Jovah's Angel

by Sharon Shinn

  “The horses are dead,” Caleb informed Noah in a low voice. The Edori nodded.

  “We have to start back on foot,” Noah said.

  “Now? Can’t we wait a little, till the rain stops?”

  Noah shook his head. “This kind of rain never stops. If we don’t find shelter somewhere, we’ll all wash away. And unless we keep moving—” He glanced at the angel, whose eyes were closed in concentration. Caleb wondered if she was trying to cut off the flow of the tears or if she was trying to remember how to walk. “We’ll get sick and die if we stay here,” he ended abruptly.

  Caleb nodded. “How long on foot?”

  “In this? Hard to tell. A few hours. I’m trying to think where there might be shelter somewhere along the way.”

  But neither of them could remember anything suitable from their previous journeys over this road. Grimly, they searched the remains of the cart, seeking any provisions that had escaped unharmed. They found no food, but the tarpaulin could be salvaged. Wet and bulky, it made an uncomfortable load, but it might be all they had to shield them against the oncoming night.

  Eventually they set off blindly into the falling rain, trusting the Edori’s sense of direction. The men took turns carrying the canvas and guiding Delilah along the path. She made no attempt to speak. Caleb had never seen anyone who made so perfect a picture of abject misery, and yet she never complained or asked them to stop. It occurred to him, finally, that she thought this was the end of the world; she was dead, or dying, or already in some un-imagined hell. Protestations would avail her nothing now.

  And he looked about him at the scarred landscape, ripped apart as by the god’s own hand, and thought perhaps she was right. Something was ending, had ended, was self-destructing, here on the plains outside of Breven. And if here, why not in Velora and Luminaux? Why not in Bethel and Gaza? What would keep all of Samaria from coming brutally apart, since neither mortals nor angels could trust Jovah to guard them and keep them safe?

  And he plodded forward into the relentless rain and understood a measure of Delilah’s fear.

  The Edori came for them about an hour later. Thomas and Laban were driving one of the big transport wagons, large enough to hold three wounded men, and following the route they had always taken into the city. Never had Caleb felt such overwhelming relief to see anybody. Quick queries established that the three of them were unharmed, though their horses were dead, and the camp had been out of the main trajectory of the tornado.

  “But half the tents were blown apart anyway,” Laban reported, helping Caleb dump the tarpaulin into the wagon. “Everything’s upended and most of the fires are out. All the wood’s wet, so you can hardly get anything to burn. It’ll be a cold camp tonight if it doesn’t stop raining.”

  “Was anybody missing but us?” Noah asked.

  Laban grinned. He was a big, easygoing man who found life almost universally agreeable. “Everybody else was smart enough to get back when the rains started,” he said.

  “Well, we were coming back,” Noah said. “We were too far away.”

  “Didn’t you think about staying in the city?” Thomas asked.

  “Thought of it. Too late. The storm came up too quickly.”

  “You’ll have to tell us about it,” Laban said. “After dinner tonight. There’s not many who feel a tornado dance across their backs and live to describe the sensation.”

  Noah glanced at Delilah, seated docilely in the back of the wagon. Caleb’s eyes followed his. The angel had wrapped a dry blanket over her lap and shoulders, and she was huddled inside it in as small a shape as she could achieve. Even her wings seemed shrunken. Her dark hair was wildly disarranged, and her face was colorless. Her eyes were open, fixed on some point at the bottom of the wagon.

  “I don’t think this is going to be a story I’ll want to tell tonight,” Noah said quietly. “Not at this campfire.”

  “If there is a campfire,” Thomas nodded. “I think we’re all ready here. Let’s go.”

  But there was a fire back at the Edori camp—just one, and everyone was gathered around it, but it was the most welcome sight in the three provinces, as far as Caleb was concerned. Noah cleared a place for Delilah right at the edge of the flames and covered her with pillows and blankets, but he was not the only one who fussed over the angel. Martha brought her food and Sheba brought her wine, and the children clustered around her, offering her their toys and their treasures if those would make her feel better. Martha tried to shoo them away once, but Delilah freed a hand from her blankets and waved them all back.

  “I like to have them near me,” she said, and her voice was husky as if she had been sick for a long time. “Maybe some of them would sing for me.”

  Which they did willingly enough, lifting their sweet untrained voices in a medley of songs cheerful and sad. Gradually Delilah warmed herself before the fire of their affection. She began to smile; she let the blankets slip from her shoulders and reached her arms out to take the smallest girl on her lap. The girl whispered something in Delilah’s ear, and the angel actually laughed. Caleb, watching from the other side of the fire while he let his own bones dry out, felt a great compression ease from around his heart. She would be all right, then. Delilah had survived another devastation.

  It was a few days later that he realized he was not entirely correct about that. They were on their way back to Luminaux, none of them looking forward to the tedious, uncomfortable journey in the rumbling Beast, and they had stopped for the night at one of the same campsites they had utilized on the way to Breven. This trip, Delilah joined in the fuel-gathering and fire-building; she was as active as either of the men. Caleb regarded this transformation with suspicion, but Noah seemed to view it as one more proof of the angel’s overall wonderfulness.

  This night, over the fire, they were discussing the Edori’s upcoming voyage to Ysral. Caleb was asking Noah pertinent questions: When did the Edori plan to set sail? When did the engines need to be completed? When did Noah have to return to Breven? Delilah listened carefully to each query and reply.

  “They plan to leave the week after the Gathering,” Noah said. “One last chance to see all their brothers and sisters and friends. Then—off to Breven, off to the new land.”

  “Not much time,” Caleb commented. “The Gathering is only a couple of months away.”

  “The boats will be ready by then. And the engines.”

  “You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” Caleb said, as if he were joking, but he was seriously interested in the answer. “You don’t intend to join them, do you?”

  Noah laughed ruefully. “Half of my heart wants to go. What a splendid adventure! What a story to tell your children and your grandchildren! I sailed for Ysral and lived to tell the tale. But I—” He shook his head. “I have so much I want to do here. I have such a stake in the new technologies we are exploring. In Ysral, it will be a fresh new world, yes, but there will be so much work to be done. And none of it scientific. And science owns most of my heart.” As he finished, he glanced at Delilah, but he did not say the words aloud: And you own the rest of it.

  “Glad to hear it,” Caleb said. “I’d hate to lose you to this Ysral venture.”

  “How many people are going?” Delilah asked.

  “Twelve hundred. Well, there’s room for twelve hundred,” Noah amended. “I think, at last count, eight hundred had signed up. Which is a lot. Which is almost a fourth of the Edori.”

  “So few?” Caleb asked. “I thought the Edori numbered in the tens of thousands.”

  Noah shook his head. “Not even in our more glorious days. There have always been few of us, because the life is so hard. And now… We dwindle away by the hundreds every year. Soon there may be no Edori left—at least, no Edori roving Samaria, living together in tribes. We’ll be scattered throughout the towns and villages, forgetting our traditions and our clan names.”

  “You sound like Thomas.”

  “All Edori sound like Thomas. These things wo
rry us. That is why so many are sailing for Ysral.”

  “Freedom forever to live the untrammeled life,” Caleb said with a little smile. “And goodbye forever to the angels and the allali.”

  Noah grinned. “And glad to see the last of them.”

  “Not all of them,” Delilah said unexpectedly.

  Both men turned to look at her in surprise. “What do you mean?” Noah asked.

  “Not goodbye to all the angels,” she said. “I asked. Thomas said it would be an honor.”

  “What would be an honor?” Caleb said, though the sudden clench of his stomach gave him the answer before she did. The look on Noah’s face was one of profound horror.

  “To have me along. They’ve agreed to let me sail with them for Ysral.”

  Alleya headed toward the rendezvous in Semorrah with no clear idea what she would say to the merchants and Manadavvi who awaited her there. She and Jerusha and Micah had agreed that their best course was to stress the importance of the Gloria, coming up in three short months, and the opportunities for disaster that it offered. If we do not present a harmonious front to the god, will he not punish us with thunderbolt and destruction? Did it not happen in the time of Gabriel? Her adversaries did not seem to have looked that far ahead; they appeared to be interested only in the profit potential of the present.

  In her free moments, Alleya had continued reading her purloined history books, looking for more clues to catastrophes in the past. She had found very little that was weather-related once she got past the founding of Samaria, but one odd little story held her interest long enough to keep her up late one night, reading. It was the tale of an oracle named David who claimed to have come face to face with the god, having been whisked by Jovah’s hand to a floating tower somewhere in the heavens over Samaria. David was generally considered mad, and his stories had been rigorously repressed even at the time. In fact, Alleya read the account in the old language because the translator had omitted it from his version, as if to keep the story from spreading down through the centuries.

  But that did not help her solve the mystery of Jovah’s inattentiveness now.

  With a sigh, Alleya closed her books and went to look out her small window at the night panorama before her. It was late; she had been reading far too long for someone who planned to take off early the next morning. She had hoped for a comforting glimpse of the glittering night sky, but clouds shut out all light overhead, even the moon. Instead she gazed down at Velora, illuminated even at this hour by a multicolored mix of torchlight, gaslight and the new electrical light that burned with such a cool, unwavering fire. The world was changing even as she watched; no way to avert those changes.

  She rested an elbow on the sill and pillowed her cheek in her hand. What was she going to say to Gideon Fairwen and Emmanuel Garone and Aaron Lesh? She had come close to begging Delilah for help, but none of her pleading had moved the dark angel. In fact, that night in the Edori tent, as they endlessly shifted and rearranged themselves in an attempt to get comfortable, they had come close to a shouting match that would have roused the whole camp.

  “I understand! You feel hurt and angry and abandoned—I understand all that!” Alleya had exclaimed in what must have seemed like the most unsympathetic of voices. “But this is more important than you, and you must understand that! If the merchants and the Manadavvi choose to desert us, what happens to Samaria? What happens to the cities and the trade patterns and the lives of the farmers? How can we keep our society functioning at all if the most powerful members withdraw their support? It is not merely a problem of flooding across the eastern plains, Delilah—we are looking at the disintegration of the life we know. Help me. Tell me how to deal with them, what to say to them—”

  “I don’t have any idea!” Delilah had cried. “Even if I were whole, even if I were Archangel, what could I say to these people that you cannot? You think I don’t see what is happening, what could happen, to all of us? Of course I do! I don’t know how to stop it! Only Jovah can stop it, Alleya, only Jovah can hold us all together—and he can do that only if he listens to us, if he holds back the storms, if he proves to the merchants that he trusts the angels so that they should trust us as well. Does Jovah listen to you, Alleluia? Because he has not listened to me for a long time. How can I make the merchants believe in me if the god does not? How can you?”

  But that had not helped at all. Alleya sighed again, propped her other elbow on the windowsill and leaned her other cheek on that hand. What would she say to the merchants, the Manadavvi, the Jansai, the angels? Jovah listens to me, but only sometimes, and you should listen to me now. That was sure to hold their attention. That was certain to keep them faithful. She closed her eyes once, tightly, then opened them again, and continued to watch the lights below as if they could flash her some kind of secret message.

  She took off for Semorrah at first light—or what would have been first light if the early morning rains hadn’t turned everything gray. It didn’t seem worth the effort to pause and pray for sunshine, so she just endured the wet, feeling her hair, her clothes, the feathers of her wings, grow slick and sodden within the first five minutes of flight.

  She had assumed the rain would clear up within ten or fifteen miles, but in fact, the farther she flew from the Eyrie, the more tempestuous the storm became. Once or twice she was caught by an unexpected gust of wind that tossed her above her course the way a playful father might toss his infant over his head, and she found this most unnerving. She was used to riding the currents, taking advantage of their dips and swirls; she was not used to having them treat her like a snowflake or an autumn leaf to be flung about at random.

  Still, she had flown in worse, so she kept going. It was hard to gauge her progress, because the rain made every wingbeat heavier and slower; she thought it might take her half again as long to make it to Semorrah as it usually did. Which meant, if Samuel and her other angels followed her at noon as they planned, they might not make the river city till nightfall. She had told Samuel she wished to arrive alone and separately so the merchants did not feel threatened by a sudden eruption of angels into their city; in fact, she had just wanted a few extra hours of solitude, to think about her strategy and clear her head. As the storm worsened, she was beginning to regret her decision. This was not the sort of weather she liked to be caught in alone.

  Another blast of wind shoved her sideways, temporarily causing her to lose her rhythm and her altitude. Alleya drove her wings hard, climbing higher, trying to peer through the curtain of rain below her to get a better sense of her bearings. She almost felt as if she could take her two hands and push aside the misty veil before her, it was that thick and substantial. Hard to see anything, really, not the ground below or the horizon ahead; it would be easy to miss her way. Another snarl of wind spun her backwards, made her dizzy. She fought to right herself and was amazed at how much strength it took.

  Perhaps it was time for a weather intervention after all. She began to sing, tilting her head back to aid the prayer in its ascent to Jovah. She felt the words leave her mouth and disintegrate about her head in the sullen air. Hard to believe Jovah would heed that. She must go higher.

  She increased the sweep of her wings, aiming for higher elevation, but the air around her was so thick that she felt herself tiring even as she started to climb. So thick that she felt her breath clog in her chest. She could not see, she almost could not move; for a moment she was suspended in a great, gluey web of clouds, wings extended and mouth sucking for air.

  And then suddenly the wind shifted, roiled over her, shook her like dice in a cup. It lifted her feet over her head, dropped them back toward the earth as she was wheeled in a sickening circle. Now air currents pummeled her from two directions, rushing in on her, then jetting away. Her wings almost tore from her body. Instinctively she folded them forward, wrapped herself in their cocoon, and immediately felt herself plummeting toward the earth. A cry of panic ripped from her throat; she heard it unravel above her as she
fell backward toward death.

  Desperately, she unfurled her wings, beat them against the treacherous air. Like a skidding mountain climber grasping at a protruding root, she managed to catch herself, safe for the moment. She hovered briefly, panting for breath, trying to get a sense of the currents around her. Everything was wild, helter-skelter, malevolent; she could not read the pattern of the air.

  Sudden small flurries caught her from below, from the left, but she was able to ride them out, coast back to relative calm. What was happening here? This was no ordered movement of winds, no comprehensible mix of cold air and warm air doing a sinuous but predictable dance. She had tracked wind her whole life; she knew how it was supposed to behave. This was utterly random, mindlessly vicious. This was not wind under anyone’s control—not hers, not Jovah’s.

  Even as the thought crossed her mind, she was rammed from behind by a solid wall of racing air; she was pushed before it like debris brushed away by a hand. Again, she cried out in terror; again, she lost the sound as the wind swept her back and forth, scrubbing her across the empty countertop of air. She tumbled over and back, like a child rolling down a hill. Again, she clamped her wings to her body to keep them from tearing from her back; and she felt herself plunging earthward with no way to halt her fall.

  She slammed into a rocky soup of mud, and spun three times before she fetched up hard against a broad tree trunk. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think, she couldn’t see. Everything was pain and darkness and terror. Around her, the rain poured down in a fierce, defiant onslaught. It took her a long time to realize that the surface below her was stable ground, and would not betray her with sudden motion.

  Shakily, she forced herself to sit up and check her damages. She was alive, that was one thing; and if she tried, she really could breathe. She could even open her eyes and look around her. The first thing she spotted was blood on her feathers, and the sight made her frantic. Dear Jovah, she had broken her wings. She was a cripple like Delilah. But a few seconds of experimentation brought a flood of relief. Her wings were sore, but functional; she was essentially whole.