Jovah's Angel

by Sharon Shinn

  “She turns right easier than she turns left,” Noah said. “When you’re going left, allow for a long, slow curve, so start a few yards back from where you think you should. I already showed you how to brake and throttle. That’s about all there is to it.”

  “All right. Let’s refuel, and we’ll be on our way.”

  It was an entirely different experience, Caleb discovered, driving the Beast. First, his seat was significantly higher than the passengers’, giving him a more lordly view of the countryside. Second, there was something deeply satisfying about being in control of all this raw, stupid power, forcing it to bend to his will, creating motion and direction out of fire and steam and metal. It was more of a physical workout than he’d anticipated, because the throttle and the brake each were operated by pedals that required him to throw his whole body weight behind both feet; and turning the car in either direction demanded all the strength in his arms and his back. He learned quickly enough (as Noah surely had) that his best course was the straightaway, rolling over any minor obstructions that didn’t look likely to tilt the Beast over on its side, and that the only good reason to vary his speed was to come to a complete emergency halt. Those rules digested, he thoroughly enjoyed himself, jouncing along on his unsprung seat like a kid riding pillion on his father’s horse. He felt like king of the world. It was the most fun he’d had since flying.

  Still, after a few hours, it became somewhat tedious; it was hard to imagine how well this would wear over four or five days. He was glad for a break a couple of hours after his shift started—gladder still when they reached their scheduled campsite for the evening, and he was able to bring the Beast to a halt.

  He cut the motor, and the silence pressed against his eardrums with an actual, palpable weight. In fact, for a moment it did not seem like silence at all, but a muted roaring, as if he were hearing the Beast from a great and puzzling distance. He shook his head slightly as if to dispel the illusion, and he heard Noah laugh behind him. He turned with a smile.

  “We’ll all be deaf before the trip is over,” the Edori remarked.

  Delilah was rubbing her left ear. “I thought it was just me. You sound like you’re far away.”

  “You’ll be fine in a few minutes,” Noah told her.

  Indeed, during the bustle of preparing camp, Caleb found the sensation gradually fading. Since there was still an hour or two of daylight left, he and Noah fetched water and fuel so they could start out immediately in the morning; again, Delilah prepared the meal. Caleb would never have imagined the angel to be the happily domestic type, but she seemed quite cheerful as she watched the fire and heated bread in the coals.

  She had another surprise in store for them at this meal. Light as her baggage was, she’d managed to tuck in a single bottle of wine, and after they’d eaten, she poured it into their three metal camp cups. “Here’s to a successful first day of our journey,” she said, lifting her cup in a toast. “It was more fun than I dreamed it would be.”

  Caleb grinned, but Noah seemed worried that she was being sarcastic. “I hope it hasn’t been too grueling,” he said anxiously.

  She gave him a brilliant smile. “No, it’s wonderful,” she assured him.

  There was not enough wine in a single bottle to make the three of them drunk, but something had lifted their spirits to a pitch of high silliness. Delilah started singing some of her cabaret songs, and clapped her hands when Caleb came in on the choruses (he knew them all by now). Noah didn’t join in till Delilah switched to a sweet country ballad that Caleb didn’t know. He was surprised to hear Noah add a tenor harmony to the second verse—even more surprised by the rich, mellow tones of his friend’s voice. Delilah, he noticed, showed no such amazement, leading him to suspect that she had heard Noah sing before—privately.

  “I didn’t know you were a singer, Noah,” he said when the song ended. “You could be on the stage right alongside Delilah.”

  Noah grinned. “No, I usually reserve my performances for the sacred ceremonies. If you had come to the Gathering last year—as you were invited to—you’d have heard me then.”

  “Well, I’m impressed,” Caleb said frankly. “But then, I don’t know much about music.”

  “Sing something else for us,” Delilah urged the Edori. “What was that one you sang the other day that I liked so much?”

  “Oh, ‘Susannah’s Tale.’ But it’s sad.”

  “Isn’t that the kind of song you sing over a campfire late at night after a long hard day of travel? Songs of lost love and redemption?”

  “Now you’ve got me curious,” Caleb said. “You’ll have to sing it.”

  “All right, all right.”

  It was a bittersweet song, telling the story of the Edori woman Susannah, stolen from her lover by an Archangel when the god told him she was his chosen bride. In fact, the lyrics were not particularly mournful, but the melody had been written in such a grieving key, and the singer’s voice was so effective, that Caleb truly felt himself beginning to grow a little depressed. Well, a tale of heartbreak and forbidden romance was likely to stir in any man memories of his own personal tragedies, his own unattainable desires. Caleb fixed his eyes on Delilah’s motionless wings, outlined by the smoldering fire, and thought about another angel with whom he reasonably had no connection at all.

  As Noah ended his song on a long, low note, Delilah chimed in an interval above and then swung into her own sweet, woeful lament. This one concerned a lost child traveling from city to city looking for her father. If Caleb believed that such banal lyrics wouldn’t have moved him, he was wrong, for, again, he felt his heart squeeze down with misery and sorrow—but perhaps it was not the song itself, but the marvelous, manipulative power of the singer herself. Hard to remember that this was the same woman who could belt out eight verses of the most vulgar ditty imaginable, and with equal conviction. Hard to know whether the laughing or the melancholy face was the true one.

  This time, as Delilah finished, Noah laid his voice under hers for a note or two, then glided into another song. At last, relief. This one was livelier, though hardly light, another love song but one with a happy ending. Delilah added a whimsical, swirling descant to his chorus, a flurry of notes and shifting harmonies that left Caleb breathless; he couldn’t wait for the second verse to end so he could hear that combination of voices again. When they finished, he applauded.

  “More! More!” he called out.

  Delilah laughed. “Sing with us, won’t you?”

  “I can’t compete at this level.”

  “Oh, sing with us,” Noah urged. “We’re just entertaining ourselves.”

  “I’d much rather listen,” Caleb said. “You can’t believe how much I’m enjoying myself.”

  So they sang another hour at least, changing songs, changing moods, with a fluidity that amazed Caleb. The longer he listened, the more convinced he became that this was not the first time Noah and Delilah had wrapped their voices around each other with such sensuous pleasure, and the more certain he was that they had performed a second, more intimate duet. They read each other’s cues too easily, they understood that secret language of the eyes and hands that only lovers used. But Noah had said nothing of this to Caleb. When had it transpired? And wasn’t it clear to everyone—even the Edori, and most certainly the angel—that such a liaison could only end in heartache for one of them at least? As the evening wore on, Caleb listened ever more soberly to the songs of longing and despair, and realized that the performers were singing about themselves.

  The next day passed much as the first one had, except that the trip was made a little more wretched by a slow, inexorable rain. Cold, fat drops startled the travelers awake, and they hastily rose and prepared to leave. Noah moved every single piece of luggage in the passenger compartment to retrieve a huge tarpaulin folded under one of the sofas. He and Caleb lashed this to the upper framework of the vehicle, creating a close, dark, but somewhat protected cavern for the two passengers. The tarp stretched most of
the way over the navigator’s seat, but their route took them straight into the angled spray of the rain.

  “Driver’s going to get wet,” Noah called out to Caleb over the sound of the motor and the low grumble of thunder. “You want to drive first or second?”

  “I’m not afraid of rain,” Caleb shouted back. “I’ll go first. Maybe it’ll clear up.”

  But it didn’t, and when they switched places at noon, Noah drove on in pretty much the same downpour Caleb had faced. Caleb was pleasantly surprised, however, to find how cozy the passengers’ compartment was, especially since the heat from the indefatigable churning of the engine poured through the whole damp cave. His wet clothes started to dry a little, or at least seemed less chilly, and he grinned at a somewhat bedraggled Delilah.

  “Well, if this is the worst of it, it’s not so bad,” he said. “Of course, who knows what’s in store tomorrow.”

  “Hail,” the angel said pessimistically. She gestured at their sagging roof. “I don’t think this will be much protection then.”

  “At least we don’t have to worry about finding water today.”

  “I think it’s raining like this all over middle and eastern Jordana,” she said. “We won’t have to worry about water for the rest of the trip.”

  If that was true—and it probably was—their real concern became how to move the heavy Beast over the endless miles of wet desert sand. Back at the Edori camp, Noah and Caleb had discussed this more than once. The Beast weighed perhaps two thousand pounds—and was made no lighter by the addition of three passengers—and it could easily be mired in the treacherous sand of the former desert. Mired forever.

  It was Thomas who had suggested they follow one of the old Jansai trading routes that hundreds of years ago had led travelers in and out of Breven. There were three principal roads, he said, one going straight north along the coastline, one straight south, and one that looped around the southern edge of the Caitana Mountains and headed due west toward Castelana.

  “They were paved when they were built, but they haven’t been maintained for a hundred years or more,” Thomas had said. “Still, I’d guess the old roads would hold you up better than the swampland that the desert has become. You wouldn’t want to take a horse down those roads today, or even a man, because they’re nothing but chunks of rock and sudden gaps, but your vehicle, there, with those wheels—”

  “Built for that kind of terrain,” Noah had replied. “But Thomas, I never heard of these roads before. When were they built?”

  “When Breven was in its heyday,” had been the reply of another Edori, a man so old he looked as though he might actually remember those long-ago days. “That was—oh, sometime before Michael was Archangel. Before the river cities became the trading center for Samaria. Caravans were coming in and out of Breven every hour, but they had trouble crossing the desert. That’s why the Jansai built the roads.”

  “Breven fell from grace a little after Gabriel began his reign,” Thomas finished. “Not so much commerce passing through Breven. But then they started building up the shipyards, and that took away from the caravans, too. So nobody uses the roads anymore. They’re in terrible shape. But I think they’d serve you.”

  “I never heard of these roads before,” Noah repeated. “How do you know about them?”

  Thomas gave him a wintry smile. “Because when I was a boy, the Edori did not live settled in campsites like any allali merchant. We traveled every season, every moon cycle, as an Edori should. We knew every mile and every footprint to be found in Samaria. Even now I could tell you of hills and valleys and hidden rivers that you would never find, seeking on your own. No one knows where they are, except Edori. And even the Edori are forgetting.”

  Caleb had never heard of the roads either, but he believed Thomas when he said he could draw them a map. And they had planned their route so that, in the middle of their third day and about halfway through their journey, they intersected one of the abandoned roadways built by Samaria’s greatest traders more than two centuries ago.

  At this point, they were still traveling through relatively gentle countryside, all winter-brown shrubbery and hardy trees that thrived in the flat plain between the straggling Caitanas and the bunched Heldoras. Thomas had warned them that the road was so overgrown by grass and weeds that it would be hard to see, “but I think you’ll know it when you run across it.” He was right: About an hour past noon, as they chugged along in their usual style, all three riders felt a sudden jolt and jumble as the big cleated wheels bit into a hard, broad surface.

  “This may be it,” Noah called back to the passengers. “Let’s get out and check.”

  They all piled out, though Delilah did very little to help ascertain what, exactly, they had stumbled across. Noah and Caleb fell into squats and began digging through the matted dead grass to find what kind of texture lay beneath, and how wide a swath it offered. They dug up a few clusters of grainy black rock wrapped in a hardened solution that looked much like the cement of the Gabriel Dam; and, casting from side to side, they determined that this had been spread into a roadway that was nearly twenty feet across.

  “Plenty wide,” Noah said, standing upright and wiping his hands on his trousers. “Probably allowed enough room for travelers to pass in opposite directions.”

  Caleb nodded. He was still studying the ground, trying to find any visual clues that would reveal the location of the buried road. “Going to be hard to follow, though,” he said. “If you can’t see it.”

  Noah shrugged. “Follow the compass straight east to Breven.”

  “Well, the road’s going to curve now and then. Obstructions in the way. Natural human error. How will we know which way it’s bending? We run off the road into the muck, we’ll never tow the Beast out.”

  Noah grinned. “Drive carefully,” he suggested. “Pay attention. You’ll feel the front wheels drop off.”

  “Going to slow us up some.”

  “That’s all right. We’ve made good time so far.”

  So they swung the Beast back toward the road, since they’d overshot it by about ten yards, and continued their journey on the Jansai caravan route. The Beast’s metal tires bit happily into the shattered stone of the roadway; this was, as Noah had guessed, the ideal terrain for the big vehicle. All three passengers could instantly sense the difference in the ride—not necessarily better or worse, Delilah commented later, but more consistent.

  “At least you know what you’re getting from bounce to bounce,” was the way she put it. “It lulls you into a sort of security.”

  And, as Noah had said, the driver could immediately tell when his wheels had grazed the edge of the track. It was not easy, of course, to wrench the Beast back on course, but by the time they came to a halt for the day, they’d never once completely left the road. Both drivers considered this a promising sign for the remainder of the trip.

  There was yet another good omen: They’d arrived on the outskirts of a small town built at the juncture of the road and a minor river. No doubt it had enjoyed greater activity during Breven’s more prosperous days, but still, it was a bright oasis of civilization for the three weary travelers.

  “Look! I believe it must be Luminaux ahead!” Delilah called out in delight when they came close enough to make out the low stables and silos at the edge of town.

  “Ysral itself could not be a more welcome sight,” Noah replied.

  “They’re going to bar the city gates against us if we pull up in this piece of junk,” Caleb said more practically. “You want to chance being mobbed, or shall we leave it a few miles away from town?”

  “Take it with us,” Noah said. “Safer.”

  Delilah laid her hand on his arm as if she were comforting a lunatic. She and the Edori were riding together in the back while Caleb took his shift as driver. “Noah—trust me—no one is going to steal your precious car. It will be safe no matter where we leave it.”

  Caleb grinned. “No one could figure out how to run it,�
�� he said. “I don’t think it will be stolen.”

  “Well, someone might throw rocks at it or break something,” Noah said defiantly. “I’d rather have it near.”

  “Suits me,” Caleb said, and hauled the Beast to the left, leaving the road to head straight for the town.

  Predictably, their arrival created quite a stir. Children were the first to come running up, shrieking and pointing, but the men were not far behind. The women mostly watched sensibly from the doorways and windows, calling out to their neighbors across the alleys, “Did you see that?” The travelers did not go very far down the main street that seemed to bisect the town, but pulled over at one of the first stables they saw and motioned an ostler over.

  “Is there anywhere we could leave this for the night?” Caleb called over the rumble of the motor. “Not in the stable, of course, but maybe in back where it would be out of the way?”

  “We’ll pay you,” Noah added.

  “What in Jovah’s name is that damned thing?” the ostler demanded, and variations of his question were repeated by everyone in the crowd that had gathered. “It smells like one of those factories over in the city. You riding in that?”

  Obviously, Caleb wanted to reply, but decided to be more diplomatic. “It’s a self-propelled traveling vehicle,” he said. “We’re taking it on a test run from Luminaux to Breven.”

  “It sure is noisy,” the ostler remarked, but his words were drowned out by queries from the other watchers. “How does it run?” “How fast does it go?” “Can I take a ride?” “Dad, Dad, can I go for a ride in the propelled what’s-it-called thing?”

  Caleb glanced back at Noah, who was having a harder time communicating with the onlookers from the deep well of the passenger compartment. “You have a money-making opportunity here,” he said, but Noah merely grinned and climbed nimbly up and out of the car.

  “Sure, we’ll give rides to anyone who wants,” he said. “But kids can’t ride unless their parents say so.”