The Book of Heaven: A Novel (40 page)

“Commands are human, Lord Pekrin. The Divine has no need of them. The act of cherishing is divine, and demands something greater and more difficult than obedience. Rain said, ‘Tell the truth about what is inflicted on you. And tell the truth about what you inflict.'

“Rain said, ‘You cannot imagine the degree to which God shuns power. You cannot imagine the degree to which God is not a warrior, or a king. You who rule women because they are the life to come on earth, you who claim to rule even over the life to come in Heaven.'”

Pekrin could not tolerate another word from the woman. “I am sorry for you, then. I will tell you your story. I know better than your God how your story ends. You are going to die for this She-God who cannot save you.”

“You know my fate because it is you who make it. But my fate is now transfused into your life. Rain said, ‘A belief in one's own righteousness is a form of superstition.' And I am sure that your God will, in His turn, demand a death of you.”

Soon after, the time of the purges began. As always, when interrogations are determined to find evidence of guilt, many innocents are swept up along with the criminals. Some are condemned through coerced confessions, others through an accidental personal antipathy they provoke in the interrogator, others through motives that have nothing to do with the accusations.

Families, as always, settled scores and punished, expressed favoritisms, took revenge, made alliances through denunciations, just as they did through the marriages they arranged. One girl of a fine coastal family was executed for Rain worship after being accused by an uncle, who had been in fact himself drawn to the sect. His feelings of guilt over his own wavering made him more suspicious of true believers, as he later admitted. His strength in the face of temptation earned him exoneration.

General Jarre, invigorated, pored over maps and studied the transcripts of confessions. He helped establish the special tribunals necessary to examine the accused and render verdicts. The prisons were overburdened with suspects, and it was a subtle business establishing who was a genuine worshipper, or simply a curious observer.

Jarre's former malaise disappeared, as he comprehended the glory of what God had planned for him. He was a pure gold chess piece in the Champion's hand. He was instrumental in ferreting out cells of Rain worshippers, though he was never successful in learning the fate of the abducted innocents. They had simply, miraculously, disappeared.

The Rain worshippers' cunning and invention in improvising chapels was challenging for God's courtiers. They needed so little for their sacraments—a glass of water, a candle, a rose, a broken bird—that they were frustratingly mobile.

Throughout the Peninsula, in basements, in clearings and coves, abandoned buildings and caves, they were hunted down. Hundreds were executed, women and men, although children, permeable to all adult influence, were taken to camps to be purified and rededicated to the faith of their fathers. Toy birds were banned, and figures of angels, and all images of creatures with wings.

The heightened tension made for many night raids on innocent celebrations. Entire villages along the coast lay in ruins, or were difficult to reach, so zealous captains instead showed their efficiency by harassing respectable gatherings, it must be said, sometimes surrendering rather than capturing, sitting down to carouse with the hosts in the absence of culprits.

Port guards patrolled the waterfront, though only for display, as the area was generally off-limits for women. They, too, took to sitting down to the bottles of wine offered on their random and routine inspections of the ships in port. That was how six guards on the verge of getting pleasantly drunk heard a soft whispering chant, like rainfall, that seemed to come from belowdecks on a relief ship laden with rice and dried vegetables for the refugees of the wave.

They looked at each other and then at their hosts, conviviality replaced by tension. They called for the captain of the ship to authorize an inspection below, but he was not on board. The highest-ranking officer available was quickly located and ordered to lead them below. As they neared the hold, they made out distinct but incomprehensible words, in the way that rain itself seems to whisper a subtle, once-known language.

“Rain. Soften. Our. Souls. Rain. Make. Our. Salt. Tears. Spring. Sweet. Rain. Make. Stone. Ground. Flower. Wash. Death. From. Us. Falling. Rain. From. Heaven. Rain.”

Two guards kicked the door open. Candles burned in the center of the room. A wingless clay bird was suspended from a piece of mooring line, swaying rhythmically. Eight men moved in a circle underneath it, holding up glasses for the clear water Admiral Annan poured for them from a crystal pitcher sparkling in the light of the flames. The port guards were so accustomed to showing deference to the legendary seaman that for a moment they stood frozen.

The worshippers and the guards simply looked at each other, hesitant like fathers and sons reunited after a long separation. But instead of rushing into each other's arms, the guards seized the worshippers, and to the awe of the onlookers who recognized Admiral Annan, marched them through the streets to prison.

One might have thought Annan's heresy would be a deathblow to his old friend and comrade-in-arms, Jarre, who had already suffered so much. But Jarre met the news with a mixture of contempt and exaltation.

The disgrace of his friend, paradoxically, restored his shattered faith. He was now confirmed beyond doubt in his knightly service to the Sovereign King of the Universe. He was forever God's liegeman. All that had happened to him had seemed like wanton punishment, but had in fact been revelation.

The one sentimental concession Jarre made was to allow Annan to be condemned for heresy, not as a traitor who had abducted children consecrated to the service of the state. He took no part in Annan's trial, but paid a final visit a few days before Annan was to be executed. The great bond that had existed between them was severed, but Jarre was fascinated by his friend's fall, as people are by fatal accidents. He was gripped by the need to understand what had eclipsed the great sun of his former friend's mind and soul.

Jarre's stature was such—and even more so now—that he could arrange to meet Annan outside his cell, in perfect privacy. For the sake of Annan's human dignity, he wanted to ensure that no eavesdropper had the opportunity to broadcast Annan's ravings.

Annan was brought in by a guard; he still had his air of vigorous health, solid as a thick-trunked tree, which made his imminent death seem even more unnatural.

Annan sat down quietly opposite Jarre. “I did not imagine you would want to see me,” he said.

“I am haunted by questions only you can answer. I want to know if you really are one of these who believe that my dead daughter is a deity. Or was this a ploy for rallying support for the political ambitions you must have harbored for years? To be candid, I want to understand if you are mad or sane.”

“And I will be candid with you. I believe. Not absolutely, in the way you do, the way I used to. We are not creatures made for the absolute, our breath is too wavering, our perception too flawed, our doubts too necessary. But I saw God in Rain. She is alive in everyone. Even you.”

“What sort of God is it who has no power, who makes no miracles? I know you are going to talk about the kiss she gave that brought the dead man back to life. I have never witnessed such a kiss, but in any case, this deity saved only one life.”

“You cannot know how many other miracles one sole miracle begets. She was not a savior. She did not confer salvation. She said we were to be the saviors. She said we know God only through each other. That God is not in us, but between us. That we deliver God to each other, like a flame passed from cupped hand to cupped hand. We bring God to life in each other. And in any case, she did perform other miracles.”

“What other miracles?”

“She led sixty children to freedom under hopeless circumstances. Therefore she gave life without being a mother. That is a miracle.

“She was stronger than you are, though your word is law. She was stronger than I am. That is a miracle. When you saw her, you saw a being who had descended into Hell and struggled there. She returned not as most do, a gladiator, but a dancer.

“She did not kill, in the face of the most excruciating temptation. She refused to bring into the world the cruel God her tempters wanted to beget with her. That was a miracle.

“And there was yet another miracle. She made me into a human being.”

Jarre stared at him, incredulous.

“After a lifetime as a champion of God, a Prince of God's Court, you are capable of believing that a woman could be God incarnate? That God would deign to enter into a woman? Into a being polluted with sin and blood, the slave of men and even children, too weak even to defend herself? You know God's teaching as well as I do. Man has a soul, woman has a nature.

“You sicken me. God is omnipotent, the creator of the world. No one can measure His power.”

“You say that God has created Heaven and earth,” Admiral Annan replied, looking at his boyhood friend steadily. “And yet He is unable to imagine a woman in any way different from your own conception of her. He has apparently never been able to create a good woman.

“You say God is omnipotent. And yet He might incarnate in a man, but is incapable of incarnating in a woman without desecrating Himself, without being destroyed. So then, out of all creation, in your belief, only woman is more powerful than God. Which of us, do you think, is the heretic?”

Jarre stood up without a word, turned his back on the man who had been his friend, and left the room.

Annan was beheaded two days later, in the presence of Jarre, according to the law of the Peninsula.

Despite the purges, the devotion to Rain was not completely crushed on the Peninsula, and remains very much alive to this day. But Jarre's pursuit of the heretic cult gave him a new sense of mission; he was reborn as the hero of God he had been at the battle of Saldava.

And to his wonderment, he once again knew the joys of domestic life. He built another villa with a sea view, this time on a bluff, using much of the material from the one that had been destroyed. He divorced the wife of his youth, and married a girl of good family, with fine Smaraldian features.

Within the year, she had given him twin boys, and by the time my own work on the Peninsula was drawing to a close, she had borne a girl, a third child to replace the three who had been killed. All that he had lost was restored to him.

Shortly afterward, to our mutual regret, I left his employ. I had been offered a post in a much larger country, and despite my affection for Jarre, I wanted to make use of my skills to serve on a larger scale. But I left having fulfilled what I had set out to accomplish.

I had been entrusted—inspired—honored—by God—with the task of selecting an impeccably good man for a jointly administered experiment, a test of faith in the face of unmerited suffering. And in Jarre, I was certain that I had chosen perfectly. Here was a man ruthless only in the love of God, a man whose every action was taken in a spirit of angelic necessity.

I recognized in Jarre a man who understood the pure symmetrical division of good and evil, right and wrong, male and female, animal and human, adult and child, rich and poor, earth and ocean, darkness and light, sacred and profane.

He lived by the precise and invariable principles through which God created the world. His life was an expression of everything he had learned of the Lord of All. The supreme clarity of his mind made it like a quotation from a poem of God's. It was heartrending to see him suffer so unjustly, though I knew he would ultimately prevail.

I was scrupulously conscious of my responsibility in this mission. For I have always considered myself a friend of God, and a lover of mankind, whatever you may have been told. Despite this, I have known nothing but abuse, generation after generation. I have borne it patiently, though I think no one, even Jarre, has suffered as I have. Nor have I ever been thanked for all I have given to the world.

It is a gross insult to say I am an enemy of God. On the contrary, I hold God in the greatest esteem and even affection, even though I do not love God with the devotion I hold for human beings. Why would I? God created them; but they created me, for which I adore them, though my creators' doings are often as opaque to me as God's are to them. God's will comes to me through them.

I am no rebel, no troublemaker. When I fail people, it is out of sheer incomprehension—but I always do, to the best of my ability, exactly as they tell me.

Mistakes, though, are always possible, as always between languages, as they attempt to translate the words of God to them, and I to translate their words to me and to execute their will. The work I had to do on the Peninsula rendered me frantic at times.

Of course, you want to know if Rain was God. Might it be that God is actually human? How can I know? I have never seen God; I simply follow God's instructions as clearly as possible when I receive them from my creators. And that can be a difficult task, unless someone knows right from wrong as infallibly as the blessed General Jarre, and the other elected ones. For it is perfectly lucid, what is right and what is wrong. It is for this knowledge that I am welcomed among the good, and am sometimes called the Bringer of Light.

Otherwise I can find myself in a vortex of contradictions, as on the Peninsula, where some deserve to suffer, yet do not, and others are blameless, yet tormented.

There it can seem the innocent are guilty, and the guilty good. There rape, torture, murders are crimes, yet at seasons perfectly justified by God's law.

There love struggles into birth through some strange intermittent partnership of hatred, and Heaven exists in Hell, and Hell in Paradise, and an imprisoned sacred prostitute, damned by her own father, might have been an incarnation of God.