Archangel (50 page)

“That is where the next thunderbolt is to fall,” Gabriel reminded him.

“Yes, but only if we do not perform the Gloria! You said yourself we have three days. We will sing tomorrow—”

Whatever Nathan saw on his brother’s face stopped his voice. “Gabriel?” he said tentatively. “You do think … we can avert the god’s wrath, do you not? You do believe we can save Semorrah and ourselves?”

God above, he was so tired. Every muscle, every bone, ached with its individual protest, but his heart was sorer than anything else. “If we sing, yes, I believe we can,” he said quietly. “But I am not sure that Rachel—I am not sure that, given a chance to see Semorrah destroyed, she would not take it. She hates that place with a passion you cannot even conceive of.”

“But—why? And surely, even if she hates it—”

Gabriel shook his head. “It would take too long to explain. You would have to understand Rachel. You would have to
be
Rachel. I think—I think she would let the city go.”

Nathan’s face was a study in disbelief.

“I’ll do what I can about the river,” Gabriel said. “You find Josiah, and tell him what I have just told you. And then find Rachel. She will probably be with the Chievens or with the schoolchildren of Velora. Bring her to our pavilion. Have Josiah talk to her. Perhaps he can convince her to sing tomorrow and spare the city. If not—” Gabriel spread his hands in a hopeless gesture. “We must do what we can to evacuate Semorrah.”

And so he went aloft, his wings feeling heavy and sluggish as he beat them against the humid air. Within minutes, his black hair was plastered to his head; his skin and even his flying leathers were soaked through. It was a cold, steady, eternal rain. It could flood the whole earth in a matter of days. He lifted his face to it, closing his eyes, submitting himself to the god’s will. As Jovah chose, so be it.

He flew higher and higher, aiming for the icy, dry air above the cloud line, but he realized after a while that there was no such
place. The rain fell from the top of the heavens themselves; there was no getting above the storm. So he circled at this high, cold altitude, shrouded on all sides by the falling rain, and he meditated a moment. Then he began to pray.

The falling water seemed to muffle his words, wash them down to earth, instead of letting them float upward to the god. He banked and altered his position till his body lay on an almost vertical plane, and he tilted his head back. Now his music rose from his mouth in a direct line up toward the god. His wings made rhythmic stroking passes through the sodden air. The sibilant hissing of the constant rain made a net of sound around his head.

There were songs to disperse the rain clouds, even such clouds as these; songs to shift aside the laden air, dissipate the collected water. But he did not sing these. Who was he to try, with his frail voice, to countermand the will of the god? Instead, he lifted his voice in songs of entreaty and obeisance, prayers of faith and supplication.
Deliver us, Jovah, from the outward symbols of your wrath. We have doubted you, we have turned away from you. But you are mighty, and you are merciful. God, do not destroy us now. Let us live to learn again to love you
… .

He sang for an hour, maybe two, his voice oddly deadened against the damp air, the swish of his wingbeats sounding as loud to his ears as the muted strains of song. Never had he worked so hard and felt so little response from the god. The rain still fell. The clouds still loured all about him, pressing in with an actual weight. He who was never cold began to feel a chill creep from his fingertips backward to his heart.

Well, he had asked for forgiveness. He had prayed for mercy. He would be more specific, though it bordered on heresy: He would beg the god to stop the rain.

Accordingly, when he sang again, he turned to the prayers that would shred the clouds and call forth the high, gusty winds. These were the prayers he knew best, the lyrics he could sing almost without conscious thought. These were the melodies that, from long familiarity, he loved the most. The god had always heard him when he sang these prayers. Surely the god would hear him now.

Almost instantly, he felt a change in the saturated currents around him, though at first he was not sure what the shift portended. A sudden swift blast pushed him from his stable position.
The rain was no longer falling straight down on his head; now it blew diagonally against his face. He banked sharply and regained altitude, feeling the icy hand of the wind butt into him again.

And he saw the black fist of the cloud open its fingers and let the light of heaven seep through.

He stayed aloft another half hour, singing the same words over again, but by then it was clear that his prayers had been answered. The rain thinned and petered out. The clouds shook themselves and fell to pieces. The sun was hazily glorious through the lifting mist.

Jovah was still there, and Jovah still listened. The worst of Gabriel’s fears could be put aside. But he was haunted by terrors almost as bad.

It was early afternoon before he landed, circling once over the whole Plain to assess the extent of damage. Big dark Galo was simply gone. A raw, blackened pass now broke the ring of the mountains. From the throat of this opening poured the glittering waters of the Galilee River, welling up from some underground source that had heretofore been partially stoppered by stone. Even now, from the air, Gabriel spotted a cadre of men throwing boulders into the great open mouth of the river, trying to dam its flow back to normal levels. It looked impossible.

He landed a few feet from the blue awning that marked the Eyrie pavilion and looked for someone he could trust with a single, urgent question. Hannah was the first one who appeared.

“Is she here?” he asked without preamble.

“Rachel?” she said. “Yes, in her tent.”

“Has Josiah been to see her?”

“He’s there now. He’s been there a while.”

Gabriel’s heart squeezed painfully down. If Rachel had been feeling rational on the subject, it would not have taken long to persuade her. “Thank you,” he said distractedly, and made his way as quickly as he could to the small tent he had had erected for her.

Before he could get close enough to listen for voices, the flaps parted and Josiah stepped out. The old man looked tired and drained; the night had been as hard on him as it had been on the angels. He saw Gabriel and nodded, unsmiling, and crossed to the angel’s side.

“Well? You’ve talked with her?” Gabriel demanded.

Josiah nodded again. He looked weary enough, or disappointed enough, to weep. “I’ve talked with her. She has made up her mind, and there is nothing you can say to her that I did not. Go get some sleep, Gabriel. The world will not turn tomorrow without you.”

Josiah gripped the angel’s arm, then left, stepping carefully and unsteadily through the camp debris. Gabriel stared after him, then turned around and stared at the tent. After a moment, he forced his feet to take him forward, and he pushed aside the canvas flap and went in.

When, over her protests, Nathan had carried Rachel to the angel pavilion, she discovered that she had never been so angry in her entire life. Considering that she had spent a great deal of the past five years in a constant simmer of fury, that was saying a lot; but it was true. She would not speak to him after he deposited her inside the small tent that had been set up for her. She almost could not focus her eyes and take in her surroundings once Nathan left. So when Josiah arrived a scant five minutes later, he was unfortunate enough to find her on her worst behavior.

“Good, you are here,” he said, ducking his head to enter and rubbing his hands to ward off the damp chill. “Nathan didn’t know how long it would take him to find you.”

She swung round on him, and the wrath in her eyes caused his mild face to open up with a wary surprise. “I should have known,” she said tightly. “Gabriel expects the worst from me but does not have time to deal with me himself. Have you come to make me see reason?”

“And I’ve come to hear reason, if you’ll speak it,” the oracle said quietly. “Perhaps you’ll tell me why Gabriel asked me to talk to you about the fate of Semorrah.”

She laughed harshly and a little wildly. Josiah waited patiently, and she began to pace around him. “Merely because I have longed to see Semorrah destroyed my whole life. I have called down Yovah’s curses upon it. And now, without any further prompting from me, the god is poised to wipe out the city and everyone who lives there. Gabriel thinks,” she said, “that this will please me.”

“And will it?” he asked.

She whirled to face him. “To see the white city smashed by
Yovah’s hand? Yes! I would stand on the riverbanks and dance! I would fall to my knees and sing the god’s praises! I would invoke the curses again, if I thought the thunderbolts were falling too slowly. Yovah,” she said, her voice falling to an intense whisper, “shower your wrath upon this thrice-damned city. Strike it with fire, with thunderbolts—cover it with storm and flood—”

She stopped abruptly and waited for his shocked reprimand, but he merely watched her out of sober, puzzled eyes.

“And what Gabriel wants,” she said, in a more normal tone, “is to have me stand beside him tomorrow and sing the prayer that will turn aside this disaster. He wants me to lift my voice, and soothe the god and save Semorrah.”

“Yes,” said Josiah. “And that is what I want as well.”

She laughed again, more faintly, pressing her hand to her mouth and shaking her head with slight, disbelieving motions. “I have been docile till now—”

“Hardly,” Josiah murmured.

“I have. I have done what they asked of me—learned their songs, lived in their high, stone prison, left my Edori friends. I have been— Every part of my life has been shaped by angel intervention, don’t you see? It was Raphael who cast me from my parents’ home and drove me into slavery—it was Gabriel who swept me from Semorrah to the Eyrie— Over and over again, the course of my life has been violently changed, by outside forces, by angels. Nothing—at no point in my life—never have I had a moment’s free will. And now—”

“Now is not the time to exercise that will,” Josiah interrupted her. “Yes, the angels were the instruments of your changes, but the plot was laid out by a divine hand. It is part of the mosaic of our life on Samaria. You were chosen by the god to play your part. The path that brought you here was twisted, yet it has brought you here, to this place on this day—and this is the time for you to play your part, to speak your lines, to fulfill your destiny.”

“I have been given no choice!” she cried. “The god’s hand marked me, and my life has never been my own! I never asked to be angelica, never asked for the hazards it would bring me, and it is not a role that I want! Surely at some point in my life there must be a choice offered to me—and I must be able to choose as I desire!”

“And why should your life be different from that of any other man or woman?” he asked her sharply. “Who among us is given choices such as you talk about?”

She stared at him.

He swept his arm out to indicate the pavilion beyond, the whole of the Plain, all Samaria. “A child is born—angel or mortal, male or female—to a wealthy family or to a poor farmer. The child has no choice in that matter. The fever takes his parents when he is young, so he is abandoned on the streets of Semorrah. Or Luminaux. Maybe a stranger is kind to him—maybe he is caught by Jansai and sold into slavery. Where is the choice in that? Maybe he grows to adulthood fine and healthy, and a runaway horse-cart knocks him into the ground and slices his arm off, or his leg. Did he choose this tragedy? All of us are victims, at some point, of a malicious fate or a scheming god. What makes you think you are different than any of the rest of us to find your life shaped by events you cannot control?”

She raised both hands, palms out toward him, in a warning gesture. “Yes, very well, into each life some chance misery or good fortune falls,” she said. “But even the meanest man, the most miserable child, has moments now and then where his will decides his destiny. He can choose to steal, or he can choose to starve—he can invest his money in farmland or gold mines—he can pick the woman he will marry or the slave he will abuse. Many factors may be out of his reach but he makes personal decisions—every day!—which will influence the course of his life.”

“Yes, and so do you. So do we all,” Josiah said. “And because we do not have control over those larger issues it becomes doubly, triply important that the choices we
are
allowed to make are the right ones—that we are not guided by hate, or spite, or fear, or revenge, or anger. If your life has brought you, struggling and screaming, to this one day in your life, Rachel—think! Is this how you make your choice? Is this how you display your heart? By standing aside, silent, so that death can sweep down? So that thousands of innocent people can die? Is this how you choose when it is allowed you to choose?”

She had turned from him as he flung his stern words at her, but now she swung back. Her face was ravaged with grief; she was actually crying, but she was still so angry that she did not appear to be aware of the tears.

“No!” she cried. “Of course it is not! I would, if I could, level the city with my own hands. I would see every last river merchant die, every overfed, rich slave owner swept into the rising river.” Her voice quieted, if only slightly. “But I know better than you, Josiah, who the innocent of Semorrah are—the abandoned children who live in the alleyways, the slaves driven in from Jordana, the timid daughters of the wealthy merchantmen, sold and bartered like so much property—do you really think I would condemn them all to death?”

“But then—you said—”

“
Gabriel
thinks I would,” she said, and her voice was so bitter and so hopeless that Josiah reached out to her. She backed away from him, swinging her head. “
Gabriel
thinks I am that lawless. I am that vengeful. I am that cruel.”

“You have given him reason to think so,” Josiah said very gently.

She nodded. She was so weary she wanted to sink to the floor, sift into the earth, dissolve into particles of dirt. “Every reason,” she said tiredly. “But he still should not think it.”