Archangel (3 page)

Gabriel flew high for most of the journey, dropping to low reconnaissance altitude only as he arrived in the vicinity of the village. From the air, there had been little to see—no hearth smoke, no cultivated patches of green against the undomesticated brown and gold of the prairie grasses and weeds. Lower to the ground, he was surprised to find nothing yet—no outlying huts, no hard-won orchards, no sounds or smells or sights that spoke of human habitation. He flew in ever-widening circles, wondering if he could have missed a crucial landmark, or if Josiah had misread the information Jovah had supplied. There appeared to be no village here at all.

He had been quartering the same area for a good hour, looking for clues, when his attention was caught by a random scattering of boulders half a mile from a streambed. Not so random, if looked at just right—if a few of the boulders were rolled back into place, and a few more dug up from the loamy earth, they would form a series of rectangular shapes that once could have been small houses standing side by side.

Gabriel canted his wings and came down, landing with practiced ease on the balls of his feet. There was scarcely a hitch between the last wingbeat and the first footfall as he strode forward to inspect the boulders. Yes, definitely the remains of walls and foundations, three or four homes that had once housed near neighbors. But that had been some time ago, judging by the extent to which the wild grasses had reclaimed this section of land and the land for miles around it. Ten years, maybe more, since anyone had lived here.

Frowning heavily, Gabriel looked around him. What he had taken for underbrush and the large nests of prairie wolves now assumed a different aspect—of huts knocked down and fences pulled apart. He counted another half a dozen piles that might have once been houses, and it was safe to assume that he had overlooked a couple of solitary habitations a few miles away in each direction.

“But farmers don’t abandon their homes,” he muttered, kicking at a piece of moldering wood that might have formed the
crosspiece of a roof. “They live in one place forever, and their children live there, and their children’s children—”

Only plague, in his experience, could cause a whole village to uproot and relocate. Gabriel searched in vain for the ward signs against illness, the special flags hoisted to warn away travelers and call down the angels who would intercede with Jovah on behalf of the sufferers. He found nothing like that. Indeed, what he did find made him frown more blackly and puzzle more deeply: the charred remains of several buildings, scatterings of clothing and jewelry and other personal belongings—and here, on the very edge of the village, a collection of skeletons. The bones fanned out from the village proper, all facing away from the tumbled homes, as if the citizens had fled madly from a central menace and tried to escape in as many directions as possible. It did not look, from this morbid array, as if anyone had succeeded.

Gabriel walked to a high boulder some distance from the open graveyard and sat, thinking very hard. To all appearances, the village had been attacked and systematically destroyed, the inhabitants all murdered, or some—perhaps—carried off. It was hard to credit. True, Raphael had turned a blind eye to the ravaging of the Edori, but until this time, Gabriel had never heard that the Archangel had countenanced any violence against the simple hillfolk, who were notoriously devout. It was in Jordana that most of the outrages against the Edori had occurred—carried out, for the most part, by the warlike, wandering Jansai merchants—but these were not Edori. These were farmers, Jovah’s true children, dedicated to the god and under the direct protection of Raphael. Who had attacked them, and how had it occurred without Raphael’s knowledge? Why had Jovah not exacted a retribution?

And where was Rachel, daughter of Seth and Elizabeth? Had she died in the assault, Jovah would surely have known of it; he would not now have proposed her name to Gabriel as his bride. So she must be alive—somewhere, somehow—in Jordana, Semorrah, Bethel or Gaza, or even the fabled Edori homeland of Ysral.

Gabriel had six months to find her. And he did not know where to begin looking.

T
he instant she realized she was awake, Rachel shut her eyes tightly and made her mind a total blank. It was a trick she had learned five years ago, and these brief moments in the morning, before true consciousness, before
remembering
, had for that period of time been the best in her life. She did not let herself know who she was, where she was, what her situation might be; she just existed.

Today, that sheer existence lasted less than a minute. “Stupid girl!” she heard a moment before Anna swatted her across the back with a broom handle, and she leapt from bed, half-fearful and half-indignant. The chain rattled between her hands as her shackles resettled over her wrists; she shook her hair back from her face.

“What?” she said, with the sullen defiance they had been unable to beat or threaten out of her. “I’m awake.”

Anna brandished the broom, but more to express her irritation than to offer harm. Though she was a bondwoman rather than a slave, and was considered invaluable by the head cook and the chatelaine, Anna’s situation was little better than Rachel’s, and there was a certain complicity between them.

“Well, and you should have been awake an hour ago. Guests arriving all day and the betrothal party tonight, and so much to do I don’t know what to start first. And you sleeping like a baby, like a lord’s daughter—”

“Oh, yes, I feel very much like a lord’s daughter,” Rachel
responded with heavy sarcasm. “Just tell me. What do you want me to do first?”

The list, it appeared, was endless, from cleaning out the guest bedrooms to helping in the kitchen to running errands across the length and breadth of Semorrah. This last Rachel did not mind so much; as always, she made the most of her brief, partial freedom. She dawdled a bit at the market, and stopped to rest on a park bench, where no one would see her and cuff her across the cheek for her slothfulness. It was a clear, warm day, and she turned her face to the sun, closing her eyes again, letting herself forget again who she was, where she was… .

But then she was stupid, as she was always stupid: After her errands were run, she went home by way of the River Walk. Semorrah was a huge, impossibly beautiful city constructed of milk-white stone—all its spires, domes, archways, towers and sanctuaries built of the same pale rock. Even more impossibly, it was built on a small island in the middle of the River Galilee, which divided Jordana from Bethel. There were only two approaches to the alabaster city—across the fabulous webbed bridge from Jordana, a delicate affair of ropes and steel that looked no more substantial than string; or by boat, through the water gates that faced the Bethel side of the river.

The city was so famous, and so wealthy, that it had long ago overrun the available surfaces of the rocky island that served as its base. Yet buildings continued to go up, one precariously balanced atop another; more and more people came to do business, or to visit, or to stay, so that the streets and bazaars and alleyways teemed with life. The whole world came to Semorrah. You could not walk through the market without seeing a lord’s daughter reclining in her chair, carried by six slaves wearing her father’s livery. You could not walk down the meanest street without encountering a Jansai merchant, a Monteverde angel, a Luminaux craftsman.

You could not stroll down the River Walk, your eyes turned longingly toward Jordana, without seeing another Jansai trading party coming in across the spidery bridge, driving their fresh catch of Edori slaves before them.

Which was why it was stupid to follow the River Walk home.

She could not help herself; she stood there and watched as the slaves were herded across the river. They looked dazed and exhausted, sore from the hard journey, hungry, afraid. Some of
the wilder ones still continued to glance about them, judging distances, possible weapons, escape paths. The rest just plodded forward, lost already, hopeless. From a distance, it was hard to tell one from the other, for the Edori all bore a remarkable clan resemblance—high flat cheekbones, dark straight hair, bronze skin, brown eyes. Nonetheless, Rachel made herself look at each one carefully, straining her eyes, hoping she did not recognize in each sorry new arrival a familiar body, a beloved face. Once or twice she saw, or thought she saw, someone she remembered from a campfire at one of the Gatherings—a leader of some other tribe, a girl she had met in passing at a streambed, fetching water. But she never saw those of her own tribe, her adopted family, her friends—or Simon.

Even if they were alive, it was unlikely she would ever see them again. The whole camp had been dispersed or destroyed in the Jansai raid five years ago; everyone who had not been taken had died, she was sure of it. But Simon had not been among the slaves that had been walked to Semorrah five years ago, nor her cousins nor her uncle. That did not stop her from wondering. Every time she walked through the Semorrah streets, she watched the faces of the slaves. Every time she was sent with messages to another lord’s household, and she found herself however briefly alone with another Edori, she asked after those she had lost. She never yet had found traces of them. And if they were not in Semorrah, they were probably dead.

But she still watched the incoming caravans, in case, in case.

Anna had lost no time in telling her how lucky she was. “The lady Clara, now, she’s truly a devout woman,” the bondservant had told Rachel on her very first night in Lord Jethro’s household. “She doesn’t hold for carryings-on. A man, even a guest, even her own son, found bothering the slave women—well! It just doesn’t happen in Lord Jethro’s house. You might be beaten, you might be starved—if you misbehave, that is—you might be sold, but while you’re under this roof, you won’t be molested. And that’s a sight more than can be said about most roofs in Semorrah. You should fall on your knees and thank Jovah.”

But that Rachel had been unable to do. She was more likely, as was her wont on most nights, to rail against Jovah, to bitterly question his wisdom and his kindness—or to importune him, as she did now, to unleash his powerful destructive wrath.

“O Yovah, if it be thy will,” she prayed, her voice a whisper
but fierce for all that, “call down thy curses on this thrice-damned city. Strike it with fire! With thunderbolts! Cover it with storm, and flood it with the raging river! Let everyone within its borders die, and let every stone be washed away to sea. And let me stand on the riverbank and watch.” She took a deep breath, scowling at the now-empty bridge. “Amen,” she added, very softly, and turned back toward Lord Jethro’s house.

Late in the afternoon, Anna sent her to Lady Mary’s room. “For her own woman’s come down with some fever, and she can’t seem to dress herself. No, nor style her own hair—”

Rachel stared at the bondwoman. “Well,
I
don’t know how to style a lady’s hair,” she said.

“Well, you can do up the back of her dress and make a curl with the hot tongs, can’t you?”

“I can do the buttons, I suppose, but I’ve never—curling tongs!”

Anna pushed her out of the kitchen, where they had both been helping the cook, and in the direction of the great stairs that led to the living quarters of the gentry. “Do what you can. Lady Clara says the little one’s near hysterics.”

Still protesting, Rachel allowed herself to be pushed from the room and wearily began climbing the three flights to the guest rooms. The lady Mary was to wed Lord Jethro’s son, Daniel, on the following morning in a ceremony that bid fair to be the most lavish Semorrah would see this season. Already the palatial house was full to overflowing with visitors from all three realms— wealthy Jansai merchants from eastern Jordana, the Manadavvi landowners of Gaza, the craftmasters of Luminaux and angels from all three holds. Indeed, someone had said the Archangel had arrived the night before, although Rachel had not laid eyes on him. Not that it was a sight she pined for.

In the midst of all this confusion, the lady Mary looked like a lost soul. Her father had accompanied her when they arrived three days ago, and then promptly disappeared with his host to discuss politics, economics and fishing vessels. The young bride had no mother or sisters or friends, and the lord Daniel had not appeared interested in entertaining her, as the match was a financial one, not romantic. Rachel had actually found it in her heart to be sorry for the girl—small, mousy, hopeful and frail—and
she was not a woman who generally wasted pity on any of the gentry.

Her impatient knock on Mary’s door was answered by a quick “Come in!” uttered in a high, childlike voice. Rachel entered. The lady Mary indeed looked as if she might start crying at any moment. She was standing in her petticoats and chemise, shivering before a small fire, attempting with her hands crooked behind her back to wind her long, thin hair into some kind of knot. Nonetheless, she was trying desperately to hold onto her dignity.

“Can I help you?” the lady asked in a polite voice.

Rachel almost smiled. “I’m Rachel,” she said, coming in and shutting the door. “I was sent to help
you
.”

The lady dropped her hands. Her face was suddenly eager. “Oh, could you?” she exclaimed. “My poor girl is so sick, and she’s the only one who ever does my hair, and helps me with my clothes, and she knows just how all the layers go, and I just don’t think I can manage it myself—”

“I don’t know about the layers,” Rachel said, stepping forward. “And I’ve never done much with hair. But I’ll do what I can.”

“Thank you so much. Really, I just—thank you.”

Rachel had dropped to her knees before the fire. “Let me stir this up a little. You look half frozen.”

“A little chilly, maybe,” the girl murmured. “I didn’t know how to make it burn again—my girl usually does that.”

Does this “girl” have a name?
Rachel wanted to ask, but she refrained. Mary had identified Rachel’s station with one quick glance, taking in the bare feet, the plain, ill-fitting gown, the wide chain hanging between the heavy shackles. She seemed so ingenuous that Rachel half-expected her to exclaim, “Oh, you’re a slave!” but no; Mary had seen slaves before. She was not disconcerted by their presence.