Rebel Angels

by Michele Lang

  * * *

  The small crowd waiting for us at the Empress reminded me of the Hashomer in Kraków—ready to fight despite the knowledge they almost certainly fought in vain. The tea and cookies were piled high in the middle of the table, but none of us touched the feast. Helena prowled around the perimeter, pouncing on a teacup every so often.

  Uzziel had explained to me that these men were the village elders of Quba. Men from the eleven synagogues on the Jewish side of town, but also elders from among the Muslim majority, the Mountain Tats, the animists, and the Zoroastrians. Djinn, Yazata. These were the people who had suffered the most when Stalinist rule had reached the Caucacus, the people who lived close to magic. And the people who would pay the price if we succeeded in our quest and found the gem. They had met to debate and discuss our presence in their town. And they wanted us to present our case.

  Some of them were Jews, wearing Western suits and looking secular, others wearing Eastern caftans. Some of them were Yazata, with features of fire. Some of them were fierce mountain men of the Tats and the Urdeks, local tribes that worshiped the fire.

  They were harder to convince than Uzziel, for they still clung to the illusion they somehow could beat their enemies without the gem. They wanted their secret to remain hidden in their mountains, where they had kept it quiescent and safe for centuries.

  But secrets sometimes fester, hidden in the darkness. And the only cure for the sickness remains exposing the secret to the light. Nobody wanted to see the secret of the gem, revealed at last in plain sight. Raziel and I didn’t, either. But we convinced them that everything else we’d tried—Book, spell, partisan bombs—had failed.

  So the men gave in to us. But it was no victory that Raziel and I celebrated when we prevailed. Instead, we sat together in silence around the table, our hearts heavy.

  Uzziel broke the silence by standing up. “I will take them. And if they survive it, they will come back to us. And we will at least fight together.”

  “You don’t have to fight,” I said. “Take care of your own. We will join the armies of the West and do what we can, far away from here.”

  “It doesn’t work that way with us,” Uzziel said, his voice as gentle as when we had spoken in private. “Once we make alliance, we fight together. Here, everywhere. To the death, and beyond in the afterworld. It has to be that way.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, here in the Caucasus, your family is who you have. Betrayals everywhere—before the Soviets, it was the czar, and the czar’s secret police, and the Turks, too. People lie, they lie. Out of fear. Raziel is my brother. That matters more than anything.”

  He motioned for Raziel and me to follow him out of the café. We thanked the men gathered around the table, then followed Uzziel down the long, curving staircase to the street. He looked both ways, then motioned for us to follow him into the temple next door.

  Morning services had ended, but a collection of slippers, work boots, and dress shoes still waited by the front door for their owners. The floor was covered in carpets, the magical kind, swirling and shimmering under our feet.

  “Wait here,” Uzziel said. “I want to tell the rabbi. We are going to Xinaliq.”

  At the word, a chill went through me like an arrow. I didn’t know what Xinaliq was, but the word filled me with a strange longing and foreboding, all mixed together. Like it was a place out of my dreams. Or my nightmares.

  Uzziel returned a minute later. “We don’t have time for you to meet the rabbi now, and besides, it isn’t safe for him to know you. He’s not family, you see. But he sends you with his blessings.”

  It was only then that I noticed the carpet, tightly rolled up and tucked under Uzziel’s left arm. Raziel stepped forward to help him with it, an awkward and heavy burden to carry.

  “Helena wove this one herself,” Uzziel said, and headed out the front door to the dusty street outside the synagogue. He unrolled the enormous carpet and set it down, right on the cobblestones.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “And hold on.”

  16

  The carpet swooped up from the street into the sky, over the Red Town and past the birch forest. After a first panicky glance, I decided not to look down, instead to stare at the carpet itself and hold on as hard as I could. The wind whistled in my ears, and after I realized I wasn’t about to fall to my doom I stole a peek beyond the thick white fringes woven like a mane into the edges of my flying steed.

  The rocky hillsides rose up all around us, the sheep below roaming the crags, looking like tufts of dirty cotton. Uzziel and Raziel spoke together too quietly for me to hear, their heads together. And I wondered at our ability to fly like angels with the help of a strange, wondrous magic.

  We landed soft as thistledown on a craggy mountainside, in the middle of a tiny village. The clouds gathered menacingly below our feet.

  “Welcome to Xinaliq,” Uzziel said, a little out of breath. “This is where the Mountain Jews live. You will find silver chalices from the Temple, bits of breastplates…” He trailed off with a sigh.

  I looked around. A dozen stone huts clustered on the edge of a mountain pass. They looked like they had grown up from the rock, instead of having been constructed by human hands. A goat wandered aimlessly among the huts, nosing at the dust, looking for something to eat.

  The hut at the farthest edge of the cluster looked the most deserted. It was the only hut with a red door. Uzziel said something, but I didn’t hear him. I stared at that door, stared and stared.

  Uzziel laughed and touched my shoulder, and I came back to myself with a hard snap. “You don’t need my help,” he said. “Good luck. I’m going back down to the Red Town. If you manage to survive the next few minutes, I will be in the valley with my brothers. And if not … it is better if I stay far away from here, for any number of reasons.”

  Raziel and Uzziel looked at each other for a long moment, the only sound the wind whistling through the sparse trees below us that clung to the mountainside. Raziel opened his arms, and the two men embraced.

  I looked back to the front door of the hut at the edge of the village. There was a spot on the red door. It hummed with magic, throbbed with it.

  I tore my gaze away to return to my companions. Uzziel was gone; he had flown without saying good-bye, and taken our only carpet away. “You were studying the door,” Raziel said with a slow smile.

  “We’re crazy for doing this, aren’t we? And how are we getting out of this place, if we do manage to find the gem up here?”

  He only shrugged, and that sad, sweet smile only grew wider.

  I sighed and walked down the stony little path that wound among the stone huts, toward the hut with the red door. A couple of chickens ran crazily in my path, underfoot then away with a cacophony of furious cackles.

  I paused to look around the village. Woodsmoke lazily curled up from the largest hut, nearest the entrance to the town of Xinaliq. Otherwise, except for the insane chickens I could detect no signs of life, the goat having wandered off a while ago.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  “To be honest, I think they are hiding. Despite the properties of those carpets, I don’t think people fly around on them as a matter of course. Just like in Budapest, most of these folk are regular mortals who only fear magic, of any kind.”

  “That’s why there is an amulet on that door.” I pointed at the red door, and only realized how badly I was trembling when I saw my fingers.

  “It’s not an amulet, not exactly.”

  By now we had reached the lonely hut at the edge of the village. We stood in front of the red door, red like a gaping maw, red like raw meat.

  A hand hung upside down in the middle of the door, at my eye level. At first I thought it was a real human hand, but after I blinked hard I saw that it was bejeweled, with mother-of-pearl fingernails and red jasper for palm lines.

  “The five fingers of God,” I whispered.

  “Yes, the hamsa. A mark of the Lord’s
protection, for both the Jews and the Muslims here. It is ancient, my love … this looks very like a Temple hamsa. But I imagine it has been put here only recently.”

  “We cannot pass.”

  I stood before the door, holding Raziel’s hand now, and I wanted nothing more than to curl up in the dirt of the road and hide from that mark of the Lord. Those five fingers struck down Pharaoh, they smote the Amalekites. They smote the Hebrews, too, when they got too far out of line.

  “You can pass.”

  “Not for what I intend to do.”

  Raziel’s hand squeezed mine. “Trust me. You can pass.”

  But I didn’t know the words. I didn’t have the spells, the magic trick, the Hebrew words. I just stood in the dust before the threshold, humbled and, I will admit it, ashamed.

  I bowed my head and racked my brain. How could I force my way in, trick my way in? I could hurl witchfire at the door, but I knew just by looking that it would hold. And that hand would hurl the fire right back at me.

  I almost considered walking away, giving up. But we had come so far. This terrifying gemstone was our last hope. Gisele waited for me in London, Eva risked her life in Budapest, and Churchill marshaled his human armies. But if Hitler reached the oil fields, and this gem, none of their sacrifices would matter.

  I took a single step forward, slipped my fingers out of Raziel’s grasp.

  “I am Magdalena Lazarus. May we please enter?”

  The hamsa never spoke. No cosmic flashes emanated from its palm. But silently, on well-oiled hinges, the big red door swung open.

  And Raziel and I stepped over the threshold, into the darkness inside.

  17

  As soon as we passed by the hamsa guarding the front door, I knew for sure.

  The gem was hidden here. Lord only knew why the ancient jewel of Raziel lay dormant in a stone hut instead of in the center of a king’s diadem.

  It was not in the world. It was here.

  The hut was nearly dark; rugs covered the floors and the walls, and hung over the windows like flaps. The sunlight streamed in from behind Raziel and me in the doorway, illuminating the path into the room, a walkway of golden light.

  The carpets in the stone hut had magic; I saw the figures woven into them, moving, swaying, dancing as I stepped forward. I cringed as my footfalls passed over those woven faces, but they did not seem to mind.

  But the gem …

  I sensed its presence in the room immediately. And it sensed mine. The gem knew as well as I did when I arrived.

  It did not call to me the way The Book of Raziel had in a burnt-down warehouse in Amsterdam. But it watched me, it took my measure.

  How did I know this? Have you ever met someone you knew was going to change your life, the first moment you met them? You know such a thing in the pit of your stomach, at the base of your throat, in the secret recesses of your madly beating heart. And you know it in an instant.

  I knew in an instant.

  A little girl sat on a lumpy-looking bed shoved into the corner. She stared at me with wide, unblinking amber eyes. It took me a moment to realize that she was blind.

  Raziel moved past me to kneel by the bed. He murmured in Hebrew for a few moments, words that I could not understand but that contained gentle warmth.

  He was comforting that girl, the way he had consoled me, countless times throughout my life, whether I could hear him or not.

  But I went into trance now, captured by the power of Raziel’s gem. The Gem of Raziel had instantly, almost casually, overpowered me, a little fly paralyzed by the spider’s venom.

  I sank to my knees in the far corner of the drafty stone hut. A wooden cigar box rested on the floor. The carpet under it was bleached white.

  I watched my fingers stretch toward the box, watched as they pulled up the hinged top.

  Leyla’s face stared up at me, painted on the inside of the lid, as expressive and lovely as her ghost had been, the paint shot through with sparks of gold.

  And below it, inside the box wrapped in a bleached bit of cheesecloth, rested the primordial Gem of Raziel. The Heaven Sapphire. The tzofar, bearer of the light of creation.

  I gasped when my fingers touched the thing, unwrapped it. Chills, hot and cold, shot through my body like an electrical shock. I could not stop shaking.

  “No,” I whispered, but my word of power meant nothing here, in the presence of this thing.

  It regarded me like a disembodied, star-shaped eye. It took my measure, it decided to make use of me.

  In a mere instant, in time out of time …

  Raziel slipped his fingers over mine—when had he come to my side? “Easy, Magduska,” he said, his voice as gentle as when he’d spoken to the blind child on the bed.

  “Close your eyes, before it’s too late,” he murmured in my ear, as soft as a guardian angel whispering blessings from beyond.

  It was supposed to be too late for me to obey him. The stone had already taken possession of me. But somehow I managed to heed Raziel—only he, in all the world, could have interrupted the gem’s spell.

  My eyes fluttered closed, as if I had fallen asleep. And a tidal wave of images roared through my mind: golden columns, crashing flames, men in jeweled breastplates, wailing women.

  The visions reminded me of Gisele, and like that she arose in my mind’s eye, clear as life. I saw her awakening in an airy bower, the light streaming in through the high-paned windows.

  She was still at Chartwell, sleepy and safe. My beloved little mouse …

  Raziel smoothed away the tears streaming down my cheeks. “Never look into the gem again,” he said, his voice low and calm. “You will never return from a second look, Magduska.”

  His words brought me back to my senses, and I gulped for air, my eyes still squeezed closed. Suddenly I sensed the cold drafts in the room, the scratchy wool rug under my knees, Raziel’s strong arms wrapped around my shoulders.

  “This was your great gift? My craft and creed, Raziel, the thing is death.”

  “I know.”

  That startled my eyes open, and I turned to look at him, my beloved. Raziel I could look at forever.

  “How could death be any kind of gift, any consolation to man for losing his way?”

  He smiled then, his eyes wise and sad. “The world is a consolation for the gem, rather than the other way around.”

  I sort of understood what he meant—the gem was a hole in the world. Daily life, even with its terrors and disappointments, is a welcome alternative to an eternal gaze into the gem.

  “It is a microcosm of the Lord’s plan,” Raziel continued. “The ordinary world does not much survive encounters with the gem.”

  “But how could I possibly ever use such a thing? It knows what it knows, it wants what it wants. It is an eye, a staring eye.…”

  I trailed off, caressed the smooth, cool edges of the brilliant blue gem with my fingertips.

  “You sense its power,” Raziel said. “The Lazarus witches kept it safe. Their power lay in resisting the gem. Do you yet understand?”

  My mind flashed on the word “no,” the engine that powered the manifestation of my magic, from the time it had first come forth at the age of nine. “You mean, the Lazarus power is based in restraint?”

  “Ultimately, yes. You have been given certain gifts, you and your sisters—to summon, to see. But do you understand how your power is subordinate to this gem?”

  “No,” I replied, honestly more confused than I had ever been before in my short, confusing life.

  “Your ‘no,’ Magda, your ability to withstand the power of the gem—that is the bedrock of the Lazarus magic. Over generations, your mothers have taken the task of guarding the world from this gem.”

  “You mean, all of my power is meant for nothing more than keeping this ancient stone hidden away?”

  Raziel could hear how little I liked that idea. He sat back and tried not to smile. “All my power was meant to do the same. Once, the Gem of Raziel served as a fo
cus for the world, a fulcrum upon which the world balanced. But the world can no longer contain this gem. Too many seek the power of it for themselves, and the world itself could shatter.”

  My head hurt, trying to make sense of all this. “But sweetheart … you came all the way here, with me, to seek your gem. This dangerous, world-destroying, useless thing.”

  He sighed. “It hasn’t been my gem for thousands of years.”

  “Well, yes. But I came to make use of this gem, to stop the war and save Gisele’s life.”

  “I know. But the best use of it is no use. It was going to be uncovered shortly one way or another, by Hitler or by Stalin. I preferred it come to you instead.”

  My mind reeled with the news. “But how can I fight my enemies with this thing? If I even look at it I am lost!”

  Raziel said nothing, just smiled. And allowed me to absorb the implications of what he didn’t say.

  “So if Asmodel looks into this gem it’s all over?”

  Raziel shrugged again.

  I stole a glance at the girl in the corner, still looking into the middle distance, listening to our voices. “She looked into it, didn’t she?”

  Raziel sighed. “Yes. She was just a baby. Her mother was too careless. But now she sees … other things.”

  I thought of the high priests I had seen in my visions, my Gisele, and I said nothing of them.

  Instead I blundered ahead, knowing it was stupid to keep insisting on answers when neither Raziel nor anybody else had any to give me. But stubbornness was all I had, and it had kept me and my girls alive this far. “It is madness for me to think I could control this gem in any way. Or even keep it hidden.”

  “It is,” Raziel agreed. “Forget mastering the tzofar. All you need to do is not look upon it. Use your ‘no.’ You are strong enough to withstand the rest.”

  I covered the smooth gorgeousness of the Heaven Sapphire with the cheesecloth. Closed the cigar case with a soft, final-sounding snap.