A Rumor of Angels

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  “Lute was from Quaire’en,” Ra’an commented darkly.

  Rya’s habitual smile deepened. “Yes. Does he still sing the sad sea songs? He had quite a voice in our younger days. Ah, so many friends, so long ago.”

  “That’s all the colony means to you, isn’t it?” growled her son. “Memories. You don’t really care what’s going on there now. Well, I can understand that. Life is very pleasant here; why should you trouble yourselves?”

  Jude wished she could protect this lovely smiling woman from what she knew was about to happen.

  “That must be why you tell Elgri that the shanevoralin are lying?” Ra’an pursued, building up steam.

  “Oh, the shanē.” Rya dismissed them with a gay wave, just as Elgri had done. “Unbalanced creatures. They thrive on crisis, and neglect the profounder truth of the everyday. Ra’an, I know the shanē do not lie, but by their very nature, they do distort the picture. The exiles weathered many crises when I was one of them. They will weather many more. We have not forgotten. We think of Menissa often and wish them strength in our Gatherings. Come,” she said to Jude cheerfully as if the subject were closed, “let me introduce you to the lai. They love to hear compliments on their handiwork.”

  “Rya!” Ra’an blocked her path. “What if I, who have just come from the colony, tell you that the shanevoralin do not exaggerate? What if I tell you that crisis is the everyday, that the situation is worse than you could ever imagine? Will you believe me? Or am I just another unbalanced voice to be humored and ignored lest I disturb your precious complacency?”

  Rya’s smile did not weaken, and Jude thought her either very brave or very foolish. “How serious my son has become,” she teased him girlishly. “Your first night home in nearly… what is it, Ra’an, can it be thirty years? And you will only give us frowns and gloom? You have not even told me how Daniel is.”

  In the silence that followed, Jude felt ice creeping through her veins, even as the warm night licked about them.

  “Daniel is dead, Rya.”

  At last the smile faded. “Ah. I am sorry.”

  “He died trying to find you,” Ra’an continued tightly. “After spending nine years trying to be the parents who had deserted me.”

  Tears glistened in Rya’s eyes. “There are times when one must sacrifice to fill a greater need,” she replied simply.

  “And it’s easy enough to replace one son with another.”

  For the first time, Jude witnessed Ra’an’s compulsive bitterness lash out at someone other than herself, and she wondered what she could possibly find to admire in this angry, ungenerous creature. “Ra’an, that’s unnecessary,” she said.

  “Is it?” he retorted. “You don’t think she should see what I have become, what life in the Terran colony has done to her eldest son? How can they help me if they don’t know what I’ve come from?” He turned away and took a controlling breath, aware of his own angry energy charging the night air. Rya’s hands floated upward in a reflexive warding gesture.

  “Ra’an,” she pleaded gently, “we are not so callous as you think, but what can we do? If we break the isolation of the colony, the security of the Wall is compromised. Those who went into exile understood this. They were all volunteers.”

  “I was not a volunteer! And the safety of the Wall is already compromised! It grows weaker every day. Do you think the Terrans meekly accept their imprisonment in Menissa? Live this precious idyll of yours, Rya, savor every calm and perfect day in Ruvala, for believe me, those days are numbered!” He bore down on his mother mercilessly. “There are over five million Terrans in the colony now. And more each day.”

  Rya’s eyes widened in shock but also in pain.

  “Surprised? Well, think how surprised you’ll be when they come boiling over those mountains and find you ignorant, unprepared, without a strategy to resist them! In fact, there’s no point in resisting the irresistible, is there? Perhaps you all secretly realize that. Is that why you hide out here in Ruvala, ignoring the warnings of the shanē and telling yourselves pretty stories about the brave and dedicated exiles? Is that why, Mother?”

  Cringing, Rya cried out in an anguish Jude recognized.

  “Ra’an, stop it!” she shouted, pulling the older woman to her protectively, even as her own brain burned with his invading fury.

  As always, when recognized, the anger vanished. Rya tottered in Jude’s arms. Ra’an groaned, flicked Jude a desperate glance, and fled without a word.

  Jude helped Rya to a sitting area and a soft cushion. Rya sat a moment, recovering, blotting her tears with the long sleeve of her robe. “I will call a House Gathering tomorrow,” she said finally with a sigh of acceptance. “But he must not bring such anger into a Gathering.”

  Jude’s tongue brushed her lips nervously. “If you are saying what I think you are, he can’t, ah, join in your Gathering, Rya. That anger you felt, he has no control over it.”

  “Cannot join, or will not?” A hint of stubbornness appeared in Rya’s voice, and Jude knew that Ra’an was not entirely a Terran product.

  “Can not. I… he thought you knew. His… halm is blocked somehow.”

  Rya’s fist pounded her knee. “This uncontrolled anger only an adolescent would be excused for! I felt no blockage but the blockage he himself creates!” She quietened, then grew sad. “So. There at least the shanē spoke true.”

  “Rya, he sees himself as some sort of defective. He really believes in that blockage. He’s very unhappy, your son.”

  “I see that.” Rya collected herself and rose. “Then you will both come to the Gathering and speak to us of all this, and we will try to understand. Come upstairs, Judith, my dear, and I will show you your room.”

  Jude followed Rya up three rounds of stairs out onto a walkway running atop a huge branch. A few paces through a tunnel of leaves and without passing through a door of any kind, they were in a cozy apartment. There was no ceiling, only the leaves rustling overhead. The floor was a series of small planked sections stepped up and down to suit the contour of the tree branch. Walls were sliding glass panels that could be moved about to enclose as much or as little of the space as the climate or the user demanded. Now, in the summer night, most of the panels were stacked in one area, forming a corner in which nestled the bed. Roll-up reed blinds provided privacy while allowing free passage of air. Cotton rope matting covered the planking, one step up to the low wide bed, a step down to a sitting area furnished with a hooked rug of muted lavenders, and big burgundy cushions. Two more steps down led to a tiny basin and toilet area, and hidden all about where most convenient were little shelves and cabinets for clothing.

  Rya rearranged a glass vase of wild flowers on a shelf above the bed. “This is one of our guest houses, impersonal but…”

  “It’s lovely, Rya, and so are you, and your family, to take a stranger in so gracefully, a…” She swallowed her last word too late.

  “A Terran?” Rya shook her head. “What has my son been telling you about us? I had always hoped for the time when I could receive my Terran friends in my own home, when everything is worked out and the Wall can come down.”

  Jude’s back drooped. “Don’t look for it in the near future. Your son is often driven to extremes by bitterness and hatred of the Terrans, but what he says is true. There are Terrans who suspect your existence out here. I was sent by them, in fact, to find you, to discover a way over the mountains as many others have tried and failed.”

  “The madmen in the streets… the shanē have shown us some of that also.”

  “Yes. But Ra’an and I made it through. Is that because he is Koi, or because the Wall is weakening?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Rya thoughtfully. “There are strange murmurings on the halmweb. We get reports…”

  “Of what?”

  Rya interrupted her reverie with a laugh. “Oh, it’s nothing. There is a kind of superstitious sensibility in vogue in certain quarters. Like the weather, it will pass.”

&nbs
p; Jude glanced around the suite and up at the ceiling of leaves. “Rya, all this loveliness, it really is in danger.”

  “Not tonight, I hope,” she replied, fine lines crinkling her ruddy face. “There, there, child. I’m not laughing at you. It’s just that I am tired. We will speak of it tomorrow. Let me see now… Dal promised she would hunt up some clothing. Here.” She opened a virtually invisible closet and rustled around, selecting a simple white shift with a velvet yoke. She held it up against Jude’s body. “Will this do for the night?”

  Jude nodded, while wondering fleetingly if she would ever again choose from a closet hung with her own clothing. “It’s wonderful, Rya, that your Terran is so fluent after all these years.”

  “Kirial and I practice now and then,” she replied, pleased.

  “Then truly you have not forgotten the colony.”

  Rya sighed, and Jude heard subtle resignation. “No, we have not. We speak Terran as a… what is it… a parlor game, but secretly we understand that one day we will need it either to protect ourselves or to take part in some new Arkoi.” She went to turn down the tapestry bed cover. “Do you need anything else?”

  “Would there be something like an aspirin around?”

  “Aspirin. Ah, yes. I mean, no. We do have painkillers for serious injury, but… you do not need that.” Rya came close and looked at Jude intently. “Your head hurts you.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  Rya smiled knowingly. “Come sit with me awhile.” She nestled cross-legged among the cushions in the sitting area and patted the rug beside her. As Jude joined her, Rya took her hand and began gently to massage her fingers.

  “It was you who explained to me why Ra’an could not sit in on the Gathering. You must understand, then, the source of your headache.”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Halm is a gift that one must learn to use, but even before that, one must learn to accept that it is there at all. Even Koi children who grow up with adults to whom it is second nature often find acceptance the most difficult hurdle of all.”

  “I guess I accept it intellectually.”

  “That is not enough. Part of you is listening very hard while the other part is refusing to hear. It is this conflict that creates the headache.” Rya’s strong fingers worked at Jude’s wrist, and the pain in her head lessened. “Accept the gift. Choose to listen.”

  “I will try.” Ra’an was surprised, Rya, but you’re not. “Did you know other Terrans with halm potential when you were in the Colony?”

  “Several. Of course, we could not tell them, or help them to develop it, without endangering our security. Daniel Andreas was one, and I recall thinking that his son had very strong potential.”

  Jude felt a sudden chill. “James?”

  “Yes, that was his name.”

  “James is one of the lunatics in the streets now.”

  Rya’s fine eyes, the same violet as her son’s, narrowed in sympathy. “Ah. He lost them both, then.”

  “He?”

  “Ra’an.” Rya shifted her massagings to Jude’s thumb joint. “How did you become aware of your halm?”

  “Ra’an. For some reason, halm contact is possible between us, in a crippled sort of way, at moments of extreme… well, usually when he’s angry.”

  “Interesting. Then you should be able to help him with his blockage. There is great power there. I felt it.”

  “He won’t really let me.” She caught Rya’s nod. “That’s because it’s me, a Terran. He would welcome a Koi who could help.”

  “Perhaps Anaharimel. She is a great teacher in Quaire’en.”

  “Tell him of her! Regaining his halm is all that matters to him.”

  “Is it?” Rya looked pensive. “Well, perhaps it is now. When it was time for him to learn it, all those years ago, he was not so eager. It meant being Koi to him, and he only wanted to be Terran. But perhaps Anaharimel.”

  She said it without rancor, and Jude found her eyes filling with tears at the complex structure of rejection and loss represented by Rya tel-Yron and her stranger-son. She looked down at Rya’s long-fingered hands, so like Ra’an’s, kneading her palm. “You know, Rya… I never had a mother either.”

  The older woman stopped, moved. She took both Jude’s hands and patted them. “Is the pain better now?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Then get to bed now.” She rose and went about turning out all the glow-globes but one over the bed. “Sleep well, Judith,” she said and was gone.

  Alone for the first time in many weeks, Jude got up and wandered about the little tree suite touching, exploring. She washed and undressed, then slipped the white shift over her head. The fit was far from perfect, but the smooth fabric was soothing against her skin. Unready yet to sleep, she returned to the cushions, digging her toes into the thick loops of the rug, burrowing into this padded comfort like a small animal. She smelled the sweet wind blowing in off the hay fields, and stared out into the leafy darkness at birds sleeping in the branches.

  She thought of Terra—home no longer—a foreign country in her mind, like the Wards, like the colony. She thought of Bill Clennan and what he would give to know what she knew now. What he would do with that knowledge made her shiver, even more so when she admitted that two short months ago she would not have cared. What an extraordinary distance she had come since then.

  “You should be asleep.” Ra’an stood in the entry, his face hidden in shadow.

  She threw him a disgusted look and turned back to her study of the leaves. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Ummmh.” He came in and nosed around the room as she had done. He was wearing only a pair of loose-fitting dark pants.

  Jude tried not to look at him. If he’s trying to be provocative, she thought, he’s certainly succeeding. At his thigh, lounging in the blousy folds of his pantleg, one hand grasped the amber neck of a wine bottle.

  “They do care, you know. You did sort of fall out of the sky, after all,” she said to his naked back as he silently examined a small clay animal he had found on a corner shelf. “Give them time to get adjusted to you and the bad news you bring.”

  “I’d rather not talk about it right now,” he growled.

  Her patience was thinning. “Do you want to talk about how much wine you’ve got left in that bottle?”

  “Very little. Can’t you tell? Oh, and you were right. It does take longer.”

  “Rya is calling the household to a Gathering tomorrow, so we can tell them about the colony. Doesn’t that indicate some commitment to action?”

  “So I should go, to be shamed by my own family?”

  “They need to hear what you have to say, Ra’an. I’m going.”

  “Fine. You go.” He raised the bottle to his lips and drank with eyes closed.

  “All right, how about this? Do you know of a teacher of halm called Anaharimel?”

  “How would I know of such things?”

  “She lives in Quaire’en,” Jude pursued doggedly. “Rya says we should go see her.”

  “You and my mother certainly have a lot to say to each other.” He leaned against a bit of wall, gazing outward into the dark. “What does it all matter, anyway?”

  “Give it time, Ra’an! See it as a different confrontation from the one you’d prepared for anyway.”

  “Jude, please. Don’t try so hard.” Tired cracks had appeared in the armor of his anger.

  “You expected angels like everyone else.”

  “What?”

  “You expected miracles to blossom the minute you got here. Welcome to paradise, here’s your halm, here’s the solution to the world’s problems, step right up!”

  “I did not!” he flared. “But I did expect fertile ground, at least!”

  “Ra’an, you’ve got it, if you’ll only take the time to look for it!”

  He snapped his arm back to send the clay animal smashing into the corner, then caught himself. With utmost care, he placed it back on the s
helf. “I didn’t come up here to argue.” He picked up a little ceramic bowl full of scented petals, scattered its contents on the floor, and sloshed wine into it. “Here,” he said, offering it to her.

  Jude pulled herself up from her cushions and came to take it from him. She looked at him over the edge of the bowl as she sipped. “Are you waiting for me to seduce you again? Is that it?”

  A pale hint of amusement touched the corners of his mouth. “No, I thought I could take care of that myself this time.”

  She drained the little bowl and set it down, then leaned her cheek against his chest. “Every time I touch you,” she murmured, “I expect sparks to fly up.”

  The hand not holding the bottle slid around her waist to draw her tight against him.

  Chapter 28

  Drowning again in dream.

  An incandescent figure fled through lightless vaults trailing an aura of fire.

  Such awesome power.

  Hold him back. He must not come.

  Now he stops, thin arms stretched wide in welcome.

  Who stands before him, who bars the way?

  The beach spreads wide around them, a glitter in the distance.

  This is not welcome. Ah, no! She cannot move.

  Help the one who bars the way!

  The black sea closes over. The water is her terror and she must breathe it in.

  But wait. Light in the midnight ocean. Gentle pressure. Voices pulling toward the surface.

  Listen. Do not struggle.

  Help him! Help the one who bars the way!

  Do not struggle. Wake.

  She woke, sweating, lying spread-eagled on her back as if pinned to the bed. It was dark, and the only sound was the rustle of leaves and the breathing of the man beside her. But in her head, the voices still attended her.

  Have you come back to us? Rya hovers solicitously.

  She hears Dal smile encouragement.

  How odd, to lie in bed with voices in your head. She labors to clear a thought, to ask them: Is it Ra’an who bars the way?

  Gire’en soothes. Tomorrow we will speak of it.

  But he comes! The white beach! The cliffs of glass!