The Knife you can see well, especially in the late summer nights. Look up after dark; you will see its jade-green hilt, the sickle of brilliants that forms the curve of the scimitar’s blade, and the field of red stars sprayed around it, the drops of blood. It is the topmost section of the constellation called the Murder, though decrees have been issued, as yet with no success, to change its name by compulsion to the Sacrifice. Nevertheless, the true name of this group of stars is the Murder, and there the Knife quivers unmistakably at night, lodged where it was flung back into the heart of Heaven. Whatever human beings would suppress or refuse to see, the heavens record their true acts and encode their true dreams in the ineradicable testament of stars. The knife was forged as carefully as a sculpture as part of the dowry of a bride on her way to the household of an iconoclast husband she had never met. She was not to bring any images of animal or human creatures, none of the clay birds or babies that had been her girlhood toys, no paintings illustrating the cycles of legends she loved, no image of the house of her childhood, or of any guardian spirit.
What do You think about The Book Of Heaven: A Novel?
