The Book of Heaven: A Novel (26 page)

Within a day of his return to the Angelic court, with the same look of gentle, mature, and knowledgeable pain, he informed his cabinet that war with a coalition of Saints and Indigenes was inevitable. He ordered the Angels to prepare for another war that was God's Will. He announced that he would offer a traditional Supplication Feast for victory in battle when the war councils were concluded.

For her part, as soon as she had put hidden what she brought back from her travels, Savour hurriedly sought out Salt. She had three urgent gifts to give him: the truth of all she had witnessed, her dire foreboding of his personal danger, and the three bags of seeds in her keeping that held the perishable knowledge and history of the Indigenes.

When she found him, he was in her place in the kitchens. He was calculating how long the kitchen's supplies of flour would last. The stores were ample, but he knew that cultivation was coming to a halt. She called to him. Salt turned around, walked to her, and embraced her, burying his head in her shoulder. She had a bizarre disorienting sense that she was remembering this embrace, instead of living it. “I know what is happening,” he whispered into her shoulder.

He had already received the first and second of her gifts; the news had reached him, even behind the palace walls, of the Angels' works among the Indigenes.

When she tried to give him the third gift of the seeds, he shook his head, and pleaded that he was overburdened with work. He urgently needed her advice about the flour supplies. He would receive what she had brought after the kitchens were closed for the evening.

At the end of the day, when the moment had come, Salt said he had made a mistake in the provision books that needed correcting. He asked her to meet him in the cellars to look over the books, and she followed him, carrying the seeds.

He opened each pouch, and stared inside, as if the seeds were crystal transparencies, revealing some other world. Then he closed the pouches, kissed each one reverently, and handed them back to her. “They will be safer with you,” he said. “Keep them and don't let me know where you have hidden them. You are a childless woman with hundreds of thousands of children in your hands.”

“Have they taken the grain from your fields?” Savour asked him.

“Everything my family could not hide. There was a field with a fungus that they left.”

“Will you have that grain brought to me?” she asked him.

“Only the desperate would find a use for it.” He shrugged.

“The time may come. Besides, we can provision your family in exchange for it.”

Salt agreed, and sat down on a barrel of molasses. “The time has come to teach you a kind of cooking that was not part of your apprenticeship,” he said gravely.

She raised her eyebrows. “What is that?”

“The cooking of soldiers,” he said. “The food of war. The art of roasting in clay pits so no smoke can be detected, the art of baking bread in shields, of fugitive meat, using spears as skewers.”

“Where did you learn those skills?” she asked.

“I am a soldier,” he said. “I have been training with the Saints since I was eleven years old.”

A great stillness entered the room as if they had both plunged underwater. He had given his life into her hands as certainly as he had the precious seeds.

At periods when every hour is an uncertainty, lovers who may never have embraced in times of peace seek repose in each other. Salt and Savour were surrounded by treachery; the sense of trust they felt in each other was stronger than any romance. They needed to tell the truth as they needed water; they drew strength from the sense that when they were together they would neither harm each other nor be harmed. Their lovemaking was a form of telling the truth. They constructed a love, and sheltered in their mutual creation as if it were a house.

Savour had never before been with a man, and although the pleasure was never as precise as solitary lovemaking, holding Salt in her arms was a greater wonder—like holding a being that was simultaneously a child, an animal, and a god.

They did not have much time to be lovers; every day was more dangerous for Salt; Indigenes were being arrested on suspicion of collaborating with the Saints, and at any moment his time might come. Others had indeed slipped away and gone underground. Salt's years of trustworthy service in the employ of the Angels appeared to give him some immunity. But his impeccable reputation also gave him the opportunity to leave while it was possible.

He would not tell her the day, or anything precise about his plans; he wanted her ignorant if she were interrogated. He was so possessed by his passion to protect her that he failed to realize—even to imagine—that she was withholding valuable information she had gleaned from traveling with the Priest for the same reason.

Salt would not permit her even to guess which of the kitchen staff or courtiers sympathized with the Saints. “There is something, though, that directly affects you, that you must be told. The Saints are of course aware of our bond, in much more detail, I am sure, than anyone else here at court. The Angels spend their energies in controlling us, not in observing us; the lives of Invisibles belong to the masters, and as for us, all Indigenes are assumed to be both their enemies and their inferiors.

“The Saints are even more keenly aware of how uniquely you are placed to destroy the Priest—which they believe—and they may be right—will make the Angels' war impossible to carry out. I know you will be asked to poison him. And I want to tell them your answer before the question is asked with force, or in any way that frightens you. Would you kill him?”

Salt asked her this in the direct way they talked to each other. It was a question about the properties of her nature, about what was possible to her. They had worked so often together in the storerooms; now his question was about what furnished Savour.

“My answer is yes.” Savour gazed directly at him. “I would. I will never forget what I have seen him do. And so my answer is also no. I will not—because I know that killing him would destroy me with him.

“All I have trained for is to put creation into my hands. This craft has been something different for me than for you. It is my mother.

“It gave me life. It is my teacher. I have followed it from one day into the next. It has shaped a history for me, which most Ghosts must live without. It gave me a human life, a life I can give, but not take.

“Death is present always in what we do in this work—but as sacrifice, not killing. There are warriors. But I am not one. I cannot use my own human life to take a human life.

“If I dared, I would bite his jugular with my own teeth. But it is forbidden to those born under the sign of sacrificed Souraya, the stars of the Knife. If one of us killed him, even that could not stop him. It would add to his power; it would make others become him.”

“You consider him human?” Salt asked.

“Yes. And to say so is more terrible than any blood anathema. Because to say so is to know what I am.”

“Many people may be killed before he dies.” Salt turned his hands over as if he were holding a thousand unseen lives in his palms.

“I can only tell you it is as if I am playing chess with a powerful opponent. He has already claimed the power of death. I cannot use it as ably as he can. He is a great killer. He will defeat me. I know it.”

Salt bowed his head, seeing her dead. “Then this is a risk you must not take.”

“I must act within my limits,” she continued, half-whispering as she shredded cold roast meat. Even the Angels were eating frugally now.

“I am an Invisible. What I know how to do is to gauge an appetite and to disappear in satisfying it.

“I can fight him only by making something else come to life. It is all I know how to do. I must bring him into relationship with his own actions. His own actions must hunt him down. His own hunger must devour him.

“We have a Supplication Feast to cook in three weeks. You have made this kind of banquet for the court before I arrived. Since I myself have never experienced the making of this kind of feast, I will have the scope to conceive something original. I shall make a revelation—in my own way—without using torture.

“I shall set the truth on the table, even before the Priest. Though I think he will no longer be capable of recognizing it. Tell the Saints that I invite them to dinner.”

It was not long after this conversation that their parting day came. Salt wordlessly began to make a compact bundle of clothes. When she saw him gather up the implements he had used to teach her the dishes of soldiers and fugitives—the leather bag to ferment yogurt and cheese on the run, the spear that darkness transformed into a roasting spit, for chunks of meat and vegetables, the shield in which bread was baked, she knew. “It's tonight?” she asked. He nodded.

She looked at him covertly, cherishing the beauty of his body—the reality of his slight paunch, and thick bull-like legs. The eyes brown with changing glints of green that moved in the iris like river currents. The great trunk and branches of spine and vertebrae. The unexpectedly fine hands, on one of which glinted the thin silver ring of the Indigene.

She could idealize nothing about his body—it was flesh instead, that could only be loved and mourned. She was unable to believe, as she was unable to believe in the Angels' one inadequate, murderous God, that this being, this person, could undergo the sacrament of death, the transubstantiation into dust.

“Give me a day, and then report me missing.” They stood supernaturally still, like animals sensing the presence of a hunter. They looked at each other with an absolute gaze—the gaze of someone looking out on the unfathomable sea from the deck of a ship. The children Savour might have had—their children—died in her eyes, as she faced him.

A wild resentment surged in him. Love had not failed them. Life had. Why could he not be a god himself, go to war in some other form, fight in battles where defeat mattered only to men, and live an endless life with her in some other place at the same time?

Instead, the gods had granted them the gift of loss—the only means of rendering immortal the loves of the Dying Ones, as the gods call humans.

So Salt set out on his ever-narrowing path, and went stealthily into the darkness, while Savour drew up plans for the eleventh dinner in her repertoire, the Feast of the True and False.

Separately they woke together. From now on, they slept with each other and without each other, living with and without each other, embracing and vanishing at the same moment, enveloped in their mortal love.

She gave him two days, as long as she dared, before she informed the Priest of Salt's peculiar absence. She was careful to show herself unconcerned, but impeccably dutiful in relaying the information. “Perhaps some concern has held him back in his village. I'm sure he will make his way here to do his part in the making of the Supplication Feast.”

The Priest's expression of pleasant concern did not alter. “I will send an envoy to his village to see if he needs assistance of any kind.”

And he did so. Every morning now before dawn, outside the palace walls, a group of skeletally thin women gathered to wait for the court linen to be brought down. They vied with each other for the chance to clean that day's laundry, a task prized for the thin gruel left behind in the water in which the linen had been starched. They struggled to sustain themselves by drinking the milky residue of the courtly garments, and they brought with them fresh rumors of the condition of the countryside, the only news most of the palace personnel received at this period. Women moved through the country unchallenged for the most part. They were too weak to threaten the soldiers, and the court could not do without their domestic labor as long as they were capable of it.

Five days after Salt's disappearance these women were the source of reports that troops of marauding Angels had razed the rings of Indigenous villages within a fifty-mile radius of the city of Paradise. Salt's village would be among them if the tales were true.

Savour often had business with the farmers of those neighboring villages, and could find a convenient pretext for an afternoon away to discuss contracts or commission certain crops. She set out for Paradise, and hired a man to take her the rest of the way into the ring villages and fields to see for herself if the reports were true.

When she saw the smoke as they approached the first of the villages, Savour remembered herself as a child, as a huntress. This time, though, she hunted not in forest nor lake nor sea, but through clusters of ruined houses, and what had been cultivated fields and orchards.

The uprooted corpses of agate trees obstructed her path. There had been no mercy for things growing. She passed a village cemetery, and saw that the Angels had even killed the dead. Everywhere graves gaped open and the ground was littered with a terrible mosaic of bones. It was as if the Angels had feared the dead would rise and defend their people.

She searched for living beings, but found none.

In many houses, the Angels had not had been obliged to do the work of killing; the inhabitants had starved before the massacre, and their neighbors had been too weak to bury them; or worse, had eaten the remains. She saw bodies missing buttocks that had been cut off for steaks. There was a heart carved on a wall in one house with the message, “We died in March, but send our love. Mother and Father.”

She saw families too emaciated even to serve as meat, their mouths open, feeding on nothing. It was useless to think of her cat, Candle. Someone must have eaten him months ago.

She made her way across the bridge over the narrow river to the compound of Salt's family. Bodies, the shapes of what had days before been his sisters and brothers, their husbands and wives, were strewn around the courtyard, like toys a monster had played with. Salt's family had not died slowly of starvation, but had been cut down. She saw his twin brother and sister, her child in her arms. The child's rigid mouth was fixed on its mother's nipple.