The Book of Heaven: A Novel by Patricia Storace Read Free Book Online

present. It was a matter of theater; one gave the illusion, in a successful performance, of never seeing the audience.
    She observed the great wheels of metal laden with extravagant dishes, and that the company was composed both of men and women, an oddity of the island decorum perhaps. As Adon moved forward to greet the chief, she saw him drop his own eyes, much more ostentatiously and awkwardly than someone did who was accustomed to the practice.
    She saw him flinch, and furtively traced the trajectory of his gesture, noticing now, as she had not in the first defensive cautions of entering, that the walls of the structure were covered with painted frescoes and with brocades. It was strange to see Adon obliged to assume her own withdrawn posture in the face of these painted scenes. She could make out what looked like men and women having a picnic under flowering trees, another of musicians playing for dancers, and a brocade of the very scene she had just passed through, a boat moving through reed-fringed waters under a full moon. The rest were too shadowy to see from her position.
    The chief, whose name was Am, escorted Adon to a place next to his own, and seated him before a small round wooden table, decorated with gleaming metal tracery, identical to the tables set before the other guests. Then, instead of taking his own place, he returned to escort Souraya to a seat of her own, precisely opposite his, where he could take his fill of looking at her throughout the evening, accidental or deliberate.
    Adon was more helpless in the face of the subtle laws of hospitality than he was in open combat. Something as subtle as a foreign conception of courtesy had as much power, it seemed, as a conquest did to alter the course of events. The meal was a chess game played with the eyes, each of the three of them pretending not to look and not to see.
    Souraya’s mastery of inscrutability was put to the test. She struggled not to respond when she heard their host compliment Adon on the beauty of his companion. She arrested her blush, drove back the current of light flooding her eyes in response, kept her natural expressions masked as if underneath a thin sheet of metal.
    Nor did she flinch when she glimpsed Adon gesturing toward her, and heard him explain to the chief that he was traveling with his sister. Then, the chief said, with a courtly inclination of his upper body toward Souraya, your family has not only acquired treasure, but also created it.
    After the meal was finished, the singers and dancers arrived. Souraya had never witnessed such techniques of storytelling. The singers and dancers began by surrounding one of the frescoes; they narrated the story it told, and danced it in and through the audience, bringing the figures out of their frames into life, and the audience itself into the world of the pictures. The acceptance of the imagery was an acceptance of a changing world. The dancers even gave the illusion that they themselves were the creations of the audience.
    She was rapt, though she saw that Adon was barely able to control his displeasure, which rose to what she recognized as an agony of suppressed protest at the climax. It was the story of their own arrival, Adon’s and Souraya’s, told through the brocade of the moonlit marinescape.
    Boats, oars, winds, moving waters, were made out of dancer’s legs, hands, hair, and eyes, and then dissolved. With uncanny observations of their faces, voices, and gestures, Adon and Souraya were woven into the brocade with song and dance, forever honored by becoming a flickering part of the community’s pilgrimage of experience.
    After the entertainment, when their party had been shown to their quarters, Adon seated himself near the entrance. Although the bones of his face looked prominent and stony, his expression, which she always watched as carefully as a sailor watches the fixed star, was unsettled. His eyebrows were both raised, his mouth open, as if he were in the act of