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

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.
    Now she realized how close she was coming to a precipice in this settlement, for a childless woman had no political and little economic value. A woman’s possessions consisted of her jewelry and her children.
    The consequences were brutally visible everywhere, in the snubs of Adon’s kin when they were guests at her table, and their hints at divorce, the theatrical pity prominent secure mothers displayed toward her at public rituals. Now bands of beggars sang traditional taunting