The Book of Heaven: A Novel (20 page)

There was more blasphemy in the kitchen than he realized. Savour had not yet come to believe in the One. She felt more affinity with the Primal Angel; if she had had a choice between Paradise and life, she, too, would have chosen Paradise. Why would anyone risk himself here, on this hard earth, if one could be sure of Paradise?

Despite her achievement, near-mastery of the Angelic language and its array of obligatory hourly prayers praising the Supreme God of Angels, Savour still prayed in action, not in contemplation. And in what she did, she had found her guardian god, who, like a feast, was not a single being, but a perpetual metamorphosis, sometimes male, sometimes female, or neither: it manifested as an afternoon, an illness, a tulip petal, a song, or an olive, to be sensed, but never understood.

She was quite sure the Angelicals' god existed, for them.

All gods exist for believers. But its singularity seemed to make them confuse its substance with their own, lending it their own motives. Their insistence on their god's supremacy seemed less faithful than ambitious.

Their books purported to be its very certain words, as if mortal beings could reproduce divine speech, a language in which the most learned mortals were unlettered. As if divine speech were not finer than words. Divine speech would be more even than song.

Divine speech was itself food, perfect in fragrance, ever varying, infinite in flavor and nourishment. It was not meant to be written, but eaten. She spoke of this to no one, even to Salt, who prayed to the Indigenous gods.

For the Priest, it was not only a gastronomic pleasure to taste the fruits of Savour's labor. It was an ultimate refined and subtle sensuality, too, to feel no desire for her.

It was a form of gourmandise to visit her, a piquant mixture of eating and speaking, of two oral pleasures fused. In Savour's company, he could speak without consequence, about matters she didn't understand, in words she would never repeat. He could taste food from her hand without the mediation of the guard who took the first taste of any dish set before him. Nothing could be more voluptuous for a man in perpetual danger than the safety he felt here from all threats and all complexity. There is no greater safety than to feel the pangs of an appetite that can be satisfied.

Nor did Savour feel any desire for the Priest, although his almost monumentally handsome features became newly candid and youthful as he ate her kitchen offerings. She knew well how to satisfy herself, all the more absolutely, without the distraction of attending to anyone else's needs.

The Priest, however, was ill at ease with Salt, like all Angels faced with the peoples they had subjugated.

The Angels and the Indigenes were almost naturally opposed, so little did they resemble each other physically. Angelic faces were perennially childish, smooth as eggs. Even the elderly had the faces of children, though sagging, while the Indigenes aged early, their faces like maps of their stolen territory. This made them instantly identifiable to each other; Savour could distinguish them from her first days in the kingdom. She remembered how it struck her: the Angels gazed at the Indigenes with faces as unfinished as dreams, the Indigenes returned the gaze with the faces of history.

Still, despite this small tension, the refreshment of Savour's company, the near-perfect protection it afforded the Priest from either contradiction or demands, made him seek out the kitchen complex as if it were a beloved landscape, where nothing needed his interference.

The well-ordered world of the kitchens, its phases of industry, abundance, and the ever-renewed cleanliness recurring like the quarters of the moon, evoked a life lived with ritual grace. In this room, he collected himself, needing to impose nothing.

It became more and more his habit, when he could absent himself, to enter this world where he experienced, as nowhere else, the ideal condition of the man of power—to be master and child simultaneously, the object of intimate, detailed, and immediate attention exacted from beings utterly subject to his power. A child pleads for his needs to be satisfied and dreams to be fulfilled; a ruler not only receives these offices, but commands them, simply through existing.

At about this time, Savour had begun receiving visits from someone else besides the Priest.

She always left her bedroom window open to the courtyard; after her days laved in the heady smells and heat of the kitchens, the fresh nighttime air was precious to her. One night, as she was falling asleep, she heard an odd rhythmic scratching, as if someone were climbing a tree.

The sound persisted, but the gentle percussion was rather soothing, and made her drowsy again. She gasped and woke with a shock when a ball dropped from on high onto her bed. The ball unraveled, and, as if it were just being created, it acquired one paw, then, rapidly, three others, downy fur, and a pair of sea-green eyes that glowed in the dark. She lit a lamp and saw that it was a kitten, no bigger than her hand, probably alive for no more than a few weeks.

Its unsteady climb up the wooden pillars that held her bed in its frame was the equivalent feat for this creature of climbing the Three Wishes Peaks in the northwestern corner of the country, so named because no one had ever attained them. Savour knew of them because fine game fed on the berries of the mountain slopes below it, and was prized at the Angelic court.

Savour lay still, not wanting to risk any sudden movement that might provoke the creature. The kitten, too, remained motionless, gazing at her with unwavering eyes, and murmuring to itself, with a sound like a distant bubbling brook.

Savour delicately slid from her bed—the idea of a living being awake in the room where she slept was unnerving. She gently scooped it up, carried it to the door, set it down outside, and closed the door. She closed the bedroom window, and lay down again, seeking sleep as intensely as if she were hunting it. Her days were long and tiring, and doubly burdensome if she met them in a state of exhaustion. When she woke up in the early light, the kitten was lying by her arm, its small paw, soft as moss, resting in the center of her palm.

Hesitantly, almost with humility, as if she were afraid to offend it, she brushed the top of the kitten's head with only her forefinger. She traced its ears and its cheeks gently. She felt its tiny, vulnerable skull and then felt her own hand transformed by those fragile bones. She looked at her hand as if she had never seen it before.

She was used to using that tough, confident palm to flatten, to sweep, to chop, as a platform as her fingers closed around a bird's throat. The kitten fit snugly into her palm, and settled there, absolutely refusing anything from her hand but shelter. She lifted the kitten to her face, and they looked straight into each other's eyes. Savour had caressed melons, powdery milled flour, her own sex, clusters of cherries, and stalks of wheat. But she had never yet caressed a creature that stared back at her, its very breath visible in its throat. The kitten purred.

And so began a love story, one of those devotions between animal and human that remain inexplicable and wordless, articulated not through speech, but through behavior.

The kitten had made its choice, and insisted on Savour, for what quality she never knew. There would have been a palpable reason if it had courted her outside the kitchen, but it had never appeared there. Nor did it ever attempt to enter, but waited calmly for her in the courtyard, or in her rooms. Now, after the kitchen was quiet after the evening meals or entertainments, and she entered her own quarters, she would find the kitten sleeping in sweet, sumptuous trust and comfort on her bed.

He spoke to her in his feline music; a question was a door creaking slowly open on its hinges, contentment was the sound of a fire burning safely in a hearth, a sound to warm a heart as surely as a pair of hands. There was a single crystalline note of affection, a stream of playful soprano chatter during a game. And a mischievous shout for breakfast, achieved by placing his mouth directly on the sleeping Savour's ear and emitting a yowl. When she leapt up, startled out of sleep, he sat on his haunches expectantly, regarding with satisfaction his expertise in managing this being.

She said to Salt, “I am learning my third language.” He smiled, and said, “Your fourth, Savour.”

“My fourth?”

“You speak fluently the earliest language of all, the primal native tongue of food and drink. The language of life and death.”

Savour did not expect the cat to stay with her, but he did. She expected him to lose his infant tenderness as he matured and began to hunt. However, his unceasing affection came to seem almost deliberate, though he did develop a love of teasing her, disappearing and materializing where she least expected to see him, in a basket of fruit, or in residence on the full moon, an illusion he gave her by perching on a certain courtyard tree on moonlit nights.

Nor did he ever hunt, as if this too were a matter of principle. The trees in the courtyard were full of birds, but when she sat in the shade to rest, the cat would turn his back on them, and leap into her lap, as if they bored him. He did not try to catch the fish in the courtyard pond, though he sat on the stone rim of the pool contemplating them, his emerald eyes like jewels that could think.

On the other hand, he listened to music raptly, his mouth open as if he were tasting it. And he ate Savour's dishes with discriminating appetite. When he found a dish merely acceptable, he ate standing on all fours, waving his tail. When he judged the food excellent, he threw her a look over his shoulder, and sat down to eat it, to the delight of the kitchen staff.

Salt described him as a lover of civilized pleasures, and suggested they try to teach him to read. Above all sensations, he loved the feeling of being embraced and caressed, and would even ride on Savour's or Salt's shoulder, for the pleasure of the contact.

After a year, she took a momentous step; she named the cat. Giving it a name meant she found herself at a strange crossroads; a name in some way put a term to the cat's existence, but it also meant he would exist always for her.

She called him Candle, after his eyes, which were blue-green like the purest heart of flame. The name celebrated the way every movement of his glowed with the grace and unpredictability of fire. He was Candle because he brought a warmth, illumination, and peace to her room. The animal in a way made her into a person. She could see by the light of him.

Savour had little time for any existence of her own at this period; it was the season when important men were presented at formal dinners and invited to court the Princess; it was time for her to achieve an advantageous alliance and to be bred.

The breeding of new Angels was the great purpose of all Angelic women, for each generation of Angels embodied the burning hope of the Paradise that Life might yet become. Yet, despite the dramatic beauty of the Princess, and the youthful, suggestively bridal dishes—dove cooked with figs, mousses of rose petals, honey, and cream—with which Savour metaphorically portrayed the experience of marrying her, no promises were exchanged.

It was the Princess herself who was the source of the stasis.

The Princess, in conference with her father and ministers after each presentation, had refused each of the possible suitors.

No one entertained the idea of peremptory force; the Princess was notoriously expert in the corrosive defenses of the unequal. She had perfected the use of the sheer, exhausting, negative force of her will. Her violent passivity had the effect of quicksand on anyone who attempted to change a course she had firmly chosen. She fought for herself the way a womb would fight, by engulfment.

She had, she said, found a number of the candidates attractive, but all represented an insulting alliance with an inferior, each from a territory now under Angelical dominion.

These men were her father's conquests, Salt theorized to Savour, as they worked in the kitchen. The Princess wanted to make a conquest of her own.

There was no one, it seemed, that she could be prevailed on to accept. As a last resort, her father sent the High Priest Xe, his most elegant and most persuasive diplomat, to explore a resolution with her. His stature and title alone would evoke her duty to God. “It is imperative that she marry,” said the King, allowing his eyes, as he rarely did, to meet the Priest's with the expression of his genuine emotion. His gaze was intense and desperate.

Their meeting was to be confidential, its setting carefully chosen for maximum discretion. Marriages were of capital political importance to the Angelicals, whose conquests brought them the problems of managing the new territories they ruled. The choices made had the potential to affect territorial society profoundly, and were closely scrutinized for what they revealed of Angelic intentions.

To preserve the maximum secrecy, the Priest and Princess arranged to meet on the great terrace overlooking the sea that extended from her apartments. Even the Mirrors would remain at a distance, withdrawing to an alcove from where they could be beckoned if required.

A table was laid with delicacies Savour had made. She had learned from Salt's mother that Indigenous tables, during conferences, whether familial or political, were traditionally laid with salt and sweet breads and pastries, the flavors symbolizing the elements needed to reach equilibrium. They were baked in the forms of letters of the alphabet, symbolizing the need to speak and to be sustained by speech. Savour tried to achieve the effect of a true Indigenous parley table. She had observed that the Priest seemed eager to incorporate many of the Indigenous customs, despite the antipathy between the two peoples.

The Princess was waiting for him at the table, toying absently with a sugared “H.” The Priest gracefully began their discussion by asking for a salted “M.” He hoped that, as is often the case, the shared pleasures of the table would transform them into partners. “The fine work of Savour,” he said, accepting the glass of wine she offered him.

“I don't think so,” said the Princess.