The Alleluia Files (8 page)

Before Jared could reply, Christian’s attention was claimed by a group of Castelana merchants strolling by in the opposite direction. Jared greeted everyone pleasantly enough—he knew them all, of course—then slipped away, looking for more congenial company.

He found it quickly enough, in the form of three young Manadavvi women who gaily caught his arms and persuaded him to eat lunch with them. Since the Manadavvi land fell in the province of Gaza, Jared was a frequent guest in the wealthy households, and knew all the sons and daughters. Particularly the daughters. Not one of the great Manadavvi families didn’t hope the leader of the Monteverde host would take a fancy to his oldest girl and bring her home to his hold. It wasn’t just that there was no honor higher for a mortal than to marry an angel— think of the power such a wife might wield! What father would not want to see his daughter so advantageously situated?

From their hands, Jared passed back to the merchants, and, by easy stages, back to the angels. It was late in the afternoon when he finally caught up again with Mercy, who was, for a
wonder, sitting alone at an impromptu café draped with a bright yellow awning.

“Can I sit with you, or are you enjoying your solitude?” Jared demanded. Not waiting for an answer, he pulled up one of the wrought-iron chairs, turned it around backward, and seated himself. Resting his arms on the back, he stretched his wings out behind him as far as they could go.

“I’m enjoying my solitude, but I’d rather have your company,” she said. “Are you hungry? Do you want to order something?”

Jared made a slight gagging noise. “I don’t think I’ll eat again till I’m seventy. I’ve had more pies and cookies and cheese pastries—”

“I know,” she said. “But one day a year won’t hurt you.”

“So have you had fun?” he asked. “Who have you seen?”

They talked idly for a while, trading gossip and information. Mercy was even more surprised than Jared had been that Christian had been so cozy with Isaiah Lesh.

“I don’t care for that much.” She frowned. “And did you see where the Jansai pitched their tents?”

Hotels or no hotels, the nomadic Jansai always brought their own accommodations. Always had, always would. “I didn’t notice.”

“Clear across the Plain. As far from the main strip as they could get.”

“So?”

“So is there a rift between the merchants and the Jansai? They’ve always been allies. What are they divided over?”

Jared shrugged. “The trade with Ysral, would be my guess. The Jansai want to control the flow of goods into Samaria, but the Edori are welcome at more and more ports—”

“There’s plenty of room for Jansai and Edori boats at any harbor.”

“Well, then—who knows? Does it matter?”

Mercy shook her head with a great deal of irritation. “Why are you such a care-for-nobody?”

“I’m not!”

“You are. You’re such a bright young man. You have so many gifts. But you—nothing matters to you. You let everything slide by. What does it take to stir you up? What does it take to catch your attention?”

“Well, a spat between the Jansai and the river merchants isn’t it,” he said, amused. “How can it possibly matter? If it’s important, we’ll find out about it. If not—why worry?”

She leaned forward, suddenly intense. “You should be Archangel, you know,” she said. “You’re the only logical choice. Everyone should know it. Jovah should know it.
You
should know it, and you should be at the oracles’ doors day and night demanding that they petition the god on your behalf: It is not good for Bael or the merchants or Samaria for us not to know who the next Archangel will be. And do you care? Do you worry? This is your life! Your duty! And yet you spend your days flirting with Manadavvi girls too silly to remember their own names.”

“In the first place, why should I be Archangel? Why not you?”

“I’m too old.”

“Just about Bael’s age when he ascended.”

“And I have daughters and other responsibilities and I don’t want it But you—”

“Why me? Why not Jonas or Sara? No law I ever heard said the Archangel had to be leader of the hold.”

She brushed all this aside. “Because you’re a natural leader, or you would be if you asserted yourself. Because you’re a brilliant thinker when you remember you have a brain. Because you have a highly developed moral sense and an ease with people that makes you courteous but nobody’s fool. Because you look the part.”

He burst out laughing. “Well, thank you for that, I suppose, but I don’t think it’s on Jovah’s list of qualifications.”

She sighed. “And all you do is laugh at me, and go on your usual indolent way.”

He reached out a hand and gave her shoulder a slight squeeze. “Jovah’s will be done,” he said gently. “It is up to the god to name the one he would exalt. If I spent my nights ranting at the doors of Mount Egypt or Mount Sinai, the oracles would have no more news for me than they do now. Let it go. Trust your god.”

She sighed again and spread her hands apart, signifying resignation. Jared dropped his arm. “So tell me about the rest of your day,” he said. “Who else did you talk to?”

“I spent five minutes with Gretchen Delmere. I wanted to
talk to her longer, but someone snatched her away from me.”

“
That’s
what I wanted to ask you about!” he exclaimed. “That girl—Lucinda? Who is she? What’s her story?”

Mercy instantly grew grave. “A sad one. It goes back, oh, twenty-five or thirty years. When the Jacobites were first becoming a nuisance.”

Jared rapidly cast his mind back to that chapter of Samarian history. Well, “nuisance” might not be the right word. Jacob Fairman had begun a town-to-town campaign to evangelize for his concept of Jovah—not a god but a machine, a spaceship, left over from the time of the first settlers’ arrival. According to Fairman, this spaceship, which ceaselessly orbited overhead, was endowed with wondrous equipment and abilities. It had huge stores of grain which it could release when the angels prayed for food; it had miraculous chemicals which it could shoot into the atmosphere when the angels prayed for rain. It was equipped with fearsome weaponry which could unleash tremendous destruction when the angels prayed for a thunderbolt to strike the earth—or when mortals displeased the god, and he punished them with his fury.

The threat of Jovah’s wrath, of course, was the reason the Gloria was sung on an annual basis. It had been written in the Librera, the holy book, that every year at the spring equinox people from all over Samaria must gather and sing to the glory of the god. By coming together in harmony, they were proving to the god that they lived together in peace. If they failed to perform the Gloria on the scheduled day, the god would strike the mountain range on the edge of the Plain of Sharon. If, three days later, they still had not sung, he would strike the river Galilee, which was the border between Bethel and Jordana. If even this failed to convince them to sing, he would loose a thunderbolt that would destroy the world.

It had happened once, nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, in the time of the Archangel Gabriel. The Gloria had been delayed, and the god had struck down the Galo mountain that used to anchor the southernmost edge of the Plain. There was still, under two and half centuries of creeping undergrowth, a huge black circle of rock where the thunderbolt had fallen. Never since that time had the date been missed.

But Jacob Fairman had not been impressed by this evidence. Certainly the lightning had struck, he said, but it had been tossed
down by a warship, not by the god’s pointing finger. Every sacred mystery he could explain away through science. The magical Kisses every believer wore in his arm? Electronic links to the ship’s main computer! The ability of angel prayer to call forth sunshine or lure down rain? The ship’s response to preset aural stimuli. Nothing stumped him. Nothing silenced him, either. And a small, growing group of Samarians began to listen to him, to believe him, to question the very foundation of Samarian society.

Of course, he was outlawed and his words were banned, but he only went underground, and his adherents grew. Many believed Archangel Michael had had no choice but to execute him—Fairman and a handful of his followers—for political treason and religious heresy.

It hadn’t stopped the Jacobites, however, though for many years they had seemed dormant. Bael, from the time he had been instated as Archangel, had vigorously suppressed them, and everyone had thought he had eradicated their influence. But five years ago there had been an unexpected resurgence in Jacobite fervor. Bael had quelled it in the most ruthless manner possible, aided willingly by his Jansai troops. It would not have been Jared’s way (had he been in Bael’s position), but he had to admit it had been effective.

Although recently there had been more rumors….

Jared shook his head. “This girl is too young to be one of the original cultists. She could hardly have been born in Jacob Fairman’s lifetime.”

“That’s just it.” Mercy sighed. “That’s when she was born.”

“Tell me.”.

“It was, as I say, almost thirty years ago. Jacob Fairman’s adherents were turning up in the oddest places. In Luminaux.”

“I would have expected that,” he murmured.

“In Castelana. In some of the Manadavvi households. In Cedar Hills.”

Now Jared sat up straighter. “In
Cedar Hills
? Impossible!”

Mercy nodded. “There was a girl. Rinalda. She was the daughter of angels, but she was mortal herself. Well, she was the great-granddaughter of the Archangel Delilah, so perhaps someone should have expected her to have passionate and rebellious blood. She had three sisters, all of them angels. Perhaps this led her to believe that life was unfair. Perhaps it led her to
seek other avenues of excitement. Who knows? In any case, she had left Cedar Hills to seek her fortune in the world. And somehow met up with Fairman and his—heretics.”

“Did you know her?”

“A little. I was more than ten years younger, and I had spent most my life at the Eyrie. I didn’t know everyone at Cedar Hills well. And she had little patience with angels at that time. Or ever.”

“So what happened?”

“So she fell in with the Jacobites and became quite a convert, and traveled with them from town to town proselytizing. Apparently, she was quite charismatic, too—as you might expect! A woman from the angel holds denying the existence of the god! Who wouldn’t believe her? She drew crowds wherever she went.

“Naturally, Michael couldn’t allow this to continue, so she was found and brought back to Cedar Hills. Against her will, of course. They say she tried over and over to escape. No one was supposed to bring her news of the Jacobites, but apparently someone did, because she always seemed to know when there was some particularly bloody confrontation. And she knew when Jacob Fairman was killed. And it made her nearly mad.

“But by then,” she continued, speaking a little more slowly, “she had another problem. For, although she had hidden it for quite a while, eventually it became obvious that she was pregnant. And would soon bear a child.”

“Whose child?” Jared asked sharply. “Fairman’s? A Jacobite’s?”

“Well, she had already been a prisoner for eight months before anyone noticed her condition, and it was another four months before her delivery. So it was clear that, whoever had sired her child, he most likely lived at the hold.”

Jared spoke carefully. “Was she—did she say—had she been assaulted while she was prisoner there?”

“I don’t think so,” Mercy said. “Rinalda was not the type to keep such an abuse to herself, had it been so. I think she took a lover, and it helped make her wretched days more bearable. But she never named him. Not though Michael threatened her with the wrath of Jovah himself.”

“And when the baby was born? What then?”

“When the baby was born, it was clear that whoever her lover
was, he was angelic. For she bore an angel child. And only an angel can bear or sire another angel.”

Jared took a quick breath. “Lucinda?”

Mercy nodded. “And Lucinda’s sister. A mortal girl.”

Jared stared. “Twins? One angelic, the other not? I have never heard of such a thing.”

“Nor had anyone else. The consternation at the birth was almost equaled by the amazement. For although there is always rejoicing when an angel is born, Michael found it hard to credit that any of his flock had actually consorted with the Jacobite prisoner.”

“Still. She had lived there most of her life, after all,” Jared said. “They must have known her for years. It was not as if she was some rebel farmer’s daughter who had been brought in and incarcerated.”

“True. Yet Michael was furious and demanded that whoever was responsible step forward and admit his guilt. No one did, of course, and as I say, Rinalda never named him. She was made to suffer, though. They instantly took Lucinda away from her, to be properly raised by someone more suitable to oversee an angel’s upbringing.”

“What happened to Rinalda and the other girl?”

Mercy was silent a moment. “Died,” she said quietly at last.

“How?”

“She managed to escape. Taking the baby with her. It was less than three weeks after she’d given birth, and she wasn’t strong. And it was winter—the worst winter southern Jordana had seen in this century. Two days later a Jansai caravan found her on the side of the road, frozen to death, the baby girl in her arms. Also dead. I don’t remember the last time I have felt so sad.”

“I don’t wonder. What a miserable tale.”

“The day after that,” Mercy went on, as if he hadn’t spoken, “the angel David killed himself. Flew as high as he could go over the Heldora Mountains, folded his wings to his sides, and let himself fall. You cannot imagine the shock we all felt. He had been such a beloved and warmhearted boy. Everyone assumed, of course, that he had been Rinalda’s lover. We never had any proof. But I see no other way to read the story.”

“And this is the heritage of that lovely girl! No wonder she sings with such an unearthly voice.”

“I don’t know how much of her own story she knows. So few people remember it these days—and, of course, Gretchen has kept her far from Cedar Hills for most of her life.”