Archangel (54 page)

The first two men and the first woman all had fine voices, nothing spectacular, but good to listen to on a warm night under the stars and the flaring lamplight. It was impossible to sing “River Cara” badly. The crowd responded favorably, laughing and clapping, calling out for encores.

The second woman had a thin, sweet soprano that gave a wistful turn to the lovesick lyrics, and her performance was greeted with even greater acclaim. The next three singers also received enthusiastic endorsements, but by the time the eighth and ninth singers stepped up to do their verses, the audience was starting to get a little bored. They sang well enough, but everyone had already heard these stanzas; the applause was polite but perfunctory. A few people on the fringes began to edge away.

Rachel was last. The barker pointed at her. “Come forward, lady,” he called. “You’ll have to sing your guts out to win over these tin-ears.”

A few laughs greeted this comment. Rachel stepped to the edge of the stage, found Adam with her eyes and smiled. She’d
covered her hair with her scarf, and she checked to make sure the cloth was still in place before she opened her mouth to sing.

The lyrics were so simple, they were banal; it was the music that made the song such a universal favorite. Rachel put her heart into it. No reason not to sing with feeling if you were going to sing at all. She extended her hands, palms cupped, as if river water dripped between her fingers. When she finished, she flicked her fingers at the crowd as if to shake the water from her hands. People in the first two rows actually stepped backward.

There was a moment’s complete silence before the crowd broke into wild, mad cheering. Even the contestants behind her were applauding noisily. Rachel smiled, a little embarrassed (surely she was above this, but actually she was enjoying herself tremendously), and shook hands all around with the others on the stage. She accepted the thirty coppers from the showman and bent forward to hear his voice over the still-cheering crowd.

“You sing like an angel!” he shouted into her ear.

She could not help laughing. “So I’ve been told,” she said, and climbed down the rickety stairs into the enfolding throng. It was a moment before she could locate Adam, pushing through the crowd to her side. He took her arm and looked down at her. He was laughing. She stretched up and kissed him on the mouth.

But something went awry after that. They rode back to the camp in near silence, Adam leaning over from time to time to touch Rachel’s arm or guide her horse around some obstruction. They had no trouble seeing, for the full moon lavished them with light. Now and then they smiled at each other, still saying nothing.

But something was wrong. They dismounted before Rachel’s tent, letting their reins trail to the ground. Adam stood close to Rachel, waiting; it was clear he was waiting. She was the married woman, it was up to her to give the signal. She lifted her hands to his shoulders and tilted her head back, surveying his face in the bleached, ghostly light. He looked so serious. He looked as if
it would take no more than a kiss to make him fall in love with her.

She could not draw his head down. She could not put her mouth against his.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and dropped her hands.

“Sorry for what?” he asked, his voice almost as soft as hers.

“For—” She could not explain. She shrugged.

“Rachel,” he said.

She smiled briefly. “I never make it easy on anyone,” she said, though he could not possibly understand what that meant. “Adam, you’re so sweet. I want to fall in love with you.”

“Then do,” he said.

She shook her head. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” she said. “I don’t want to make this one.”

“Rachel,” he said again, this time with a note of protest in his voice. She shook her head once more, pressed her fingers fleetingly to his lips and stepped away from him. The tent flap closed soundlessly between them. It was five or ten minutes before she heard him move away, his footsteps accompanied by the heavy shuffle of the horses’ hooves. She sat on her pallet the whole time, unmoving, waiting while he waited. Even after he left, she stayed motionless for some time, scarcely breathing, not allowing herself to think.

She was still sleeping the next morning when Naomi came in and woke her up. “Breakfast,” the Edori woman said cheerfully. “Time to get up and get moving.”

Rachel rolled over so her back was to the visitor. “Why?”

“Because we’re leaving this afternoon. You’ve got to pack your things and strike your tent.”

Rachel sat up. “When was this decided?”

“Last night. While you were out flirting in the city.”

Rachel gave her friend a hostile look, but accepted the tray of food that was handed to her. “What makes you think I was flirting?”

“Well, you came back with Adam.”

“And how do you know
that
?”

“I heard you return.”

“And what else did you hear?”

Naomi looked innocent. “Nothing. What should I have heard? Did you have an argument?”

Rachel said nothing. She concentrated on eating. Naomi finally relented.

“Well, I’m glad you sent him away,” she said. “I’ve been worried, you know. I didn’t like to say anything, but—”

Rachel took a swallow of juice from a heavy ceramic mug. “And why should you be worried? Why
shouldn’t
I have allowed him to stay the night with me, if that’s what I wanted—what he wanted?”

“Because you love Gabriel,” Naomi said quietly. “And you shouldn’t be here in the first place.”

Rachel laughed shortly. “Where should I be? Back at the Eyrie?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I won’t go back there, till—till forever, maybe.”

“You’re breaking your heart over him. So you were angry and you told him you were never coming back. That’s not the kind of vow you have to keep—to anyone.”

“He doesn’t care if I come back or not.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“He didn’t even ask me to stay! Not once—not a word—”

“You had already told him you were leaving! What did you expect him to do, beg you? He’s a proud man—”

“Well, so am I proud!”

“What you are is stubborn! And—”

“And anyway,” Rachel interrupted,
“yes
, I did want him to beg me! He did beg me, you know that? He pleaded with me to save Semorrah. He would have gotten on his knees and groveled so I would save the lives of total strangers—and yet he couldn’t say a word to ask me to stay. If he had cared, don’t you think he could have pushed aside his pride for once?
Asked
me? The angelica is supposed to humble the Archangel, that’s what they told me. But nobody makes that man humble.”

“He would have let the world go up in flames before he brought himself to harm you,” Naomi said soberly. “You told me that yourself. You know he loves you. You’re just afraid of how much you love him.”

Rachel laughed shortly. “Nobody’s afraid of love.”

“Everybody’s afraid of love, because love is what hurts the most. I look at you and Gabriel, and I see a man who has made himself over because he loves a woman. And I see a woman who has shunned the man at every turn. Did you ever tell him you
love him? Did you risk your life for him? Did you push aside your pride for him? Did you change for him? What have you done to prove your love? All you did was leave.”

“I can’t go back,” Rachel whispered. “I can’t—I don’t know what to say to say to him—”

“Then bring him to you. Send him a message. He will know how to read whatever you write.”

But it was not as easy as that. She could not think of what to put in a letter to Gabriel. So she packed her clothes and rolled up her tent and moved on with the Edori another day, and another.

They had traveled by slow stages on a northwesterly route away from Luminaux, and the third day, they crossed into the shadows of a narrow mountain range. These rounded green hills shaded upward into small, pointed beige peaks, incongruously situated in the middle of the vast southern plains.

“The Corinni Mountains,” Isaac told Rachel when they made camp in the shelter of the foothills. Adam had kept his distance the past few days, though when he saw her, he always gave her that sweet, wistful smile. Isaac, however, had been around more than usual. “Though I’ve heard one of them called Hagar’s Tooth.”

“Hagar’s Tooth?” Rachel repeated sharply. “Why?”

He shrugged. “That’s what the Luminauzi call it. I don’t know why. I do know that the only way up the biggest mountain—that one, see?—is on a hard, steep road that’s lined with iron stakes.” She stared at him and he laughed. “No, really. I’ve been up it partway. Iron stakes, as big around as my fist, on each side of the trail. They went all the way up, as far as I could see.”

“Hagar’s Tooth,” Rachel repeated. “Yes. I remember now.”

She spent the night in camp, but in the morning, when the rest of the Edori prepared to move on, she made her farewells.

“Here?” Naomi asked blankly, looking up from the bedroll she was securing. “In the middle of nowhere? It’s not safe to leave you here alone.”

“It is. Trust me. I want to stay here. Leave me enough food for a few weeks, and I’ll be fine.”

Naomi protested, as did Luke and Isaac and a few others who were apprised of her decision, but in the end Rachel convinced them. They gave her enough food to last a month, left her
the tent and various tools, and took turns bidding her solemn goodbyes. The girls cried. Isaac kissed her on the mouth, Adam kissed her on the cheek.

“Get word to me,” Naomi whispered, hugging her goodbye. “If no sooner, come to the Gathering next year.”

“I will,” Rachel promised.

Finally, they were gone, a small dark caravan disappearing into the flat gold horizon. Rachel did not watch them till they were out of sight. She had her own journey to make by nightfall.

They had been camped about an hour from the foot of the mountain Isaac had called Hagar’s Tooth. It was a little past noon when Rachel made it that far, found a broad, dusty trail and began to climb.

At first, she saw nothing of the iron stakes Isaac had mentioned, and she wondered if she had chosen the wrong peak, or the wrong path. But a few hundred yards up the mountain, the wide roadway narrowed suddenly, becoming rocky and overgrown. The trees which had been cleared away at the base of the mountain now clustered more closely together, brooding over the trail with a sort of watchful mistrust. They grew so thickly on either side that their upper branches intertwined, making a dense ropy canopy above the path.

And then she saw the iron stakes. As Isaac said, they lined the trail from this point to the highest level she could see. They were as tall as a man, about four inches in diameter, and topped with sharp spikes. Some of them were rusted over, and a few of them had toppled to the ground, but there were still hundreds and hundreds left—stiff, silent guards whose only purpose was to keep any great winged creature from landing along this slope.

Hagar had built her retreat to be angel-proof. Rachel did not need to see the house to know that it, too, would have iron sentinels around it, atop it, ringing it in all conceivable directions. Hagar did not want idle guests coasting in for a quick visit, toying with her affections and destroying her peace of mind. Any angel who wanted to see her must come like a penitent, trudging up the long, steep hill and trailing bright feathers in the dust behind him.

It was a slow, wearisome climb, and the way became more difficult as she ascended, though it was never impassable. The entire afternoon had disappeared before Rachel made it to the top of the mountain and stumbled, almost accidentally, into the little clearing that held Hagar’s retreat. But then she forgot her tired
legs and dry throat and her eternal, circling memories, and laughed out loud.

Despite the hundreds of very tall stakes driven around the clearing and at random through the gardens and grounds, Hagar’s home was a place of instant charm. It was haphazardly built of warm red stone and roofed with green ceramic tile, and it sported four chimneys at odd corners. A small stream ran so close to the house that it paralleled the northern wall and curled around an ornamental fountain which it had once, apparently, played through. At one time, some tenant had been a lover of flowers, for there were three distinct gardens blooming even now, half-choked with weeds and wildflowers, but still retaining some of their formal patterns and cultivated dignity.

Oh, she could love it here. She could live here her whole life.

It took her a week to make the house habitable. Gabriel had not been able to remember when the last angelica had had any use for Hagar’s retreat. Given the state of the interior, Rachel would have guessed it had been more than a hundred years since anyone had set foot in it. Dust, dirt, bird droppings, mice nests, dried leaves, living weeds, a family of rabbits and a hundred families of spiders had taken the place over. The furnishings were sparse but some of them, surprisingly, were still usable, particularly the fine old wood tables, chairs and chests of drawers. It was harder to find something comfortable to sleep on, and for three nights, Rachel made a quilt of her cloak and lay on that.

But on the fourth day, she made several agreeable discoveries. The first was a locked cedar closet whose key hung on a hook right beside its door. Inside were feather pillows, woven pallets, wool blankets, embroidered quilts and all manner of linens, fresh and unspoiled. Inside were also twenty or thirty dresses hung along one long rod, dresses of every color and cloth imaginable. Rachel pulled them out one by one, holding them up to her chest and noting that they fell exactly to her ankles. Gowns of blue silk, green cotton, white linen; dresses with embroidered cuffs, jeweled collars, lace sleeves, plain bodices. A queen’s wardrobe here. No—an angelica’s.

So that solved the problem of what to wear and what to sleep on. Later in the day, she solved the mystery of the long, narrow, windowless room on the northern side of the house. It had two small doors built into one wall and a deep channel carved into
the floor, lined with green ceramic tile. There was no fireplace in this room, but the small stove in the corner heated up quickly— and caused the ceramic channel to grow hot to the touch as well, as though heat from the stove was being funneled under the floorboards, under the tile. Initially, Rachel had been puzzled and decided to leave the room alone.