Angel-Seeker (21 page)

“We have company,” Jordan reminded him in a low, patient voice. “Our
friends
are with us, and we've promised not to abandon them.”

Ephram pouted. “I want to play chakki,” he said sulkily. “You can stay with the g—with the others.”

“Oh, let him play his stupid game,” Martha said. “You can stay with him, too. We'll be fine.”

Jordan gave her a look of indignation. Neither he nor Ephram had worn masks, so both their faces were open studies of exhilaration—though Jordan, to do him credit, wore a layer of concern over his elation. “I'm not leaving you!” he said in a low whisper. “And Ephram's not either.”

“All right, all
right,”
Ephram said in a louder voice. “I'll come with you—in twenty minutes. I just want to play one round. I'll win some silver, I know it.”

Martha gave her brother a rather ungentle shove on the shoulder. “Twenty minutes,” she said. “Come find us over by the music stage.”

“I will.”

Jordan protested again, but Martha shrugged and strode forward, and he had no choice but to follow. Rebekah fell in step behind him, but she didn't pay much attention to where she placed her feet. She was too busy swinging her head from side to side, taking in the sights: the huge ruffled hawks chained to their perches and crying out unheeded songs of warning; the painted vistas on wide stretched canvases, mountain ranges and riverbeds that she would swear existed nowhere in Samaria; the cool, tall, handsome Manadavvi lords holding a quiet conversation with three fat Jansai merchants, everyone looking pleased and guilty. She could stand here all night, simply staring, and never see enough.

“Come
on,”
Jordan called, now ten paces ahead of her and sounding as impatient as Ephram. She quickened her step and caught up with him, though Martha was still in front of them both.

“This is wonderful,” she said in a low voice. “Thank you for bringing us here.”

“We can't stay very long,” he warned. “It's too dangerous.”

“I know,” she said. “But as long as we can.”

They wove their way past another dozen booths, turned an ill-defined corner into another brightly lit alley, and came upon a small stage that looked like it had been hastily constructed of raw wood and a few metal reinforcing strips. A ragtag group of musicians sat on this rickety platform, apparently oblivious to their surroundings, hunched over their instruments and wearing rapt, hallucinatory expressions. At a guess, they were Luminauzi, trained in the city of artists but earning their incomes by traveling around the three provinces, playing at fairs and farms.

Rebekah could not even name their instruments: two that looked like oversized flutes, three that bore strings of some sort laid across wooden frames, one that appeared to be nothing more than a piece of stretched goatskin upon which the musician played with a stick he might have picked up on the road. Yet they created sheets of melody that fell on the crowd like savage rain, washing all the listeners with divine radiance and making their skin tingle with wonder. That was
wind and this was summer—a short, playful little flirt of song was a baby's first smile—one of the flutes burst free of the strings and drum to make a sigh like love and betrayal. Rebekah stood transfixed, her mouth hanging open, not caring that she looked like an ensorceled idiot. Martha looked just as bemused, and so did half of the men standing around them, their jaws slack, their wine bottles forgotten in their hands.

“That was pretty,” Jordan commented as the music came to an end and the crowd broke into thunderous applause. “Did you like it?”

The women did not even bother to answer but applauded madly with the rest of the observers. “More!” Martha shouted out, along with half the men in the vicinity. “Another song!”

Jordan rolled his eyes. He was fourteen, and his idea of illicit pleasure was not listening to scruffy musicians playing complex music. “How long do we have to wait here?” he asked Rebekah.

She smiled at him. She was feeling breathless with beauty and possibility, half in love with the whole world just because it existed, and she was certainly pleased with Jordan for helping her come to this fabulous place. “You don't have to wait with us,” she said. “Martha and I aren't likely to get into any trouble. Just come back for us here later.”

“I can't leave you two,” he said, but he sounded less convinced than he had when he had said the same thing to Ephram.

“You can, if you come back,” she said. “What did you want to do? Play chakki? Bet on the races? I hope you don't want to fight.”

He grinned. “I'm not very good at punching. Ephram is, if we could pull him away from the chakki. I'd lay money on him and win it all back, too.”

She gave him a little shove on the arm. “Go. We'll be right here when you get back.”

He hesitated. “Twenty minutes?”

She laughed. She had no doubt it would be two hours or more before they saw Ephram again. “An hour,” she said. “Does that give you enough time?”

“Are you sure you'll be all right?”

“No one's paying any attention to us at all. We'll be fine.”

He protested another minute or two, but it was clear his attention
had already wandered back to one of the booths they had passed on their way in. “An hour, then,” he said at last. “You wait right here.”

He left, and Rebekah looked around to explain to Martha that their escort had dwindled down to nothing.

But Martha, it turned out, had already acquired another defender.

It took Rebekah a moment to locate her cousin, since the honey-blonde hair and the distinctive face were both hidden behind disguises, and half the crowd was dressed exactly like she was. And Rebekah was looking for a solitary figure, standing a little apart from the mob, circumspect, even, trying to avoid drawing any attention.

What she didn't expect to see was Martha, a dozen yards away, in close conversation with a barefaced young man a little older than Isaac, dressed like a Manadavvi and gazing down at Martha as if he could see beneath the cloth and feathers of her mask.

Jovah's old decrepit bones.

Oblivious to the crowd, Rebekah stepped a few paces closer, staring at the couple so completely absorbed in each other that they might not have realized a fair was unfolding around them. They had not just met a few moments ago, that much was certain; and that the Manadavvi lordling knew he was speaking to a young woman was evident in every strained line of his body. How had Martha met him? Where? Under what circumstances? True, Manadavvi traders came into Breven every day, selling some goods and buying others, but all of the transactions took place at the open market, where the only women present were the poorest of the Jansai or were not Jansai at all.

Had Martha been sneaking into the market for days or weeks now, dressed as a servant or boldly pretending to be a farm wife from the Jordana hills? Only her male relatives or her wide circle of female friends would recognize her once the veils were put away. No other Jansai would have any reason to know her face. She was smart enough to go to market only on days her menfolk were unlikely to be bartering—and brave enough to hope that none of the women of her circle would betray her if they saw her. Even so, such a deception, if discovered, carried such a high price that Rebekah could not imagine carrying it out except to satisfy the most extreme desire.

This man. This Manadavvi. Did Martha imagine she loved him?

Had Martha squealed and sighed over every detail of Rebekah's
rendezvous with the Cedar Hills angel, all the while keeping a much more incendiary secret to herself?

Had this been the reason she had insisted on coming to the fair and had threatened to come alone if Rebekah had refused to accompany her? Had she headed straight for the music stage to keep an assignation, not caring if her brother or her cousins saw her in conversation with the most dangerous of companions? Rebekah felt shock and dread alternately heat and freeze her heart. The questions tumbled from her brain into her chest, bouncing between her ribs like rocks set loose by a mountain catastrophe. This could not be occurring. Martha could not be so wanton with her life. This was a crime she could die for.

Rebekah took another step closer, though her feet felt so stiff and heavy they almost refused to move. As if sensing her approach, Martha jerked her head around, and her eyes fixed on Rebekah's through the swaying, surging crowd. Impossible to read her expression at this distance, in these circumstances, but Rebekah caught the message as clearly as though Martha had shouted it in her ear:
Come no closer. I am no responsibility of yours.
Rebekah halted where she stood, moving only when buffeted by the restless revelers. Martha returned her attention to her companion, who smiled at her with an unfeigned delight. Martha, or so Rebekah imagined, smiled back.

As if it was possible for the evening to get worse, that was when Rebekah saw the angel.

M
usic flowered from the stage the instant that she saw him, a hallelujah of brass from some itinerant band that had just now set up its chairs and scores. He was walking through the crowd, approaching the clearing around the stage from the opposite direction of the route that Rebekah's group had taken. He was accompanied by a handful of Jansai merchants, all dressed in bright, flowing robes and pushing each other aside to get a chance to argue with him. He was laughing. Torchlight spangled his yellow hair and threw glitter across his white wings, held narrowly behind his body as if he wanted to keep them from being soiled or stepped on. He looked regal and beautiful and fashioned of pure divine light.

Obadiah.

It was not the night, Rebekah felt certain, for her to have been left unattended by her brother and her cousins in a sea of indifferent and drunken strangers.

But she would not talk to him. She would not follow Martha's reckless example, oh no. She was an engaged woman, a dutiful daughter, a fool who might carry the image of an angel in her heart but who knew better than to reach her hand to that image and see if she could startle it into existence.

Besides, he was surrounded by powerful Jansai men who had no interest in indulging the whims of gawking young boys who wanted
to step close enough to see the angel, marvel at his wings, wonder aloud why he had wandered into Breven, where angels were far from welcome. Those Jansai men would be even less tolerant of a Jansai girl in disguise, come creeping into the city by night to sample the delights of the harvest fair.

The brass band played ecstatically on, pumping a rhythmic surge of adrenaline through her veins. She would swear by her love of the god that she had not expected to lay eyes on him again. She had come to the fair knowing he might be here,
would
be here, he had sworn he would attend and begged her to do the same, but she had not really thought she would see him. Had not thought she would be standing this close to him, had not realized that her mutinous feet would carry her, unordered, through the maze of the crowd so that she stood only a few yards from him. Close enough to see his face. Close enough to see the sweetness of the smile he turned on the fat, greasy Jansai leader whom she suspected was the merchant Uriah. Close enough to hear the timbre of his voice when he exclaimed, “I can't imagine I'd be very welcome! But you flatter me.”

If he looked over her way, if his eyes had the power of stripping away disguises, he would be able to count the cadence of her fluttering pulse by the way the color came and went across her cheeks. He was that close. She took a step nearer.

The brass band came to an exultant conclusion, and the crowd broke into enthusiastic applause yet again. “More! More! Another song!” the listeners cried out. But this was a night, apparently, that musicians took the stage for only a single number, then yielded their places to the next performers. The players gathered their horns and trumpets, bowed to the horde, and made a rather untidy exit. Rebekah dragged her eyes from Obadiah's face long enough to see who might be ascending the stage now, but it remained empty while the concert masters debated who should take the next turn. The crowd, trading insults and tossing back drinks, waited happily enough.

Rebekah looked back at Obadiah. He was laughing again, hands flung up, palms out, as if to offer a physical protest. Uriah scowled, then laughed, then stomped away from the angel and up the open, rickety steps that led to the stage.

“So!” the Jansai bawled out to the crowd. “We've got an angel here, and he thinks he's too good to sing in our competition.”

“That's not what I said!” Obadiah called, but his contradiction was drowned out in the roar of the mob's disapproval.

Uriah held his hand up for silence, and the crowd subsided a little, still muttering. “I told him, we've no love for angels, but we appreciate when a man does us honor. Is that right?”

Every voice in the crowd shouted back a confirmation of that fact.

“And we're Jansai! We can gauge the worth of every item bought and sold across the three provinces! We know what an angel's voice is worth, do we not?”

“We know!” the men cried out.

“So we know the value of an angel's voice, lifted in celebration at our humble fair, do we not?”

“We know!”

“And we've got an angel here! And we want to hear him sing! Do we not?”

“We do!”

Now Uriah pumped both fists in the air. “So let's have him sing! Angelo, take the stage!”

The throng responded with a stamping, shouting, surging howl of anticipation. Rebekah felt herself carried forward a few feet by the motion of the revelers around her, and in a moment's panic, she was afraid she would be crushed by their enthusiasm. Or hatred; it was hard to tell. Emotions were certainly running high, and the crowd was as liable to stone the singer as to cheer him. Breathless and a little frightened, she fought free of the press of people and moved a little away from the main area in front of the platform.

She could still see the stage, though. She could see Obadiah calmly mounting the steps and crossing the dais with the white, orderly grace of a god. Away from his Jansai companions, alone on the stage, he took on even more poise and incandescence. His wings, spread out fully behind him, created an aureole of brightness that wrapped his entire body in luminescence. He stepped to the edge of the stage and looked down at his audience. Incredibly, he was smiling, a winning and infectious smile that invited all listeners to like him. He must know that they all hated him, that they only shouted him onstage so
they could humiliate him. He must know that he had never in his life sung for a less appreciative audience.

“Thank you for your kind invitation,” he said in a clear, carrying voice. He sounded utterly relaxed and at ease. “It will be a pleasure for me to sing for you tonight. I will not trouble you with formal masses and prayers to the god. Instead, since it is a night of moonlight and magic, I will sing to you of love.”

Oh, loving god of the skies and waters, it could not be worse.

Rebekah looked around wildly for the only person she knew, hoping Martha would realize that now, of all times, she must come to her cousin's side and provide strength and support. Martha would instantly know that
this
angel was Rebekah's angel, and that Rebekah would be cowering in the shadows, torn between bliss and agony. Martha would come to her side, grab her hand, give her a squeeze of sympathy.

But Martha and her Manadavvi friend were nowhere in sight.

A different kind of panic drove Rebekah's heartbeat for a moment as she considered where Martha might have disappeared. Well, the Manadavvi might have traveled to Breven with a contingent of Gaza merchants, and he might have his own sheltered pavilion set up on the far side of the fair. Chances were he had a brother or a father or a cousin working the booth with him, but perhaps there was a wagon out back, a covered cart holding the unsold merchandise, and two determined people might be willing to call that privacy. Rebekah's face went hot and her hands went cold at the thought.

She wished she had never come to this thrice-damned fair. Everything was poised to go awry, balanced on the crystal edge of disaster. What would she say when Jordan returned, and Ephram? Martha, no doubt, was counting on both boys being absent for much longer than the promised period, but what if she guessed wrong? What if they reappeared in ten minutes, or twenty, with Martha missing and the whole fair to search? Rebekah felt her stomach knot and her hands clench as she turned this way and that, searching the crowd with her eyes, still hoping to catch a glimpse of the gold-feathered mask and the rich, intent features of the Manadavvi lordling.

And then the angel began singing, and Rebekah forgot everybody in the world but him.

He first sounded a single pure, sustained, wordless note, a featherlight gong of music that brought the entire audience to still attention. Longer than it was possible, so long it was clear he could not have the usual human requirements to breathe, he held the note, seeming to draw it out of the stage and the soil beneath him. When, abruptly, he shut it off, the silence he left behind was so surprised the night itself seemed to shake itself and look around in bemusement. Everybody in the crowd merely stared at him, openmouthed and stupid.

And then the true song began, riffs and trills of melody so light and sweet that it seemed either dawn or spring had arrived early. His voice laughed and beckoned, pausing so briefly on each note that it seemed to spring up behind him like a blade of grass released by a running foot. Rebekah had no way of judging if the song was sophisticated or simple, difficult or easy, but that he was an absolute master of his material there could be no doubt. The music swirled around her like a light breeze, lifting her heart like a pile of fallen petals and spinning it into the infinite heavens.

She was not even listening to the words.

He had called it a love song, so she tried to concentrate, to make out the story line or the text of the refrain. It was not that he did not enunciate, for every syllable was clear as a spoken word; it was that the music itself haunted her so completely that she could not pause to analyze its components. But the words must match the melody, frivolous and fun, for everyone around her was smiling, and these were not men who were easily moved to delight.

A quick-rising series of notes, two sharply dropped ones, a sudden nod of his head, and the song was done. Once again, the silence caught everyone totally unprepared, so that there was a moment's stunned and empty stillness. Then the mob broke into such a wild, sustained ovation that the stage trembled with it. Rebekah saw the angel put out his hand as if to rest it on a support, but there was nothing but bare wood beneath him and it was looking none too steady. He spread his feet to improve his balance and laced his hands behind his back. As the cheering went on and on, he bowed his head again, this time more deeply, and then took a pace back as if to exit the stage.

Uriah was right back up there with him, putting his hand on Obadiah's shoulder as if to hold him in place. It was Rebekah's imagination,
maybe, but she didn't think the angel cared for the Jansai's touch. Uriah shouted something at him, and Obadiah shook his head. Uriah shouted something else, and Obadiah reluctantly nodded.

“Quiet!”
bellowed the Jansai, and the crowd simmered down, though there was still a murmur of excitement bubbling under the surface. “The angel has agreed to sing a second song!”

At that, the response threatened to bring the platform down again, and Obadiah looked as if he was seriously considering waiting out the uproar on solid ground. But he stood before them all, white and gold and magnificent, showing a courtly patience.

When the noise died down sufficiently for him to be heard, he took one step forward and began to sing. This was a completely different song in a wholly different style, slow, looping, and beautiful. It was not sad so much as wistful, a meditation on a lost love or a vanished home or a dream abandoned long ago. Obadiah's voice easily made the long, elegant sweep from the low notes of the melody to the high, pensive elegy of the chorus. Each time one verse ended and the refrain began, Rebekah felt her heart make that leap with his voice. His music molded her body, sculpted her into so much tense, mute longing. She stood absolutely motionless on the edge of the crowd, but every nerve, every sense, was agitated and primed, pointed straight toward him. If she had been an arrow nocked on the bow, her release would have driven her directly into his heart.

This song did not end as abruptly as the last; rather, its last clear, mournful phrases faded and repeated, faded and repeated, till the very last note merely melted away. Again, the crowd greeted the performance with first silence and then clamorous approbation. The angel bowed again, so low that his blond hair swept the raw lumber of the stage, and then he straightened with an air of great determination. He was down the stairs and onto the ground while the throng was still cheering and chanting.

If Rebekah had had attention to spare for anyone else, she would have felt a wave of pity for the next performers. But she didn't care about those luckless unfortunates, and she didn't give Martha more than one quick thought as she took another cursory look around the crowd. All her energy was concentrated on the angel, visible in patches of glowing white through the unstable construction
of the stage, surrounded by the dull, heavy, mundane bodies of Jansai.

She had to get next to him.

She had forgotten all her vows, her responsibilities, the risks she ran of angering Hector or disgracing Isaac. She had to move closer to Obadiah, had to be able to truly look at him, to see the strength and kindness of his face. She would not talk to him—no, she was not that foolish—and, anyway, how could she, surrounded as she was by a sea of pushing, shoving Jansai men? They would have no chance to talk, Rebekah and Obadiah, Jansai girl and Cedar Hills angel, but she did not need to say a word. She merely wanted to see his face, remind her heart of its lines and contours. She asked Jovah for no more than that.

Accordingly, she drifted through the crowd, willing herself to be invisible. There was no shortage of men pressing in the same direction, determined to shake the angel's hand—or, who knew, to tell him all his fancy love songs would never change their opinion of angel laws and angel ways. But fewer than she had thought. She would have expected the whole world to run in his direction, breathless with wonder, and for all men to throw themselves at his feet in adoration.