Free The Book of Heaven: A Novel by Patricia Storace

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