The Book of Heaven: A Novel (24 page)

Savour scrupulously fished out the rings the Princess left in the pastry, so as not to be accused of theft. This was something Invisibles learned in their earliest training, to guard against the accusation of theft by those who determined to make them criminal.

Little is more poisonous to a craftsman who has struggled for mastery of a discipline than to be forced to yield to the deadly insults of masters who fuse arrogance, ignorance, and jealousy. Masters of this kind are often accompanied, too, by trains of weak followers, like the cattle egrets who ride on the backs of cattle, feeding on the insects that swarm around them.

Such people can in fact never be instructed; the asking of a question causes them intense suffering bringing them into the insulting presence of knowledge, over which they can have no lasting power. Love itself can be bought; only knowledge is always earned.

Those for whom ambition, power, and the naked adoration of wealth are substitutes for the hard-won work of a life, can learn nothing, not even at the feet of the gods themselves. For learning is wrought through a brief communion of god and human in pain and exaltation. The truth, even the smallest truth, survives those who die of it and those who die for it.

One night, several dark hours before the first light, Savour was ordered to the kitchen, again to make her game pie for the Princess. She stumbled across the courtyard groggily, beneath the full moon. She tiredly set out the flours, the mushrooms, the butter, and failed to hear the Princess enter the kitchen. She continued to set out the equipment, oblivious, until, with a shock, she heard a plate shatter.

She turned and saw the Princess, whose face was a mask of hatred. “You will greet me with the same joy I expect from any other servant,” she said savagely. Savour remained expressionless, not awake enough to grasp the need to respond quickly. The Princess picked up the jagged half of plate, and violently threw it at Savour's face.

Savour did not turn with enough speed, and the sharp edge caught her left temple. Blood streamed onto the white marble of the counter. “You will remember from now on to smile in my presence,” said the Princess. She dropped the other half of the plate on the floor. It shattered. The Princess turned her back and left the room. For the rest of her life, Savour carried a small scar, curved upward in the shape of a smile, on the left side of her face.

The Princess, who in all other ways was richly insensitive, possessed an insidious capacity to recognize what was prized by others, which she would then attempt to erode, compromise, or annex, unable to bear any inattention.

Even when her intuition was imprecise, she often managed to inflict a wound, like a bullet that ricochets. It was in this way that she was the means of separating Savour from her beloved companion, Candle.

The Priest had recently returned from an alliance-making expedition with a country famous for making superb tents from the fibers extracted from the leaves of a native tree. He had acquired a supply of these for the use of the Angelic armies.

The cuisine of this country also was renowned, for the subtlety with which it made use of all ingredients, rich or poor. The Priest described to his wife the dishes he had sampled. He had eaten vegetables steamed over seawater, soup made of rain and cream, and had been struck by the repertoire of distinctive braised dishes featuring cat, wild and domestic.

The Princess sent an order to Savour commanding a similar menu, whose centerpiece would be braised cat for one hundred guests. It was then that Salt gently advised her to send Candle away. It had to be done, quickly and secretly. The danger was too great that the Princess's eye might light on him, and inspire her to demand that he, too, be cooked.

Together, at the earliest opportunity, they put Candle in a basket, and took him to Salt's family in their Indigenous village. Candle was quiet and tranquil in the basket; as long as he could scent Savour, he was in a world he trusted. But when she left him there, and shut the door, he gave a high-pitched, anguished scream, like a child's. They told her he stood on his hind legs, and beat at the door with his paws, that he cried and screamed for her as if he were making a desperate attempt to become human in order to bring her back.

“It has to be done,” Salt said, and actually took her hand to lead her away. “You will still be able to visit him now and then, and he will come to understand that you are not lost to him. Above all, he will be safe here.”

Candle's heartbreaking cries were a dark miracle. They made Savour relive her long ago parting with Gate. Savour had never thought anyone would remember her, never expected to be numbered among the mourned.

It was the Priest who brought the agon of the Princess and Savour to a temporary end. He had made fruitful use of his forced marriage to change his relationship to the Princess's father.

The old King of the Angels was now his dependent in judgment and in influence. The King had made no objection when the Priest, ever preoccupied with the threat of the Indigenes to the New Kingdom, introduced severe new restrictions on the Indigenous population. They had long been prohibited from traveling to border areas. There was a persistent danger that they might form alliances with the neighboring Saints.

The Saints were a nation who had every reason to fear the Angelic ambitions for their own territory—or an Angelic attempt to drive the Indigenous out, forcing them permanently onto Saintlands. The Saints scrutinized intently any change in the Angelic treatment of the Indigenous in order to predict what the Angels intended for them. The borders between the two countries had already been the sites of brief, but violent skirmishes.

Now even travel between villages was to be severely controlled. The Priest was accustomed to the absolute obedience he commanded during the Angelic liturgies—the dance steps accomplished in unison, the precisely clasped multitudes of upraised hands, the dramatic prostrations among the congregants that gave the impression of row after row of wheat falling to the scythe.

The more he commanded the New Kingdom's political life, the more he was convinced that a similar submission must be required of the Indigenes, if Paradise were to be achieved. It had come to him that even determining the movement of the Indigenes would not accomplish this; their livelihoods themselves must be altered and subordinated to Angelic needs; the Angels held the power of death through their lavishly equipped army. But to conquer is not to rule. They would seize, too, the essential power of life; the power in food, in giving or withholding daily bread.

The Priest planned to accomplish this by requisitioning Indigenous reserves of food and Indigenous labor for the good of all; it would become the bread of Angels, stored in the silos of Paradise.

The Indigenes would then purchase food from the supply, according to their needs. In this way there would be both plenty, and unprecedented and permanent safety for all. The national stores would be filled, insured against future crises. And at last, every aspect of the Indigenes' lives would be ordained by the Angels of God.

Thinking about this plan gave him a kind of repose, a sign he always recognized as a good omen, an augur of success. He proposed to implement his program by a lengthy progress through the Indigenous territories, with a cohort of troops to enforce local cooperation. This would also give him the opportunity to inspect the current encampments at the borders with the Saints, and adapt them if necessary.

He did not propose, but informed the Princess that he intended to take Savour on his tour.

The Priest had become for the Princess the one being against whom she was powerless. “What good can she possibly do you in this project?” she asked, but with futile contempt.

“A great deal,” he answered. “This is, in part, a military exercise. And Savour, in her way, is a strategist. She not only gives pleasure to the body with her work, but her work has the capacity to change the mind.

“The management of imagination is the chief necessity in taking men to war. It is also an important means of taking men to peace, and that is where Savour excels. My endeavor is to change the way the Indigenous people have lived for centuries on this land. You have no idea how useful she may be to me on this expedition.”

So Savour set off with the Priest and his guard; she was charged with the task of managing the camp kitchens. Salt would remain to oversee the court kitchens, as he had before the Priest had purchased Savour.

Savour took on her tasks with joyous relief. The temporary freedom from the Princess's corrosive attacks on her was an utterly unexpected gift. The prospect of traveling in new landscapes, among unknown people, was a rare opportunity to add to the great library of her palate. The more richly she could taste, the more knowledge she would add to what she knew of the world she was inhabiting.

She was quietly proud, too, of the honor of being asked to accompany the Priest himself on the journey in which he began his magnificent task, the great work of his life, his part in restoring Paradise to earth. Savour, the only member of the company who was not an Angel, would witness the obliteration of hunger among the peoples of the New Kingdom, Angel and Indigene alike, the world as it had been in the days of Paradise.

She supervised the making of the eminently portable preserved foods that would see the Priest and his three-hundred-strong personal guard through a journey of several months, supplementing local supplies.

In addition to preserved meats, and parched sweet corn, she made hundreds of confections at the request of the Priest. He loved sweets, like all the Angels, but they were also an important element of the Angelic liturgy, symbols of the perfect fruit that had grown on the trees of Paradise, in all its eternal beauty and sweetness.

Savour packed box after box of many-colored sugar-jeweled fruit, crystallized eternal roses, and glistening buttery nut pastries buried in powdered sugar, to be eaten drowned with caramelized cream or syrups she would concoct wherever they camped.

Salt was stoic with regard to her absence—and painfully jealous—of her unexpected, if temporary, freedom. He made her promise to remember for him all the details of the regions forbidden to him. He begged her for seed samples from that unknown earth, which had once been Indigenous. The seeds, he knew, were the only way he would ever travel beyond the Angelic boundaries. If Savour succeeded in collecting them, he could still witness something unknown emerge into life.

They would travel first along the coastal route, gradually climbing into the mountains. The route was punctuated with deserted Indigenous villages, populated only by Angelic battalions. The Indigenes had been forbidden to live by the water, for fear they would rebel, reinforced by supplies and troops via the sea. They had gradually been resettled inland; the ripped-up fields and stumps of agate trees outside the walls of these villages gave them the air of tombs that had been robbed. The garrison village where they were to camp was like a stopped clock that contrasted with the cheers, commotion, and cries of “Life is Paradise” greeting the Priest's party.

Savour set to work with the battalion cook as her assistant. She sought to temper the melancholy atmosphere of this village through the sublimity of her cookery. She chose to make a dish of meat, nuts, quince, and rose wine, which at court was understood to represent yet another aspect of the union of ethereal Heaven and earth, life made paradise.

Here, though, the dish was a failure, received unenthusiastically, though perfectly executed. She was shocked to learn, for the first time, that perfection itself could fail—that the mediocre could be actively preferred to the excellent.

This was surely one of the flaws of Savour's work. Hers was always the restless, challenging food of philosophy, rarely the food of peaceful repose; she had not known the childhood dishes that gently renewed strength and prepared people for sweet sleep. She could build a cathedral, but not a house. These lonely Angels guarding the uprooted village did not want to be enchanted, but tranquilized. They wanted to imagine themselves living elsewhere. She could see and hear that they thought her work precious. It wounded her that she had not satisfied them.

She went for a walk on the beach at sunset, preoccupied by her failure. She wanted to feel the water. She entered the sea, standing ankle-deep in the waves, not one of which resembled another, one caressing her, one frisking at her ankles like a dog, one frankly trying to kill her. She tried to learn their lessons, the philosophy of the ocean.

“One wave is stone,” she thought, “the next silk. One day my work does me honor, the next it disgraces me.” She was so distracted by trying to absorb the teachings of the sea that she didn't hear the party of soldiers whose footsteps were muffled by the sand. She felt her head pulled back by her hair and saw a bright crescent of knife blade before she felt the metal touch her newly exposed throat.

“No one who is not of the Angels may walk on the shore,” she heard one say harshly.

Savour's reaction to danger had always been a preternatural calm, as is often the case with those who are aware that though they have owned certain hours, they can never determine their fate.

She said with calibrated, purposive softness that she was the Priest Xe's cook, and had not known the shore was exclusively for Angels. Her calm calmed the soldiers. They herded her, as experienced sheep dogs marshal a stray, to the Priest's quarters.

The Priest himself emerged after a quarter of an hour, and confirmed her tale. The soldiers were awed at his appearance; they knelt before him.

The Priest put his hand on Savour's head. The face of power can be wolflike, savage, determined. In its other aspect it is radiant, rapt, beyond self-doubt or any other boundary. It subjugates not with violence, but with romance.

The Priest's ecstatic smile broke like sunrise, shedding overflowing grace.

“Savour is indeed my cook. Savour may go wherever she likes,” he said. “She often forages for delicacies so that her work may refresh us—and she herself also needs a measure of refreshment from the smoke in which she works devotedly every day. I will write her a permit so that there will be no further interference with her.” He silenced the soldiers utterly by himself escorting her on the path back to the shore.