Angelica (41 page)

But she hadn't taken him up on the suggestion right away. It would seem too odd if, after that uncomfortable conversation, she rushed right down to Velora and began designing a new wardrobe. She did start to wear, with more frequency, the more colorful items in her closet—a fuschia blouse, a flame-and-yellow dress, a scarlet vest that looked rather nice over a black skirt. Once or twice she thought she saw an
approving look in Gaaron's eyes, but he said nothing.

When she could free herself from Kaski and Keren and her other responsibilities, she spent some time in the music rooms. Ahio had put together a selection of masses for her—all of them, he said, adaptable to harmony and relatively easy to transpose—and she was intent on listening to each one over and over until she found the piece that lingered in her mind and became a part of her mental repertoire. They were all so complicated; that was part of the problem. They were not like little folk songs that she could learn after two verses. They were instead composed of distinct and individual melodies—Ahio called them movements—each with its own tone, rhythm, and complex lines of music. She had been intrigued to learn, however, that every mass consisted of the same choral responses sung at approximately the same place in the piece. No matter what mass the angelica chose, the angels and the mortals and all the others attending the Gloria would be sure to know their parts.

She remembered Miriam's suggestion that Susannah learn the Lochevsky
Magnificat,
and so she sought it out when it did not appear among Ahio's selections, but the very first few minutes of listening convinced her that this was a piece well beyond her ability to learn. Still, she loved Hagar's breathtaking swoops and leaps of sound, particularly the three-and-a-half octave jump that occurred in the first soprano solo. Susannah was not a soprano—but she found herself, from time to time as she went about her daily business in the hold, humming that particular measure of music. In her own key, of course. About one entire octave below Hagar.

But she would fail at the
Magnificat
if she tried to perform it, so she dutifully turned back to Ahio's suggestions. She found herself drawn more and more often to a much simpler
Eleison
, sung, at least on this recording, by a light tenor voice of great clarity and sweetness. She didn't know who the singer was, but she had become familiar enough with Uriel's voice to know it wasn't the Archangel, and the woman who joined her solos to his was not Hagar. Two anonymous angels from the founding of Samaria, serenading Susannah as she sat, rapt and motionless, on the floor of the room they
had probably helped construct. It seemed strange to her that it did not seem stranger, what she was hearing and how she was hearing it. Perhaps her whole life had become so unfamiliar that she couldn't pick out the truly miraculous events anymore.

Gradually, she stopped playing the other possibilities and instead played the
Eleison
over and over, sometimes twice a day if she could spare the four hours. It became the music in her head almost constantly, though as a rule almost any tune could be jostling about in there, ready to come out in a snatch of song when she was preoccupied by something else. Now, there was no room for anything but the
Eleison
—the tenor solo, the soprano solo, any part of it from supplication to amen. Sometimes it even served as the background music to her dreams, accompanying her through the chrome-and-white corridors of her nighttime visitation.

And even that, when she woke at night and considered it, did not seem so odd.

Without even making the conscious attempt, she began creating her own harmonies to the
Eleison
, for a while experimenting as the mood struck her, but gradually settling on a more permanent score. On the opening movement, her harmonic line matched the solo one note for note, though some of the intervals were creative and not a few were dissonant, just for a beat or two. On the first soprano solo, she crafted a descant that was so radically different in tempo and mood that it sounded like an entirely separate song, though it was quite hauntingly beautiful when sung against the main melody. With the two duets she was obedient, tamely accepting the harmonies of the composer, but on the final tenor solo, she played with the music a little, embroidering a little here, echoing a little there. She liked the way it sounded.

She was not, however, confident enough of her own musical ability that she would even consider performing her own versions without first getting Ahio's approval. So one afternoon, she invited him to join her down in the music rooms to hear what she'd accomplished.

“You've already written the harmony?” he asked, amused. “I thought I was going to do that for you once you'd picked the piece.”

“Oh—that's right—well, you can probably come up with something even better than I have,” she said in a rush, because she greatly respected Ahio's abilities and she truly had forgotten.

He was grinning. “Probably not,” he said. “At any rate, I can't wait to hear what you've dreamed up. I'll come down this afternoon. I have to finish this for Enoch first, though.”

“I'll leave the door open for you,” she said.

Which was how it happened that she was sitting on the floor in the music room, out of sight of the hallway, and momentarily in silence as she hunted for a new disk to insert in the machine, when Gaaron came down the hall with Zack and Jude in tow. Normally, of course, anyone using a music room would shut the door to perfect the acoustics, so it was entirely natural that Gaaron would assume the entire hall was empty.

“I see both of you boys are none the worse for wear from your three weeks helping Enoch,” Gaaron said, his voice pleasant.

Zack growled something unintelligible and Susannah frowned, trying to remember what exactly had happened. Oh yes—a dreadful thing. Zack and Jude carrying mortal boys up into the air and then dropping them, taking care to catch them before putting them nonchalantly on the ground. It had been the talk of the hold until Susannah arrived with Keren, happening during both her absence and Gaaron's. Gaaron had told Enoch to have the boys labor in the storerooms until he came up with a suitable punishment, a word that caused Susannah to shiver.

Then again, she had flown in an angel's arms, and she knew just how petrifying it was to look down and realize that only chancy luck and unshakable goodwill were keeping her from plunging headfirst onto the ground. She could not imagine being the mortal boys terrorized by the angels in such a way.

But she hated to think of Gaaron being unmerciful.

“I've given some thought to what I can do to impress upon you that what you did was not only wrong and dangerous, it was harmful to you and Jude as well,” Gaaron said.

There was a sharp crack of laughter from Zack. “Didn't
hurt
me
any,” he said scornfully. “Didn't hurt them, either. Stupid babies. Afraid to fly.”

“There are many things I'm afraid of,” Gaaron said. “Flying doesn't happen to be one of them. I'd hate to be dropped in the middle of the ocean, though, trying to find my way to shore. I think my wings would drag me down and I'd drown. I think you would, too,” he added thoughtfully. “If you were set down in the ocean, I'd think you'd find the water as unfamiliar an element to survive in as Silas and Mark found the air.”

There was a moment of dreadful silence. “You're going to drop us in the
ocean
?” Jude demanded in a squeaky voice. “To
drown
?”

“You can't do that,” Zack said quickly, but not as if he entirely believed it. “You can't.”

“No, I can't,” Gaaron said. “But I know I have to do something to teach both of you how serious your actions were—and how fragile and precious life is. Even the life of someone unlike you. Even the life of someone you do not like.”

“Silas isn't precious,” Zack muttered.

“He is to someone,” Gaaron said.

“Well, so what is it that you're going to do?” Zack demanded.

“I'm sending you on a journey.”

Susannah felt a certain dismay shiver through her. He had threatened once to do that, to send Zack and Jude to Breven—and, after all, she had put the thought in his head when she suggested he send Miriam to Luminaux. But Breven was so far away, and full of such unreliable citizens. She was not sure she would turn anyone over to the Jansai.

Zack made a little offhand grunt, accompanied, she was sure, by a characteristic careless toss of his unkempt black hair. “Yeah, Breven,” he said. “You said that before.”

“Manadavvi country,” Gaaron corrected.

Everyone within hearing distance was surprised, including Susannah, who should not have been listening.

“What would we want to go there for?” Jude asked.

“You'll be accompanying two women and two babies who are taking a trip from the Eyrie to Constantine Lesh's
estate,” Gaaron said. “I can provide you with maps, but I believe the women know the way. They were born there, though both of them have lived at the Eyrie for many years. They'll be coming back after their visit home.”

“I can't carry a woman and a baby,” Jude protested. He was taller than most mortal boys his age, but skinny; he probably didn't have Susannah's body mass, and
she
certainly couldn't have carried a mother and a child anywhere.

“
I
can,” Zack said.

“Oh, you won't be flying,” Gaaron said. “You'll be walking alongside them. Or riding, if you can find a horse to carry you, but generally they shy at our wings. You'd be thrown five times a day. Walking's probably safer. More comfortable.”

There was another short silence. “You want us to walk from here to northern Gaza?” Zack said. “It'll take—weeks! We'll—why would we do that? Someone else can fly them there.
You
could do it.”

“I could, but I'm too busy,” Gaaron said. His voice was perfectly calm, perfectly reasonable, but absolutely unyielding. “They need to bring a cart with them, full of possessions to return to Constantine. Something about a piece of furniture that has been in the Lesh family for generations. That really needs to be transported over land.”

“So? Why does it have to be me and Jude?” Zack wanted to know.

“Because as leader of the hold I am asking you to perform a task for me. As you grow older and more responsible, I will often have missions that I will send you on—to pray for rain, to pray for plague medicines. I have to know now if you can be entrusted with those important duties, that will determine if the people of Bethel live or die. If you cannot be, of course, then you cannot be useful members of the hold, and you will not be permitted to live here.”

Now the silence was awful.

“That's one reason,” Gaaron said, still speaking in that reasonable, inflexible voice. “Another reason is that I realize I am partially at fault for your recent actions. I have not trusted you, Zack, or you, Jude, with the tasks that any angel should be expected to perform. I have thought you were too
young, too immature—with the result that you acted irresponsibly and cruelly. But I believe that if I give you a chance to perform a hard task, you will perform it well. You will see that the lives of four other people are completely dependent on you. I am certain that, under your guidance, they will make it safely to Gaza, and that they will be fed with the food you gather, and that they will be kept warm by the fires you build along the road, and the water that you fetch for them when you make camp too far from a riverbed.”

“I don't know how to make a fire,” Jude said.

“Don't you? Then you'd better learn. You leave in two days.”

“Two days!” Zack exclaimed. “But we—you can't just—”

“And the third reason I want you to accompany these women on the journey,” Gaaron said, raising his voice to drown out Zack's, “is that I believe they would both like a chance to get to know you better. Silas' mother and Mark's aunt. They came to me and asked what kind of people could be so cruel as to torment these boys. I thought a journey of some weeks would give them a chance to learn more about each of you—and you to learn about them. As I said, Silas and Mark are precious to someone. As you are precious to someone. I thought it would not hurt to remind you that love is a powerful force in this world, invisible though it seems.”

Again, not a word from either of the boys. Susannah herself was not sure she could have spoken, had she been sitting nearby and invited to participate in the conversation. What a risk, but a glorious one, to send these two wild boys off on such a tricky mission! Surely Gaaron had built safeguards into his plan—surely he or one of his other angels would fly overhead from time to time, to monitor the progress of the traveling band and make sure the angel boys did not desert the very vulnerable women. There was a devious kind of elegance to his solution, offering both boys a chance to be so good, if they didn't take the much easier course of being bad. Was he right? Or would this difficult journey prove them to be as incorrigible as it sometimes seemed they already were?

“What if we won't go?” Zack asked finally. “Will you send us to Breven then?”

“Oh, no,” Gaaron said coolly. “I'll set you out on the streets of Velora to do as you will. You'll be no more responsibility of mine or the hold's. But I'm sure you'll be able to take care of yourselves.”