheban songmakers, tunics of velvet and satin, brocaded with lines of poems and song stanzas from that evening's recitation, the phrases punctuated with jewels.

No one knew when the country's epics had first been compiled and sung, but they were unique, in that the principal heroes of the epics were not only or primarily men, but also women. Unconventionally, the heroines and heroes of the Sheban epics sought not glory, but fruitful and illuminating love. The Sheban singers emphasized, generation after generation, that humankind studied, knew, and understood far more of war than it did of love.

In undertaking that subject, the cycles of the Sheban songs were far more tragic than the martial epics of their neighbors, as love is more rare than glory, more unpredictable than battle, and exposes all who love to the greatest dangers imaginable.

Those wounded by the sword die once of their wounds, but the wounds of love recur, replicating themselves through both male and female in each generation, destroying those who never knew or understood the source of their destruction. The wounds of love kill not only warriors, but women, and most terribly of all, children.

Many more have died of attempting love than victory, and countless numbers hate love more than war. Honor has often been the dear prize awarded to the killers of lovers. The epics of war have always and still outnumber the epics of love. For those who love deeply and greatly gain a clairvoyant, excruciating awareness of the fear and suffering of the world along with their joy, which few warriors could endure. Who is not more truly afraid of a love story than of a tale of war?

Nevertheless, the poetry of war has always been treated with a dignity and accorded a prestige denied the poetry of love. But the Shebans persisted in singing of love in all its aspects. There was the tragedy of Nenufar, a girl who could not love human beings, and of her successive unrequited loves for a swan, a face on a coin, a stone wall, and finally for a diamond necklace that strangled her.

There was the lengthy cycle of the exploits of the warrior Bano, who boasted to God he had no fear of death, and was undefeated in his marvelous adventures until the twelfth book, when his muscles trembled and failed in the task of cherishing as he held his beloved Orania, dying not from wounds on the battlefield, but in their bedroom, in his arms.

There were tales like that of Mana, an epic of maternal love, in which a mother embarks on a quest to rescue her captive daughter, a great role for a virtuoso coloratura, with its spectacular complex arias celebrating the timeless sacrificial love of mothers, each more dramatic than the next, only surpassed by the denouement, in which Mana fails to recognize the unaccompanied voice of the escaped daughter whom she herself had had imprisoned. This was one of the most splendid among the many works that explored what grand public rhetoric serves to conceal, and how often false love is nearly indistinguishable from true.

The Shebans had also evolved an entirely new genre of romance, in which the happy endings of their neighbor's conventional comedies served as the beginnings of the story's action. They thought any story a failure if it came to an end.

Finally, there was the sublime, unending cycle of Eno and Aiyesha. Every year the reigning queen and king composed a new book of the inexhaustible story of this couple, charged with the perhaps impossible task of creating love in a loveless world.

The great epics and songs were sung to the accompaniment of a unique stringed instrument of Sheban invention, the oar, originating, as you might guess, from the oars of that seafaring people. The basic chord setting the rhythm of the recitations evokes an oar moving through the water, the rowing beat driving and percussive, contrasting with the music of the water, lapping, or viscous, or leaping in white-capped waves, expressed by the combinations of the strings.

It was the custom for the oars to be crafted by pairs of adolescent girls and boys, as this was considered the only means of successfully fashioning an instrument that combined the anatomical qualities of female and male. The oars were ornamented with figures of red, gold, and mother of pearl drawn from the images of the epics, and the bodies of the instruments made of highly polished wood. The Sheban oars could be played horizontally, like guitars, or upright, like cellos, producing different tones.

Sheba, the saying went, was surrounded by the sea, and by song. City inhabitants lived in buildings that formed the walls of quadrangles ornamented with scenes from the epics worked in mosaic. In the shared central courtyards of the quadrangles were pools lined with colored tiles inscribed with quotations from the songs.

The courtyards were bordered with both real trees and flowering bushes and invented trees, vines, and bushes of gold, coral, and other precious materials, hung with fruit and flowers in various stages of ripeness and bloom, made intricately of jewels. At dusk, when the fragrance of the natural blooms was subdued, the immortal trees gave off their own fragrances, by means of ingenious mixtures of the famous local aromatics, perfuming the quadrangle throughout the night. It was through these fragrances that the Shebans told time. Each of the eight hours of the day corresponded to a fragrance on the incense clock, so that they woke to the hour of Bread, and lived the sequence of their days through the hour of the Ocean, to the bedtime hour of the Rose.

The eight hours of sleep at night were mutable, designed for each individual's preference, so that one might dream through the hours of Almond or Bonfire, another to the Hour of Lavender or Lemon or Cut Grass.

In this way, the Shebans admitted the mysterious elasticity of time; the hours of the schoolchild whose clock infused the fragrances of gingerbread and ink were dreamed differently than the hours of a young man who dreamed of sleeping blissfully with the eight girls whose perfumes fixed the hours of his incense clock. This was what any Sheban traveling in other countries would speak of nostalgically, the incense that woke them at dawn, and the exquisite scents that rose at night from their gardens of dreams.

Anyone who was drawn to a particular jewel on the branch of a dream tree could pick it like a grape or a rose, and wear or contemplate it until another jewel beckoned, speaking a message in its inaudible, but real language.

There, children, Sheba and Quiran among them, fed and tended the rare water silkworms who lived in the pools, which spun the extraordinarily strong and flexible threads that furnished the strings of the oars. The use of the water silk was responsible for the inimitable melodies accompanying the songs, each instrument capable of producing eighty-four thousand notes, not only the full known range of the musical scales of earth, but also of the marine scales.

A Sheban orchestra was organized so that players on the right-hand side played the music of a character's actions, and on the left, thanks to these additional scales, the music of a character's unspoken feelings.

These song cycles were the basis of their children's education. As soon as the children were weaned from their mothers, it is said, they began to suckle instead from the breasts of poems and songs, words and music flowing into them. Thus, the children began life with learning to assume many forms. This, the Sheban sages said, was the difference between humans and animals, which were confined throughout their lives to one form only. Animals never imagine themselves people, though people are constantly impersonating animals.

The Shebans considered the goal of education to be the most difficult of all arts to master—the art that could never be perfected—of loving wisely. An important function of their arts was the education in desire.

They were roundly mocked for this in most of the world outside their borders, where any degree of wisdom mixed with love was held to kill passion and pleasure.

The Bana, to the north, denied the existence of love altogether, and coupled only for procreation.

The Ellusha, to the west, lived for pleasure and could never get enough.

The Philosophers, to the south, lived for wisdom, which they considered incompatible with love. They thought it better to renounce pleasure altogether, and could never get any.

And the Zealots, to the east, believed that love was simply an aspect of war, another means of acquiring territory.

The Shebans taught, to the contrary, that wisdom would reveal new passion and invent new pleasure in love, and that the art, science, quotidian life, and even the inventions of a civilization with this aspiration would be of a different order. They endured the contempt of their neighbors (who, despite their condescension, made up large numbers of the rapt spectators of the Tellings) not always with grace, but impassively. Instead of being mutilated or kidnapped at their initiations, Sheban children were trained to craft and sustain their roles while exposed to taunts, heckling, and coarse insults from an audience.