Angels at the Gate (39 page)

“What?” My mind cannot grasp what he is saying.

He takes a deep breath and says more clearly. “Raph and Mika are in the courtyard inside the Gate.” Danel looks toward Lot, who has emerged in clean clothes from our room, where he was washing off the grime of his journey from his fields.

“Who is at the Gate?” Lot asks, having only heard part of Danel's announcement.

“El's messengers,” Danel says again.

My heart is a loud drumbeat in my ears.
Mika? Here?
It is impossible; and yet somewhere buried in my being, I knew he would come.

Danel adds, “The people's mood is not welcoming.”

I can barely hear him over the thunder of my pulse, but I understand at once, and so does Lot. Since their presence here almost two summers ago, Lot's preaching has included frequent pronouncements about the visit of his god's angels, hinting their return would mean El's punishment was imminent.

It is obvious to me, however, that Lot is surprised at the angels' return, despite his public predictions.

He points at me. “Prepare. I will bring them.”

Danel has caught his breath. “I tried to get them to come to my grandmother's house,” he warns, “but they insisted they would sleep in the Gate with the merchants.”

“No,” Lot says. “They do not understand the danger. I will bring them.” He glares at me as if I am the cause of this problem.

“All will be ready,” I manage, my thoughts whirling like a desert dust demon.

We have already prepared the meal, so Lila spreads freshly beaten rugs in the courtyard and shoos the chickens aside. We roll out more guest rugs for sleeping pallets.

Pheiné does nothing useful, but stands in the middle of the courtyard, her hands on her hips. “We have no room for guests with that cursed donkey here.”

I ignore her, rearranging the cushions to make a place for them around the cook fire. Pheiné hates being ignored.

“At least that disgusting dog is gone.”

I am passing near her, and I spin around without thought, the flat of my palm meeting her right cheek with a loud
smack
. She staggers back with a sharp gasp.

Thamma, who had been helping Lila with the rugs, freezes, her eyes widening. Lila turns her head away, but not before I catch a fleeting smile.

Pheiné takes several outraged breaths before she manages to speak. “You struck me!”

I say nothing.

“You serpent!”

She takes a step toward me. I am taller than she, but she knows I cannot move quickly. I narrow my eyes and grasp my staff tighter. When I do not back away, she stops, her nostrils flaring. “My father will not allow this in his house.”

“I am wife here,” I say as calmly as I can. “The house is mine, as is discipline of the children.”

Her left cheek flames to match the right one. “Children? You are the child!”

“It is true I am younger in age, but it makes no matter. I am wife and this is my household. Now, do something useful or get out of the way.”

W
E ARE READY
when Lot returns. I greet them courteously as they enter, but Mika grabs my shoulders. “Adira!”

I cannot hear for the gallop of blood in my ears.

Raph, beautiful Raph, puts a hand on Mika's arm. “Brother.” It is all he says, but like Lila's soft word to Danel, it captures Mika's attention, and he releases me.

I bid them sit on the plaster bench that lines the wall in the greeting room, the same seat where Hurriya washed their feet in the traditional welcome to travelers. How surprised would that young Adira have been to know in only two summers' time, she would be in Hurriya's place. I am dizzy with the disorienting thought and grateful to be on my knees, closer to the earth.

Pheiné positions herself to minister to Raph, angling her face so he does not see the red mark on her cheek. She has avoided speaking to me or acknowledging my existence.

Mika protests when I remove his sandals. I am certain Raph has told him of all my injuries, if he cannot see for himself that I move like an old cow. I keep my head down, grateful for the thick braid that falls over the injured side of my face.

I wash the dust from his feet with tenderness, my hands trembling, remembering the touch of his hands on my flesh. The memory still sears—only so, I tell myself, because another man's touch has not replaced it. And now that half my face looks as if an ox stepped on it, a man is not likely to touch me, unless I slip out in the night during the Spring Rites and keep away from the torchlight. I silently mock that young girl-in-boy's-garb who worried about the slight bump on her nose.

When I am finished, Mika helps me stand. Still I keep my gaze down, though I can feel his desire to have me look at him.

I cannot hide myself when we sit for the evening meal. I sit with Raph between Mika and me. Raph is much easier to talk to. He was at my side when I looked far worse.

“I am glad to see you, Adira,” he says, “but you are so thin! What happened to the flesh I put on you in Mira?”

“I too am glad to see you.” I smile, aware of the way my mouth twists at the right corner where my cheek hollows into a depression.

“Where is Nami?” he asks.

Suddenly I cannot speak.

“She jumped out the window,” Thamma says hastily, her eyes still wide and as full of Raph as Pheiné's.

Raph gives me a look of sympathy. He understands my love for Nami and my suffering.

“Has El sent you because of Sodom's sin?” Lot asks after we have begun to eat. It is not good manners to speak business before the meal is over, but he cannot restrain himself.

“I seek … something here,” Mika says.

I remember he came the first time seeking ancient knowledge, something from his people's dim past when they lived beyond the sea in a land of rolling hills as thick with green grass as a tightly woven carpet. So many times he has told me of his homeland, that it is as real to me as the desert or the sea outside my window. My gaze travels the white plaster walls of my house. To my surprise, I have to wipe at a tear. Perhaps, I hope, no one saw it.

But I can feel Mika's gaze. He saw.

“If El sent you to find something, I will help you find it,” Lot says eagerly.

Mika's jaw twitches. With Mika, this signals irritation. “Do you know then the instructions to build a time-temple of stone?”

Lot's thick lips part. “I know not what this is.”

I remember something Mika told me when we spoke out on the desert.

Our oldest name is “Watchers.” We have watched the sky from the beginning of time. My ancestors built temples of stone that measured the heavens and brought the goddess into them
.

As it had then, a passage from one of Sarai's teachings presents itself in my mind, but this time I speak it aloud: “And they brought me to a place of darkness, and to a mountain the point of whose summit reached
to heaven. And they showed me all the secrets of the ends of the heavens, and all the chambers of all the stars, and all the luminaries.”

Into the quiet that follows, Pheiné says, “I am certain our guests do not wish to be bored with that old tale.” She smiles sweetly at Raph.

Lot's expression clearly conveys he thinks his wife has lost her senses. “Why—?” he begins, but Mika raises his flattened palm toward Lot in a command for silence.

Mika has never taken his eyes from me, and I have nowhere else to look but in them. They are as green as the lands of his ancestors, and they fix on me as if I have uttered the words to the knowledge he has long sought. I blink.

Mika does not blink. “Speak those words again,” he says in a voice I have never heard from him.

I repeat the quote.

“Is there more?” he asks, almost hoarse.

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

I do, the words coming easily to my mind, though I have not recited them since I last sat at Sarai's feet with Ishmael before our journey to Sodom. They speak of Enoch's journey to a high place where he saw El and his angels, a place of many portals arranged in a circle. The angels taught him which stars rose in the circle. Now my heart is beating faster.
This structure, this palace of El's, could it be the time-temple?

Mika and Raph stare at me.

A stranger has big eyes, but sees nothing.

—African proverb

I
AM AGITATED WHEN LOT DECIDES
to sleep in our bed. Perhaps he is jealous of El's angels and the attention they have paid me. I need not have been concerned. Lot drank heavily after the meal and snores almost as soon as he lies down. If I had wanted sleep, I could not have found it at his side. When I slip from the room, I am not surprised to see both Mika's and Raph's pallets empty. I
am
surprised, however, to see Lila sitting up against the wall, her blanket around her shoulders.

“Where did they go?” I ask her quietly.

She points to the window.

I almost laugh. “How did they know?”

She shrugs.

My smile dissolves. “What now?” I ask softly.

She does not answer, knowing the question is not hers, but mine. I go to her and she stands, knowing how arduous it is for me to sit on the floor or at least, how difficult to rise to my feet afterward. “You know I often go out that way at night?”

She nods.

“Do you know why?”

She starts to shake her head and then stops. “I believe it has to do with the sorrow in your heart.”

I consider her. “You are a wise woman, Lila.”

She pulls the blanket tighter. “Will you go tonight?”

This is the question I am asking myself. I turn and step to Philot's side to give him his treat and a scratch. He is getting gray around his eyes and muzzle, as I will here in this house.

Somehow, Philot has settled my mind. I cross the remainder of the floor to the window and climb out. A chill wind from the sea makes me wish I had brought a warmer wrap, but I will not return for one, because I might lose my courage. The soft slosh against the shore is as familiar as my heartbeat. Only the fiercest storm can lift the heavy salt-laden water into higher waves. It is said diving beneath the surface is impossible, that the sea will spew out anyone who tries. Hurriya did not try. She just lay face down upon its breast.

As always when I walk this path, my heart aches for Nami. I still look for her every day, remembering how she chewed her tether and returned to me when the Hurrian horsemen took her. I think I will always look for her.

I climb with care around the fallen stones of the wall and walk the path I have trod so many times. My eyesight is limited on the right side and so when the path turns that way, I almost run into Raph where he sits on a flat stone. His hand flies out with a warrior's speed to catch me as I stumble.

“You are always saving me, Raph.”

“You have no debt to me. I should never have left you in the hands of those cursed Babylonians.”

I sigh. “Should we count the choices we regret? How do we know what would happen if we chose differently? If you had not left, the guards might have planned more wisely and killed you in your sleep. Then you would not have been there to save me.”

“I never thought of that.”

“You were waiting for me here?”

“Yes.”

I look up at the overhang that blots a piece of the moon, the place where I once sat with Raph and Mika and where Mika held the blue fire. “He is there?”

“Yes, he waits for you.”

Another choice. Another path split from the trail. What would it mean were I to turn around and go back to my house with Hurriya's window and my snoring husband?

But I had known what I would do since Philot took his fig—perhaps before that, when I rose from the bed. Perhaps even when I heard there were angels at the Gate.

And so I climb the path, something I could never have done if I had not spent night after night making incremental progress and strengthening my leg in the process. I take my time, trying to slow my heart and bring to my mind what words I will say to Mika, but I can do neither.

Never has the journey up the cliff taken so long or gone so quickly. When I finally begin to climb the last bit, Mika's hand reaches out for me and pulls me up to stand with him on the overhang. Below us is the sea, brushed in a bold stroke by moonlight. To our left, the torches of Sodom flicker against the dark. Wind whips around us, a clean wind tonight, singing in my ears. Mika pulls me tightly against his chest, and the world goes still about us.

When at last he releases me, he holds me at arm's length and only breathes my name. “Adira.”

“What do you see, Mika?” I whisper the question, afraid of the answer even in the dimness of the night.

He frowns, taking my face between his hands and tilting it up so I am looking directly at him, the moonlight full on my features. He does not hesitate. “I see the girl who pulled me from a raging flood, the girl who stayed with me and shared her water in the desert and cared for me, though she risked her own life to do so. I see the girl who crossed a wasteland to find my brother, though she could have returned to the safety of her family.” His hands still firmly cup my face. He is not finished. “I see the woman who was the goddess for me, though she had never lain with a man, the woman who dared heaven with me. I see beauty and strength. I see the person I wish beside me for whatever time the goddess grants me of this life.”

I close my eyes, not knowing what to do with this, though it is what my heart has cried for since I climbed the steps of Ishtar's temple.

Finally, he gives me a little shake. “What are you thinking, Adira? Tell me.”

My mouth makes a sound that is part laugh and part sob. “I am thinking I have never heard so many words out of you at once.”

He smiles, and pulls me again to him.

I am not certain if the tremble of the earth beneath us is real. In his embrace, I allow myself to stop thinking and simply to be where I am. I absorb the press of his arms, the smell of him, the solid wall of his chest. I do not think of tomorrow or when I must pull away from him.