“Who’s Raheli?” Elizabeth finally asked when the two of them were alone again.
“Oh, she is practically my sister!” Naomi said. “We grew up together in the Manderra tribe, but then she was lost for so many years—but two years ago she returned to us, and you can imagine the rejoicing.”
“She was—taken? Like Rufus?”
Naomi nodded. The Edori woman was chopping dried vegetables and feeding them slowly into a simmering pot. “I heard nothing of her for years. Everyone said she was dead, but I knew she was not. I knew it. And then, two years ago at the Gathering, there she was. I have not been so happy since the day my first daughter was born.”
“But she’s not coming this year?”
“No, her friend is going into a difficult labor, and Raheli is afraid to leave her. Well, that I can understand. I almost couldn’t bear to let Luke’s sister out of my sight when I was pregnant. She had had five children herself, so I was sure she could help me through my own birthing! But Raheli is no midwife, I assure you, and so I think it a little funny that her friend is so sure she cannot survive this event without her. But Raheli is a very fierce friend, and she would not leave behind anyone who needed her. I do admire her for that. But I miss her!”
“Well, maybe she’ll come to the Gathering next year, and you can see her then.”
Naomi stirred, tasted, and stirred again. “Oh, I’ll see her much sooner than that. The whole clan will travel to the Plain of Sharon to hear her sing at the Gloria.”
“Sing at—your Edori friend sings at the Gloria? With the angels?”
“Well, anyone can sing at the Gloria once the angels are done with their part, you know,” Naomi said. “Though it is true that not many Edori attend from year to year. More of us go now that Raheli leads the singing.”
Elizabeth felt as though she had somersaulted backward. “Your friend Raheli—is Rachel? Is the angelica?”
Naomi beamed. “Yes, angelica, that’s what they call her. I’m not very good with titles. The Edori don’t care much for such things.”
“And she—who is her pregnant friend, then?”
“That lovely woman who is married to Gabriel’s brother. Why can’t I remember her name? I met her once—”
“Magdalena?” Elizabeth said in a strangled voice. She was remembering the outspoken, golden-haired woman who had seemed so protective of the angel, wretched with early labor pains. Fierce was not a bad word to describe her.
“Yes, that’s her! They’re very close. So naturally Raheli could not leave her at a time like this.”
“No,” Elizabeth said, hoping she had not said anything snippy or overfamiliar during her brief conversation with the angelica. “Of course not.”
Naomi smiled over at her. “May I tell you again how happy we are to have you among us? I am so glad you accompanied your friend.”
Elizabeth shook away thoughts of angels and their consorts to concentrate on a topic she was more familiar with. “He wanted so desperately to come, but he was unsure of his welcome. I think he brought me more as a hedge against rejection than as a companion of his days.”
Naomi sighed a little and started peeling an onion. “So many of them . . . last year and this year . . . all the people who were snatched up by Jansai during the time of Raphael’s reign, they are making their way back to us. But they are hurt and afraid and unsure of their welcome, and it breaks my heart to see them limping into camp with such hope and terror in their eyes.” She gave Elizabeth one quick, straight look. “Not limping with their feet, you understand. Limping with their souls.”
Elizabeth nodded. Yes. She had understood.
“And some of them—you can see them heal, as soon as they cross into the camp. You can see their heartbeats readjust to the sound of the drums. One or two of them—it makes me cry to recount the story, can you see the water in my eyes?—they have found clan members among the other tribes. An uncle or a sister who escaped the Jansai depredations and who came to rest with another clan. And to see them reunite with someone they loved when they thought everyone they loved was dead—it breaks your heart at the same time as it lifts you up. I would wish for such a thing for your Rufus. But I have not heard of any of the Kalessas coming back to us last year or this.”
“Maybe next year,” Elizabeth said hopefully. “Maybe when he—or she—gets his courage up. It took Rufus weeks and weeks to be sure that he could come.”
“Yes, that’s what I hope,” Naomi agreed. “That every year more of them will come back to us, freed from their masters and free in their hearts as well. And maybe Yovah has spared a dozen of the Kalessas. The god has been so good for so long.”
Naomi paused, as if briefly overcome by emotion, and Elizabeth turned her attention back to her dough. Punching down first this loaf, then that one. She would be able to feed fifty people on bread alone.
“So who’s going to eat all this food?” she asked presently. “Surely there’s enough here to feed the whole camp, but I thought I saw everyone else cooking and baking as well.”
“Oh, yes!” Naomi said, her voice bright again, her normal voice. “But today and tomorrow we cook enough for two days so that everything is ready on Feast Day and there is nothing to do but listen to the singing.”
“And that’s what you do for a whole day? Sing?”
“Well, every clan takes its turn, of course. One of the clan elders gets up to relate the events of the past year—where the tribe traveled, what it discovered, which woman left to follow a man in another clan, what babies were born, who died—oh, the whole history of the year. Thus we learn in one long day what has happened to all our people.”
“I would think it would be hard to remember all that.”
“Really? I admit, I forget bits and pieces of what the other elders have told us, but there are some who can recite the stories of every clan for the past twenty or thirty years. Luke can tell you everything he has heard since he was a boy. He knows where the Barcerras wintered five years ago and how many women of the Lohoras have followed the Corderra clan. He has a splendid memory.”
“Luke is your husband?”
Naomi laughed. “I chose to leave my clan and follow him, yes, but the Edori don’t take husbands and wives. Which is why it is so funny to me that Raheli has married the angel Gabriel—though, don’t mistake me, I admire Gabriel greatly, and I could not have picked out a better mate for Raheli if I had sat down and interviewed every angel, Edori, and allali in the three provinces. But to marry him! Well, it is a strange idea to me.”
“Then how do you know you have found the right man if you don’t marry him? How do you know he will stay with you?”
Naomi shrugged. “How do you know these things if you do speak words in a ceremony? No words will bind you if your heart sets you free. I cannot imagine my life without Luke. I believe he will be with me always. That is binding enough for me.”
Elizabeth was not so sure this doctrine worked for her. She had dreamed for so long of being cherished and protected by a powerful man that she could not imagine blithely accepting the prospect of a long-term future dictated only by the whims of affection. She wondered how Rufus felt about this Edori concept. She was not sure she wanted to ask him.
It was almost as if Naomi had read her mind. “So tell me a little bit about Rufus and yourself,” she said. “Where did you take up with an Edori man? In some city, I suppose. He called you an allali girl.”
Elizabeth laughed. “I’m afraid to ask what that means.”
“Oh, nothing too terrible! City dweller—except that—well, Edori don’t have a high opinion of people who live in cities. You understand. We cannot stand to be trapped very long in one place.”
“Yes, I guess I am an allali at that,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve lived in Semorrah and a few other places. For the last few months in Cedar Hills.”
“And that’s where you met Rufus?”
Elizabeth nodded. “He’s working with the men who are putting up new building
s. The city is growing every day.”
“And you think he plans to stay in Cedar Hills?”
Elizabeth returned her attention to her dough, punching down a loaf that had just risen sufficiently. “I don’t know. I think he’s a little lost. Displaced. I think he might—having come to the Gathering—decide it’s time to live among his people again. Having been apart from them for so many years.”
Naomi was silent a moment. “I would wish for that,” she said. “I will offer him a place in my clan, in my tent, before he leaves. But I don’t think he’ll take it. He’s a halfling now—part Edori, part something else. So few of the people who were taken from us by Jansai have come to live with us now that they’ve been freed. They come to the Gathering, yes, they travel with us for a few weeks or a few months, but our life is not their life anymore. Part of them wants other things. Your Rufus is probably that way, too—pulled in two directions at once.” She smiled over at Elizabeth. “And, of course, he will not want to leave you.”
Elizabeth smiled, trying to hide her embarrassment. “Oh, I don’t know that he will make all his calculations around me.”
Naomi made a tsk! sound of disbelief. “You! He cannot take his eyes off you! He carried you with him how many hundred miles so he did not have to spend a night away from your body!”
This was plain speaking indeed—another Edori trait—but Elizabeth felt it almost a relief to confess the truth. “I’m not so sure—that is, as for my body—well, we have not—not yet—”
“You have not yet made love?” Naomi demanded. “Oh, now, that’s a sin. A beautiful girl like you and a man as handsome as Rufus? Such gifts are not to be wasted. We must work to remedy that.”
“Well, but I—and it was such a long trip—I feel so dirty with dust from the road and no chance to get really clean—”
Naomi lay down her spoon and called for one of her daughters. A small, shy, smiling girl, maybe eight years old, emerged from Naomi’s tent. “You watch the cook pots for me,” Naomi instructed. “Elizabeth and I will be gone for a little while.”
“Gone where?” Elizabeth asked as Naomi took her arm and pulled her away from the fire.
“To the water tents. You didn’t know we had such things set up? No, it never occurs to a man to talk about luxuries. Do you have soap with you? Scent?”
“Soap, yes, a little, but scent? No.”
Naomi tsked again. “And clean clothes? Something soft and beautiful? With your hair, I would think you wear a lot of rich colors? A lot of greens? I have a lovely dress, not exactly a dress, a wrap that hangs about me like a robe. Very soft, very pretty—girlish, you know what I mean.”
“Feminine,” Elizabeth supplied.
“Exactly! And some perfume—I bought it in Luminaux, it smells like flowers on a summer night. Do you have pins for your hair? Anything that sparkles? Glitter in your hair will draw a man’s eyes to your face, did you know that? Yes, I assure you, it is true.”
Helpless and fascinated, Elizabeth followed Naomi inside her tent, where the Edori woman tossed through a trunk to find the items she wanted. Then she followed Naomi through the entire campsite—though they paused hundreds of times to exchange greetings or gossip with others that they passed—to a long row of tents set up on the very perimeter. All of these tents straddled a small stream that meandered around the camp and southward. Each of the tents appeared to be floorless, unlike the sleeping tents set up inside the camp.
“Normally, we do not go to such trouble, but the Gathering is special. Everyone wants to be clean for the god! So we have the water tents here—the necessary tents, as some people call them—so you don’t have to wander out to the bushes in the middle of the night. And then we have bathing tents here, one for the men, one for the women. See?”
Naomi pulled back a flap of one of the long, low structures, and they stepped inside. It was quite an unexpected scene, filled with steam and scented with woodsmoke. A substantial fire burned on one bank of the stream, its smoke vented through a hole in the tent roof; over it hung a massive cauldron of water. Half a dozen naked Edori women lounged about on stools or on mats spread upon the ground on either side of the creek. They were drying their hair or smoothing cream into their skin. All of them looked up when the other two women entered, then smiled and returned to their preoccupations.
“See?” Naomi said again, gesturing. “Hot water to bathe with. And it is nice and warm in here, so you can take your time scrubbing your body. You can get much cleaner than you can hopping into a mountain river in the middle of the winter.”
“You can get your hair clean,” one of the other women said.
“And you will feel much better than you would have believed possible,” Naomi assured her. “Come. Let’s get you out of your travel clothes.”
And Elizabeth, who was not used to stripping down in front of strangers, allowed Naomi to help her out of her dress and her underthings and position her on the rocky bank so the wash water would fall most naturally into the river. Fire or no, it was still chilly standing naked on the edge of the stream, waiting to be doused with water, and Elizabeth shivered a little. But the idea of being truly clean and dressed in pretty clothes held her feet in place, and she gasped with delight when the first bucket of warm water splashed over her head.
Dinner that night was a lively communal affair as all the Chievens gathered around Naomi’s cook-fire and engaged in banter and discussion. Everyone wanted to hear Rufus’s story, though he told it haltingly: the massacre of the Kalessas, followed by the misery of slavery and the aimlessness of freedom. Elizabeth listened closely to see if there were any details she could pick up, any more clues. She thought she understood him; she wanted to know if she had missed or misinterpreted any signals.
Her own story was demanded next, and supplied, and then conversation became more general. The men talked about the day’s hunt, the children chimed in with tales of their own adventures, the women shared glances of amusement and recounted some of their own stories. Elizabeth could not tell which child belonged to which parent, since the children seemed to turn with equal affection to every adult in the circle. Naomi’s daughters sat with women who were situated across the fire, and Naomi herself held on her lap two small boys who hadn’t been in the camp during the daylight hours. Elizabeth wasn’t even sure if these children belonged to the Chievens or had wandered over from some other clan and been accepted with the impartial welcome that seemed to be extended to every wayfarer who stumbled in this direction. It made her, briefly, long to be small enough and incautious enough to be able to seek sanctuary at any likely haven, sure of affection. She thought it must be a wonderful thing to be an Edori child.
Unless your tribe was ravaged and annihilated, of course. Unless you were ripped from safety and serenity and thrust into a life of captivity. She understood a little of what it was like to go from security to privation, but she had not lived at either edge of the extremes, as Rufus had. She was not sure she would have emerged half as assured as he had.
Though the wounds were there, she knew.
She was not sitting next to Rufus during dinner, though she was not sure how that had happened. She thought perhaps Naomi had engineered the seating arrangements, placing Elizabeth between a good-looking Edori man of about her own age and an older woman with grizzled gray hair and a radiant smile. Elizabeth was getting a fair idea of Naomi’s thinking process by now, and she could read the Edori’s intent: Show off Elizabeth’s youth and beauty by placing her next to a grandmother, awake a spark of Rufus’s jealousy by seating her next to a handsome man. She wasn’t sure it was working, though. Rufus seemed perfectly happy chatting with Luke and one of the other Chievens as he sat across the fire from Elizabeth. He did look over at her and smile from time to time, but he seemed neither alarmed at her chance for flirtation nor struck by her alluring appearance. Elizabeth smoothed the soft blue folds of her borrowed gown and smothered a sigh.
The meal was good, and everyone made a point of co
mplimenting the bread once Naomi let it be known that Elizabeth had prepared it. Once the food was cleared away, the singing began. Some of the songs Elizabeth recognized—lullabies and ballads—though some of them were offered in the Edori tongue, and she knew only the melody, not the words. Most were unfamiliar to her, some plaintive, some joyous, all of them with the power to shift her mood within a few measures. Naomi, who had the loveliest voice of the clan, sang a duet with Luke, and then harmonized in a trio with two other women. Everyone applauded and called out praise when the song ended, but Naomi shook her head.
“I miss Raheli’s voice,” she said with a sigh, coming over to sit beside Elizabeth. “Have you ever heard her? The god himself grows mute and bedazzled when Raheli sings.”
“Perhaps I’ll be at the Gloria someday, and hear her then,” Elizabeth said politely, sure this was quite unlikely.
“Do you sing? Let us hear your voice,” Naomi urged.
Elizabeth felt a small current of alarm glow through her. “Me? No. I never—I don’t sing.”
“Come. One piece? A love song?” Naomi said, letting her eyes dart toward Rufus and then back again.
“I—really, I can’t. No treat to hear me.”
“You can join the general voices,” said the old woman now sitting on the other side of Naomi. “We will all sing a good night prayer to Yovah, and you can sing along then.”
Elizabeth nodded numbly. “If I know the song.”
“Oh, everybody knows this song,” Naomi said, and launched into the first verse. It was an old melody, a simple one, sung by children in every city in Samaria, and apparently every child in the tents and wagons of the Edori as well. Elizabeth did not understand the Edori words, but she obligingly sang along in the language she knew, hearing her own rusty, untrained voice blending agreeably with the Edori voices around her. Angeletta had told her once that she sang like a screech owl on a disappointing night, and Elizabeth had never sung in public again. But here, at this camp, with these people, she didn’t mind participating in the universal chorus, adding her imperfect notes to the great swell of supplication and thanks. No one could hear her, except perhaps the god; and though he treasured a beautiful melody above all things, he cherished any faithful heart that lifted up a song in prayer. Or so the priests had always said. Elizabeth sang a little more loudly.