The Book of Heaven: A Novel (16 page)

Gate smiled. “Your description makes me feel drowsy and content already. Well done, Savour. Remember that we are the animals who feed with our minds before we feed with our bodies.”

She went on constructing her mental banquet. “I will seat him facing the door, so he can see anyone who enters and exits. I will offer no shark or boar or any animal that is a danger to man. The wine should be floral, and golden, the color of the hair of princesses. And more, no knife should appear on the table, nor any glass, nothing that shatters, or cuts. There will be no need for any guest to cut his meat; it will be set before him in refined morsels.

“The Banquet of Trust begins with soup, because drinking is more primal even than eating. The taste of water, the essential, the pure, the necessary, when you are thirsty, first drunk ardently, and then slowly, is the taste of truth itself.”

“There is still a problem to solve.”

“Yes, I know—how many covers to set. I think what I will try is to tell him that at our great dinners, we honor each place with a portrait of the guest. And that this also serves the safety of the Governor, to ensure that each guest matches his image. I will have an apprentice paint them on ovals of terra-cotta to match the dinner service. I will hope the Angel doesn't realize that painting these portraits will give me the count for the dinner.”

“It may be that even if he does, he has already decided for you, and will enjoy your ruse all the more.”

Whether the Angel was deceived, or complicit, Savour was chosen. She revealed the first of her Twelve, and won the confidence of the Angel. She was ordered to prepare herself for departure from the country where she had grown up, but which was not her home, to the country of her life's work, which would not become her home.

Savour was the last Invisible to go on board the ship of the Angels, bound for their New Kingdom. Gate had said good-bye to her as she was emptying her personal pantry. It was in the evening, before the dinner service, when the training of his new apprentice was to begin. They stood awkwardly before each other, rather than side by side at a table or an oven. The moment of unoccupied leisure was unnatural to both of them.

“My apprentice,” Gate spoke, too moved to find words beyond the literal. “I would have liked to have brought you a gift to take with you, Savour. But you know the law. We nameless ones are permitted no souvenirs. The ones who are not remembered are commanded not to remember. We must not risk the consequences.”

Sudden tears welled up in Savour's eyes. To have nothing to remember Gate by, nothing he had even touched, was an annihilation that returned her to the primal one that had made her an Invisible. “Savour,” he said, “you will have at least the fine things you have won in competitions. And I have put into your hands all that we who have tasted the fruit of the Forbidden Tree are permitted to keep: knowledge.”

Savour then slowly and deliberately violated another strict prohibition: she sank to one knee and put her hand on her heart in a gesture of respect that was reserved only for the Governors of the Island.

She lowered her head, and then, she felt on her hair, a delicate, almost impalpable caress, like the weightless drift of sifted sugar; Gate's hand settling for a moment on her hair. It was the first time a human being had caressed her. Forever after, she thought of it as knowledge; the final knowledge he imparted to her.

In the morning, her utensils, the great copper and silver banquet trays, her silver-banded tortoiseshell tureens and marble bowls for frozen creams, all the equipment that she had earned through Governors' prizes, was carefully loaded in the cargo hold, near the quarters of the living cargo.

Large boxes of carefully stored savours were brought aboard, so precious that they accompanied her, as did her knives and ladles. Each of her implements bore the traditional inscription engraved on equipment awarded to Invisible artisans: “I am the servant of a slave: Savour.” She had brought a high enough price to earn the right to the tools of her craft.

Her bundles were carried to the kitchen annex of the great round cabin that dominated the upper deck of the ship, the quarters where the Priest and his entourage would be lodged. The quarters where she was lodged were not far from the cabins that housed a cluster of the prettiest girls and boys, who would be resold to harems or theaters. She thanked her gods that she had been spared beauty.

She was to assume her culinary duties immediately, and oversee their meals during the voyage. During the hour when the Invisibles belowdecks were brought up for air and exercise, Savour was to be made literate. She was to learn to read and write the language of the Angels; she would need the means to manage the Princess's household without supervision, and with the expectation, as the Priest told her, of perfect Invisibility.

She had her lessons in the early afternoon on the same breezy veranda overlooking the open sea where she oversaw the fine dinners served at night. The language was another kind of food.

She tasted the new words with her tongue and teeth; they had rich, odd, distinctive flavors. Each letter of the alphabet had a distinctive flavor. “A” did indeed taste of apple, just as the illustration promised.

She held the syllables on the roof of her mouth, and just outside her throat before she swallowed them, like pomegranate seeds. When she first held it, she was astonished by the capacity hidden inside the pen; it gave her the power to see the words outside herself. It was an implement like a wooden spoon, blending letters into words, or like a trowel from a kitchen garden. Even though her hand assisted the letters, they took form on the page like plants springing from the underworld, with a life beyond the gardener's power.

The new language taught her that languages held many things in common, but that each held a reservoir of words so local that they were experiences in themselves, like the foods native to a certain soil. They could be known only through intimacy, either with the place they came from, or with a person from it.

She learned each of the thousand names of God. The Angels knew one God with all these qualities; she knew a thousand gods each with these qualities, metamorphosing from moment to moment like rising bread, like wine in ferment. For Savour, the world was overflowing with divinity, often unrecognizable, even deceptive. The Angels knew much more about their God and His thoughts than she did of hers.

The words she was learning also tasted of the moment she was living, of elemental fish straight from the water, cooked with a richness that offset its absolute oceanic flavor, in the fresh butter churned from the cows stabled on board. She seasoned it with herbs cut from heavy pots in a sheltered corner on deck. The perfect intensity of attention necessary to achieve the right texture and flavor was part of the taste of the dish. Cooking it was a matter of bringing the body of the dead fish back into time, so that it tasted of new life. She cooked it as quickly as a falling star.

She oversaw bread baked on deck. True Invisible, she vanished into her rising bread. She imperceptibly entered the bodies of her masters as they savored the warm, earthy bread under a canopy on nights of soft sea breezes.

The glittering blade of the great Knife constellation hung low in the sky at that season, seemingly suspended over the ship as it sailed. She bowed her head each time she saw it, the bright Knife of Souraya, Savior of Children. Seeing it made her feel, not exactly protected, but fulfilled, on the path to whatever was inevitable for her.

It seemed as if there were a deep ocean above them as well as underneath them. The blue-black sky frothed with stars like celestial whitecaps. Musician Invisibles played during the meals, compositions that could never be repeated, using the sounds of waves or the winds in the sails as additional instruments of their orchestra.

She thought of Gate, but as part of this firmament, not quite intimately. She was an exemplary Invisible, trained in all the arts of vanishing; there was no one she had not already said good-bye to.

She grasped something new as they sailed. She had striven for the taste of perfection before, but now she added a new quality of luxury to her work. To eat luxuriously meant to be given the sensation that nothing could be denied you from the ends of the earth, in any season or any climate. The incongruous fresh-churned butter, young greens, new laid eggs, and aged wines set on a table in the middle of the ocean taught her. To eat luxuriously was to exist everywhere; to eat like an immortal.

At night, she lay awake devising new dishes to express this. When the masters were in the grip of the appetite for luxury, her work needed to range over the world, and bring it into relationship on their plates.

She had been told that parts of the New Kingdom experienced heavy snows in winter. She envisioned silver dishes of newly fallen sugared snow bathed in a syrup of sugared rose petals. She began to make more inventive use of the eggs the shipboard chickens produced, and to dabble with new geometries. She took to ending the Angels' meals with globe-shaped custards bathed in caramel; it made them feel as if the world itself was theirs for the tasting, and that it was sweet.

She was relieved—and took a cautious pleasure—to see that the Priest-Angel experienced her dishes with a questing appetite, as if he, too, were learning the grammar of a language. He observed that his guests sat between courses with their mouths open, like children enthralled by the telling of a story, which pleased him enormously.

“Superb,” he would say, after calling her from the kitchens to congratulate her after each dinner. His lavish compliments were offered as extravagantly as a wealthy man offers the best wines of his cellar.

Savour, though, had been taught to fear praise—and especially praise too easily given, which was like the bright light used to stun animals. “May it sustain you,” she responded with the not unpleasant austerity that he recognized was a refusal of his judgment—perhaps even of his right to judge.

These were her first encounters with conversation, its intentions, exchanges, maneuvers—its perfumes, distinct as the handful of toasted sesame or crushed bay leaf, or the wrist flick of coral salt crystals a cook used to sign a dish.

Even from within her shelter and plenty, though, Savour could hear the hungry. She was haunted by the daylight-blinded Invisibles below, the air in their lungs apportioned for the sake of economy. Spared the full knowledge of what their condition was, the shape of the ship became for her the architecture of the human being—above, beauty, craftsmanship, finesse of taste; below, all that suffered unseen, and must not be acknowledged.

The question tormented her: Was it possible for each person aboard this ship to sail on the upper decks, to be exquisitely fed, to have sufficient space and air?

She winced as she descended each day the fine broad staircase of the Priest's dining room to the rough ladders leading to the foul-smelling depths of the ship, where the Invisible slaves and the livestock were housed. If the structure of this ship were the anatomy of justice, then her question was answered.

When they made landfall two weeks later amid the calls of a thousand waking birds at dawn, she shivered stoically on the deck. She was accustomed to fear; though she felt the chill sensations of fear, she was never surprised by it. She had never lived a day without fear, and neither—she was certain—had any other creature, not even the sweetest drowsy infant.

She was astonished by her new quarters: she had been allotted two rooms for herself alone, which gave onto the kitchen garden on one side. On the other side, the kitchen's courtyard with its marble pools stocked with fish afforded her more privacy than she had ever known, or imagined. At the same time, her proximity to the Gate of Provision, where supplies were delivered and itinerant sellers brought goods, gave her a free relation to the world outside that she had never before enjoyed.

The vast subterranean chambers beneath the kitchen complex were crowded with storage jars as full as merchants' bellies. There was a winter and a summer kitchen, as there were winter and summer dining rooms, the winter with a view of the mountains, the summer with a view of the sea. She could range the seasons and the landscape as never before for her materials. She was especially intrigued by the thought of spring. On the island where she had grown up, she had known the alternations between severe winters and brilliant summers, with little variation between them. Two new seasons would offer her an entire new vocabulary of taste.

The apartments of the palace were laid out over shifting, uneven terrain, as a series of pavilions. Even the mountain caves were incorporated into the living quarters; natural wine cellars, they had also served as defensive retreats during sieges. They were adaptations of the tents that had lodged the people of the New Kingdom in their nomadic days before the Conquest. Before, they had moved their dwellings with them; now it was they themselves who moved, from palace to bunker. The precipitous height of the royal suites reflected the old ways, too. The powerful families enjoyed the security and commanding prospects of the highest slopes, while their advisers lived in quarters below them, accessible for consultation, expendable if necessary during attack.

Even before she settled into her quarters, Savour went to the kitchens for a first glimpse. Her childhood hunter's instinct was at work. She needed to analyze her terrain, its advantages and disadvantages, and to survey the workers she would be supervising as well. She would deal with her own quarters later; they had far less to do with her life than the kitchens and pantries.

She was awed at her first sight of this cluster of rooms; they stimulated in her an odd, expansive pride in her command over them that she felt it important to suppress. It was as dangerous to her as the High Priest's compliments. Pride was eradicated in Invisible children. They were reminded that they had no sustained presence on earth, as those with genealogies did; they were born each time they successfully accomplished their work, and were as lifeless while awaiting a new task.