Archangel (12 page)

“Judith was born here at the Eyrie,” Hannah told Rachel in a colorless voice. “Her mother is an angel. Judith and Gabriel were brought up almost like brother and sister.”

“Well, hardly that!” Judith said, laughing, but Rachel sensed
she was not pleased. “We’re close, but I never thought of him as a brother.”

“Judith,” Hannah said repressively. Judith gave her a pretty pout, then smiled again at Rachel.

“It’s just that I’m not used to the idea of Gabriel being married.”

“I certainly wouldn’t want you to change your relationship with him because of me,” Rachel said flatly. “Don’t think of me at all.”

A quick frown pulled down Judith’s delicate brows and was instantly erased. She gave a soft laugh that did not, to Rachel, sound sincere. “Oh, don’t be silly. I’m sure you’ll be a wonderful wife. Jovah picked you, after all.”

“Yes, Yovah picked me, not Gabriel,” Rachel agreed. “Gabriel got stuck.”

Now Hannah spoke Rachel’s name in that reproving voice. Judith gave her another false smile.

“Well, I do hope you’ll try to be friends with Gabriel—and friends with his friends,” she said in a honeyed voice.

“Of course I’ll try,” Rachel said, accenting the last word very slightly. Hannah motioned her forward down the corridor.

“Come, now. There’s more to see.” And so they passed beyond the beautiful Judith before any more pleasantries could be exchanged. Rachel left her sarcastic comments unsaid. She did not think Hannah cared much for Judith, either.

The second person to whom Rachel spoke more than mere civilities was the head cook in the great kitchen. “You’re the one who made my breakfast this morning?” she asked directly. “Where did you learn to cook Edori food so well?”

The cook, a middle-aged woman whose face was permanently red from the heat of the ovens, beamed in response to Rachel’s compliment. “Ah, I spent a few summers in Luminaux when the Tigrera clan used to camp nearby, and I knew a boy and, well, his mother showed me some of her recipes.” She had the pleasant lilting speech of the Bethel lowlander. “And I thought, after five years working like a dog in Semorrah, you’d probably be liking some of the good food again.”

Hannah had stiffened at the oblique reference to servitude, but Rachel laughed. “But I’m sure I could teach you a dish or two to please a Semorran lord,” she said. “I spent plenty of time
in the kitchens, I can tell you. If you ever need an extra hand to peel or stir, let me know.”

“That I will, angela, that I will.”

It did not take Rachel long to figure out that there was a polite but definite caste system within the Eyrie, and that angels rose to the top while servants sank to the bottom. Natural perversity, therefore—and a certain fellow feeling—led her to be extremely friendly to all the cooks, launderers, seamstresses and cleaning maids they encountered, while she maintained her coolness to the angels and less workaday mortals. Hannah was wise enough not to criticize or even comment.

Only once did she venture an opinion to Rachel, even before she opened the door to a well-lit room in the middle level. “I think you’ll like Matthew,” Hannah said, a half-smile on her lips. “He is our leather worker. He makes most of the flying clothes for the angels—and bags and satchels and shoes and anything else we find a need for. He is a craftsman of a high order—and a tenor with a truly fine voice.”

“Is he a Luminauzi?” Rachel asked.

“No,” said Hannah, opening the door.

He was an Edori. He was bent over a low wooden bench, his back to the door, but there was no mistaking that silky black hair or the redwood color of his bare arms. The sound of voices at the door turned him around, a smile already on his face. Oh, how well Rachel knew that Edori welcome, given to everyone, proven friend or not. How had it come to be replaced with such bitterness in her own heart?

“Matthew. I’ve brought someone for you to meet,” Hannah said.

But he had heard the Eyrie gossip; he knew who the new angelica was and where she had come from.

“
Raheli, sia a Manderra, ve a Edori
,” he said, holding his hands out to her. “
Gealamin, moschieaven
.” Rachel, daughter to the Manderra of the Edori people. Good welcome to you, rest from your travels. “So all the scattered are not dead. Yovah is good.”

She answered him in the same tongue, asking after his clan affiliations. “But how does an Edori come to be in an angel’s hold?” she demanded next, still speaking the nomads’ language.

He released her hands to gesture with his own, and gave her
a smile. “You know the Edori are wanderers,” he said. “I wandered too far into the Velo Mountains one day. And then I stayed.”

“How long?”

“Going on fifteen years now.”

“Fifteen years! Penned up in a cave miles above the plain!”

He laughed. “I leave from time to time. I have been to most of the Gatherings of the past fifteen years. Or—” He shrugged. “When I get the urge to roam, I leave. But I always come back. This is my home. I am getting old and it is a nice thing to be settled.”

“And how do you leave?” Rachel wanted to know. “There is no way out.”

“The angels are very obliging. They take me down to Velora and pick me up again when I want to return. It is an easy thing to come and go.”

Rachel shook her head. “Not for me. I have—” It was a moment before she could recall the word from the expressive Edori tongue, but of course the Edori had a word for everything. “Height-sickness,” she said at last. “I cannot be up and look down.”

He nodded. “There was a woman from our clan who had the height-sickness. For that reason, we did not travel among the mountains until she died … But surely there must be a way to get you down from the mountain. If not in an angel’s arms—”

“It hardly matters,” Rachel said tightly. “I am here, and here is where Yovah wants me. Perhaps I will never leave this mountain again.”

Matthew looked troubled. Hannah, who had politely forborne to look irritated when they began conversing in a language strange to her, laid her hand upon Rachel’s arm. “You can return later to talk to Matthew,” she said. “There is more of the Eyrie I would like you to see today.”

So she bid farewell to the Edori and promised to return when she was able. It did not take any prescience to guess that Matthew’s workshop would become a haven for her in the coming months, and all three of them knew it without the words being spoken.

G
abriel’s trip to Luminaux had not proceeded exactly as he had foreseen.

To begin with, he did not go to Luminaux at all. True, the envoy awaiting him in Velora was from the Blue City, but he came, he explained, as an intermediary and not as a petitioner.

It was early in the morning after the disastrous arrival at the Eyrie with his furious angelica in tow, and Gabriel had not slept well. Consequently, he at first blamed his incomprehension on his exhaustion.

“Excuse me,” he said to the small round man who had introduced himself as John. “Did you just say that you’ve come to ask me to make a weather intercession?”

“Pray for rain, yes,” John said, nodding.

“For the farmers south of the Heldoras?”

“That’s right.”

“But that’s in Jordana.”

“True,” John said, as if reluctantly conceding a point. “But they have had no rain for three months, and their plight becomes desperate.”

“I don’t quarrel with the situation. Clearly, they need an angel’s attention. But shouldn’t you—shouldn’t
they
—be traveling to Windy Point to ask Raphael for intercession?”

John studied the level of the liquid in the glass of water he was sipping. “Ah,” he said. “Well, perhaps.”

Gabriel waited.

John stirred. His body was a shape rounder than the wooden seat was used to accommodating. “In fact, Raphael has been asked for assistance. In the past.”

Gabriel felt his body narrow as his bones infinitesimally contracted. A whisper of premonition skittered past his ears. “What do you mean?” he asked slowly.

“Last year, same problem. Winter drought. The Archangel was asked for assistance. And the year before. And the year before that. Each time he said that the dry weather was Jovah’s plan— that Jovah would send the rain when he chose. And each year,” John went on, “the rain did come. But too late in the season to save the harvests. There have been enough crops to subsist on, but nothing left over to sell—and these farmers live on the produce they can barter. And the river has grown shallower every year. And some of the wells have dried up. If they do not get rain this year, it will be a catastrophe. They will have to give up their homes—their lives. They might as well emigrate to Breven and sell themselves as slaves.”

Gabriel frowned at the reference to the Jansai, but he was so disturbed by the central problem that he didn’t bother to speak a reprimand. “Has Raphael been there to view the danger for himself?”

“He has not.”

“So he told you—”

“He did not tell
me
,” John corrected. “He told the petitioners from the farm villages, who went three times to ask him for intercession.”

“And how is it you have gotten involved in this problem?”

John smiled. “At Luminaux, we trade with everyone. My father and I have bought from these farmers for generations. Since some of the village elders knew me, they brought their problem to me—”

“And why did they not come to me directly?”

“They thought a man of Bethel should be the one to approach the angels of the Eyrie.”

Gabriel nodded. That, at least, had been diplomatic. But the request itself—

“It is, as far as I know, unprecedented,” he said, thinking aloud. “True, mortals may ask a favor of any angel who happens to be passing through their realm. But to seek out an angel from another hold …”

“Desperate times,” John said mildly. “You are held to be an arbiter of great fairness. I thought you would at least give me a hearing.”

“And if I refuse you, I suppose you will travel on to Monteverde?”

John looked grave. “I think, by the time I arrived in Monteverde, the situation would be beyond the power of the angel Ariel to repair. You are indeed the last hope my friends have.”

Raphael would be furious—if, indeed, he ever found out. If John was speaking the truth, it seemed the Archangel spent little time overseeing his less glamorous and less wealthy constituents. Then again, Raphael
was
Archangel; perhaps the duties were far more onerous than Gabriel imagined, and it was impossible for him to attend to as many small details as he would like. Something Gabriel would find out soon enough for himself …

Raphael’s wrath was not something he greatly feared—in fact, he was sure he could generate a little anger in return if the situation arose. How could the Archangel—any angel—allow his people to suffer so, when their plight was so easily remedied? It was beyond Gabriel’s understanding.

“I’ll go,” he said. “But if I find that the situation has been misrepresented to me—”

“Not at all!”

“I will be greatly displeased. And I will remember it.”

“You will find everything as I told you. I thank you. My friends will fall to their knees to bless you. I hope you will go as soon as possible—”

“I will leave now. Give me the map, and I will go from here.”

It had taken a very long day to angle southeast across Bethel, cross the Galilee at its widest point and locate the dry plains spread out south of the Heldora Mountains. It was clear before Gabriel had even reached his destination that John had spoken only the truth. Even the uncultivated plains west of the Heldoras were brown with more than winter’s habitual blight. Dry pools and unfed stream tracks pocked the terrain, clearly visible from flying height. In a year or two, if present weather patterns continued, the whole region could parch to dust and blow away.

He located the cluster of villages without difficulty, and spiraled in for a landing at the cobblestoned center of the largest one. At the appearance of the second-most famous living angel,
the townspeople seemed equally divided between awe and jubilation. Some gaped at him from behind drawn curtains while others came rushing forward to personally and vehemently thank him for coming.

Like all angels, Gabriel disliked being touched, particularly by strangers and particularly on his sleek, sensitive wings. He took a haughty stance to fend off the more enthusiastic greeters, since physical force clearly would not do. The strategy worked, as it usually did. His admirers kept their distance, still beaming at him.

“I was to ask for Levi Miller,” Gabriel said, searching the crowd for anyone who appeared to be a leader. “Is he here? Can he be fetched?”

Levi was even then arriving on the run. Drought or no drought, he had managed to eat well in the past three years, and the sprint had made him breathless. “Good angelo,” he wheezed, arriving at Gabriel’s side. “I cannot tell you how pleased I am that you have come to us—”

“I think I understand the situation,” Gabriel said, cutting him off. “I will sing for you tomorrow morning, and you should have rain by nightfall. Tell me please how the rain usually falls here, from what direction the winds come, how many days it falls, what months are wet and what months are dry …”

Levi turned to the crowd and shouted out two names; two men detached themselves from the group and hurried forward. “We must talk weather with the angelo,” he said to them. “Back to my house. My wife will cook for us.”

So the men retired with the angel to Levi’s kitchen to discuss precipitation, cloud formation, the ideal annual ratio of sunshine to rain. This far south, snow was almost unheard of, but winter was traditionally the rainy season. Spring was damp, summer was dry, the rains came intermittently again in autumn …

“Very well,” Gabriel said when he had heard enough. “I know what I must ask of Jovah tomorrow.”

He accepted Levi’s offer of a bed for the night, resigned in advance to the usual discomfort of mortals’ homes: excessive heat, furniture that seemed specifically designed to entangle his folded wings, the oppressive silence unbroken by harmonic background singing. This night another unexpected, unwelcome distraction kept him awake: the memory of stalking away from the sobbing woman he had brought to the Eyrie to be his angelica.