The Book of Heaven: A Novel (19 page)

“You have heard at least one of the songs that had stayed inside this woman's body: ‘you shall make honey of stone and of the glaciers, wine.'” He sang the line; Savour did recognize it, a tune popular among the Indigenous kitchen staff.

“Hidden inside these words,” Salt continued, “we slowly discovered, were the treasures of our old knowledge, crafts, architecture, our sagas, our history undistorted by Angelic destruction. Most extraordinary of all, in that particular song, hidden in its code of metaphor, was a precise recipe for the lost method for making agate butter. Our marriages felt true to us again; we remembered that we were the fathers and mothers of our children. We have slowly developed a secret language of these songs; we can communicate simply by quoting them.

“So the Angels hate this tree, and all agate trees, because their will to destroy us can never be satisfied without annihilating the very land they have conquered. And for us, these fruits are the miracle of the honey flowing from stone, of returning to life from death.”

Savour's first court dinners functioned not only as public displays of her skill, but as explorations of the Princess's tastes. Her plates spoke the language of the New Kingdom, as she served up delicate birds braised with the local black rose honey, herbs, and figs, and waited to see what the intimate flavors of the landscape around her evoked in the Princess.

Savour watched from the hall as the company took life from her dinner. She was delighted to see that the youngest of the three Mirrors shut her eyes and, for a fraction of a second, smiled with involuntary pleasure. The Princess's face, however, remained impassive, and the Mirror's trace of expression quickly dissolved.

The Princess had ordered a very rare red wine to be poured, in lavish quantities, as the guest of honor was famed for his vineyards, and had recently been employed to advise the Angelicals about wine production in the New Kingdom.

He toasted the Princess, and held his glass to the light to admire the wine's color of the setting sun. The Princess beckoned to the server behind her, who returned hurriedly with a silver bowl. The Princess tossed a handful of ice from the bowl into her wineglass. Savour saw the guest wince with disgust, as if she had urinated into the crystal goblet. “I like my wine iced,” the Princess said, with a challenging, insultingly flirtatious glance at her dinner partner. “It pleases my own taste to drink it cold.” She lifted the glass to the winemaker, and sipped, and rolled the ice on her tongue. “My satisfaction is greater than your conventions.”

The winemaker replied, “It is true, Madam, that all the earth has to offer is a mere reflection of your lovely self.”

She sent Savour word after the first few dinners that she expected more impressive dishes. Savour learned what that meant. The Princess dazzled her guests with Savour's culinary feats. She accepted rapturous compliments for Savour's soufflé of green almonds, accompanied by ice creams made of silk and silver leaf.

The Princess ordered dishes made from costly ingredients, brought from distant conquered lands, and obtained with as much risk as possible. She wanted omelets from eggs gathered on high cliffs by agile children. She wanted snow in summer, cherries in winter. She wanted brilliant colored fish brought by deep-sea divers, extravagant flavors and lavish expenditures of devotion to her service.

She ordered a Solstice Banquet for the court, a winter feast. It was a banquet dreaded each year by the kitchen staff. When they received the order, Salt beckoned to Savour. He led her to the still life medallion on the wall that pictured the Angelical Solstice Banquet.

The central image in the medallions was of a company at its banquet; around the borders ran a dizzying pattern of knots in black and gold. Salt traced the border with his finger; it was then that she saw that the black and gold knots were stylized snakes coiled around the border.

“Yes,” Salt affirmed, “they are pit vipers. The solstice is celebrated with many courses of dishes based on snake. The Angelicals must eat of flesh that crawls at least once every year. This symbolizes the submission of the colonies they have conquered. Those who would rise up are cut down, and their very uprising serves the Angelicals. The flesh of pit viper is considered to have extraordinary restorative powers. Of course, for us, if we are not cautious, its powers will be anything but restorative.”

The creatures were delivered to the kitchen gates by the snake hunters, who imprisoned each serpent in a flat wooden box, carved with a pattern of wings imitating the Angelic seal. Salt dressed Savour in a kind of thin metal armor and pulled a pair of metal gloves up to her elbows. He put a metal mask over her face, then he put on his own gear. They walked to the kitchen courtyard.

“I will teach you the wrong way and the right way to make them meat,” he said. “I'll demonstrate first, and, if you are ready, the second is yours.” He took a pair of long shears and a stick, and gave Savour a pair of shears to use if anything went awry. She tensed herself, and Salt looked at her.

“Breathe,” he said. “I'm going to open the box and reach in.” He opened the box swiftly but smoothly, reached in, and grasped underneath the snake's head with his metal glove. It was the work of seconds, as it had to be. He sheared the snake's head off, and threw the bleeding head into one basin, the still writhing body into another. “Why do you say that is the wrong method?” Savour asked him. “It's already over. I can't think of any way that would be as fast.”

“Look down into the basin,” he said. She leaned forward, noticing the sneering raised ridges on the sides of the face, and the lidless eyes, perpetually open like the eyes of the damned.

“Carefully,” Salt cautioned her. “Not so close.” He dropped the stick into the basin with the snake's head, and she saw the severed head strike the stick, stop, and strike again.

“They can do that for hours after the kill,” Salt said. “So it isn't the speed that keeps us safe, but the deliberation. Imagine what would happen if one of the kitchen children overturned the basin, or emptied it too soon. The second way takes longer, but is more secure.” He handed her the tongs. “I'm going to reach in, grasp the head, and open the jaws. When I do that, take the tongs and pull out the left fang, then the right. Then shear off the head.”

He opened the box. This time the viper was not bewildered, but furious at the disturbance, and surged to strike his metal arm. He caught hold of it and opened the jaws of the creature, its head jerking like a wave he was holding back from the shore, its tail whipping against the world. Savour reached in with the tongs and pulled the fangs out of the mouth struggling to close. Its conscienceless eyes looked into hers with the absolute purpose of killing her; she quickly sheared through the solid muscle close to the head. She couldn't think of it as a neck; the uniformity of the snake's body suggested that for it, eating, mating, and killing were mere phases of the same activity.

Salt taught her to separate the meat from its web of tiny bones, and to make correctly the ritual banquet courses of soup and pâté, followed by the grilled flesh served on curved metal skewers representing snakes in motion. Savour would always think of viper as the meat of fear, and was privately sure that its legendary powers of energy enhancement were the result of the fusion of the two fears concentrated in it at the moment of death, the reptile's fear, and her own.

No direct word of pleasure or disdain ever reached the kitchens from the Princess's quarters, though menus were sent down.

The Princess wanted dishes that were the equivalent of incomes, that glittered across rooms like rich women's rings, never intended to be delicate ornaments for the wearer's finger, but to dazzle eyes across reception rooms.

Savour created banquet dishes: enormous roast pigs hollowed out, then filled again with their own metamorphosed flesh pounded with snails, truffles, butter, and cognac, and swans stuffed, like never-ending puzzles, with peacocks stuffed with turkeys, each bird smaller than the next, until the last tiny figpecker, stuffed with roasted quail eggs, each containing a pearl.

Some guests would leave her table richer by a pearl, others would return home as they came. The Princess herself, through her power to confer, emphasized her detachment from these small variations of fortune.

At last, the Princess herself sent word on the occasion of this piece of culinary theater, via the Mirrors. Savour was escorted across the courtyard and into a small reception room on the sea-facing side of the palace.

The Mirrors had been sent to deliver the message. When they were in attendance, they were permitted to utter only sentences or echo words that the Princess had spoken. It was understood during their tenure that they were a trio of carrier pigeons, that the use of the pronoun “I” at these times was the royal prerogative of the Princess alone. The Mirrors were deprived of personal speech in a practice reminiscent of the way other courts deprived men of their virility to make them effective guardians of women.

The Mirrors spoke in unison: “My guests took pleasure in what I created.” They turned away after delivering themselves of this speech, and Savour was sent back across the courtyard.

These were not the sort of dishes that interested Savour, though she executed them with the defiant perfection so often the foundation of perfect obedience.

Her particular delight was to make each element of a dish remember something of what it had been. This was how Gate had taught her, to make the lamb remember the herbs it had fed on, or the orange the sun it had mimicked. Two things, he had said, were fundamental to a masterpiece of cooking: either it re-created a remembered ecstasy of the past, or it discovered some immortality promised in the future. A successful dish, he said, must be all that is not fatal; it must taste of either memory or destiny.

Savour loved, too, to learn dishes that had names and were made of inherited knowledge. She was intrigued by preparations that preserved techniques, such as the Indigenous dishes that she learned from Salt. They taught her how a creation can be utterly altered by an infinitesimal addition, a drop of lemon, one syllable of vanilla. They gave her the majestic feeling that she could reenter life through history. It was as if a pear she was slicing had dropped from a tree in Heaven, relayed from cupped hand to cupped hand until it reached her own.

The Priest visited the kitchens after he returned from one of his administrative journeys, and was reminded of his first impressions of Savour's work. She was making dinner for that evening's kitchen staff, and out of material that would scarcely serve four important guests, she spun an abundant supper for thirty people. She stopped her work when she saw him, and held up her palms to greet him. “Life is Paradise,” she said correctly.

“Life is Paradise,” he replied. “Go on with your work, Savour. I enjoy watching you cook; it is like watching someone weave a grand carpet out of nothing but colored threads.”

Savour had to permit him to watch, but she permitted him as graciously as if she were free to refuse. She knew well how men loved to see women in a state of devotion to a task. It seemed to suggest to them a wonderful, enfolding shadow, a muse, a personal guardian devoted solely to each one of them.

“I am hoping for a soufflé,” he said. “It is a dish that expresses your gift—something thick and solid becomes something ethereal, as if you had fused the material with thought. It is a dish of resurrection, what we will be when we are raised, our flesh leavened, fragrant, real, but weightless.” She was too absorbed in what lay on the board before her to respond, but was struck at how keenly he grasped what was essential to the dish. She replied only, “What I am making has no name yet.”

He sat and watched as she transformed one substance into another. She altered chicken, saffron threads, and brilliant red peppers into broth. With her knife's sharp blade, she chopped four onions, one after another, in the palm of her hand. She simmered them in butter, until the fragments became crisp vegetable sugar, tasting of words well spoken.

Then she took the chicken, and with hands as quick as hummingbirds, she unwound its flesh into silken threads as if she were deconstructing a flower.

Now it existed as a substance no thicker than the saffron, which itself now existed as a color and fragrance more brilliant than in its former state.

She took walnuts, pounded them with mushrooms and some green herb, and used the paste to change the broth into another language altogether. Without his seeing, she had set a handful of flour in a pan to toast; it became wheat again, regaining the color and fragrance it had had in its field under the sun.

She used it to make the broth into a thick sauce, and then again, through a further alchemy, into a thick, velvety, utterly new kind of flesh, when she combined it with the threads of chicken. At last, she pounded some small hot peppers, garlic, some dried rose-colored fruit, and oil, and ribboned the trays with this, until the substance underwent another metamorphosis, looking very like the intricately patterned porphyry marble columns of the palace.

She gave him a plate of it, cut into diamond shapes. Its flavor was orchestral, infinitely more profound than the showy food she produced for the Princess. She had made something as absolute as a tree.

Yet what he enjoyed even more than the delicacy she offered him was the novel sensation he derived from her company. This eccentric, unworldly slave girl made him feel free—and that was the greatest of all delicacies for him.

“This reminds me in its texture of the creamy, fertile earth of the Indigene's valleys—but as finely colored as palace porphyry,” he said. “It's a new kind of earth you have made, Savour—an earth that sustains man not through struggle, but through delight. It is even blasphemous,” he joked daringly, “for God himself has given the earth to the Angels through divine war and divine deception, but never through divine pleasure.”