Angel-Seeker

by Sharon Shinn

  Rebekah was tugging the close-fitting hallis in place, and frowning in front of the mirror. “No, but it’s not laying right. It’s making me feel all squishy.”

  Martha came over to inspect the problem. “What? Here across your bosom? It’s all bunched up in back, wait a minute—”

  But even with Martha’s adjustments, the hallis felt too tight for comfort. “I don’t understand it,” Rebekah said. “Hepzibah just made this for me a month or so ago.”

  “Have you gained weight?”

  “A little, I think, but not there!”

  They both giggled. “It doesn’t matter,” Martha said, whipping the looser-fitting jeska over her cousin’s head. “No one will be able to tell once you’re fully dressed.”

  And, indeed, the two of them were quite pleased with themselves as they stood side by side, examining their images in the glass. Rebekah was all dark hair and brilliant color; Martha was a desert blossom, green stalk and golden tassel of hair.

  “So jealous,” Martha said again. “I can’t wait.”

  The dinner was sumptuous: rich courses of meats and gravies, flavored with exotic spices and set off by a variety of wines. Hector often reserved the best dishes for the men’s table, but because Simon’s wife and sisters were dining with them that night, the fare in the women’s hall was just as grand as food in the main dining room. Rebekah and Martha gorged themselves, and everyone around them did the same.

  After the meal, Jerusha shooed Rebekah out into the garden. “It’s too cold,” Rebekah whined, but Jerusha merely told her to get a heavy cloak and stroll around the perimeter. Martha giggled and fetched wraps for both of them, and they paced around the garden for twenty minutes, shivering, before Isaac and Hector’s uncle made an appearance.

  “So I’ve heard my nephew’s account of the trip to Gaza,” the old man said. “What were your thoughts?”

  “I was impressed by the great wealth of the Manadavvi people, but I found their customs distasteful,” Isaac said in a serious voice. Martha elbowed Rebekah in the ribs and made a mocking face.

  “How so?”

  “They display their riches in pointless ways. I understand the value of a grand house, and I even understand investing in beautiful furnishings, but they overspend. The houses are too grand. There are so many empty rooms just piled on for show. There are too many useless treasures hanging on the walls or standing about in the statuary. I saw door handles made of gold and walkways lined with chips of diamond. A Manadavvi flaunts his wealth, whereas a Jansai merely enjoys it.”

  “They are ostentatious,” the uncle said gravely.

  “Yes. And arrogant. They were willing to make deals with us, but their disdain was evident. More than once I wanted to say, ‘My opinion of you is even lower than yours of me.’ But I did not.”

  “No, for a good trader pretends every man is his friend, even a man with no goods or money at hand. For who knows when such a man may acquire wealth or merchandise?”

  “And their women,” Isaac continued.

  Now Rebekah and Martha exchanged quick looks, mirthful but curious.

  “They treat their women badly,” Isaac said.

  “Now, that is something I hadn’t noticed,” Hector’s uncle said.

  Isaac made a little grunt of disgust. “They parade them around the room like the gaudiest of possessions! They show them off like their women were prizes they had wrested from the marketplace. A woman should be guarded so carefully that no other man knows what treasure you possess. A woman is too precious to be gazed upon by strangers.”

  Martha made a little bobbing motion with her head, as if she liked the way he phrased his answer, even if she didn’t agree with his philosophy.

  “Unfortunately, none of the other peoples of Samaria share our views on this matter,” the old man said. “They consider women ordinary and commonplace.”

  “Well, the Manadavvi at least have no understanding of what gives a woman value,” Isaac said, a note of contempt creeping into his voice. “And the women themselves behaved with a shocking lack of virtue. We were forced to dine with them, you know—men and women mixed all together at a single table in one room.”

  “Yes, I have dined with the Manadavvi before.”

  “And the women spoke shamelessly with the men seated around them, not at all embarrassed to be out in public and on display in such a fashion. And some of the women—young women! unmarried women!—were deep in conversation with men, completely unsupervised by any father or brother that I could see. I swear I saw one girl slip away from the room in company with a Luminaux merchant in our train, and they did not return. I can only guess, with horror, what might have passed between them when they were out of sight.”

  Now the looks Martha and Rebekah exchanged were half rueful and half apprehensive.

  “Shocking, indeed,” the old man said. “But again, their customs are not our customs, their ways not ours.”

  “Some truths are universal,” Isaac said firmly. “A young woman is a piece of glass, fragile and beautiful. It takes only a single careless motion to brush that glass to the floor, to see it shatter and break. A young woman who has been compromised is useless—she is valueless. Kirosa,” he added, using the Jansai word that meant broken. “She must be swept aside and forgotten, and a new glass found to fill her place. The Manadavvi cover their broken pieces of glass with bright shawls and expensive jewelry, but I see the shards beneath the finery. I would cast such a woman into the desert. She would have no worth to me.”

  The men kept on walking, but Rebekah and Martha were standing stock-still, staring at each other with their eyes wide and their mouths parted in horror. All Jansai men felt this way; what he said was no surprise. But it was one thing to know something, to acknowledge it while pretending it had no significance to you. It was another to hear your affianced husband say out loud the words that could seal your death warrant if he ever learned the truth.

  Two days later, Jordan brought Rebekah her embroidered scarf. “This is yours, isn’t it?” he asked. “I found it in the garden yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” she exclaimed, snatching it from his fingers. Her imagination, no doubt, but it smelled of snow and starlight. “You’ve had it all this time?”

  He looked surprised. “Yes. I’m sorry. Were you looking for it?”

  She tried to choke back her hysteria. “It’s just that—I’d lost it, and Martha was upset with me. She made it, you know, and she says I’m so careless with all the gifts she’s given me—which isn’t true—”

  Jordan shrugged. “Martha’s a little unsteady these days.”

  She was wholly focused on the significance of the scarf, on the fact that Obadiah was in town—or had been in town a day ago—but something in the tone of his voice caused Rebekah’s gaze to lock onto Jordan’s face. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged again. “Eph says she’s always fighting with her mother and her aunts, sleeping till all hours of the day, hiding in some corner of the house where they can’t find her whenever there’s work to be done. He says if he didn’t know better, he’d think she’d gotten into their father’s liquor store, but all the wine is kept in the men’s kitchen, and he knows she wouldn’t cross the dividing wall.”

  Rebekah was fairly sure there was no part of Ezra’s house that Martha hadn’t crept into at some point. She knew for a fact that, whenever the men were gone on an extended journey, Martha would get up in the night and glide through the men’s quarters, exploring, while the servants and the young boys were asleep. The wine cellar would be Martha’s playground. She no doubt had a bottle or two stashed in her own room at this very moment.

  But such transgressions, of course, were the least of Martha’s crimes.

  “Martha’s just—Martha,” Rebekah said lamely. “She’s always been a little wild.”

  “Well, she’ll need to calm down soon if Uncle Ezra’s going to find her a husband.”

  “Is he trying to make a match for her? She hasn’
t said anything.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know,” Jordan said a little smugly. “Eph says their father has been talking to Michael and Elam. They both have good trading routes, though Eph says Elam is shrewder and more likely to turn a profit.”

  “I didn’t know Elam had any sons,” Rebekah said.

  “He doesn’t. But his wife died three years ago.”

  “He’s fifty years old!”

  “A steady man for an unsteady girl,” Jordan replied. “That’s what Eph says.”

  “I think maybe you’ve been spending too much time with cousin Ephram,” Rebekah said sharply.

  Jordan looked surprised. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  She shook her head and was unable to explain. “Because he’s—because he—oh, Ephram is always such a braggart, always showing off how much he knows or how much smarter he is than everyone else. He doesn’t need to be monitoring his sister’s behavior and plotting with his father to see her married off.”

  “Of course he does. If she doesn’t marry, Martha will be his responsibility. Just as you would be mine, if you didn’t marry Isaac.”

  It was too ludicrous. Rebekah had been helping care for Jordan since the day he was born; she’d rocked Ephram in his cradle while Martha tickled his tiny feet. Impossible to think that these little boys would suddenly become judgmental men who saw their sisters as burdens, as objects to be sheltered or bartered. But Jordan was perfectly serious, and Ephram, she knew, had always wanted to race headlong into the duties and delights of manhood.

  Something to consider another day. Her hands were nervous on the scarf, winding and unwinding it around her fingers. What had Obadiah thought last night, when she did not appear in response to his signal? No doubt he had waited for her in his hotel room for hours last night, his hopes gradually fading, his eager face falling into lines of disappointment or worry. Jovah’s bones, he would be frantic with anxiety, convinced that her failure to appear meant that some disaster had befallen her on the streets. She must go to him now, right away, soothe away his fears and remind him that she loved him—

  Not now. Tonight.

  She did not think she could endure the intervening hours.

  “I wouldn’t mind, though,” Jordan was saying.

  She had no idea what they were talking about. “Wouldn’t mind what?”

  “If you never married. Or if you came back to my house after you were widowed. You’ve always been the best sister to me, and I would do everything to care for you, if that task came to me.”

  She kissed him impulsively on the forehead, though he tried to duck, and thought how much he looked like Jonah. Sweet Jovah singing, might it be Jonah who someday entertained the same grave thoughts about how to best care for his aging sister? Oh, very easily. Hector was twenty years younger than Hepzibah, after all, and she’d lived in his house for at least a decade.

  “I appreciate it,” she said, forcing herself to sound serious. “I’ve always known I could count on you.”

  The day took forever to dodder past, creaky and as full of irritations as an old woman with an achy back. Rebekah had a quick, snappish fight with her mother over something stupid—the color of her jeska, perhaps, or the way she’d styled her hair—and Hepzibah lectured her for ten minutes about her table manners when she failed to answer a question addressed to her at dinner. Everyone was in line to use the water room right when Rebekah wanted to take a quick bath, to freshen herself up for her evening assignation.

  And no one, it seemed, wanted to sleep at all that night. Rebekah stood for half an hour in the hallway outside her door, hand on the knob so she could pretend she was just stepping back inside if someone spotted her, and listened to all the movement going on up and down the corridor. Was everyone lying awake, finishing up an embroidery project, or holding a last conversation before bedtime? Was no one ready to turn off her gaslight and tumble onto her mattress, bid good night to Jovah, and drift off to sleep?

  At last she could stand it no longer. She vowed to tell anyone she met that she was hungry (she was, actually), and that she was just stepping into the kitchen for a late snack. She glided silently down the halls, encountering no one, and felt her way cautiously past the stoves and tables in the kitchen. Once in the garden, which seemed quite bright by moonlight after the utter darkness indoors, she stayed in the shadows as she circled around to the gate. She paused a moment to listen to the sounds from all directions—the house and the street—then lifted the latch and stepped out.

  Obadiah almost wept when he saw her. She felt the shivers shake his body as he swept her against him, holding her wordlessly for the longest time. She lay against his chest with her eyes closed, reveling in sensation: the heat of his body, the strength of his arms, the sweetness of his scent. His feathers tumbled across her hair, down her back, textured as velvet. She did not know how she would be able to leave him when the evening came to an end.

  “I have spent the last day praying for the god to strike me dead,” he whispered against her cheek. “I was sure you were already in Jovah’s arms, and I wanted to join you there.”

  “No, nothing has happened. I didn’t even get the scarf until today. I didn’t know you were here.”

  “And it’s been so long! Weeks! And I couldn’t get back, I couldn’t leave the hold, there was so much to do, and I thought, she will not believe in me, she will think that I have forsaken her.”

  “No,” she lied. “Not for a minute.”

  “By the god’s own heart and heartstrings, I have missed you, Rebekah.” He groaned, holding her even tighter, pressing her bones into his bones. “I did not imagine I would ever have to go so long without seeing you again.”

  “And I have missed you.” She gasped, since she couldn’t get enough air to speak in a normal voice. “Obadiah, I must breathe—”

  “I will give you my own breath,” he said, and covered her mouth with his. And it was true, he breathed for both of them, or else she ceased to need oxygen at all. For it seemed she did not once inhale on her own again for the rest of the night, but drew all her sustenance, all her cues, even the pace of her heart, from Obadiah’s body; and that was enough to satisfy her.

  After they made love, they were both starving, so instead of lying in bed and murmuring endearments, they sat at the fancy table and had a hearty meal. Obadiah told Rebekah of all the farms and provinces he’d visited in the past four weeks, praying for a change in weather or a gift from the god. She was fascinated by the variety of tales, the glimpses into so many different lives, amazed that none of them were like her own.

  “And what was she wearing?” she asked, every time his tale included mention of a woman. “What did her husband say to her? How did her son treat her?”

  Or: “But how did she break her wrist? Working in the field? You mean, in the direct sunlight? With—no, you mean those other men were not her brothers?”

  Or: “What do you mean, she’s a teacher? She teaches the little children? The adults? The men, too? Does she—and she doesn’t wear a veil? Don’t they stare at her?”

  She had always known, in a vague way, that women outside of Breven lived somewhat different lives. But she had just assumed they were very much like her own life, except in small, unimportant details—that the foods they preferred featured different spices, that they only covered their faces in daylight, that they walked unescorted in the world, but only to certain destinations. She could not imagine living in a world so free of boundaries, so filled with frightening, constant choices. What should I wear today? What shall I eat? Whom might I encounter on the street? How did such a woman know what expressions to hold upon her face, when anyone might see it at any point and guess what thoughts were circling in her head? How could she calculate the cost of food, how could she judge when to plant and when to reap, how could she barter products in the marketplace? How could she lie down at the end of the day, carefree enough to sleep, knowing that she relied completely on her own skill and wit?

  Earlier thi
s very day, Rebekah had laughed at the notion that Jordan would care for her, but she had never considered the implications of having to care entirely for herself. She did not think she could do it. She did not know how.

  “I wouldn’t want to be that woman,” she said quietly, when Obadiah described an isolated farm wife whose husband and son lay sick with fever.

  “No, I pitied her sincerely,” Obadiah said. “She must have been so lonely out there! But the food was in for the winter, and her older boy looked like he’d be a help around the farm, so I imagine she’ll pull through well enough.”

  She looked at him helplessly. She wouldn’t have wanted to be any of those women. But she didn’t think she could explain.

  “So how have you passed your time?” he asked. “More eavesdropping on Isaac’s conversations?”

  She laughed. “Yes, just the other day he was telling us—telling Hector’s uncle—about a trip to Manadavvi country, and Martha and I got to listen. He didn’t seem to like the Manadavvi much.”

  “Well, see? Your betrothed and I have one thing in common.”

  “He thinks they treat their women poorly.”

  Obadiah laughed. “The only women treated less poorly than Manadavvi women are those who happen to be angels. Spoiled and beautiful, those Manadavvi girls. And powerful and clever and full of secrets. I don’t think he needs to feel sorry for them.”

  She didn’t bother to explain. “Full of secrets? How would you know that?”

  He grinned. “I’ve talked to a few of them from time to time. I always came away convinced they were concealing something vital. And now that I’ve talked to Zoe so often—”

  She could not identify the peculiar tingle of heat that prickled across her face and hands. “Zoe? Who’s that?”

  “The woman here. The one you usually see downstairs when you arrive at night.”