Jovah's Angel

by Sharon Shinn

  “Incessantly. Since the rains started. We have done what we could. We have been able to shift some of the smaller storms. But none of our prayers seems to have a lasting effect.”

  “Why?” Alleya demanded in frustration. “Why can Jovah not hear us?”

  Jerusha shrugged. “Or why does he choose not to? There is a purpose in everything he does.”

  “He says,” Alleya responded slowly, “that he is not punishing us. That he answers us when he is able.”

  “When did he say this?” Jerusha asked.

  Alleya waved a hand to denote a southerly direction. “I saw Job a while ago. We asked the god questions that he answered in the most circuitous manner.”

  Jerusha smiled faintly. “As he answers everything. And did he tell you how to stop the storms and the flooding?”

  “He told us to seek help from the son of Jeremiah,” Alleya said dryly. “Which was not at all illuminating.”

  “Who is Jeremiah?”

  “Precisely.”

  “It was the name of the Archangel Gabriel’s father,” Jerusha said. “But he lived hundreds of years ago.”

  Alleya lifted her head consideringly. “Job said it might be a reference to a historical figure,” she said. “And did not Gabriel have three sons?”

  “Yes, all dead for a century or more.”

  “Well, their sons or their sons… The records must be somewhere. In the Eyrie, no doubt.”

  “Jovah keeps such records,” Jerusha reminded her. “The oracles record such information for him when they list the names of those who have been dedicated by the priests.” Unconsciously, her hand went to the Kiss in her right arm. “So Jovah knows the name of every man’s son.”

  “Yes, well, Jovah chose not to be more specific last time I asked him, so I think I would first try another set of records,” Alleya said with some asperity. “But I thank you for the thought. I will see what I can discover about Gabriel’s progeny.”

  So, back at the Eyrie, Alleya found her way to the archives and researched the lives of the children of Gabriel and Rachel. Indeed, they had had three sons, and each of those sons had had a number of children, but the records were vague about the family members who were not angelic or in some other way illustrious. For instance, very little was said about the second son’s second daughter, who apparently eloped with some Edori nomad at a young age and could have had any number of children. The Edori as a rule did not dedicate their children, so Jovah was unlikely to have kept track of these particular offspring; and who knew how many of them had had children and which of them might be the very man Jovah desired?

  Alleya rubbed a dusty hand across her forehead, leaving a track of dirt. Think clearly, she admonished herself. Jovah would not have singled out someone of whose existence he was unaware. He asked for the son of Jeremiah, thus he knows of such a man, thus the man has been dedicated. It does not matter if Gabriel had a hundred untracked Edori grandchildren or great-grandchildren; the designated son of Jeremiah would not be among them.

  Although that still did not tell her who this mysterious man was, or where he could be found.

  And could she really spend the next few weeks of her life trying to reconstruct Gabriel’s family tree? Perhaps she indeed must return to one of the oracles and ask for guidance.

  It was a day of petty frustrations, for a series of other annoying problems cropped up. No one had signed up to sing the harmonic for the noon hour, for instance, so at the last minute Alleya and Dinah scrambled to the open stone grotto at the top level of the compound and offered a few unrehearsed melodies. Their voices did not blend particularly well, especially when they had not practiced their numbers, so Alleya was unsatisfied with the result—and displeased that such a long-standing tradition had almost been so casually broken.

  When Timothy and one of the mortal girls relieved them an hour later, to sing a much smoother requiem, Alleya instantly turned to Dinah. “As of this minute, I’m putting you in charge of this,” she said. “The singers for the harmonics are to be scheduled at least one day in advance from now on. And if no one has signed up for the shift, you have the authority to conscript anyone you choose and sing the other half of the duet yourself.”

  Dinah looked as if she could not decide if the commission pleased or annoyed her. Alleya added, “Thank you,” somewhat abruptly, and the younger angel smiled. “I will not fail you, angela,” she said, and that seemed to take care of that.

  But then one of the cooks complained about meat from a Velora vendor, and the vendor insisted on seeing the Archangel personally to defend himself, and a committee of farmers who had traveled all the way from middle Jordana wanted to discuss the encroachment of the Jansai traders onto property they had always considered theirs. The voices seemed to rise around her in an indecipherable babble; she felt a low grade of panic set in, and found herself deferring or delegating as many decisions as she could. The Jordana contingent she promised to meet with in the morning; the cook she fobbed off on one of the older mortal women who had lived in the Eyrie for decades. Before one more person could catch her eye or tap on her shoulder, Alleya escaped down the lower tunnels to the last remaining music room.

  Where she slipped in a recording of simple love songs performed by the divine Hagar, the single disc in the whole collection that did not feature sacred music. She stood in the middle of the room and closed her eyes, imagining all her stress and worry draining away, through her spread fingertips, through her toes, rising through the top of her head unimpeded by her tangled hair. She pictured herself growing lighter, translucent, weightless, insubstantial enough to be buoyed two feet above the floor by the music. She felt her wings shirr, and her muscles melted lovingly across her bones.

  Then the music abruptly stopped.

  As if she actually had been dropped from a low height onto the stone floor, Alleya felt her head snap backward and her spine jar into place. Fresh panic rose through her throat; her cheeks cooled with anxiety. She quickly crossed to the panel of knobs set into the wall and began twisting and turning the dials. Not this machine, too, not the last one, not the only one… When the soaring music suddenly erupted again, rescued by who knew what combination of prods and pushes, Alleya was so relieved that her whole body went slack. Her legs could not support the weight of her body, so she let herself crumble slowly to the floor. She drew her knees up for a place to rest her heavy head; she wrapped her wings around herself for comfort; and she gave in to the overmastering impulse to sob.

  At which point the door opened and Caleb Augustus walked in, and stopped to stare at her in blank astonishment.

  Alleya scrambled to her feet, catching her shoes in her pooled tunic and almost pitching headlong back to the floor. Caleb hurried forward to grab her arm but she jerked away, hot with mortification. She could feel the heat rising to her brows, the stickiness of tears drying down her face; she had never felt more completely at a disadvantage.

  “Angela, are you—?” he began, but she interrupted before he could complete his sentence.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded, running ineffectual hands through her hair, down her skirts. “How could you just walk in without knocking, without permission—?”

  “The angel sent me here, he said you would be glad to see me—”

  “What angel?”

  A tentative grin crossed the visitor’s face. “Well, he seemed to recognize my name and I didn’t ask him his,” he said a little whimsically. “He said you would want to see me right away.”

  She turned her back on him, endeavoring to compose herself. Her breath still caught raggedly in her throat. It would not take much to start her crying again, and she would not do it in front of this man. In front of anyone. “I wanted to see you, but under more controlled circumstances,” she said as levelly as she could. “Excuse me. I will be myself in a moment.”

  He walked around her to come face to face again. “But won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” he coaxed. “I can’t stand to see
you crying and not be able to help.”

  She laughed shakily. “I think my problems are insoluble,” she said, “ranging as they do from great to small. Today just featured too many in succession. I don’t ordinarily give in to them like this, however.”

  “It’s reassuring to know you do.”

  “Reassuring? In what possible way?”

  He was smiling. He had a marvelously inviting smile, filled with complicity and sympathy; if she was not careful, she would find herself telling him every thought in her head. “It makes you seem more human. More approachable. I find you just a little intimidating, you know.”

  She laughed in sheer disbelief. “Me? Intimidating? Most people are more likely to find me—obscure. Insignificant.”

  He surveyed her with a closeness that once again made the blush rise. “Maybe intimidating was the wrong word. You seem remote, hard to reach, as if you were standing in a marble chamber very high above the world and the rest of us called out to you in voices that you heard only distantly, if at all. It makes me feel as if I were addressing a painting of an angel and not a real person. But when I come in to see you crying—well, then, you’re right down on the trampled earth with the rest of us.”

  Her flush intensified, partly to be told such a thing, partly because she was unnerved at how well he had described the way she often felt. But: “I wish I could find that high, quiet chamber today,” she said a little tartly. “Believe me, I would hide myself there and never come back down.”

  “And so what are the problems great and small that have reduced you to tears?” he asked. “Maybe I can help.”

  “Oh, let me see. A quarrel between the cook and the butcher, a delegation of unhappy Jordana farmers, threats from the river merchants, complaints from the Manadavvi, rebellion among my angels—and, just now, my last music machine seemed to break. That was the final disaster, I think, the mishap that pushed me to the edge. A minor problem in comparison with the rest, but—”

  “It seems to be working now,” he said, swinging around to examine the equipment with careful fingers. “What a beautiful song. Who is this singing?”

  “Hagar. The first angelica. Her voice could make the most mundane music seem sublime. They say that Rachel had a voice as brilliant as Hagar’s, but of course we no longer know how to record singers—and anyway, I don’t believe it. No one else could sing like this.”

  “How was it recorded? May I see?”

  So she stopped the music and extracted the small silver disk. It was completely featureless except for its shape and color; it bore no ridges or markings. Caleb turned it toward the light to watch the reflection glitter along its surfaces, front and back.

  “Amazing,” he said. “I don’t even know what this material is.”

  “Do you think you can figure out how the equipment works?”

  “I don’t know. Not if it’s as foreign as this.”

  “What kind of tools do you need?”

  He pointed to his shoulder; he was, she realized, wearing a bulky backpack. “Brought them all with me. Should I start with this machine, or one of the machines that is already broken?”

  “One of the broken ones!” she answered swiftly, and he laughed. “Well, but as long as this one is still working—”

  “I understand perfectly. Show me where I should begin.”

  For the next hour, Alleya watched the engineer dissect one of the failed machines. It would not have been, ordinarily, the sort of pastime she enjoyed, for she had no aptitude for electronics—or interest in them, either. But there was something about Caleb Augustus and his complete absorption in his task that made her feel a certain sympathetic kinship. Just so did she feel when she was lost in the labyrinth of a melody or keeping her balance on the rippling arpeggio of a duet. He could not have appeared more entranced.

  While he was too engrossed to notice her, she studied him. He looked like nothing so much as a farmer’s eldest son, dressed up (but only slightly) for market day in the biggest town for a hundred miles. He was a little bigger than the average man but not brawny; his features were strong and intelligent. His sandy hair was cut close enough to stay out of his way but with no special attention to fashion; though his clothes were clean, they showed much wear. He was a man who liked to be comfortable, she decided, but who rarely worried that he would be otherwise. He looked as though he found the world nearly always a welcoming place. Not surprising; she was glad to have him here. She imagined most people were pleased to see him.

  She was even able to restrain her impatience to know what he learned, so she did not bombard him with questions about how well his task was going. In fact, she just sat there, leaning one shoulder against the wall, and watched him. He had pried off the glass and metal faceplate that guarded the inner workings of the player, and exposed a whole range of wires and circuits that would have sent her into instant despair. He had only looked more intrigued, and had begun to cautiously poke at each gleaming joint and intersection.

  Now and then he murmured aloud, though she had no illusions that he was addressing her. “Well, if that’s a moving part, what’s moving it? Although—I don’t see why this one should have to move, and it seems to—and where the hell is the power coming from?”

  He had extracted the oddest array of tools from his pack, and with these he slowly began disassembling the machine. She bit back an automatic protest (“Don’t, you’ll break it!”); what more harm could he possibly do? But she could not resist one question. “Do you think you’ll be able to put it back together?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said abstractedly, still completely focused on his work. “But I don’t know if I’ll be able to put it back so it works.”

  “Is there anything I can get you?”

  “Some water would be nice.”

  “For the machine?”

  At that he did give her his attention, flashing her a quick grin. “No, for me.”

  She was embarrassed, but how could she know what a piece of equipment might require? “Would you rather have wine? Tea? Juice?”

  “Whatever’s handiest,” he said, and went back to his work.

  So she fetched him a snack tray—wine, water and pastries—returning to find dozens of unidentifiable parts arranged precisely on a white rag laid on the floor. The hole in the wall had become deep enough for Caleb to insert his head.

  “How about some kind of light?” he asked, not even withdrawing his head when he heard her enter. “I can’t see everything in here.”

  “You mean a candle?”

  “Is that all you’ve got?”

  “We don’t have any electric-powered lights.”

  “Well—make it an oil lamp, then. I don’t want wax falling anywhere inside here.”

  So then she left to find him a lamp with a glass shade, but the shade was green and he asked if she could find something clear. Because the color made it difficult to ascertain which wire was which. So she left again, returning with the requested item.

  “It’ll have to do,” he said, fitting the shade over the brass casing. “Can you stand here and hold it for me? No, a little higher. The light has to shine in. Yes, that’s right. Hold still.”

  So she stood there another hour, motionlessly as possible, and thought that this was the pleasantest hour of the day that she had passed so far. It didn’t seem to occur to Caleb Augustus that this particular brand of menial labor ranked far below the general run of responsibilities that fell to the Archangel, and obviously she could have assigned someone else the task.

  But she liked watching him work.

  It was quite late in the day by the time he laid aside his last tool, pulled himself gingerly from the cavern he had excavated, and shook his head. Alleya set the lamp down and rubbed her arm.

  “Well?” she asked. “Can you fix it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I can tell what’s wrong, I think, but I don’t know if I can compensate for it.”

  Her heart sank; she had been convinced he could hel
p her. “So what’s wrong?”

  He held up a small cylinder, about the size of his little finger. “As far as I can tell, this is the power source of the machine. I’ve never seen anything like it. I can’t imagine how it works, but somehow it seems to hold stored energy. And when the machine is turned on, this little item releases enough energy to make all the parts go around. But all the energy seems to have been drained away. Therefore, no moving parts. No music.”

  “So can’t you just—do something else to make the things move?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to determine. But it’s a very delicate balance in here. My wires are thick and clumsy things next to theirs—like a rope compared to a length of thread. I could rig a motor that would generate the power you need, but I don’t know if I could conduct that power inside the machine without hopelessly tangling up everything inside. Plus—my motor would be fuel-generated, and create fumes and noise, and so you wouldn’t want it in the room. Can’t really appreciate the sound of Hagar singing when she’s competing with a motor making all kinds of racket.”

  Alleya felt blank. “But then—you’re saying—there’s nothing you can do?”

  “Well, I can try to set up a motor in the hallway, say, and run the wires in, and see if I can generate the juice. You’d have to be careful not to dislodge anything—not trip over anything—and you’d still probably hear some of the noise from the hall.”

  “The rooms are acoustically perfect,” she said automatically. “They deaden all outside noise.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t be able to close the door all the way.”

  “Ah.”

  “And if that worked—Have you ever considered having the entire hold wired for electricity?”

  She just looked at him for a moment. It was as if he’d asked her if she had ever considered pulling out all her wing feathers, one by one. “It’s not—it never crossed my mind one way or the other.”

  “Well, there would be a lot of advantages,” he said. “You could get rid of your gaslight, for one thing. That’s always a danger, you know, gas. It can kill a man in a few minutes.”