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

basket of fruit, bread, and new eggs for the breakfast of those in Adon’s party, and waited for Adon’s reply.
    Souraya would be escorted into the chief’s household when the day’s business was done, and Adon would continue his travels of commerce. Adon put the payment for his wife in the locked chest where he kept the other records and earnings of his expedition. At nightfall, she followed Am’s servants, on the path to her new stranger master, still stunned at the way Adon had disposed of her, his chosen wife. She, who had only ever experienced living as a daughter and a wife, was sick with fear. She did not look back, at those carrying her luggage, nor did she look forward, at those leading her away. She kept her eyes on the ground, while her heart saw what it saw.
    She was led through a courtyard, and then taken into a pavilion with a wooden door, painted with a scene of musicians playing their instruments on a shore to a party of revelers in a boat at sunset. It was a scene of grace and melancholy, much imitated later in the vernacular art of the region—the boating party seemed to be drifting away from the music they were hearing, while the musicians would soon be without any audience to hear their songs. There were more frescoes on the walls of the room, which looked out onto the water and the shore of an island opposite.
    Souraya wandered around the room, drawn to the skillfully painted scenes. Any one of them could have taken place in the setting just outside the room, and she suddenly understood the playfulness that had put exterior into interior. The world then was inside the room, and the pictures filled its walls with possible adventures and histories and destinies, with other lives than her own; their presence communicated that what happened inside the room was not negligible, its scope too was the shared world’s scope.
    She was brought refreshments, and told to expect to be welcomed shortly by Am, who would announce himself unaccompanied. She saw his face with impotent fury and with dread, both emotions as daily and recognizable to her as the taste of water. She prepared herself to understand the new absolute will to which her life would now be chained. Looking at the frescoes had given her moments of repose and freedom, the relief of a voyage into another world. His presence recaptured her for this one.
    She concealed the sudden surge of intense irrational hatred she felt for him with a gesture of courtesy, in the ancient practice of women. Every woman had touched her hand to her heart in delicate obeisance at a moment when she wanted to tear out the heart of the person opposite. He seemed younger when she saw him close than he had yesterday, much nearer her age than Adon’s. She dropped her eyes, so as not to insult him by gazing at him as if she were his equal.
    “Please look at me freely” was the first thing he said. “Look at me without fear. I want to see myself in your eyes, and I want you to see yourself in mine. Be welcome as a guest, not as a prisoner.” She did as he asked, and looked straight up at him, more fully and intensely than she had ever looked at another human being. She was terrified to do it, anticipating a blinding impact in the candid exploration of another’s face. A taboo was being broken, and though she could not express it, she was not sure she would survive.
    Two joined gazes, she would later say, create a particular reaction, mysteriously generate something together, breed a feeling as palpable as a fruit.
    They read each other’s look as if each contained the first illuminated page of a story. What their gazes made together, she said, when she could describe it, was a kind of immediate biography, a shared recognition of the integrity of personhood, a mutual sense of the truth of each other’s humanity. It was as if they had already shared a life. Their understanding was silent, instantaneous, and moved through the eyes, as real a phenomenon as a sudden storm or