"So this awkward and unnerving day subsides, although briefly on a calmer note. The masters can't have helped but smell the unease in the air - for everyone, not just the orchardman - since Tabi disappeared. The ground beneath even the angels' feet has quaked with the shock and disrespect of her departure and the fear of having to explain it all to the garden's lord when they next dare to visit him. They understand their workers, now fewer than fifty, are bereaved and must be reassured at once, before the imp of disobedience takes hold like some fastgrowing tare; and first one, then another, then a crowd grow bold enough to think that, possibly, the world is more enticing than eternity. Then what of eden?· Those tares will multiply. Those fields and gardens will grow wild. The masters cannot tend them on their own. Those walls and barns and sacred roosts will age and crack like trees, weighed down by ivy, moss and vines, brought down by wind and time. And what of angels? Where will they take wing? (p. 16)
Tabi has other opinions. She reflects upon her fate and situation. She challenges the other humans with her blasphemic thoughts. Unless you experience it yourself, you will never know. You just accept the narrative of somebody else.
"It's possible, she likes to tell her brothers and her sisters, who all must have thought the same a thousand times but never dared to say so, that life beyond the palisades is paradise. And eden is a lesser place! The sermons teach the labourers inside to think that their estate is measureless contentment and the outside world is little more than famine, pestilence and suffering. Great is their sorrow and fathomless their pain. But who's to say, unless they find out for themselves? Who's to say, indeed, that there is even death out there unless you are prepared, just once, to chance the moment and the toe? No, maybe death is a just a falsehood the lord has invented for fear of losing his labourers, she says. It's even possible his angels made it up themselves without his guidance. And what a fine deceit! If no one fears the world beyond the wall, everyone will leave. And then what will the angels do for sustenance and care? Angels are as helpless as a bush whose berries won't be picked and cooked except by human hands. A wing has never grasped a spade or worked a piece of dough or carried water from the well. They can't even lay an egg, can they? she asks, to shocked silence and then to laughter. What can an angel do without a little help, except expect to be obeyed? It's also possible, she finishes, that there is no lord above - Has anybody looked him in the face? - but only angels saying that there is. They claim to fly up to his firmament to tell him how his garden and his servants fare, when actually they only hide· behind a cloud and then return with lies to tell and further orders for us to obey. We're pinned down in our orchards and our fields, she says, for fear of someone who's not real. (p. 176-177)
"No, Jamin detests the go-between. It's not angelic, but he does. And he would like to see his fall from grace. He can imagine a not too distant day when the man, no longer anybody's eyes and ears, is just a common labourer, a digger in the mud, a beast of burden in the fields, a toiler in the moil, another pair of hands who'll work his bully fingers to the bone and have to spend a so-called day of rest and recovery at the stock pond under Jamin's command. 0 how the gentle angel will torment him then. How hard he'll make him work amongst the mud and weed. He'll have him clearing stones from the deepest parts. He'll have him picking out the duckweed with his fingertips. The go-between will be as damp and lowly as a worm. It is meanly satisfying to imagine him, dangling from a master's beak, as supper for the fish" (p. 38)
Tabi's friend Ebon wants her back, then decides to go and save her, a risky endeavour for him too, to leave the garden of eden. But the interest is ignited on the other side too, among the mortals, whose curiosity is increasing with the sudden arrival and the visibility of the angel. One of the mortals climbs on the ramparts of the garden of eden.
"What now? His family and neighbours are asking him to describe what he can see. They've no idea what to expect; but, now that they have somebody - their very first, their pioneer - up on the wall and within sight and smell and hearing of the truth, they're hoping that there is nothing they should fear. All the stories they have told themselves when they have gathered round their fires and heard the night wind beating on the barbican and shaking its great gates have never truly been believed but have nevertheless always had a tighter hold on them in the darkness than any daylight logic ever could. A yarn that's spun and woven out of midnight flames is always stronger than the silks of day. But standing in the shadow of the wall this morning they have their fingers crossed that fireside stories don't come true and that the world beyond the wall will turn out to be not so very different from their own. Something dull and unremarkable would not be a surprise. After all, the great trees that reach out across the rampart are no different from the branches that reach in. The birds that come and go across the wall - the pies, the jacks, the peckers and the tits, the rooks and starlings, and the doves - are all familiar. As are the plumes of smoke when winter fires are lit." (p. 217).
