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

asking a question that confused and panicked him.
    He had taken the knife forged as part of Souraya’s dowry from its sheath, and turned and turned it in his hand, as if he were meditating on its inscription. Souraya watched him cautiously, turning and turning his face in her eyes, wondering what mood was being communicated to the knife.
    At last the knife came to rest, its glittering blade still on the flat of his palm, like a snake charmed into sleep. The familiar certainty returned to his face, a characteristic, almost aggressive tranquillity.
    Adon invited his wife to sit with him. “I cannot reproach you for impropriety in this case as it was forced on you,” he said, “nor for the beautiful accident of your features, as they were given to you, but your face has brought me into great danger. We are undefended here, except by God.
    “You have fascinated our host. It is apparent. His object will now be how best to acquire you for himself. I cannot prevent him. The dilemma now, rather, is in how to maneuver him to earn what he could simply take. This is the art of commerce, how to make a jewel-covered bride of a girl anyone can rape.
    “If this lord suspected we were husband and wife, he would simply rid himself of the obstacle of me and take you. You would live, and I would die. I have seen such situations. But God has spoken to me.
    “With God’s help, I find a stratagem that will protect me, and may yet turn to our profit. You will be my sister. And so Am will make an offer for a sister that would be impossible to make for a wife. I am sure of it. And I will accept it.” He sheathed his knife in the traditional iconoclast gesture that accompanied the sealing of an agreement or the acceptance of a treaty.
    “You will join his household until I find the means to bring you back. This is a hard thing to ask of you, I know, but I will not be murdered for your sake. It is not God’s will that you should live and I should die. I am God’s servant. You are mine. Pack what you will need. Remember at all times that you are my sister. And don’t dream they won’t come for you. God permits the visions He sends to me.”
    For the second time that night, Souraya became an athlete of silence and emptiness. She froze her eyes, her forehead, her mouth, regulated her breathing, this time to conceal her shock and disbelief. She drained herself like a lake, emptying herself of any visible emotion. But inside her self, where images could not be forbidden, she had witnessed a death.
    It was as if she had seen the soul of her husband fall and die in front of her, fall from his body as from a cliff, leaving behind not a corpse, but a soulless living body, the body of the man prostituting her, selling her body for his. She, too, had been separated from her body; she had never realized, never understood, how expendable, how provisional a thing it was.
    She had imagined herself as under her husband’s protection, like a precious coffer filled with his future children. In this vision was the way she had made herself consent to her life with him. But she was as secure in his protection as a fish is under the protection of a fisherman.
    She had thought because he loved her body that he cherished it. But now she saw that he took her body to be a dream of his own. It gave him pleasure, it gave him work, it gave him comfort, and profit. It was even more completely his body than his own, since if he needed to, he could discard it. Nothing she had imagined about who she was to him was true. At that moment, she became his widow.
    In the morning a messenger did indeed bring an offer from Am, along with a handsome weight of the gold ore that was the iconoclasts’ preferred currency, because they abhorred, as blasphemous and polluted, coins impressed with images.
    He was followed by a group of men and women bearing slabs of silk and baskets of dried fish: these were the fundamental currency of their own economy. The messenger also set down a