“I heard you return.”
“And what else did you hear?”
Naomi looked innocent. “Nothing. What should I have heard? Did you have an argument?”
Rachel said nothing. She concentrated on eating. Naomi finally relented.
“Well, I’m glad you sent him away,” she said. “I’ve been worried, you know. I didn’t like to say anything, but—”
Rachel took a swallow of juice from a heavy ceramic mug. “And why should you be worried? Why shouldn’t I have allowed him to stay the night with me, if that’s what I wanted—what he wanted?”
“Because you love Gabriel,” Naomi said quietly. “And you shouldn’t be here in the first place.”
Rachel laughed shortly. “Where should I be? Back at the Eyrie?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I won’t go back there, till—till forever, maybe.”
“You’re breaking your heart over him. So you were angry and you told him you were never coming back. That’s not the kind of vow you have to keep—to anyone.”
“He doesn’t care if I come back or not.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“He didn’t even ask me to stay! Not once—not a word—”
“You had already told him you were leaving! What did you expect him to do, beg you? He’s a proud man—”
“Well, so am I proud!”
“What you are is stubborn! And—”
“And anyway,” Rachel interrupted, “yes, I did want him to beg me! He did beg me, you know that? He pleaded with me to save Semorrah. He would have gotten on his knees and groveled so I would save the lives of total strangers—and yet he couldn’t say a word to ask me to stay. If he had cared, don’t you think he could have pushed aside his pride for once? Asked me? The angelica is supposed to humble the Archangel, that’s what they told me. But nobody makes that man humble.”
“He would have let the world go up in flames before he brought himself to harm you,” Naomi said soberly. “You told me that yourself. You know he loves you. You’re just afraid of how much you love him.”
Rachel laughed shortly. “Nobody’s afraid of love.”
“Everybody’s afraid of love, because love is what hurts the most. I look at you and Gabriel, and I see a man who has made himself over because he loves a woman. And I see a woman who has shunned the man at every turn. Did you ever tell him you love him? Did you risk your life for him? Did you push aside your pride for him? Did you change for him? What have you done to prove your love? All you did was leave.”
“I can’t go back,” Rachel whispered. “I can’t—I don’t know what to say to say to him—”
“Then bring him to you. Send him a message. He will know how to read whatever you write.”
But it was not as easy as that. She could not think of what to put in a letter to Gabriel. So she packed her clothes and rolled up her tent and moved on with the Edori another day, and another.
They had traveled by slow stages on a northwesterly route away from Luminaux, and the third day, they crossed into the shadows of a narrow mountain range. These rounded green hills shaded upward into small, pointed beige peaks, incongruously situated in the middle of the vast southern plains.
“The Corinni Mountains,” Isaac told Rachel when they made camp in the shelter of the foothills. Adam had kept his distance the past few days, though when he saw her, he always gave her that sweet, wistful smile. Isaac, however, had been around more than usual. “Though I’ve heard one of them called Hagar’s Tooth.”
“Hagar’s Tooth?” Rachel repeated sharply. “Why?”
He shrugged. “That’s what the Luminauzi call it. I don’t know why. I do know that the only way up the biggest mountain—that one, see?—is on a hard, steep road that’s lined with iron stakes.” She stared at him and he laughed. “No, really. I’ve been up it partway. Iron stakes, as big around as my fist, on each side of the trail. They went all the way up, as far as I could see.”
“Hagar’s Tooth,” Rachel repeated. “Yes. I remember now.”
She spent the night in camp, but in the morning, when the rest of the Edori prepared to move on, she made her farewells.
“Here?” Naomi asked blankly, looking up from the bedroll she was securing. “In the middle of nowhere? It’s not safe to leave you here alone.”
“It is. Trust me. I want to stay here. Leave me enough food for a few weeks, and I’ll be fine.”
Naomi protested, as did Luke and Isaac and a few others who were apprised of her decision, but in the end Rachel convinced them. They gave her enough food to last a month, left her the tent and various tools, and took turns bidding her solemn goodbyes. The girls cried. Isaac kissed her on the mouth, Adam kissed her on the cheek.
“Get word to me,” Naomi whispered, hugging her goodbye. “If no sooner, come to the Gathering next year.”
“I will,” Rachel promised.
Finally, they were gone, a small dark caravan disappearing into the flat gold horizon. Rachel did not watch them till they were out of sight. She had her own journey to make by nightfall.
They had been camped about an hour from the foot of the mountain Isaac had called Hagar’s Tooth. It was a little past noon when Rachel made it that far, found a broad, dusty trail and began to climb.
At first, she saw nothing of the iron stakes Isaac had mentioned, and she wondered if she had chosen the wrong peak, or the wrong path. But a few hundred yards up the mountain, the wide roadway narrowed suddenly, becoming rocky and overgrown. The trees which had been cleared away at the base of the mountain now clustered more closely together, brooding over the trail with a sort of watchful mistrust. They grew so thickly on either side that their upper branches intertwined, making a dense ropy canopy above the path.
And then she saw the iron stakes. As Isaac said, they lined the trail from this point to the highest level she could see. They were as tall as a man, about four inches in diameter, and topped with sharp spikes. Some of them were rusted over, and a few of them had toppled to the ground, but there were still hundreds and hundreds left—stiff, silent guards whose only purpose was to keep any great winged creature from landing along this slope.
Hagar had built her retreat to be angel-proof. Rachel did not need to see the house to know that it, too, would have iron sentinels around it, atop it, ringing it in all conceivable directions. Hagar did not want idle guests coasting in for a quick visit, toying with her affections and destroying her peace of mind. Any angel who wanted to see her must come like a penitent, trudging up the long, steep hill and trailing bright feathers in the dust behind him.
It was a slow, wearisome climb, and the way became more difficult as she ascended, though it was never impassable. The entire afternoon had disappeared before Rachel made it to the top of the mountain and stumbled, almost accidentally, into the little clearing that held Hagar’s retreat. But then she forgot her tired legs and dry throat and her eternal, circling memories, and laughed out loud.
Despite the hundreds of very tall stakes driven around the clearing and at random through the gardens and grounds, Hagar’s home was a place of instant charm. It was haphazardly built of warm red stone and roofed with green ceramic tile, and it sported four chimneys at odd corners. A small stream ran so close to the house that it paralleled the northern wall and curled around an ornamental fountain which it had once, apparently, played through. At one time, some tenant had been a lover of flowers, for there were three distinct gardens blooming even now, half-choked with weeds and wildflowers, but still retaining some of their formal patterns and cultivated dignity.
Oh, she could love it here. She could live here her whole life.
It took her a week to make the house habitable. Gabriel had not been able to remember when the last angelica had had any use for Hagar’s retreat. Given the state of the interior, Rachel would have guessed it had been more than a hundred years since anyone had set foot in it. Dust, dirt, bird droppings, mice nests, dried leaves, living weeds, a
family of rabbits and a hundred families of spiders had taken the place over. The furnishings were sparse but some of them, surprisingly, were still usable, particularly the fine old wood tables, chairs and chests of drawers. It was harder to find something comfortable to sleep on, and for three nights, Rachel made a quilt of her cloak and lay on that.
But on the fourth day, she made several agreeable discoveries. The first was a locked cedar closet whose key hung on a hook right beside its door. Inside were feather pillows, woven pallets, wool blankets, embroidered quilts and all manner of linens, fresh and unspoiled. Inside were also twenty or thirty dresses hung along one long rod, dresses of every color and cloth imaginable. Rachel pulled them out one by one, holding them up to her chest and noting that they fell exactly to her ankles. Gowns of blue silk, green cotton, white linen; dresses with embroidered cuffs, jeweled collars, lace sleeves, plain bodices. A queen’s wardrobe here. No—an angelica’s.
So that solved the problem of what to wear and what to sleep on. Later in the day, she solved the mystery of the long, narrow, windowless room on the northern side of the house. It had two small doors built into one wall and a deep channel carved into the floor, lined with green ceramic tile. There was no fireplace in this room, but the small stove in the corner heated up quickly— and caused the ceramic channel to grow hot to the touch as well, as though heat from the stove was being funneled under the floorboards, under the tile. Initially, Rachel had been puzzled and decided to leave the room alone.
But that afternoon while she was outside drawing water for dinner, she noticed an overgrown ditch running from the stream toward the house. And when she cleaned out the leaves, branches and other debris, she found the ditch lined with the same green tile. And then she realized: Hagar had wanted a water room like the one she had gotten used to at the Eyrie. She’d had part of the stream diverted to run through her house, and added on the stove to heat up the water when she wanted to bathe. The water must go in one door and out the other … and surely there must be meshes of wire or cloth to keep out fish and small animals and floating insects… .
It took her most of the next day to clean out the exterior ditch and rig up sluices and screens, but by nightfall, Rachel had water running through Hagar’s house again. She celebrated by taking a long hot bath. Oh, this was sublime, this was pure ecstasy. The water bubbled over her, warm and soothing, constantly renewed, and flavored with the fresh scents of moss and forest. Wild and safe at the same time. She was never leaving this place.
During the next two weeks, she worked in the gardens. It was impossible, of course, to obliterate a century of neglect in a few days, but she made a tremendous improvement. She even made another pleasant discovery: There was a fourth garden, a vegetable plot, and even now it was growing heavy with tangled tomatoes, corn, squash and beans. With the vegetables, the fruit she had found, the fish in the river, and the dried meat she had brought from the Edori camp, she could live a long time.
Maybe forever.
Rachel was so happy here that she sang all the time. Sometimes she was not even aware of the fact that she was singing until she caught sight of herself in one of the long, narrow mirrors in almost every room (Hagar, or someone, had certainly liked to look at herself). Then she would see herself—hair in mad disarray, old gown covered with dirt and grass, arms laden with flowers or dust rags or tools—mouth wide open and singing so vigorously she could almost see the notes glittering in the air. She would laugh, and stop, and keep it down to a hum for an hour or two. But then she would notice the music again, and realize it was coming from her.
She paid no attention to what she was singing. It could be anything—Edori ballads, the childhood lullabies she had learned so long ago, snatches of Luminaux street songs, even some of the masses she had studied back at the Eyrie. Now and then she heard herself wordlessly caroling the melody to one of the prayers she had heard Gabriel or Obadiah sing, prayers for rain or sun or wind or protection, she was not sure. She did not know the lyrics to these songs, and perhaps it was just as well. She did not know what she would pray for if she were to lift her voice right now to the god.
And then she began to wonder. Gabriel had told her once that there were places in Samaria where Yovah’s ear seemed most attuned, and Hagar’s retreat was one of those places. If she were to stand here now, at the front door of this little cottage, and fling her arms out and raise her voice in song, what would she ask for? The god had listened to her once, down on the Plain of Sharon. Rachel no longer doubted that her voice had the power to move him. But what would she pray for? What did she want?
Bring Gabriel to me, she heard a voice in her head say; and it was her voice; and it was the only thing she wanted. But she did not know how to ask that of the god. There must be something else she could request. She would like, a second time, to feel as if she could call on her god and have him listen.
It was three more weeks before she found the key to the silver box in the bedroom that must have been Hagar’s.
She had unearthed the box before she had been in the house four days. It had been in the back of a closet, covered with rotting silk and a handful of loose dirt and a nest that might have belonged to mice ten years ago. Black with tarnish, it was still beautiful—a wide, flat, shallow case of chased silver. The top was studded with sapphires set in a fleur-de-lis pattern, and by that Rachel had known it as Hagar’s. The lock, which was also made of silver, was too stubborn to yield to prying, and Rachel had been reluctant to break into anything so cool and beautiful.
But then she found the key, on a ring of keys hanging just inside the doorway of the small stone shed situated about two hundred yards upstream. She had not yet determined the purpose of the shed—a smokehouse? a dairy? a storage room?—nor had she found any of the locks that the other keys fit. But she knew as soon as she saw it that the tiny silver key would turn in the ornamental silver lock, and she hurried back to the house to retrieve the crusted box.
When she pried off the lid and stared inside, she could not have been more surprised or more excited had she found a cache of unset jewels. Carefully, reverently, she lifted out the brittle, browned sheets of paper, afraid they might shiver into dust at her touch. The notes and staffs could have been drawn by anyone, but the verses and the sparse comments in the margins could only have been written by one hand. Hagar’s personality fairly leapt from the page; each word seemed to have jumped from her pen to the paper in quick, impatient downstrokes. She had scrawled titles across the tops of a few pages, but more often than not, the music began with a treble clef, a key signature and the opening words of the song.
Slowly, Rachel glanced through sheet after sheet of music, skimming the lyrics and reading the author’s remarks in the margins. “Too boring. Change to minor key?” Hagar had written once. On another page: “Needs an additional stanza.” On another: “Uriel will like this.” On another: “For Daniel, not that he’ll ever get to hear it.” On another: “My favorite.”
But the composition that Rachel paused over was the one she had looked for since she first realized what was in the box. Like the others, it had no title, and it carried a brief comment from the musician: “The music of desire.” Rachel hummed the opening measures softly, just to get a sense of the melody. Even inside the house, even without whispering the words, she felt the power of this music. She heard the rustling trees fall silent to listen, she caught the startled inquiry of the passing birds. She felt the god hold his breath and wait to hear more.
This, then, could be her letter to Gabriel, her invitation, her apology. He would understand this message. When she decided she was ready to see him again, she would step outside her cottage and lure him to her side with this song. He would come then; she would wait until she was certain.
She rose to her feet, brushed the dirt from her knees and walked straight out the front door. Holding the music before her, learning it as she went along, she sang the ballad with her whole heart. Only the god could hear, and the wild crea
tures that made their homes on this mountaintop, and the trees and the river and the mountain itself; but it seemed as if the whole world listened. Rachel closed her eyes, pressed the music to her chest and sang the song over a second time.
Only the god could hear her, but Gabriel would come.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In the first chaotic days that followed the Gloria, it was easy for Gabriel to gloss over the answer every time someone asked him where Rachel was. It was hard to keep track of anyone in all that confusion. He left Ariel and the Monteverde angels to oversee the emptying of the Plain, while he and Nathan and Obadiah flew to Semorrah to do what they could for that beleaguered city. The water was indeed very high, lapping over the wharf streets and sending warehouse mice and cats seeking higher ground. Yet the bulk of the city was safe—filled with terrified people who greeted the angels with heartfelt cries, but still above water.
They worked there for two days, mostly calming the residents by their sheer presence, but also helping put to rights fallen buildings and crumbling power alliances. They were really there to prove that the god would not strike the city, that the music on the Plain had been effective, that they had averted disaster with their prayers. When the danger passed—three days after Jovah had struck down the mountain—they were free to go.
They returned to the Eyrie, but only briefly. There were still so many trips to make, so many oaths to receive, and this was the psychological moment to exact fealty from the Jansai and the Manadavvi. Gabriel thought of the miles he had to cross, the pleas he would have to make, and he felt exhausted. What he wanted was to sleep a hundred years, and then fly off to find Rachel.
Speaking of Rachel. “I thought she was with you the last few days,” Hannah said to him the morning after his return. He had risen late, but Obadiah and Nathan were still lingering over their breakfasts, and he had joined them. Hannah had found them within minutes.
“Who, Rachel?” Nathan had answered his mother. “No, she came on back to the Eyrie.”