Archangel

by Sharon Shinn

  Gabriel frowned at the reference to the Jansai, but he was so disturbed by the central problem that he didn’t bother to speak a reprimand. “Has Raphael been there to view the danger for himself?”

  “He has not.”

  “So he told you—”

  “He did not tell me,” John corrected. “He told the petitioners from the farm villages, who went three times to ask him for intercession.”

  “And how is it you have gotten involved in this problem?”

  John smiled. “At Luminaux, we trade with everyone. My father and I have bought from these farmers for generations. Since some of the village elders knew me, they brought their problem to me—”

  “And why did they not come to me directly?”

  “They thought a man of Bethel should be the one to approach the angels of the Eyrie.”

  Gabriel nodded. That, at least, had been diplomatic. But the request itself—

  “It is, as far as I know, unprecedented,” he said, thinking aloud. “True, mortals may ask a favor of any angel who happens to be passing through their realm. But to seek out an angel from another hold …”

  “Desperate times,” John said mildly. “You are held to be an arbiter of great fairness. I thought you would at least give me a hearing.”

  “And if I refuse you, I suppose you will travel on to Monteverde?”

  John looked grave. “I think, by the time I arrived in Monteverde, the situation would be beyond the power of the angel Ariel to repair. You are indeed the last hope my friends have.”

  Raphael would be furious—if, indeed, he ever found out. If John was speaking the truth, it seemed the Archangel spent little time overseeing his less glamorous and less wealthy constituents. Then again, Raphael was Archangel; perhaps the duties were far more onerous than Gabriel imagined, and it was impossible for him to attend to as many small details as he would like. Something Gabriel would find out soon enough for himself …

  Raphael’s wrath was not something he greatly feared—in fact, he was sure he could generate a little anger in return if the situation arose. How could the Archangel—any angel—allow his people to suffer so, when their plight was so easily remedied? It was beyond Gabriel’s understanding.

  “I’ll go,” he said. “But if I find that the situation has been misrepresented to me—”

  “Not at all!”

  “I will be greatly displeased. And I will remember it.”

  “You will find everything as I told you. I thank you. My friends will fall to their knees to bless you. I hope you will go as soon as possible—”

  “I will leave now. Give me the map, and I will go from here.”

  It had taken a very long day to angle southeast across Bethel, cross the Galilee at its widest point and locate the dry plains spread out south of the Heldora Mountains. It was clear before Gabriel had even reached his destination that John had spoken only the truth. Even the uncultivated plains west of the Heldoras were brown with more than winter’s habitual blight. Dry pools and unfed stream tracks pocked the terrain, clearly visible from flying height. In a year or two, if present weather patterns continued, the whole region could parch to dust and blow away.

  He located the cluster of villages without difficulty, and spiraled in for a landing at the cobblestoned center of the largest one. At the appearance of the second-most famous living angel, the townspeople seemed equally divided between awe and jubilation. Some gaped at him from behind drawn curtains while others came rushing forward to personally and vehemently thank him for coming.

  Like all angels, Gabriel disliked being touched, particularly by strangers and particularly on his sleek, sensitive wings. He took a haughty stance to fend off the more enthusiastic greeters, since physical force clearly would not do. The strategy worked, as it usually did. His admirers kept their distance, still beaming at him.

  “I was to ask for Levi Miller,” Gabriel said, searching the crowd for anyone who appeared to be a leader. “Is he here? Can he be fetched?”

  Levi was even then arriving on the run. Drought or no drought, he had managed to eat well in the past three years, and the sprint had made him breathless. “Good angelo,” he wheezed, arriving at Gabriel’s side. “I cannot tell you how pleased I am that you have come to us—”

  “I think I understand the situation,” Gabriel said, cutting him off. “I will sing for you tomorrow morning, and you should have rain by nightfall. Tell me please how the rain usually falls here, from what direction the winds come, how many days it falls, what months are wet and what months are dry …”

  Levi turned to the crowd and shouted out two names; two men detached themselves from the group and hurried forward. “We must talk weather with the angelo,” he said to them. “Back to my house. My wife will cook for us.”

  So the men retired with the angel to Levi’s kitchen to discuss precipitation, cloud formation, the ideal annual ratio of sunshine to rain. This far south, snow was almost unheard of, but winter was traditionally the rainy season. Spring was damp, summer was dry, the rains came intermittently again in autumn …

  “Very well,” Gabriel said when he had heard enough. “I know what I must ask of Jovah tomorrow.”

  He accepted Levi’s offer of a bed for the night, resigned in advance to the usual discomfort of mortals’ homes: excessive heat, furniture that seemed specifically designed to entangle his folded wings, the oppressive silence unbroken by harmonic background singing. This night another unexpected, unwelcome distraction kept him awake: the memory of stalking away from the sobbing woman he had brought to the Eyrie to be his angelica.

  True, Hannah had been there and Hannah was better qualified to calm her down than he was. But he should not have abandoned Rachel so abruptly. Bundle of hair and defiance that she was, she was still lost and alone in a strange place, and she was, after all, his responsibility. But to have attacked him that way—! Wilder than a marauding Jansai. How had she come through five years of slavery so unregenerate? And what was he supposed to do with her next?

  The questions troubled him as he drifted off to sleep. No answers came to him in his dreams.

  He rose early, ate the good breakfast prepared by Levi’s wife, then went outside to take wing. He ascended effortlessly into the opalescent whiteness of the cloudless morning sky. Higher and higher, aiming straight for the zenith of the heavens, so high that even to his superheated blood the air seemed cool; so high that beyond the blank blueness of the sky he could sense an eternal, waiting night. Jovah could hear a prayer whispered upon the earth, but a prayer shouted from the heavens reached his ear faster. The angels had always believed that the nearer they were to their god, the better he would listen.

  Aloft in the icy air, the Heldoras a flattened beige zigzag beneath him, Gabriel flung his arms wide and began to sing. He could hear every sound, this high up: the rhythmic stroking of his great wings, the brief catch and intake of his own breath, the faint sluicing of blood through the canals of his ears. But the sounds did not carry, had no resonance, left no echoes. The thin dark air was a vacuum. It sucked up even the sound of his own voice rising from his chest, carrying it in an almost discernible arc upward, a golden path of notes spinning from his mouth through the black layer of the firmament to Jovah’s ear.

  It was the song for winter rain coming from the west. There were songs for summer rain, and songs to stop rain, and songs for the rain that only comes at night. Gabriel knew them all, the pleas for winds from the south and thermal currents and moisture cooled to a precise degree. The words, prescribed in some archaic formula centuries ago and handed down from angel to angel, were nearly incomprehensible and did not matter anyway. It was the music, Gabriel knew, that moved Jovah and caused him to act.

  He sang till his breath seemed to crystallize in his lungs, till his body was numb from the buffeting of the stratospheric winds. He had been aloft two hours or more. Already he could sense a shift in the air, a gathering of powerful meteorological forces. If he stayed up here much longe
r, he would be caught in a developing thunderstorm.

  He descended through skies grown ominous with clouds, and coasted in on a damp, heavy breeze. What appeared to be the entire population of the town had turned out on the cobblestoned central square to watch the buildup of the storm. They cheered loudly when he touched down.

  “You’ve done it!” Levi exclaimed, bounding over to shake Gabriel heartily by the hand. “So quickly!”

  Gabriel disentangled his hand as soon as possible. “I’ll stay the evening to be sure the weather really breaks. It should rain a good three or four days—this time—and then rain again off and on the rest of the season. If it dries up again, send someone to the Eyrie, and I’ll come back and pray again.”

  “Thank you, angelo—”

  “Many thanks, angelo! Jovah is gracious.”

  “Thank you—bless you—”

  Gabriel heard the murmured, heartfelt outpouring of gratitude, and it filled him, as it always did, with a deep and almost fierce satisfaction. Thus, to be an angel. To be called to the scene of distress and disaster, and to bring healing and harmony. To succor and to save. To repair the damaged bridge that linked men to their god. He never felt the calling so strongly as he did at moments like this.

  The rains swept in. Everyone ran for cover. Gabriel retreated to his room at Levi Miller’s but waited in resignation for the inevitable summons; and it came. Levi knocked hesitantly on the closed door, then entered to find the angel standing motionless at the window, watching the liquid onslaught of the weather.

  “My wife and I will be heading over to Jacob Carter’s barn-bunch of people will be going there, I expect. Jake has a few barrels of wine he’s made himself, good stuff, too. Folks will be wanting to celebrate, you know. If you’d care to come, I know everyone would like a chance to thank you.”

  “Everyone has thanked me enough, I assure you.”

  “Well, if you aren’t feeling up to it—”

  “No, I’ll come for an hour or two.”

  So he went to the barn, and sampled the atrocious wine, and heard the townsfolk discuss in earnest detail the crops they intended to grow this year. He was no more successful at mingling with the farmers than with the rich merchants of Semorrah. Nathan had laughed at him once and remarked, “At least you’re not a snob. You dislike everyone equally.” He had felt moved to protest, but it was not far from the truth.

  He stayed as short a time as seemed polite, then returned to Levi’s house. Sleep was a little easier to come by this night, with the rhythmic dance of the rain to fill the excruciating silence. He was awake early, though the household was up before him, and he broke his fast with Levi’s wife. Then he was back outside and once more on the wing, and glad to be gone.

  It was wet flying till he broke through the clouds, and then he was dazzled by unfiltered sunlight. He flew steadily for most of the day, not following a straight line back to the Eyrie. He looped south over the prairie lands, and wove an erratic pattern in a northern direction, watching the land below him unroll. He had, from time to time, flying this way, spotted some anomaly that bore investigating, or a plague flag hoisted above a small town, or a flooding river that he could track to its source in a corner of the region where too much rain had fallen. It was the reason he was gone from the Eyrie so much—because he liked to watch over Bethel from above, like Jovah over Samaria.

  “You love the land more than you love the people in it.” Again, Nathan speaking. Again, quite possibly true. But they were the same to him, the land and the people, the same in an abstract way: things to be cared for the way some people cared for their crops or their livestock or their collections of glass and pewter. Though he maintained an emotional distance from his people, they were a part of him in ways he could not make anyone else understand. They defined him. They gave him a reason for being. If there were not people for angels to watch over, he, Gabriel, would not exist. And so he loved them because they told him who he was.

  It was late afternoon before he arrived back at the Eyrie. Even before his feet touched the landing rock, he heard the voices raised in song—three voices, two women and a man. He felt trouble ease from him and the strain of a long flight fall away. He smiled, and gently laid his feet upon the stone.

  The first person he encountered in the corridors was Judith. As usual, she looked delighted to see him. Her perfect face flowered into a smile and she held out her small hands to him. He took them briefly, then let them drop.

  “Gabriel! You’re back! It seems like you’ve been gone forever.”

  “I was here a few days ago.”

  She pouted, in the way that she so often did with him. “For one night! After you’d been gone for weeks and weeks. I never get to see you anymore.”

  He resumed walking, and she fell in step beside him. Long ago she had perfected the trick of walking close to his side but half a step ahead of him so that she did not accidentally brush his wings. She knew how he hated his feathers to be touched. She had done it once.

  “I’m likely to have less free time as the Gloria approaches, not more,” he said mildly. “And afterward—”

  “You’ll never have time for me anymore.” She said it with exaggerated sadness, fluttering her lashes at him, acting as if it were a joke, which it was not. He shrugged.

  “Things change and the world spins on,” he said. “What have you been doing since I’ve been gone?”

  “What I usually do. Teaching the children, mostly. Working on my gown for the Gloria. Going into Velora at night to hear the musicians.”

  “Who’s been taking you into Velora?”

  “Why? Are you jealous?” she asked quickly.

  “Just curious.”

  “Obadiah, mostly. And Nathan took me once.”

  “Really? Nathan. Well, I hope you had fun.”

  “It would be more fun if you took me.”

  “It will be a few weeks, I’m afraid.”

  She caught his arm, careful still not to lean too close to his wings. “You’d take Rachel if she wanted to go,” she said.

  Aaahh. “Not likely,” Gabriel said coolly. “She’s afraid to fly. Heights unnerve her.”

  “Well, she wants to go to Velora. She’s been asking Nathan and Matthew and everyone if there isn’t some other way down.”

  Gabriel was silent, taking Judith’s remark more seriously than she perhaps intended him to. He had not considered Rachel’s predicament. Unable to bear the journey to or from the Eyrie in an angel’s arms, Rachel was effectively immured here in a high prison. And she had been Edori, used to traveling where she would. How could she ever get down if she refused to let him carry her? How could she visit Josiah, which he would like her to do? Come to that, how would she get to the Gloria on the Plain of Sharon? He wanted to curse, but he would not give Judith an opening like that.

  “Maybe we’ll think of something,” was all he said.

  “She doesn’t seem to like it here very much,” Judith went on. Her tone was cautious; she was wondering just how he felt about his angelica, and hoped his response would give something away.

  “She just got here,” was his noncommittal reply. “How has she been amusing herself since I’ve been gone?”

  Judith’s small shoulders hunched in a shrug. “She spends a lot of time in her room. And a lot of time in the recital chambers.”

  “Really? She’s been practicing?”

  Again the shrug. “Who knows? No one’s heard her sing. She hasn’t volunteered for the harmonics.”

  He smiled. “Give her time! Maybe she doesn’t know our music.”

  “I thought the Edori were such fabulous singers.”

  “Some of them are. I don’t suppose they’re all musicians.”

  Judith took his arm again and leaned inward, effectively stopping his progress. He looked down into the heart-shaped face, just now wearing a tragic expression. “Oh, Gabriel, I know it’s not very nice of me, but I just can’t like her. She’s so unfriendly, so—so haughty, almos
t, and what she has to be haughty about when she was a slave for five years—”

  He shook her off and frowned down at her. Uncannily, Judith seemed to have realized how much he hated Rachel’s indentured past. She had brought it up before. “How can you blame her for that?” he said, making his voice stern. “Do you think she was a slave by choice? Do you think you should be blamed for it if you were suddenly taken prisoner and sold in the city markets? She has a right to a little pride now. The Edori are proud people—”

  “Oh, the Edori!” Judith exclaimed. “You’re always defending the Edori. They aren’t even people of Jovah—”

  He made an impatient gesture with both hands and began striding down the hallway again. She hurried to keep up with him. “All right, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you mad,” she apologized, catching his arm again. “Gabriel, please don’t run away from me. I’ve missed you so much.”

  Again she managed to stop him, this time by the wheedling tone in her voice. He gazed down at her and saw, not the pretty girl who very probably loved him, but a problem.

  “Judith,” he said slowly. “I am very nearly a married man. I am very nearly Archangel. My life is not my own. You should not be wasting your life with dreams of me.”

  He was not surprised when the wide gray eyes filled with tears. Judith had always been very good at emotional scenes. “I can’t help it,” she whispered. “I have always—”

  He stopped her abruptly. “Don’t,” he said. “It doesn’t get any better than this, Judith. Don’t hope for more.”

  She might have persisted, but voices could be heard coming down the hallway and she had to prepare herself to face others. Minutes later, she was laughing with the angels Eva and Esau; no one would have known she had been on the verge of tears. Gabriel absently answered the questions tossed at him by the angels and covertly studied Judith. He had never entirely understood her, although it had always been clear to him what she wanted: him. It was her motives that eluded him. He had always had a hard time believing she was sincere, even when she seemed to love him. He did not know if this meant she was not sincere, or that she was so affected that even her sincerity seemed assumed—or that he generally distrusted everyone.