A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “There they are!” somebody shouted.

  And there they were on a stretch of open ground littered with old car bodies and tumbled walls, lit by bonfires. In the foreground, Greens capering, black and orange in the firelight, legs raised, backs bent, stomping out their war dance, howling out their war cries: hoo-wah, hoo-wah, Wally Skins bending and shuffling, scalps bobbing on his belt and headdress. In the background the Cranks were setting off red and yellow flares, Crank colors, leaping high in a dance of their own It went on awhile It always went on awhile, working the men up to it. Then finally, the two gangs drew into formation for the attack, after which things got confusing: smoke and men running, this way, that way, men down, men up again. No question, the Cranks were getting the worst of it. They were outnumbered, and Wally Skins had better weapons. The word on the street was, he’d spent the whole Green war chest on Sudden Stop’s fanciest weapons.

  “Where those Cranks goin’?” somebody said. “They runnin’ into that buildin’! There’s people livin’ in that buildin’!”

  “Scared, I guess,” snorted somebody else. “Want to hide where Wally Skins won’t come after ’em.”

  “What’s he doin’?” asked the first voice.

  “He’s—he’s fixin’ to burn that tenement,” said the second in awe. “He’s really fixin’ to burn the Cranks out.…”

  And there it was on the screen, Wally Skins manning a big, complicated flame gun and the building going up like a bonfire while the screen peeked into every window where the grandmas were, and the mamas, and the little kids, watching them as they came jumping out of windows and off the roof, listening to them as they burned and screamed.

  Words marched across the bottom of the screen: “Odds-shop pool for minutes to insurance cancellation.”

  Abasio went to the counter and bought himself a ticket on fifteen minutes.

  Fourteen and a half minutes later, the words said, “Insurers announce cancellation. Winners fourteen and fifteen.”

  Abasio went to pick up his winnings. A silver rat, which was nothing to be sneezed at.

  “He’s dead,” said a bearded bettor, shaking his head.

  “Who’s dead?” asked Abasio.

  “Wally Skins is as good as dead. Ten to one, he’s in the debt-arena by next week. Ten to one they’ll make the Greens fight the Survivors! Wally Skins went way too far this time.”

  Abasio shook his head. It could happen. The Greens would have to pay the damages, insurance or no insurance. Their slaves, tots, conks, and hags could be sold at auction, but that wouldn’t bring nearly enough, so the Greens would be summoned into the debt-arena, where half the ticket sales went toward payback. Even matched against average fighters, most gangs only lasted four or five bouts in the arena. Matched against Survivors, the Greens would be lucky to last one time. Somebody was set on making an example of the Greens.

  When Abasio got outside, the whole city smelled of smoke, and the first person he saw was TeClar.

  “I gotta message for you, Basio. Kerf, he tole me you should go to Purple House, quick.”

  “Now what does he want?”

  “It not him. It’s that Sybbis. She’s goin’ to a ark-type village to consult a Or-a-cle, an’ Kerf, he knows you go to the country sometimes, he wants you along. You be guide and fight off the trolls.” TeClar almost broke himself up laughing at this idea. But then, TeClar had been born in the city and had never seen a troll.

  Though it was early morning in the village, the Water Babies were already playing under the waterfall, their infant voices heard everywhere in the village, raised either in joy or in complaint, as shrill as treble bells.

  Orphan, still abed, pulled the blankets over her head, made a nose-hole to breathe through, and tried to go on sleeping. She’d been cleaning Burned Man’s House until long after dark and felt much aggrieved at this early-morning racket. Every morning it was something! If it wasn’t the Water Babies, it was Hero, clanging his sword on his shield and declaiming in the village square. If it wasn’t him, it was Fool, standing by his fence calling “Mama, Mama” in his cracked voice, or Oracle chanting versicles into the predawn silence. Each of them seemed determined to break the night-still with some particular vehemence of his or her own, let lesser folk lie wakeful if they would.

  Another peal of infant laughter!

  Orphan sat up, ready to rage at the world!

  Silence. Silence more unnerving than the noise.

  She cocked her head and listened, Nothing. Babies suddenly quiet No clangor of swords No chanting voices. No Bastard shouting imprecations at this one or that one. Only the waterfall muttering to itself as it always did. Only the subliminal crackle of psychic flames from the Burned Man’s House.

  “What’s happening?” Orphan asked sleepily.

  “Somebody coming,” said the guardian-angel from its perch by the doorpost. “Horses over the hill, the hill, galope, galope, galope.”

  Orphan sighed. It was a conspiracy. On days she got up early, nothing much happened. On days she wanted to sleep, something always interrupted. As though the universe had her in its sights and aimed to keep her always on the verge of exhaustion.

  She rolled off her cot to land half-squatting beside the hearth where she stirred up the coals, threw on a sparse handful of dry twigs, and swung the kettle over the resultant blaze. Out back she pumped a gush of icy water for her morning ablutions, scrubbed her teeth with her fingers dipped in wood ash, and pulled a comb through her hair. Inside once more, she dragged the cleanest of her three smocks over her head, thereby reminded it was washtime again. Everything she owned was dirty, not ritually dirty but really dirty. Sweaty Stinky. Everything but her underwear. Oracle had given her the silky chemise and panties last spring as her twentieth birthday present. Or eighteenth arrival-day present, actually, since no one knew when her birthday was. The garments were still in their original box in the back of the cupboard, too precious to be worn. Orphan was saving the underwear for—for special.

  Back in the hovel she set out her tea chest along with her new cup, a chipped one Bastard had thrown away. Breakfast would be tea and a wrinkled last-year’s applcot yet again. The applcot tree outside her door was laden with fruit, but it was yet inedible, hard little orbs of so dark a green as to be almost black. Lunch she would—well, skip, and supper … maybe Oracle would invite her to supper Or Drowned Woman.

  “Somebody, galope, galope,” remarked the guardian-angel.

  “Well, who?” she asked impatiently, dipping her fingers in the cold ashes at the edge of the fire to mark her face and rubbing a little into her hair for good measure.

  The guardian-angel didn’t say. It merely turned its head so that one eye could stare at her while the other looked down the dusty street toward the notch in the hills where the road came through from the lands beyond. Orphan went to her crooked door to see for herself. A glittering there, moving nearer. Dawn light reflected on something shiny, quite a lot of it. Too many people to be from faraway, and farmers didn’t travel like that, which meant it was probably some businessman from an Edge or some gang-lord from a city, probably come to consult the Oracle.

  As though to verify this, Oracle came striding from her cave, tattered robes swirling around her dirty ankles, to stand in the middle of Main Street staring northward toward the sparkles. “Oh, woe,” Oracle cried, lifting her arms prophetically. “Oh, woe.”

  The effect of her dramatic posture was somewhat diminished by the gather of giggling Water Babies who came dripping from the pool all by themselves. Drowned Woman was probably still asleep.

  Bastard slammed open several windows in rapid succession. Burned Man came out of his house and screamed something unintelligible but agonized. From the far end of the street, Fool tumbled from his ramshackle shanty to cry, “Somebody coming,” and strike out wildly with his slapstick, crackety-crack, batty-bat. “Maybe Mama!”

  Whoever it might be, it wasn’t his mama, Orphan was sure of that. By now, everyone could see it w
as a procession: one high-somebody gang-lord carried in a chair by sullen slaves (rent-a-slaves, Bastard, sneered to, Burned Man, pointing out the tattoos), he with his cockscomb hair dyed purple and bracelets halfway to his pudgy shoulders, followed by several other purple-crested high-somebodies, older men, riding horseback and making hard work of it, then a closed litter, with a few young gangers bringing up the rear. The youngsters were the source of all the glitter, for their leather jackets were covered with shiny studs and they carried brightly plated weapons. Orphan thought they were fire-squirt guns, though they might be bullet-shooters. Except for blade and bow, Hero’s choice, she knew very little about weapons.

  The gang-lord clippy-clopped down the village street, shouted his slaves into a stumbling halt, then just sat there, staring at Burned Man and the Water Babies, his mouth making a moist round hole in his plump, hairless face. Oracle gestured impatiently and pushed through the throng until she stood at the visitor’s side.

  “Why do you come, ome, ome, ome,” she said in her echo voice, the one that sounded as though it came from a limitless cavern, far far underground. Orphan almost snorted. She could do that voice too. Almost anyone could if they practiced.

  The smooth-faced gang-lord seemed impressed, but one of the older men answered: “We have come to consult the archetypal Oracle.”

  “Yeah, the Oracle,” affirmed the gang-lord in a childish tenor with a squeak in the tail of it. Three oldish men from among the high-somebodies stood nearest him, watching him as a magpie watches a cat.

  This is the son of somebody important, Orphan thought with sudden insight. Either that, or he’s a puppet, set up by those old men. Men like him didn’t command men like that, so somebody else was pulling the strings somewhere. That was what Hero would say, at any rate.

  Oracle was making her usual pronouncement:

  “I am the archetypal Oracle, whose words are a window into the future, whose visions are the truth of tomorrow! If you will come into my cavern.…” She bowed the gang-lord the way he was to go, but it wasn’t he who went Instead, the door of the litter opened and a purple-gowned woman stepped out. She wore shackles on her ankles, but the chains were only a few links long, not even joined, two tinkles of gold that didn’t impede her progress as she minced after the Oracle toward the gaping darkness of the cavern.

  Interesting, Orphan thought as she sidled around the corner of her hovel to the stone outcropping that crowned the Oracle’s cavern. According to Burned Man, gangers’ women were close-kept and much-controlled in the cities. Certainly it was rare for a city female to visit the village, and rarer yet for one to consult the Oracle. Now what would this one be wanting?

  The best way to find out was the listening hole she’d discovered some years back, a snaky crevice that went all the way through to the cavern from the ledge behind Orphan’s Hovel. Kneeling at its outer orifice, she could hear everything Oracle said as clearly as if she were standing next to the tripod. Orphan scrabbled over a bench of rough stone and knelt, her ear close to the hole, eyes half-closed.

  The first sounds were ritual ones: gongs and bells. Orphan caught a whiff of incense, then heard Oracle grunting as she heaved herself up on the tripod. If Oracle kept putting on weight, pretty soon she’d need a stouter tripod.

  “What ask ye of the Oracle, acle, acle, acle,” her voice demanded, the echo going all the way back into the mountain.

  The woman spoke in a petulant treble that sounded much rehearsed, the words unfamiliar, or pronounced in an unfamiliar way: “I ask if I, Sybbis of the Bloodrun gang, gold-bought conk—concubine of the gang-lord. Young Chief Purple, will bear the lord a son.”

  Orphan could almost see the pouted ruby lips forming around the words, the sidelong glance beneath lids so heavily lashed, they looked like underbrush, the heavy ringlets falling at either side of her face, the breasts that jounced and bobbed like fruit on a bough. Sybbis was what Bastard would call doable. Burned Man would say she was an archetypal Helen, from some old myth Both of them would mean the same thing: Sybbis was sexy.

  Orphan plucked at the smock over her own modest chest and sighed Biology, as Burned Man sometimes remarked, was both bewildering and immoderate.

  More gongs and bells, another whiff of fragrant resin. A long silence while a filmy wisp of smoke seeped from the listening hole. Finally Oracle’s voice:

  “Shall the applcot tree he blamed that she bears no fruit

  When the Maker-of-trees has adorned her with flowers

  That bloom all undisturbed.”

  Silence again.

  Orphan almost giggled, stopping herself only just in time with a hand clamped over her mouth.

  “I don’ unnerstan’,” the concubine replied in her pouty voice.

  Oracle snorted. “I think you do. If you do not, the advisers to the gang-lord no doubt will.”

  “Howdja know ’bout them?” the concubine asked.

  Oracle snorted again.

  “You gonna tell all them wha’ you tole me?” the little voice persisted in a calculating tone.

  “Of course not. You’re the one prophesied for.”

  More gongs and bells, more smoke out the listening hole. Orphan got to the edge of the outcropping just in time to see the concubine mincing back toward her litter. The gang-lord squeaked a command, and his slaves started, a nervous movement that made the chair sway and dip before steadying. When Oracle came from the cave, the gang-lord commanded his chair directly at her, as though to trample her, but Oracle stayed rooted like a tree Unflappable, Oracle.

  “D’ju say wha’ I wan’, woman?” the gang-lord demanded in his squeaky tenor.

  “The words are not mine, Young Chief Purple. They come as they will.” Oracle waved a dismissive hand. “Of course, they must be paid for by someone.”

  The gang-lord gestured toward one of his advisers and turned his slaves away, lashing at them with his whip and screaming in aggrieved fashion. One of the old men bowed and muttered something to Oracle, probably an apology, as he presented a purse.

  It was then, just then, that one of the younger men, the youngest one riding a horse, turned in his saddle and caught sight of Orphan. His face changed in a way Orphan could not quite describe, except to tell herself that his eyes opened like windows; at first opaque, they became suddenly clear, fixed on her own with a force like gravity. She felt herself falling toward his eyes, flying into his gaze like a diving bird.

  He was extremely handsome, her senses told her, though some reluctant mind-part denied this. What was he, after all, but a purple-crested savage? One of those whom Burned Man would have given his life to civilize? His hands disfigured with tattoos, his open vest showing a massive brown chest between its laces, his knees gripping the horse he rode as though they had grown there. A savage, of course, but his eyes stayed fixed to hers, even when someone shouted in his ear, jerking him around to begin the ride out of the valley once more.

  She knew him. She was certain she knew him. Well, how could she know him? He was ten years older than she, at least. He had never been here before, so much she was sure of.

  All well and good, but she knew him nonetheless. She felt their mutual gaze fall away as though it had been a physical thing, now unfastened, felt it drop like a rope, like a heavy chain, something she had had hold of but had now lost among the leafy clutter at her feet. Her eyes searched for it, wanting to pick it up and reattach it. Then she raised her eyes to search for him, but he was lost somewhere among the others.

  “Well now,” she said to herself, almost panicky at her feelings of loss when there had been nothing to lose. “Well now, forget this business of looks and burning eyes and think what’s happened here.” So she did, telling it off laboriously: A gang-lord came, and he paid for a pronouncement, and no doubt he will regret the payment when the concubine tells him her blossom lacks a workable bee! The gang-lord, though young, was either infertile or impotent, most likely impotent from the looks of him. Surely he knew that. What had he been hoping
for, a miracle?

  So she told herself, keeping her mind away from that other thing, that wondrous recognition she had no words for at all.

  Whatever the gang-lord had hoped for, away he went with what he’d received, the slaves plodding along under the weight of the litter; the purple-crested men glumly slumped in their saddles, no doubt bored to tears …

  Except for one man, that one man, he, he alone turning to peer back at Orphan once more, their eyes meeting again, as though drawn by some force outside themselves, as though they would never have enough of looking, enough of seeing. Then the trees came between them, and he was gone.

  She felt his eyes still. It was a cable of gold, reaching from somewhere inside her into the distance where the road went. She felt her face. It was flushed and hot, as though she had been bending over the fire where that cable was forged.

  The villagers stared after the visitors, murmuring to one another. Orphan thought they must have seen what had happened to her, but they seemed not to have done so. The world could be on fire, still they would mutter and clack like chickens, seeing nothing but the corn between their toes.

  And so, thought Orphan, another morning. And so, she thought trembling, a morning like no other.

  “I take it no son for the gang-lord,” said Burned Man, who had come out onto his porch to observe the proceedings.

  “Not from his loins, no,” Oracle replied. “How did you know what she asked?”

  “I know the cities,” said Burned Man with a painful shrug, “at least as well as any Edger knows them. In the cities a high price is paid for virgin girls who have no sign of disease, for it is believed they will produce healthy tots, no matter what sickness the ganger himself may carry. Tots are desired for the strengthening of the gangs. The young gang-lord will be very angry when he learns what you said.”