Dinah spoke up next. Like Asher, she was dark and intense; together, the two were usually a volatile mix. “We were in Gaza while you were gone, and while we were there, some of the Manadavvi came back from the river, telling stories of the floods. They had been trying to get a shipment to Semorrah, and lost two boatloads when the riverbank gave way. They were really angry—”
“And they were afraid,” Asher interjected.
Alleya touched each of them with her glance. “And did you fly out to the plain? Was it storming?”
“Of course we went immediately,” Asher said with some indignation. “And we prayed for hours. The storm did not lift. It did not even seem to lighten.”
“How long has it been raining there?”
“By now, probably five days without ceasing,” Dinah said. “Before that, intermittently.”
Alleya spread her hands. “Why weren’t we told of this? Aaron Lesh and Emmanuel Garone were here not long ago, and they seemed eager enough to bring up other problems.”
The three angels exchanged glances. Timothy, a fair-haired, good-looking but petulant young male, spoke next. “Maybe they were afraid to say anything to your face,” he suggested. “But they blame the angels.”
“Who blames the angels? For what?” Alleya said impatiently.
“For the storms. They think we’re sending them.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why would we do that?”
“To punish them. They weren’t very clear about it, but there was talk—”
“From whom? Did any of the Manadavvi actually take one of you aside and say, ‘Why are you angels sending us all the rain? What have we done to you?”’ Her own words gave her pause—just so did she sometimes word her mental supplications to Jovah.
“Well, no,” Dinah said, glancing sideways at Asher.
“But you were consorting with some of the Manadavvi servants, and they repeated the gossip to you. Is that it?” Alleya asked.
Asher said defiantly, “I heard it from more than one person, and they all seemed convinced that we were sending the rain. That we meant something by it.”
“But when you went to sing prayers—”
“Well, we weren’t successful. They think maybe we didn’t try.”
“And when we told them you were gone,” Dinah said softly, “they didn’t believe us.”
Alleya flung her hands out. “But it makes no sense! What could we possibly have to gain by flooding out the Manadavvi and the river merchants? Why would it occur to us to do so?”
“Emmanuel Garone claims that angels threatened to do it in the past,” Timothy said solemnly. “When the Manadavvi were difficult.”
Alleya threw him a startled look. “Well! Someone’s been reading his history books,” she said. “I wouldn’t have expected a threat that old to still frighten anyone.”
“You mean, an angel actually made such a threat?” Dinah asked. “Who?”
“The Archangel Gabriel, in fact,” Alleya said. “Back when he was feuding with the Manadavvi. As it seems all Archangels must eventually do.”
“What are you going to do?” Dinah asked.
“Fly to the Plain of Sharon, obviously, and see if the god will heed me. Although I would like a little time to rest my wings and change my clothes.”
The three younger angels traded looks again, making Alleya suspicious. “What?” she demanded. “What are you thinking?”
Asher tilted his chin in the air, a pose that made him look even more than ordinarily striking. “We were thinking—you should let the rains continue just a little longer. How dare they say such things about the angels! And we have heard how they came here days ago, questioning the sanctuary treaties and looking for more special privileges. We think the Manadavvi have flouted the Archangel’s authority too long—yes, and the river merchants as well. It is no bad thing to make them worry a while. Perhaps then they will show us a little more deference.”
Jovah save me from the young and righteous was Alleya’s first thought. She closed her eyes briefly and wondered how Delilah would handle this. With a jest and a mocking remark that would be so cleverly worded it would instantly deflate Asher’s whole arrogant argument. But she was not Delilah.
“One of the luxuries the Archangel does not have is spiteful-ness,” she said, her voice gentle but the words barbed. “Any misuse of power, whether active or passive, is shocking and inadmissible. I would no more deliberately allow the river to flood than I would pray for the god to loose thunderbolts on the Manadavvi compounds. We want harmony, not vengeance.”
“Justice!” Asher burst out.
Alleya smiled faintly. “It is not justice when your only motive is to make someone else sorry,” she said. “I believe that you tried to disperse the rains. I hope I am able to succeed. If I am not, the Manadavvi will really believe the worst of us, and then I think we will have a true crisis on our hands. I do not wish the Manadavvi to actively turn against us.”
“Of course you will be able to stop the rains,” Dinah said, her voice suddenly uncertain. “Why would you not?”
“Why were you unsuccessful?” Alleya asked with a shrug. “Jovah does not hear all of us, which is a frightening thing to me. It makes me wonder if someday he will no longer hear me.”
Now they all wore matching looks of apprehension, as if it had never occurred to them that she, too, might one day be fallible. Alleya could not decide if that comforted or appalled her. “Angela,” Dinah asked, “why does Jovah continue to send the rain?”
“And the snow, and the drought, depending on where you are,” Alleya added. “I don’t know. I’m sure he has his reasons, but they are at present unclear to me.”
She had escaped as quickly as she could to seek the solitude of her bedchamber. It seemed like more than three days since she had left, and she wanted nothing so much as to rest, relax, gossip with Samuel (Guess where I found Delilah!) and read the books she had borrowed from Mount Sinai. But she had spoken truly to her little trio of avengers. She could not in good conscience let the rains fall and make no effort to stop them.
So, late that afternoon, she set out again, this time for the Plain of Sharon. It was almost nightfall by the time she arrived, and a sullen sunset offered just a faint tainted light to see by. She always found it an impressive, sobering sight: the shattered black peak of Mount Galo breaking the ring of mountains that enclosed the plain. The god’s finger had touched the world, electrifying it the way Caleb’s mysterious fire had electrified his body, leaving behind a seared mark and the memory of tremendous power. She would have given much to have been present the night the god blazed down in wrath. She thought that her awe would have far outweighed her terror.
Because of the rain, she had flown in low, and now she spiraled upward over the broken mountain. The air was treacly, clinging to her wings with actual malice; she had to fight her way higher to get as far above the storm as possible. Even after she cleared the worst of the rain, the air about her felt dense and unforgiving, and she had a curious sense that all acoustical properties had been deadened. Usually, this far above the earth, the air currents felt alive; even before she started singing, she would hear the echoes of her wingbeats batted from star to star. She could sense that Jovah was listening, just waiting for her voice, and that he knew before she started to sing just what she was going to pray for.
But tonight she had no such illusion of an eager listener. Instead it seemed as if she were in a close room whose walls were covered with padding—it was as if, no matter how loud a sound she chose to make, the noise would be muffled by invisible quilted walls. Her imagination, surely; the wet, clogged air was coloring all her perceptions.
She slowed her wingbeats to hovering speed, clasped her hands and began singing. Her voice seemed to linger too long in the air around her, the new notes piling on top of the old ones in tumbled disharmony. She was in a net of her own music, a sticky web of her tangled prayers, and she knew this was not a song that was ascending to Jovah.
She drove her wings down twice, hard, gaining altitude, then settled into a slow flight pattern that made a gigantic circle over the plain. As she flew, she offered her prayer again, and again each word lay on the air where she sang it, neither rising nor disintegrating. She sang the prayer again, trailing it behind her like a banner, each note so solid and distinct that she could almost read the music, staff and score. Again she circled, still singing, adding another layer of music, and another, till she had laid a coil of prayers high over the ruined peak of the Galo Mountain. And not a single note overlapped another; every word was clear, pronounced on its perfect pitch; and suddenly it seemed that Jovah was able to understand what, for hours, she had been saying. For she felt the air around her shift and she heard the dull continuity of the falling rain skip and falter; and she saw her golden song literally unfurl as it lifted itself to Jovah.
And she slowly descended through the unraveling clouds, and she was afraid, because next time she might not guess how to arrange her prayer so that the god heard it; and clearly he was beginning to have trouble now hearing even the Archangel.
She returned to the Eyrie late the next day, having stopped overnight in a small town in northern Jordana, to pray for the cessation of snow there the following morning. This intercession was much more straightforward than the one over the Galo Mountain, and she flew home feeling slightly comforted. But only slightly. All still was not well at the Eyrie, for the river merchants had sent a politely worded letter asking her to meet them in Semorrah at her earliest convenience. They were not specific about their concerns, but she could guess what they were: the portage rights that the Manadavvi had asked about, and the fear of flooding because of the long rains.
“You go,” she told Samuel, reading him the letter. It was signed by Gideon Fairwen, long-standing president of the merchants’ guild and the richest man in Samaria aside from the Manadavvi. “Tell them I’m too busy to come.”
“They’ll be insulted.”
“Well, it will be a measure of just how seriously I view their complaint. They should know by now that I’ve stopped the rains over the Galo, so that should answer that question—and I can’t bear any more whining about the damned Edori sanctuary. So you go. If they have any other problems they want to discuss with me, tell them to come here.”
He smiled. “I’ll bring them back with me.”
She smiled in return. “And take Asher. He’s looking for a fight. But keep him more or less under control.”
So Samuel left with Asher in tow, and they were gone three days. Which passed in relative, welcome quiet. Alleya used that time to begin study on the books she had borrowed from Mount Sinai, although the reading went slowly. In many places, the translator had guessed at a word or a phrase, labeling it with a question mark and enclosing it in a bracket. She was a little disappointed that the history book glossed over the mechanics of the settlers’ arrival on Samaria, merely explaining it as a “miracle wrought by Jovah,” although she had never heard it described in any more explicit terms.
The first chapter seemed to be little more than a list of the names and genealogies of the colonists—with a mysterious notation that all this information had been “fed” to Jovah. She was fascinated to learn, however, that there had not been perfect harmony among these original Samarians, and that a small splinter group led by Victor and Amos Edor had refused to conform to the basic governmental patterns that the others had voted in.
“The Edori!” she murmured. “Descended directly from the first malcontents. I wonder who else knows that?”
The second chapter, however, made her sit up straight in her chair and read as fast as her eyes would take in the words.
“Now, even before Jovah had set his children onto the land of Samaria, he had seen that it was ravaged by storm. In the southern portions of the chosen land, rain followed rain followed rain, and in the north, snow followed snow. Elsewhere the land was dry and offered no water, not for bathing, not for drinking, not for raising crops. And Jovah said, ‘We must remake this land in the ways that are pleasing to us.’
“And for this reason, and for other reasons, Jovah set about creating the angels. He drew aside men of science and whispered instructions into their ears while they slept. Then, for twenty days, he watched his children as they labored on their new land. From the twelve hundred that he had set down on Samaria, he chose fifty. These fifty and the men of science he drew apart from the rest; and following Jovah’s instructions, the men of science practiced their crafts of biology? and genetics and grafted wings onto the backs of the fifty mortals. And thus were angels created.”
Alleluia looked up, wide-eyed with shock. The angels had been created by men? Specifically to control the weather? This was not the way the Librera, the holy book, recorded the birth of the angels. She had no need to look the passage up, but she did so anyway, fetching her leatherbound copy of the Librera and opening it to the first chapter, which described the arrival on Samaria. As she remembered: “Then Jovah created the angels to watch over all the peoples of Samaria and ensure harmony throughout the realm.” Nothing about weather.
Nothing about the continent being uninhabitable without intercessions by the angels.
Nothing about men of science practicing their diabolical magic. In fact, the Librera only mentioned technology in the most scornful of passages, leading the modern reader to assume that all the colonists had abhorred science and all its gifts and trappings.
And yet scientists, under the guidance of the god, had made men into angels.
She continued reading, although her brain felt disordered and she was not sure she would make much sense of the next few pages.
“Then Jovah took the angels aside and said to them, ‘These are the prayers I will teach you. You will sing these words when you wish for storm, these words when you wish for sunshine, these words when your crops fail and you need
seed grain. My supplies are virtually limitless; they will be available for centuries, so ask for what you need.’
“Then Jovah said to the angels, ‘Here are more prayers that I will teach you. When your people are swept with plague, sing these prayers and I will send you to heal them. When the women miscarry and the men turn to sport instead of love, I will send you manna to make the wives again seem attractive to their husbands, if you will sing these words.’
“Then Jovah said to the angels, ‘I have set my above you close to the earth so that I can hear you any time you pray. But if my ever fail, I have set in the Corinni Mountains and in the Plain of Sharon and in ??Arrand? not a place on any maps>, and these shall carry your words to me instead.”’
Alleya read the last paragraph three times, hoping it might make more sense, but it did not. If these satellites were devices that amplified the angels’ voices and helped carry them to Jovah’s ears, perhaps they had failed; perhaps that was why Jovah was having so much trouble hearing them now. But what had he put in the Corinni Mountains and at the Plain of Sharon that would facilitate the angels’ prayers—and where exactly (for these were both fairly broad geographical areas) were these mysterious objects located? And how in the world would she recognize them even if she came across them?
She read a bit farther, but the history offered no new revelations, at least in this chapter. Just as well, she thought, laying the book aside and massaging the back of her head. What little she had learned so far had clarified nothing and shaken some of her profoundest beliefs; and she was not sure she had the strength right now to endure any more surprises.
Samuel returned grim-faced and weary; Asher seemed even more fired up than he had been about the Manadavvi situation.
“They blame the angels for the storms,” the older man said. “They think it is some plot to bring them to heel, and they are very angry.”
Asher struck a pose, imitating Gideon Fairwen. “‘What have we done to earn the a
nger of the angels? We live as we have always lived, do business with the men we have always dealt with. Why would the angels turn against us?’ The man makes me sick.”
“Did they believe what they were saying, or do you think this is a conspiracy with the Manadavvi to give them an excuse to flout us?” Alleya asked Samuel.
“Hard to tell. But they did seem angry.”
“But surely they noticed that the rains had stopped.”
“Yes, after a week of rain. And the river had already risen.”
“So what did they want from us? An apology? A concession? Why did they call us there?”
“To tell us not to think they can be controlled by such tactics,” Asher said scornfully. “To warn us that they will rebel if we continue tampering with the weather.”
“To remind us that mortals and angels agree to work in harmony, and once the harmony has been disrupted, it is impossible to restore,” Samuel said more soberly.
“Yes, well, very effective if we were in fact trying to punish them,” Alleya said sharply. “But since we are not—a vexing complication. I cannot afford to have the merchants and the Manadavvi in mutiny. What has Jerusha said about any of this?” she continued, turning to Asher. Jerusha was the leader of the angel host in Monteverde. “You were in Gaza recently. Did you see her?”
“We did not stop by Monteverde. I could go now—”
Alleya shook her head. “I’ll go. Maybe she’ll have some advice.”
But Jerusha, when consulted on the following day, gestured in her characteristic short, dismissive way and shook her head. “I know there is unrest among the Manadavvi,” she said. “There always is. It irks them that, powerful as they are, they are not all-powerful. They are always seeking the rift in the fabric of Samaria.”
Jerusha was small, dark and unemotional; her movements were precise and her mind analytical. Still, Alleya thought, the situation called for a little more worry. “Have they complained to you?”