The Book of Heaven: A Novel (27 page)

She gasped as a black-winged corpse ascended overhead into flight—the Angel of Death. But it fell to earth as quickly as it had soared upward. Two vultures were contesting the body of Salt's mother, one on each shoulder. It was their struggle to feed on her that had lifted her into flight. This, then, was the lost Paradise of the Angels, the paradise they had made of life.

Then, alone among the butchered bodies of the people she had eaten and drunk with, Savour died with them. One can die, as she did then, although her life did not come to its end.

Some gods came into her, and she began involuntarily to sing a funeral song. Words she had never spoken poured from her, as blood that cannot be staunched gushes from a mortal wound. The stanzas came, breaking one after another, wave after wave, and she was helpless to be silent, as a child inside a woman in labor is forced to be born. She sang:

“Unknown gods we drove away, we invoke you.

You who are not named, but are not nameless,

Pardon our arrogance. Return to us.

Let the myriad altars we destroyed surge up again,

Ocean of gods, and lave the world with generous prayer,

Restore, we beseech you, your manifold blessings.

Let no one be called infidel unless

He seeks to harm another.

Let the curse of idolater be reserved

Only for the self-righteous,

Whose tyrannous faith brings war,

And permits any cruelty

In the service of its self-deity.

Let the charge of blasphemy fall

Only on the self-anointed,

Ventriloquists of divinities.

Once again, let no god be abominated,

Declared a devil by another's partisans,

Let none be despised, but all honored.

Terminus, god of border markers, return from Rome,

Teach us again our limits. Mark off the finite from the infinite,

Let no man claim the deaths he causes are the will of God,

That the bodies at his feet are the butcheries of angels.

Show the women their own deaths in the tortures they inflict—

Their children will tremble at the sight of them,

And drown on their own mothers' milk.

Abattur, come with your scales from Persia;

We need your judgment.

Anat of Canaan, goddess of war, wear your ostrich feather crown;

You alone knew the purpose of war, not to destroy other creatures,

Each born as it is, already in its shroud—

But to fight death.

Pattini, Lady born of a heavenly mango, share with the starving

Your miraculous rice, protect us from epidemics,

Both those we endure, and those we devise.

O Ptah, who created us in Egypt on a potter's wheel,

Make us serviceable and lovely.

Nu-gua, who made us in China of yellow clay,

Do not shatter us.

Huracan, who made us in America of cornmeal,

You who live simultaneously in eternity and time,

Watch over us in Heaven,

Watch over us on earth,

Watch over us in Hell.

Quat, who made us on his island out of boredom,

Inspire us to give our stories better endings.

Imrat, who fashioned us in India of butter,

And in the richness of divinity made other gods,

Remind us that it is not our limitations that are sacred.

Lowalangi, great guardian from Indonesia,

You speak of us tenderly as your pigs,

And teach us we are incapable of worship,

Until we see ourselves a thousand ways.

Nanse, Our Lady of Sumeria, Queen of Divination,

Tell us the awful truth—that this world is a faithful record

And clear interpretation of our dreams.

Omeototl, glorious Aztec, born of your own thought,

Keep us unfinished ones ever-thinking,

Revealed always by what we have caused to exist.

Patrons and Givers of Gifts, we summon you.

Juturna of the springs and wells,

Quench our thirst.

Egres, who first gave turnips to the Finns,

If we scorn your gift,

We repudiate the world.

Dua, god of daily grooming,

Reviver of mankind,

Patron of the perfume and the sacred bath,

It is your vocation also to wake the dead,

Your therapy through which they remember

How to use their limbs. Remind us of the

Resurrections hidden in our days,

Celestial incarnate in quotidian.

Cao Guo-Jiu, patron of actors,

Of all that is both true and false,

Sustain us in belief,

Protect us with doubt.

Hintubuhet, Androgyne,

Maker of Marriage,

Butterfly of both sexes,

Bless those who seek devoted love.

Tenenit, refresh us with the golden beer

Brewed first in your sky-blue lapis vat.

Marungogere, maker of genitals,

Thank you.

Arhats, enlightened ones,

Lend us your heavenly eyes,

So we might glimpse other worlds,

Read other scriptures, so those who

Know nothing of the earth they inhabit

Will not dare again to speak to us of Heaven.

Return to us, Pantheon,

Abundant in divinity,

Without you, we cannot be human.

Winged Nari, from the Heaven of dead children,

We petition you: have mercy on us.

Ran of Scandinavia, goddess of the drowned,

Lift the breathless gently into your nets,

Pray for us.

Freya, weep for us your golden tears.

Mayan Ixtab, Goddess of Suicides,

Show those in torment your inhuman mercy;

With compassion beyond blessing,

Receive them in your Paradise.

Greek Eirene,

Whose liturgies were never stained with blood,

Grant us peace.”

This song is still sung, among those who celebrate the feast of the Cauldron, during the first night when that constellation is visible in the sky.

Savour, reared Invisible, succeeded in making her way back to the court undetected; she knew it was important for her to take her place in the kitchens, and to know absolutely nothing she was not told.

She thought of Salt, standing before the tormented bodies of his kin; she made of her steady, expressionless work that night a cabin where no one could touch him. The evening meal was nothing out of the ordinary, but she dedicated it as a funeral sacrifice for the destroyed villages, and for Salt's family above all.

A few days later, the Priest himself came to the kitchens, in the informal way he used to enjoy. He asked if she had had any word from Salt, and when she shook her head, he told her he now feared the worst—that Salt had abandoned them to make common cause with the Saints and the Indigenous rabble that were their allies.

Savour served for a convincing expression. The Priest must look at her forehead, eyes, and mouth, and be certain that he still knew more about Savour than she did about herself.

She told him that she hoped it was not true that Salt had abandoned the work for which he had such a strong gift. She hoped he would not sacrifice his life in a cause unworthy of him. She said that she would make that her personal supplication to weave among the supplications of the great traditional antebellum banquet of the Angels.

So for those who could read it, she began to write the book of wheat and curd, and to articulate the scriptures of cinnamon, saffron, and green almond. It was the most difficult dinner she had ever devised. The Priest must not realize that it was the dinner of his betrayal. And Savour must not be paralyzed by her old debt to the Priest, who had shown her nothing but favor and kindness.

The Banquet of Supplication, Savour's Feast of True and False, was a dinner in which nothing presented at table was what it seemed. It was a dinner of artful deception.

Each of the courses represented a quadrant of the New Kingdom, and served as a votive offering for the unity of all the Angelic territories.

Fifty small green-throated doves were set in nests made of crisp sautéed noodles for the first course. They were a variety of bird that could be found only in the southwest. Savour's cooking had always been a natural history of the lands where she found herself. But the doves, molded of white and green cheese, designed to form a sauce melting in accord with the rhythm of their consumption, also were a code, as the emblem of peace, that the southwest contained no military camps she knew of, was thought to be secure, and left undefended.

With the next course, celebrating the rivers region of the northwest, she sent out a course of fish, whose bodies were enrobed in twenty delicate layers of pancake, with olives for eyes. Striated ribbons of pounded greens gave them the illusion of swimming through rippling water—and the attentive now knew how many boats patrolled the rivers.

Racks of succulent pork ribs made out of the crackling sheets of dried bean curd disclosed the number of garrisons in the east.

Savour kept her tour de force for the end; servers wheeled in a table with a portrait of the New Kingdom and its territories executed in sugar. There were reproductions of important buildings, and as close to a contour map as possible of all the territories, done in colored sculpted sugar, with the Three Wishes Peaks towering over the table, and chocolate waterfalls pouring from its pinnacles. The guests broke off bits of the Angelic empire and sweetened their mouths with the walls of the Angelic palace.

Thus the Indigenes and the Saints were able to gauge where below the Three Wishes Peaks they could unite their forces.

We were told later that the Saints had begun constructing their rope bridge over the dizzying abyss that separated the two countries by forming a human bridge over the sheer drop. The first materials for building the bridge were passed over a chain of men, blinkered like horses, linked arms to legs, swaying over the abyss. It seems impossible, but no one has yet contradicted the story. The Indigenous guerrilla groups then joined the fierce Alpine army of Saints.

But perhaps the God of Battle, terrifying because he knows no fixed allegiance, favored the Indigenes that day in some measure because of the ingenuity of Savour.

She supplied the Angelic armies with bread tainted with the flour from Salt's diseased acre. The Angels found themselves fighting shadows. There were many Angels who saw three wavering soldiers where there was only one, thanks to the hallucinatory flour. Others were wrapped in visions, and still others were overthrown by nausea alone. The Priest himself was taken prisoner when he was kneeling and shielding his eyes in prayer, unable to defend himself from the multitudes of Indigenous dead who had risen to fight alongside the living army.

He was brought back to the Angelic court, now under the control of the Saints and the Indigenous, and placed under arrest. The Princess, her father, and other significant Angels were placed under guard in their own quarters, awaiting trial. All access to them, even by their servants, was severely restricted. They would have no further need of a banquet cook.

A number of their workers, even their Invisibles, were offered their freedom, and the chance at new work on the other side of the mountain if they chose. Most took up the offer, and lived their lives as the free people they had never been.

It never occurred to the Priest, nor to the Princess, that Savour might have had any role in their defeat. She existed for them, like all Invisibles, only insofar as she served their needs. And while the Angelicals had grasped the role of privation and scarcity in ruling a subject population, they had never conceived that defeat might also come through satiation.

Death, ironically, came to the Priest through his famous fastidious appetite. Even if Savour herself was no longer permitted to cook for the Angelical courtiers, he still requested that the kitchen reproduce some of the fine dishes for which she had been famous. The elegant food gave him pleasure, and perhaps momentarily put the taste of power back in his mouth. His jailors satisfied their own caprices to indulge him.

This was doubly cruel, as the Priest had been used to indulgence by command, not caprice. The intermittent satisfaction of his appetites made even his pleasure a humiliation.

In the end, it was a favorite dish that killed him. He must have died very quickly after he picked up his knife and fork to cut into one of the game pies that he craved. One could imagine from the fang marks on his throat that the pit viper he released from its concealment under the pastry struck the nearest exposed flesh with furious speed.

No one accused Savour, as she was no longer responsible for his fare, though some said perhaps the Princess had actually succeeded in learning this dish from Savour, and had added her own touch. Others disagreed; the Princess had always used the labor of others to carry out her wishes; and besides, the disappearance of the Priest was a great convenience for the new rulers.

It was only a short time, perhaps a week after the Priest's death, that we saw Salt again. Savour had been kneading bread dough that morning. Her strong, certain hands shaped and caressed the chaotic, ragged mass as if she were forming a human body from clay.

She had set an array of foods on the table, each dish, down to the smallest detail, made from her own hands. She poured a garnet-colored wine into a carafe the shape of an hourglass. The offering was simple, but still a feast in those days when the country was just beginning to recover from the Angelic famine. There was a round of warm bread, salt she had harvested herself, fresh butter, agate butter, cheese, ripe apricots, and a plate of black rose jam, as if she were expecting someone. She did not seem surprised to see him hobbling across the courtyard.

He was pale, and skeletally thin, and his eyes glowed in contrast to his translucent skin like candles in a paper lantern. He walked with a painful, lurching gait, as if the only victory he was now capable of was to take another step.

She did not run to him, but stood in the doorway, still and utterly quiet, as one stands over the cradle of a sleeping child. Salt was equally grave and quiet; he walked toward her. He looked neither to the right nor the left, but only straight into her eyes, as if only their light were supporting him and keeping him from falling.