Archangel Read online

  “I don’t want to sing.”

  “You never do want to sing. Aren’t we ever going to get a chance to hear you?”

  “At the Gloria. I assume you’ll be there?”

  “Well, I had planned to skip it this year, but since you’ll finally be satisfying my curiosity, perhaps I will show up after all.”

  Maga was shocked. “You can’t skip a Gloria!”

  “He was teasing,” Rachel said.

  “You’re the one who’s teasing,” Obadiah said. “Why won’t you sing for us? I don’t mean now, I mean ever.”

  “Perversity,” Gabriel said before he could stop himself. But his wife laughed at him.

  “Mostly,” she agreed. “Because it makes you all so nervous.”

  “Gabriel most of all, I’ll bet,” Obadiah commented.

  Gabriel was smiling back at his wife. “No,” he said. “I believe she can sing as well as Jovah wants. He chose her to please himself. Therefore she no doubt sings—like an angel.”

  They all laughed. The owner of the hall approached their table with some diffidence.

  “I don’t wish to interrupt, but several of the patrons have recognized you, angelo, and asked if you would be willing to sing for us tonight? It has been some time since those of us in Velora were privileged to hear what the inhabitants of the Eyrie are lucky enough to hear on a daily basis—”

  “I would be pleased to sing if you genuinely wish it,” the angel said.

  The proprietor was all smiles. “Oh, delighted! Nothing would please me more! Do you want accompaniment? Should I ask one of the harpists to stay?”

  Gabriel shook his head and rose to his feet, following the owner. “No, no, I don’t need anything, thank you—”

  He was led to the back of the room and through a narrow tunnel almost too low to accommodate his wings; it was a relief to step into the comparative open space of the stage. He swept his gaze across the small room to find virtually every eye upon him, then glanced up at the table where his friends and his wife sat waiting. Until this moment he had not determined what to sing. It was that look at Rachel’s face that decided him.

  He bowed briefly to the audience, laced his hands before him and began to sing. Although it was not in his usual classical style, Gabriel had practiced this particular piece in his rare spare moments in the past few weeks, and he was pleased with his first public performance of it. He felt the low burning on his arm and saw from the corner of his eye his Kiss flicker with color. So his wife was pleased with his performance as well.

  It was the love song Matthew had sung at their wedding, a simple ballad which required little more than good diction and the ability to sustain an occasional high note; but it was a beautiful piece for all that. Gabriel half-closed his eyes, working his way with physical pleasure up the slow scale at the refrain. He was so used to singing in Jovah’s honor that it was a strange, almost sensuous experience to be singing for someone else’s gratification—but he was, and he knew it, and Rachel would be a fool not to know it as well.

  When he repeated the chorus at the end, this time switching to Edori, he felt the heat in the Kiss flame suddenly higher. Ah, that had surprised her; she had not thought he knew the nomad tongue. He held the last three notes a little longer than necessary, showing off perhaps, but the crowd did not find that a cause for censure. Indeed, the applause was as enthusiastic as any he had ever received. He smiled, bowed again and shook his head when there were calls for an encore. Some insistent fellow in the back row had begun chanting “Angels! Angels!” in a rhythmic voice which was taken up by the louder patrons in the hall. Gabriel saw the proprietor hurrying over to his table again, and Obadiah and Magdalena were on their feet. He made sure that he was out of the connecting tunnel before the other two entered.

  “It’ll be hard for anyone else to please this crowd after your performance,” Obadiah said gloomily as they passed each other outside the narrow hallway. “I would much rather precede you than follow you.”

  Gabriel smiled, and rejoined his wife at their table. She looked over at him in—could it be?—approval.

  “That was really beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “I thought you might like it.”

  “I didn’t know you could speak Edori.”

  “I can’t. A few words. For the most part, I learned that piece phonetically. I couldn’t translate it for you if I didn’t already know the chorus.”

  “Ah, then you couldn’t translate it at all, because the Edori chorus is different than the popular translation.”

  “Really? What was I singing?”

  She shook her head. “Better that you don’t know.”

  Now he was both amused and alarmed. “Tell me!”

  She shook her head again, putting a finger to her lips. “Hush. They’re singing.”

  Obadiah and Magdalena were a little more generous, singing three duets for the appreciative audience before they too yielded the stage. The applause that followed their performance was thunderous, and continued long after the three angels and the angelica had risen to their feet, waved farewell and left the hall.

  There was a great deal of talk and laughter among the four of them as the angels accompanied Rachel to the tunnel car at the foot of the mountain.

  “Come to my room when you’ve arrived,” Gabriel told her when they stopped at the inset door. “I have something I forgot to give you before.”

  She was stepping inside and closing the grille. The thread of light inside the shaft threw the faintest illumination across her face, set the tangled hair to glowing. “What is it?”

  “Something from Josiah. A letter.”

  She raised her eyebrows, but did not reply. Though Gabriel was standing right there, she reached over to pull the bell-cord, to alert those above that she was in the cage and would be coming up. He nodded.

  “Very wise,” he said.

  “I never fail to observe this rule,” she said. Then she lowered the activating lever and the car rose slowly into the mountainside and disappeared.

  “I hate that thing,” Maga murmured.

  “She requires it,” Gabriel replied.

  Obadiah tugged on the Monteverde angel’s wingtips. She twitched them away. “Don’t get personal,” she said.

  He was laughing. “Race you to the top,” he said. The two of them took off, great wings making a whuffling sound like banners whipping in the breeze. Gabriel followed at a more leisurely pace, landed, and headed directly for his room. In a few minutes, Rachel was at his open door.

  “A letter from Josiah?” she said. “About what?”

  He handed it to her, shutting the door behind her. “He wouldn’t say and I can’t read Edori,” he said pleasantly. “You’ll have to tell me if it’s something I should know.”

  It only took her a few moments to open the letter and read the two paragraphs on the single page, but in those moments she changed utterly. One moment she was smiling and ironic; the next she was sick, stunned, clenched into a knot of pain. He crossed the room in two strides.

  “Rachel! What is it—what did he say?”

  She looked at him blindly, shaking her head. He thought that she had no idea, for a moment at least, where she was or who was addressing her. He took hold of her shoulders and pushed her gently toward a chair.

  “Sit down. Here— All right, then, on the floor. Rachel, tell me what he said to you.”

  She had sunk to her knees on the thick red carpet, and he knelt beside her. He was still gripping her arms; he thought she would topple over if he released her. He shook her very slightly.

  “Rachel, talk to me. What’s in the letter? Is it— Did someone die?”

  It was a guess, but a good one, and it shocked a response from her. “Simon,” she choked.

  Simon? “What happened to him? How does Josiah know?”

  Her reply did not quite make sense to him. “He—we were the only ones who bore the Kiss, so the oracle said he could find out—and now he tells
me that Simon is dead, has been dead two years—two years!” she wailed, suddenly coming to life. She twisted in his hold, but not to escape. She pounded both fists on the red rug, tossed her head from side to side in fierce denial. These were the signs of storm he was becoming familiar with. Gabriel kept his hold on her.

  “I’m sorry your friend is dead, and you did not know it for so long—”

  “He should have been dead much longer!” she raged. “Simon—a slave for three years! It took him that long to die, fighting the whole time, hating them, hating himself, wretched and beaten—Simon …”

  The rest of her words were incomprehensible to Gabriel; Edori no doubt, words of imprecation or grieving, he could not tell. But now she was crying—huge, tearing sobs that were as fierce as her fury. He thought she would rend herself in two with weeping.

  “Here—here—” he murmured, drawing her into his arms, holding her tightly against his chest either to comfort her or restrain her or muffle the tears, he hardly knew. All three, maybe. She resisted briefly and then gave in, grinding her face against his leather vest, clenching and unclenching her fingers against his bare forearms. He felt her nails rake against his skin hard enough to leave a trail.

  It took her a long time to quiet down, and even then it was only by contrast. She still wept bitterly, though less passionately, and he still held her. She had come to rest with her back against his chest, both his arms wrapped around her, his head bent over hers. “Shh,” he whispered again and again, rocking her a little, trying to convey some of his pity and distress. He felt so sorry for her. Whoever this Simon was, she had clearly loved him, and now he was dead. Yet another thing lost to her forever.

  When she started speaking again, he thought at first the words were in Edori, and then he thought they were not meant for him. A farewell to this Simon, perhaps, a prayer to the god to receive the migrant soul. Yet the cadence of the prayer sounded familiar. He leaned closer to hear, till his ear rested on the wild golden hair.

  What he heard stopped his heart.

  “Yovah, if it be thy will, call down thy curses on the city of Semorrah. Strike it with fire, with thunderbolts. Cover it with storm and flood it with raging river. Bring pestilence and plague, and let everyone within its borders die… .”

  In a weak, exhausted whisper she was calling down Jovah’s curse as Gabriel had heard her do once before. He clapped his hand across her mouth and stared down at her in horror. He felt her lips move against his palm as she continued the invocation silently. She stared back up at him, remorseless and defiant, and he thought that this was perhaps one mortal whom the god would heed. And he pressed his hand more tightly against her mouth to stop her, and felt a sort of dread travel through him from his fingers to his heart.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Although she had been glad when Gabriel first returned, Rachel now spent some energy wishing he would go away again. There were many reasons, not the least one being the fact that she had been so pleased to see him again. And he had seemed pleased with her, and the whole world seemed unexpectedly harmonious.

  And then the dreadful news had come, and she had gone a little mad, and now Gabriel hated her again; and so she wished he would go away.

  He had not said he hated her. He had in fact been extraordinarily kind, but she had seen the look on his face when she whispered the curse on Semorrah, and she had been too stubborn to recant. Well, she had not felt like recanting. In fact, if she had the power today, she would go stand on the Plain of Sharon and call out the curse in her loudest voice, and watch with satisfaction as Semorrah tumbled into the foam-laced waters of the Galilee River.

  To his credit, Gabriel had tried to understand. The morning after that dreadful scene he had come to her door, sober and solemn as always, to ask after her state of mind. He had stepped inside the room and stood squarely, though quite unconsciously, in the white plane of sunlight billowing in through the open window and all she could do was stare at him. He was so beautiful— all blue and silver and black—so beautiful and so serious, and here she was, once again, having played the lunatic at their very last meeting. So she had greeted him with an icy reserve, too proud to show embarrassment, far too willing to show him first that she hated him before he had a chance to make his feelings plain to her.

  His own expression was remote, his gorgeous voice chilly. “I wanted to see if you were feeling any better today,” he said in the formal way she had almost forgotten.

  “Yes,” she said flatly. “I’m fine.”

  He had hesitated, and then asked a carefully worded question. “Would you want to tell me who Simon was?”

  “My lover,” she shot at him instantly, hoping to shock him or at least unnerve him. “Five years ago.”

  But he merely nodded. No doubt he had worked it out for himself. “I’m sorry that he is dead,” he said, which he had said last night. “Why do you think he died in Semorrah?”

  “Because he did not die on the Heldora Plains, where the rest of the Manderras died,” she said. “He lived three years longer. And the Jansai leave no survivors—only dead men and slaves.”

  “He may not have died a slave. He could have escaped. He may not even have died in Semorrah.”

  “Semorrah, Castelana, Breven—it is all one,” she said, her voice still hard. “I would see them all crushed by the falling mountain and drowned under the rising sea.”

  And seeing her unrepentant, he had bowed and gone away. And he had avoided her ever since, and so he hated her.

  Well, perhaps it was just as fair to say she had avoided him. In any case, they had not spoken much these past two weeks, and might never speak again, and Judith walked around smiling smugly, and Rachel did not care.

  She did care that Magdalena had returned to Monteverde, though Rachel had begged her to stay another month, another week, at least.

  “I can’t—I have duties of my own back home,” the angel had said gently. “People I have neglected quite shamefully. And— you know …”

  “Now that Nathan is back, Gabriel is pressuring you to go.”

  “Not quite pressuring. Gabriel is too courteous to treat me unkindly.”

  Rachel had let a small sniff express her opinion of Gabriel’s courtesy. Magdalena had smiled.

  “But it is time for me to go. I miss my sister and my friends. I have a class of girls I am supposed to be teaching for the Gloria, and that is only a couple of months away now. I’ll see you again, then. It won’t seem so long.”

  But it already seemed long, and the angel had only been gone two weeks. Rachel missed her all the more because—now that Gabriel hated her—she had only two friends left at the Eyrie. One was Matthew, who was fine; and the other was Obadiah, who could be trouble.

  True to her nature, Rachel spent most of her time seeking trouble.

  It was Obadiah himself who pointed that out to her, although she had not thought he noticed. And she denied it when he said it. But she knew it was true.

  They had spent most of that second week together in Velora, working at the school. Peter’s efforts had brought in about thirty street children who were more or less willing to attempt living in the experimental school cum residence, though they were highly skeptical and all looked ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. Nonetheless, the lure of cash, as Peter had foreseen, was a powerful one, and they had attached a payment to everything. Each class taken, each night spent in the dorm, each project completed— everything was rewarded. Those who had learned mathematics were beginning to grasp what the sum total of such largesse might be, and they were the ones who seemed most interested in staying.

  Rachel had set herself up as an instructor in a class on weaving, and was pleased when four girls and one teenaged boy elected to study with her. Obadiah had undertaken to set up a musical curriculum, staffed by several local luminaries and featuring in addition a revolving roster of visiting musicians. Basic theory was taught in these classes, as well as specific applications in voice, harp, flute and percussio
n. Obadiah, who could not promise to be on hand for daily lessons, had nevertheless assigned himself a full week as tutor, and that week had just now come to an end.

  The angel and the angelica-to-be had agreed to have an elegant dinner at one of Velora’s more gracious restaurants, as a treat after seven days of relatively intensive labor. The room was mostly dark; the accommodating host had seated these grandest of patrons in a semi-secluded private alcove. Over the food and wine, they talked first about the school.

  “There’s this one boy—James—do you know him?” Obadiah asked her.

  “I think so. Very small. Very blond. Very difficult.”

  “That’s him. Mostly I just want to slap him. I swear if I had been his father, I would have abandoned him, too.”

  “Obadiah!”

  “But have you heard him sing?”

  “I don’t think so. Is he good?”

  “Not yet. But he will be. I heard him for the first time—oh, three days ago. You could have pulled every feather from my wings and I wouldn’t have moved a muscle. I was in shock. He has a voice.”

  “Probably an angel’s son,” Rachel said cynically. “Maybe even yours. Maybe you did abandon him, after all.”

  He smiled at her lazily. “I don’t think so, lovely. I have always avoided the angel-seekers for precisely that reason.”

  She eyed him speculatively. “Then you’ve been very discreet about your romances,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to have been much gossip about you.”

  “And who were you asking?”

  “Maga, mostly. Who else could I ask?”

  “Well, Maga hasn’t been around the Eyrie all that much. She wouldn’t know.”

  “So, who? Tell me.”

  He laughed, seemingly delighted rather than embarrassed. “I cannot believe you would be so tactless as to ask me!” he exclaimed. “Let me assure you I have far more discretion than to tell you.”

  “I hope it wasn’t Judith.”

  “No, she’s far too scheming for my taste.”

  “Then—”

  “Stop asking, dearest. I’m not the man to gossip about love.”