Angelica

by Sharon Shinn

  As Miriam stood and gaped.

  She remembered the stranger she had seen in the farmland in Bethel, dressed just like these were, who had watched her just a moment and disappeared. But these three showed no signs of disappearing. She remembered, too, Kaski’s story of marauders who lifted long thin sticks of metal and shot fire at the unsuspecting Jansai.

  Were these three merely watching, or did they intend to attack?

  What could she do? What could she do?

  She could not believe that no one saw her. Not one of the three black men sensed her presence, thirty feet away, and whirled around to crisp her with flame. No one in the busy camp caught sight of her and called out, “Miriam! You lazy allali girl! Come help with supper!” Everyone seemed completely oblivious, the Edori unaware of the strangers, the strangers blind to Miriam’s presence—and Miriam, agonized and frozen, acutely aware of them all.

  One of the black men, the one in the middle, leaned in as if to whisper to his companion. The man he had addressed edged away, slowly, careful to make no sudden movements. The man in the middle, moving with equal caution, brought his right arm up to rest it on the boulder. In his hand was a long thin stick of metal, pointed directly at the heart of the camp.

  Miriam did not even feel herself move. It was as if her whole body had become as numbed and icy as her feet and she could not tell if her nerves and muscles obeyed her. She did not will herself to scream. But still a great wailing cry broke from her throat, and her feet carried her forward, and she threw her glittering black rock as hard as she could, and the whole world exploded.

  The second rock was in her hand, and thrown, and then the third rock, before she was even aware of her actions. The three black strangers had scattered in a sparking arc of fire, one of them crying out in a fierce howl as flame ripped across his chest. The other two fell low to the ground, and rolled, and came to their knees to stare at her.

  The Edori in the camp shouted and scattered, some flattening themselves to the ground, some dashing to one side, some to the other. Three came running straight for Miriam—and the waiting black strangers.

  “Noooo!” Miriam shrieked, throwing another rock, and another one, though rocks were stupid, rocks were useless, against men who could throw incendiary fire. “Go back! Go back! Run away!”

  But Dathan was racing toward her, five paces ahead of Bartholomew, and Thaddeus was right behind them. She saw, because it seemed she saw everything with a desperate clarity, one of the black-clad strangers lift a hand to his throat.

  And then two of them disappeared.

  Miriam kept scooping rocks out of her bag and pelting them at the single remaining visitor, who lay strangely motionless on the ground. And she kept screaming at the oncoming Edori, “Go back, go back, go back!” But Dathan and Bartholomew and Thaddeus still ran toward her, not breaking stride, and the stranger still lay on the ground, unmoving.

  Dathan reached her first and wrestled her down, as if to protect her from any danger that might be about to shatter her from a low height. Bartholomew and Thaddeus, she saw, had little crossbows in their hands—weapons that could fell a deer and so might reasonably be expected to kill a man, except that no Edori would ever consider turning a weapon upon another human being.

  “She’s safe!” Dathan shouted over his shoulder. “See what’s out there!”

  “It was them—the black men—but they disappeared,” Miriam moaned, knowing she sounded incoherent, knowing he could not possibly understand her. “The ones who burn the camps—I saw them before—they were here, but they disappeared—”

  “There’s one that didn’t disappear,” Dathan said grimly. He was crouched over her, his hands pinning her in the grass, his body angled to shield her from any harm that might come from the direction of the boulder. But his head was turned to watch Bartholomew’s progress. “Looks like he might have gotten hurt.” He glanced down at her with a flicker of a smile. “One of your rocks, I guess.”

  She shook her head, hard to do flat on her back. “The fire,” she whispered. “His friend lifted the stick to send fire at you, and I knocked his hand, I think. The fire went over this one instead.”

  Dathan was silent a minute, no doubt watching Bartholomew’s cautious approach toward the fallen enemy. In a moment, he allowed a little hiss to escape between his teeth. “Here’s an interesting gift from Yovah,” he breathed. “This one is still alive.”

  They made their camp around the injured man. Dathan and Bartholomew and Miriam had been tacitly chosen to deal with this stranger, this invader, and they had none too gently hauled him into the circle of tents while the others continued building up fires and cutting up vegetables and in general preparing for the oncoming night.

  At first, Miriam did nothing except watch. Bartholomew had dumped the black man onto an unused pallet, letting his arms flop to the ground and not taking any care to make sure his head was out of the mud. Then the two men had crouched beside the stranger and begun their examination. First to go had been the shiny hat, which revealed bright coppery hair that was neither as bright nor as fiery as the hair on the man Miriam had seen in a Bethel field. They had pulled off his black clothes to reveal that strange, lustrously dark skin beneath—not so dark as his outer garments, but deeper than the Edori brown—and to reveal also a deep wound across his chest. It was blackened and blistering, though oozing red, and it was hard to tell how deep it went. This was the effect of the fire-throwing stick, Miriam thought, turned at close range upon a friend.

  This was the effect of a rock-throwing allali girl traveling with Edori and reacting with pure and terrified instinct.

  Bartholomew and Dathan consulted in low voices, and Miriam crept closer to hear. “Breathes like a man,” Bartholomew said.

  “Bleeds like one, too,” Dathan concurred.

  “Let’s see the rest of him,” Bartholomew said, and began to pull down the stranger’s lower garments.

  For a moment, Miriam turned away, instinctively granting privacy, but curiosity turned her back again. Yes—he appeared to be a man in all the familiar ways, covered with more hair on his genitals and thighs than she was used to, though she understood that even among ordinary men, that sort of thing varied. She let her eyes wander over his whole body, seeking similarities to the men she had known, seeking differences. Except for the skin and the hair, he seemed formed like the humans living on Samaria; he was built no differently than Gaaron or Nicholas or Elias.

  Bartholomew laid a hand just above the ugly curve of the wound. “Feels like a heartbeat,” he said.

  Dathan tilted his ear over the slack mouth. “Breath moving in and out,” he said. He straightened. “You can see the blood running under his skin. He is patterned like we are.”

  “He is not one of us.”

  Dathan shook his head. “But he is in some sense a brother.”

  “In the sense that Jansai are brothers,” Bartholomew said, with a morbid pass at humor.

  Dathan responded with a sharp crack of laughter. “Yes, in just that way,” he said.

  Miriam edged even nearer, till she, too, crouched on the ground, her shoulder brushing against Dathan, her eyes still studying the naked, unconscious man. This close, she could hear the faint, laboring sound of his troubled breathing. “What are you going to do with him?” she asked.

  Bartholomew looked at her across the prone body. “What would you do with him?” he asked.

  “What would I—it’s not my decision!” she exclaimed.

  “It is the whole clan’s decision,” Dathan explained. “Your words are to be weighed as carefully as Bartholomew’s, or mine.”

  Miriam looked now at the dark face, pinched in an expression of pain and confusion. The coppery hair was matted with sweat, though the air was so cool; the heavy hat must be hot to wear. His skin looked so smooth, even across his cheeks and jaw. Either he was almost too young to shave, or men in his tribe did not grow hair on their faces. She wondered suddenly if his beard would be as red as the
hair on the top of his head. She glanced again at his pubic hair. Almost dark as an Edori man’s, but with a coppery glint in its tangled curls.

  She looked again at his face.

  He was pretty, with prominent cheekbones and a small, modeled nose; his mouth, open to draw in more air, was wide and generous. She wondered if his eyes were the same startling green she had seen on that stranger in Bethel. If he died of his wounds tonight, she would never know.

  “He was not the one who lifted the stick of fire,” she said at last. “It was the man next to him.”

  Bartholomew nodded seriously. “He does not appear to have any weapons on him at all. At least that I can identify as weapons.”

  “He looks like a boy,” Dathan said.

  “Too young to stand against his tribe, or to know that the path his clan follows is violent and harsh,” Bartholomew added.

  “He looks cold,” Miriam said.

  There was a moment’s silence. “Get a blanket,” Bartholomew said.

  She rose to her feet and flew through the camp, bumping into half a dozen Edori and apologizing breathlessly. She dove inside her own tent and took the blanket from her own pallet, sure that Tirza or Amram would share with her when the night became too cold. In a few moments, she was back beside Bartholomew and Dathan, and they allowed her to cover up the comatose stranger.

  “What about his wound?” she asked.

  Bartholomew shrugged. “I don’t know how to dress it. Not much you can do for a burn, anyway, except keep it clean.”

  Dathan nodded. “Looks cauterized. Just let it heal.”

  Miriam watched the dark face gather in a spasm of pain, then the stranger gave a little cough, made a strangling sound, gasped twice—and then resumed his difficult breathing. “He might be thirsty,” she said.

  “A risk to give him water,” Bartholomew said. “He could choke on it.”

  “Just a little bit,” Miriam said.

  Bartholomew nodded. “Get a rag. Dip it in a cup. Squeeze a few drops into his mouth. We’ll see how he does with that.”

  Miriam came to her feet again and then paused, looking down at the three men. “Does that mean you’re going to help him live?” she asked.

  Bartholomew glanced up at her. “It’s up to the clan,” he said.

  C hapter T wenty-one

  Dinner that night was a largely silent affair, as each small group gathered around its own fire and ate quickly and efficiently. Tirza asked Miriam once if she was feeling all right, since the blond girl only picked at her food and took a few sips of water, but Miriam merely nodded. She was overwhelmed with thoughts—unpleasant thoughts—terrifying ideas.

  What if she had come back from the river five minutes later, to find the campsite a charred, smoking circle of catastrophe? What if she had been stranded out here, miles from anywhere or anyone she knew, completely alone and helpless? Or what if she had arrived just in time to scream in horror, and draw the attention of the murderous strangers, and be scorched to cinders in turn? She could be dead right now. Everyone in this circle of tents could be dead—everyone she had come to love so very deeply, all could have disappeared in an instant. Five minutes—one minute—some random combination of seconds could have coalesced and completely altered the course of her life.

  What if her aim had not been so true? What if she had not had the rock in her hand? What if the stranger holding the stick of fire had not been distracted, and turned to face her, and so injured his companion? What if he had decided to destroy her first and then turn his weapon back on the Lohoras?

  Why had he spared them? Why had she been so fortunate as to arrive in time to slow his hand?

  Was this Yovah’s work? Was Yovah guarding them so closely that he would not allow the fire to fall upon the Lohoras? Then why had he allowed it to fall on the other camp—the Carhansons, it was widely believed, for no one had seen them in months? Why was one tribe saved and another tribe sacrificed? Where was the god’s hand in that?

  She could not get past the fact of her own mortality. She could not get past the fact that she had been so close to death that she had literally stared it in the face. She could not imagine what Gaaron’s emotions would be upon learning that his sister had disappeared, that she had not only left the sanctuary he had provided for her, but deliberately put herself into the path of danger—and been destroyed by it. She could have died today and he would not have known for weeks, maybe months, that she was dead.

  All the Lohoras could have died, and no one who loved them would have known.

  She could not get her mind to absorb and accept this information.

  “Here. Let someone who’ll enjoy it eat your stew,” Tirza said, taking her bowl from Miriam. “I’ll save you a few chunks of bread. You’ll be hungry later tonight, and bread’s always easiest, even on a stomach that’s turned at the sight of tragedy.”

  Miriam stared up at her kind, calm face, knowing that desperation peered out of her own eyes. “Tirza,” she said in a small voice. “Everybody almost died.”

  Tirza nodded. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

  Miriam wanted to say more, to put the whole shocking haphazardness of the event into words, but she could not think how. Tirza placed her palm against Miriam’s pale cheek.

  “Not an easy thing, to look at death and see him looking right back at you,” she said quietly. “Not an easy thing to see death stalking your friends. It shouldn’t be an easy thing. Go ahead and tremble.”

  Miriam nodded and then she shook her head. She would not be a weakling, she would not be the only Lohora who was not calm and strong. “I’ll have some of that bread now,” she said in a determined voice. “I find I am a little hungry after all.”

  They held the council meeting around Bartholomew’s fire, because Bartholomew was the one they all most admired, even if each of them planned to speak up with an opinion that every other one would listen to. Miriam sat between Tirza and Bartholomew, cross-legged on a folded pallet to keep away the chill of the damp ground. When Tirza reached over to take her hand, Miriam allowed her to hold it. For comfort, and for strength.

  “Let us begin with a prayer,” Bartholomew said quietly. He sang the opening lines of a song that was new to Miriam, and all the others joined in a few beats later. It was a solemn piece that sounded like a plea for wisdom and courage. Miriam could not tell for sure, because the words were Edori, and she had, in all this time, only learned a little bit of their language. But she hummed along when she could catch the melody, and she added a high little harmony to the “amen” at the end.

  When the song was through, Bartholomew glanced around the fire, touching each individual face with his gaze, drawing them all together in a sense of strong purpose. “As you all know, we have been very blessed this day,” he said in a low, clear voice. “We were approached by enemies, and we were saved by the hand of Yovah. Our enemies are gone, and we are alive. It is a day of thanksgiving.”

  “Alleluia,” the Edori murmured.

  “Now we must ask ourselves, what was the god’s purpose in showing us such mercy? Are we merely to thank him for his great gift of our lives? Or are we to ask him, Yovah, what truth did you reveal to us? For what purpose did you spare us? What are we to do now?”

  “What is the state of the strange man who was left behind?” asked Claudia’s lover, Adam.

  “Grave,” Bartholomew said. “He breathes and sleeps, but neither his breath nor his sleep is easy. He will die without tending.”

  “He should die,” Anna said. “He wanted to kill us.”

  “But he did not kill us,” Adam reminded her.

  “It was not his conscience, nor even Yovah’s hand, that saved us,” she retorted. “It was Miriam’s scream and Miriam’s quick action.”

  A low murmur of assent went around the camp at that. “I believe Yovah’s hand wrapped itself around Miriam’s hand,” Bartholomew said gently. “Or none of us would be alive now.”

  “Yes, and we thank Yovah profuse
ly for interceding,” Eleazar said. “But it was not this one’s intent to spare us. There is no reason for us to spare him.”

  “It is not the Edori way to kill any creature, except to hunt for food,” Bartholomew said.

  “We don’t have to kill him,” Eleazar said. “We merely let him die. As he would have let us die.”

  “Miriam says his was not the hand that held the weapon.”

  “Yes, but his was not the hand that struck down the weapon. He stood aside. Let us stand aside. Let the god make his disposition.”

  “What if he was spared for a reason—as we were spared for a reason?” Bartholomew asked.

  Eleazar shrugged. “What reason could that be?”

  “I do not presume to read the ways of Yovah’s heart.”

  “He’s a boy,” Dathan spoke up. “He does not look evil.”

  “The corvain root does not look evil, and yet it will kill you if you so much as touch it,” Eleazar said with some heat.

  Dathan spread his hands. Miriam could not remember ever seeing that laughing face so serious. Susannah would be proud of him, she thought, and then she wondered where that thought had come from. “I have traveled with the Lohoras all my life,” Dathan said. “I have never seen them turn away a stranger in need. I have never seen them leave a wounded creature to die. I have never seen them refuse a gift from Yovah. I agree with Bartholomew. This man was sent to us for a purpose. Perhaps that purpose is nothing grander than Yovah testing us to see if we will be kind to our enemies. And perhaps it is greater. I think we are meant to care for him, and perhaps return him to his tribe recovered. Perhaps that will convince his brothers and his uncles and his friends that they should no longer wage war on such a gentle people.”