Jovah's Angel

by Sharon Shinn

  She had propped herself up on one elbow to protest, but the doctor’s chiding tone caught her off-guard. She gave Caleb a smoldering look, but accepted the drink meekly enough from Nathan’s hands. “What will I feel like when I wake up?” she asked.

  “The area of your wing where you still have feeling will hurt,” Nathan said.

  “And the part beyond that?”

  “If you have any sensation, it will be dull and muffled. I expect the battery to give you back gross motor skill but not much refined sensation. I could be wrong.”

  Delilah pillowed her head on her folded arms and closed her eyes. “I expect nothing,” she said, and drifted off to sleep.

  Nathan nodded. “Good. Let’s begin. This shouldn’t take long, but there’s no need to dawdle.”

  It was a strange, fascinating brand of engineering, Caleb decided, this rewiring of the human body with its own circuits and cables. Nathan Lowell worked with painstaking care, knitting the living tissue to the metallic to the dormant; and then he neatly sewed up every cut and fissure.

  “It’s small enough and light enough that I can’t imagine it will disturb her, but there will be a period of adjustment all the same,” Nathan commented. He gave a final pat to the small lump that marred the perfect fluid line of the white wings.

  “If it works at all,” Caleb said.

  “If it works at all,” the doctor concurred.

  “When will we know? How long before she wakes up?”

  “She may sleep another hour or so, depending on the condition of her body and the strength of her will. We may as well let her sleep in peace.”

  But Caleb lingered a moment after the doctor left, looking down at the slumbering angel. “The strength of her will is immeasurable,” he murmured. “But I don’t know that she has ever slept in peace.”

  He joined the doctor for a brief snack and to discuss the possible complications from surgery. “You never told me,” Nathan said at last, “where you discovered these—batteries.”

  “At Mount Sinai, in an old library room,” Caleb said, lying smoothly. “I wouldn’t have recognized them if I hadn’t seen a nonfunctioning one in a machine at the Eyrie.”

  “It’s amazing. I wonder how they work—what their components are.”

  Caleb grinned. “I plan to try and find out.”

  Long before Nathan expected the angel to awaken, Caleb took an engineering manual with him into the operating room, and sat beside her, reading. He could not bear for her to wake up, alone and in pain and choking down hope. He had brought her here; he would, to the best of his ability, see her through.

  It was early evening when she first stirred, murmuring wordlessly, rubbing her forehead against her forearms. Caleb laid his book aside and scooted nearer, wondering if she might just be dreaming. But a few minutes later, she opened her eyes, rolled halfway to her side and looked around her.

  “I feel horrible,” she said in a slow voice. “What did you make me drink?”

  “Some evil medical potion,” he said, handing her a glass of water. “Are you in pain or just feeling groggy?”

  “Both,” she said, accepting the water and swallowing half the contents. “So I take it the operation was a failure.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because you haven’t greeted me with ecstatic smiles and cries of good news.”

  “I don’t think we can tell anything until you try to work your wing. But you don’t look strong enough even to stand—”

  She laughed weakly. “Well, let us see what we can discover.” She pushed herself to a sitting position, then closed her eyes briefly, waiting out a dizzy spell. Then she smiled at Caleb and held but her hands. He pulled her to her feet and kept his hold on her.

  “You could wait a little,” he suggested. “If you’re so disoriented, you shouldn’t—”

  “I think I’m well enough to flap my wings,” she said. “My wing. Now watch me.”

  And she unfurled her wings with a rippling, stretching motion, as a man might extend his arms to loosen his muscles after a long sleep. The feathers made a shushing noise across the floor; the black-tipped edges made a serrated pattern against the stark walls of the office. Right side and left, the wings made mirror images of themselves behind her back.

  “You moved it,” Caleb said neutrally.

  She glanced automatically to her right side, where the damaged wing had never responded to her will, clearly expecting to see it trailing limply on the floor behind her. Her breath caught; her pale face grew chalky white.

  “I cannot feel it,” she whispered.

  “Move it—flutter it—do whatever it is you do,” Caleb instructed. “See if it responds.”

  Slowly, as if her feathers were made of glass, Delilah worked the right wing, extending it, bringing it forward over her shoulder, folding it backward toward the wall. The whole time, she watched in amazement as the wing advanced and retreated, as if it were animated by a power other than her own will.

  “I cannot feel it,” she said again. “At least—there is a sort of weight there, like a pile of pillows—but I cannot feel it moving.”

  Caleb stepped forward, ran his hand lightly over the portion of the wing severed from the nerve. “Can you feel my touch?”

  She shook her head. “No. I can feel a kind of pressure if you push against the wing, but I cannot feel your fingertips—”

  He moved the wing forcibly forward. “You mean, you can feel that?”

  “It’s like that weight shifts.”

  “And you can shift that weight yourself.”

  Again, she shuffled the wing back and forth. “Yes, although I don’t have a real sense of control—”

  “That would take time, I imagine,” he said calmly. He wanted to jump up and down, to shout hallelujahs, but he was not sure of Delilah yet. To learn to operate a mechanically stimulated wing, where she had no sensation and little control, would be a tremendously difficult task; and yet, it was responding, she could manipulate it. Would she realize what a gift she had been given, or would she find it even more bitter to have only half of her desire fulfilled?

  But this was Delilah; he had forgotten, for a moment, the blazing intensity of her soul. Even now she was frowning as she attempted some invisible contraction of muscles. “I can feel that,” she was saying, more to herself than to him. “But if I move that way—”

  “I think, if you experiment and exercise, you will learn how to control it better and how to tell when it is positioned the way you want—”

  She looked at him now as if suddenly remembering he was in the room. “Will I be able to fly?” she asked directly. “Will it bear my weight?”

  “I would try to strengthen the muscles before I attempted to fly,” he said. “They have been unused for a long time, and I don’t know how much power they will regain—”

  “Then why give me back any movement at all, if I won’t be able to fly?” she snapped.

  “I believe you will be able to compensate for the lack of feeling and retrain your muscles,” he said quietly. “But I don’t know. I have done what I can for you. Dr. Lowell has a therapy program worked out that should gradually improve the muscle tone and your ability to work the wing, but it may take months—”

  She brushed past him, so determined that he did not attempt to stop her. “I will fly by the end of the week,” she said over her shoulder, heading out the door. “Or I will never fly again.”

  Although he should have left for the Eyrie the next morning, Caleb postponed his departure for another day—and then another. He was waiting for Delilah, who was nowhere to be found. The housekeeper disavowed any knowledge of her whereabouts, and Joseph, whom he approached when all other avenues proved fruitless, merely shrugged his disinterest.

  Well, she had clearly gone somewhere to try out her wings, to retrain them if she could, and if she could not—then what? What if she were to attempt flight too soon, before the shriveled muscle had remembered how to react? What i
f she were to achieve some grand aerial height, then tire suddenly or misread her strength, and come somersaulting down a stairwell of cruel breezes? Caleb imagined her lying on the ground somewhere, bleeding and broken, miles from Luminaux, hours from help. If anything happened to Delilah, it would be entirely his fault. He watched the skies, and waited out the laggard days.

  It was midnight on the second day, and he had, reluctantly and anxiously, sought his bed, when he was roused by a terrific clamor at his door. He had not actually been asleep, nor had he slept the night before, but still he felt dazed and disoriented as he stumbled to the door and opened it.

  Delilah strode in like a stormcloud rolling through a valley; she seemed to throw off stray bolts of energy and churn like a whirlwind. Everything about her was alive—her skin, her hair, her eyes, her wings. She glowed like a haloed woman.

  “You look tousled. Did I wake you?” was her opening remark.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded. “I’ve been so worried about you—”

  She laughed and shook her hair back. It seemed damp with some kind of celestial dew. “Flying,” she said. “I love night flying—it’s like swimming among the stars. You can actually feel the starlight on your face when you turn your head from side to side. It feels like hot raindrops or—no—I can’t describe it. And there are no words to tell you what moonlight feels like across the feathers of your wings.”

  “So you’ve done it,” he said, just now remembering to shut the door. He motioned her farther inside the room, but it was clear she was too excited to sit. Indeed, already she had begun pacing through the small space, letting her wings brush carelessly over tables, chairs, objects on the floor. “How long did it take you? And don’t you think you should have waited a few weeks as I—”

  “Oh, I waited a whole day. I did little practice flights down the low foothills just to see if my wings would hold me. It was frightening at first because I couldn’t get used to not feeling my right wing. It would be as if you tried to pick up firewood with both hands, but you had no sensation in one of them. You could look at your fingers, and watch them open and close when you wanted them to, but you could not tell by touch if they were responding to your will.”

  “Yes, I thought that’s how it would be. So I think it’s risky of you to attempt a long flight—”

  “Oh, I’ve figured it out now. I got caught by a crosscurrent this afternoon, and I had to admit that was a little unnerving, but I just had to remember how it was done and I was all right. And it was tiring, I’ll grant you that—I used to be able to fly five hundred miles in a day! And today I was worn out after fifty or sixty miles. But I’ll get my strength back. Quickly, too. In a few weeks, you won’t know that I was ever hurt. I won’t even remember.”

  “Take it easy,” he advised. “I’m serious, Delilah, listen to me. You’ve just had a fairly major operation on damaged tissue that is still sensitive, and you could harm yourself—”

  She laughed at him again, swept him into a breathless embrace. He could smell the starlight and raindrops in her hair. “I can’t slow down,” she mocked him when she let him go. “It was always my trouble, Caleb—I wanted too much too fast.”

  “But now you know what that kind of attitude can cost.”

  “And I know what months of worrying and hurting and hating can do to the soul,” she replied. “I will be a little careful! Do you think I want to lose my wings again? I could not live through another year like the one I just had. But I have to be happy again. I have to be joyful again. Or I may as well not be alive at all.”

  He turned his hands palm up, a gesture of resignation. “So what will you do next, oh-so-carefully, as you get used to your wings again?”

  She laughed. “I will go to Breven, of course.”

  “Breven! But surely—”

  “No, I no longer plan to make the voyage to Ysral—though I must confess I am consumed with curiosity to see it. Perhaps I will fly there one day, though they say it is too far for an angel to go.”

  “Then why Breven?”

  Her eyes chided him. “Because I believe there is one Edori who will not set sail if I ask him to stay in Samaria with me.”

  He felt a malicious hand ease its constriction from around his heart. “You’re going to fetch Noah,” he said, suddenly glad. “You’re going to tell him—What are you going to tell him?”

  “That I can fly, of course.”

  “But—he loves you, you know. He may want to sail to Ysral anyway if he thinks you don’t love him in return.”

  Her face softened and she briefly stopped pacing; she was visited by a moment of peace. “How could anyone not love Noah?” she asked. “He deserves better than to love me.”

  “He would not think so.”

  She tossed her hair back over her shoulders and resumed both her smiling and her striding. “So I think I will be able to convince him to stay. That will make you happy, yes?”

  “Yes. Almost as happy as I am to see you whole again.”

  “And I still have not thanked you, have I?”

  “But you were doing me a favor, remember?” he said with a smile.

  She shook her head. “You will never be able to maintain that fiction,” she said, and now her voice was serious. “But there is no way I can put into words my gratitude for what you have done. You have given me back my life. You have given me back everything that gives my life meaning. If you had saved me from drowning, you could not have more surely rescued me. There is no way such a debt can be repaid, but if you can think of anything you need, anything I can give you—”

  “The debt of friendship is never collected,” he interrupted. “And nothing is ever owed.”

  “Still, I will remember you with awe and affection every day of my life,” she said. “And I will speak your name when I ask for blessings from Jovah.”

  “So now you love the god again,” he said.

  “How could I not? He has restored me. He has used you as a tool to make me whole again.”

  Close enough to the truth; perhaps she was even right to worship the god who had done so much for her. “I will be glad to have you pray for me,” he said.

  She was shaking out her wings as if adjusting a fold of her dress, but she looked up at him now with a rueful smile. “Isn’t it strange? Just because he has healed me, I believe he can hear me again. But I have no proof of it. It is just a feeling.”

  “I would guess you’re right,” Caleb said solemnly. “Maybe it will rain tomorrow and give you a chance to prove it.”

  She laughed. “In any case, I have a great deal to do before I leave in the morning. But I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye. And—thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  She took two quick paces forward and kissed him on the mouth. She tasted like wind, night and wildness. No wonder the Edori loved her. “For all the things I don’t know how to say,” she said, pulling back. Four steps took her to the door, and she was gone.

  Caleb lay awake a long time after she left, no longer even attempting to sleep. He had not tested the repairs he had made to Jehovah, of course, but he was sure they had worked, and the ship was now once again able to respond to all angels. The storms would cease; the mutinies of the wealthy men would die away to grumbles. The world was back to normal. Time had reversed itself, and they stood now where they had started a year ago.

  Only he had changed. An incredible knowledge had illuminated his mind, and a spectacular love had reshaped his heart. The one he must keep secret; the other was to alter every current of his life.

  He rolled to his side, content, and finally slept. In the morning, he repacked his bags, saddled his mare, and set out once more on the road to Velora.

  Six days of hard traveling took him to the Eyrie, but he needn’t have hurried: Alleya was not there. Samuel gave him this news but tempered it with glad tidings.

  “I got a note from her a couple of weeks ago, saying Jovah could hear the angels again,” th
e older man confided. “And sure enough, that day when the storms came in, Timothy and Asher went aloft and prayed. And the rains cleared! And the news came in from Cedar Hills and Monteverde—Jovah is listening to the angels again. He has remembered us. And I believe he will not forget us again.”

  Not in my lifetime, Caleb thought, but of course he did not say so. “Did Alleya say when she would return?” he asked.

  “In about two and a half weeks, her note said. I expect her tomorrow or the day after.”

  “She asked me to do some repairs on the music machines,” Caleb said, bending the truth. “Is it all right if I come back tomorrow and start working?”

  “You think you’ll be able to fix them this time?” Samuel asked skeptically. “I admit I find that noisy motor distracting.”

  Caleb grinned. “This time, I think I can do it right.”

  “Then we’ll be glad to have you.”

  So Caleb spent the night in an inexpensive hotel (wondering, Will I be living at the Eyrie in a few weeks?) and returned to the angel hold the following morning. Work on the music machines went fairly quickly—there was nothing more complicated than disengaging the spent battery and plugging in the fresh one—though it took him a little longer to dismantle his external motor. He smiled at it with a certain fondness as he took it apart. It had done the job well enough, though it was no match for settler technology; and it had brought him closer to Alleya. It had certainly served its purpose.

  Around noon he was finished, and he rolled up his kits and left the labyrinth to emerge on the central plateau. The day was sunny and fine—at last, true spring unmarred by the capricious storms—and he dawdled as he made his way toward the grand stairway through the inevitable throngs of petitioners.

  He was wondering when Alleya might appear, and so he was not paying much attention to those around him, but suddenly a low murmur in the crowd erupted into scattered shouts. He glanced around, trying to identify the source of agitation, and he saw a number of people pointing skyward. He looked up. Shading his eyes, he saw nothing more unusual than a single angel making a lazy spiral far overhead, and he turned his eyes back to the people around him. But now everyone was staring at the circling angel, and excited whispers were swelling into cries and cheers and expressions of disbelief.