by Sharon Shinn
“And I’ve come to hear reason, if you’ll speak it,” the oracle said quietly. “Perhaps you’ll tell me why Gabriel asked me to talk to you about the fate of Semorrah.”
She laughed harshly and a little wildly. Josiah waited patiently, and she began to pace around him. “Merely because I have longed to see Semorrah destroyed my whole life. I have called down Yovah’s curses upon it. And now, without any further prompting from me, the god is poised to wipe out the city and everyone who lives there. Gabriel thinks,” she said, “that this will please me.”
“And will it?” he asked.
She whirled to face him. “To see the white city smashed by Yovah’s hand? Yes! I would stand on the riverbanks and dance! I would fall to my knees and sing the god’s praises! I would invoke the curses again, if I thought the thunderbolts were falling too slowly. Yovah,” she said, her voice falling to an intense whisper, “shower your wrath upon this thrice-damned city. Strike it with fire, with thunderbolts—cover it with storm and flood—”
She stopped abruptly and waited for his shocked reprimand, but he merely watched her out of sober, puzzled eyes.
“And what Gabriel wants,” she said, in a more normal tone, “is to have me stand beside him tomorrow and sing the prayer that will turn aside this disaster. He wants me to lift my voice, and soothe the god and save Semorrah.”
“Yes,” said Josiah. “And that is what I want as well.”
She laughed again, more faintly, pressing her hand to her mouth and shaking her head with slight, disbelieving motions. “I have been docile till now—”
“Hardly,” Josiah murmured.
“I have. I have done what they asked of me—learned their songs, lived in their high, stone prison, left my Edori friends. I have been— Every part of my life has been shaped by angel intervention, don’t you see? It was Raphael who cast me from my parents’ home and drove me into slavery—it was Gabriel who swept me from Semorrah to the Eyrie— Over and over again, the course of my life has been violently changed, by outside forces, by angels. Nothing—at no point in my life—never have I had a moment’s free will. And now—”
“Now is not the time to exercise that will,” Josiah interrupted her. “Yes, the angels were the instruments of your changes, but the plot was laid out by a divine hand. It is part of the mosaic of our life on Samaria. You were chosen by the god to play your part. The path that brought you here was twisted, yet it has brought you here, to this place on this day—and this is the time for you to play your part, to speak your lines, to fulfill your destiny.”
“I have been given no choice!” she cried. “The god’s hand marked me, and my life has never been my own! I never asked to be angelica, never asked for the hazards it would bring me, and it is not a role that I want! Surely at some point in my life there must be a choice offered to me—and I must be able to choose as I desire!”
“And why should your life be different from that of any other man or woman?” he asked her sharply. “Who among us is given choices such as you talk about?”
She stared at him.
He swept his arm out to indicate the pavilion beyond, the whole of the Plain, all Samaria. “A child is born—angel or mortal, male or female—to a wealthy family or to a poor farmer. The child has no choice in that matter. The fever takes his parents when he is young, so he is abandoned on the streets of Semorrah. Or Luminaux. Maybe a stranger is kind to him—maybe he is caught by Jansai and sold into slavery. Where is the choice in that? Maybe he grows to adulthood fine and healthy, and a runaway horse-cart knocks him into the ground and slices his arm off, or his leg. Did he choose this tragedy? All of us are victims, at some point, of a malicious fate or a scheming god. What makes you think you are different than any of the rest of us to find your life shaped by events you cannot control?”
She raised both hands, palms out toward him, in a warning gesture. “Yes, very well, into each life some chance misery or good fortune falls,” she said. “But even the meanest man, the most miserable child, has moments now and then where his will decides his destiny. He can choose to steal, or he can choose to starve—he can invest his money in farmland or gold mines—he can pick the woman he will marry or the slave he will abuse. Many factors may be out of his reach but he makes personal decisions—every day!—which will influence the course of his life.”
“Yes, and so do you. So do we all,” Josiah said. “And because we do not have control over those larger issues it becomes doubly, triply important that the choices we are allowed to make are the right ones—that we are not guided by hate, or spite, or fear, or revenge, or anger. If your life has brought you, struggling and screaming, to this one day in your life, Rachel—think! Is this how you make your choice? Is this how you display your heart? By standing aside, silent, so that death can sweep down? So that thousands of innocent people can die? Is this how you choose when it is allowed you to choose?”
She had turned from him as he flung his stern words at her, but now she swung back. Her face was ravaged with grief; she was actually crying, but she was still so angry that she did not appear to be aware of the tears.
“No!” she cried. “Of course it is not! I would, if I could, level the city with my own hands. I would see every last river merchant die, every overfed, rich slave owner swept into the rising river.” Her voice quieted, if only slightly. “But I know better than you, Josiah, who the innocent of Semorrah are—the abandoned children who live in the alleyways, the slaves driven in from Jordana, the timid daughters of the wealthy merchantmen, sold and bartered like so much property—do you really think I would condemn them all to death?”
“But then—you said—”
“Gabriel thinks I would,” she said, and her voice was so bitter and so hopeless that Josiah reached out to her. She backed away from him, swinging her head. “Gabriel thinks I am that lawless. I am that vengeful. I am that cruel.”
“You have given him reason to think so,” Josiah said very gently.
She nodded. She was so weary she wanted to sink to the floor, sift into the earth, dissolve into particles of dirt. “Every reason,” she said tiredly. “But he still should not think it.”
“That is not a fair test for Gabriel,” the oracle said seriously. “It is not reasonable to expect him to pass it.”
“Nobody ever said I was reasonable.”
“Let me explain to him—”
“I can make my own explanations,” she interrupted sharply. “If he bothers to ask me, then I will tell him.”
He shook his head; there was no soothing the troubled waters that lay between these two lovers. “Then you will sing tomorrow?”
She made a moue of resignation. “How can I not?”
He came forward, took her into a light embrace. She endured it for a moment and then pulled away. “Do not hate him forever,” Josiah said. “He loves you. But he has no choices either. In his hands lies the fate of the world.”
“And mine.”
“And yours. Do not blame him for gripping your hands rather too tightly. He is only trying to keep us all safe.”
She was still standing in the middle of the tent, feeling the contrasting pulls of physical exhaustion and spiritual turmoil, when Gabriel bent his black head and stepped hesitantly inside.
* * *
“Rachel—” he began.
She did not turn to took at him. “I know,” she said in an ironic voice. “You came as quickly as you could.”
“Well, I did,” he said cautiously. “It has been a difficult day.”
“In every respect.”
He came closer. “I wanted to ask you—”
She whirled on him. “I know what you wanted to ask me! Josiah has already asked me. Your brother has already asked me. Save Semorrah! Pray that the god intercede to spare the city.” She flung her hands out. “So? Go ahead. Ask me.”
He studied her with a close, troubled attention. When he spoke, his voice was soft, persuasive. “I understand,” he said slowly, “why
you would want to see the city leveled into the water. I do understand. It is not just that you have suffered there—and that countless Edori have suffered there—it symbolizes every kind of suffering to you, everything terrible. Greed, and hatred, and abuse. I understand that it is not revenge that motivates you, but justice. And you have a passionate sense of justice. I understand all this, but, Rachel—it will not do.”
He put out a hand, palm up, in a curious and vulnerable gesture. “The city cannot be cleared, you know,” he went on. “The river has stopped rising, but the harbors are flooded, the bridge has fallen, and there is no way for angels to ferry thousands of people to safety. You remember your friend Lady Mary? She is in the city, carrying her unborn child. How many Edori slaves are there, watching the river rise and looking in fear toward the heavens? These are the people you would condemn to death if you refuse to sing tomorrow. You cannot believe in a justice as fierce as that.”
He left her deeply shaken. The gentle, almost kindly words unsettled her and dissipated much of her anger—but she had begun with a great deal of anger, and she still had plenty left. She gave him a shrug of feigned indifference.
“Innocent people have died before this, and will die again,” she said. “If I choose to stand silent beside you tomorrow, there is nothing you can do to change my mind.”
“Is there not?” he asked, very low. “Is there not some personal penance you would impose on me? You have complained before about my arrogance, my self-righteousness. I will become humble. I will beg you for their lives, if that is what you want. Ask me.”
She looked over at him, marveling. “How can it mean so much to you?” she asked. “You have no friends in Semorrah. The wealthy merchants hate you, and the others you don’t even know. If they died, you would not see their faces in your dreams.”
He gave a small shake of his head. “How can I explain to you?” he asked. “You will call it arrogance if I claim that the weight of all those lives lies heavy on me. You have always believed that Jovah hears every voice raised to him in prayer—well, I am not Jovah, but I hear the voices, too. Each voice. I am the safeguard of every soul on Semorrah, whether or not I know the faces. I have never in my life asked Jovah to throw down a thunderbolt to destroy another man—not because I didn’t believe that he would not answer me with lightning, but because I believed that every man’s life was sacred. Invested with a purpose and a divinity of its own. If I had been Jovah—” He stopped, troubled by the sacrilege of that, but went on. “If I had been Jovah, I would not have been able to smite the mountain yesterday. I would have let all of them live.”
“I would have struck them all down,” Rachel said swiftly.
He nodded. “I know. But surely you cannot extend the same fate to Semorrah.”
She turned away from him again. “And if I refuse to sing?” she asked over her shoulder. “Will you bring Ariel or some other woman to sing in my place?”
“You are angelica,” he answered. “It must be you.”
“While I live, I am angelica,” she agreed. “But if something were to cause me to die, suddenly, in the middle of the night—”
He made no answer. She swiveled back to face him. His blue eyes were locked on her so fixedly that she was momentarily dizzied. “But I forget,” she said softly, “how much you value human life.”
“Even to save Semorrah, I could not harm you,” he whispered. “To save the whole world. If you refuse to sing—tomorrow, or ever—so be it. The world will perish, and we will all perish. But I cannot raise my hand against you.”
It was impossible to draw a breath. She managed to speak with the sparse air somehow left in her lungs. “Very well, then, I have my terms ready,” she said. “I will sing tomorrow—and walk away from this Plain. You will return to the Eyrie without me, and you will not follow me, and you will not seek to bring me back. You will not set angels to scouring the countryside looking for me. I will return for your next Gloria, and your next and your next. And you can expect no more of me than that for the rest of your days.”
It was as if he had not heard her. His gaze was so vivid, so intense, that it trapped her in an azure prison. Almost, he reached his hand out to her; she had the definite impression of an impulsive movement forcibly checked. She envisioned him laying his cool fingers against her face and peeling back her skin, peering inside her head, reading the coded text of the brain inside her skull.
“So,” he said, and again his voice was so low it was nearly inaudible. It was almost as if he were speaking to himself. “You were going to sing anyway, and all this anger is for me, for not believing in you.”
“Oh, no,” she said, with an attempt at carelessness. “I don’t care if you believe in me or not.”
He nodded, but not as if he were responding to her words— rather, as if he were acknowledging some unvoiced protest spoken soul to soul. “Very well, then, hate me for it,” he said, “but it is something I am glad to know.”
She jerked herself violently to one side, to escape the spell of his stare. “Very well, then, we understand each other,” she said curtly. “We sing tomorrow. At what time are the festivities supposed to begin?”
“The hour past dawn,” he said. “I will come for you. Will you be in Naomi’s tent?”
She would have been if he had not assumed so. “I will be here,” she said instantly. “I will be ready.”
“Sleep as well as you can,” he advised. “It will be a long day.”
As if she would be able to sleep this night. As if she would ever be able to sleep again. “Till tomorrow, then,” she said. He nodded at her and left.
He had not been gone three minutes when she began to cry. She was still weeping—silently, ceaselessly, in utter black despair—when Naomi came to her two hours later. She could not even tell Naomi the two things that made the tears run so bitterly down her cheeks: that he would not give her up even to save the world, and that tomorrow she was pledged to leave him forever.
* * *
Gabriel had not expected to sleep, but he did—dreamlessly, peacefully. The world held very few terrors for him now. The god had proved his existence; storm and flood had subsided at his prayers; and the angelica had agreed to lead the multitudes in the mass that would save them all.
True, Rachel would hate him for the rest of her life. But that was something he would wrestle with later, after the Gloria was sung, after the world was secured for one more year. For tonight, he would fall exhausted upon his cot just one more servant of the god. On the morrow he would awaken as Archangel.
He woke early, but he was not the first one up. He smelled cooking fires and cauldrons heating up even in the predawn dark. He rose, washed himself thoroughly and dressed with care. Black silk trousers were tucked into his black boots; a fine lawn shirt was fitted carefully over his shoulders and his massive wings. He wore a silver belt and his silver wristlets, and his eyes looked like jewels set deliberately in his face.
Leaving his tent, he went directly to Rachel’s and was not surprised to hear soft voices within. Naomi was the one who invited him to enter when he called out a greeting, but he had eyes only for Rachel once he stepped inside.
She was a statue of gold from her hair to her dress to her thin sandals. She wore a gold sash around her waist, thickly embroidered with sapphire-blue flowers in the pattern of her husband’s family, and sapphire earrings dangled from each ear. Her hair had been arranged in some impossibly complex fashion. Perhaps ten braids had been started halfway down her back, and tied, and the individual plaits had been linked together by a blue satin ribbon, creating in effect a shawl of her own bright hair. She had her back to him when he came in, but as he just stood there, staring at her, she turned to face him.
“Will I do?” she asked him coolly.
He nodded wordlessly. Naomi began chattering before he had marshaled his thoughts. “I have told the angelica she should wear the wristbands of the angels, but she says she left hers in the Eyrie. Could she borrow some? I
know it is traditional to wear them.”
Rachel looked annoyed. “What do you know about traditions among the angels?” she asked.
“I know enough,” Naomi said firmly. “The angelica stands on the Plain and raises her hands, and the sun catches the jewels in her bracelets. Isn’t it true, Gabriel? So you need bracelets.”
“I have brought her something she can wear instead,” he replied, crossing the tent. He had wrapped the slim package in a blue silk scarf. Rachel took it reluctantly from his hand.
“Is it a tradition to exchange gifts on the morning of the Gloria?” she asked.
“On the first Gloria, it often is. It is not required.”
She motioned backward, at her cot, and Naomi retrieved a long leather case. “I got this for you in Luminaux,” she said.
He could not believe it. She had bought him a present, and she still intended to give it to him. “I’m honored,” he said gravely. “Open yours.”
She unfolded the scarf and looked down a moment without speaking. “Let me see,” Naomi said, taking the package from her. “Aaah,” the Edori woman sighed. “These are so beautiful—”
“Put them on,” he said.
Rachel extended first her right hand, then her left, and Naomi helped her with the gloves. They were made of a gold net so fine that the latticed threads were almost invisible. Around each wrist were sewn circlets of sapphires, clustered together so densely that they looked like bracelets of solid blue. She turned her hands palm-up, palm-down, and the jewels glowed in the torchlight of the tent.
“Thank you,” she said with no inflection. “I will be happy to wear them.”
Naomi was smiling at him. “I know what she got you,” she said. “I’m the one who brought it back from Luminaux.”
He examined the supple case for a moment just to prolong the anticipation. He still couldn’t believe it. “From Luminaux, is it?” he said. “I thought perhaps I was getting a gift from an Edori craftsman.”
