The Book of Heaven: A Novel (46 page)

Noctis, though, stubbornly stayed seated, leaning against the silkworm pool, her back supported by cushions. The boy leaned down to offer her his hand, but she stared ahead, ignoring him. Another faint burst of applause sounded from the Arena.

Above the staccato of the overheard applause, the Queen sang a line of a wedding night serenade, “So male stars and female end their exile,” another woman took up the next line, “begin the crossing of their brilliant mile,” and a third wove her voice into the song, “accept the union that completes their trial…”

“Please join the singers,” the boy said to Noctis.

“My child,” she said, calmly, since this was a considered estimation of the boy's capacities, and any insult incidental to the judgment, “I have spent a long life as an apprentice, and then, a guardian, of art. It has mattered too much to me to offer it to you under coercion. It would be as if I gave you permission to rape my daughter. I will not join the singers. I do not admire them for singing, though I do not blame them.”

The serenade continued, with the sopranos in unison: “And fuse and form in wedding life to life,” now answered by the altos, “that human constellation, man and wife.”

The boy's mouth tightened. He was being tested and humiliated in public by an old woman. He looked furtively toward the commander, and realized that he was observing the contest. “You must join the singers,” he said. It was no longer a request, but a threat.

“There is only one command artists obey: that we obey no commands. If we did, we would forfeit the power over power that is the strength of art. I must preserve myself for the great role I still hope for.”

The boy was sick with rage as only a young man can be whose first authority is challenged. He dragged Noctis to her feet, hoping he might casually break her rotten old arm. “Your great role is to sing with the other women in this courtyard. That is your great future,” he said, and began pulling the balking old woman toward the singers.

She said one more simple word to him: “No.” He dropped her arm, then swiftly and savagely kicked her three times, like a horse he had lost patience with. She fell to the floor, and lay still, her head and neck angled like a snapped branch dangling from a tree. The singers gasped and fell silent in mid-phrase.

A group of soldiers quickly clustered themselves around the old woman and carried her away. The Zealots were famous for the quality and daring of their doctors, having wounded so many.

“Sing, sing,” the commander urged. “She will be cared for.”

The Queen gave the pitch, and the women began to sing again, from fear surely, but also to take refuge in the architecture of their accomplished voices, and to sing their men to safety inside it. They sang the song of the marriage chamber, their voices playing among the verses like candles illuminating the corners of a room.

Noctis the Bridge was the only woman who died the night of the Zealot invasion. Her body was taken to the Arena, and placed on the platform erected there with the bodies of all the Sheban males over the age of ten who had been in the capital that night.

The wedding songs of the Sheban women had muffled the sounds of killing, as had the great camouflaging unison bursts of clapping that were the specialty of the Zealot women's battalions, arranged in percussive patterns choreographed for such occasions.

The young Zealot soldier who had trampled Noctis in the furor of his first mission was himself executed in disgrace. He had shown himself unworthy of the military code. A soldier must never kill from an impulse of personal rage, which could taint the action with ambiguity, but in the collective certainty of justice, beyond any repentance.

The Zealots spared the younger boys of Sheba, who were almost always malleable enough to be remolded as soldiers, and released them to their mothers. The ranks of the great male Tellers were decimated, though a number escaped from the provinces, and went into hiding. It was rumored that an eminent former King, Caspar, who lived in retirement in the countryside, had not been captured.

As was the Zealot custom, the bodies lay in state for two days, two being a sacred number for the Zealots. And now the famous squadrons of women soldiers appeared in public, for they were the patrols of honor: guardians of the dead, census takers, information gatherers, and the superintendents of prisons. Their service was to function as restorers of order after combat.

Zealots were brought up on the principle that every element of the world was dual in nature, and that every word and act that did not incarnate a dual purpose was wasted. At the Zealot coming of age ceremony, the boys and girls pledged as soldiers with their hands on a sheaf of gold-tipped arrows, and spoke the army oath, “False for truth's sake: architect of what I break: I do and I do not.”

The two days of lying in state under the patrols of honor exemplified the principle. They not only served as homage to the sacrificed, but also ensured that anyone who was feigning would be discovered; at the sign of a flickering eyelid, a breath, the sound of a groan, the soldier women would quickly administer the coup de grâce.

Sheba's betrothed, her father, and her brother were among the kingdom's dead. The Sheban women, under the direction of the soldiers, dug the collective grave of their husbands, their sons, their brothers, and their fathers.

On the third day, the women mourners gathered in the Arena for the funeral procession. The commander took the stage and addressed them.

Kito stood beside him, hands slack at his side, a stunned expression on his face, as if he were not quite sure he could trust the sensations of being alive. The order had already been disseminated that he would lead the new government of Sheba.

The commander lifted his hands in benediction. “I come before you today not only as a soldier, but as a priest—a priest who has presided over a great, a noble, and painful sacrifice.

“For the men of Sheba have not been murdered; they have been sacrificed. They lived for peace; and they died for peace. If your neighbors to the north had shared our love of peace, there would have been no need to annex this territory, on which they had designs. They left us no choice.

“For in the cause of peace, the life of the individual may be consumed, like a small flame in a great fire, in the name of the greater good. We pledge to work with you, to restore what you have lost tenfold; for as our oath says, we are the architects of what we break, and we shall return to you a new kingdom, a new Sheba.

“Much has been asked of you, as we have asked much of ourselves. But what will be accomplished will be the work of peace, and, you will realize, the work of love, that value so central to your culture.

“Now we ask of you one more sacrifice. We ask that you do not indulge yourselves in weeping as we return the sacrificed to the earth. We do not cry when we eat bread in the morning, we do not shed tears while we sleep, for eating and sleeping are necessary to us. We do not mourn the necessary. To weep during this ritual would be an insult to the sacrificed, and an insult to us.”

The women stood while the shrouded bodies were lifted by the patrols of honor. Kito took the Queen by the arm, and led her to the head of the procession. She leaned against him heavily, and he touched her hair in a gesture of comfort so tentative that it was almost invisible. The commander solicitously offered his arm to Sheba.

The train of women walked to the burial field slowly and soundlessly, as if they were the ghosts of their men, their faces contorted and their lips twisted with the effort to repress their tears.

Contingents of foreigners who had been culled from the audience at the last Tellings and were hastily returning to their own countries halted when they saw the mourners, and stood in respectful silence.

When they arrived at the burial grounds, the silence remained profound. The bodies of the men had already been shrouded, and dropped into the crater the Sheban women had dug. All along its rim, the Zealot women's patrol of honor stood at attention, ever watchful for signs of life.

Kito escorted the Queen forward and stepped behind her, retreating so that she could sing the first funeral call. She did not lift her head, her eyes fixed on the ground. Her lips trembled; it was clear that she did not dare words, let alone attempt the music.

A series of cracked, inarticulate stammering noises emerged from her throat, terrible caricatures of words, as if her tongue had been cut in half. It was a dark, unprecedented disgrace for the chief epic artist of her country; several women gasped, gripped by a sickening awareness that the Queen was being used, an exhibition of the death of Telling.

She had been forbidden to mourn the deaths of her husband, son, friends, and colleagues. Without mourning she could not sing the truth, could not produce the words of funeral, or the correct pitches of the songs, any more than she could order a child to say “I love you” to her and have the declaration mean anything. Without explicitly forbidding what words might be sung or said, the Zealots had succeeded in making the funeral songs false.

Sheba could not bear her mother's wounded babbling. She withdrew her arm from the commander's proprietary support, and walked with forced, deliberate serenity to the Queen's side, to assume the leadership of the funeral ceremony. She held up her right hand, in the traditional gesture of the leader who would signal for the response of the chorus.

“As is our custom,” she bowed to the commander to acknowledge him.

Then she threw back her head and laughed, in delicate trills. She directed the women to answer, and they laughed, a perfectly coordinated mass of trilling laughter. She repeated the trills, and her mother took them up, joining the chorus.

Then Sheba changed the tempo, and the laughter became clipped and staccato, as if their laughter was mocking the sound of marching boots. The chorus drilled out its laughter in response. Sheba's leading laugh took a new tone; she howled, and the women howled chorally, as if supernatural jackals were howling in mirth in some predatory heaven.

Then Sheba led them in peal after peal of violent laughter, forcing a faster and faster rhythm, like the convulsive ringing of bells. She laughed until the tears ran down her face, and the women followed her, their bodies rocking and their faces contorted with laughter. At her signal, the women formed a closed circle, their arms around each other, eyes streaming, shoulders racked with wild laughter, until at a sign from Sheba, they abruptly fell silent.

“We don't expect you to be familiar with all of our customs,” Sheba said to the commander, when the funeral chorus had ended. The commander looked for a long time at Sheba, with speculative, severe, and admiring eyes.

“Then I must set myself to learn them,” he said.

The women were still again, after their possessed laughter; several of the women's faces were fixed in smiles, as they wiped the tears of laughter from their brilliant eyes.

On the return from the burial, the commander did not take Sheba's arm, but dropped behind a pace. Kito put his arm protectively around the Queen, and held her close. Sheba walked alone.

She saw nothing, heard nothing, except Far's voice, wrapping her like a cloud in one of his ritual phrases of love: “You were born to laugh.” He had told her the truth, but she had understood only a half-truth. She had been presumptuous; it seemed she had been born to laugh—but not, as she had thought, to be happy.

She was back in the quarters of her childhood; the room was intact, but the childhood was shattered. The personal belongings that had been in the lodging where she and Far had planned to live had been retrieved and delivered here in her absence.

She opened her costume chest and took out her incense clock. She emptied the incense from the hours that measured the night, the hours fragrant with the burned sugar that reminded her of him. Then she knelt before Far's costume chest, opened it, buried her head in it as if it were his grave, and cried as violently as if she were being eviscerated.

Within the first week, the Zealot caretakers had provided the Shebans with a constitution, outlining the people's rights and responsibilities as a Zealot protectorate. This document became the source of the weekly decrees issued and statutes established during the next two years, as Sheban life was remade in the Zealot image.

The Zealots proclaimed that they would sustain the theater school, and the central place of drama in the life of the Shebans, so much so that they would allot a portion of their own budget to commissioning new epics and lyric plays. Thus, war became a subject as prestigious in epics as love.

Noctis the Bridge had always taught that the study of love included the study of war, although the opposite was not true, but the Zealots were more intensely concerned with the kingdom's future than its past. The school would no longer train its students to perform only Sheban works, but would be open to candidates from all territories protected by the Zealots. Thus, a body of Zealots would be qualified to teach the Sheban techniques fitted to Zealot stories.

The greatest change in the life of the kingdom was the incorporation of all able-bodied Shebans, women and men, into the Zealot army. The Sheban peoples had never sustained a standing army; they had considered the stage their territory and their country; Sheba itself was ultimately the stage a Sheban mounted to perform, the excellence of the Sheban epic craft was the only defense possible for a country that altered from night to night, with each Telling.

Now only active performers would be exempt from Zealot military service, which was carefully designed not only for dominating Zealot neighbors, but also for the purpose of dominating the Zealots themselves.

The Zealot army was at the heart of its government and education; its centrality spared the Zealots the dissent and rebellions that were such a danger to other aggressive nations.

Parents, teachers, leaders, doctors, priests, were all soldiers. The walls of Zealot nurseries were covered with images of the children's parents, holding their weapons. A Zealot child could never separate herself from the army, any more than he could separate his life from his body. Zealot children were taught to stand in respect in the presence of any soldier; a child who refused, with the most innocent obstinacy, was put under observation; troublemakers were identified from the earliest age.