Archangel Read online

  “Well, I’m sorry for that, but Maga, this is terrible. How is it nothing is being done for these children?”

  “Something is being done,” Obadiah said. “I think there is someone here in Velora you should meet.”

  His name was Peter and he had been, he told her, a priest for forty years. Like other priests, his life’s work had been to travel from city to city, village to village, homestead to homestead, dedicating newborns to the god and grafting a Kiss onto each small arm. Three winters ago, his life was changed.

  “I suppose I had seen the urchins of Breven and Semorrah and Castelana before,” he said reflectively, “but I had not really noticed them. I dealt with infants, not children. They were not my concern.”

  Rachel nodded, never withdrawing her eyes from his face. He was a tall, gaunt man with completely white hair, pale blue eyes and a mild, studious expression. He looked as if he had spent his life reading handwritten texts by inadequate lighting. Magdalena’s sunshine poured in through the huge windows of the place they were in, a mostly unfurnished warehouse on the edge of the Velora shipping district. The old man and the angelica had taken the only two chairs in this corner of the room; the high, curved backs did not accommodate angel wings. Rachel’s companions sat on the floor, also listening in silence.

  “That night—it had been very cold for days, and I was glad to get back to my inn—I was very annoyed to hear knocking just as I sat down to my dinner. But I am a servant of the god, and so I rose from the table and answered the door and discovered, to my surprise, a very young girl standing on my doorstep offering me what looked like a loaf of bread. I was so surprised to see a child there that I didn’t immediately take in the details—how thin she was, how raggedly dressed. I did manage to speak in a kindly voice when I asked her what she wanted.

  “‘I found this baby,’ she said. ‘I’ve been watching him for a week now, but he won’t eat bread and I don’t have any beer, and I think he’s dying.’ Well, I—bread and beer!—I was astonished on so many counts I hardly knew what to say to her first. I told her to come in, to sit by my fire and explain to me what she was doing walking around with a baby in the middle of winter.”

  He paused. While he told the story, he seemed to be unaware of his visitors, although he had seemed sharply curious about them when Obadiah first guided them to his door. Now his eyes were fixed on a different scene, in a city far from here on a night three years ago.

  “So she said she had found the baby in an alley a week before, and she’d taken it with her back to the drainage ditch where she had set up her own cozy little bed, and she’d tried to nurse the baby back to health. But all it did was cry and sleep, and it wouldn’t chew bread, and she had no beer. And she said again, ‘I think he’s dying, but I heard a priest was in town, and I know that priests can send babies back to Jovah.’

  “I was—the word ‘shocked’ doesn’t cover it. Among other things, her theology was wrong, because priests don’t send anyone to Jovah—angels do that. But I could not get past the initial horror, the fact that this child, this feral child, had brought to me an abandoned infant, a babe she had tried to care for with her limited skills—I mean, where were her parents? Where were this baby’s parents? Why were either of them on the street? And then this baby—” He shook his head. “It could not have been more than ten days old. So frail, so small—so close to death. And Jovah did not even know he had been born.

  “Because, among all the bigger shocks, I realized to my dismay that this baby had not been dedicated—would not, if I did not work fast, ever be recorded in Jovah’s great book of names, would die without the god’s knowledge that he had even been born. And so, with my dinner cooling on the table and the street girl looking on, I blessed that baby with the Kiss of Jovah, gave him a name, offered him to the god and watched him die on my hearth.”

  Maga took a quick, sympathetic breath. Peter glanced over at her and his watery eyes were suddenly focused on the present again. “You feel sadness for that wretched baby—but what about that wretched girl?” he asked. “It only occurred to me, as I wrapped the infant’s head in a clean cloth from my own luggage, to wonder if there might be other unfortunate children in the world who had been left in back alleys and by riverbeds and on street corners before their parents had a chance to give their names to the god. And that one of them might be standing before me even then. And I looked at her bare, thin arms, and I saw that she was one of them, and that Jovah had no idea that she existed on this world.”

  He shook his head. “It took some time,” he said, “but I convinced her that she should take the opportunity, then and there, to be dedicated. She had got it into her head somehow that the god only lays his Kiss upon those who are about to die—that if she was dedicated then, she would die by morning. I had to explain at length. I had to agree to let her spend the night in my room, safe at my fire, promising that she would wake up alive and whole the next morning. So she let me implant the Kiss in her arm and speak her name to the god, and in the morning she was fascinated to see how the sunlight caught the glass and turned it to colors. And she went off quite cheerfully into the bitter cold.”

  “What happened to her?” Maga asked.

  “I have no idea,” Peter said somberly. “She who changed my life so completely disappeared before it occurred to me to secure her. Her name was Josephine, I know, because so I recorded it in Jovah’s book. And she lived in Breven. And she is still alive, for Jovah still registers her Kiss in the oracles’ communications. But I have never seen her again. And I wonder every day how she fares.”

  “Changed your life,” Maga repeated. “How? What has happened to you since?”

  The day that Josephine left him in his inn, he told them, he effectively renounced the priesthood. He became obsessed with finding all the lost children of Samaria and dedicating them to the god. He stayed in Breven nearly a year before the Jansai elders came to him, complaining, and he was none too politely asked to leave the city.

  “Complaining?” Maga asked. “Why?

  Rachel could answer that one. “Because it is much harder to sell a dedicated child into slavery,” she said softly. “And that’s what the Jansai elders did when they rounded up the street urchins.”

  Peter nodded at her. “Precisely. So I left Breven—protesting loudly, I might add—and drifted across Jordana. But there are too many Jansai there, and I could find no allies. My plan was to go to Luminaux, for I hear the child gangs are quite numerous there, surviving very well in the warmer climate and the more generous city, but I was detoured into Velora. And I have found so much here to occupy me that I have not left yet.”

  Rachel leaned forward. “What is this place? A home for the street orphans?”

  “To a large degree. I had been here nearly a year, dedicating the children I could persuade to accept me, before I realized that merely giving their names to the god could not protect them in their daily lives. So I begged for money and goods and favors from the local merchants, and they gave me this place, and I have stocked it as best I can with beds and clothes and food. Not many of the children take advantage of it—more in the winter, of course—but even then, I don’t know how to reach them all, how to make them want to come here, how to convince them that I could give them something better, safer, than their lairs in the streets and the alleys and the ditches.”

  Rachel was still intent. “It needs to be more than a shelter in the winter,” she said. “It needs to be a school—a place where they can learn skills they can peddle now, crafts they can practice when they become adults—”

  “Few of them live to be adults,” Peter said.

  “What happens to them?”

  Obadiah stirred and spoke softly. “They freeze in the winter, tumble under carts, fall ill with lung disease, die of untreated wounds. Some are snatched up by Jansai passing through, looking for more fodder. A strong child fetches a higher price than a healthy adult.”

  “This can’t be allowed,” Rachel said ra
pidly. “We have to save them.”

  “I would love to save them,” Peter said. “I am doing what I can. Anything you have to offer me I would gladly consider.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Gabriel spent the first three weeks of his married life traveling. It had not seemed like a bad idea originally, since as far as he could tell his bride would be just as happy if he were gone, but it proved to be wearisome all the same. As he neared the end of his third week, he found himself thinking more and more of the comforts of the Eyrie—its warm quartz walls, its soothing harmonic music, its fellowship, its peace. Although he did not list his wife among his familiar comforts, it was perfectly natural that his thoughts would turn to her, now and then, with speculation if not affection.

  But he’d had little time for longing thoughts of home. It had been a grueling trip and he was not pleased with what he had found out.

  His plan had been to make a circuit of the major cities of Samaria and speak to the civic leaders there, in general terms, about his upcoming tenure as Archangel, and to sound them out on any concerns or grievances they might have. Good will toward him was about as high as he could reasonably expect, since he would be making brief visits with many of the leaders who had just attended his wedding; they owed him some civility for his recent hospitality.

  He had gone first to Gaza, flying back with Ariel and the angels of her host and spending a few nights at Monteverde. He had always liked Monteverde. Like the other two angel holds, it was situated on a relatively high mountain, but the Verde Divide was almost ridiculously easy to scale and thus there was constant, ready access to the hold. In fact, Monteverde seemed much more like a small, bustling city than a hold, for scattered among the angel dwellings were mortal residences, commercial shops, schools, inns and markets. Angels, humans and pilgrims lived together in happy community amid the green trees and lush shrubbery that gave Monteverde its name.

  One morning he had left for Elijah Harm’s compound, Elijah being the most powerful of the Manadavvi patriarchs who possessed the greatest wealth and power in Gaza—perhaps in all of Samaria. As always, Gabriel was amazed at the sheer size of the Manadavvi holding, a walled fortress complex at least as big as Monteverde. Maybe five hundred souls lived inside the Harthhold gates; a few thousand more were tenants on the rich, black land whose bounty was the base of much of the Manadavvi wealth.

  Elijah Harth would be pleased to meet with the angel Gabriel. Would the angel Gabriel kindly wait while the Manadavvi lord finished up other business?

  So Gabriel stationed himself at a huge window in a faultlessly furnished drawing room, and looked out at the gardens below. What he at first took to be a scattered crowd of visitors strolling through the hedge mazes and rose beds was in fact an extraordinary number of gardeners laboring to keep the gardens trimmed. Gabriel was not an especially ascetic man, but he was disturbed by the corollary implications of such extravagance. How many servants kept the rooms clean, the water heated, the food cooked, the patriarch and his family dressed? Were there not better uses to which both the labor and the time could be put?

  Elijah himself interrupted these musings. Like most of the Manadavvi, Elijah was thin, very well-kept and sophisticated; his intelligence could be quickly read on his bony, high-cheeked face and in his hooded, watchful eyes. He was dressed in a pale blue robe which fell sheer from his shoulders to the floor; every hem and seam was stitched with intricate silver. The robe was closed at the throat with a Kiss-sized sapphire which, sold on the open market, could feed a family for a year.

  “Gabriel,” Elijah greeted him in his smooth voice. “How good to see you again so soon.”

  “Elijah.” They shook hands, and Elijah motioned the visitor to sit. Angels came often enough to this house; there were plenty of chairs carved to accommodate the great sweeping wings. Gabriel sat.

  “As you know,” the angel said, “in a few months I will become Archangel. I have always respected and admired you as a leader among Manadavvi, and I know the power you wield among the clans. I wanted to discuss policies with you before they are implemented, to get some of your ideas a few months in advance.”

  Elijah inclined his head. “I appreciate that. May I say at the very beginning that you could do no worse than to follow Raphael’s example in every particular?”

  Gabriel kept his countenance, but he was surprised. He had not expected the Manadavvi to be such loyal supporters of the Windy Point Archangel; Jansai, yes, but not Manadavvi … “Unfortunately that might not be possible in every instance,” he replied coolly. “But perhaps if you told me what specifically you are reluctant to see changed—”

  Elijah made an elegant gesture with his well-manicured hands. “For instance, the tax structure,” he said. “I am old enough to remember that in Michael’s day, there was a higher percentage levied on the commercial farmers, such as we Manadavvi, when they brought their goods to market. Raphael agreed with us when we pointed out that since we fed and supported so many dependents within our compounds, we should not be unfairly taxed in addition.”

  Aaaah. Special privileges for the rich. Gabriel had not known about that deal before. Still, as the angels’ holds, which profited from the taxes, were not in any sense deprived, there seemed no reason to restructure the agreement. At least presently. “I understand the reasoning,” Gabriel said gravely.

  “I like, too, the unrestricted commerce between regions,” Elijah pursued. “Again, in Michael’s day, to ferry produce across the Galilee River was to pay an excise fee, and thus many farmers did not do their marketing in Jordana. Jordana, and particularly Breven, suffered more from this situation than did the Manadavvi. Raphael, who after all could not help considering Jordana interests, was quick to strike down the fee.”

  Gabriel spent a moment wondering how much of all this Ariel knew, since Raphael’s arrangements with the Manadavvi essentially kept money out of the Monteverde coffers—and since the Archangel Michael had been her grandfather. But again, he nodded. He was saving his arguments for matters he cared about more deeply.

  “In fact,” Elijah was saying, “I am sure that we—and Malachi of Breven—and other leading merchants such as Jethro of Semorrah—are far more conversant with appropriate measures for taxation and intraregion trade than you are. We would, I am sure, be glad to form an advisory committee—”

  “I appreciate the offer,” Gabriel interrupted, smiling faintly. “No doubt at the moment you understand the intricacies of the situation better than I do. But I am willing to learn—and I have many advisors already. Any inequities that come to my attention in the next few years will certainly be addressed.”

  “I am pleased to hear you say it.”

  “One inequity which I intend to stop immediately,” Gabriel went on pleasantly, “is the enslavement of Edori and their sale to whoever is rich enough to buy them. I am aware that the practice is prevalent mostly throughout Jordana and the river cities, although Gaza is not entirely free of the taint of slavery. Yet I feel certain that you, as an enlightened, educated man—”

  “Deplore the institution of slavery. You are quite right,” Elijah said, interrupting in turn. “But I am afraid it is not all as simple as you would like it to be. Moral right and wrong often fall victim to economic imperatives.”

  Gabriel frowned. “Surely you have enough tenants and vassals to farm your lands without resorting to slave labor. And— since you have just told me yourself that your taxes have been adjusted to reflect the drain on your resources—you cannot sit here and tell me that you cannot afford to pay your workers.”

  “My finances are sound,” Elijah said a little coldly. “But for many of those I deal with, slavery is an economic necessity.”

  Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. “Perhaps you could explain.”

  “In Breven, for instance. The slave trade accounts for a good portion of the city’s wealth. I deal heavily with Breven merchants. If they can’t sell their human goods, they cannot buy my produce, and I have a glutted market. A
nd prices fall, and income falls, and I am unable to pay my workers what I would wish, and some of them begin to go hungry—”

  “Are you seriously telling me,” Gabriel said, “that you support the murdering and enslavement of hundreds of souls a year solely to keep your grain prices from slipping?”

  “You oversimplify. A vast number of factors are affected in the complex network of trade.”

  “Still, you are valuing human life below the price of corn.”

  “The price of corn, as you put it, translates into the wages I can afford to pay, and directly affects the lives of my bondsmen. What if they were to starve because of a ban on the slave trade? Would those deaths weigh less heavily on your conscience?”

  “Whoever starves in all of Samaria, it should not be anyone within a hundred miles of Manadavvi land,” Gabriel said bluntly. “You could feed the whole world three times over.”

  Elijah gave him a faint smile. “We are not just talking food, Gabriel. We are talking the economic structure of an entire continent.”

  Gabriel came to his feet. “Then I must urge you to consider ways to amend that structure,” he said. “For, whether it comes slowly or all at once, whether it bankrupts you or enriches you or turns the whole Manadavvi region into a wasteland, slavery has come to an end in Samaria.” And on that distinctly undiplomatic pronouncement, Gabriel stalked from the lovely chamber and left behind what he was fairly sure was an enemy.

  He had had highest hopes of the Manadavvi; therefore, he was not surprised when the rest of his visits went along the same lines, or even less well. Lord Jethro of Semorrah, Lord Samuel of Castelana, and various other river-city merchants gave him Elijah’s exact argument, though phrased less nimbly; Malachi of Breven merely laughed at him.

  “If we can sell slaves, we’ll get slaves,” said the oily, balding old gypsy. “What the market desires, the Jansai provide.”

  “I would not wish,” Gabriel said shortly, “to be forced to use violence to reverse your opinion.”