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You can’t say she wasn’t warned.
There’s a trial, and wasn’t that a surprise—nulla poena sine lege, sure, but she was told. ‘And you shall surely die’, not even the small print. It’s her sons and daughters who get to squabble over grains of sand at the gates to the city, arguing Semitic substratums and inerrancies. She got it straight from the source, the Law from which all laws proceed.
(She’s not even sure she can argue mistake of fact—He hadn’t stooped to speak hers and Adam’s clumsy proto-language, rife with misunderstandings and shades of ineffable feeling. Just went and dropped the knowledge into their brains, cold and certain and true.)
Most of the trial is spent wishing the Judge would look up from the memorandums set before Him. She hasn’t seen His eyes since she was cast out, and she wonders if they are still green, of if that was just the Garden, reflected.
She wishes someone would tell her where Adam is.
The jury—of her peers, and isn’t that amusing? as though she has peers—adjourns to decide the verdict. She adjourns to the alley behind the courthouse, and bums a cigarette off an angel. She’s not sure which one, they’re all Latinate names, blinding light and faint humming, too many eyes stuck in incongruous places. (Oh, theology, her lawyer had dismissed when she asked about the strange creatures in the gallery, their many bestial heads quarreling among themselves. After your time, dear.
The whole of history is after my time, she had muttered, but it was lost in the shuffle of bodies and files, wings.)
She lights up with a spray of sparks from one of the angels’ many-turning interlocking wheels and shuts her eyes, inhales a mouthful of smoke.
“Got a light?”
She cracks an eye. Then the other. “You’re Him,” she observes, exhaling. Not the Judge, but Him, all the same. He has Adam’s eyes, and her spade of chin, though the softness of His mouth is all Seth’s, and the mark on His brow is Cain’s. She feels a fullness of pity for whatever mother bore Him, undying sons are always heavier to carry. The extra life there is like lead.
He smiles, and it is blinding. “Him? Well, yes. And…no. It’s complicated.”
“Theology?”
He rolls His eyes to the heavens. “You have no idea.”
He leans against the wall beside her, and she passes Him the cigarette. “They don’t normally smell like incense, you know,” he says after he’s taken a drag, exhaling thick smoke. It curls into the air before Him, making her think of snakes. “Cigarettes, I mean. The incense was his—my—our idea. We couldn’t imagine wanting to eat death.”
She doesn’t have to imagine it. “They hadn’t invented them, in my time,” she says with a shrug. “I never had one before coming here.”
“Right,” He says softly, passing the cigarette back to her.
“So what do you think my odds are?” she asks, trying for humor and mostly sounding tired. She feels tired, down to Adam’s rib floating over her soft organs—and Adam’s rib never aches. This trial has dragged on too long. “You might have some insight, complicated as you are. Innocent or guilty?”
He looks at her for a long moment before saying, “What do you think, Chava?”
Guilty, on all counts.
Her lawyer manages to argue them down to suspended sentence with community service, and she has to bite her lip to keep from laughing—service? this place is glutted with holy men and women, who can’t go an hour without falling to their knees to wash one anothers’ feet; Heaven needs service like she needed birth-pangs.
But an angel (she’s still not sure which one, Latinate name and eyes in incongruous places) presses a shovel into her hands, and tells her to dig.
“Where?” she asks, looking out across the endless gold cobblestones, clear as glass. There is no earth in Heaven; even the gardens here are grown from the soft ground of nothingness-coming-into-being—or that was how it had been explained to her, anyway. (a child’s question, what is that? and one of the holy women had taken pity, said, nothing now, but wait.)
The angel merely shrugs its wings, and watches her with all those eyes.
She’s all sweat and fury at the end of the day, having wasted long hours trying to catch the point of the spade against frictionless, faultless cobblestones. Her palms are torn, aching; she can barely move her shoulders without crying out. She just manages to drag herself to her bed in the halls of limbo, shuts her eyes, thinking she will rest only for a moment and then rise, wash—
“Mother?”
She has to grit her teeth against a litany of curses—mild, she and Adam might have invented the art, but it took their children to master it—and cracks an eye open. One of her billion billion sons stands there, clutching a bowl. “Just water,” he says. “But I thought, your hands…”
She shifts, groaning, until her weak hands dangle over the edge of the bed. She shuts her eyes again, and listens to the rustle of cloth on cloth, the sound of a rag being wrung out. She makes a high-pitched sound when it is pressed to her torn palm and seems to bite down into the skin. “Sorry, I’m sorry,” her son mutters. “That’s the antiseptic, it’ll take a moment to get used to.”
Adam had cleaned her this way, she thinks—after Cain and Abel were born, he had shed his robe and wetted it, used it to wipe the blood from her thighs.
“I am told it gets easier,” her son says, after a long moment. The aching of her palms has eased some. “Whatever task you have been given, to atone. Everyone says it gets easier.”
She opens her eyes. He has a kind face, this son of hers. “What’s your name?”
“John. Not that one.”
“What one?”
He blinks at her. “Oh, you don’t…”
“Theology. After my time,” she says, because everyone seems to agree on that, at least.
She lifts the hand not cradled in John’s, and runs it over his hair, leaving bits of rusted blood on the bright silver. He lets her.
“For someone called ‘the helpmeet’ you’re not very good at accepting help,” John says one night at dinner, after she refuses the food offered her by yet another holy man. There is so much food here—an unreal abundance to her eyes, accustomed to seeing rocky soil, and meager flocks. Someone is always offering out enormous golden dishes to them, heaped with fish or fruit or things she has no name for.
She mistrusts most of it, and subsists on figs, and a meal of rye she makes herself. John looks appalled, and every time asks if she would not a least add some sort of spice, or she is not the mother of all mankind.
“A mother does not ask help of her children,” she tells John, passing him a fig. He makes a face. (She knows he prefers apples, but she does not know what an apple is, or how to go about getting one. She supposes she should ask one of the holy men and women, but—
Cain used to say she was too proud, his mother. Where do you think you learned it, my son? she had answered.)
“Who does a mother ask help of, then?” John asks, struggling to split the rough skin of the fig. She takes it from his hands, and splits it open in one clean movement. She hesitates a moment before setting a half in the curve of his palm. It looks like an open wound.
“The snake showed me that,” she says, and feels him looking at her, as she lifts a piece of the fig to her mouth, buries her teeth in the flesh.
“Where is Adam?” she asks her angelic guard one day. They have broken for noontide,and she is sitting in the shade of a chalcedony tree, picking at the hard edge of the callus at the heel of her hand.
She has not managed to even loosen one of the cobblestones yet.
The angel looks at her balefully. That is not for me to say, it says, the words carved from onyx and dropped into her mind like ‘and you shall surely die’ was, once. She shivers.
“It is a simple question,” she says. “Where is my husband?”
Not-here. That is all you need to know.
“No, it’s not. I need to—”
Wasn’t knowing what got you in trouble in the first place? the angel asks idly. It becomes suddenly very engrossed in a smudge on the bright cobblestones. She watches as it lifts a hand to one of its bestial heads, licks its thumb. Carefully polishes away the scuff.
(Sometimes she sees Him outside the court building, smoking cigarettes that smell like incense. He always flashes her a grin, exhaling smoke that curls around His hands like a snake.
She lifts one hand from the shovel, slung across her shoulders, to wave.)
John is still waiting for a court date, and so she invites him out with her. (If this is not permitted, her guard gives no indication of it; it merely regards both of them with all its incongruous eyes, and sighs. She gets the sense her angel does not like her very much.) She and John pass shovel between them—the sun is high overhead she is laughing, watching John pose theatrically, then hammer on a likely cobblestone with the edge of the spade. The gold sings each time, clear and sweet.
All the stones ring out when struck, some in high musical tones and others deep, sonorous. “Like bells,” John had said, when she showed him. (She did not know what ‘bells’ were, but she supposed that must be one of those things her children inherited from Him.)
“We could probably play a killer rendition of ‘Smoke on the Water’ if we could find the G,” John says, passing her the shovel. These days it fits in her hand like breath fits in her lungs, an extension of her arm, her self.
“I have no idea what you just said,” she laughs, hefting the spade and bringing it down on another stone, and—
It cracks, and out spills the earth.
(There is still dark loam under her fingernails, lying in bed that night.)
The next morning, she is to the golden square before the sun—the facsimile of a sun, never too hot, or too bright, or too dim, for what sort of Heaven would that be—has risen above the jasper walls. Her angel turns up at the appointed time with a wineskin of something that smells of fouled water, and dark earth.
It’s coffee, the angel says, the words cold as onyx, but she cannot mind. You are early today.
“I’d like seeds,” she says, trying not to fidget too much. (She does not think the angel likes it, when she fidgets.) “This is earth, good soil—I want to plant seeds in it. I do not care what kind. Whatever will grow in this place.”
The angel studies her with its many eyes. Clear and till the courtyard, it says, finally. Clear and till the courtyard, and we will speak of this again.
She hefts the shovel in her hand.
“—would you like some help?”
She does not turn, and lift her spade, and kill the holy woman with the blunted edge of it, but it is a near thing. (She is Cain’s mother, still.) Instead, she bows her head and breathes deeply, exhaling the frustration and mindless rage of so many hours spent in fruitless labor. She has tried everything for three days, and no other cobblestone has split, or been pried from the earth, or even shifted. The golden courtyard is still like glass, with a single chip where the earth bleeds through.
The holy woman is watching her.
Her daughters—the ones she carried in her womb, not just of her blood—were women like the earth, sweet as figs, with wide hips for children and broad arms for taming oxen. Their rage was the flaming sword of the angel at the gates to Eden, and when they laughed, it was like His thunder.
This holy woman is thin and pale as a thing grown in the darkness, and she looks as though she has not laughed all her life.
“Would you like some help, Mother?” she repeats in a reedy voice, tinged by some thickness, accent unknown. (Ah, you’re pre-Babel, the young man at the Gate had said, after a solid minute of gibberish. Sorry, we don’t get many of your sort here. My accent is probably terrible.)
“What’s your name?”
“I—Agatha,” the girl says. If she is waiting for this to spark some recognition, none is received. (Theology, the Mother thinks wearily. After my time.)
“Agatha,” she repeats. She is so tired, and she cannot keep beating herself against the mirror-gold until it breaks her. “You are certainly welcome to try.”
She holds the shovel out to her, but Agatha does not take it. Instead, the girl kneels down, presses her hands together, palm to palm. It’s a strange gesture, but she has seen it before—others have done so before in the barracks of limbo, before the lamps are blown out. John says it is for speaking to Him.
(She had generally just opened her mouth.)
The angel drifts from where it had been sitting in the shade of the chalcedony tree, all its eyes focused on the small, pale plant of Agatha. She tenses, waiting for it to berate her for accepting help, or to stop Agatha from—but it merely watches, as though waiting for some sign.
It comes a moment later, when the whole courtyard heaves, like it is about to give birth, and the cobblestones slide away, scatter in a hail of gold—the angel grabs her arm, pulls her in close to its body. (It is warm, and smells strange, like that coffee and something else, like a sword of fire, and figs.) She buries her face in the soft down of its breast, until she feels the ground judder, and still.
(She thinks maybe her angel likes her, after all.)
When she looks up, the courtyard is dark soil and cracked earth, loose cobblestones. Even the chalcedony tree is crooked, uprooted.
Agatha is standing, now. Pale and slender as a thing grown in the dark. “I am the patroness of earthquakes,” Agatha says, as though that is explanation, surveying the courtyard with abnormal-pale eyes.
“All right,” the Mother of All answers, clutching at the spade in her hand. When Agatha smiles, it is cruel and cutting as pincers.
“Excuse me,” she says, catching a holy woman by the sleeve as she passes her in the halls of limbo. The words feel thick and unpracticed on her tongue. “Could you tell me where the apples are?”
John laughs aloud when she comes to him that night with her tunic unbelted, so she could carry half a bushel. (That was what holy Dorothea had said it was called, a bushel.) She dumps them over his head, and he laughs, he laughs like thunder.
Apples are sweet, she finds.
Agatha returns the next day, and the day after, bringing sisters and brothers. They greet her as ‘Mother’ and teach her digging songs—sacred and profane alike, red balloons and lambs of god and beheading tyrants, anything to lighten the heavy golden cobblestones, or drive the spade into the earth.
The angel watches over all of them, and once or twice, she thinks she sees ones of its bestial heads smile.
(”Will you help?” she asks Him one clear morning, the shovel slung over her shoulders like an afterthought, a second set of clavicles. He is leaning against the wall of the courthouse, taking the first puff of a new cigarette.
His first exhale is thick, it burns her eyes.
“I already have a garden,” He says, grinning a little lopsidedly. “You remember. This one—this one is yours.”
He takes another drag, and she thinks of Abel, her sower-son, green and dead. Impulsively, she leans in, kisses His cheek. He looks at her, with wide doe-eyes like Adam’s before he took his bite. “Am I your mother or your daughter?” she asks, just to hear Him laugh, just so they can say together, like a curse—
“Theology.”)
She is to the golden square before the sun, surveying the rich earth, broken and tilled for planting. The gold cobblestones have been dug up and laid again, forming a narrow walkway—radial, one of the women had called it. (She liked to listen to their talk, her postmodern children. She had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but she could never have imagined what that meant, how much her children would know; the turning of stars and monsters of the sea, invisible and hidden things that she had thought of as His country, but they knew them. They knew them all.
If she was meant to feel remorse for giving them such a gift, He should have kept them apart.)
Her angel turns up at the appointed time with its wineskin, and comes to stand beside her, wings rustling. Its goat-head lips at her hair, and she smiles. You have cleared and tilled the courtyard, it observes, and she does not think she is imagining the note of pride in its voice.
“Yes. I would like seeds—”
It holds the wineskin out to her. When she takes it, and unknots the cord around its mouth, out comes a stream of pale golden seeds, then yellowed, and black; a bulbous thing she does not know, a fistful of green cuttings, pale white.
She wonders if she can cry in this place. She has never tried.
These will grow, the angel says, laying a heavy hand at the crown of her head. Especially for you, Of-the-Garden.
“Thank you,” she manages to choke out, before she begins to weep in earnest.
(The first rain her garden—her Garden—knows is this. She wonders if He wept too, wept with this wild joy of something-coming-into-being . It would explain a great deal about what He grew, after.)
..epilogue.
She wishes she could say she is surprised when the Judge turns up one morning, instead of her angel—but she has been listening to her children argue as they weed, over stories and theology and how to make a really excellent baked potato. She thinks she understands now, the rules of the game He had asked her to play with Him. She thinks she understands how lonely He must have been.
A father does not ask help of his children, after all—for that, he needs a mother.
So yes, the Judge comes. He comes, the smell of incense lingering on his fingers. He comes to stand beside her on the far radial edge of her Garden, where the half-grown apple trees afford them a sliver of green shade. For a long moment, He simply looks at her before smiling, saying: “What do you think, Ishah?”
She looks out at the green where once there was gold. The sun rises and her children arrive in ones and twos, ready to serve, to get on their knees and pull weeds, make earthquakes.
“Not innocent,” she says, finally. “But better.”