Archangel Read online

  She jerked backward from him as if he had struck her. “No.”

  “You are afraid of heights, I know—”

  “No. I can’t. No.”

  He gave her a cajoling smile. “Do you think I would drop you? I have never dropped anyone, you know.”

  “Obadiah, I can’t,” she said, a trace of panic in her voice. “I won’t—don’t ask me. I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right,” he said. “But it would solve so many things.”

  Their food came, and they ate for a few moments in silence. Rachel looked up to find him watching her expectantly. “What?” she said.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Actually, I do,” she said, smiling a little. “Is it grilled horse manure or something?”

  “No. Perfectly respectable food. But no one else will eat here with me.”

  Her smile broadened. “This shall become our special place, then. We’ll come here again when I return.”

  “Agreed,” he said instantly. “I’ll reserve a table now.”

  The rest of the meal passed companionably, and Obadiah did not again bring up painful topics. When they had finished eating, they walked slowly back to the mountain, and the angel escorted the angelica to the tunnel car. It was full dark by this time, and the air was chilly, but it was clear that spring was on the way. The wind which had been so wicked all during the winter seemed merely playful now; the hard ground gave just a little beneath their feet.

  “When do you leave?” Obadiah asked as she opened the cage door and stepped inside.

  “Tomorrow. First light.”

  “Matthew has hired horses?” She nodded. “You know how to ride, of course.”

  She laughed. “Of course. It’s been five years—almost six—since I have ridden, but I’m sure I haven’t forgotten.”

  “I was on a horse once. I’d gotten extremely ill, oh, a day’s flight outside of Luminaux. They tied me to a horse and escorted me back to the Eyrie. It was awful. He was afraid of my wings and kept leaping forward every time a feather would brush him. I was sore from my ankles to my—well, sore all the way up. I’d rather have died of fever, I think.”

  “I like to ride,” she said. She had fastened the grille, but reached out a hand to him between the bars. “Don’t be so sad. I’ll be back in a few weeks.”

  His hand closed on hers. “I thought I was covering it up so well,” he said. “I really wish you weren’t going.” He put her hand against his heart and held it there. “I’ll sing for you each night,” he said softly. “Jovah keep you safe.”

  She kissed the fingers of her free hand, then laid them against his lips. “And you also,” she said.

  He took her hand from his lips and clasped it against his chest beside the other one. “Now I’ve got you and you can’t get free,” he said. “Trapped in a little cage inside the mountain.”

  “With an angel holding me down,” she finished. “Yes, that is how I feel much of the time.”

  Instantly he released her. “Truly, Rachel, take care,” he said.

  She rang the bell and activated the lever. “I will,” she said. “Dinner again in a few weeks, my friend. The time will go very fast.”

  The car began its slow, lumbering ascent. “I don’t think so,” she thought he said, but the noise of the car made it hard to catch his words. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself and wondered why the night air suddenly seemed so cold.

  She half-expected Gabriel to be waiting for her on the landing—or at the door to her room; and when he was at neither place, she half-expected him to come to her sometime later to wish her a formal farewell. So strong was this belief that she tarried over her packing, and waited till very late before taking her bath. Even after she had undressed and gone to bed, she lay awake a long time, listening to the harmonic voices and thinking he would come to the door. But he did not.

  She slept badly and woke early, heavy-eyed. But there was little she needed to do to prepare; she had done most of it the night before. She closed up her bags, glanced once around her room and stepped outside.

  Gabriel was nowhere in sight. She felt her whole body grow smaller, leaden, in a single sweeping rush of disappointment; she felt the way she sometimes did when the tunnel car dropped too fast. But that was ridiculous. She did not want to see him any more than he wanted to see her.

  She stepped briskly down the corridors to Matthew’s chambers, and found him awake and ready for her. His dark face was alight with excitement and he gave her a quick absentminded hug.

  “To the Gathering we go, my girl,” he said. “Ah, but I can hardly wait to be among the people again.”

  He rode down the mountain with her, and they hiked into Velora to pick up their horses. Matthew had, of course, chosen well, hiring a compact blond palomino for her and a sturdy black gelding for himself. Like most Edori, they used only bridles and the barest of saddles. Matthew strapped their luggage across the horses’ backs, and swung up easily. Rachel stood and watched him, glancing from time to time back at the mountain. But no great white angel wings glided down from the Eyrie. No husband appeared to wish her a cold goodbye. She mounted, urged the horse forward, and did not look back again.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “I ‘m glad you came to me,” Josiah said. “I’ve thought of you often.”

  Matthew had allowed himself to be introduced to the oracle, but excused himself from the dinner and the talk that came afterward. “I’m an old man, and travel tires me,” he had said with his sweet smile, but Rachel knew that he was just tactfully giving her time to visit with Josiah alone. She had enjoyed the meal, served by soundless acolytes in one of the smaller interior rooms. Now they sat before the fire and sipped the most marvelous liqueur Rachel had ever tasted.

  “I wanted to thank you for writing tome,” she said. “Although the news was not welcome, it was better to know.”

  “I was sorry to have to tell you he is dead.”

  “I am glad of it,” she said. “He hated life those last years. I know him. He is happier with Yovah.”

  “Peace on his soul,” the sage murmured. “Will you pray for him at your Gathering?”

  She leaned all the way back in her chair. “I have not done much praying to Yovah lately,” she said softly. “Except to call down curses, which he has not answered. I don’t know that he would listen to me—at the Gathering or at the Gloria.”

  “Ah,” said Josiah. “Now I know why you are here.”

  She smiled faintly. “And why I am going to the Gathering. To remember what it is like to love the god.”

  “That is a very interesting concept,” Josiah said. “‘Loving’ Jovah. I am not sure that I love him myself.”

  That brought her straight up on the edge of the big chair to stare at him. “But—of ail people—”

  “He is not an easy god to love,” Josiah said calmly. “He is not very warm. He is a just god, that I do believe. He has a great deal of passion, and a great deal of power. But does he love us? I have never been sure of that. He guards us well. He guides us. And he lets us make our own way until we err. Perhaps that is a kind of love, but it is not very affectionate.”

  She could not help laughing. “And I thought I spoke heresy—!”

  “A learned man cannot help but consider the boundaries of his world, both physical and spiritual,” Josiah said. “The oracles, you will find, believe most fervently in the god—more than the angels do, more than the farmers and the merchants and the Manadavvi. We know he is there. But who is he? What shape does he take? Has he ever come down among men? What is his interest in us, if it comes to that? Sometimes I think we—the whole race of humans, on this planet and elsewhere—were created as some vast, divine experiment, that he sets up a group of us on each world and gives us different environments and watches us to see which of us adapts the best. Other times I think he has given us—all of us—a puzzle, which we are somehow to solve, and he waits from generat
ion to generation, giving us a few more clues with each new birth, to see how long it will take us to unravel it. And other times I think I do not understand any of it, and it is all as it was taught to me, and that is an end to it.”

  “I am beginning to feel less badly about my own isolation from the god,” she said.

  Josiah smiled. “Oh, I am not the greatest of all doubters, as you must be thinking,” he said. “There is the story of the oracle David, who lived some hundred and fifty years ago. He had been a questioner his whole life—he was obsessed by the interfaces, the screens we oracles use to communicate with the god. He said he had discovered a way that a man could go directly to the god, see him face to face, and that the secret was contained in the interfaces. So he brought an acolyte in, and positioned himself just so—I can show you the place on the floor, because this all transpired on Sinai—and he told the acolyte to press a certain button. And, so the story goes, a great golden haze rose all about him, and the acolyte looked away in fear. When the boy looked for David again, he was gone.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “To see the god, so he says. There is an account of it in his memoirs, although the language is very hallucinogenic and hysterical.”

  “And what did the god look like?”

  “Actually, he never laid eyes on Jovah, just the place where he lives. It was wondrous and strange—as one might expect—filled with odd lights, and surfaces and textures that were wholly alien. The interface screens were there, so he was able to communicate with the god—until the day he learned that the god could speak to him, aloud, in a deep resonant voice that was, he says, wholly dispassionate. It was the voice more than anything which seems to have driven him mad.”

  “He was mad, then?”

  Josiah smiled again. “Well, when he returned, bathed in the same golden glow, he fell to the floor and began sobbing, and he did not speak a coherent sentence for weeks. And then the things he had to say were so bizarre that no one would believe him. So he took to writing down his adventures, but his words were so revolutionary that the other oracles locked him away and had him tended until he died. They wouldn’t even let him use the interfaces anymore, though he begged to be allowed to go back to the screen just once. So he died, raving and unhappy. And the oracles put his writings under lock and key, and let no one but their successors read about him.”

  “But what did he say that was so revolutionary?”

  “Well, that’s something the oracles only discuss among themselves,” he said pleasantly. “Let us say he just cast doubts upon the omnipotence of the god. And while I may seem to you to be a heretic, I do not for a moment doubt that Jovah is capable of saving all of us or destroying all of us, if he chooses. And that whatever he chooses is right, because he is all-knowing and we are the ones who are faulty and in error.”

  Rachel sighed and sank back in her chair. She was not much interested in esoteric speculations on the nature of theology, anyway. “And I am among the most faulty,” she said gloomily. “I have quarreled with my husband—again. I have left him without a word, though he knows where I am. I have made advances to another man. I have refused to give him the help he asked for. I have really done everything I could think of to spite him.”

  “Well, of course you have,” Josiah said gently. “You love him.”

  She jerked her head in his direction. “Love him? Love Gabriel?”

  “And you are trying to get his attention. It is hard to get Gabriel’s attention—I know from bitter experience.”

  “I don’t love him,” she said positively.

  “Also, you don’t want him to swallow you up, which is very wise,” Josiah said in an approving voice. “Gabriel has a very strong will. It is hard to stand against him, and a compliant woman would be totally absorbed into his personality. That is why Jovah chose for him a woman who is not at all compliant.”

  “Anyway, he doesn’t love me.”

  “He is not whole without you,” Josiah said. “And you are not whole without him. Neither of you has been willing to realize this yet. Which is why I am glad you are going to the Gathering. It will do you both good to know what it feels like when you are not at the Eyrie.”

  “I will feel fine when I am not at the Eyrie,” Rachel said sharply. “In fact, I’m very glad to be gone from it now.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you are,” the sage said, smiling again. “I wish you the merriest of times at the Gathering among your Edori friends, I hope you return to Velora rested and serene and sure of yourself. But I think you will miss your husband while you are gone, and he will miss you. If it is so, I hope you will act upon it. Jovah brought you together for certain reasons. Only one of those reasons was your happiness—but it is not the least of them. It is time you were happy, Rachel. I do wish you joy.”

  With these words ringing in her ears, it was hard for Rachel not to be thoughtful during the next four days of the trip. Matthew, a seasoned traveler, and a respecter of moods in any case, forbore to make conversation. The horses had been well-chosen; they were easy-gaited and strong-winded, well up to the journey. The two Edori traveled south at a good pace, and made it into Luminaux on the evening of a beautiful spring night.

  “Azulato,” Matthew murmured as they rode through the high marble gates. “The Blue City.”

  Nowhere in the world was there a place as beautiful as Luminaux, city of craftsmen, artists and intellectuals. It was indeed, as Matthew said, all blue. Its major buildings were all constructed from the same polished blue marble, richly veined with white and rose quartz. The cobblestones—laid in circular or fountained or mosaicked patterns—had been chipped from a grainy violet granite. Obelisks and monolithic statues appeared at irregular intervals at the street corners or in scattered parks, and all of them had been carved of lapis lazuli or turquoise. Hyacinths, violets, dahlias and lilacs bloomed in gardens and window boxes in front of every house; and even the darkening sky was an unmarred indigo.

  “Truly,” said Matthew, gazing around from the place where they had both, involuntarily, come to a complete halt, “this is a sight that refreshes the eyes.”

  They rode forward slowly, aiming for the stables on the edge of town. The buildings in this complex were made of wood, but they had been painted a serviceable navy color. The travelers knew before they pulled up before the wide doorway that the groom who would take charge of their horses would be a knowledgeable man who loved animals, for in Luminaux no tasks were considered menial; every man went to the job he loved, and was respected for mastering its complexities.

  “Ah, good beasts, both of these,” said the smiling ostler who came out to take the black and the palomino. “You did not push them too hard on the ride down, but I can see you’ve covered some distance.”

  “We came from Velora in easy stages,” Matthew confirmed.

  The ostler was stroking the gelding’s soft nose. “And arrived in Luminaux to look for merchandise? Or to commission an artist? Or—” he glanced speculatively at Matthew’s face. “Or to travel westward to the plains to join the Edori in their rituals?”

  “We’re here for the Gathering.” Matthew nodded. “But we came a few days early to see the sights of the Azulato.”

  The groom gave them directions to a moderately priced inn, and they found it with no trouble, a sturdy two-story building not far from the central markets. It was built of inexpensive white stone but every one of its twenty wide windows was fitted with stained glass panels, cerulean and cobalt and aquamarine, and wisteria climbed over the painted lintel.

  They were Edori and used to sharing quarters, so they took one room and sat before the fire till midnight, talking. Not of the trip down or Josiah’s last words or even of life at the Eyrie—no, nor of life in Semorrah, which Rachel never wished to speak of—but of the nomadic life, the quiet freedom of the Edori, in harmony with the land and the wild creatures and Yovah. They told anecdotes about clan members they both knew, or had heard of; they remembered Gatherings when Hepzibah ha
d sung, or the incomparable Ruth.

  “And will you be singing at the Gathering, is what I’ve been wondering?” Matthew asked her. “For it’s a fine voice you have, though it has been five years since you’ve raised it in song.”

  Rachel laughed softly. She was stretched out on a woven rug before the fire, feeling more comfortable and happy than she had in nearly six years. “And what makes you think my voice is so fine?”

  “We never met to speak to each other before you came to the Eyrie,” he said. “But we had been at Gatherings before, you and I, and you lifted your voice in songs I am not likely to forget. You and that Naomi lass, who is now with the Chievens. You used to sing together, and everyone came close to listen.”

  “Naomi has a beautiful voice,” Rachel said lazily.

  “Aye, that she does. And you also, or you did. But five years in the cursed city without a place to practice your songs—how you must have missed it.”

  “I used to go,” she said dreamily, “down to the wine cellars. They were huge—caves built under the river, all damp and echoey and dark. I would stay there as long as I dared—hours sometimes—and sing. And sing. All the Edori songs I knew. And some of the new ones I had learned when Lord Jethro had minstrels in to entertain. I don’t care for many of the allali songs, but there were a few I heard that I liked well enough to memorize. I can’t tell you the number of times I got punished for disappearing, but I didn’t care. There is something about singing—for me, anyway. It cleanses my heart. It makes me whole again. I would sing, and I would become stronger.

  “Sometimes when I was singing,” she continued, rolling over onto her stomach to stare more intently into the fire, “I would take my chains and shake them like tambourines. Make a joyful noise to Yovah. And on those days I wouldn’t even hate my chains, because they had been part of the music. And if I had not had the music,” she said, her voice dropping, and her head coming down to rest on her arm, “I would have died there, before my first year was gone.”