by Sharon Shinn
CHAPTER FIVE
So it had not been an auspicious beginning to her new life, Rachel thought the next morning. In fact, it could hardly have been worse. Not overjoyed to begin with at the thought of making her his angelica, Gabriel must now be wishing he could shatter the Kiss in her arm and tell Yovah to look around for a second choice. It was a prayer she planned to make herself as soon as she could pull herself together.
She had awakened early, keeping her eyes tightly shut as was her custom, briefly closing her mind against the sure knowledge that something awful had happened. But it was impossible to ignore the singing, the sweet voices rising and falling in perfect harmony. She imagined that in no other place in the world did one wake up to a sound like that.
She got out of bed to take a closer look at the room she’d been brought to the night before. Hannah had led her here and taken her directly to the bed.
“I think you need sleep,” the woman had said in a quiet voice. “I will come back to you in the morning, and we’ll sort everything out.”
Rachel had clutched her arm. “What is that sound?”
“What sound?”
“The—those voices.”
“Ah. Angels singing. At the Eyrie, there is always music. I believe, if you listen to it, it will soothe you and you will fall asleep. Sleep is what you need.”
And she had slept immediately, lulled by those voices, or Hannah’s voice, or so completely drained by her disgraceful emotional display that she had no energy left for curiosity. This morning was a different matter. She felt rested, ravenous and inquisitive.
The stone floor was icy beneath her bare feet; in fact, the whole room was chilly for a woman used to the humid river breezes of Semorrah. Rachel slipped her feet into the shoes she had worn the day before, wrapped herself in a blanket stripped from the bed, and strolled around the chamber.
Stone—everything was stone. Even in Semorrah there had been wood and iron and cast plaster inside the stone houses. Here, everything was rock—the walls, the floors, the ceilings. It was like being in a giant cave. Her Edori soul shuddered at the thought of being shut up inside a mountain, a maze of tunnels between her chamber and an exit. No doubt she was in one of the more desirable rooms, for it was fitted with a window to let in the sun— but she did not have the courage to go look at that view. She remembered all too well the flight up here last evening. Gazing out that window would bring on nausea and faintness.
Given that it was essentially a cave with a window, it was rather a pretty room. Across one long wall hung a gorgeous tapestry, into which tiny figures had been woven in patterns of gold and purple and green. Tales from the Librera, no doubt; among the embroidered mortal forms she spotted a number of angelic figures. In the middle of the room, a small table, a stool and cushions were grouped together as if inviting people to sit. Her own bundles—all her gifts from Jethro—were piled in a corner, awaiting disposal in various chests and trunks. There was no fireplace, but she felt heated air circulating in the room (not enough, in her opinion), and she suspected that it was somehow being forced through an ornamental grate at the foot of her bed.
And there was, faintly, the splash of water from not far away. Rachel followed the sound through a narrow archway and gave a low cry of admiration at what she saw. Steaming water fell from a pipe attached to the ceiling and into a marble pool. A small opening in the bottom of the pool drained the water away at the same rate at which it fell. Across the room, there was another arrangement of rivulet and drain, but this water fell more heavily and appeared to be cold. Hot water for bathing, cold water for drinking, all ceaselessly flowing, as constant as the angels’ singing. Even in Lord Jethro’s house, where a viaduct ran from the city well, water had to be hauled upstairs by hand and laboriously heated. This room, as a slave girl well knew, was a luxury of the highest order.
She dropped her blanket, pulled off her clothes, and stepped into the hot stream of water. Luxury of luxuries; she would be a slave for ten years just for this experience. A cake of flaky soap had been placed at the side of the pool. Scented with herbs and honey, it left even her rough skin feeling smooth. She used half of it to wash her hair, but felt no need to hoard. A place that could offer a constant stream of heated water must be able to provide extra soap at any time a guest might wish it.
Rachel’s eyes, which she had shut as she turned her face up into the falling water, opened in dismay. A guest. Hardly. She was a tenant now, a lifelong dweller. She was, or was soon to be, angelica, wife to the Archangel, and presumably the most important woman in this hold. The thought made her feel even more helpless.
She stepped from the water, wrapped herself in a towel and returned to the main chamber. Among the gifts from Jethro were numerous boxes of clothes. Surely something would fit.
She had barely finished dressing when a small chime sounded from the direction of the door. Rachel froze, her hands on the lacings of her shoes, and waited for something to happen. In a few moments, the chime rang again, and was quickly followed by a woman’s voice.
“Rachel. It’s Hannah. Are you awake?”
“Yes. Come in.”
Hannah had brought food, and she waited in silence while Rachel devoured the meal. She had missed dinner the night before, and in any case, she was always hungry. Or always during the last five years. It had not been so before.
She looked up to find Hannah watching her inscrutably. “It’s very good,” Rachel said, setting down the last empty dish. “Thank you.”
“Are you feeling better this morning? More rested?”
“Yes, I think so. Thank you.”
“That’s a very pretty dress you’re wearing.”
Rachel glanced down at it a little more critically. She had chosen this dress because it was of heavy wool and looked warm. But it was pretty, a deep-dyed blue with a narrow waist, full skirt and tapered sleeves. She tugged the cuffs down to cover her wrists. “A guilt gift from Lord Jethro,” she said with some of her usual spirit.
Hannah smiled. “It is the irony of the century that Gabriel found you in Lord Jethro’s house.”
“Because I was a slave there, you mean?”
Hannah’s delicate brows rose. “Because he did not want to go there. Because he does not like Jethro, or the city merchants. If he could have, he would have sent Nathan in his place. But Nathan would not have been able to find you. Therefore, it was the god’s wish that Gabriel go.”
“I am not sure that Yovah concerns himself so closely in mortals’ lives,” Rachel said dryly.
“He has in yours.”
“So it seems.”
Hannah smiled again. “Come. If you are done, it is time I took you around the Eyrie to show you how it is built, and to introduce you to some people.”
Rachel came to her feet, prickling with apprehension. “How many people?”
“How many live here? About a hundred and fifty.”
“A hundred and fifty angels?”
“No, there are only fifty angels. The others are mortals—husbands and wives of the angels, their children and those who work for the angels—cooks, launderers, repairmen, chatelaines—”
“And slaves?”
Hannah, who had started toward the door, turned back to stare at Rachel. “No slaves,” she said quietly. “Why do you ask?”
“There are slaves at Windy Point,” Rachel said. “Why should there not be slaves here?”
Hannah took a step closer. “What makes you think there are slaves at Windy Point?” she asked.
Rachel shrugged. “So I was always told. There are slaves everywhere else.”
“Not at the Eyrie. Neither Gabriel’s father nor Gabriel has ever sanctioned the institution of slavery—anywhere. Gabriel has been most outspoken against it, in fact.”
“And yet, there are slaves. Every day Edori are taken prisoner—”
“And Raphael is the Archangel. Now. Perhaps when Gabriel ascends to this rank at the Gloria, he will be able to change things.”
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br /> Rachel moved slowly across the floor toward Hannah. “Gabriel,” she said. “I know nothing about him at all.”
Hannah leaned against the door. She was an older woman, in her mid-fifties, Rachel guessed; her black hair was streaked with white and pulled into a knot at the back of her head. She had thin, patrician features and would not have looked out of place sitting across from Lord Jethro at a Semorran banquet.
“Gabriel will be thirty years old this summer,” Hannah said. “The youngest age at which an angel has ever ascended to the rank of Archangel. Jovah chose him when he was fifteen, so he has known for half his life what honor awaited him. It is an honor he takes very seriously—he takes most things seriously. He can be difficult. He can be very sure of himself, and so other people’s opinions do not always matter to him. He thinks it is a very easy matter to separate right from wrong, good from bad, so subtleties often elude him. He is not patient. But he is—he is never less than committed to making things right. Everything he does is with the goal of bringing goodness to the world. I can’t explain what I mean. There is no evil in him. That is a rare thing to say about anyone, even an angel.”
“You sound as though you love him,” Rachel said.
“I loved his father.”
Rachel’s eyes narrowed; surely she would not have spoken of Gabriel in those terms if he was her son. Hannah smiled, reading the question.
“Gabriel was born to the angel Jeremiah, who led the host here for forty years. I was Jeremiah’s second wife.”
“And Jeremiah?”
“Dead now for five years. Gabriel has led the host since then.”
Five years ago. Yovah had certainly made life interesting at that time for both the Archangel-elect and his angelica. No wonder Gabriel had not rushed out looking for a bride.
“And when is it to happen?” Rachel asked, following her own thoughts.
“When is what to happen?”
“The ceremony. The—the wedding. Between Gabriel and myself.”
“Soon, I would think. But there are preparations to be made. Angels from the other hosts must be invited, and the oracles, and some others. It is not a simple event. You and Gabriel must discuss it when he returns.”
“When he returns?”
Hannah nodded. “He left this morning for Luminaux. A messenger had been awaiting him in Velora for more than a week. He will not be back for several days.”
Rachel stared at Hannah, trying to conceal her reaction. Was it irrational to feel fury that she had been abandoned during her first day in a strange place by the one person she knew, and who had brought her here against her will? Considering that she did not even like the man who had carried her here and that he must, by now, have come to hate her? Still, fury was what she felt. One more item she was adding to the list of things for which she would never forgive the angel.
Not expecting to, Rachel fell in love with the Eyrie.
But it was such a lovely place, it would have been hard not to. Everywhere—rooms, corridors, great halls, small kitchens, floors, ceilings, walls—they were surrounded by that lustrous rosy rock, luminous as quartz in some areas, dense as granite elsewhere, but always faintly glowing, rich to the eye, sleek to the touch. Rachel had been born to farmers and raised among Edori; she had grown up among green things, sensitive to the demands and possibilities of the soil. She had hated white Semorrah, a cool alabaster prison—but the Eyrie, though it was also a place of stone, was beautiful to her.
Or perhaps it was the singing. She was never unaware of it as she and Hannah inspected rooms and climbed stairs and paused for introductions to the jumble of people who lived there. Rising and falling, the voices were always allied in perfect harmony, even as the voices changed; two women’s voices held a double note on a high, ecstatic tritone, and two men sang the next words in descending thirds, and still the effect was the same. Live in harmony. There were many messages in the Librera, but that was the central one. Live in harmony. The Edori had taken that to mean “Live in harmony with the earth, with the growing things and the wild things and the men and women of your own people.” The angels had settled on a more literal translation.
Having taken Rachel around the three separate levels of the complex, Hannah now led her outside. After the muted illumination of the tunnels, Rachel was hampered for a moment by bright sunlight. When her eyes adjusted, she looked around with interest. They had stepped onto a wide, flat plateau, surrounded on all sides by the three terraces of the Eyrie.
“This is the place where we have games and celebrations,” Hannah told her. “We hold informal sings here—nothing like the Gloria, but a way of practicing for the Gloria. We have meetings here, if there are things everyone should hear, for it is the only place all hundred and fifty can gather. Some angels choose to alight here, instead of at the landing rock above, merely because it is a quicker way to the kitchens.”
“You have meetings here?” Rachel said. “Isn’t it cold?” It was late autumn, and she was freezing.
Hannah smiled. “Not for angels. They are never cold. In the summertime, and even in the spring, it is a delightful place if the sun has warmed it all day.”
“Well, it’s nearly winter now,” Rachel said, hugging herself for warmth.
“During winter there is generally a central fire, and perimeter fires all along the edges. See where the braziers are set up? I prefer the winter sings, actually, because I like to exist by firelight.”
“You are a Manadavvi,” Rachel said. “How did you come to be here?”
Hannah was silent a moment. She looked surprised and, unexpectedly, sad. “How did you know that?”
Rachel unwrapped one arm and raised it in a gesture of inevitability. “I was Edori. I traveled through Gaza and saw the great homes of the Manadavvi. One of your houses would have made the whole city of Semorrah look small.”
Hannah turned away. “That was a long time ago.”
But Rachel felt a certain kindred interest in the story of anyone else who had been brought, willy-nilly, to the high reaches of the Eyrie. “How did you come to be here?” she asked again.
“My father was a Manadavvi landowner of some importance,” Hannah replied. “When I was a girl, my sister married, and angels from the three realms attended. One of them was Jeremiah.”
“And he brought you back with him? Did you want to come?”
Hannah was recounting the tale slowly, as if she did not want to tell it at all. “I was nineteen. He was nearly thirty. He already had a wife, although she had not yet borne him children.”
Rachel frowned. “Yes? And? He fell in love with you?”
“He—the Kiss on his arm leapt with light the first time he saw me. My own Kiss was like a live brand burning against my arm. I could not sleep for pain the whole time he was in the house. I had been told,” she said a little more rapidly, “that this was how Jovah allows true lovers to know one another. Samaria is wide and filled with many people. Those who are meant to be together often do not find each other, or recognize each other when they come face to face, and so Jovah has devised this system for revelation. I did not really believe it,” she added with a faint smile, “because it had never happened to anyone I knew. It is a fable young girls tell each other when they dream of the men they will marry. I did not believe it would ever happen to me.”
Rachel felt heat rising in her cheeks as the mystery of her own experience was now explained to her. The Edori for the most part were not dedicated, so this had not been a story told among the tribes. “So you returned to the Eyrie with him.”
Hannah shook her head. “He had a wife,” she said. “I did not go.”
“But—” Rachel frowned. “You go where your heart leads you,” she said. “And the heart changes. There is no disgrace or dishonor in that.”
Hannah gave her a quick, painful smile. “Is that the Edori way? I have heard you do not believe in marriage.”
“The Edori do not believe in bindings of any kind,” Rachel said. �
�The Edori know that the only permanence is Yovah. It is better to bow to the dictates of the wind than to try to chase or chain it.”
“And the Manadavvi believe that a promise once given is sacred, and that to come between a man and his wife is a crime exceeded only by taking another man’s life. I did not go with him.”
“But—” Rachel said again. She was trying to remember something Gabriel had said, which she had been too angry to consider carefully at the time. “Among angels—what do the vows of marriage mean?”
“The angels tend to be more flexible,” Hannah said, and her voice was a little dry. “Some do not marry at all, though they have lovers and they bear children. Some marry, and have lovers anyway. It is not encouraged, exactly, but it is not forbidden. After all, it is desirable that they have children. So if their hearts take them to more than one lover, Jovah is pleased.”
Rachel was cold, and she wanted to go inside, but she also wanted to follow this conversation to its conclusion. She tightened her arms around her body and kept asking questions. “Why is it desirable for angels to have children?”
“So there will be more angels, of course. Only an angel can sire—or bear—another angel. And angels are only born from a mix of divine and mortal blood—two angels together produce monsters, demons, lucifers. And not every union of angel and mortal produces more angels, and there is no way to know until the child is born. And even if an angel and a mortal have one child who is angelic, the next child may be mortal. There is no way to know. And so angels love where they will, and Jovah permits it, even though to the Manadavvi such license appears to be a crime.”
“And so Jeremiah wanted you to return with him, but you wouldn’t. But then his wife died, and you came to the Eyrie. Is that how it went?”
“More or less.”
“And you loved him.”
“Oh yes, I loved him.”
Rachel studied her. “But he did not make you happy.”
Hannah started. “I miss him.”
Rachel shook her head. “You were sad before he died.”
Hannah gave a light laugh. “The Manadavvi are a stern people. It is just my habitual expression. You must be cold. Let’s go back inside.”