Archangel (23 page)

“Maga!”

“Well, you asked.”

“I don’t think I’ll ask you for any more stories,” Rachel exclaimed. “Everything you tell me has a sorry end.”

Magdalena was laughing. “I apologize. How can I make everything right again?”

Rachel sighed. “Bring back the sunshine. I hate this awful cold and snow.”

Magdalena came to her feet. “All right. The snow will be gone by nightfall. Tomorrow we’ll go into Velora again.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to go aloft and pray for a weather intercession. We’ll have sun in the morning.”

“Pray for— Can you really do that?”

Maga laughed again. “Of course I can. Weather is the easiest thing for an angel to control. Want to come with me?”

“
Flying
? I don’t think so.”

“All right. I’ll only be gone an hour or so.”

And she left the chamber. Sure enough, late that evening, the snow stopped falling; the clouds drifted apart; the stars appeared fiercely white against the absolute blackness of the night sky. When Hannah remarked at dinner that the air seemed much warmer than it had that morning, both Rachel and Magdalena thought it prudent not to explain why.

And the next day they were back in Velora again.

It was too cold to shop for long at the outdoor bazaars, so Rachel and Magdalena had taken refuge at a pastry shop, where they drank hot spiced wine and nibbled on cheese rolls. Rachel had seated herself by the window.

“Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine,” she chanted. “I think I’ll just sit here all day.”

“Eating cake and getting fat and lazy,” Maga agreed. “Sounds good to me.”

“Sounds good to me, too,” said a man’s voice behind them. They both looked around quickly to see the slim, graceful form of the angel Obadiah thrown into high detail by the angle of the sun. He had entered the shop and come to their table without either of them noticing. “Can I sit with you and put on a few pounds?”

“Of course,” Maga said. Rachel merely looked surly. Obadiah pulled up one of the metal chairs—like the Eyrie chairs, carefully designed to accommodate angels—and gracefully disposed his wings over the back. He gave them both a seraphic smile.

“Lovely weather, for a change,” he said. “I compliment you on the efficacy of your prayers.”

Maga choked back a laugh. “What makes you think—”

“I can scent an intercession unerringly, lovely. I was on the point of going aloft myself, when I noticed a distinct improvement in the temperature last night. And if, as I believe, it was the angelica’s idea, I compliment her as well.”

“Not my idea,” Rachel said. “I didn’t even know it could be done.”

“Well, it’s not supposed to be,” Obadiah said thoughtfully. He raised a hand to signal to the shopkeeper for service. “Gabriel gets very testy when angels misuse power for personal comfort. But then, almost everything makes Gabriel testy. If we all conformed to his standards, we would sit mute and motionless inside the Eyrie, thinking only pure thoughts.”

Rachel could not stifle a giggle. Obadiah slanted her a sideways look and then grinned at Magdalena. “So she does laugh,” he said to the other angel. “I confess, I have never even seen her smile in the weeks she has been at the Eyrie. I was beginning to wonder if she hated us all.”

“She likes me,” Maga said serenely.

“Everybody does.”

The shopkeeper brought wine and rolls to Obadiah, who flashed his bracelet in lieu of payment. The man nodded and left.

“You mustn’t be misled by our forbidding, disdainful appearances,” Obadiah continued, addressing Rachel this time. “You think angels live such fabulous lives, performing good deeds and communing with the god—lives to which poor, unworthy mortals could not even aspire—but I assure you it is not all rapture and glory.”

“I never thought it was,” Rachel said dryly.

“I, for instance, was called away three days ago when a traveler to Velora said he’d seen a plague flag hoisted over a homestead fifty miles from here. You recall the weather, of course— Magdalena had not yet charmed the snow clouds from our gloomy skies—so there I was, darting past the flakes and even beginning to feel a bit chilled as I flew west for an hour. I spotted the flag, found the homestead—and entered the house to find one robust woman, a healthy man and half a dozen farm children gamboling around the fireplace. Not a cough to be heard, not a sore or lesion in sight.

“So I introduced myself politely, inquired in the kindest of voices about the presence of the plague flag, and received nothing but blank stares from the lord and lady of the household. Ah, but young Ezra, who looked to be about ten years old, came running in from the barn saying, ‘Is he here? Is the angel here?’ I admit to feeling, at that precise moment, a surge of misgiving.”

Maga was laughing openly. Even Rachel was amused by the
light, sardonic tone of Obadiah’s voice. He was fair-haired, open-faced, slightly built. Though he told the tale as if it pained him, the laughter behind his eyes was easy to read.

“The lady of the house turned to young Ezra and exclaimed, ‘What have you done? Surely you didn’t call an angel down here to look for that fool animal,’ and the lord of the house expressed his intention of giving the boy a good sound whipping. He strode off somewhere, presumably to find a nice sturdy piece of leather. Ezra, meanwhile, evaded his mother’s hands and came running up to me, grabbed me by my belt and began sobbing into my chest. ‘He’s been gone for three days—I know he’s going to freeze to death in all this snow. I can’t find him and I’ve looked everywhere.’ “

“Let me guess—a dog,” said Maga.

“A
goat
, if you please, a white goat with white horns, who was no doubt destined to be slaughtered for dinner in a month’s time, anyway.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I went out looking for the goat. I brought Ezra with me so I could have an extra pair of eyes—at least that’s what I told him. Really I just wanted to postpone the whipping if I could. We were out for three hours.”

“Did you find the goat?” Rachel asked.

“Oh, yes. Holed up under a fallen tree, all snug and comfortable. And if you don’t think
that
was a pleasure,” he added, “flying back four miles with a ten-year-old boy under one arm and a squirming goat under the other, well, then, you have no imagination.”

Both women laughed aloud. Obadiah surveyed them benevolently. “So,” he said to Rachel, “the next time you are overawed by your angelic counterparts, remember me and the goat, and it will all whittle down to the proper perspective.”

“Thank you, I will.”

“Well, you’re very kind,” Magdalena said. “I don’t think Gabriel or Nathan would have gone searching for a pet.”

“No, somehow it’s always me who ends up with the bizarre or humiliating assignments,” Obadiah agreed. “I remember, my second or third time out, responding to a pilgrim’s petition—”

For the next hour, he entertained them with stories of his misadventures. Rachel could not remember ever laughing so hard. Magdalena contributed a few of her own stories, and even Rachel
recounted a tale of an ill-fated Edori campsite which had not, at the time, been funny. It felt good to laugh, to remember, to share. It had been so long since she’d had friends.

It was Magdalena who brought the session to an end. “But we came down to buy thread and yarn for my weaving,” she said. “Let’s go look some more.”

Obadiah accompanied them back to the bazaar, where they wandered between the booths and were occasionally separated for a few moments at a time. Rachel was by herself in front of a booth of glassware when she was approached by a frail, dark-haired girl who looked about seven years old.

“Please, lady,” the girl said, tugging at Rachel’s sleeve. “My brother’s sick and he’s awful hungry. Could you give me something—”

The pale, paunchy man who owned the booth took a menacing step forward. “Get out of here, you. Go on—get!”

Rachel laid a hand on the filthy, tangled hair. “I don’t have any money with me,” she said gently. “Where is your brother?”

The girl pointed. In an alley off the main boulevard sat a huddled bundle of ragged cotton topped with a tousled dark head. “He’s been sick for two days and all he wants is some bread—”

“Let me go see him.”

“Lady, do you want the glass?” the shopowner demanded.

“No,” Rachel said over her shoulder, and followed the girl to her brother’s side. His eyes were closed and his hands folded across his stomach, and he moaned in a small voice as he rocked from side to side. He seemed even more emaciated than his sister.

“Does he have a fever? When’s the last time he ate anything?” Rachel asked. She dropped to her knees to get a closer look.

It was a tactical mistake. Someone shoved her hard from behind; as she toppled forward, the sick boy leapt to his feet, miraculously recovered. Hands yanked on the gold chain she had hung around her neck that morning; nimble fingers untied the silk scarf from her hair. Before she could regain her balance, they had stripped her few valuable items from her and gone skipping down the street. She heard cries of anger and outrage follow them as the brother and sister wove through the throng and disappeared.

She had not even tried to resist. The instant she’d recognized the scam, she had frozen, allowed them to take what they would.
Now, as running footsteps hurried up from behind, she steadied herself against the alley wall and pushed herself slowly to her feet.

“Rachel! Are you all right? What happened? Those children—!” Magdalena was the first to reach her, with Obadiah right behind. Strangers formed a crowd behind the angels as she turned to face them.

“I didn’t even see them. What did they look like?” Obadiah demanded. “I might be able to catch them.”

Rachel shook her head. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. They just took a couple of things.”

Maga had already noticed the thefts. “Oh, your pretty gold necklace! And your silk scarf. And—your belt with the gold disks—oh, Rachel, it took us three days to buy that belt!”

Rachel laughed shakily. It was no very pleasant thing to be attacked, even by children, and even though they left you quite unharmed. Seeing her whole and relatively calm, the gathered onlookers began to disperse. “The belt and the necklace hardly matter,” she said. “I hope they can find some nice little shop to pawn them for a few gold pieces. They looked hungry.”

“And you looked like easy prey, lovely,” Obadiah said. “One of us should have been with you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s disgraceful,” Maga said. “That an angelica can’t walk safely through the streets of Velora—”

“It is disgraceful,” Rachel interrupted. Her trembling had stopped; she was feeling, instead, the steadying power of righteous rage. “Disgraceful, that in a town less than a vertical mile from an angel hold there should be starving children on the street, reduced to begging and robbery to survive.”

The angels both stared at her. Obadiah, predictably, began to laugh.

“But Rachel—aren’t you angry?” Maga asked, puzzled.

“Of course I’m angry! How can such things be allowed to happen? Why aren’t these children provided for? Why doesn’t someone care for them? You yourself told me that at least some of them have been sired by angels, though they aren’t fortunate enough to bear wings when they’re born. Is that their fault? Among the Edori, you are responsible for your child no matter how he looks when he is born—no matter if he has hair of a color you dislike or a foot deformed in the womb or a mind that will never cease to function like a child’s—”

Maga glanced around to see who might be listening. “Rachel, hush. This is not the time or place—”

“Angels who think it’s so important to sire more
angel
children and then not caring what happens to the mortal babies that are brought into the world. Leaving them to starve or die or turn into street urchins who know no way but violence to survive—”

Unlike Gabriel, these two had not had an opportunity to see Rachel in full spate before. Maga was distraught, but Obadiah remained cool. He blocked Rachel’s way as she began to pace, spreading his wings wide and backing her toward the building. When she lifted her hands as if to strike him, he caught her wrists and pushed her gently against the brick of the wall.

“You can’t solve anything when you’re crazy like this,” he said, his light voice taking on hypnotic, soothing rhythms. “Calm down, discuss it—we can work it out.”

“Solve it! Discuss it! What can be done? It’s disgraceful—”

“It is, I agree, calm down. There are things to be done, things you can do, but you have to stop a minute, think, calm down—”

Quickly enough, the beautiful voice had its effect. She stopped resisting his grip, took several long breaths and stared fixedly down at the cobblestones until her vision returned to normal. When she looked up at her companions again, she was still angry but in control.

“I’m not sorry,” she said defiantly. “You think I behaved badly, but such a thing should make you angry, too.”

Obadiah released her. Maga rushed in to give her a quick hug. “But Rachel, you should not get so upset about things. You frightened me—”

“Well, I’m sorry for that, but Maga, this is terrible. How is it nothing is being done for these children?”

“Something is being done,” Obadiah said. “I think there is someone here in Velora you should meet.”

His name was Peter and he had been, he told her, a priest for forty years. Like other priests, his life’s work had been to travel from city to city, village to village, homestead to homestead, dedicating newborns to the god and grafting a Kiss onto each small arm. Three winters ago, his life was changed.

“I suppose I had seen the urchins of Breven and Semorrah and Castelana before,” he said reflectively, “but I had not really
noticed them. I dealt with infants, not children. They were not my concern.”

Rachel nodded, never withdrawing her eyes from his face. He was a tall, gaunt man with completely white hair, pale blue eyes and a mild, studious expression. He looked as if he had spent his life reading handwritten texts by inadequate lighting. Magdalena’s sunshine poured in through the huge windows of the place they were in, a mostly unfurnished warehouse on the edge of the Velora shipping district. The old man and the angelica had taken the only two chairs in this corner of the room; the high, curved backs did not accommodate angel wings. Rachel’s companions sat on the floor, also listening in silence.