The Book of Heaven: A Novel (44 page)

“And if there were an arena, with every seat filled,” Noctis said, “imagine the infinite, unpredictable variety. Now I give you one more thing to notice before we finish today. This will be equally useful to the ones who become Tellers, and the ones who don't.

“Sheba and Far have no quarrel: and yet, they quickly created a conflict. They were able to end it just as quickly, because they were playing…inside reality and outside of it at the same time. That is what our education aims for—to make us the slave of neither reality nor dream. For what we insist is reality may be as unreal as any hallucination.

“Sheba and Far are not lovers. And yet, their kiss was as intense as if they were. You should go home filled with awe at the power of these gestures to turn us to their purposes—and make use of this occasion to remember how easily you may be deceived in both war and love. Good afternoon.”

Noctis had been more acute than even she knew in teaching that a kiss revealed the secrets of a heart. The kiss that Far and Sheba gave each other had not really ended; it had only paused. Each discovered, separately, but simultaneously, that they wanted it to begin again.

That night, in their different neighborhoods, each remembered in extraordinary detail the features of the other's mouth and arms, as if Sheba's kiss had formed and created Far, and Far's kiss had formed and created Sheba. It was as if they had discovered some new form of indelible personhood in this act. And each deliberately remembered it again and again, hoping to dream it when they fell asleep.

They began to tamper subtly with their days, remaking hours so that they would yield occasions to meet and talk. Like all first lovers, they looked at each other as mirrors, enraptured not only with each other, but also as truly with their own charmed glimpses of themselves. Far was enchanted by Sheba's sparkling, sweet temperament, like an island with a perfect sunrise every day. “You were created to laugh,” he told her, charmed by noticing that her face, even in repose, showed the delicate contours of a smile.

“And you were created to be a great Teller. Even the sound of rain falling sounds to you like an audience chattering about a performance during intermission.” Not long afterward, they followed their first kiss where it led them.

Sheba shyly commissioned a new nocturnal incense mixture for her clock. The scent-makers teased her gently; for generations, this had been a sure signal of first love. Now she slept all night enveloped in the essence of burned sugar, to be reminded of the scent of Far's body.

During the final year of the Metamorphosis, a presentation costume chest was crafted for each graduating apprentice by the masters of stagecraft, who were responsible for the physical aspects of every production, set and costume designers and makers. A council of these makers was present throughout the schooling of a class of apprentices, and it was this council who designed the wardrobe chests for each student. Not one was alike; for many Shebans, the chests were the most precious possessions of their lifetimes, and their first performance was always formally dedicated to these craftsmen.

On the day of the initiation, the Sages of the Tellings waited onstage as their students were called up for the presentation of their coffers.

Far was called forward to receive his costumes; he acknowledged the Sages, and then approached his own tutor, Noctis the Bridge. He knelt before her, and kissed her hand. Two craftsmen brought his chest from the wings onto the stage; they could not suppress their smiles of delight, for these occasions were as joyous as they were solemn.

Far's chest was of rare blue wood, stained in many shades. The top was decorated with a carved bridge, alluding to his tutor, dividing a blue sky and blue sea, on which mother of pearl glistened like the sun on water.

Inside were his three costumes, each one the garment of an epic character. He turned pale at this greatest honor and obligation. When Noctis stood to whisper his initiation words to him, his expression grew grave, and he put his hand on his heart.

Then it was Sheba's turn; she ascended the stage of the Arena. She made her way to Noctis, and swooped to the floor in front of her, curtseying like a wheeling bird. Her coffer was brought out; she nearly cried out with pleasure at its beauty.

Its top was of transparent crystal, with the four phases of the moon in mother of pearl in each corner, the crescent moon a witty reference to her ever-present smile. The brass clasp was in the shape of a bridge.

It was lucky that she had been so delighted with the chest, because she was less pleased with the costumes.

One was for a minor character in a comedy, an old woman who plays the ribald nurse of the heroine.

The second was much more pleasing, since the costume was for the same comedy, but this time it was the dress of the heroine herself.

And the third was a sour disappointment. It was a famous costume worn by her mother playing the lost prince Horizon in a tragic epic that Sheba did not like, since it had no clear resolution. The audience never agreed when the curtain fell about what had really happened, while it was a great challenge for the player, who did not know either.

It was a beautiful costume, of dark red silk brocaded with gold and scarlet pomegranates, but Sheba did not want to play a role of her mother's, and she had no grand ambition to act in tragedies, even though the lost prince was a starring part. She turned to Noctis for her initiation words; the only response the audience could read on her face was incomprehension.

For some, this would begin the long journey into the great characters of their epics, a path of selflessness difficult for a culture of performers who were eager to be magnets to the audience's eyes. Finding the voices and gestures, learning the lines, living the life of these men and women who lived in them and in whom they lived, learning to be someone else, was recognized as a form of religious pilgrimage by the Shebans.

Springtime opened the season of the Tellings, which always began in the great central Arena, with a performance of the first book of Eno and Aiyesha, and closed in early autumn with a performance of the most recent, written, produced, and played by the current King and Queen. It was also the opening of the season of weddings, celebrated after performances; many foreign spectators who were indifferent to the dramas bought tickets for the sake of the magnificent spectacle of the marriages.

The bridal processions set out from the Arena, each departing from one of its twelve exits, a great wheel of brides and grooms and attendants whose trembling jewels made them look like a human galaxy. It was considered auspicious to be married during the Tellings, the new couples joining their lives framed by the ancient stories of love; thus the world began again.

Elegant celebrations were held in the courtyards of the honored artists' houses that surrounded the Arena. Not only were the festivities open to all, so that guests strolled from house to house, but the host and hostess of each reception were by custom strangers to the brides and grooms, another good omen, since to celebrate the love of strangers was a foundation of Sheban hospitality.

There are sometimes years that seem to crown the lives of people with so much joy and fulfillment that they have the effect that sorrow sometimes does; the only way so much joy can be borne is to dedicate it to other people, make a gift of it to those waiting for joy, or deprived of it, pour it out so that it does not overwhelm the heart.

For Sheba and Far, this spring was the crest of such a year. They were now experienced enough players to take on substantial roles. Sheba had one of the light comic roles she adored, as the principal boy in a famous coming-of-age comedy, playing an adolescent in love with his elder brother's fiancée. Her brother Quiran, to complete her delight, would play the title role.

Far had been chosen for a role in the second book of Eno and Aiyesha, surely a first step on the path to be chosen as a king of Sheba. And they were to take their own place in the spring wedding processions and to be married.

Even Sheba, with her untroubled childhood, had never known anything like this abundance inside her matched with the abundance outside her. The lengthening days were the image of a love extending into the unknown future, the swallows celestial comedians, the new flowers in all their colors were the kisses from some divine being who could not stop making love to the world.

The man-made season, as they called the performances, began well, too, opening as always with the shorter works, alternating with concerts, building toward the majestic epics that began at the summer solstice, and culminated in the autumn.

Each work marked a particular turn in the year, and its words and music seemed to have a particular taste, anticipated like the foods that ripened and were savored successively in each season. Sheba's work was finished in the first month of the festival; Far's would begin at the end of summer, when they were already wife and husband.

Noctis was present for Sheba's fourth and tenth performances. Sheba had an impulse to beg her not to come, or at least to come for only one performance. All Noctis's students dreaded the special tension of her presence, and the matter-of-fact rigor of the criticisms that she delivered in the dressing rooms while the stage cosmetics were lathered away. She was a critic of acute taste and no personal malice, which made her judgments the more formidable, as authoritative as if they were posted on a wall in sheets of calligraphy.

“Oh, my dear,” said Noctis, “let us keep our stage frights in perspective. Why should you be afraid of my being in the audience? Comedy is sacred to God, and it is God we play to. And God is patient, having waited thousands of disappointing years for us to master the happy ending. There is no genre we play so amateurishly.

“Not only will I be at the fourth and tenth performances, but at the seventh, too, I think. I will be of more use to you that way.” She mischievously smiled a statue's inexorable smile, a mime she was famous for.

Few of Noctis's students ever equaled her in her ability to translate herself into a statue, a falcon, a chalice, a cypress tree. It was for that gift of moving between beings as if between languages that they called her Noctis the Bridge.

Sheba had not only received Noctis's criticisms, but also passed through them, changed, like a jewel refracting the light from a new angle. She understood even better now how Noctis the Bridge had earned her title. She had found playing in the Arena more satisfying than she had imagined, but now she was delighted that her part in this season's Tellings was done.

She had a refreshing period in which she avoided the Arena altogether. She listened to the passages Far was preparing, marveling at the stately beauty of his voice, even though his work was just beginning, and his delivery uncertain. When he sang the great section describing the preparation of Eno's bridal chamber, he built the room with his voice, filling the air with insubstantial wood, marble, and sheets of beaten gold that surrounded Sheba, but could not be touched. His singing turned her thoughts to their life to come; it was now her time to marry.

They had chosen a section of one of the Tellers' courtyards to house them, and Sheba gave herself the joy of furnishing the rooms as if she were furnishing their future life. The windows were still of clear glass; at the end of the season, they could claim their first colored glass window, worked with their images in their first official roles.

The fruitwood costume chests inlaid with abalone shells were fortune-tellers, the silk carpets woven with the scenes of epics were omens, the chimes hung with the golden letters of the Sheban alphabet were invocations chanted by the wind.

She could hardly wait to live there, with Far; and then sometime with the children she imagined with the nervous shyness of a hostess anticipating important guests. Impatient to know how the house felt at night, she arranged a makeshift bed so she could sleep there the night of the summer solstice, a night when dreams were said to reveal the future to the solitary sleeper, and even more marvelously, to allow the dream to know something of the dreamer.

And so that year, her dreams fulfilled both promises. Far had walked with her to the house, carrying the heavy embroidered coverlet they had been given as a wedding gift. Sheba brought her incense clock in its jeweled case, with its nighttime fragrances of burned sugar already mixed and set in position to kindle when it was dark.

He tried to tempt her and charm his way into the house, for the sheer pleasure of the love-play. Sheba allowed herself the subtle pleasure of temptation to which they both knew she would not yield. There is no greater freedom than to be tempted by a trusted lover, which offers all the charms of seduction, with none of the danger of betrayal.

Sheba drew away from him, denying him voluptuously. “You know it is the solstice. I have to sleep alone tonight, my love, and so do you, or the true dreams will be mixed with things that will never happen, and we won't know which is which.”

“I want to dream of you, and I want you to dream about me, every night, forever.”

“I already do, and you know that I do. But tonight, I want us both to dream of our children. They will show themselves to us only if we are apart tonight. And if we succeed in coaxing them to come into our dreams, they will be able to see us, too. When they are born, they will be born in trust; they won't wail when they come into the light, able to recognize the mother and father waiting for them.

“You know they say that each minute they are with us tonight, means a year without tears in their lives—if we dream of each other in a true dream.”

Far smiled at her intensity. For him, their future children were faceless, but he could imagine the feeling of trust a child could have for someone who was already imagining them outliving her. It was a good sign. He could trust her with his own children. She would not be one of those mothers who hate their children for outgrowing their childhoods, who struggle to stay young by feeding on their children. “Then dream a true dream. I will, too. I hope I see children who look like you. Good night, love.”