The Book of Heaven: A Novel (42 page)

This was a culture of performers; the courage to risk humiliation was the work of every day, and greatly valued among them. The initiation, though, introduced the children to more than the troubles faced in an evening's performance, but showed them a beginner's glimpse of the dark eternal perversity they must always face without despair. It was the players' work to draw the entire audience into a mutual embrace, as lovers must hold not only each other in their arms, but the hostile, unrequited world.

The Shebans were not ignorant of the epics of their neighbors. Many of the Tellers could recite long passages of those works, and all knew at least the stories they told, as Sheban troupes traveled widely.

Theatrical companies were an important Sheban export, not only in the neighboring regions, but also in the entire extent of the world known to the Shebans. Troupes were commissioned by courts, universities, festival organizations, theaters, and great houses, for periods ranging from one month to three years.

Each month, orders were placed through the various embassies for groups of particular songs or performances of specific epics. These orders could involve delicate negotiations and adjustments, since songs were not simply texts and notes. The players and musicians themselves were the songs and epics, and to order a title was to order the troupes trained to embody it.

Sheba's uncle, Kito, who was responsible for the oversight of all foreign embassies, could recite long passages of any number of the great foreign epics. Sheba and Quiran spent some of the enchanted afternoons of their childhood in his grand suite inside one of the buildings lying in the park that housed the complex of theaters that were the very heart of the country. The children's visits were a poignant, unacknowledged gift on the part of their parents, since Kito was a widower and had no children of his own.

Their indulgent uncle permitted the children, when they were very small, to play with the tokens each resident ambassador presented to the kingdom of Sheba during his tenure. The custom was for each mission to present its hosts with a jewel identifying its country.

The Philosophers, for example, gave a brooch of a golden book inscribed with a passage from one of their honored thinkers. When their representative arrived, she detached the second page of the brooch during a ceremonial reception, and gave it to Kito to display during her stay. She wore the first page of the golden book as a kind of passport. The Ellushans gave a crystal plate, heaped with fruit shaped from precious stones; their ambassador wore a pendant of the fruit, while Kito displayed the plate. The Zealots gave a silver target, inscribed with the device “True Aim,” and their ambassador was recognizable as he wore the Zealot spoke, a circle of five golden arrows, symbolizing that they were invincible in all directions. In this subtle way, not without a certain discreet charm, the Sheban governors kept track of the comings and goings of visitors in their land.

Kito also gathered and compiled information about each country's economy, geography, and language, and was celebrated for his map-making skills. He was a prodigy, able to give detailed and accurate details of the topography of countries he had never visited. And no one knew the terrain of Sheba in such detail, as if he himself had created it before it was set down on earth. The children pored over the maps, and listened rapt to his store of stories about the other worlds beyond them.

“Knowledge,” he would say impressively, glancing at them with his keen eyes the color of blue flame, “is as important as love.”

Quiran hesitatingly drew a relevant-seeming paradox that the children of his year had recently been set to study. “We cannot…we cannot…,” he stumbled, “love without knowledge. We have no knowledge without love.”

“Very true.” Kito nodded. “But above all”—he smiled—“no one can love without eating.”

He offered the children a plate of the marvelous Ellushan creams, the golden cloud of cream buried inside the centers of caramelized roses, and proposed to recite an episode from a Zealot epic. He went into a private storeroom just off his public suite, and returned with a Zealot instrument, a kind of hand-held harp. The music was ritualistic, repetitive, and compelling, as if to convey with each phrase that nothing else could have been said, with each event that nothing else could have happened.

The tale was a love story in the Zealot style, of a great hero who landed on the shores where a beautiful queen ruled. The hero and the queen conceived an uncontrollable passion for each other, and had a son. Then the hero abandoned the queen in the middle of the night, without saying good-bye, overwhelmed by the revelation of his divine destiny. The gods had chosen him to sail to an unknown country, and battle its inhabitants in order to found a great city.

Kito sang it impressively. The song changed his face, as the songs one sings form the underlying architecture of each face. The song turned his face from a man's into a monument's, like the armored statues he had described seeing in the Zealot capitals to which he had traveled. As he parted from his love, he sang of his destiny as a battle from which he must not run away. Kito was so moved that he actually stood, carried out of himself, and enacted the final passage in which the hero ascends the path the gods have chosen for him.

The children were quiet, as much because they had seen Kito's familiar features change into a marble mask, as because of the story. Kito himself was impressed by the silence of the two usually boisterous children. He escorted them to the door, let them each take two more creams from the plate, and kissed each one on the cheek. “Give my love to your mother,” he said, and went back to his work.

In fact, despite the power of the music, the story seemed false, and for nearly a year, became a feature of the brother and sister's secret satirical repertoire. Sheba, being smaller, took the part of the hero for comic effect. She stood on a barrel, as if it were a statue's plinth, and wore a makeshift helmet like a mocking cherub. “A hero must embrace divinely destined life,” she sang, her jaw set, and her piercing eyes searching the horizon in the fearless quest for her immortality, “and sails toward fame at night from his ungodly wife.”

“And stinking child…and stinking child,” Quiran added a chorus, his eyebrows raised with compassionate but condescending regret, one reluctant hand on his imaginary massive chest, the other raised in a gesture of inexorable and self-aggrandizing farewell.

They outdid each other in assuming the facial expressions demanded by the rhymes and rhythms of Zealot epic. They competed in molding their eyes into the gaze of a hero chosen to look into the face of the world, but not into human eyes. They imitated the cast of lips formed only for the sublime kiss of fate. They would collapse in laughter, unable to be statues long enough for destiny to take them in hand.

Their parents were amused when they stumbled on the children in midperformance, and delighted at their precocity. Brother and sister had already instinctively grasped that styles of acting could be codes declaring, even prescribing, ideals of how to feel and how to live.

It was proof of their talent that they had caught the way the heroic Zealot style abdicated personhood. All the hero's actions must be radiant, surrounded by a nimbus of glory; even his cruelties were superb, belonging ultimately, as did his powers, to the God that ordained them.

The parents smiled at each other in unconfessed relief. Sheban artists of their stature secretly dreaded the prospect of having untalented children, and lived under years of considerable strain of concealing their fear, or worse, their disappointment. The children's comic performance freed them of this anxiety. “But,” said Sheba's father, with a slow-dawning smile, “there is something new to be afraid of.”

“What do you mean?” his wife asked.

“That they are so talented they will see the flaws in our own styles,” he said. “We are trained as epic singers; but we may find ourselves in satire at last.” They collapsed in laughter.

At the age of ten, Sheban children were taken to the crafts workshops where, for the first time, the force, precision, strategy, and struggle with which jewels were formed was revealed to them. Sheba never forgot the shock of this introduction, long after she had left the kingdom.

The children, even though warned by their elders, were overcome with fear when they witnessed the master jewelers demonstrating the explosive angled blows with which rocks were split so that the gems inside them emerged with the capacity to refract maximum light.

The rocks were struck with an executioner's force and keen placement; a number of children invariably burst into tears at this moment. Sheba shivered, and thought of the terrible moment in the epic of Gil when an elephant stamps on the hero's skull and crushes it.

But when a stone breaks beautifully, it finishes in an existence of ever-changing light, not in death. The children were taught in the workshops, without realizing it, the first terrifying lesson of love—that no heart is truly capable of love until it has been broken. And it was their first true experience of the core of Sheban teaching; these people held that love educates through metaphor, and imitated its methods as best they could.

“If they break beautifully—perfectly—they can then receive their facets,” explained the chief geometress, who demonstrated the cutting, “exactly like souls receiving experiences. When a stone breaks badly, we call it destiny. But when a stone breaks beautifully, we call it living.”

She held up a ruby, which shed glowing flecks of light, like drops from God's wineglass. “It seems motionless, doesn't it?”

She handed the gem to Sheba. “But turn this one in your hand. It is your hand that moves it, but it also leads and guides your hand. Can you feel it exploring light in all its motions? Now let your mind play in the light like a dolphin in water. Remember the pictures that come to you, and eventually you can learn to read them as a fortune-teller does.”

Sheba passed the gem to the boy next to her. The geometress handed her a destined stone for contrast. Its color and the light that it refracted was muddier, warped, imprisoned. “The brilliant gems are the ones that break beautifully. It is as if they give themselves to the chisel. When your turn comes, do not be afraid to let your heart break.” Sheba heard these words with foreboding. She was secretly determined that this would never happen to her.

In the evening, before the current rehearsal—for their seasons were marked not only by nature, but also by rehearsals and performances associated with the changing year—Sheba approached her father and asked him to explain.

He put down the music he was carrying, and was quiet for a moment. “I remember the Breakings vividly, and the geometress who explained it to me when I was your age,” he said.

“What she meant,” he continued, “is that love is not like death. There is nothing inevitable about it. Death is inevitable. In the realm of love, anything can happen, or not happen. All die: but many never love. It is a path of perpetual surprise, in the way the jewels you saw give and receive changing light, speak new languages.”

It was the practice of Sheban adults to speak freely and candidly to their children about death as well as about love, in the simple style they believed imitated the speech of angels.

Their Philosopher neighbors called death “apotheosis,” which, Sheba's mother had often remarked, made it seem rather superior to life, and something one could hardly wait to achieve. Their other neighbors, the Zealots, had their own euphemism; they called death “passing,” as if it were a form of excretion.

The Shebans admitted that they were always failing in their own practice; still, those who were squeamish about the reality of death could hardly teach their children about love.

Sheba's mother had entered the room with Quiran, and added, “It is in the song of Oriana: ‘We die by destiny, but we love by choice.' You know that song.”

Her father said, “Even when we don't recognize that we have chosen. Love is the only invitation we receive that we can always refuse. No one—not even the deities—can compel love.”

Sheba had stopped listening; her brother was bouncing a golden ball she found irresistible. She dove for it, like a gull for a shellfish, and he began to pummel her. Their mother rose impatiently to separate them. “When are you going to struggle for what is yours, not what is his?” It was the first thing anyone had said to her that day that Sheba confidently understood.

This was the only day of her childhood that Sheba had hated. She did not want her heart broken, or anything to happen to her resembling that pulverizing and chiseling.

She wanted things to stay as they were in her good life, safe with her adored brother; she wanted to savor the secret greatest bliss of children, the perfect security of parents who loved each other well. She wanted the incense of the immortal trees to draw her dreams toward them when she slept, and wake from her nightmares to find all as it was. She wanted to run away when she was afraid, and then be called back and comforted. She wanted to learn the great songs and love them, but not to be an important singer, always preoccupied, and always anxious, preparing for the next performance. She was, in the local assessment, a merry soul, interested only in comic roles. She wanted to do what she wanted. Which was to dive.

She was almost an underwater creature; when she plunged into the blue and green world below her, she felt paradoxically as if here at last she could truly breathe, her body in love with the sea, in the way some of the songs described that feeling. The ocean was her first love. But Sheba was a creature drawn to cyclical action; she adored tracing fluid circles underwater, as if she were a paintbrush; she loved diving partly for the sake of returning to the surface. She was only devoted to things that ended well.

After the Day of the Breaking, Sheba followed her brother into the conservatory for performance classes. From age ten to age fourteen, the children were schooled in Metamorphosis. The first year, the students could not play anything human, or use any known language; they played animals, rivers, rain, meats cooking in pots.