The Given Garden Read online

  But God was wrong.

  *

  Miguel knew that he had caused Satan pain, but he still counted her as a friend and a confidante, so when he needed to speak to God, he sought her out and asked if she would let Heaven stay with her in his absence. She asked him why her and not the child’s mother, and Miguel confessed that he had not been able to find Neveah for days, and that no one would think to look for Heaven in Satan’s house. Satan had shut herself away to prepare her felled son for burial, so she agreed to protect Heaven and ushered the child inside. Knowing that Satan was still very powerful, Miguel departed for Eden with a lighter spirit, knowing that he had left his daughter in the hands of the most divine being in Barachiel.

  But Satan was the last person that Miguel should have trusted. Yes once she’d been sweet and pure and innocent and adoring, but her spirit had been broken and though she knew that God would meet Miguel in Eden, he had ignored her prayers and left her to the wolves instead and now, her spirit was a vengeful one. No man could ever love her again, the women had been delighted to see her fall off the pedestal that Miguel had seated her on in the beginning, and had tormented her after the attack (no doubt suspecting it had been their husbands behind it) and now, Satan was completely alone and wanted to leave her life, which she planned to do as soon as she’d seen Hell buried.

  Yes, Satan had a heavy heart and an ill mind, and she resented Heaven for being her mother’s child, for having her father’s complete adoration and finally- for causing her son’s death. So, after Miguel had left, Satan fed Heaven a large poison berry- just one like the many that had been forced down her throat on the night of Miguel’s wedding- hoping to make her sick enough to give her mother a scare and return to do her maternal duty the way that Satan had always watched over Hell. She called the poison berry an apple, and Heaven took it eagerly- but then perished after one bite, shocking even Satan who began to wail and scream for help. In her fervour, she’d forgotten that the little girl was only a mortal and much more fragile than she, who had been forced to ingest several of those same berries but had survived. Of course the berry would have been lethal to her! Had she been in her right mind, she never would have handed it over!

  Miguel got back only when the girl’s body had turned cold, and though he tried to revive her, none of the Souls had enough power left to bring her back to life- not even Satan whose power was a destructive one, not healing. He grew angry and threatened to kill Satan, for that would be a fair exchange, and Satan sobbed and nodded over the corpse of her son whom she had laid out on his bed in his finest clothes, agreeing that was what she deserved and because without Hell, she didn’t want to live anymore anyway.

  But God appeared in human form and everyone fell back in terror. He forbid Miguel from causing death to another, for that would only weaken his soul, and told Satan that she was ungrateful to wish her life away and a monster for having taken a little girl’s life.

  Satan pulled Hell’s body into her arms, unfurled her torn wings so that God could see what had been done to her, and begged God to understand her grief and just put her to death. But as punishment, God turned her feathers black then sent Satan, alive and well, with Hell’s spirit to the same place where he had sent his negative energy for eternity, so he would not have to deal with her pain weakening him as his had- crying out that Satan did not belong in the paradise he was creating. Miguel reached for her as a glittering black mist swirled around her and her son, realising that it had gone too far and that this wasn’t the solution, but all he ended up with was a palmful of Satan’s black feathers and then, she was gone.

  Then, while everybody wept for their losses, God picked up the little girl and held her fast to his chest. He told them that they should not grieve, for it was sapping his strength and his ability to protect them further with it, and he promised Miguel and the other Souls that Heaven’s spirit would be safe in the paradise he was creating, for he was on the cusp of creating something as perfect as he and that he would name this paradise for her. Then he promised them that they would all get to join him in Heaven once they had perished on the earth, if their spirits were as pure as hers had been at the time of their death, and if they loved him still despite the trials they were facing in the world of his creation, unlike Satan who had failed.

  As Miguel wept and braided Satan’s black feathers into his hair, the Souls and mortals asked what it was they could do to live well and fairly and escape being sent to the dark place too, and he told them to do only to others what they would have others do to them. He ordered them to spread this message for he could no longer sense everyone who loved him in their vast numbers, and to tell people what he had done to protect them and that all he needed to ensure their happiness for eternity, was their love. He gave the eleven remaining Soul Mates the power to sense the good in people and the bad in others so that they would know who needed help, and then he left, weak and frail. meanwhile, Miguel used what energy he had left to transform into a great black bear in front of them and then raced off into the woods to hide, leaving them to govern themselves while he mourned.

  But, when God returned to his original form, he was pleased to discover that Heaven’s spirit and happiness made the after life and him stronger. When he realised that he could take whoever he wanted to Heaven whenever he wanted, God decided to change his plan and bring all of the remaining eleven Soul Mates back to his kingdom before they could perish on earth, and their Nephilim offspring so that the only humans remaining would be mortal and equal. Never again would a mortal boy attack a Nephilim child like Hell in a moment of jealousy! Never again would a Nephilim child be worshipped more than he! Or a Nephilim jealous of a true Soul Mates wings! And how strong he would be in the company of not only his Soul Mates, but also the dozens of children that they had borne!

  Some of the Soul Mates did not want to go and leave their families, but they still loved God more and when he promised that the eleven originals would be strong enough to pass through both worlds when needed, they agreed to accompany him to Heaven. Others, like Miguel, were through with the mortal coil and embraced the chance to return to God and rest in the paradise that was as glorious as his daughter.

  Miguel was broken-hearted, but also drowning in guilt from the inside. He didn’t want to lead people anymore, because he no longer felt like he was worthy of such a feat. He didn’t feel like he had earned an eternity in a paradise either- but he wanted the chance to linger with Heaven’s spirit, so that he could reflect on what happened and what he had done to contribute to the awful feelings which had brought about Hell and Heaven’s deaths. In time he saw that he’d been wrong to favour Heaven over his sons, wrong to make promises he could not keep and foolish to keep them to a woman like Neveah who did not even shed a tear over her daughter’s passing. She hadn’t wanted a mortal child- she’d wanted one of Miguel’s powerful male sons! He’d taken a vow with Neveah thinking that had been the Godly think to do but it had brought chaos upon his people and hurt the only people he had actually loved. He knew that he’d never again use the word love to describe something less than it and to remember this; he never took Satan’s feathers out of his hair.

  Miguel’s powers were restored in Heaven, and slowly but surely, every Soul Mate became glorious again as they shared and delighted in this new plane, and they thanked God profusely for having created it just for them and swore that it was a better life than their human ones had ever been- even Miguel.

  God was happy, but life on earth was harder without the Soul Mates present, and so God commanded them to return when they were truly needed, and to intercept when he could not, as guardians for mankind while he rested again. Humans would come to call them angels but no one would ever understand who they were or why they were- only that they were there for those who believed in God’s love. Stories circulated about God and his angels and his intentions for the human race, and some of the Nephilim were treated like Gods upon earth, their magic credited to other forces- the sun, the tides, a
nd in the most exotic countries, other Gods! But God let them keep their beliefs for the longest time, because all that mattered was that the love they felt made its way to him. The Barachiel people especially, missed their creator Miguel so much that that they took to wearing feathers as he had in his last days, and when time lapsed and the stories about Miguel grew muddled, they started whispering that they would be able to honour his memory, and the Soul Mate friends that he had spoken of like Satan, by worshipping the animals, just in case his spirit was hiding there.

  But, as the angels strengthened from sharing in Heaven’s glory, Satan was left alone with all of God’s dark energy and she too named it after her fallen child: Hell. All she’d wanted was to die, and the fact that she had been forced to live alone with her guilt and sorrow forever infuriated her until she forgot those sad feelings and knew only rage. God had been twice as powerful when he’d owned all of his emotions and after years of basking in his weaknesses, she became almost as powerful to him in might, but only almost, for she didn’t have love to feed off, as he did, only hate.

  But Satan found a way to channel what energy she did absorb, and eventually she discovered that she too, could move between one world and the other if she exchanged her spirit form for a human one. She too learned how to give herself wings and a tail and to alter her appearance, and she also learned how to shape her own dark paradise as God had created Heaven. And because she was beautiful and seductive and no longer a broken angel, she found a way to spawn herself again, and amass followers of her own- feeding not off their love but their lust, jealousy, fear and anger- everything God had infected the human race with only to turn his back on. She promised people that if they followed her, they would live the best lives of all the mortals and after their lives had run their courses, Satan took their spirits back to the plane that God had created just for her, punished them for their follies and laughed in contempt at God’s foolishness, for the more people he refused entry to heaven to- the more she could reap down to Hell.

  God was not perfect, she knew- just a man divided and distracted by his own dreams of glory. She had loved him and she had done more good than anybody, but she had suffered more for his weaknesses because he hadn’t been strong enough to overcome them, the way he’d made the mortals do with the same internal conflict between right and wrong, love and hate, greed and charity. She was the reflection that he hadn’t been able to meet with his own eyes!

  And she was determined to make him see it.

  End Book II

  PART TWO

  The Fledgling

  11.

  It didn’t take me an eternity to finish the book that Kohl had sent Kohén home with for me- it took me two years an eleven days. Two years of me reading until the wee hours of the morning, and probably six months of me using my flashlight under my covers to look up words from the old-world dictionary that Coaxley had unearthed for me from the library, or running off to the Collection room to try and find physical evidence of whatever object I’d just read about.

  I was obsessed. I loved the way the words were put together, and I loved learning about how the world had been so long ago. The kid’s books that I’d read had either been medieval or very twentieth-first century- stories about kids in cities, kids watching televisions, kids going to parks- or princesses in castles. But Margaret Mitchell’s world was different from both, and very similar to ours. The cities in the south had been pretty, but small. Manners had been important, technology had been a long way off and people were being oppressed for the good of other people. Being a third-born was nothing like being a negro in the nineteenth century, of course, but being a woman now wasn’t much different for me than it had been for Scarlett, and yet she’d broken through every boundary presented to her with gusto, and I admired her, even though I was fairly certain that I wasn’t supposed to for she’d hardly been full of God’s light. In fact, she was a lot like the Satan I’d read about it in the books of Creation.

  I turned eight shortly after I finished it the first time, but the second time only took me three months, and the third time, one. Kohén had come back from Pacifica excited to change the world- that and to learn how to surf- and so he took more lunches to himself to study or go down to the beach with the board he’d brought back, and though I was jealous of the way that he was changing without my constant observation, I made my peace with it once it became part of the routine, for it gave me more time to read anyway.

  By the time we were ten, Kohén could ride waves all the way to the shore (I went to watch him a few times but Maryah always fretted that I’d get sick in the ocean breezes which buffeted the beach and cliff behind it) and I could read Gone With The Wind in under a week. So when Kohén went surfing, I’d take my book down to the southernmost gardens and read, while Kelia tagged along with her own studies, asking me questions every time she stumbled upon something she didn’t understand- which was often. Sometimes Kohén would make me get up and play with him and though Kelia often tried to get involved, she was far too delicate to be athletic and often gave up a few minutes into our games to annoy Martya for answers and save herself the sweating, which she deplored.

  Playing with Kohén was as fun as it had always been at first, but I had to admit to myself that something had changed in our friendship since he’d left for Pacifica, and as time went on, his love of those islands only seemed too grow deeper roots, and that really did alter the dynamic of our friendship, especially after he went there for the second time and left me alone for three months again in the summer that he and I both turned ten. Suddenly, there was something we didn’t have in common present on his mind all the time, and while he daydreamed of coconuts and surf, I was imagining myself surrounded by workers of African-American descent on a plantation of my very own; workers that I’d pay the highest salary that any Blue Collar worker had ever earned, to help right one more of history’s many wrongs. Okay times had changed and people who treated people differently because of the colour of their skin were considered insane, but I still wanted to honour this by making a change of my own and if I could work as a Blue Collar after I had carried out my Given sentence, there was a chance that I could earn enough money to start a farm of my own.

  Kohén wanted to talk about the islands, but I wanted to know what he knew about the Kingdom of Yael, which I knew had once been Scarlett O’Hara’s region. He wanted to move offshore as soon as he was old enough and join Kohl, rather than waiting for Kohl to return, and together, they would create a Fifth Calliel kingdom- one which was self-sustaining due to the abundance of fruits and the unpolluted waters, where fish apparently leapt out of and practically into the catcher’s hands.

  But I wanted to move to the south and start a plantation, and build a grand white house with pillars and twelve oak trees lining the drive- no more, no less. Kohén argued that it was too wild on that side of the country and difficult to get a transfer into Yael, and that if I wanted a plantation so badly, I could come to Pacifica with him and grow pineapples. But I wanted to pick cotton so that one day I’d be able to wear a cloth that breathed in the summer sun, and I sensed that I’d be very good at growing it if my vegetable gardens were anything to go by. After all, I’d always had a green thumb, and cloth was still one of the most difficult things to produce, for most of the silk and cotton plantations on our continent had been ruined by the tornados and floods in God’s wrath. I had borrowed seven books from the palace library then about horticulture and considered myself quite the expert.

  We started bickering more often. Kohén insisted that I was younger than him and therefore, not as clever, and I pointed out that I’d started reading faster than him, which meant that I was the smarter one now. He shot back that it made more sense to band up with a Nephilim then to go off on my own, because his power could help whatever he planted to prosper, and I insisted that I’d had the biggest, most abundant gardens in all of our village and that I’d do just fine without him, but if he wanted to help me by proving how powerful he
was, he was welcome to visit me seasonally in the south and destroy the locusts that would certainly attack me, with his electric charge. He said it was stupid to expect him to cross across an ocean then a country, and that his plan made the most sense and was the most fair because if I followed him, we’d never have to worry about traveling to see one another, and I snapped back that he could follow ME because Calliel needed fabric more than it needed pineapples and that pineapples could be grown in the south too, so why did I have to cross an ocean to do what I could do by hopping a steam train on the rail line that was already being built? Kohén lost his temper then and said that the rail would take years to reach the opposite side of the country, and that boats were available to the islands NOW and that we could start our new life as soon as we were old enough with Kohl. Then he added that I was ridiculous to be dreaming of a world that had been lost because I’d fallen for it in ‘that fool book’ and that he was going to write a very cross letter to Kohl for having given it to me. Then he said that I ought to follow HIS lead because he was older, a prince, had Nephilim blood and had actually already seen where he wanted to go and knew without a doubt that his ambition was the only one that was actually conceivable. How did I even know that the land in the south could be farmed? And if cotton could be grown there, why hadn’t anyone else done it? Then he told me why before he could finish- the Atlantic ocean suffered more piracy than the others, and so most of the eastern seaboard, all the way down to the tip was considered wild and untamed lands that were inhabited by bands of outlaws who had never found a kingdom of their own. Moving into the walled city of Yael was one thing, but heading out on my own to a remote location was just downright dangerous. I would be raped, pillaged and murdered and it would be all of my own fault.