“Sir!” Bael called out, summoning the waiter. “The young lady would like something to drink!”
In a few minutes they were all settled with their iced juices and their trays of cheese and breadsticks, and Bael was able to refocus his attention on his guest. He leaned slightly forward across the table, fixing her with dark blue eyes that seemed capable of staring at hell without wavering.
“So! Are you enjoying your first Gloria?” he demanded in that rolling voice.
She was getting just a little tired of this question. “Very much. The music was amazing. I was just spellbound during your performance. Angelo.” Belatedly she nodded at Mariah. “Angela.”
Bael waved this off. “My angelica and I have sung at nineteen consecutive Glorias. We are expected to be brilliant. But your voice took us all by surprise. Tell me, who have your teachers been?”
“My aunt Gretchen, mostly. From the time I was very small, she taught me—oh, everything. Scales and breathing exercises and basic harmony until I was old enough to start learning real music.”
Mariah leaned over and spoke in her husband’s ear, although everyone at the table could hear her. “Strange. I don’t recall that Gretchen had a particularly exceptional voice.”
“Adequate merely,” he replied, again as if no one else could overhear. “But as long as she understands music, her voice is of little consequence.” He addressed Lucinda again. “And what is your repertoire? You performed the solo quite impressively, but can you sing the masses as well?”
“Oh—of course—maybe a hundred of them,” she said. “I haven’t counted.”
“A hundred?” Bael repeated. “All by memory?”
“I was taught that it was impolite to sing with the score in front of you. As if you didn’t care enough about the music to learn it.”
To her left, Omar laughed softly. “And Gretchen Delmere was always certainly an expert on politeness.”
“Well. A hundred masses. That is certainly a remarkable number,” Bael said. “I take it that you actually can read music—that you did not learn these merely by listening to a recording and memorizing?”
Aunt Gretchen had been right; Bael wanted to make sure she had had the proper instruction and made it clear he didn’t believe she could have. “I can read music,” she said.
“She has no equipment to play a recording on,” Omar said. “So she told me. Which makes her accomplishment even more amazing.”
Lucinda looked at him. She was not enjoying this part of the conversation, though she was making an effort to hide it. More of Aunt Gretchen’s politeness. “Is it such a high number, then?” she asked him. “How many do you know?”
He laughed aloud. “Maybe a dozen quite well, and fifty or so well enough to remember them if I practice,” he said. “Those serve me adequately on the occasions I am called upon to perform.”
“So your musical background is sufficient,” Bael went on, addressing Lucinda again. “And your deportment seems satisfactory. I assume you have been taught the other basics—literature, history, rudimentary mathematics?”
“Well, I suppose you could quiz me,” she answered with a smile. “Otherwise, how will you be sure I really do know what you think I should?”
There was a short pause while everyone else at the table assimilated the fact that they had been rude and that she was not so unsophisticated that she did not realize it. Bael, however, if he was nonplussed, did not show it. He reached across the table to pat her hand.
“There, now,” he said, in a voice too loud to be as soothing as he intended. “You mustn’t be offended. You seem a rare, exotic creature to us, and we only want to get to know you.”
“I don’t seem exotic to me,” she replied, but she managed to smile. “You’re the ones whose lives seem strange.”
“As they are,” Omar murmured. “As they are.”
“But then, tell us more of life upon this island,” Mariah said in her high nervous voice. “Is it really just you and your aunt living there? No one else?”
“Oh, no. There are twenty-two other people there right now. And Hammet is expecting his brother and cousin to come out any day now, because the inn has grown so much he needs help to maintain it. Actually, Hammet has talked about building another hotel—more of a luxury place, you know, because we have been getting more tourists during the summer months— and then he’d probably have to hire five more workers. So we could be growing pretty rapidly in the next few months.”
“And exactly how do you—well, how do you entertain yourself? Out on an island with twenty-two other people?” the angelica asked.
Lucinda grinned, “Mostly I work. There’s only me and Aunt Gretchen and Emmie and Jackson, and the hotel has eight rooms. So I clean, and do laundry, and work in the garden, and sew, and trade with the merchants who put into port, and help in the kitchen and—” She laughed. “If it needs to be done, I can do it. There’s never time to sit and be bored.”
“And do you have any friends there, child?”
“Child” did not seem like the right word for someone who was nearly thirty, but Lucinda let it slide. “Twenty-two friends, “she said with a smile. “How many do you have?”
That stopped Mariah; indeed, it stopped the whole table, although Omar was silently laughing. Lucinda just let the reply hang there, too stubborn to soften it with another comment. She might be a wide-eyed miss from the desolate island, but she had dealt with her fair share of unscrupulous shipowners and wily Jansai, and she knew how to hold her own in any transaction.
“Mariah counts all the people of Samaria as her allies and friends,” Bael said finally. “And here comes one of them now. This is another I would like to have you meet.”
He was gazing beyond her, so Lucinda quickly turned her head to see a middle-aged, dark-haired woman making her way slowly through the crowd. She was dressed very simply in a white robe and sandals, and she held the arm of a young girl walking beside her as if she needed physical support.
“Jecoliah,” the angelica said in that voice she still appeared to think was a whisper. “I did not know she was here.”
“I saw her briefly last night,” Bael replied. “Omar, could you direct her to our table?”
“Certainly, Father,” the young man said, and came smoothly to his feet. In a few moments he was leading the white-robed woman to their table and helping her seat herself on his own stool. Then he and the girl with Jecoliah stood a few paces behind her, patiently waiting.
“Jecoliah,” Bael said, his deep voice raised even a little more than usual, as if he spoke to a deaf woman. “We are pleased to see you here. Are you enjoying the Gloria?”
“Very much,” she said. “Are you?”
Bael missed the humor in the reply, for he went right on speaking, but Lucinda could not help a private grin. “Indeed, I am. Jecoliah, I wanted to introduce you to one of our young guests. Her name is Lucinda, and she has come in for the week from Angel Rock. Lucinda, this is Jecoliah, the oracle of Mount Sinai.”
Jecoliah peered in Lucinda’s direction out of friendly, cloudy eyes, and Lucinda realized that the older woman was not deaf, after all, but nearly blind. “You must be David’s daughter,” she said instantly. “I am indeed pleased to meet you. You look something like him, though he was darker than you are. But you have his eyes.”
Jecoliah was the first person in Samaria who had mentioned her father’s name, and Lucinda immediately liked her. She was delighted when, at that very moment, someone called out to Bael, and the Archangel and his wife left the table. Omar slipped quietly into Mariah’s deserted seat.
“I know nothing about my father except what my aunt has told me,” Lucinda said. “And she does not talk about him much.”
“Well, he was young, which made him rash, and he was in love, which made him ill-advised,” Jecoliah said with a sigh. “But other than that he was sweet-tempered and good-natured, and you couldn’t find a soul to say an unkind word about him. He was a good man.”
/> “The oracle speaks, and thus every word is true,” Omar murmured.
Lucinda ignored him. “Forgive my asking,” she said to the other woman, “but I am not certain what an oracle is. Or does.”
Omar smiled, but Jecoliah merely nodded. “You would have no knowledge of us, there on Angel Rock. There are three of us, one in each province, and we serve as mediators with the god. We can speak to him—not directly, not by voice—but through special screens that allow us to ask him questions and receive his written reply.” Jecoliah smiled. “I do not see well at all—that is why I have one of my acolytes lead me around as if I were an old woman—but I can see well enough to read the script of Jovah’s hand.”
Lucinda was fascinated. Gretchen had never talked about oracles. “And what sorts of questions do you ask the god?”
“Lately, who will he Archangel, but he has not replied,” Omar said.
“No, but he will,” Jecoliah said calmly. “He always does. And we ask him who will be angelica or angelico to the Archangel. And we report to him events that transpire so that he can interpret them for us—perhaps not for this generation, but for the next one and the one that follows. We tell the god the details of Samaria, and he tells us how to live.”
It sounded complex and mysterious to Lucinda, and she decided not to pursue it further. “Did you know my mother as well as my father?” she asked.
Jecoliah shook her head. “Very little. Only well enough to see what everyone saw, that she was passionate and hard to hold. And to be angry that her life ended as wretchedly as it did.”
“Old tales. Old wounds,” Omar murmured, but there was a warning note in his voice. Lucinda looked directly at him.
“I know the story of how my mother lived and died,” she said. “Don’t be afraid of what she’ll tell me.”
He smiled at her with a certain rue, and she liked him better than she had for the last twenty minutes. “Any tale of pain and betrayal stirs the emotions when it’s told, whether for the first time or the hundredth,” he said. “I’ve no doubt you’ll hear it more than once during your sojourn in Samaria. Just remember that it was long ago, and no one suffers anymore, and nothing you feel can change it.”
“And you remember that I am not a child,” she said softly.
He nodded. “Then we will deal well enough together.”
Lucinda stayed another ten minutes talking to the oracle and the Archangel’s son, but that last exchange with Omar lingered in her mind more than the rest of the conversation. She felt uncharacteristically broody as she left the table and continued wandering through the fairgrounds, or maybe it was just that she was getting tired. The week had been a long one, after all, and this day had started before dawn and been packed with events. So she was actually relieved when she spotted Gretchen’s thin, tall form moving stiffly through the crowds, obviously on the lookout for someone, most likely herself. And she was more surprised than excited to learn that she and her aunt had been invited to spend a few days at the angel hold in Jordana, and that Gretchen had accepted.
The trip to Cedar Hills took three days, though Lucinda and any of the other angels could have completed it in less than half that time. But they moderated their pace to accommodate the caravan that traveled below them on the paved highways of Samaria.
When Lucinda learned how her aunt and the other mortals from Cedar Hills were to be transported, she almost decided to ride with them. She had never seen anything like the huge, rumbling vehicles with their great exposed engines and long hollow bodies designed to carry human cargo over great distances. These particular vehicles, so the angel Jonas informed her as they waited for the journey to begin, were luxury accommodations. They were specially fitted on the interior with padded seats and comfortable footrests and both heating and cooling systems to keep the air temperature bearable.
“And this is the only way to travel, if you’re not going to fly,” he said. “The Jansai transport trucks—Jovah save me. They’re open-air vehicles, nothing to shield passengers from the wind or the sun or the rain, and they’re noisier than the river falling over the Gabriel Dam. They’ll take you over the ground three times faster than you could go on horseback, but it’s a miserable way to achieve speed.”
“And those are your only choices? The Jansai trucks and these?”
Jonas bobbed his head from side to side in an equivocating way. He was a good-looking, friendly young angel whom she knew from his past visits to Angel Rock (when she was flirting with him), and he seemed willing to tell her every bit of information she didn’t know.
“Well, there are the public buses, and they fall somewhere in between in terms of comfort. But they take days and days and days to cross a hundred miles, because they stop at every little town along the way. Now, a few Luminaux engineers have been working on designs for smaller vehicles—cars that might carry only three or four passengers at a time—but the concept has been pretty much derided as inefficient. And Bael has not been a friend to locomotive advances. He has resisted funding any new scientific projects, and he discourages the universities from developing much new technology. So nobody’s done much toward modifying passenger vehicles. But maybe next year, or the next year, with a new Archangel in place—”
She’d already heard that phrase more times than she could count. When the new Archangel is installed … When Bael’s replacement is found … Since no one knew who the new Archangel would be, everyone was free to indulge in the most optimistic hopes about what that person would accomplish.
“So, you think the new Archangel will be more of a friend to technology?”
“Depends on who’s chosen. For myself, I don’t care much, but there are a lot of people who do. There are many who’d like to see the Augustine University back in Samaria—or who’d like a chance to see what the Augustine researchers have come up with lately.”
“What’s the Augustine University?”
“Well, it used to be the most advanced scientific research institute and teaching facility on the continent. Based right at the foot of Mount Sinai. Started by a man called Caleb Augustus and an Edori named Daniel sia Calasinsa. It flourished during Delilah’s day, and for twenty or thirty years after that. Credit them with virtually all the electronic amenities we have today. But, like Bael, Archangel Joel was no fan of technology, and he tried more than once to shut the school down. Eventually, the professors just moved the whole place to Ysral. Where only the Edori are benefiting from the new marvels of science.”
“So they’re the ones who built these trucks and buses?”
“The prototypes. The early models.”
“And what is it that Bael has against science?”
Jonas smiled. “You must know your history better than that.”
“Samaria was founded by settlers escaping a brutal war on a planet far from here,” she recited in a childlike singsong. “Technological advances had brought this world to the brink of destruction with weapons so powerful they could not be withstood. Our forefathers prayed to Jovah, and he took them in his hands and carried them to Samaria, where he instructed them to live in harmony all their lives.”
“Very good!” he applauded. “So Bael’s fear, theoretically, is that if we encourage any scientific advancement, we will eventually build whatever weapons these other ancestors discovered, and destroy ourselves and the whole planet. He’s not the only Archangel to have felt that way, of course. That’s why we as a society have not crept very far down the road of progress in the last hundred years.”
“Maybe it’s a slow road.”
“Maybe we have no incentives to make it a faster one.”
They might have continued debating for the next half hour, but at that point the rumble of the big engines grew to a deafening level and the big buses shuddered to life. Around them, the air was suddenly patterned with a massive interleaving of angel wings as the contingent from Cedar Hills took flight. Jonas and Lucinda flung themselves aloft and began the long journey southward.
Lucinda loved to fly. It was something of a guilty pleasure, because Gretchen hated to see her take wing, constantly fearing that she would meet with an errant breeze and go cartwheeling down into the beautiful, treacherous acres of the sea. Early on, she had promised her aunt that she would never fly so far away that she couldn’t see the green–and–tan contours of Angel Rock—which had severely limited the scope of her travels. The idea of flying for hundreds of miles, without pausing, without circling back, made her giddy with anticipation.
She drove her wings down sharply, repeatedly, gaining altitude as fast as she could, till she was far above the ground, the trucks, the other angels. She saw Jonas glance up at her and rise a few yards, but nowhere near her level. A few of the other angels also turned their faces up to her, calculating her speed and her distance. They seemed to be smiling.
This high up, the air was frigid and full of devious, sometimes dangerous currents. The cold did not bother her; like all angels, her body was built to withstand the icy temperatures at high altitudes, and indeed, she was often uncomfortable in a warm room. As for the malice of the wind, well, that was an adversary she had faced time without number; she had had no other real opponent in the past twenty-eight years, and so she had sharpened all her skills on it.
Now came a sudden uprush of air, swift and powerful; she pulled her wings closer to her body and let herself glide on its back. It stopped abruptly and she fell, loving the breathtaking drop, the sensation of speed in the moments before she spread her wings again and eased herself from side to side to slow her descent. For a few minutes she coasted, then she arced upward again, higher than before. She flew forward as fast as she could for as long as she could stand the pace, outdistancing both the trucks on the ground and the angels in the air. Then, once more, she folded her wings to her sides and plummeted toward the earth in a dizzying, blinding drop. Unfurling her wings with a snap, she felt the shock of arrested motion along every nerve and bone in her body. She hovered for a moment in place, and laughed out loud.