Archangel (8 page)

Very well, then. Gabriel did not like it, but it seemed she was among the serving class, most probably a visitor to the mansion, come in the train of some merchant’s wife. He slept lightly for a few hours, then rose to prowl the lower corridors of the great house, stalking up and down the cramped hallways where the abigails and lady’s maids were quartered. But the Kiss remained cool and dark against his arm. She was not there.

He returned to his room, to spend the last hours of the night brooding at his window. She was in Semorrah, she had to be. All right, she had heard him singing yesterday, but perhaps she had heard him from some vantage point other than this house. She had been in a passing cart, or listening at the window of one of
the great houses a few blocks away. She was within the sound of his voice, that much at least he could cling to. Tomorrow—this morning—he could seek her again. He could take wing and hover over the city, singing the tender country ballads that women seemed to like so much. She would hear him, wherever she was. She would look up, and against her will, perhaps, stop whatever she was doing to listen to him, moved without knowing why by the timbre and cadence of his voice—

His meditations were abruptly interrupted by the opening of the door. He glanced impatiently over his shoulder to see one of Jethro’s wretched slave girls entering with a coal scuttle and broom—no doubt the same one who had built the unwanted fire yesterday morning. He spared her only a glance before turning his attention once more to the empty cobblestoned streets just beginning to take shape in the dawn light.

He would sing, and she would hear him, and he would know she was near because his arm would burn as it was burning now, as if the slave girl had indeed lit the fire and held a live coal to his arm—as perhaps she had done the morning before—

He wheeled silently and stared at her. She was crouched over the hearth and did not look his way. Bare feet took him soundlessly to the doorway; not until she rose and made to leave did she realize he had moved. The Kiss on her own arm was alive with mutinous amber lights. She looked to be nothing but eyes and tatters and undomesticated golden hair.

“Unbelievable,” he said, and then he spoke her name.

R
achel stared up at the angel’s face and felt a shiver of panic. Pride made her hide it behind a scowl. “Who are you?” she said, pretending ignorance.

He had clearly never been asked the question in his life, and was instantly affronted. “I am the angel Gabriel,” he said stiffly. “I lead the host at the Eyrie.”

“Oh,” she said.

“And you?” he asked. “You are Rachel, daughter of Seth and Elizabeth?”

“I’m Rachel,” she said cautiously.

“I’ve been looking for you for weeks.”

She felt her panic grow, and her hostility with it. Both were unreasonable. “Why?” she asked in a most ungracious tone of voice.

He took a deep breath, seemed to consider somewhat hopelessly what to say, and expelled the breath. “Did you know,” he said at last, speaking with great effort in a gentle voice, “that I am to become Archangel later this year?”

“You are?” she said.

He nodded. His blue eyes never stopped searching her face, as if he were seeking ways to slip behind the mask of her expression. She felt her scowl deepen in response. “Every twenty years, a new Archangel is chosen by Jovah, to lead all angels and all peoples of Samaria. This summer, I will lead the singing of the
Gloria for the first time.” He hesitated. “You do know what the Gloria is, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said sharply. “I’m not stupid.”

He was still watching her. The jeweled color of his eyes was beginning to reverberate in her head. “Then you also know that one of the people singing beside the Archangel is the woman chosen by Jovah to be his bride—his angelica—a mortal woman joined to the angels in harmony.”

This was getting deeper into dogma and ritual than the Edori had ever taken Rachel, but she nodded. “Certainly.”

He took another long breath. “And the woman Jovah has chosen as my bride,” he said, “is you.”

She felt herself staring at him like a half-wit.

“That is,” he murmured, “if you are Rachel, daughter of Seth and Elizabeth, born in a small Jordana farm town not far from the Caitana foothills.”

“I was born near the Caitanas,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “But I have not been there … for years and years.”

“I have been to that place,” he said abruptly. “It appeared to have been destroyed. What happened to it?”

She shook her head. “I was very young. I have few memories of that time and place.”

“Then what happened to you? How did you get from there— to here?”

“I was adopted by the Manderra clan of the Edori people,” she said, her voice taking on a certain proud lilt; so the Edori always identified themselves to each other. “They found me when I was a child. I was with them until I was twenty.”

“And then?”

Her expression became ironic. “And then what do you think? How do Edori women usually become allali slave girls?”

She deliberately used the contemptuous Edori word that once meant merely “city dweller” but had come to mean also money-grubber, cheat, slave trader, whoremonger and anyone engaged in unsavory commerce. She saw with satisfaction that he knew the word and did not like it.

But he managed to reply in an even voice. “I imagine, through the intervention of a Jansai war band,” he said. “And that’s what happened?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Five years ago.”

“Who was taken? Everyone from your clan? The other Edori I have spoken to said the Manderras were dispersed.”

“Dispersed or dead,” she said in a hard voice. “There were maybe ten Manderras in the slave train that brought me into Semorrah. There were also Edori from other clans, some that I knew, some I did not. What happened to the rest of the Manderras I do not know.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. She did not reply. He spoke more briskly. “You can tell me more of your story once we are at the Eyrie.”

She realized she was staring again. “At the Eyrie?”

“Yes. We will leave today—now—as soon as you are ready and I have told Lord Jethro that I am taking”—he paused, and eyed her somewhat unfavorably—”one of the members of his household with me.”

“But I don’t want to go with you,” she said.

He stared at her as if she had spoken in tongues. “Don’t want to? Are you mad? Don’t want to come to the Eyrie with me—to be
angelica
? You’d rather—” His voice took on great sarcastic energy. “You’d rather stay here, in Semorrah, as a slave to Lord Jethro, when you could be a free woman in Bethel—a free woman, sweet Jovah, an angelica! What kind of choice is that? That isn’t a choice!”

“I don’t want to go with you,” she repeated. “And I’m not a slave.”

He swept her with one comprehensive glance. She felt her face flush. “I’m not,” she said defiantly. “Or I won’t be. Lady Mary has requested that I be given to her as a bride gift, and she has already promised to free me.”

He was still incredulous. “To do what? Serve her the rest of your days? Braid her hair and fetch her drinks and listen to her inane chatter about her husband and her children and her pets?”

Rachel lifted her chin. “She’s going to pay me.”

“Trust me,” he said grimly, “no salary would be high enough.”

“I’d rather go work for her than be your angelica,” she said.

“You don’t even know what an angelica does,” he said with some heat.

“No? I know what allali wives do, and a lot of it’s worse than listening to inane chatter about husbands and dogs.”

He was utterly furious, and he looked like a man who did not always successfully throttle his rage. She edged back just a little. “The angelica,” he said, through tight lips, “holds the position of highest honor on Samaria. She sings beside the Archangel at the Gloria. She hears petitions that men and women fear to put before the Archangel himself. She can, if she chooses, be a great force for good among mortals, among angels. Many angelicas have had special relationships with Jovah, asking from him boons and favors which have been divinely granted. The angelica is one step from the god.”

“The angelica, you said,” she responded, “is wife to the Archangel.”

She had not thought he could become angrier, but it seemed she was wrong. “If it is the thought of the physical relationship which repels you, you need not be concerned,” he ground out. “They marry, but Archangels and their angelicas have often made their own arrangements.”

She arched her eyebrows just a little. Stubborn unto death; Simon had told her that once. Stubborn just for the sake of stubbornness, and stubborn out of fear. Stubborn when there was no good reason for it except that she had never, not even in five years as a slave, learned to back down. “Edori,” she said, “do not believe in marriage.”

“You,” he said, “are not an Edori.”

“Nonetheless—”

“And you,” he added, “have no choice. Don’t you understand? The god has chosen you. Not I. Were I free to take a bride of my own choosing, believe me, I would not have gone to the Caitanas
or
the Edori
or
the kitchens of the great houses of Semorrah, looking for the woman of my dreams. You have been thrust upon me as this role has been thrust upon you. I suggest you accept it with as good a grace as possible.”

She shook her head. “No. I will admit it is an honor, but I decline it. I will not go with you to the Eyrie.”

He gave a small, bitter laugh and tossed his hands apart. For a second, she thought she’d won. But no. “You may say you are not going,” he said. “You may resist. You may hate me, you may hate Jovah. But you are going. You cannot escape your fate. You cannot escape the dictates of your god.”

“I have a right to choose my own life!” she cried suddenly, filled with an uprush of despair. “I have a right to refuse you!”

“Did the Jansai give you a choice? Did they allow you to refuse?” he said with an exasperated malice. “Understand this. Your life has been given over into other hands, and your will is insufficient. We leave in two hours’ time,” he added, turning away from her. “Tell who you will that you are leaving. I will see Lord Jethro myself.”

And he opened the door and stalked out, leaving her staring after him in mingled rage, hatred, astonishment, shock and fear. Perhaps he had not meant it as cruelly as it sounded, but she felt very much as she had when the Jansai rode shrieking into her campground and forever altered her existence. It had been an unforgivable thing for the angel to say, and she vowed right then that she would never forgive him—not for saying it, and not for doing it. Once again someone was taking her life out of her hands, just when it seemed worth living.

It was hard to tell, Gabriel thought cynically, who was more embarrassed at the discovery that his angelica had been laboring as a slave girl in Lord Jethro’s household for five years, but the Archangel-elect felt that he concealed his discomfiture better than his host. Jethro could not have been more apologetic or accommodating; in fact, his incoherent expressions of mortification palled quickly.

“All I ask is that you have her bonds removed as soon as possible,” Gabriel said, interrupting. “Within the hour. And that you find her some decent clothing to wear so that I am not ashamed to bring her to the Eyrie.”

“Certainly—oh, most willingly—but, angelo, let me assure you—in my house she met with nothing but kindness. There was no mistreatment, no importuning—”

“I’m sure of that.”

“One thing more you can be sure of,” Jethro continued earnestly, “I will tell no one—absolutely no one.”

Gabriel shrugged, his expression wry. “This is not a secret it will be possible to keep,” he said. “But I would appreciate it greatly if you did not facilitate the gossip.”

He had made only one stop before heading straight to Lord Jethro’s bedroom suite to demand instant admittance. The stop had been at his brother’s room, to waken Nathan and tell him the mixed news. Even half-asleep, Nathan had been properly appalled and amused.

“Jovah guard us,” Nathan had said, struggling to sit up and grind the sleep from his face. “Could it be worse?”

“It’s worse,” Gabriel replied. “She dislikes me.”

Nathan choked back a yawn. “Already?”

“She does not want to go with us. She declined the honor awaiting her. I informed her she was not allowed to decline. I would not put it past her to make a run for it. I want you to get dressed and find her. Follow her. Keep her in your sight till I rejoin you.”

Nathan shook his head to clear it, and came to his feet. “Gladly. Where is she? How will I know her?”

“Look for anyone racing from the house.”

“Seriously.”

Gabriel actually had to stop and consider. He had been so intent on the person behind the face that he had not consciously studied Rachel’s physical appearance. “Shorter than me, but not by much,” he said slowly. “Thin. Pale. Beautiful hair. Long and blond and very curly. Her eyes are brown. Her hands are chained together.”

“She sounds most striking,” Nathan said. “I will hardly be able to mistake her.”

“I left her in my room, but I doubt she’s still there. I have no idea where she would have hidden by now. I’m off to inform Jethro of the dishonor he’s done me these past five years.”

Nathan tried to force back another yawn. “And to think,” he said, “you didn’t want to come to the wedding.”

Gabriel was tricked into a laugh as he strode out the door.

It was nearly an hour before he confronted his bride-to-be again, and in that time she had undergone a remarkable transformation. She had been thoroughly cleaned up, her hair ruthlessly combed, her ragged dress changed for a silken traveling gown of deep green. The chains that had bound her wrists were gone. But the expression on her face had not altered, and she looked at Gabriel with a mixture of defiance and dislike as he entered the salon where she and Nathan waited.

“She did not run” was Nathan’s greeting.

“I’m glad of it,” Gabriel said. He studied her. Now that he thought about it, she hadn’t looked much like a slave girl this morning. Her attire, perhaps, had been wretched, but her demeanor had not for a moment been subservient. She certainly did not look like a slave girl now. Nor, with that hair, did she look
like an Edori. Neither did she bear a resemblance to any of the weather-beaten, work-weary farm women he had ever seen. “And are you any more resigned to coming with me?”