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

pregnancy.
    As she had envisioned, and had demanded, the child was put into her arms as soon as the cord was cut. She sat down with the nearly weightless creature on her knees, observing the beseeching movements of his unmuscled arms, the tiny fingers like fistfuls of fresh herbs, the bewildered, already human face. She called for the plaque and the honey, and wrote down his name. Then she kissed his name onto his lips. “Pelerin,” she sent the name into his body. “Pilgrim.”
    The midwife, concerned to have the child fed, disentangled him from Souraya’s arms. She did not want to let him go. She cursed herself for not being able to feed him. It dismayed her to see him at his mother’s breast. He fit there like a star within a constellation. Souraya had named him—she was his fate. But Roucoul, she saw, as her milk went into the child like rain into the soil, was his existence. And nothing could change that.
    This was why the priests insisted that each conception was an act of God’s, and surrounded each birth so densely with ritual, prayer, and custom. These were exorcisms of the mother, a seeking of protection of the child from some other, not maternal, source. Otherwise, in the beginning, it might seem that the woman, the birthgiver, had absolute power over life. It was she who gave each life, and thus, terrifyingly, it was also the woman who had the power to take it away, as Souraya had herself seen a number of times, effected simply by a subtle withdrawal from the child, who wilted like a parched plant. There were mothers who simply selected one child to sponsor, and another to neglect. And as a rule, their infants obeyed them to death. Even law could do little to change that power.
    Adon was eased by the child’s solution of his dilemma, as everyone who had expected to inherit from a rich man without an heir was not. He was quite indifferent to Roucoul, as long as she had served her purpose, and continued to serve it. Her abject misery would have been of concern to him; her happiness was not. The child, for him, was born of Souraya’s thought, and another proof of the providence she was for him.
    For Souraya, though, the household was unbalanced. Her husband preferred her, and that was as it should be. But the household’s child preferred its mother, grew to resemble her, spoke almost a private language with her.
    Pelerin dropped his voice to a whisper before Souraya, rarely smiled in her presence, and made her feel an intruder in her own home. It was almost as if he had absorbed the way Souraya had dealt with his mother while he formed in her womb, and now refracted her own behavior back to her; he treated Souraya with perfected, pragmatic, affectionless obedience, unless he felt his mother was being maltreated. He displayed an odd assumption of equality with Souraya, as if he were uncannily aware that he was the guarantor of her marriage. Souraya had called his mother a soldier maker; he was a childlike caricature of a soldier.
    Twice, though, he had lost that martial obedience, and attacked Souraya, on the two occasions she had slapped his mother. It was almost irresistible to Roucoul as the two women struggled over the boy, to assert her motherhood over him by finding a way to refer to Souraya’s childlessness. Though Souraya was disgusted with herself for striking the girl, the taunts touched her where she was wounded to death.
    It happened again on a day when Souraya was beginning to teach the child to count. He could hardly force himself to attend to her, and followed his mother with his eyes, as she did the cleaning; heavy household tasks were now almost wholly hers. Souraya had made the boy sit close by her side, though he never stopped tapping his feet, as if he were running away from her, even though the rest of him stayed still. Roucoul, proud to be his favorite, began to hum one of the folk songs about childless women.
    A fury surged up in Souraya, a burning energy of anger. She felt as if she