The Alleluia Files (27 page)

She could hear the smile in his voice, though she did not look at him. “They’re happy to see me go. Happy to see me return, I’m sure, but not grieving when I set sail again.”

“And of course they know you’ll be back.”

“They know it. I tell them so. I never made a promise like that I did not keep.”

“And to how many others have you made that promise?” she asked before she could stop herself.

“Not as many as you might think,” he murmured. “The Edori reputation has been somewhat exaggerated.”

“Well,” she said. “I don’t know much about Edori. I don’t know much about anything off this island.”

He came to a halt and she followed suit. He stood for a moment gazing out at the ocean, as if he had not seen it every day of his life for as long as he had been at sea, and then turned his head so he could survey the short, sharp cliffs that sealed off this tumbled shore. “It’s a nice island,” he said, as if he had assessed it and found it acceptable. “I’ll want to return. Often. Though I would not want to come so often that anyone found me intrusive.”

“I can’t imagine that would be the case,” Lucinda replied. “You know that Aunt Gretchen lives to make every guest welcome.”

“And you, Lucinda?” he said softly. “Would you welcome me?”

He had left off examining the beauties of the island and was staring soberly down at her. Her heart had grown so big that there was no room left in her chest for air, and so she was taking short, shallow breaths and finding them insufficient. But she managed to return his look steadily and serenely, and her voice sounded calm, even to herself.

“I would,” she said. “Anytime you arrived at our harbor.”

He put a hand to her cheek so lightly that it was more a sensation of warmth than an actual touch. His eyes were so dark, night-dark, secret-dark, the dark of forgotten dreams. His skin was the color of old wood, polished by hundreds of loving hands. He was more beautiful than she had imagined a man could be.

“Then I will be back here,” he said, “as often as the tide.”

“As often as the sea brings you, you mean.”

“More often than that. You shall see, mikala. You shall see.”

Dinner and the quiet interaction of the evening were much more prosaic but infinitely easier to live through. Maurice had a tray in his room, but Rico, Joe, and Michael joined the rest of the Manor’s guests for the six o’clock dinner—for which Lucinda and Reuben had to hurry home in order to be on time. Gretchen
knew how to do up a meal in grand style, and for certain pampered guests she offered every elegance, but for ordinary meals, everyone sat down to the table in democratic fashion—guests, innkeeper, even Emmie and Jackson, and all the food was handed round the table. No one had ever complained about mis, and the Edori were certainly not going to be the first. The other seven guests were full of questions for their hostess and her niece, wanting to hear all about their trip to the mainland, and so conversation was general and lively. The food, of course, was excellent.

Afterward, some of the guests departed, and the others drifted into the music room, looking for mild entertainment. Lucinda sat in a corner, quietly talking to the young Luminauzi girl who was here with her parents, but she waited patiently for the inevitable request; and it came.

“It’s so rare mortals like us get to hear an angel singing,” said an older man who appeared to be on a pilgrimage to Ysral with his wife. At a guess, he was a businessman in one of the smaller Bethel towns—well-to-do by his own standards and not embarrassed in any company, but not as sophisticated as a Manadavvi, either. “If Lucinda would be willing to offer a song or two for the glory of Jovah, we would be most delighted.”

“Oh, do sing, Lucinda, please do,” the young girl begged.

Lucinda rose to her feet, smiling pleasantly. “Of course,” she said. “But I don’t have to sing the sacred masses if you’d rather hear something else. Although I do know the masses! It’s up to you.”

A quick murmur running around the room revealed that most people would prefer to hear a contemporary tune, if the angel did not believe that was sacrilege. She nodded and went to the harpsichord. Reuben, she noticed, casually rose and circled the room till he came to rest right across from her, where he might have an excellent view of her face. Well, she had sung for angels at the Gloria; she would not be nervous of a few Edori.

Accordingly, she picked her favorite songs, the ones most perfectly in her range, and let her fingers dance lightly down the narrow keys. She could feel her voice rise, giddy and true, over the remote, tinny music of the harpsichord; she sounded happy, as if she laughed over every note. She could not help smiling. Around her, the audience smiled in response.

Gretchen came over to stand beside her as she finished her
second selection. “That was very nice,” she said approvingly, flipping through the pages of a book of music. “I was thinking—here, I haven’t heard you sing this one in a long time.”

It could be sung as a solo, but the harmony was sweet. “If you’ll sing it with me,” she replied, smiling up at her aunt.

“Oh, heavens! I haven’t sung in months.”

“Just once. Just the first verse.”

“Well—” Gretchen glanced at the music again, then nodded briskly. “Well, why not. Scoot over.”

So Lucinda made room for her on the edge of the seat, and Gretchen reminded herself of the descant by tapping out her part very softly on the upper registers of the keyboard. They sat side by side, Lucinda playing the accompaniment, and sang the whole song straight through, all four verses, their voices blending in well-rehearsed harmony. They had sung together their whole lives, they knew each other’s strong notes and missed phrases, and their voices moved silkily beside each other like images in a mirrored glass. When they finished, Lucinda pounding out a few dramatic chords for emphasis, the small audience erupted into spontaneous applause. Gretchen sat there a moment, wreathed in smiles, then leaned over to kiss her niece on the cheek.

“You’re a sweet girl,” she said, and got up from the bench. Despite the requests of the others in the room, she refused to perform again.

“Too much work!” she said, quite gaily for her, and sailed out of the room toward the kitchen. She was still smiling.

Lucinda sang one more song, a quieter number to induce guests to start thinking about their beds, and then closed the lid. “I think I’ve had enough performing for the evening,” she said with a laugh when the businessman asked for one last number, and came to her feet. They were too polite to protest for long.

Soon after that, everyone dispersed, seeking their various rooms. Lucinda moved mechanically around the parlor, pushing pillows back in place and closing the curtains for the night. She was tired herself, though she should not be. What about the day had been so hard—?

“Your concert tonight reminded me of something I meant to show you when we were aboard
The Wayward
,” Reuben said from the doorway, and she whirled around a little too quickly. He should not startle her so; her heart was absolutely racing.
“But then the Jansai came calling, and I didn’t have time.”

“I can scarcely remember any life before the Jansai arrived, firing at us,” she said, summoning a careless smile. “But weren’t we discussing treason just about then?”

“We were discussing the Jacobites, yes, and machines that are tuned to music,” he said, taking a seat on the plush flowered sofa. “Come. Sit here and let me show you this.”

She could not sit on such a piece of furniture; her wings would not allow it. Instead, she pulled up a hassock before him, and let the feathers tumble behind her. His eyes wandered from wing tip to shoulder blade as if he liked the white spill of quill and down, and then he looked at the object in his hand.

“A music box,” she said. It was a small silver case with tiny scrolled legs; the top was glass painted with the face of a singing angel. It was held shut with an ornate clasp in the shape of a rosebud.

“Of a sort,” Reuben said, holding it out to her. “Can you open it?”

She took it from him with an inquiring glance. “I suppose not,” she said, and gently tried to twist the flower. It did not budge. “Maybe it doesn’t open?” she guessed.

“Oh, it does, and there’s a treasure inside,” he said, smiling. “A ring that I bought in Luminaux one day when I had no business squandering my money on trinkets.”

“Then you probably shouldn’t have bought the box, either,” she said. “For it looks quite expensive.”

“Well, it was, but at that time I had more money,” he excused himself. “Besides, it was made for me by a friend of mine.”

“Who sealed it with a lock only you could open.”

“Anyone can open it,” said Reuben, “who knows the key.”

“Holds the key?”

“Knows it,” he corrected. “For, listen.”

And he sang a sweet, wordless melody in a honey-smooth tenor that made her briefly absentminded to hear. The song was maybe twenty notes long, and when the last note sounded, she heard a sharp metallic click. She looked down at the music box in her hand. The rosebud had flicked to one side.

“Did that—did your song unlock it?” she asked in a wondering voice, holding the box away from her body as if it were an enchanted thing. “I heard a sound—”

Reuben nodded. “Open it. See what’s inside.”

“How can a song undo a lock?”

“It’s an electronic lock. It responds to aural cues.”

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“Well, I couldn’t duplicate it myself, but there’s a tiny receiver in there that picks up sound. And it responds to the song you just heard. And that song breaks the circuit that wires the lock in place. I’m told that it’s a very simple principle, though I admit I found it amazing the first time I saw it.”

“I find it a little terrifying.”

“Open it,” he said again, and when she did not, reached over himself and swung the painted lid upright.

The inside was lined with black velvet and on the velvet lay a silver ring set with an unbroken band of emeralds. The stones alternated in cut, a square gem beside an oval one, all the way around the band.

“Oh, how pretty!” Lucinda exclaimed, instantly forgetting her unease over the lock. “May I try it on?”

“Certainly.”

It did not fit the first finger she tried, but slid smoothly over the ring finger of her right hand. In the muted light of the drawing room, the emeralds looked sleepy and content, rich with thoughts and dreams of their own. She turned her hand this way and that to see what secrets the light could uncover.

“I can understand why you did not try to resist buying this,” she said, “though I do have to wonder if you had a lady in mind when you made your purchase.”

“Well, I did,” he said, smiling, “but I changed my mind before I saw her again. When I realized I would rather never see her again than part with my emeralds, it seemed like a good time to make my farewells.”

“Are you
sure
those Edori tales have been exaggerated?” she murmured.

He laughed. “Well, some of them.”

Regretfully, she took the ring off and laid it back in its case. “Where did you get it?”

“Luminaux, of course. The most beautiful things in the world are to be found there, though we try to make them elsewhere as well. But nothing I’ve found in the mainland or Ysral compares with the treasures I have come across in the Blue City.”

“Thank you for showing it to me.”

He picked up the box once more and held it at his eye level. “Now, how do you suppose I lock it up again?”

“I would think you sing another song?”

He nodded. “Good guess. But not quite right. I sing the same song—backward.”

“The same notes in reverse order?”

He nodded again. “Listen.” And he sang again in that delicious, offhand tenor, the same few notes that he had sung before but arranged in the opposite direction. The silver rosebud slipped into place as his last note sounded. Reuben looked over at her and grinned.

“Isn’t that clever? Who would have thought of such a thing?”

“Let me try,” she said, and took the box from his hand. “Do I have to be on exactly the same pitch as you? Or do I just have to have the intervals of the notes correct?”

“I assume the pitch doesn’t matter. I don’t pay much attention when I unlock it, I just start singing.”

She nodded, then sang. She was a quick study, and the melody was very simple, and she had been paying attention. She got it right, first try, for the lock snapped open under her fingers. She laughed softly.

“I’m impressed,” he said.

“I want to try something,” she said. “If I sing it deliberately wrong, what will happen?” So, a little more haltingly, she offered the song in reverse, but changed the last note. The rosebud did not move.

“A true key in a real lock, with only one correct fit,” she said. “I am still amazed.”

“I will have to commission him to make a box for you,” he said. “And have it programmed with some impossibly complex song that will take you days to master. Not to mention how hard it will be to learn the song in reverse.”

She had stopped listening; she was gazing down at the painted angel on the lid and remembering something. “You know, this is so strange,” she said slowly, still looking down. “I’d almost forgotten. A few months ago we had a spell of dry weather on the island. It’s so cloudy here, especially in winter, that we all love sunny days. But at this particular time we were running low on fresh water, so we all agreed that a few hours of rain would be welcome. So I went aloft and prayed for storm.

“There are many prayers for weather,” she went on more slowly, “and the prayers that call for snow and those that call for thunderstorms are very different, but in each there is a passage that is identical. Just a couple dozen measures—maybe a page of written music. What comes before and after varies radically from song to song. But there must be some combination of notes that tells Jovah we want precipitation, and the
kind
of precipitation is determined by the rest of the music.

“So the rains came, and we all filled our cisterns and barrels and cook pots. And after a few hours we agreed that we had had enough, and I went aloft again. And I sang the prayer for sunshine, for the dispersal of clouds. And in the middle of that song I realized there were about twenty-five measures that were identical to the ones in the song for rain. Except they were in reverse order. I had never sung the two prayers so closely together before, and so I had never realized it.”