The Book of Heaven: A Novel (22 page)

It was a strange world the Princess created, functioning through the dark privileges of hatred. The freedom to hate, to insult, to strike, were privileges she claimed, but denied to others. If the same impulses welled up in those she harmed, it was treated as unconscionable insubordination.

It was as if she needed hatred the way others need love, and sought ever-fresh ways to obtain it. Their resentment of her was a crown of distinction, and she provoked them until they did her that homage.

Nothing made her more certain of her soul's heroic and superior integrity than the hatred of others; it made her feel a precious jewel, perpetually threatened by marauding thieves. The hostility of others perfected her, proved the presence of God in her, as a jeweler's attacking chisel makes a gem brilliant.

Savour's task in connection with the royal marriage was to devise the decor and menus for the betrothal and wedding dinners. She would also have to cook the betrothal dinner, though nominally, it was supposed to be the work of the fiancée.

Now, no matter what her other tasks, no matter what time of day or night, she was obliged to confer with the Princess when she called. In this way, the Princess could both berate her for not responding quickly enough, and also for her neglecting the task in which she was engaged. That evening, she was summoned from supervising an important dinner for the Synod of Angelical Priests.

Salt knew the order and seasoning of the dishes perfectly, and the servers had mastered the symmetry of each plate, but Savour still felt tormented when she was not allowed to concentrate on the task before her. When she was working as she wished, her mind and body seemed to her to enter into what she cooked, to be consumed, and then to survive inside the ones she fed.

As she hurried through the labyrinthine passages to the Princess's quarters, she felt she understood at last something of the nature of fate.

She had undergone a rigorous training in all aspects of her craft so that the results of her work would be, within reason, what she expected them to be, unless she was experimenting. Within the kitchen, her work was elegant and consistent.

But she had not reckoned on the dining room, where her masters and their guests sat, competing, intriguing, seducing, insulting, putting her work to purposes she had never dreamed. The kitchen, whose workings she understood, was small; in the dining room, she was an instrument in a world of unforeseeable intentions and events. That was fate.

As always, the Princess was reclining, surrounded by standing attendants. She had thought she'd seen a mocking glint in one of the Mirror's eyes—and the Mirror had confirmed her suspicion by defending herself. A truly obedient Mirror would have reflected the Princess's accusing gaze. “Lean down,” the Princess said. “Closer.” The Mirror leaned low over the couch, so the Princess could slap her effortlessly. “Beloved,” whispered the Mirror, uttering the formulaic response of those who assented gratefully to correction.

Savour had learned to be less fearful. Her situation protected her, as a Mirror's did not. She was less easily replaceable. The self-abnegation demanded of her was different, but her training had prepared her for it: she had to perform her work perfectly to public adulation, but refuse praise; all that she accomplished must be acknowledged to emanate from the Princess.

“Come closer,” the Princess said to Savour. Savour was not a personal attendant; she was not required to address the Princess as “Beloved,” which would have been impertinent.

“Yes, ma'am,” said Savour, and inclined her head.

“I want to talk to you about the wedding feast. I've chosen a theme.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Savour.

“I want,” the Princess said slowly, “the Feast of Undying Love. Can you make that feast?”

Savour observed, with disbelief, an atom of anguish in the Princess's brilliant gaze. It was as if she saw fire there, not only as something that could burn others, but also as something that was consuming itself. It occurred to her for the first time that the hateful, too, crave love.

“Well?” the Princess asked sharply, as if Savour had been caught out in some theft.

“I will try,” said Savour, too truthfully.

“You weren't brought from across the sea to ‘try.' You were selected to interpret my wishes faithfully. You do not grant my wishes; you fulfill them.”

“Will you describe them for me, ma'am?”

“I want you to make a dinner that seems to have no beginning and no end. I want you to make dishes in the form of circles, of rings, the forms of perpetuity and renewal.” She raised her voice. “I want to offer beauty that doesn't die. I want the guests to taste supernatural snow. I want to see their plates thick with drifts of snow that doesn't melt, and to remember it forever.” She turned her face away from Savour. “I expect these things to appear on the nuptial table. I expect my Metaphor dishes to be remembered forever. See to it.”

Savour hurried back to her kitchen. A mighty work of invention lay before her. She understood that she would not be able to use one of her Twelve; they could only be effective in situations whose outcomes were yet to be decided.

The evening's encounter had revealed to Savour the true nature of the Princess's appetite: it was an appetite she had mistakenly thought was trained on the extravagant demonstration of power, like demanding strawberries in January. But what Savour had seen that night was an appetite not for the extravagant, but the impossible; a hunger for the fruit of the Paradise tree itself. And an insatiable appetite is a murderous one, which nothing on the face of the earth can satisfy.

Savour set to work, though she sensed that no flavor she could combine or consummate would change the Princess's fate, whatever it might be. Young as she was, the Princess was like a ship already far from shore, disappearing from sight.

Long after the kitchens were quiet and even the scullery staff, compulsive as sea waves in its rhythm of soaping, scraping, and drying, had gone to wherever they slept, Savour composed the wedding Feast of Undying Love. Her small cat, Candle, kept her company during those late nights. He leapt onto the stone preparation table to assess what the baskets contained or what was rising underneath the copper cloche. Knowledge obtained, he slept on a cushion at her feet, as she stirred and sculpted and changed liquids into solids, searching for the snow that wouldn't melt.

She worked to make the material express what was required of it; she was drawn into that labor, into that doing, so completely that she often forgot that her task was to immortalize a joyless contract.

Even a dinner that gave supreme pleasure, yet did not enter into memory, would be an utter failure, like a single night of rapturous lovemaking with someone forgotten.

The banquet must dazzle with its beauty, but pass beyond the eye into consciousness. A great dinner does not vanish, but is transformed into speech in the throat, as a marriage is made to exist through vows. It was Savour's work to begin by setting perfected nature before the guests; and to end by putting words into their mouths.

She devised a feast in which every course was an allusion to some aspect of love, marriage, or fertility, and in which every course would develop until the culmination, in which the perishable elements of the beginning would take imperishable forms. Thus the first course—fried flowers stuffed with partridge liver, quince paste, and sheep's cheese, mixed death and the bloom of new life together, and would be completed at the finale by a dessert of flowers crystallized in sugar, preserved by a sweetness, as of love.

All would wane, wax, and begin again.

Savour devised a platter to set before each guest of small crepes, folded to figure the phases of the moon. The new moon would be filled with the roe of sea urchin, the half-moon with velvety greens and mushrooms, the three-quarter moon with minced pheasant, the full moon with a mousse of venison. In this way, the guests would range from sea to the subterranean, to the sky, and then the earth, the presence of egg in each element a promise of rebirth. There would be breads baked in the form of rings, as the Princess had envisioned.

And for the main course, magnificent crown roast rounds of lamb, pork, and veal would be served, their exposed edges of bone capped with glittering semiprecious stones. They would be accompanied by gold platters, six feet in circumference, of pilaf, on whose surface Savour would reproduce, using pistachios, pomegranate seeds, and thin crisp fried petals of brilliant blue potatoes, the strands of the magnificent emerald, ruby, and sapphire necklace which was the Priest's wedding gift to his bride.

She felt certain, so far, of her culinary pageant, but she struggled in vain to match the Princess's desire for the snow that does not melt. “How can I fabricate what does not exist?” she said worriedly to Salt; she had failed to find any substance that would evoke snow visually or in texture, that would also bring the feast to its sweet, sublime finale.

“You are thinking too much like an Angel”—Salt shrugged—“with their ‘war for peace' and ‘life is paradise.' If the Angelic scriptures ordered us to drink the sea, they would send us to shore every day with cups, and order us to praise the taste of the bitter water.

“I cannot make myself a woman, nor make you a man, though in many ways I am like a woman and you are like a man. You should be seeking for something that is like ‘snow that doesn't melt'—a dream of it—not the thing itself. Truth comes to us in resemblance, in shade. In moonlight. In grasping what exists through what we cannot make exist.”

Savour remembered Gate, who prayed to a Goddess of Fortunate Coincidence he called O, for the syllable of recognition that she forced you to utter when you encountered her, the sound of the homage she demanded. The Invisibles had a particular reverence for that goddess. She was playful and witty; she would place the thing you were seeking where you least expected it.

She was an important deity of all cooks. With all their efforts to master complex techniques, not one could make a dish that would become a legacy for each generation unless that goddess was present. And as always, with Immortals, one had to court her through practice and skill before she would reveal to you the exquisite bliss of what you did not know, and transform it into knowledge, like a tree flowering in spring.

Savour set to work with all the materials she knew that were clear or white—sugar, salt, rice, potatoes, flour, egg white, milk, cream, cheese, water, even chalk, pearl, and bone. These and other materials would be strewn about an area of the kitchen that functioned as her workshop. There, she examined these substances in as many of their properties as she had grasped. Even phlegmatic Savour lost her temper in these experiments, and would fling the inedible messes angrily into a basket for an apprentice to empty.

Salt arrived during one of these hours to use the time to plan the choreography of the feast. Savour's hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat. “One thing is clear,” said Salt. “You are not made of the snow that doesn't melt.” Savour looked at him unsmilingly and kept working. “When you have something of value to say, I will hear it,” she said severely.

“It looks as if I have strayed into the laboratory of one of those mad alchemists who is trying to make a flesh and blood man from a skeleton.” This class of people, former cooks who had turned charlatan, were known in the New Kingdom, where they preyed on the Indigenes, offering to resurrect their legendary leaders who would lead them in rebellion against the Angels.

“Like them, I have whipped and grated, melted and strained, and have not brought anything into creation.” They turned to discussing the problems presented by the arches through which the wedding guests would enter the courtyard where the festivities were to be held. Each of the arches represented an entrance into Paradise, in the form of a different season symbolizing the passage from time into eternity, and so, from betrothal across the threshold to the undying love of marriage.

Each must be appropriately decorated, so Savour and Salt worked to invent the imagery together. They shared a certain pride in their training as banquet cooks, feast-makers as well as flavor-makers.

After he left, Savour turned again to her experiments. She took six eggs, and cracked them one after another. She had never lost her love of the distinctive sound of an egg cracking—not like the shock of a snapping twig, or the wounded shearing of ice on a pond. An egg cracked as delicately and deliberately as a heel tapped a parquet floor to begin a dance.

She separated the whites from the yolks through the sieve of her own fingers. When she cooked, she felt her body fit the world as if she were the world's wife.

She took a whisk of Salt's invention, made of braided, thinly shaved, and flexible twigs, and began to beat the whites, almost idly.

Her mind set sail on them, as the motion caused them to imitate the moods of the sea, glassy calm, rippling, frothing, plunging with tempestuous whitecaps. She whipped at them, as the peaks drifted and bubbled, and she thought, like a sailor in a storm, of shore.

She had an image of gleaming sand, then realized that she had the image itself at her elbow and could plunge her hand into it. She took a drift of sugar and scattered it into the egg whites. They began to sparkle and swell. They took on the majestic and mysterious texture, both fragile, and impenetrable, of snowdrifts. She had only ever seen them before as clouds, as envisioned by the Invisibles. She dried her forehead on her hand, and the motion made her think of drying what was wet, of the way fire set shapes, as with clay dishes.

She set the bowl in the oven, and when she brought it out, saw that the egg whites held their shapes, and now seemed a glacial landscape gleaming in the distance. She was sure she had discovered the snow that doesn't melt. She had the means now to culminate the feast. She could present the final course that would sum up the Banquet of Undying Love, while delicately suggesting the sweet consummation of the wedding night to come.