The Book of Heaven: A Novel (17 page)

She tamped down her flame of pride like a kitchen fire, and marveled at the almost ruthless elegance, practicality, and spaciousness of the suite. These kitchens were like a perfectly conceived, monumental body.

Even the kitchen walls united beauty and utility, as they flowed with words in sinuous scripts, the work of the royal calligraphers. Each wall was covered with recipes of the territories and peoples conquered by the Angels, who had no cuisine of their own. “God grants His Angels this abundance”: each formula began with this prayer, for to eat of the empire was to possess it.

Beneath it were painted exquisite miniatures of the ingredients necessary for the dish, in the brilliant colors of all that was edible. These were followed by the title identifying the recipe; beneath it were illumined images inset in medallions of gold, of the finished dish, or a picture of the dish being served at a wedding, funeral, banquet, or in iconic scenes from the legends of the Angels.

Somewhere in each image was embedded the prayer she had heard the masters say at the end of each meal—“Praise God, for we have eaten of the earth which is given to us.” It is said that these paintings are the origins of the pictures of fruits, meats, and meals that you know as still lifes.

Savour would be expected to master these dishes for festivals, though at this time she was so newly lettered that it was all she could do to grasp what they contained, moving from letter to letter, a monkey climbing the tree of language.

She had intended to begin her explorations in the spice rooms and grain rooms, but a man a bit younger than she was, with strong short legs, a belly like a tulip bulb, and eyes that gleamed like fine sunflower oil, approached her, before any of the other workers had spoken to her. He wanted to find out if the Angelic ships had arrived with the anticipated master of the kitchens, the new feast-maker.

A few of the kitchen workers, bent to their tasks of sluicing and cutting, took the chance the moment offered to joke and chatter with each other. Savour drew him toward a window, and said to him simply, “I am the feast-maker. And who are you?”

The young man held out both hands palms up in the greeting gesture of the Angels, symbol of a freely accepted submission to fate. She was used to it now, though the gesture looked disconcertingly like the posture of begging for alms. “My name is Salt,” he said. “Or rather, that is my kitchen name, my service name. Because you mustn't imagine that I am an Angel. I am an Indigene.”

These were the primitive people, it had been explained to her, who had been conquered and dispossessed of the land that now formed the New Kingdom, underneath which lay the true lost Paradise of the Angels.

The Indigene had managed the palace kitchens while the Priest was abroad searching for a master cook, he told her. He would now return to his previous rank, becoming her assistant, and master of the kitchen supplies, the liaison between the Indigene farmers and gardeners and the palace administration.

He spoke without tension appearing in his face or voice, but Savour feared that he might be hiding his resentment.

Nothing was more subversive in a kitchen, Gate had taught her, than the bad will of the staff, so she prepared herself for a long, researching conversation, making herself ready to wander blindly in the man's mind, as alien to her as a forest.

And she hoped she could coax him into some stories of the Princess Life, who bore this name as did all the eldest daughters of the Angelic nation. If Savour could see her portrait in his mind, she would succeed in meeting her before they were introduced.

There was no chance to talk more deeply, though; a robust, almost masculine woman, wearing three necklaces of jade beads and gold cuffs on her wrists, appeared in the courtyard, and beckoned to her.

“You are to follow me to the Pinnacle,” she ordered Savour. “The Princess has asked for me to bring you to her.” The faces of the kitchen workers, which had showed a range of narrowed eyes, rounded lips, raised eyebrows, in reaction to the sight of Savour, now assumed a blank unity. The appearance of this woman was more threatening to them than the unknown new director of their daily lives.

Savour had been so eager for a glimpse of the kitchens that she had put on fresh but simple kitchen work clothes after her arrival early in the morning. She was not even wearing the belt with the keys to the kitchens with which she had been presented with some ceremony on landing. She made an involuntary gesture in the direction of her rooms, which the jade wearer interpreted correctly, with a warning. “The Princess Life expects to have her requests fulfilled immediately when she makes them. Climb behind me to the Pinnacle.” Savour, exhausted and self-conscious in her kitchen tunic, had no choice but to follow the royal attendant.

They made their way through tunnels, alcoves, and labyrinths, climbing their way through and around the cliff where, legend had it, God had flung the Primal Angel, who had sinned against Him by preferring Paradise to life.

God had been furious at this rejection of His gift. No longer able to create the world He had envisioned, He had hurled the Angel from Heaven. The impact of the Angel's wild trajectory had created an earth, not of intention, but of accident, the shattered angelic substance combined with the Divine Impulse, which was the source of all life.

That pulverized Angelic body had split into woman and man; its fragments formed ocean and sky, forests and deserts, fish and flowers; from the Angel's blood had crystallized the multicolored gemstones, and from the splintered bones, the flying mosaic of the birds. The Angel's brain had cracked like a pomegranate, and produced the created peoples, who never came to share the Angelic Remnant's longing for their lost paradise, or their determination to gather the earth into a divine empire, and offer it to God, who would at last lift it back into paradise.

Savour's idea of splendor had been formed only from the skills she had been taught and from nature; she was unprepared for, and terrified by, the unnatural wonders she saw during their ascent, increasing in extravagance as they approached the Pinnacle.

Everywhere there were unexpected forms and colors, tents outlined in rubies, opal-colored domes where music sounded when you passed beneath them, black and scarlet silk cushions in the shape of full-blown roses, from the depths of which hidden servants materialized, carrying trays, papers, keys to secret doors. It was like nothing on earth.

The entrance to the Princess's courtyard was a screen latticed with patterns of diamonds; they spelled out a psalm from the Angelic scriptures that opened: “Therefore make of life a paradise…”

The jade-braceleted servant pushed open a leaf of the screen, and motioned to Savour to follow. In the center of the courtyard, there was a green marble pool, filled with water that gleamed green, and ringed with both real and artificial trees. The man-made trees were hung with gems representing fruit, a botanical garden evoking paradise, crafted by goldsmiths and jewel makers.

Savour could make out a figure reclining under a canopy near the pool. The canopy was embroidered with gold brocade, which spelled out the Angelic greeting, “Life is Paradise.” A servant emerged from beneath the canopy, carrying a tray.

The jade-wearer halted abruptly, forcing Savour to trip and stumble. She frowned worriedly, distressed that the Princess's first impression of her would be of a clumsy and graceless servant.

The jade-wearer, who had not spoken a word to her during the climb to the Pinnacle, held her back. “Your face is wrong,” she said. “In the Princess's presence you are expected to smile. In serving her, you serve God, and you must show your joy.” She curved the corners of her own lips upward, and adjusted the lids of her eyes, so that her pupils caught the light and sparkled like glass. “Make your face like mine,” she said to Savour, and led her forward.

The Princess did not alter her position as they approached her, though Savour saw an intense, minute attention in her eyes. She was dressed in a web of thousands of delicate gold chains, interwoven with tiny diamond letters of the Angelic alphabet. It was impossible to discern almost any of her natural physical characteristics; even the color of her hair was obscured, since her head was covered with tresses and waves of the same spider-thin golden chains. She lay unmoving as a distant landscape as she watched them draw near.

Even her fingers, weighted with ten magnificent rings, were still, as if she found motion demeaning, something expected of servants, or of men, who were compelled to show their power in running, jumping, wrestling. Her own power was a magnet's—she lay still, and was irresistible, drawing everything to her.

She did not offer her hand, but shifted slightly on her cushions, and the golden chains of her dress changed shape, like sand dunes in the wind.

Three other women hovered over her, bending reverentially toward the Princess, as if over a cradle. These were the Mirrors, who attended the Princess. The Princess's left eyebrow lifted imperceptibly; the left eyebrow of each Mirror arched. Later, Savour was to learn that they underwent special training for this work at the Royal Theater. She wondered what would happen to them when the Princess's face changed, as life would change it. Her own had changed, she could see, simply from speaking the Angelic tongue.

Savour noted that the Princess was a beauty; she had the kind of beauty that is most seductive, an angry beauty that gives the woman an air of dissatisfaction with her own splendor, and so appeals to the spectator to complete her beauty with happiness.

Savour hurried her eyes to her object. She knew that the great rarely tolerated a direct gaze from an inferior, before they required a downcast gaze.

She always used her moment of contact to gaze intently at the mouths of people she was meeting, a cook's version of palm reading; it was through their mouths that people would encounter her art. From the shape and set of a person's mouth, Savour believed she could intuit something of the nature of the individual's appetites. The Princess's mouth suggested an almond, rich and faintly bitter. Her lips were not parted in the manner of the insatiable, but closed in the manner of those difficult to please.

The jade-wearer presented her ceremonially: “In fulfillment of the High Priest's commission, I present the feast-maker Savour, new mistress of the kitchens, to her Princess Life.” Savour waited for the first word from the ruler who was truly now her life; her blood galloped in her veins.

“Why are you dirty?” the Princess asked, with no other greeting. Her voice was like lemon dripping into broken skin. Her brilliant hazel eyes narrowed, her gaze suddenly reptilian. The Mirrors' eyes narrowed, and their cheeks hollowed, reproducing the Princess's expression with startling precision.

Savour shuddered; the knife was invisible, but she had been cut. Her fidelity to her craft had emerged so absolute and early that she had never suffered the disciplines the other Invisible children knew. She had rarely been spoken to informally, and even more rarely lied to; there was little to conceal from the Invisibles. She had little experience of contempt or accusation, which affected her with a swift, strange, reflex conviction of her own guilt.

She ran her mind over her body like an abstract hand, to examine what offended the Princess. She found herself inelegant, but not unclean. But, she realized, if she protested that she was not dirty, she would contradict the Princess. If she did not, then she would be acknowledging the justice of any punishment the Princess chose. The respect she was constrained to render to the Princess meant that any of the lady's thoughts must be treated as fact. The Princess's sentences were royal sentences indeed. With only a word, she had soiled Savour.

Savour found that she had crossed some boundary into a world that must exist, without contradiction, as the Princess described.

She was spared the choice, or indeed, any response, by a flurry at the entrance to the jeweled garden. The jade-wearer took her arm and forced her to step backward, and backward again, as a farmer compels a horse or a water buffalo in harness.

The King of Angels, child of God, father of Life, surrounded by the swarm of courtiers who fluttered around him always, like the leaves attached to a great tree, led the newly returned High Priest toward the reclining Princess.

At the sight of them, she lifted herself on one elbow and extended a hand, covered in a brilliantly colored dew of tiny jewels, which were freshly fastened with an adhesive paste of almond and sugar, made by the kitchen each day; these spelled out with the traditional dressing prayer, “O Life beyond price…” Her facial expression altered when she turned her face toward them, away from Savour; even the shape of her chin and cheeks changed; what had been a sickle moon was now round and full.

When she turned from her father to the High Priest Xe, she sat upright, her eyes newly radiant, fixed on his. The eyes of the Mirrors began to sparkle in sequence, until they shone impeccably. She looked at him and angled her head delicately toward her right shoulder, adjusting her position as if he were a mirror showing her a delightful image.

“Life is Paradise,” she greeted them with the formula. “Praise God for your homecoming,” she said, speaking now to the Priest alone, her words slow and soft, silky and enveloping, her lips shaped in a charming smile, as if her face were a flower a butterfly had lit on.

“Life is indeed Paradise. It is an honor to be greeted by the Daughter of God,” the Priest said, more formally.

Savour had experienced the range of his manners from having traveled with him; she thought that at this moment, he and the Princess were struggling in a way she recognized. It was like the struggle she experienced between herself and a flame when she wanted to control the temperature for the sake of a particular dish. “It is an honor to greet you,” the Princess said, claiming the formal word, and melting it. But the Priest took her word, and made it impersonal again, set within a solid frame.