The Book of Heaven: A Novel (21 page)

“No?” he asked.

“No,” she answered. “It's the work of some Indigene or other.” She took a letter and tossed it over the balcony; a group of birds hurtled toward it, like arrows to a target.

“In any case,” he said, “let me make the traditional wish. Let salt and sweet be complements, and our agreement perfect. May I sit with you?”

She indicated the seat across from her, but turned her face away from him toward the sea.

“Princess,” the Priest began, “it is appropriate that you look out to sea. What we have to talk about today is vast. The decision before you is vast, and its consequences are also vast, not only for your life, but also of course, for our Kingdoms, and for the Paradise that we seek to create. A moment has come when what you choose to do or not to do may mean Paradise Regained or Lost for us, for the people of Paradise.”

She looked at him for a moment, and then turned her face again toward the sea.

“Your father tells me that you are reluctant to marry. I assure you, I am in sympathy with your hesitation. It is not for nothing that among the Angels, dreams of death and funeral processions are said to be portents of weddings. Your fears are natural—a union for life, the creation of children, and yes, the difficulty of combining pleasure and policy…”

“I am not reluctant to marry,” she said. “In fact, I have made my choice.”

“Then I rejoice to say I have misunderstood. Our impressions of your state of mind had been quite different. With your permission, I will bring the happy report to your father of your choice. He will feel the gratitude and relief that I do.”

A gull soared overhead as if obedient to a force of countergravity. It seemed to be falling forcefully, but upward. It pinned its wings backward, soared upward to a carefully gauged height, and dropped an oyster on the stone of the terrace with a clatter. The bird swooped toward the cleanly cracked shell and began to eat what was inside. They were too intent on their conversation to notice it, and the Mirrors did not dare to interrupt and shoo it away.

“I take pleasure in thinking so,” she said, and took a sip of her wine.

“And which among your suitors may I announce as your future husband?”

“I shall marry you,” she said.

“That is impossible,” the Priest answered.

“I engage myself to you,” she repeated.

“But, with the greatest respect, I am close to concluding an agreement with someone else.”

“Then you must not conclude it. It is not what I wish.” She looked at him with incomprehension.

“Princess, it is the greatest of honors that you offer me. Still, for the sake of my own honor, I must refuse.”

“And I refuse your refusal,” she said, her eyes welling with tears, whether of hurt, shame, or rage, he could not tell. She reached for his hand across the table, but he kept his hands clasped together under his chin. “I love you. I have always wanted you for my husband. I am certain you want this, too—but you do not yet know it. You talk of pleasure and policy. I am your kingdom, power—your glory, if you accept.”

“Princess, again, I thank you for this immense honor, which I do not deserve. But I cannot accept.”

She looked at him, her lips tight, tears now spilling down her cheeks. They were not calculated tears, but real ones. She wept at his mortal cruelty; he was robbing her of her dream of life itself. “I will do something that I don't want at all to do, if you refuse me again. I will scream. And the Mirrors will have no choice but to echo my scream. And the guards will rush through my rooms onto the terrace. Then I will say that you tried to rape me. And the Mirrors will be obliged to repeat what I say. And you will end as something quite different than my husband.”

“I ask for a day to reflect.”

“I refuse it.”

“Then I have no choice.”

“Let salt and sweet be complements. Our agreement is now perfect.”

He then took the hand she offered, as a key accepts a lock. “Our agreement is now perfect. I will inform your father that you and I intend, with his consent, to be husband and wife.” He lifted her hand to his forehead, in the customary gesture of respectful leave-taking. “There has been violence done here today, Princess, a violence of unforgettable precision and delicacy. But since our agreement is now perfect, I think we can also agree that it was not you who was raped this afternoon.”

“I am now your wife-to-be. I give you freedom to kiss me,” she answered.

Despite the discretion of their meeting, unpleasant rumors circulated about the Priest, that he had brought about the marriage through an unseemly passion that coerced the Princess and endangered her honor. These murmurings introduced in the Priest a new gnawing suspicion that the rumors were emanating from the Princess's quarters.

He observed that the tales were designed to illuminate her virtue, and to throw a shadow on his own, in a way that must mean her father had assented to the scheme.

He found himself abruptly in the worst position for a courtier, the trusted counselor of a monarch he could no longer trust, and the husband-to-be of a treacherous wife.

And as the administrator of all ritual, he now had to set in motion the ceremonies, old and new, of betrothal and marriage, even of his own strange marriage, in which he, like any woman, was the bride. He was obliged like a woman to consent regardless of his feelings, whether delighted, appalled, or suspended in the feminine discipline of awaiting the inevitable, marrying an unknown husband, bearing an unknowable child.

For Savour now, labor was trebled; the work of planning and consultation for the receptions and wedding festivities was added to the execution of each week's work of provisioning and feeding the population of the Angelic palace of the New Kingdom. Still, the profundity of her training supported her, she had been taught that a kitchen must be managed like a wine cellar; the cook must know what is in it and where, and the current stage of life of each of its provisions.

She understood better than ever what she had been taught was the first precept of all cookery: that a dinner begins in the mind before it approaches the body.

So she was able, with only a few suspenseful days, to continue sustaining her community, while devising and testing varieties of dishes for the wedding.

These would be the Metaphor dishes through which the Princess would display her imagination of herself through the theater of her bridal glory, and express her dreams of her future union. In addition, the dishes accepted for the Angelic Books must be recorded pictorially, either by Savour herself or another kitchen artist under her supervision. And she was expected to teach them as well, so they could always be reproduced, once accepted.

Still, when she felt burdened by the endless provisioning, the almost involuntary preoccupation of her mind with possible dishes, new combinations of flavors and textures, evoked the hunter child she had been.

She recognized that working of her mind, imagining a fleck of cinnamon in a venison curry, or endlessly recording the stocks of sugars, salts, dried mushrooms. It was another version of the human-animal self, the creature ranging along a forest path or plain, seeking in crevices or underbrush or in trees whatever might be edible. The sense that the dead and the living had all known that intense burden of hunger and the intense strategies against it strengthened her. She felt herself to be human and animal, a young sister of ancient hunger.

She remembered, too, that her burdens came precisely from abundance, from possibility—that all around her, in the Indigenous territories, beyond the borders of the New Kingdom, women knew exactly what they would cook for dinner—nothing.

The precision with which she managed her provisions was even more critical at this period, and she appreciated more than ever Salt's administrative skills. Among the panoply of skills of the ideal cook, it was those she struggled most to master. The gods give humans gifts like silver, but it is for the mortals to keep them untarnished and shining.

She and Salt added an hour to each day, spent in a morning inspection of the storerooms. Each took a notebook to record supplies on hand and supplies needed; the separate records helped guard against mistakes, and to maintain an accurate measure of the materials supplied from each part of the empire. All the Angelic kitchen personnel were well acquainted with the story of the first feast-maker of the New Kingdom, who threw himself from a cliff after the oysters he had planned to open an important feast failed to arrive.

In Savour's pantry, there were eight kinds of rice and at least fifteen variants of salt of all colors, so that the Angels could taste and see the shores of the colonies they had conquered.

“We need more pilaf rice. I also see that we need to replenish our rice to grind for flour.” She had had a request for beignets of a local olive as big as a fist, stuffed with spiced meat and greens, then coated in rice flour and saffron dust, and fried; she calculated the amount of the material needed next to the dish in her kitchen diary. She always wrote with a touch of disbelief—it was so strange to be unlettered in her own language, to be an infant in her native language and an adult in the Angelic tongue.

“What do you make of this marriage?” Salt asked, as he duplicated her request in his notebook.

“What do you think?” she answered. “I hate it. I fear it. The person who is the most kind to me will soon be married to the person who is the most cruel. And the palates so badly matched, between a man who wants to taste the world, and a princess whose true appetite I cannot understand.”

“Do you believe the rumors?” he asked, not looking at her, but down into the bronze saffron strongbox, its lid chased with stylized crocuses.

“Which ones?” she asked, equally preoccupied with the box.

“You know. That he forced her. Do you think the Priest capable of rape?”

“You remind me of things we Ghosts used to speak about when I was an apprentice. Many Ghosts, as you know, are made by rape. I have never forgotten what my master teacher, Gate, used to say when he trained us in the art of aphrodisiac dishes.” Salt, always curious about the legendary craftsmanship of the Invisibles, interrupted her to ask what those dishes were.

“We learned a greater range of dishes than you seem to do here; your erotic cookery is rich and blunt, based on feminine oysters and phallic truffles, that evoke desires through obvious fragrances and shapes. Still, we learn that these are not true aphrodisiac dishes, as they only awaken desire where it is already present.”

One of Savour's Twelve was the Dinner of the Fulfilled Wish, though she was not free to tell even Salt the names and compositions of her Twelve. The Twelve were the crown of her craftsmanship; if finely executed, they had the power to change or renew a destiny—including her own. Still, the bond between them had grown strong. She described the creation, without revealing its secret relation to her.

“We are taught that desire is affected by many oblique elements, the burden of daily cares, for example. In that case, the dishes evoke not simply the lover's sex, but the experience of joyous abandon that refreshes and renews desire.

“We delicately evoke the flesh of sex with rose-colored wines of the appropriate shades, and we set a landscape on a platter. It is the dream garden where what one reaches for is present to hand.

“The dinner is set out on exquisite small trays; it is eaten with the hands. The guest eats at the pace he wishes, and takes as much or as little as he wants. He nibbles, he grazes, he devours, he caresses, to his perfect satisfaction.

“There are brilliantly colored vegetables and fruits, like solid fragments of the blinding rainbow the sun makes in your eyes when you stare into it over the shoulder of someone you are embracing. There are hot crisp vegetable and melting cheese beignets, barely fastened, with the fritter batter slipping off them like loose shoulder straps in the passion that quickens carelessly made children. There are ice creams with the colors and perfumes of flowers. And so forth.” She had spoken with the inspiration, but also the practicality, of one whose work is to make dreams exist.

“Savour,” said Salt, “there is no Invisible I envy. A Ghost's life is one of enslavement. Even the lives of many Indigenes are less harsh. I wish at times, uselessly, that I had the power to set you free. But there are times also when I realize that you have more freedom than I could presume to give you.”

Savour led them out of the spice storeroom, followed by Candle. She paused on the wine cellar steps, bent down, and gently caressed him behind the ears. It was the cat's favorite caress, and he threw his head back with pure pleasure and trust.

Salt followed and paused. “But you have forgotten to tell me what your teacher said or what you think of the rumors about the Priest. Could he do such a thing?”

Savour had begun to note which stocks of bottles must be replenished. She set down her kitchen diary, trying to summon up Gate's exact words.

“This, as fully as I can remember, was what he said when he was teaching me the aphrodisiac dishes I have described to you.

“He said that he believed we could understand the very nature of human evil if we could ever grasp this; why is it that we work with such artful delicacies to restore a man's power to make love, while soldiers in their thousands, in attacks on villages, and policemen torturing in interrogation rooms and men on lonely streets so easily find the erections necessary to rape? As to the Priest, on the day we can understand why love makes a man incapable and brutality makes him potent, we can decide on the truth of the rumors.”

The cat had climbed onto a rafter; he leapt into Savour's arms, lightly as a falling leaf. She locked the storeroom door behind them.

Savour's conferences about the composition of the wedding banquet brought her into uneasy contact with the Princess, who governed through displeasure and insult. After every meeting, Savour felt as if she were snake-bitten.