A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The baby cried. The mother nuzzled. Or maybe it was the father. Orphan had no idea which. Obviously, the two could talk to one another, because what was going on was not mere baby-parent babble. It was a conversation. If Orphan had to attach words to it, it would go something like, “How did you get down there in the first place?” “Mama, I was just climbing on the nest walls.” “How many times do I have to tell you, don’t climb on the nest walls! You could have been killed!”

  And would have been if Hero had found it, thought Orphan as she sat down to catch her breath and to consider how she was going to get down. Even Hero admitted that going up was often easier, since one’s eyes were at one’s top end.

  The Griffin had to ask twice before Orphan realized the question was aimed at her.

  “I ask again, what is your name?”

  “Orphan,” said Orphan, turning to see the large Griffin’s eyes fixed on her with a fierce bronze glare. She dropped into one of the defensive positions. Hero had taught her.

  “Not eating you,” said the Griffin. “No need for apprehension.”

  Orphan slowly straightened up.

  “Is Orphan your name? Or is that merely what you are called?”

  Orphan shook herself. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.

  “Were you merely born? Or were you created for a purpose?”

  Orphan could only stare, wide-eyed. The Griffin nodded to itself, talked to the little one a moment more, then grasped Orphan quickly and firmly by both shoulders and stepped out into the air.

  A moment later, breathless, Orphan was released at the bottom of the wall.

  “Griffins live long,” said the Griffin, thrusting down with its great wings. “I will remember you.”

  When the Griffin had flown up to the cave once more, the guardian-angel came out of hiding and sat on Orphan’s shoulder, chortling in a puzzled-pleased fashion.

  “Fine lot of good you were,” grumped Orphan, turning about to go back to the village. “Fine lot.”

  When she got back to the village, she wanted to tell someone what had happened, so, spying Poet ensconced on the doorstep of the Creative Artist’s House, she decided to tell him. Before she could get there, however, a high reedy voice called from inside the house. “Your lunch is ready, John. Wipe your feet when you come in.” The Poet’s Spinster Sister. All the time she’d been in the village, Orphan had never heard her say anything but. “Your meal’s ready, John. Wipe your feet when you come in.”

  So Poet was at lunch, and there was no one else around to tell, and when night came, Oracle said she was in no mood to be pestered.

  “Well, tell me this, at least,” begged Orphan. “Was I merely born, Oracle? Or was I created for a purpose?”

  “Eat your soup,” said Oracle, with a frown. “And don’t ask questions it would take an Oracle to answer.”

  “But you are an—”

  “Eat your soup!”

  Seasons came and went, and though at first Orphan remembered the Griffin clearly, as time went by, the incident became fuzzy. Stories and dreams and actual happenings got mixed up in her mind, and sometimes she wasn’t sure whether she actually remembered events or had been told about them or had dreamed them. Griffin got all mixed up with Changing Woman and Coyote and Bear and the dream Orphan kept having of the house in the woods with the three tall chairs. In the dream, she was tired and wanted to sit down, but she couldn’t climb onto any of the chairs. They were too high, too far. There were no handholds, no place to put her feet. In the dream she tried each of the chairs in turn, but all of them were huge and gray and carved all over with fearsome creatures.

  Whenever she had the dream, she would wake up with her heart pounding, sitting straight up in her narrow bed, clutching her raggedy blankets around her, only to hear her guardian-angel whistling and chortling from the head of the bed.

  • • •

  Oracle had taught Orphan to read and write when she was tiny. By the time she was seven, she had read quite difficult things with long words, and by the time she was fourteen, she had read all the books in Oracle’s cavern—at least, those that were at all interesting—and had started over.

  Orphan was delighted, therefore, when a new inhabitant moved into the village, one who had among his belongings shelf after shelf of books. His name, so said Oracle, was Burned Man. His people came and went for days, stowing wagonloads of his belongings into the house next to Orphan’s Hovel, which was known as Martyr’s House, and when they went away at last, leaving him behind, they cried.

  It took a little while to get used to Burned Man’s appearance, which was dreadful, but Orphan, who managed it at first for the sake of the books, found she could ignore how he looked a good deal of the time. Burned Man taught her arithmetic and algebra and geography, she seated on the bottom porch step of his house, he seated a step behind her where she wouldn’t have to look at him, marking maps and equations in the dust with a long pointy stick.

  During geography lessons, he spoke of the great forests to the east, seas of trees that stretched all the way to the eastern ocean, speckled with warrior tribes. West over the mountains lay the desert, and beyond that the western sea, the Faulty Sea, with towns along its shores. South lay Artemisia, then High and Low Mesiko and the land bridge to a whole other continent full of huge snakes and alligators and birds as tall as men. He talked of the traders who moved among these peoples and places. Mostly, however, he talked of manland, so called because the men who lived in the cities and Edges and farms shared a language and, more or less, an economic system. Mostly, he dwelt upon the cities and the gangs who ran them.

  “You make city people sound just awful,” Orphan complained. “They don’t sound very civilized.”

  “Some of them aren’t,” he had mused. “The wall between civilized and natural man is a flimsy one. Natural is born in our bones Civilization is received from our parents and passed on to our children, as a gift. If we don’t have it to give, our children don’t get it.”

  “Why doesn’t somebody give it to the cities, then?”

  He didn’t speak for a long time. She sneaked a look at him, a quick one. It was very uncomfortable to look at Burned Man for long. About the time she decided he wasn’t going to say anything more, he did.

  “Perhaps one reason for children being born little,” he said painfully, “is so their parents can teach them to control themselves while they’re small enough to be controlled. If a person grows up without controls, it’s very hard to civilize him. Like trying to stop a truck without a brake.”

  “Like Bastard,” said Orphan.

  “Exactly like Bastard. The cities are full of people like Bastard. No way to stop them at all.”

  There was another long silence.

  “But why are they that way?” Orphan persisted.

  “Think of it this way,” he whispered to her. “Imagine that people are tiny. Imagine that they can live on the surface of a cube.”

  She shut her eyes and imagined it. “All right. I’m pretending.”

  “Imagine the cube is a foot each way. There are six square feet, one to each side of the cube. And there’s one cubic foot inside, right?”

  She pictured this without difficulty. “Right.”

  “Imagine one more thing. Imagine one of these little persons can live on each square foot of outside, one person can live in each cubic foot of inside. How many outside to how many inside?”

  “Six,” she said. “Six outside to one inside.”

  “Now, if you make the cube bigger, the number of units inside increases faster than the number of units outside. Can you see that?”

  It took her a little time, but she did see it. “Since this has something to do with people being civilized, I suppose you mean a little cube is like a family. And a bigger one is like a city. Is that it?”

  Burned Man laughed his uncomfortable laugh. “You’re right. Both cube and family have an outside and an inside. Outsiders know of the world, they’re experienced, they
’ve learned what works. Insiders haven’t. They have only wants and urges. In a family, if Grandma, Grandpa, Mama, Papa, Older Brother, Uncle are all working to civilize one child, the child can hardly escape, can he?” Burned Man laughed, the way he sometimes did, all breath and no ha ha. “Even if there are two or three working to civilize one, it works out. But if there is only one to civilize each one, or one to civilize two, or three, or if the insiders grow up never learning what works and have children of their own.…”

  Orphan shook her head at him. “You’re getting upset.”

  He breathed heavily. “You’re right.”

  “You shouldn’t get upset. It’s not good for you.” Oracle had told her as much. “Stop thinking about cities.”

  He made a funny noise, not quite like a chuckle. More painful, somehow. “I’ll try.”

  Orphan tried to help. “When men went to the stars, they should have taken everybody.”

  He started to say something more, then stopped. Orphan waited. Suddenly he stood up and went into his house, shutting the door firmly behind him.

  Orphan stayed on the porch steps until she was sure he wasn’t coming back. When she got back to her hovel, she found Oracle waiting for her.

  “What was Burned Man going on about?” Oracle asked her softly.

  Orphan quoted Burned Man as best she could, concluding:

  “He said the cities were too big to be civilized by anybody.”

  Oracle sighed. “Poor man! I wish he’d understood that before.”

  “Before what?”

  Oracle hummed and jittered. “Well, Orphan … before he burned himself. He thought immolating himself would make someone do something.”

  Orphan felt unaccountably angry at this, for it made no sense. “He burned himself! Why did he do that?”

  Oracle patted her, calming her down. “Burned Man was an Edger.”

  “What’s an Edger?”

  “Someone who lives in an Edge. That is, not in the city itself, but in the protected Edge, which has retained much of what the cities lost long ago. Technology, Law, Arts and sciences. The Edges, so I am told, are blessed places where a remnant of true humanity has saved itself. The Edges, so I am told, are damned because the people there turned their backs on those in need when they fled the cities. Whichever, or perhaps both, Burned Man was an Edger, and he was also what is called a reformer, you understand? He saw suffering in the cities and wished to alleviate it.”

  “He told me about that,” Orphan said.

  “He tried to help and couldn’t. He tried to get other people interested, but they weren’t. Finally, he went to the Council Building of the Edge where he lived, he sat down on the steps, poured fuel on himself, and set himself alight. He left a letter of protest saying he hoped his horrible death would draw attention to the problem and something would be done.”

  Tears seeped down. Orphan’s cheeks. “Poor Burned Man,” she whispered. “He went on living, and nobody did anything.”

  Oracle shrugged. “What was there to do? As you said, it was too large a problem to have an acceptable solution. Some fires cannot be put out, they must consume themselves. Some knots cannot be untied, they must be cut. But people can’t accept that. Burned Man couldn’t Poor man. He’s an archetypal Martyr, a walking accusation, an uncomfortable neighbor. So they sent him here.”

  “Are all of us here uncomfortable people?” asked Orphan.

  “Most of us.”

  “Including me?”

  Oracle looked into her eyes, stroked her cheek, said tenderly, “I imagine so, child. I imagine so.”

  “I tell you one thing,” said Orphan angrily. “Before I’d go burn myself, I’d be sure it would do some good.”

  People came and went in the archetypal village. Glutton came one spring, but died of overeating by fall. Poet died, and in his place came a Painter with an irascible little wife of faded beauty who sounded almost exactly like Poet’s Spinster Sister. Conspirator came for a time, then disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Sycophant arrived and pitched his tent next to that of Hero, just in time to be eaten by a huge stinky troll that came down from the hills. The troll had finished Sycophant and was about to start on Gossip when Hero returned from somewhere all out of breath and killed it dead. Orphan didn’t sleep well for a long time after that.

  Everyone got older, even Ingenue, who went on saying she was nineteen just as she always had.

  Every now and then Oracle asked Hero about the walkers, being as casual about it as she could manage, and he said they still stalked the roads of the world, asking the same question they had asked for years. “Have you seen a dark-haired girl, a fosterling perhaps. A girl of seventeen? A girl of eighteen?”

  Lately, Bastard had made a habit of hiding where Orphan couldn’t see him, then whispering to her in a voice out of nightmare. Sometimes he was in the trees along the path or outside her window.

  “There are other villages,” he whispered in the dark night, his voice like a ring of smoke, circling, infiltrating.

  “There are villages where the Hero is the Fool, where the Oracle is the Idiot, where the Bastard is the Hero.”

  Orphan sat on the stool beside her fireplace and tried to pay no attention.

  “There are villages where time turns back on itself and the old wonders rise again,” he whispered. “Where man is the lord of creation and woman his willing servant. Where pain is pleasure, Orphan.”

  She turned, seeing him peeking at her at the window corner. His eyes had red sparks in them, like the eyes of an animal at the edge of firelight. His teeth showed between his lips, very white.

  “There are villages where my kind and your kind are allies,” he said to her. “Maybe, even … lovers.”

  Orphan got up and ran out the door, toward Oracle’s cavern, where she’d feel safe. Behind her she could hear Bastard’s soft laughter, a clinging sound, a sucking sound, making her think of the bats in Oracle’s cavern, who made that same sound as they digested the blood they had drunk in their nightly forays.

  One time she saw Bastard talking with Fool. Bastard never talked with Fool, no one did, really, and Fool never listened to anyone. Usually, he just stood beside his gate, looking up the road, crying “Mama, Mama.” Now there was something evil in the line of Bastard’s back, something horrid in Fool’s fascination.

  Neither of them had seen her. She stopped around the corner of Fool’s shack, where she could hear without being seen.

  Bastard chortled. “Oh, she was young, just the age I like ’em. She had long hair, down to her sweet little ass. She kind of twitched, the way they do, walking along. And I said to myself, ‘I’m going to have a piece of that or know the reason why!’ ”

  Fool repeated the words after him: “… piece of that.”

  Orphan poked her head around the corner of the house to see Fool rocking to and fro, petting himself between the legs. He did that sometimes. In fact, he did that a lot of the time.

  Bastard said, “I asked around until I found out where I could find her. I take what I want!”

  “Take what I want! Take! What I want!” Fool giggled and bounced. Then he became very still and took his hands away from himself. “Mama said no,” he said to Bastard in a strangled-sounding voice. “Mama said no.”

  Bastard poked him and laughed. “Ah, well, but your Mama didn’t know this girl. So that night, I went in through her window with a knife.…”

  “Through her window,” Fool cried with a sidewise glance, licking his sloppy lips. “With a knife.”

  “Just to keep her quiet and respectful.” Bastard laughed his sucking laughter. “I like women who are respectful!”

  Orphan felt her shoulder seized firmly in a large, hard hand.

  “What filth are you listening to?” Oracle demanded in a whisper.

  “Bastard’s talking about raping someone,” Orphan replied, rubbing her shoulder.

  “No doubt,” said Oracle, pulling her around the back of Fool’s shack and away towa
rd the cavern. “What did you think the R branded on his forehead was for—reformer?”

  “No,” grunted Orphan. “I know what it’s for. Oracle, it wasn’t what he was saying. It’s that he’s talking to Fool.”

  Oracle frowned and nodded.

  Orphan went on. “Fool doesn’t usually talk with anyone. He just stands at the gate of his house, staring up the road.”

  Oracle sighed. “That’s the way his mother went, after she left him here years ago. At first he stood there at the gate and howled, day and night. Finally, I told him if he howled, his mother would die and never come to him, but if he would be a good quiet boy, his mother would come fetch him, eventually.”

  “Will she come back?” asked Orphan.

  Oracle shook her head. “Only metaphorically. She had an IDDI. It’s why she brought him here.”

  Orphan didn’t need to ask what IDDIs were Oracle had been disgustingly specific and boringly historic about sexual diseases, going over and over them until Orphan could have listed them and all their causes and symptoms in her sleep. Since IDDIs were what killed most people, it wasn’t surprising that Fool’s mother had died from one.

  Orphan shook her head and said, “That’s too bad. I wish Fool could be happy. I wish something nice could happen to him.”

  Oracle sighed. “Sometimes there are no nice things, only bearable things. There are no acceptable solutions to some problems.”

  Orphan knew that. Oracle had told her often enough.

  Seasons came and went; snowfall and summer sun. Oracle asked the farmer, when he came to deliver milk, whether he had ever encountered walkers. Oh, yes, he said. They were wandering the world asking the same question they always asked.

  “Have you seen an orphan girl of nineteen? Of twenty?”

  CHAPTER 3

  Abasio was lounging around Purple House one afternoon, feeling bored and restless, when the door banged open and one of the kid-Purples came in with blood running down his face and arm, one eye rapidly swelling shut and a bad cut on his shoulder.