The Book of Heaven: A Novel by Patricia Storace

Author:Patricia Storace [Storace, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 9780375408069
Google: KQCHAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0375408061
Barnesnoble: 0375408061
Goodreads: 17934709
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2014-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

This song is still sung, among those who celebrate the feast of the Cauldron, during the first night when that constellation is visible in the sky.

Savour, reared Invisible, succeeded in making her way back to the court undetected; she knew it was important for her to take her place in the kitchens, and to know absolutely nothing she was not told.

She thought of Salt, standing before the tormented bodies of his kin; she made of her steady, expressionless work that night a cabin where no one could touch him. The evening meal was nothing out of the ordinary, but she dedicated it as a funeral sacrifice for the destroyed villages, and for Salt’s family above all.

A few days later, the Priest himself came to the kitchens, in the informal way he used to enjoy. He asked if she had had any word from Salt, and when she shook her head, he told her he now feared the worst—that Salt had abandoned them to make common cause with the Saints and the Indigenous rabble that were their allies.

Savour served for a convincing expression. The Priest must look at her forehead, eyes, and mouth, and be certain that he still knew more about Savour than she did about herself.

She told him that she hoped it was not true that Salt had abandoned the work for which he had such a strong gift. She hoped he would not sacrifice his life in a cause unworthy of him. She said that she would make that her personal supplication to weave among the supplications of the great traditional antebellum banquet of the Angels.

So for those who could read it, she began to write the book of wheat and curd, and to articulate the scriptures of cinnamon, saffron, and green almond. It was the most difficult dinner she had ever devised. The Priest must not realize that it was the dinner of his betrayal. And Savour must not be paralyzed by her old debt to the Priest, who had shown her nothing but favor and kindness.

The Banquet of Supplication, Savour’s Feast of True and False, was a dinner in which nothing presented at table was what it seemed. It was a dinner of artful deception.

Each of the courses represented a quadrant of the New Kingdom, and served as a votive offering for the unity of all the Angelic territories.

Fifty small green-throated doves were set in nests made of crisp sautéed noodles for the first course. They were a variety of bird that could be found only in the southwest. Savour’s cooking had always been a natural history of the lands where she found herself. But the doves, molded of white and green cheese, designed to form a sauce melting in accord with the rhythm of their consumption, also were a code, as the emblem of peace, that the southwest contained no military camps she knew of, was thought to be secure, and left undefended.

With the next course, celebrating the rivers region of the northwest, she sent

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