The Alleluia Files (20 page)

Again, he had to throttle his own anger. “Have you ever seen an angel pray to Jovah?” he asked quietly. “Have you ever seen an angel ask for sun—and seen the sun emerge from behind a veil of clouds? Whatever you believe about the god, whatever you believe about prayer, do not disparage it until you have seen it work.”

“I do not believe in the god, and I have no faith in angels, either,” she fired back at him. “Why should I trust anything you give me? It could be poison, for all I know.”

“It will not be poison,” he said. “It could save your friend’s life. Now. Come outside and watch me pray to the god. Perhaps what you see and hear will convince you.”

She did not want to, but he could tell she saw no easy way to refuse. She could not continue to mock him if she did not witness his failures—and maybe she was curious, too. Obviously,
she had never had a chance to see an angel at his prayers; perhaps she wondered what such an act of blind devotion entailed. She followed him outside.

He took three running steps and threw himself aloft, climbing to cruising level. Normally, when he prayed, he flew as close to the ceiling of heaven as he could, to be near enough, to Jovah to pour his song directly into the god’s ear. But he wanted this Jacobite rebel to hear him, perhaps to be moved or even converted by the power of prayer.

When he started to sing, he felt like the whole world was listening, and he responded to the challenge. Maybe it was just that he had never had a skeptical audience before, and so he felt like he had something to prove; or maybe it was simply a peculiar combination of low altitude, high humidity, and the valley of central Jordana that created a setting of breathless acoustics. His own voice sounded new to him, welling up from some unfamiliar place in his chest; the words that he had sung countless times at hundreds of forgotten sites sounded fresh and powerful. He sang as if he offered Jovah the first prayer on the first Samarian morning, and he felt each note register separately on the god’s merciful heart.

He was pleased with himself when, half an hour later, he touched down on the ground outside the wounded man’s cabin. The girl, whom he had half expected to be inside, ignoring her angelic visitor, was standing outside waiting for him. She looked oddly disturbed, though she was making every effort to hide it.

“So?” she said when he came within earshot. “Where is this medicine the god is supposed to send?”

“It will arrive. It may take an hour or two—no longer. Be patient.”

“And what does it look like? How will we know it?”

“It arrives in the form of small pellets. Jovah sends different drugs for different diseases. There are the pills that ward off plague and the pills that scare away fever. All kinds of medicines.”

“How does he send it?”

“It falls from the sky.”

She nodded in satisfaction. “Dropped from the storage hold of the spaceship. I see.

“It is not!” he denied, startled. “It is formed by Jovah’s own hand, fashioned for the individual emergency—”

“If he sent blue pills when I was sick and yellow ones when you were sick and pink ones when Peter was sick, then I might think Jovah designed them for each separate crisis. But if he only has five or six different kinds of drugs, and that’s what you get every time you pray, then I think this Jovah of yours has a limited stock, such as a machine might store, and he is not a god at all.”

He was so angry he could hardly stand still; but in the back of his mind, he was hearing Christian’s voice.
Say the machine has been programmed to respond one way when it hears one combination of notes, and another way when it hears a different combination.
Jared thought of them as prayers; Christian called them aural cues. Could they be the same thing?

“I am sorry to learn you were unmoved by my prayer,” he said stiffly to the girl, because he would not give her the satisfaction of knowing she had shaken him. “Perhaps you will be more impressed by the results.”

“I heard you sing before,” she said abruptly.

He focused on her. “I can’t imagine when.”

“At your Gloria. Over some piece of equipment in a shop in Breven.”

“There were a hundred singers performing that day. You could scarcely pick my voice out from all those other strangers.”

She gazed at him steadily a moment, and without another word began softly humming the closing bars of the Margallet duet. His part, not Mercy’s. Usually a woman would hear and remember the soprano and alto lines, while a man would retain the music sung by the bass and tenor. Jared felt the skin on the nape of his neck dance with chill, and a frisson of excitement skittered over his Kiss.

“That’s the piece,” he admitted. “How do you know it?”

“I don’t know it. I just heard it that one time.”

“You must have liked it.”

She turned away. “I have an ear for music. I can’t help it.”

And she ducked inside the cabin without looking at him again. Jared shook off his strange sense of premonition and settled himself outside to await the god’s bounty.

It was not long in coming. Half an hour later the ground at his feet was pelted with a handful of hard cinnamon-colored tablets. He wished the girl had been outside to see them fall,
but he knew even this miracle would not impress her. From a fabricated god, all gifts were suspect. Nonetheless, he gathered them up and carried them inside.

She was attempting to raise Peter to a half-seated position so she could pour a little water down his throat. Jared hastened forward to assist her, crouching on the floor and taking the injured man’s weight against his own shoulder. She did not bother to thank him, but held the cup again to Peter’s mouth and watched him drink. Silently, Jared handed her one of the pills. She slipped it into Peter’s mouth and made him sip again. The sick man swallowed but twisted against their hold in protest. The girl signaled to Jared, and he lay Peter back against the pallet.

“How long before the drug takes effect?” she wanted to know.

“Maybe an hour. We can give him one every eight hours until they run out.”

She held her hand out and he poured the rest of the red tablets into her palm. She inspected them without comment, then dropped them into an empty cup at the side of the bed.

“Well,” she said, in the voice one would use to close a conversation, “thank you. I guess you’ll be going now.”

He sat back on his heels, steadying himself with his wings spread against the floor. “Why would you think that?” he said. “I wouldn’t abandon you while your friend was still sick.”

“And of course I appreciate that,” she said dryly. “But I don’t think there’s much more you can do for us.”

“But I want to stay.”

“But I don’t want you to.”

“I wish you’d tell me your name,” he said abruptly.

She looked at him coldly. “I see no reason you need to know it.”

“So I don’t have to think of you as ‘that Jacobite girl.’”

“The description suits me.”

“I am not your enemy,” he said, suddenly intense.

“And I am not your friend,” she replied.

He balanced there another moment, watching her, wondering what he could possibly say to win her over, then he rose to his feet. “I’ll scare up something for dinner,” he said. “Do you have anything or should I go hunting?”

Briefly, she looked ready to protest, and then she shrugged.
“I have dried meat. A few dried apples. Not much else.”

“There’s a stream nearby. Do you have a fishing rod?”

“There may be one in the storage cabin.”

He headed for the door. “I’ll see what I can find.”

He located no rod or reel among the Jacobites’ possessions, but a long-handled net had been packed in with some traveler’s clothes. He carried this with him to the stream, and there he caught four trout in half an hour. Afterward he scanned the riverbank for anything that looked promising. There were three varieties of purple flowers rioting along the muddy shorelines. On impulse, he picked a handful.

When he arrived back at Ileah, the girl appeared to be hanging out wash. She had strung a line between one cabin and a pole she had stuck in the earth, and to this she was attaching half a dozen dripping shirts. In the light wind of early evening, the wet clothing made a pleasant snapping sound.

“Do you like fish?” he asked, and she swung around to face him, drying her hands on the front of her blouse.

“It’s fine,” she said absently. “I built up the fire.”

He showed her the flowers. “For you,” he said.

He had never seen anyone show such a look of complete bewilderment. She stood absolutely still, hands at her sides, eyes fixed on his face, as if she had forgotten the rudiments of speech and motion. He could not keep himself from smiling. It was ludicrous, actually: an angel offering wildflowers to a Jacobite at an abandoned Edori sanctuary that had recently been overrun by murderous Jansai. He urged the flowers on her again.

“I thought they were pretty,” he said. “You’ve had a tough couple of days. Can we put them in a cup of water?”

Still without speaking, she nodded twice, and gingerly took the blossoms from his hand. In a few minutes she had found a suitable container, filled it with water, and carefully arranged the stems. The whole time she moved as if she were made of glass that had already fractured at some unimagined trauma, which would fly apart into a million pieces if someone laid even a whisper of breath against it.

“Do you want to cook, or shall I?” Jared asked.

“You can,” she said in a faint voice. “I’ll find another set of dishes.”

So they enjoyed a curiously domestic evening around the fire in the sick man’s cabin. Jared fried the fish while Tamar laid
out a cloth on the floor, setting it with two places and positioning the makeshift vase in the exact center of the fabric. She had already stewed some sort of gruel for the sick man, and while Jared cooked she coaxed a few mouthfuls down his throat.

“Is he any better? Can you tell?” Jared asked.

“His fever seems to have gone down,” she said. “But he doesn’t seem much more coherent.”

As if to belie her words, Peter suddenly spoke a few sharp, lucid phrases. “Jansai,” he said. “Killed them all.”

She laid him back on the floor. “I know,” she said. “Dawn and Daniel and Kate and all of them. But you’ll be fine.”

“My head hurts,” he said.

“Are you hungry? Will you take more food?”

He shook his head fretfully. “Where’s Conran?”

“Not here. I don’t think he ever showed up.”

There was a moment’s silence while the girl waited to see if he would say anything else. Jared thought Peter had fallen asleep again, but suddenly he spoke again.

“Tamar.”

“Yes?”

“Tamar?”

“I’m here. Peter? Peter?”

But that was all. The hurt man stirred uncomfortably on his bed, sighed heavily, and drifted off. She waited a few more minutes, then moved over to sit before one of the plates she had arranged on the floor.

Jared brought over the pan of steaming fish and served them. She had already cut up some of the dried apples and what looked like shriveled, sorry carrots. The fish smelled better than he would have expected. Maybe he was just hungrier than he’d realized. He lay the pan aside and sat across from her.

“Tamar,” he said thoughtfully. “That’s a pretty name.”

“I’m so pleased that you like it.”

“There was a famous Tamar, oh, a couple hundred years ago. You’ve heard of the Archangel Gabriel, of course? She was his niece.”

“I don’t think I was named after any angel.”

“She was mortal, though both her parents were angels. They say she was very troublesome.”

For the first time he saw her smile. He was more pleased than
he could have believed possible. “Then perhaps I was named for her after all.”

“Would you be willing to tell me,” he asked cautiously, “a little of your story? How you came to be a Jacobite, for instance?”

“Born to Jacobites and raised among them.”

He felt a surge of alarm. “Your parents weren’t among those you found murdered here, were they?”

She shook her head. “They died when I was a baby. Alongside Jacob Fairman. I was raised by their friends.”

A stark story there; he could guess at its incredible bleakness and solitude. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “No wonder you are such a staunch believer in your rebel doctrine.”

“I am a believer because it makes sense,” she replied instantly. “Not because I have been misled by fanatics. As you have been.”

“I have been taught something that seems to me to be absolute truth. As you have,” he said mildly. “I think you have been shamefully lied to, but that doesn’t lead me to think you should be executed. It leads me to think you should be educated, perhaps.”

“
You’re
the one who needs the education,” she said.

“All right, then,” he said. “Educate me.”

She was quiet so long that he was sure he had pushed her too far. When she started speaking, her voice was quiet and precise, a teacher’s voice, not a madwoman’s. Not a fanatic’s.

“We believe the original settlers were brought to Samaria on board an incredibly complex vehicle called a spaceship, designed to travel billions of miles across the landscape of the stars. This spaceship was called the
Jehovah
, and it was a marvel of engineering. Not only could the settlers live on it in comfort during the years it took them to complete its voyage, but it could be programmed to orbit above the planet they chose to inhabit for hundreds or thousands of years.

“So Uriel and Hagar and the rest chose Samaria. And
Jehovah
orbited overhead. In its storage compartments, it held medicines and seeds and chemicals, and it could release these items when people on Samaria had need of them. It was fitted with strange, amazing devices that could focus power on the atmosphere of the planet and make clouds dissolve or draw together. And it was armed with powerful weapons, aimed always
at this planet, which could be unleashed whenever certain conditions were met. When an angel sang a prayer asking for a thunderbolt. Or when the people of Samaria failed to gather for the annual Gloria, singing their songs of universal harmony.