The Alleluia Files (9 page)

“Yes, tell me about this Gretchen and where in the world Lucinda has been all these years. I don’t believe I’ve ever laid eyes on either of them.”

“Gretchen was David’s sister—mortal, of course, but brought up in the hold just like he was and used to angel ways. About three years after David and Rinalda died, she went to Michael and offered to raise Lucinda herself. He objected at first, because he saw no reason an angel should be raised anywhere except one of the holds, but she finally convinced him. She had always been a fairly earnest young woman, and David’s death made her almost grim. Quite formidable. In the end, Michael agreed. And she took Lucinda away with her to Angel Rock and there, as far as I know, they have lived ever since.”

“Angel Rock! That dreary place!”

“Yes, it is not where I would have chosen to grow up myself. But she does not appear to have taken any particular harm from it. She looks reasonably refined and you have to admit her voice is amazing.”

“Yes, but those are fairly external signs. To be brought up by a joyless maiden aunt on some tiny island in the middle of the ocean—it makes even my careless blood run cold.”

“No, I don’t envy her her life,” Mercy agreed. “I invited Gretchen to come to Cedar Hills for a few days, and bring Lucinda. I hope she accepts. I think it would do them both good to be around more ordinary company for a while. And I plan to tell Gretchen that I’d be happy to keep Lucinda for a few weeks—or a year or as long as she cares to stay. I think it’s time that girl had a few normal hours in her life.”

“I wonder why this aunt Gretchen spirited her away like that,” Jared commented. “I would have thought she would have considered Cedar Hills the best place for the girl.”

“Maybe she was afraid Lucinda would always be treated strangely because she had such an odd history. Or maybe she was angry at Michael because he allowed such a series of disasters to happen, right under his nose. Or maybe—and sometimes I’ve thought this was the true reason—she was afraid of Rinalda’s tainted blood. That rebel streak. She wanted to get the girl as far from the mother’s influences as possible. Who knows?
Maybe she was right. There are no Jacobites on Angel Rock.”

“Let me know if she comes to you at Cedar Hills. I’d like to get to know her.

I’ll come down and visit.” “I’ll be glad to have you.”

After a few more idle remarks, they rose to their feet and went their separate ways, back to the friends and obligations of their separate holds. It occurred to Jared as he wound his way through the still-lively crowd that he had promised to make two visits in the next few weeks, although neither journey had been in his mind when he first came to the Plain. Not that it mattered; Christian and Mercy were two of his oldest friends. Visits to them could be nothing but enjoyable.

L
ucinda moved through the Gloria with a sense of inexhaustible wonder. She had never seen so many people gathered together in one place in her life. Perhaps two dozen souls all told lived on the island they called Angel Rock, and it was rare even half of them were in the same room simultaneously. To be confronted with thousands of new faces all at once was confusing and bewildering.

And wonderful. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so excited. Well, she could, though. The day, a little over two years ago, when a cruise ship carrying a hundred passengers from Luminaux to Ysral had foundered off the edge of Angel Rock, and all one hundred had come to stay on the island. The three small inns that served as the main commercial center of the island could not easily accommodate all guests, but they did what they could. Men and children were bunked in the taprooms and the parlors, while the women were allotted the beds and couches and floors of the bedchambers. Two young girls had shared Lucinda’s room with her, and they stayed up late into the night, talking excitedly about the adventure at sea and life back in Samaria. These unexpected guests had stayed for a week, and Lucinda had spent that whole time walking around in a state of rapt, awestruck delight. The shortage of food, the complete lack of privacy, the problems with the plumbing— none of these had bothered her in the least, though they had seemed about ready to drive Aunt Gretchen mad.

That was the time she began pestering her aunt to bring her to Samaria for a visit.
Can we go for my birthday? Can we go to visit your relatives? Can we go for the Gloria? Can we go, can we go, can we go?
Gretchen seldom talked about Samaria.
Most of what Lucinda knew about the place she had learned from visitors who docked for a day or two at Angel Rock, to replenish food and fuel, to rest after a bad storm, to leave a mate who had fallen ill. But nothing had prepared her for this pageantry.

She was not sure her aunt ever would have heeded her pleas, except that one day an invitation came from the Archangel himself, asking them to attend the Gloria. She remembered that Gretchen had read the letter with an odd mixture of alarm and resignation, then sighed before she handed it to Lucinda.

“I would have thought he would have forgotten all about us by now,” was Gretchen’s comment. “I suppose we have that Jonas to thank for this.”

“Jonas?” Lucinda asked absently, quickly scanning the letter. Her heart had started a galloping rhythm in her chest; it took all her energy to keep her voice calm. Gretchen hated any display of emotion. “Oh, that young angel who was here last month.”

“Yes, who was just supposed to stay overnight and ended up staying for three days because you flirted with him so much.”

Lucinda looked up. “I didn’t
flirt
with him,” she said mildly.

“Well, whatever you call it, when you sit up all night playing melodies on your harpsichord and singing harmony together.”

“He had a nice voice,” Lucinda said.

“Well, you can be sure he flew back to Bael and told him just how fine
your
voice is, and that’s why the Archangel has invited you not only to come to the Gloria, but to sing.”

“He says that? Where?”

“On the second page. He adds that if you aren’t familiar with any of the sacred music, or aren’t comfortable singing in front of a large group of people, he certainly won’t pressure you.”

“Oh no! I would like it very much!”

“It’s his way of telling me,” Gretchen said, taking the letter back and reading it for a second time, “that he wonders if I have raised you right, taught you all the things you need to know. It’s his way of finding out if I have been a fit guardian for you.”

“Why wouldn’t you have been? And why would he care?” Lucinda asked, puzzled. Gretchen merely sniffed and refused to answer.

“But he can’t fault me for your voice or your musical
training,” her aunt went on with a certain grim satisfaction. “That he’ll see right away.”

“He will? Then does that mean—oh, Aunt Gretchen, can we go to the Gloria? Can we really?”

“We don’t have a choice about it,” Gretchen replied, but her voice, and her expression, softened as she looked at Lucinda’s joyous face. “You don’t gainsay the Archangel. But you’re happy about it, aren’t you? Well, then. Maybe it’s worth going.”

They had spent the next few weeks in a frenzy of preparation, cleaning and repairing their best clothes, practicing the music Lucinda would sing at the Gloria, hiring neighbors to care for the inn while they were gone, contracting with a ship owner to carry them to Breven.

This should have been easy, since there were ships in and out of Angel Rock on a daily basis. But many of them were Edori vessels, and Gretchen had an advanced and unshakable distaste for the Edori which she had never satisfactorily explained to Lucinda. “They’re heathens,” she told her niece once. “They don’t live like civilized folk.” Another time she spoke contemptuously of the Edori’s heretical religion, similar to the Samarians’ true belief in Jovah but radically different in that the Edori did not recognize Jovah as the one supreme god. Still another time, she mentioned that the Edori did not believe in marriage and recognized no bond to another living soul. Lucinda let most of this roll once through her head and then melt away, as she did with so many of her aunt’s pronouncements. The truth was, Lucinda had decided, Gretchen lived by a set of rigid standards that she was afraid to relax for herself, and so she viewed with profound distrust anyone who was gaily able to contravene her own narrow definition of correctness.

So—although Gretchen had overcome her dislike of the Edori enough to trade with them on a regular basis—she would not accept a berth on one of their ships. Which was unfortunate, since most of the ships that put into the small harbor at Angel Rock were Edori.

It had not always been that way—or, at least, Angel Rock had not been intended as a haven for Edori. Until the last century it had not even been inhabited. The ocean that lay between Samaria and Ysral was too vast for an angel to cross in one day, and so angels had never been able to fly the distance to the smaller continent. It had been Edori who had first navigated
the unmarked sea to discover Ysral, whose existence had long been rumored. Edori had settled Ysral and made it their homeland, and so many of them emigrated there that within fifty years of its discovery, almost no Edori were left on the central continent of Samaria.

Once the Edori established themselves on Ysral—and once they began ferrying back boatloads of exotic fruits and marvelous grains—it became only a matter of time before the Jansai and other Samarian entrepreneurs opened up their own trade routes to Ysral. And once ordinary Samarians were traveling between continents, it became imperative for angels to find some way to negotiate the waters so that they, too, could freely move between civilized lands. They could journey by boat, of course, though it was beneath their dignity. They preferred to fly.

And so exploratory teams of Jansai were sent out to locate suitable islands along the route to Ysral where an angel could rest along the way. Angel Rock, which was almost midway between the two continents, proved to be perfect. It was large enough to support a small community that would cater to the traveling angels, and hospitable enough to make that community a pleasant place to live.

It was never expected to be more than an outpost, a single utilitarian dorm with one or two misanthropic overseers who did not mind their solitary existence, but it had grown to be something a little more lively. Angel traffic was heavier than first anticipated; Edori ships put in there constantly, Jansai traders less regularly, and commercial liners from Luminaux or one of the Manadavvi ports even less frequently. But it had become a point of pride among the residents of the island to be able to offer good food; quality accommodations, and passable entertainment to their visitors, and so the reputation of the island had become quite high. High enough to draw world-weary tourists every once in a while, who stayed for the summer season, swam in the sun-warmed ocean, bargained with the Edori for incredible goods, and generally considered the island a luxurious retreat from the stresses of their lives.

So it had not been, for Lucinda, a particularly lonely existence. But that did not keep her from desiring, with all her heart, to travel to Samaria and sing at the Gloria. It took so long for Gretchen to find a ship she was willing to cruise on that, more than once, Lucinda considered offering to fly them both to the
continent. But she knew better than that. Gretchen was afraid to fly. They would go by boat or they would not go.

At last a Manadavvi pleasure ship came through, and the captain willingly agreed to take two passengers as far as the port of Lisle on the edge of Gaza. Were they willing to leave in the morning? They were. Providentially, one of their guests that evening was an angel who would be flying back to the Eyrie in the morning. With him, Gretchen sent a letter to Bael informing the Archangel that she and her niece would arrive at Lisle in nine days. Would he have someone meet them there to escort them to the Plain of Sharon?

The voyage itself was much more boring than Lucinda had expected. She was not allowed near any of the interesting parts of the ship (the engine room, the galley, the captain’s bridge), and the area of the upper deck where she was permitted to stroll was greatly restricted. She did enjoy standing at the stern and watching the aquamarine water curl away into a sculpted white wake as the ship made its stately way through the ocean. And she struck up a few conversations with the other travelers on board, though she had always found Manadavvi to be haughty and unsociable, and these were no different. And Aunt Gretchen, predictably, was seasick. So Lucinda had very little to do and no one to talk to.

But, oh! how different it was in Lisle, in Gaza, on the Plain of Sharon! And what color, what music, what splendor there was at the Gloria!

Within minutes after singing her piece, Lucinda had managed to evade her aunt’s eye and melt into the crowd. Since they had arrived at the hotel on the Plain, it had become easier and easier to slip away from Gretchen, who had become increasingly distracted by all the people gathered for the event. This despite the fact that Gretchen had tried to keep a tighter hold on Lucinda than usual. But here, at the Gloria, it was impossible to keep track of anyone.

The first thing Lucinda did when she got free of the angels was buy a stick of candy-coated ice cream. She had seen dozens of others eating these confections and she had practically ached with desire. When she learned that not only did the ice cream come in a variety of flavors, but the candy coating did as well,
she was struck dumb. She had not even imagined such luxury in her life.

The ice-cream vendor smiled at her. It was early in the day and he was not yet irritated with the crowds. “There’s strawberry ice cream covered with white chocolate, strawberry ice cream covered with dark chocolate, chocolate ice cream covered with orange candy, chocolate ice cream covered with mint, cherry ice cream covered with peppermint—”

“Strawberry and white chocolate,” Lucinda said very quickly, before she could hear another choice and change her mind. She handed over a silver coin (Gretchen had given her a handful and said gruffly, “I suppose you’ll want to buy a few things”), and moved down through the bazaar. Nothing in the world could compare to this.