A Rumor of Angels

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  They walked through arching smooth-walled corridors pooled with the pale light of suspended globes. Faint breezes sighed along the polished stone. Verde walked and mourned a long dry mourning, but the icy claws still fisted around his heart, and at the back of his brain, he pondered the wonder of James Andreas.

  They brought her down the long corridor and up the endless crooked stair to a windy cave where the lake waters rushed in through secret passages. They laid her on the stone bier of Menissa’s ancestors, set on a ledge above the waves, and ringed the bier in silence. As they stood, a flock of gull-beasts swooped in on the wind, circled low about the gathering, and settled with a thunderous clapping of wings on rock shelves high above.

  Luteverindorin approached the bier and laid a wrinkled webbed hand on the shrouded head. He unwrapped the linen until it lay in folds of soft yellow around the body, then, bending, kissed the forehead, and stood back, his arms raised in final salute.

  “Dur manit ma!” he cried out.

  “Ma degenit su,” three hundred voices chorused.

  Now may she return, Verde intoned silently.

  The bier glowed orange-, yellow-, white-hot. There was a crack and flash and in one searing fireball, the body was consumed. Hot wind pulled at Verde’s eyelids as he closed them against such awful finality.

  When the bier cooled, there was ash, white and fine as the furred breasts of the gull-beasts. Luteverindorin unwound a strip of yellow cloth from his wrist and swept them carefully into an earthenware bowl. As he bore it around the horseshoe from Koi to Koi, each laid a finger to the ash and touched it to his tongue.

  He came to Damon Montserrat, who touched the ash and crossed himself.

  He came to Mitchell Verde, whose hand shook as he raised it to his lips.

  He came to James Andreas. Andreas touched the ash, and his fingers to his tongue, then cupped his hands around the old man’s on the bowl. Old Koi, young Terran, they gazed deeply into each other’s eyes. Verde watched with sudden stabbing intuition. Halmtalk!

  And Lute nodded, his own solemnity touched with a certain awe. Andreas took the yellow cloth and bound it around his pale forehead. Then he grasped the bowl in both hands, stepped to the edge of the ledge.

  “Dur manit, ma degenit su!” he cried, and flung the bowl into the tumult of water below. The strip, of yellow whipped about his head like a banner. The shanevoralin rose as one from their perches and wheeled, screaming, above his upraised arms.

  Chapter 23

  The huruss cannoned smoothly down its bedrock tunnel, but Jude tossed in her berth and moaned, then jerked awake, sweating and shaken, when Ra’an touched on the light above her head.

  His dark faced frowned. “Nightmares? Still?”

  She shivered. “This one had real people in it. James, your… James Andreas, and that man who takes care of him, in a huge cave with a lot of Koi.”

  “But you’ve never seen any other Koi.”

  “I knew who they were, as you do in dreams.”

  His frown deepened. “What were they doing?”

  Outside the small pool of light around her berth, the car was shadowed, earth-brown and mysterious. Jude gathered the bed quilt around her knees, grateful for his questioning, for the compulsion to tell him her dream was this time too strong to resist. “There was a carved stone bier and a little shrouded corpse, a child or like a child, with hair so blond it shone like silver through the shroud. The… James stood beside her, then turned his head and… looked at me, as if I were there, then there was a great burst of flame and I heard the gulls…”

  Ra’an lowered himself to the edge of the berth. “He looked at you?”

  Jude nodded and shivered again. “As if he wanted to make sure I was watching.”

  His long fingers tied speculative knots in the silken fringe of the quilt. “This is a traditional Koi funeral rite that you have dreamed, a ritual you could have no knowledge of. Your other dreams, were they like this?”

  “Not so… real, so complete, as if I were there. The others were like watching from a distance.”

  “I attributed the dreams to the influence of the Wall, but we’re free of that now.” He fell silent, staring at the carpeted floor, then spoke again, wrapping himself in a cool didacticism. “One of the properties of halm is that the shock of a traumatic event befalling one portion of the population is instantaneously transmitted to the rest… or so they tell me. As a still-unpracticed telepath, your mind is most receptive during sleep. Thus it is possible to assume that you dreamed the truth, as it was happening. Describe it to me again.”

  As neutrally as she knew how, Jude said, “Ra’an, I could show it to you.”

  “No.”

  “As you wish.” She began slowly, resurrecting her dream in meticulous detail from out of the obscuring gauzes her brain had already laid over the painful memory. Talking, building the picture in her mind, she saw again the circle of mourners, the swooping gulls. Perhaps I can just send it to him, like a videgram. It can kind of play in his brain without violating privacy, be there before he knows any better.

  Ra’an listened to her careful words describe the taut profile of James Andreas bending over, lowering the yellow shrouded bundle to the bier, while internally Jude focused the image and thought hard of sailing it at him like a glider. Is this how they do it?

  “… and the old man pulled aside the yellow cloth, and Andreas turned and—” Ra’an jerked away sharply and she knew the image had found its mark.

  “Meron!” he gasped. He was too stunned to object to her trespassing. He rose and paced the length of the car. “And James, he seemed so…” Gripped by a sudden invasion of thought, he shot a hand out to the wall for support and shook his head in denial. His mouth worked soundlessly, just the barest escape of breath, then he mumbled, “Ah, James…”

  “Different!” Jude breathed. “Why did he seem so different?”

  Ra’an turned away, brushing the back of his hand across his eyes in his characteristic gesture of distress.

  “Ra’an?”

  “It’s nothing. I… just had this…” Again, the hand across the eyes. “I don’t know. For a moment there, I felt as if he were looking through you, at me. I… no wonder you wanted to show it to me.” Further realization brought bitterness seeping back into his voice. “You’re not supposed to be able to do that, sneak up on me like that. What kind of telepath are you?”

  Jude tried to meet his glare, could not, and looked away with an earnest apologetic shrug. “A Terran telepath?”

  Only hours later, she was shouldering her camera pack to join Ra’an where he waited alert and silent by the huruss door. She had no idea what time of day it was, or night, and remembered how it was only prison routine that had told her in the Wards. She fussed at her freshly laundered trail clothes, sorry to see Ra’an tight in his Terran black again.

  Ruvala. Home of angels? She was about to find out. A worm of doubt worked at her anticipation. What if they will not have me?

  The huruss broke its flight in a long gliding hiss. Jude braced her knees against a jolt that never came. She was unaware of the moment when motion ceased, just that a wakeful hush had settled over them. The huruss had stopped. Ra’an’s silence radiated a steady pulse of anxiety that pounded against her eroding confidence. But she held herself still. There was nowhere to run, and what could her doubts and waiting be compared to those of the returning exile beside her?

  The door sighed open.

  First reflex was terror, and stumbling backward, hands raised as if against a blinding light. Sound and light. A concussion of birdsong, a firestorm of sun and shadow, dazzling pinwheel color, odor, taste, coolness and heat, an assault, an anarchy of sensation, rushing, laughing, wooing, engulfing until touch was all that remembered reality and she reached out blindly for the solid anchor that might slow her tumble into the maelstrom. Her fingers found wood and cool metal, and she relaxed, trusting the lessons learned at the Wall. She let the torrent surge around and through
her until she floated upward without panic and rode it like a streamborne leaf.

  With the easing of her heartbeat, the chaos receded. Out of sensual riot, fragments coalesced, perception was reordered, not into normalcy but close enough to sanity for a mere human to grasp.

  The landscape breathed. It would not admit to a steady here and now, but like a proud beast exhibited its inexorable slow fluxing for all to see. Eons ago, at the window of a high-rise hotel room, Jude had resisted this rhythm, fearing that loss of self that humans label insanity. Now that rejection itself seemed insane. Why resist, if acceptance brought divine visions in the very particles of light? There was magic in the sparkle of water against the forest greens, magic in the flow of wind and pinesap, of warmth across the cheek, in the arching of the back and the stretching of arms and hands and fingers, magic and gentle ecstasy.

  A bird sang close by. Jude sighed from every bone and nerve, woke from her reverie and stood unaided, calm.

  “Welcome home, Ra’an,” she said to the alien beside her.

  “Even so…” he murmured.

  For a long while, they remained at the doorway, staring, absorbing, regaining their balance.

  Ruvala Station.

  “What do you see?” she asked at last, for it was not immediately obvious.

  The Koi in him understood, though he began haltingly. “More beauty than even a biased memory could conjure, yet it’s only… here, a wooden platform, weathered, footworn.”

  “I see parts of it that are newly laid, there, so fresh the sap’s still beading on the boards.”

  “Some benches there, with low backs.”

  “And others over here?”

  “A peaked roof above, and carved support posts twisted with vines and purple flowers.”

  “Do you see a hint of frost on the leaves?”

  “And wait… a bird?” He squinted upward, unsure.

  “Yes!” Jude laughed delightedly. “Singing us a welcome.”

  Ra’an ventured a careful step onto the platform. “He seems to be the only one,” he observed, perhaps with relief.

  They agreed that the station was deserted, despite Jude’s conviction that there had been voices to be heard a moment ago. By the sun, it was late afternoon in Ruvala, warm and fragrant, deep summer. The station sat in a clearing, not wide but very green. A stream fell in a rainbowed arc to the grass from a semicircle of cliff. Nearby, the dark hole of the huruss tunnel pierced the rock.

  The rock was rock, steady as it had been for centuries, the tunnel only slightly less ancient than the rock. But the stream was another matter.

  “It wavers,” Jude pointed out. “As if it weren’t quite sure where it was meant to run.”

  “Time and change,” Ra’an supplied.

  “Time… the tower! My first day in Arkoi!” She explained her double vision from the monorail. “Image overlaid on image, echoes, like this!”

  He nodded. “I remember this stream from when I was a child, but it’s changed course a bit since then, so what I see is both of them, what it was then and what it is now.”

  As he said it, a shiver pricked her skin. An echo of Andreas, who had insisted he saw not her but what she was to be. “Ra’an, I have no past here, so what am I seeing?”

  “Describe it to me.”

  “There are many streams, coexisting, but one of them doesn’t shimmer like the rest and that’s the real one, the now. Somehow I can tell that.”

  His mouth pursed thoughtfully. “All of its pasts, with no memory of your own to take focus from the rest? Perhaps. As you spend time here, you’ll find your brain learns how to sort it all out, to let the present come through strongest.”

  “Thank heaven. Right now I’m not sure I’d know where to step. The few flashes I had like this in the colony terrified me. I thought I was going nuts.” She let out a long shuddering breath. “Is this what Langdon, what they all tried so hard to capture on film?”

  “No doubt. The Wall now dampens this phenomenon in the colony, but Langdon went out before the Wall had built to full strength.”

  Jude sighed again, and admitted defeat. “Ah, Ra’an, no wonder you sneered at my cameras. I might as well junk them here and now. No mechanical device is going to capture this! I mean, it’s behind our eyes, really, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t understand it myself. But they say wherever there is halm, this phenomenon persists.”

  “It’s glorious, isn’t it? Like hearing all the harmonies in a piece of music simultaneously. Color so vibrant, light as if it were alive!” She stretched rapturously. Who needs cameras! “And those trees…!”

  “Yes. The trees.” Ra’an had seen them and was smiling a smile at last unmarred by bitterness. “The trees are Ruvala,” he said softly.

  Beyond the stream, the trees began. They rose like the piers of a cathedral, soaring from bases as broad as houses into a green infinity. There was nothing wavering about the trees. They glowed with ancient life, their image clear and sure.

  “Past or present make no difference to the trees,” Ra’an remarked, and Jude nodded. His cryptic statements were beginning to make sense to her.

  She left her camera pack lying on the platform and followed a faint path through the sweet-smelling grass. Crossing “stream present” on warm flat stones, she approached the first tree joyously. Up close she lost all sense of the whole. The tree was a spread of massive trunk whose rugged bark called out for a loving caress. Where the base split into arching roots, age and weather had hollowed out caverns higher than her head. Inside it was dark and smelled of earth. Green and golden light flickered through the vaulted openings and dropped stained-glass patterns on the dirt floor. Jude laid an ear against the inside wall, and the tree sang to her, in the most profound of basso groans that vibrated in slow, swaying chords from its taproot mining the bedrock up through every cell to where the wind plucked at its highest branches. It sang of age and storm and fire and the myriad tiny lives passing like seconds beneath its canopy, and Jude’s listening was like a sleep.

  And then another voice came singing through the forest.

  Jude woke, and peered out from her woody cavern. A creature approached, gliding through the tall fern undergrowth with the wary grace of a fawn, a form in motion the colors of the forest, a dark head passing through haloes of sunlight. Smaller dappled creatures leaped along at its side.

  One of Arkoi’s angels, at last? She watched it from her hiding place, nervous, elated. It stopped a few paces away, listening, a very young and human-looking angel with black hair flowing around bright eyes, which it focused directly on the tree with a puzzled expression. Jude shrank against the inside trunk, then thought. But wait, I’m not afraid, and stepped slowly forth. The young angel did not seem startled, only vastly curious. It looked her over as if confirming to itself that she was real, then with a look of comprehension, a beatific smile spread across its face. It warbled at her, incoherent music, and she smiled back, understanding nothing but its tone of amazed discovery. The companion creatures squeaked and bounded in circles around them.

  Ra’an’s voice rang out from the station. The angel turned eagerly, straining to see through the tree trunks, as if Jude were seeing it for the first time, it became human, male, a dark-haired adolescent full of bright impatience who gestured for her to follow as he jogged off toward the clearing, surrounded by his leaping retinue.

  At the platform, Ra’an was unloading the mules. He looked up at the little group trotting across the grass, and waited unmoving as the young stranger came to stand directly before him like a mirror image. Watching them face each other, Jude was amazed that the resemblance had not struck her immediately, the same long lean body, the blue-black hair, the russet skin. Doubled, their beauty dazzled her.

  Ra’an said nothing, made no gesture of greeting. He stared at the boy, waiting, a dark contained presence against the child’s mobile warmth. So alike, yet not alike at all.

  Jude wanted to break through this ten
sion, to urge Ra’an to speak, to give a little just for once, but sensed the monumental effort going on inside him.

  Oh God, let him hear. But the stranger’s smile showed only eager deference.

  Ra’an’s shoulders sagged. His eyes shut, a terse flick, then opened in a face set hard against despair. The boy’s youthful patience broke. He warbled more of his gay music, and it was language this time.

  “Comea, malin,” he said to Ra’an, with a bow so slight it might have been a shifting of his weight, or a reaction to standing still for such long minutes.

  “Comea,” Ra’an replied slowly, hoarsely.

  The stranger ducked his head with a bashful grin. “Lo mana malin dai,” he offered. “Elgri.”

  “Malin…?” Ra’an looked completely dumbfounded.

  The boy nodded.

  “What’s he saying?” Jude demanded.

  After a moment, Ra’an replied, “He said: ‘Welcome, I am your brother Elgri’… I never had a real brother.”

  Elgri was unperturbed by Ra’an’s doubting frown. “Elgri tel-Yron Nari,” he continued.

  “Nari means ‘the youngest of his parents,’ ” Ra’an supplied.

  Jude took a step backward. “Ra’an, how can you doubt him? Look at the two of you! Surely not all Koi could be as much alike!” She held out an impulsive hand to Elgri. “My name is Judith… oh.” She stopped, flustered. Do the Koi shake hands? But Elgri had attempted in a split second to figure out her intention. He took her hand but did not shake it, and they regarded each other awkwardly for a moment, then burst into simultaneous giggles like old school chums.

  Ra’an watched them laughing together. “Tho manit Gemai’an,” he broke in stiffly. In his mouth, the language was not music. “Terran,” he translated, to make sure his barb hit both targets.