The Alleluia Files (24 page)

As it turned out, Reuben had had other things to worry about than the angel’s dangerous maneuvering. The cannonball that had struck the bridge had sent glass and twisted metal spraying through the small chamber, and Maurice had been hit by flying
timbers. He was unconscious and bleeding, and there was grave doubt about his chances for survival.

Gretchen, who had always been a competent nurse, had assumed the chore of caring for the captain. Given a compelling task, she had managed to overcome her seasickness and resume some of her usual brisk efficiency, and she already had Joe and Rico running errands and fetching supplies for her. When they were not aiding her, they were helping Michael repair the most extensive damages to the ship. Reuben had climbed into the shattered bridge and taken over the task of piloting the ship.

That left the galley to Lucinda. The space was cramped but orderly; if she did not turn too swiftly from table to grill, she could reposition her wings without knocking anything from the countertops. She was an adequate cook, not an inspired one; she knew how to prepare a meal for three or thirty, but it wasn’t a job she sought out. Still, everyone else was obviously occupied, and this was something she could do, and so she went to work willingly.

Michael, Joe, and Rico were surprised and grateful when she called them down for the meal, though they waved off her offers of any further assistance. “Help your aunt with the captain,” Michael said. “That’s about all you can do.”

“Well, and I’ll clean up here. And make breakfast in the morning. How long before we make it to Angel Rock?”

Michael looked somber. “If we keep the engine running, we could be there before dawn. But the cannon fire did some damage and I’m not sure how well the engines will hold up. Might be best to drift in under the sails. We’re still deciding.”

“We don’t have much of a harbor at Angel Rock,” she, said, “but there is a yard where you can do repairs—”

Michael nodded. “We know it We’ll be there a day or two, most likely. But we’ll be limping into port, I’m thinking.”

He didn’t say that they were in any immediate danger of shuddering apart here in the middle of the cold ocean, so she didn’t let herself think about the possibility. Much. She of course could fly to safety in a couple of hours, but how could she leave these six behind to drop slowly, inexorably, into the hungry waters? If she knew they were in danger, she could rescue them, one at a time, fly first Gretchen then Maurice then Reuben then the others to Angel Rock or some closer haven, but it would take time, hours and hours, so she would
have to know in advance in order to save them all…. But they were not in any danger, they just had to be careful. By tomorrow they would be home.

She took a plate of food down to Gretchen, who was nursing the captain in his own spartan cabin. “How is he?” she asked.

“Cold and in pain. I think it’s best not to give him anything to eat right now. I think he may have a concussion.”

“The food was for you,” Lucinda said gently.

Gretchen looked at her blankly for a moment. “Oh. I see. Thank you. Yes, I believe I am hungry.”

Lucinda couldn’t help smiling. Her aunt was difficult, opinionated and stubborn, but she was so
strong
. Whatever the crisis, she had the skills to rise to it, and forget her own illnesses and fears. A month ago Gretchen never would have admitted that she could be so absorbed in nursing an Edori to health that she would forget her own bodily needs. But Lucinda was not surprised.

“Do you need anything else? I’m going to take dinner to Reuben now.”

“No, I believe I’ve got everything I need. Check with me again in an hour or two.”

“I will.”

Finally, Lucinda prepared a plate for Reuben and climbed from the galley to the deck to the bridge to deliver it. In the moonless dark, it was something of a trick to clamber over the disordered deck and into the ravaged bridge, careful not to tear her skin or her clothes or her wings on the sharp edges of splintered wood and ripped metal. The bridge, always small, was even more cramped now as planks lay across its tiny floor and jutted into its confined space.

Reuben sat in the captain’s chair, hands resting lightly on the rudder, eyes fixed before him on the glinting black surface of the sea. As far as Lucinda could tell, he was guiding the boat by memory alone, for she could make out direction neither by constellation overhead nor instrument panel at his side. There was so little light from the stars that they did not seem to sketch patterns either in the heavens or across the water, and it was impossible to tell where the horizon line lay.
The Wayward
could be anywhere, it could be nowhere; it was suspended in an element as foreign to her as space.

“This must be what it felt like to travel to Samaria on
Jehovah
,” she said softly, almost to herself.

Reuben did not start or turn suddenly around, so he must have heard her approach, though he had offered no greeting. “I have often thought that same thing,” he said. “But surely the sea is less frightening than the stars.”

“You can drown in the sea,” she reminded him.

“And you could, I am guessing, drift forever between the stars, lost and disoriented, with no home port to go to. I would choose the ocean any day, I’m thinking.”

“I brought you dinner,” she said.

Now he turned to look at her, though she doubted he could make out anything of her face in this nonexistent lighting. “And did you cook my dinner as well?” he asked.

“I did. It’s not fancy, but it will nourish you well enough.”

“Then you have yet another skill I would not have guessed. First you wage war like a Jansai, then you cook like any ordinary woman. There is more to you angels than a man first suspects.”

It was disguised as irony, but she clearly read the anger. “I will not allow you to chastise me for doing what I could today,” she said, laying his plate before him so she could set her fists on her hips. “It was a simple enough thing, and I was in no danger.”

“It was wondrous brave, and you were in grave danger, and I will chastise you if I like,” he replied, his voice still under control but a little less so. “As I would reprimand any of my men who flung themselves in harm’s way, even to save their fellows. Every minute you were on deck, you were in danger from falling cannonballs.”

“I was aloft soon enough.”

“And a target even a half-blind Jansai could see! Had they turned their cannons your way while you floated above them in the air, could you have moved quickly enough to evade them? I think not! And one of those shots would have torn through your soft skin much more easily than through the wood and metal and rubber of this ship.”

“They would not have aimed at me,” she said confidently. “Kill an
angel
? Bael would never allow that. Never.”

“How would Bael have learned about it?” Reuben demanded. “If you were dead and every soul aboard
The Wayward
went down, who would be left to report atrocities to the Archangel? I was close enough to the Jansai ship to see where their guns were firing. I saw the muzzle slipped free of its support and aimed toward the heavens. You could have died in seconds, mikala, great angel wings or no, and not one of us could have done a damn thing to save you.”

It had not occurred to her—would never have crossed her mind—that she could have been in any mortal danger, deliberately and maliciously directed at her person. The ball would not even have had to hit her body; it could have torn through one of those delicate lace wings and sent her plunging into the icy water. But it had not happened. She would not think about it.

“I will not apologize,” she said, lifting her chin, though he could not see the mutinous gesture in the dark. “For, say what you will, I saved all our lives. And I would do it again. Though you
locked
me in my cabin and forbade me to help.”

“Well, and it was an act of courage and quick thinking such as I could not have come up with myself, even had I wings such as yours,” Reuben said in a softened voice. “If it were not for the great fear I had for your life, I would be blessing you and thanking you now. But my heart stopped in my body when I saw you swooping away from this ship, and when I thought that cannon would shred you to pieces overhead, I nearly died myself. I am not used to denying anybody the right to defend himself or his friend. I don’t know why it was so hard on me to see you take a chance I would cheer anyone else for taking. Maybe I am like every other Samarian, and I think any angel is a precious thing. But I would not like to live through another afternoon like this one.”

“No, and neither would I,” Lucinda said in as offhand a voice as she could manage after that extraordinary speech. “Let us hope none of us is ever at such risk again.”

Moments after that she left the bridge, murmuring some incoherent phrase about needing to clean the galley. Well, all Edori were flirts; she had heard that often enough from Gretchen, from her friends on Angel Rock. All Edori could charm the heart from a woman’s body with honeyed words poured into her ear; they were laughing lovers who left nothing but warm regret behind. And sailors—they were not to be trusted, they wooed girls in every port from Lisle to Port Clara to the Ysral harbors, and to not a single one were they true. So
the words of an Edori sailor, sweet though they sounded, were as insubstantial as foam lashed up by a falling wave.

And yet he had sounded sincere, and the anger, she knew, had been genuine; so maybe, the least littlest bit, he cared if she lived or died. And the thought was so amazing, so huge but so intimate, that she could not get a hold of it. It made her shiver, made her sing, made her wrap her wings around herself for comfort and celebration. She stood for maybe half an hour in the tiny galley, cocooned in her own feathers, motionless, thoughtless, buffeted between doubt and fear, and wondered what it would be like to be drowned in an Edori’s love.

But her dreams that night were anything but romantic. Lately— since the morning of the Gloria—she had had odd nightmares, filled with fear and violence and desperation. Once or twice, waking at midnight, she would find herself still gripped by a wretched panic, a sensation so strong that she could not believe it was stirred up by nothing more alarming than a dream. It would sometimes be hours before the desolation faded and she could sleep again in relative peace.

But it had been a few days since she had had the nightmares, and she had been so tired this night upon seeking her bed that she had thought she would fall instantly asleep. And so she did—but a few hours later she woke herself by her own crying, soft and hopeless and unfathomable. Her face, her pillow, her hair were all wet with tears; she must have been weeping for some time before her sobs awakened her. She was surprised by the leaden weight on her chest, the sense of loss and helplessness. What could she have been dreaming of, what terrible images or fears had clenched upon her heart in the night? Dimly her mind showed her pictures of broken bodies, bloodied clothing, but she could not reconstruct a narrative. Maybe it was simply that the violent events of the day had gone reeling through her head in a drunken, brutal sprawl, and her mind could not process them rationally. It was not an easy thing to confront the possibility of one’s own death, or the deaths of those nearby. She was not used to such sober thoughts; they shocked through her body and transmogrified themselves to nightmares.

She turned to her side and pillowed her head on her hands, but she was a little afraid to go back to sleep. She still felt weary,
drained, and sorrowful, for no cause that she could identify (no one
had
died, after all). Even Maurice had seemed stable enough when she last checked on Gretchen before seeking her own bed. Everything would be fine. Reuben or Michael had apparently decided that the engines were whole enough to do their work, for they were still moving through the ocean at top speed and they would be at Angel Rock sometime before morning. They would all be safe there; everything would return to normal. A few more hours and all would be well.

T
he tiny harbor at Angel Rock was crowded: in addition to the various small working craft owned by island residents, there were three visitor ships lined up at the dock. Two were Edori and one bore the blue colors of Luminaux, so Lucinda, who had been fearing Jansai, relaxed. No danger lurking here.

Always a sleepy port, Angel Rock at dawn was completely deserted. Lucinda flew in low over the wharf, just in case anyone was astir, but she spotted no one. So she flew on to the Manor, the eight-bedroom inn that she and her aunt Gretchen operated, and landed on the flagstoned walk leading to the front door.

Emmie was standing on the porch, shaking out a rug, which she dropped to the ground when Lucinda touched down. “You’re back! We weren’t sure when to expect you! Your aunt wrote from someplace a week or so ago and said it might be another fortnight—”

“Is Jackson here?” Lucinda interrupted. “We’ve got a hurt man on our ship, and we’ll need a stretcher to carry him back here.”

“He’s sleeping, I’m sure.” Emmie sniffed. “I’ll wake him if you like.”

“Yes. Tell him to go to the dock and await
The Wayward.
Then get a good breakfast ready for five or six. I’ll go see if I can find Hammet. How many rooms are empty?”

“Four of them.”

Lucinda nodded. “We’ll put Maurice in one and the others can share. Or—I don’t know, they might want to sleep on the
ship. At any rate, they should be here within the hour, so please hurry.”

Emmie disappeared back inside, leaving the rug in the dirt. Lucinda hurried on foot down the short road to the Gablefront Inn, run by Hammet and Celia Zephyr. They were a charming, erudite couple who had retired to Angel Rock from Luminaux five years ago; Hammet had been a surgeon of some renown and Celia had been a metalworker. Although Hammet never failed to point out that his specialty had been bone repair, he was the closest thing to a doctor living on the island, and so they all brought him their illnesses, injuries, and aches for healing.