“How can we let go of the world when God have given us as our task the means to guide the mistaken back to the righteous way, to chastise the weak, and to punish the wicked?”
“Is that what God have asked us to do?”
“Is it not?”
“We are all tainted with the darkness which is the touch of the Enemy, Sister Venia. It is arrogance to believe we can see through the darkness that veils us and understand God’s will better than any other mortal soul. Only there—” He gestured toward the River of Heaven, streaming above them. “—will we be cleansed of that darkness and shine only as light.” He lowered his hand. “Shall we go in to dinner?”
2
“THE River of Heaven,” Da always said, “was called the Great Serpent by the heathen tribes who lived here before the Holy Word came to these lands.”
“Why is the zodiac called the world dragon, Da?” she would ask, “when it’s actually twelve constellations and not one creature at all? And if that’s a dragon, then why is the River of Heaven called a serpent?”
“We have many names for things,” he would answer. “It is the habit of humankind to name things so that we may then have power over them. The Jinna call the River of Heaven by another name: the Fire God’s Breath. In the annals of the Babaharshan magicians it was called the Ever-Bright Bridge Which Spans the Chasm. The ancient Dariyan sages called it the Road of Lady Fortune, for where She sets her foot, gems bloom.”
“What do you think it is, Da?”
“It is the souls of the dead, Liath, you know that. That is the path by which they stream onward into the Chamber of Light.”
“But then why don’t we see it moving—I mean really moving, flowing, not just moving as the stars all do, rising in the east and setting in the west? Rivers flow. Water is always moving.”
“That is not water, daughter, but the light of divine souls. And in any case, the aether does not follow the same laws as the elements bound to this earth, nor should it.”
“Then is there fire in our souls, that they should light up like that once they reach the heavens?”
But at the mention of fire, he would get upset and change the subject.
Now she wondered. “Hindsight is a marvelous thing,” Da would always say. “Every person sees perfectly with hindsight.” She had done brushing down her horse and lingered outside the door, staring up at a winter sky unblemished with clouds. It was bitter cold, this night; snow had fallen yesterday, delicate flakes like the shedding of down from angel’s wings, but there had not been enough to make more than a thin crust on the road today.
“Then is there fire in our souls?”
She built the City of Memory in her mind as she stood, arms crossed and gloved hands tucked under armpits for warmth, staring up at the sky. The city lies on an island, and the island is itself a small mountain. Seven walls ring the mountain, each one higher up on the slope, each one named by a different gate: Rose, Sword, Cup, Ring, Throne, Scepter, and Crown. Beyond the Crown gate, at the flat crown of the hill, stands a plaza, and on this plaza stand five buildings. Of the five buildings, one stands at each of the cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west. The fifth building, a tower, stands in the very center, the navel of the universe, as Da sometimes said jokingly.
But perhaps he had not meant it as a joke. Inside the topmost chamber of the tower stand four doors, one opening to each of the cardinal directions. But in the center of that chamber stands a fifth door, which neither opens nor closes because it is locked; because, standing impossibly in the center of the room, it leads to nothing.
Except there was something beyond it. If she, in her mind’s eye, knelt and peered through the keyhole, she saw fire.
Da had locked the door and not given her the key. He had meant to teach her—she was sure of that—but poor Da, always running, always suspicious, always afraid of what might be walking up from behind, could never decide quite when the time was right. So the time had never come.
Some things cannot be locked away.
“I miss you, Da,” she whispered to the night air, her breath a cloud of steam. Glancing up, her attention was caught by the River of Heaven, and she suddenly wondered if it, too, was a cloud of steam, warm breath on the cold celestial sphere of the fixed stars far above her. Like the zodiac, it was a circle banding the heavens, but it crossed the zodiac obliquely, cutting across at the foot of the Sisters and again, one hundred and eighty degrees round the circle, at the bow carried by the Archer.
Suddenly, with this vision of the sky bright above her, she realized that she had known all along which Eustacia Hugh had quoted from when he humilated her in front of the court. Of course she knew the Commentary on the Dream of Cornelia. But she had always skimmed over the bits about philosophy and virtue and the proper government for humankind. Those chapters didn’t interest her. She had memorized the chapters in which Eustacia commented upon the nature of the stars.