Archangel

  “About what?”

  “Oh, everything. Edori beliefs. The existence of Ysral. My behavior. His behavior. Judith. Obadiah. This trip. We agree on practically nothing. He hates me, actually.”

  “He hates you? He has said so?”

  “No. Well, he might not hate me. Well, I wouldn’t blame him for hating me. What I said to him—but then, what he said to me was worse—and anyway, it’s all horrible.”

  The mischief had completely left Naomi’s eyes. “But Rachel,” she said very gently, “tell me about it. Tell me everything.”

  Waking, Rachel shut her eyes tightly and tried not to think or move. Pushing conscious thought to the back of her mind, she was aware of two curiously opposing but distinct sensations: one of extreme spiritual well-being, and the other of cramped physical discomfort. She squeezed her eyelids together, willing the sensations to remain inchoate, unresolved, avoiding for another minute or two whatever realities she would be faced with upon gaining full consciousness.

  “Rachel, you lazy allali half-wit,” came a cheerful voice from right above her ear. “I swear I’ll dump a pot of spring water on your head if you don’t get up. It’s past noon, girl, and you’re still sleeping.”

  Slowly, wonderingly, she opened her eyes to find Naomi’s laughing face inches above her own. Indeed, the Edori woman held a stewpot directly over her head and she looked ready to tip the entire contents onto the slothful guest. The smell of wood smoke and cooked pheasant drifted in through the open tent flap. The ceaseless throb of the drums ran under the earth where her ear was pressed against the ground.

  She was in the Edori campsite. It had not been a dream after all.

  “This ground is hard as iron,” she complained, stirring slightly to indicate her discomfort. “And there are rocks under my back.”

  “My, my, the luxury of the angel holds has certainly made us unfit for the plain life among good, simple people,” Naomi said. “I ought to douse you anyway just for saying that.”

  Rachel smiled up at her. “Don’t. I swear I’ll scream to set the whole camp howling.”

  “And you’ve got the voice for it,” Naomi said, settling in next to Rachel on the thin mat that formed the tent’s only floor. “Which reminds me. I forgot to ask yesterday. Will you sing with me tomorrow night? I have a new song. You have time to learn it.”

  Rachel curled up on one side. “Oh, Naomi, it’s been so long since I’ve performed …”

  “Yes, but no one will expect you to sound as you once did. Everyone knows who you are and what has happened to you—but that just makes it more important, don’t you see? If you sing at the Gathering, all that sorrow will be wiped away from your heart. You will be as you once were. You will heal yourself.”

  Be as you once were. Rachel spared a moment to consider that. As she once was, twenty years old, happy, beloved, a wild young girl who had known, really, only one brief season of terror and that so long ago, she had nearly forgotten it … She would never be that girl again. Her life had taken too many dark turns.

  “Well, let me try to learn the song, anyway,” she said, sitting up and stretching her sore muscles. “Yovah’s tears! This is a hard winter ground.”

  “Get used to it,” Naomi said unfeelingly. “The river is also very cold. But it’s good for the soul to bathe in it. Here are drying rags. Now go.”

  They spent the day as women at the Gatherings always spent their days, alternating between cooking huge pots of food over their own campfires and making visits to the women at other fires also preparing food for tomorrow’s feast. Naomi, it seemed, knew everyone.

  “That’s Jerusha, see, in the red scarf. She followed a man into the Barcerra clan, but after bearing him one son, decided she had rather live with a man of the Cashitas, so she left him but took the son. But he followed her, wanting his son back, and so they agreed that at every Gathering they would exchange him, so he lives one year with his mother and one year with his father… . That’s Attarah, she’s just a girl, but her voice! Yovah swoons when he hears her. There was fever among the people at the last Gathering, but Attarah sang songs of healing, and everyone woke up well… . Hello there, Caleb, my boy! Why aren’t you off helping your father gather wood for the bonfire? Now, we’re going to Tamar’s tent. You’ll like her, I think—”

  At first Rachel hung back, feeling strange and shy; her life had taken her so far from these simple rituals, from these continuous joyous interactions. She had spent so many years defensive, closed, sharing no thought and no emotion, that she had forgotten what it was like to be among people who shared everything. Then, too, she wanted neither pity nor awe from them, depending on whether they were most moved by her five years of slavery or her current position of glory.

  But she need not have worried. The Edori offered her unquestioning welcome, instant affection. “Come in, come in!” Tamar cried as they stopped before her tent. “Taste the bread I have baked for tomorrow’s feast. I have flavored it with hill flowers from the Heldoras and I think it tastes finer than the loaves from Luminaux.”

  “Tamar, this is Raheli, come to stay with me for the Gathering.”

  “Welcome, Raheli. Try some of the bread.”

  It was so easy to be among the Edori. That part she had remembered. The life itself was not easy—the inevitable wear of the constant travel; the vulnerability to the weather, to illness, to the marauding Jansai; the continual threat of starvation during a hard winter or a meager spring—and yet the life was so pure. Work, eat, love; obey the laws of Yovah and the seasons. No one interrogated her. Everyone greeted her with a ritual kiss upon the cheek. It was hard not to relax, to feel happy, to grow festive.

  There were, among the strangers, old friends and clan relatives to the Manderras, and these greeted her even more effusively, drawing her into prolonged embraces or breaking into tears at the sight of her. But, like Naomi, all of these forbore to question her about her past nightmares or her present status. She was among them and she did not indicate she wished to talk about these topics, and so they squeezed her hand and offered her a taste of whatever they were brewing for the feast day.

  Late in the afternoon, when Luke returned from his tours rounding up firewood and hunting for game, the women left him in charge of the children and the cooking fire, and headed off to the edge of camp to practice Naomi’s song. First Rachel memorized the words, which were not particularly complex; then she listened three times while Naomi sang the part Rachel was to learn; then she hummed along with Naomi when she sang it through the fourth time.

  “Now let me hear you sing it,” Naomi commanded.

  “No, I’ll sing it against your part.”

  “But I’m not sure you’ve gotten it yet.”

  “Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?”

  Naomi said. “Oh, very well. You’re so stubborn. I sing one measure by myself first. You start on the same note I do.”

  So Naomi began her part of the ballad, and Rachel waited a full count until it was time to add her descant. She closed her eyes and began to sing, quietly at first, remembering what it was like to lay her music against someone else’s. They were like two hands, pressing palm to palm; voice strained against voice with an actual pressure, pushing the notes upward and downward on the scale. Then it became a loom, Naomi’s voice dark and Rachel’s a bright gold thread weaving a pattern into the tight fabric. Then it became a race, Naomi’s notes running, Rachel’s chasing after. But they arrived in the same place simultaneously, Rachel two pitches above Naomi and the harmony absolutely perfect.

  Rachel opened her eyes and smiled. Naomi was staring at her.

  “That was fun,” the angelica remarked. “Did I get all of it right?”

  “Yes.”

  Rachel frowned. “What? Has my voice changed so much?”

  “Where did you learn to sing like that?”

  “I’ve been practicing a little the last few months.”

  “You always had a beautiful voice, but—Rachel!” The E
dori woman shook her head in admiration. “Will you do a solo for us tomorrow night?”

  Rachel turned away. “I must do a solo in less than a month before thousands of people. I think others should have the honor of performing at the Gathering.”

  “Yovah must have chosen you for your voice after all,” Naomi murmured.

  “Perhaps,” Rachel agreed. “Certainly it was not because I suited the Archangel.”

  “They say he is very wise.”

  “Gabriel?”

  “No, silly, Yovah. Maybe he chose you for Gabriel as well.”

  The next day dawned clear and beautiful. Here in southern Bethel, the air was more springlike than it had been in Velora, so perfect weather might have been expected—and the Edori had spent three days praying for just such a glorious day. The angels were not the only ones who could persuade Yovah to disperse the clouds and send forth radiant sunshine.

  This was Feast Day, the most important event of the Gathering. All the work of preparation had been done; now there was nothing left to do but eat and sing. Early in the morning women hauled their stewpots and fresh-baked loaves and dressed venison to the tables laid out on one side of the double circle of fire at the center of the general camp. Thereafter, those who were hungry ate; the others performed, or watched the performers, or called out for musicians to delight them with another song.

  Anyone who chose to could rise to his feet, move to the very center of the camp enclosed by the double ring of bonfires, and create music for the glory of the god. Most of the musicians were singers, but not all; some played reeds, some played pipes, some played fantastic stringed instruments carved from twisted, polished trunks of old trees. A few, like Naomi and Rachel, performed together. Some sang old favorite songs, others introduced new music they had worked on all during the long, dark winter months. From each clan, chroniclers stood and sang unadorned recitatives of the tribe’s history for the past year, complete with births and deaths and changes, so that all the Edori could know who rejoiced and who grieved. No matter who sang, no matter what instrument was played, the drums accompanied them. From that unchanging, steady pulse, each performer got his rhythm; all Edori drew their heartbeats from the same unvarying source.

  Rachel and Naomi were greeted with such extravagant applause when their song was ended that it was clear they would not be allowed to yield the stage without an encore. Rachel blushed but Naomi was triumphant. “What do you remember from the old days?” she shouted in Rachel’s ear while the applause went on and on around them.

  “That one song that we sang two years running,” Rachel shouted back. “About the roses on the Gaza mountains.”

  “Oh, yes! I remember it. Give me the note—you start it.”

  So they sang a second piece and then, when the crowd still would not be quiet, a third. Rachel resolutely shook her head when voices called out demanding a solo, and she had to laughingly push her way through the throng to make her exit. She was flushed but exultant; it was no paltry thing, after all, to please the Edori at the Gathering. Hands touched her arm, voices cried out to her, gestures of approval, words of admiration. She smiled and nodded and made her thanks graciously, all the time edging for the far end of the camp to try for a moment of peace.

  She finally broke through the second ring of fire and stood there a moment, relatively solitary, letting the fresh afternoon air cool her hot cheeks. Well, that had been a success. Yovah willing, her next performance would receive such acclaim.

  “Ah, and that’s the voice the angels think may shame them on the Plain of Sharon,” said a burred murmur behind her. “Were any of them here today, you would have no more doubters among the divine ones.”

  She turned to smile a little self-consciously at Matthew, who had followed her through the double ring. “I wondered if you were listening,” she said.

  “You knew I would be.”

  “I am nervous about it still,” she said seriously. “The Gloria. But I begin to think I can manage it.”

  “You’ve a voice to make even your husband’s sound dull,” he said.

  But Rachel shook her head. “No,” she said. “No one can sing like the angel Gabriel.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  For practically the first time in his life, the angel Gabriel was experiencing remorse. He did not care much for the feeling. It was not often that he felt he had been in the wrong—indeed, he would not even now say that he had erred—but perhaps things could have been handled better. Rachel had behaved abominably, of course—but then she often did—and it had been unkind of him to let her leave for Jovah knew how weeks without even a polite farewell.

  Although there was no telling but that she had been glad to escape the Eyrie without being forced to lay eyes on him again. She could have come to his door the morning that she left; he was not the only one who had spoken hastily; she could have been the first to make apologies. No, not apologies—overtures. And she had chosen to leave without a word. Just as well he had not humbled himself to seek her out.

  Josiah had promised him that his bride would humble him, but so far it had not happened. There was, after all, a bitter sort of satisfaction in that.

  And yet, he should have said something… .

  Between pride, regret, uncertainty, a nagging fear that she really might not come back and—well, there it was, may as well say it—a wholly unexpected sensation of missing her, Gabriel was not having a very comfortable time of it during Rachel’s absence.

  He was kept busy enough planning his conference and recruiting the Eyrie angels to make sure the powermongers of Samaria knew that he was in earnest. He sent teams of angels to Gaza, Breven and the river cities to create some serious havoc with the local weather patterns two weeks in advance of the scheduled meeting. This should make Malachi and Elijah and Jethro think twice about the existence of the god—and Gabriel’s willingness to invoke his power.

  He had sent Nathan to Jordana and Obadiah to Gaza—or so he thought. To Judith he owed the knowledge that the angels had switched assignments.

  She had wasted no time, during Rachel’s absence, in trying to insinuate herself into his daily routine. She synchronized her meal times with his; she made a point of bringing him new music or bits of news that she thought might interest him; she commented often on how tired he looked, offering to rub his neck or fetch soothing incense for him to burn. As always, he was torn between a wish she would go away and a desire to avoid hurting her. Then again, at times her soft, insistent concern did ease him a little. It was a nice thing, now and then, to be treated well by a solicitous woman.

  This evening, she had brought him a glass of wine and a plate of cold food, since he had skipped dinner. He had been in Velora, discussing travel arrangements with merchants who offered transportation services between cities. At every Gloria there were mortals who needed to be conveyed from the Eyrie to the Plain of Sharon, and not all of them could be carried in an angel’s arms. This year, Gabriel estimated that he would have twice the usual number of travelers to accommodate, and he wanted to make sure there would be room for them all. Rachel, of course, would need a carriage of some sort. Peter had informed him that all the urchins of her school had also expressed a desire to come to the festival, and there were any number of others for whom Gabriel would be responsible.

  But the conversations had taken time, and he had missed dinner, and now here was Judith to make it up to him.

  “Thank you,” he said, smiling slightly as he allowed her into his room. “You always anticipate my needs.”

  “Well, I try,” she said, giving him a smile and a sidelong look. “The beans are cold now, but they’re delicious. And the cream sauce on the carrots—it’s very good.”

  “Didn’t you bring anything for yourself?”

  “Oh, I ate hours ago. I wasn’t down in the village, working hard.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t hard work,” he said, settling himself on a low stool and balancing the plate on his knees. “Just time-consuming. I’m
so used to just taking off and going directly anywhere I want to go that I don’t think much about the logistics of getting somewhere. The road conditions, the hours of travel time—for Rachel and the others to arrive on the Plain by the appointed day, they will need to leave at least four days in advance, maybe five. Five days! I can cover that distance in a few hours.”

  Judith had settled on the floor beside him like a docile puppy. “What would happen,” she said, “if she was late?”

  What would happen, indeed? “If Rachel was late to the Gloria?” he said a little sharply. “Why would she be?”

  Judith gestured with her small hands. “Oh, suppose her carriage overturned or the horses grew lame and all the other carriages had gone on ahead and she started walking but she didn’t get to the Plain until the day after she was supposed to—”

  “Well,” Gabriel said, “the Librera says that Jovah would show his displeasure in no uncertain terms.”

  Judith’s guileless eyes grew quite big. “You mean—he would send down thunderbolts and destroy us all? If she was one day late?”

  Gabriel toyed with a half-eaten chunk of bread. “She has a little more time than one day,” he said. “The Librera says that if the Gloria is not sung on the scheduled morning, at sunset of that day Jovah will smite the Galo mountain from which the river springs. Three days later, if the Gloria still has not been sung, he will send lightning bolts to the middle of the River Galilee. Three days later—he will destroy the entire world.” Gabriel smiled faintly. “Jovah works on the principle of threes, you see,” he added. “Three chances, and three days between each chance. But after that—vengeance is absolute.”

  “But—” Judith leaned closer, her wide eyes fixed on his face. Her perfume was subtle and troubling; he could not help noting, as he always noted, the absolute perfection of her face. “But would he really destroy the world? The angels, the mortals—all of us? Would he really do it?”

  Gabriel laid his plate aside and linked his hands around one knee. “Well, he hasn’t done it yet,” he admitted. “And the only way to test the theory is to one day maliciously hold off the performance of the Gloria. Yet the fear of Jovah’s power to annihilate us all is the only thing that enforces the tenuous harmonies that exist in Samaria today.”