The Book of Heaven: A Novel (13 page)

The concoctions she simmered in this shell were invariably successful. It was as if she herself entered into this shell when she used it. She had faith in this basin as in no other object, or indeed, person. She had found, perhaps, a womb from which to be born.

The Governors and their guests were able to recognize an unmistakable distinction when they dined on a beast, or root, or fruit that Savour had cultivated. Her food had a double life in time, as she had been gathering flavor to it before it emerged on the face of the earth, as well as after it was cooked. The tastes were of things forming or newly born, as much as things dying.

She watered the most delicate of her garden seedlings with a syrup of water, milk, and blood, and fed her animals grains mixed with spices, honey, and butter. She moved like a pen through the landscape, leaving behind her a kind of signature through the cursive of irrigation channels she had set in the fields where she was responsible.

She killed like the god of her little world, neither cruel nor merciful. She intoxicated the animals however she could; she drained them of their knowledge of death, and took the burden of the knowledge. It was another gift of those who had eaten the fruit that was forbidden.

She gave each farm animal a cup of wine, looked into its dark expressionless eyes, then turned its head away, and gave them, not birth, but death. Her clean swift cuts separated them from the life their mothers had put into them; always she had an imagination as strong as memory, of her mother looking into the dark shocked pools of her newborn eyes, and turning away.

With each butchery, she tested her own reaction. Innocence was impossible to her; she sought some form of goodness instead. She struggled never to give a death without wounding herself. She never killed without the fear that she would one day be able to murder. Surely this death-giving transformed her into a cook, made her of the guild of those who must resurrect what has been killed. Her cooking was a summoning of life; it was the way she did not acquiesce to death.

There are those who say that what the cook creates is trivial, as it disappears. On the contrary, the cook defies all that vanishes.

For a cook transfigures death, and exalts the act of eating. Those who eat and drink at such a supper encounter on their plates a meditation, a prayer, a remembrance; set before them is an embodied pardon.

A company at table unknowingly tastes the celebrated forbidden fruit. Through their laden plates and overflowing cups, they approach its secret; the bones and blood that enter them and become their bones and blood reveal to them that tragedy is inescapable. This is the cook's knowledge.

But the cook unites what vanishes and what survives. This is the cook's art—to refuse absolute destruction. The defiant delicacy, glory, and revelation of flavor, accomplished through the hands of a cook on the bodies of the dead, this is the taste and incense of resurrection, in which the sensual and the spiritual are fused.

The cook takes a handful of dust and it becomes flesh, flour pulverized from the seeds of grass rises into bread.

The cook takes flesh from a carcass, and through spice and oil, salt and butter, roasting or braising, guides it through time once again and back into life; a cook transfigures the blood of tragedy, and fills our cups instead with wine. Death vanishes into the bodies of the living and sustains them. In yet a further alchemy, the food and wine become breath itself, the scaffolding of speech—so that the guests may lift their glasses, and craft with their companions the words of honor, of wonder, of love. The glasses are filled then, the company fulfilled.

It is for this reason that religious festivals most often take the form of repasts, and are called feasts. Through eating, we know resurrection, passing from exhaustion to new life. It is for this reason that we deem the murder of a guest not only an act of violence, but also a blasphemy, wounding the hope of all living.

A company at table tastes the forbidden fruit, but does not die; the cook teaches their bodies how to make life of death. Death passes through the hands of the cook, and becomes not destruction, but destiny. The guests at table taste and drink their death; they praise death, and are forgiven death, delivered to new life. It is for this reason that funerals are concluded with feasts. The ecstasy of flavor awakened in perception is the taste not of the body, but of the soul. A dinner made by a great cook is a vision of the world to come.

Savour could not speak this, but she could craft and enact it, as when she mesmerized deer with torches, and killed while they were hypnotized. She judged their gaits and bodies expertly from her hiding places, so she could find the deer most likely to yield the preferred dish of the Governors of the Ghosts, a dish known as the Feast Without Beginning. This consisted of an unborn fawn, or better, twins. She would slit the placentas, add wine and herbs, and braise the meat in its sac. When they were served at table, they were cut into slices known as “fates.” On these occasions, the carver was instructed to give her a substantial portion, as for a guest rather than an Invisible. The presiding Governor would lift his glass to her, and say, with merry irony, “You have a great fate, Savour.”

It was perhaps true. Savour's gift distinguished her from the common destiny awaiting a Ghost: the auction hall filled with inspectors, agents, and sea captains buying Ghosts in lots of ten for speculation.

Day after day in the Lord Governor's kitchens, she learned to cut banquet foodstuffs; she cut fruits in the shapes of diamonds, emeralds, pearls, marquises, pointed stars, and lozenges, gilded them with syrup, and recovered them with their own glistening skins, so that when the guests sliced the fruit before them, its flesh scattered onto the plate like a handful of jewels. She knew very well that one seed contained in every fruit known to humankind was a seed fallen from the Forbidden Tree, and that each fruit contained a trace of the flavor of Paradise, if the cook could uncover it.

Her knife work was so fine that she could cut cold butter into golden sheets of lace; these were layered on beds of ice to hold their shape, then lifted off and flung over the great platters at the banquet table, melting erotically as bridal veils over the principal dishes. She learned the seven methods of leavening, the three hundred sauces, the ninety-nine transformations, a complex genre of dishes based on re-creating vegetables and grains as meat. She learned how to whip edible ornamental clouds of eggs in the shapes requested of cumulus, cirrus, and a repertoire of others, flavored with the essences of game, cheese, buttered lemons; they floated in haunting broths, garnishes that suited the principal dishes they accompanied. A coastal people's observation of weather was a sacred task. It was a cuisine filled with hidden magics; these copies of clouds influenced the sea clouds, and conjured fine sailing breezes, it was said.

Savour learned the arts of how a personality was revealed through the grammar of a palate, such as the range of behavior one might predict from people who preferred the foods of childhood. She was taught the classic recurring paradoxes of appetite, such as the fact that the people who refuse meat are drawn from those who hate death and those who love it, either truly tenderhearted or vicious sadists, afraid of tasting the first kill.

Unlettered, her dinners became her records of time passing, of feelings experienced, of life lived. Her soufflés, her management of fire, the architecture of a roast burned slowly into succulence on its carapace of bones, her transparent pastry revealing a jewelry of rice, meat, chestnuts, shredded mushrooms, and the butter churned in spring, were like entries in a journal. A certain cake of chestnut and chocolate represented shock and pain to her—she had cut her finger severely in learning how to make it. She would always remember drops of blood disappearing into the batter. She could recite an anthology of her menus precisely for at least four years, and all that had been said of them, and what had happened the day that dinner was eaten. For literacy, she substituted a prodigious memory.

At the end of one evening, when she was twelve, she returned to the residence hall after a banquet and found three new girls settled in her room. The three she had grown up with—the Ghost sisters of her childhood—had been sold and sent away. The House Governors believed farewells led to discontent and disruption, for both the sold and unsold, so ceremonies of farewell were either clandestine or accidental.

Savour had now, for the first time, lost the known, having previously lost the unknown. For three weeks, her kitchen work was aggressively slovenly. There was always blood on her hands. Her knives cut her as if they had their own wills; her forearms were inscribed with burns as they had not been since she began her apprenticeship. Her walnut sauce burned the tasters' tongues, seasoned with the violence of her rage. Gate, the second master cook to whom she was assigned, took her by the shoulders, almost shook her, and half-pushed her into his cubicle. “I would like to terrify you. Shall I tell you what you are risking, you cracked egg, you driftwood, you disease?” He paused, momentarily unable to invent more insults. She looked at him sullenly. “You are an Invisible. You have no past. Your mother was a grave. Your only life is the life to come.

“You are not pretty. You are not winning. It is prohibited for you to marry.

“Yet you have a chance that comes to few Ghosts—you have a gift that has been noticed. Others are sold in lots—you can be sold privately. You are fit for a rich family. Even a royal one. You may not be thrown below the decks with the others.

“You will be bought for a purpose, not for speculation. You will be protected to fulfill that purpose. You may not be raped.” Savour's cheeks reddened and she clasped herself in her own arms, looking down at the immaculate floor.

“I said it's possible you won't be raped. Or bred. A rich family wants its banquets, in private or in public, every night. They want you to cook their meat, not to breed it. You have a chance to be more safe than most of the girls in your lodging. No Ghost has more than you. But if your dishes taste of chaos, the kitchen mistress can send you traveling below the decks. You won't have the chance to cook your exhibition dinners.

“Listen to me. Look at me. I'm teaching you.

“I want you to know what a talent is—it means your body is like money. It means that your value may not change, as long as you can practice it. You are off the market. As long as you can fulfill a master's need again. And again. Your price won't fluctuate.

“Make that gift a house, hide in it. Make a lock out of the bones you roast for stocks. Invent a dish—use it like a weapon. Remember what I say. Cut the throats of the little birds—but not your own.”

He sent her to her quarters, his stony eyes liquid with crippled sorrow. Though Gate would never have children, Savour taught him the impotence of fatherhood.

The Governors of the Ghosts at that moment were debating at length whether to keep Savour or to sell her. Her cooking was highly prized; it not only gave them a celebrated and enviable table, but also served as a kind of guarantee of the excellence of all the Invisibles offered for sale. In the end, though, it was determined that the sum she was likely to bring would subsidize the clearing of a new plantation, in addition to a Great House and outbuildings in the southeastern corner of the island. She was designated for sale in one of the year's quarterly dispersals.

Over a series of days, great clots of Invisibles made a wavering progress to the ships. These were the groups who had been sold in lots. At the gangplank, the merchant waited with an inventory, and a pair of iron cuffs to lock on each pair of hands. A broad-shouldered boy squared his jaw, clearly, brightly sought the merchant's eyes with his own, shaped his posture until his stance was tall and graceful as a hero's, and refused the cuffs. “I don't need these, sir,” he said, “I will honor the contract.”

“You will,” said the merchant, and signed to his aide to bind the boy's hands, instantly distorting the clarity and balance of the boy's body. “We won't lead you into temptation. But we admire your good manners. Take him below,” he ordered a waiting crewman. “Honor is the possession of the strong,” he said, “as is the privilege of virtue.”

He spoke to no one in particular, his words unfurling like a written decree. “Submission is not honor: defiance is not virtue.” His face, which had been as public as a statue's, remained public but in a new style, the style of the barracks. “Which is why women are never either honorable or virtuous.” His witticism also decreed assent, and the men around him submitted to his proverb in unified laughter.

Privilege, however, is as ineradicable as slavery, and is present even among the enslaved. For her prized skills, Savour was sold privately. She was ushered into an anteroom on the second story of the Traveler's Exchange, as the market where the Invisibles were sold was called. The governess who was to monitor the dialogue closed the door behind them.

The room widened into a balcony overlooking all the transactions below. Savour was too terrified to peer down, afraid she would fall over it like a cliff, into the world of absolute compulsion below.

The potential purchaser wore a black tunic and black trousers, bordered with gold, as she would later learn all the priests of high rank did, though Savour did not know it at the time. In his pierced left ear was the gold and ruby earring that was the mark of a priest of the tribe of Angels. Fastened around his fine waist was the cummerbund of these princes, a belt of golden coins engraved with images she couldn't recognize and inscriptions she couldn't read. Later she would learn that on each coin was an image of God, and one of his thousand names, in the language of the Angels. This was the language in which God spoke directly to the Angels, who called themselves “His translators.”

“Please sit down,” he said, with a courtesy shocking for its sincerity. She was too surprised by the invitation to obey, so the Guardian pushed her, as you would push a door open, and she sat down. This had the effect the High Priest wanted, which was to force her to look up at him. What happened on her face as he talked, though she did not know it, was the first step in the sequence of acquisition.