The Book of Heaven: A Novel (7 page)

While Souraya waited for him, she reflected on her course of action. She looked at herself, waiting for the new man, as withdrawn from her own body as if she were a ghost or a god. What should she do with the woman sitting here by candlelight in a cavern hung with velvet? She could leave the woman underground here, and see what happened to her. Her destiny with this master might even prove to be less burdensome than a future with her husband. She could leave this woman even deeper underground, and be free of her forever. She had now lost so much and lived with so much fear that even her own destruction was no longer unthinkable to her.

But if she were pregnant? Any child not assuredly fathered by this man would almost certainly be murdered. She had seen for herself how the women's quarters teemed with this lord's children. Am's child would have a better chance of surviving if born to Adon, whose desperation for a son would tempt him into believing in himself as the father. Besides, like many iconoclasts, he had so little sense of what he looked like that he could easily be deceived in the matter of resemblance.

The chieftain was preceded by a wife, carrying the traditional equipage of welcome: a tray and cups of rock crystal, chiseled from the walls that sheltered them, filled with a tea made of “earth-milk,” stalactite drippings, and salt butter.

The wife made the arrangement of the refreshments an opportunity for a concentrated scrutiny of the newly purchased. Souraya was not surprised by her intensity: what she had gleaned from the girls of her own people who had entered polygamous arrangements was that one was as wived to the women in such a marriage as to the husband. The wife looked Souraya full in the eyes, then pulled aside the velvet hangings and held them open for the chieftain to enter. She bowed as he crossed the threshold, and took her own leave by backing out the door; it was a grave discourtesy here for a woman to turn her back to a man.

A woman who has been bought feels a rush of sickening, defensive, and absolute attention when she sees her purchaser, as a soldier does when he stands and faces for the first time a combatant on the field, who is coming toward him to kill him. A woman's purchaser, too, wants power over a body, but differs in that he pursues her life, not her death, which is a different kind of destruction. Souraya stood up to meet the man who owned her.

Another wife followed him in with a tray of jewelry, set it down, following his gesture, and left. He had a pale face, from living so much out of the sun, and an appraising eye, perhaps for the same reason. He, more than many men, was surrounded by a world he had imported and created. “Please be seated. There.” He spoke to her with a formulaic, proprietary courtesy, and a slight impatience, as if he wanted to treat her in a more perfunctory fashion, but was inhibited by the value his investment in her gave her.

“It must be a grief to you to leave your brother,” he said, “but these are the natural sorrows of women, like the transplantations of fruit trees. There is a shock, but then they bear well in their new soil. You have made his household pleasant; now you will delight my house. And you will have the opportunity to see him again before he and his party depart. Now,” he said, offering her the tray of ornaments, “let the tree choose its own blossoms, as even God himself does not permit.”

Souraya kept her eyes down, studying his way of speaking. He offered metaphors as a parent offers toys to a child in pain to distract it. And his sense of ownership seemed absolute. It was there she might free herself, for if one locates the sense of the absolute in a man, one can see where he is blind, his judgment vulnerable and unbalanced, incapable of anticipating the unexpected, prone to uncontrollable outrage; while he is staring at the sun, his prey can silently slip past him, and find a hiding place.

She made a show of examining closely the necklaces and bracelets he set before her. Some of them, the ones superior in design and workmanship, were recognizably the work of iconoclasts. She needed to experiment with him, and she saw a way to test her theory of him with a jewel. She allowed her indecision to express a welcome awe of him. Then she selected a negligible ring, and slipped it on her finger. Before she could secure it on her hand, he swiftly reached to retract it. He already had an idea of the appearance she should present. A woman's body is often a man's self-portrait. And the opposite can also be true.

So her instinct had been right. The unassailability of his ownership was a need, to which she was supernumerary. His approach to her would be to dramatize that ownership, until he was satisfied she acknowledged it, submitted to it, publicized it. These jewels were neither jewels of gift nor jewels of contract; they were glittering locks and bolts. She now knew precisely in which way she was valued.

“You are too modest,” he said. “Let me choose some more important pieces for you.” He riffled through the tray, and selected a lavish hair ornament, and a matching necklace and ring. The headdress was a masterpiece, a veil of thin rubies, cut in petal shapes, linked by a network of thin gold chains.

With an oddly maternal gesture, he set it on her head. It trembled on her hair like a drift of supernatural roses shaken apart by some otherworldly wind. The necklace was of emeralds: the roses' leaves. The ring was an ingenious creation, a cluster of diamonds trembling on wires: dewdrops. The jewels imprisoned her in beauty. He reached forward to clasp the necklace, lifting her hair; the gemstones hung there heavily, as if the weight and force of his hands still spanned her neck. He pushed the ring onto her finger, like oaring a boat upstream, and used the occasion of the touch to keep her hand in his.

“You were made for these,” he said. “They are flawless. As you are.”

Now, she saw, was the moment she could try for her freedom. For the sake of her child, she reduced the size of her life, made it small, portable, expendable as a pebble. She launched it toward him, that life the right size to gamble with.

“Sir,” she said, “I have a flaw.”

He looked at her with two expressions, an irritation that could be excavated just beneath an overlay of confident indulgence, with a sharp sparkling light, both angry and humorous, in his eyes. “I see none,” he said parentally, absolving her of any of her girlish indiscretions.

“The flaw is invisible. But it is real.”

“In any case, it is not lack of candor, and for that you are to be admired. Tell me what seems to you so important for me to know.”

Carefully, remembering Am as he maneuvered his sails, she watched what the winds and currents wanted from the boat. A facial expression finished as quickly as a life, a cluster of words fell like leaves, and disappeared. But if they vanished quickly, they could still be remembered deeply. She learned as quickly as she had to.

First his indulgence, and now his command translated her approach to him from independence into obedience. Now he ordered her to tell him what she had previously volunteered. Now, with luck, her initiative would be invisible, her action would be lost in his. She might find a chance to submit to the freedom he imposed on her.

“The customs of your people may be different than our own. So I must ask you, sir, would you have taken me if I had been a widow?”

“There is no certain answer, except perhaps, and not for myself. A widow has been a bringer of bad fortune.”

“And if I were a wife?”

“Under no circumstances but war. A woman with a living husband is a house where a snake waits hidden in a crevice, a danger even in repose.”

“Sir, then I am obliged to tell you. The flaw I have is marriage.”

She watched his impulse to strike her, the thwarted reversal of his wish to touch her, and steeled herself. But he was so confused that his movements were indecisive, and in that physical indecision, a question about the justice of his wish to harm her surfaced on his face, which took on the hardworking innocence of a student unable to solve a problem. A face working with a question is a youthful face. His practiced courtesy faltered. “This is not what I was told,” he said.

Softly, carefully, she echoed him, giving him the sound of his own words in a muse's voice. “There is much I, too, was not told.”

More calmly, having heard his voice again in the world, he seated himself again, facing her. “Is this some scheme of your brother's?” he asked, gazing at her with a judge's intensity. For her child's sake, she wanted to survive both men. So she answered him, “Sir, there is neither scheme nor brother.”

“I find myself in possession of a bride who is the wife of another man, after a purchase I made in good faith. Only your brother can have plotted this.”

“Sir, there is no brother. The man is my husband. And there is no plot. In a moment of panic, he sold me to you, afraid in your wish to have me in your household you might choose to make me a widow.”

He flinched and recoiled. “This is an extraordinary violation of both custom and trade. And having done this, is he planning instead to make my wives widows?”

“Sir, he had no plan beyond saving his life, which he imagined at risk. I do not know what he thought beyond fearing you, leaving your city, and in security, seeking some resolution.”

“He has shown no scruple in the beginning, why should he be any more trustworthy now? This is what I see: he sells a woman he claims to be his sister, but she privately claims to be his wife. I return her. He repudiates her claim to be his wife, and then justifies his attack on his host for the insult to his honor. Then the matter is settled in violence. Or that threat is averted through payment. Isn't that the plan?” He moved toward her, so rent by his own impulses, and by outrage that another man had taken the privilege of making him afraid, that she could not accurately estimate what he might do.

“Sir, there was no plan. Sir, there was no plan,” she hoped he would hear her words through his storm. She cowered instinctively to shield herself from the whiplash of his slap, ashamed that defending herself necessarily conflicted with her pride. There were moments when she valued the enforced diplomacies imposed on her sex by physical defenselessness, but she hated her endangerment at the hands of both this stranger and her husband. She crouched with her hands cupping the back of her head and neck, tearing from her hair the jeweled ornament he had given her; the heavy gems would intensify the blow and cut into her scalp.

She became a sculpture of fear; the sculptor paused before her to contemplate the work of his hands. She felt from her crouch a new quality in his breathing; the power to attend to someone else had returned to him. She ventured a look at him. The salt sovereign motioned her to sit up. “Sir, may I speak?” she asked. He nodded.

“Sir, I have said there was no plan. But with your permission, I have devised one now.”

“What do you propose?”

“Sir, return me to my husband, and let him return the payment you made for me.”

“On what grounds?”

“That you have discovered I am his wife.”

“Then his treachery is revealed, and we are forced into conflict. Or your treachery, in disclosing yourself to me, is revealed, and it is you who die for the betrayal. Have you thought of that?”

“Sir, it is not I who have made this disclosure.”

“The same punishment that would fall on you will fall on anyone you try to make responsible. Would you sacrifice one of your husband's merchant colleagues, or one of your iconoclast sisters?”

“Sir, with your permission, tomorrow morning, you will approach my husband as he is preparing to depart with his company. You passed no time with me this night, because, though you had intended to, you fell asleep in the early evening, in your own apartments. There you had a long, magnificent dream, in which the true nature of my relationship to my brother was revealed. It was not I who disclosed this to you, but God. Tell him it was God, maker of miracles, who gave you this knowledge. Will my husband punish God?”

In the morning, it happened as she promised. Adon, radiant, permeated by God, returned his host's bride payment, and received his wife with thanksgiving and with prayers. God, as had been his conviction of the divine will all along, had made each man even with the other, and restored Adon's lamb to his flock.

Adon's party was a good two days away when the gifts that had been slipped inside were discovered in Souraya's baggage, to her astonishment. There was a magnificent hair ornament of rubies carved in the shape of rose petals, an emerald necklace cut to look like leaves, a diamond ring like a cluster of dewdrops. She dared to think of them as a compliment, perhaps a repayment of a debt owed for unraveling a conflict more dangerous than her would-be husband had known. Perhaps, too, there was a soft, silent breeze of erotic regret emanating from the secret gift of the jewels the Salt of the Earth had chosen for her.

Adon was jubilant at the news of the discovery; he called for a communal prayer, and afterward, feasted the whole camp splendidly. God heaped blessings on his head; his body was a map of the world God was making, cartography of God's divine journey through the human soul.

So Adon, enriched, journeyed home. He was given an appreciative welcome. He had traded advantageously, and adroitly avoided all but the most necessary conflict. He had, in fact, spilled very little of his own or any other tribe's blood, and, of the band he had set out with, the only life lost during the entire expedition had been that of his wife, Souraya. And it was her blood that was spilled on the return journey, the blood that had belonged to her lover's child, whom she was not to bring to light.

She had desperately wished that Am's child had found its life within the palace of her bones, but her wish came to nothing; it was as if God had answered one wish of her life so supremely that nothing was left for her in Heaven. The child she miscarried two years later, she reflected bitterly, could only have been Adon's or God's. As was the child she miscarried the year after that, and the five more who found nothing to please them in the world outside, and refused to be born into it.