The Alleluia Files (7 page)

“Good enough for you?” he asked.

“I think you did practice.”

“Not at all. I’m a natural.”

“Nobody’s a natural at Margallet. That was fun.”

“Let’s do it again next year,” he said, and they both waved once more to the audience. As they moved from the center circle their place was taken by a young angel who looked to be in her mid-twenties. Her blond hair fell in a simple, straight cut to her shoulders; her wings were lacquer white. In the direct sunlight, poised and still, she looked like an ormolu statue of an angel.

“Who’s that?” Jared asked Mercy in surprise. “How can there be an angel in all of Samaria that I don’t recognize?”

She had to stand on tiptoe to see over the crowd. “Who— oh, that’s Lucinda. She came with Gretchen Delmere.”

“Lucinda? What kind of name is that for an angel? Gretchen Delmere? Who are these people?”

Mercy shook her head. “I forget how young you are. But I would have thought you’d have heard this story sometime. Lucinda is the daughter of Rinalda Linise. Or don’t you know who she is?”

Jared found his lips forming the name Rinalda Linise, but he did not speak the words aloud, for Lucinda had started singing. Thought dried up; he turned to listening marble. She sang with a lucid, rainwater purity that blended with the air, the sunlight, the dance of butterflies around them;
this
, it was suddenly clear, was the fresh scent of spring. Neither the notes nor the lyrics registered with him. He had no idea if her song was gay or pensive, if she prayed for rain or peace or thunderbolts. But she sang, and the whole world became music.

When she stopped, there was dead silence for a few moments as angels and mortals shook themselves back to a state of common comprehension. The applause that followed was so long and so sustained that Bael might be supposed to be jealous. Jared saw Mariah approach her and speak in her ear, shouting over the noise of the clapping and calling, but the girl blushed and shook her head. Keeping her eyes down and hurrying as
best she could through her admirers, Lucinda quitted the center circle and disappeared into the crowd.

“You
must
tell me more about her,” Jared exclaimed, turning back to Mercy, but her attention had been caught by an angel from Bethel, and she was deep in another conversation. Then Jared was accosted by a woman from Luminaux, whom he only vaguely remembered meeting, and by the time he was free of her, Mercy had drifted off.

The Gloria was falling into its more relaxed state, one that would endure for the remainder of the day. As soon as Bael and Mariah had sounded their final “amen,” the official business of the day was done; all the rest of the performances were less for the glory of the god than for the entertainment of the masses. So as soon as the Archangel ended his piece, the vendors opened their booths for commerce, and the melee began.

It was said you could buy anything your heart desired on the blue streets of Luminaux, but it was almost as true on the Plain of Sharon the morning of the Gloria. Of course, there was every imaginable food item available—several thousand people had to eat, after all—but in recent years the Gloria had become a souvenir hunter’s dream. Shirts embroidered with angel motifs, oil portraits of Bael, miniature reproductions of all three angel holds, posters printed with the list of all Archangels from Uriel to the present, cookbooks featuring Mariah’s and Mercy’s favorite recipes—all this and more could be had for a handful of coins or a few of the crisp new paper bills.

Naturally, you could buy recordings of Glorias from the past decade as well as other music. Highly prized were copies of the sacred music brought with the first settlers to Samaria seven hundred and fifty years ago. These recordings, until recently, had only been available on the original silver disks that could be played nowhere except on special equipment built into the Eyrie and Monteverde. But sound—recording it and sending it where someone wanted it to go—was the new frontier in technology, and some clever fellow had discovered how to copy the settlers’ music onto the bulky black disks Samarians used today. Jared had been told the quality was quite good, and sales had been brisk. Particularly popular were the tracks laid down by Hagar, the first angelica, whose voice Jared had never heard matched. Although, frankly, he would have plunked down a few
dollars for a recording of the solo Lucinda had just performed. Well, perhaps it would be available.

Jared wandered through the merchants’ booths, idly looking over the merchandise and eating a meat pie. With half an ear he listened to the music still coming from the center of the plain; it would go on all day. It sounded like the angels had finished singing, and now the amateurs were lifting their earnest voices to Jovah. As the day wore on, livelier groups would present their music, and listening would become more fun; but the unspoken rule seemed to be that no one should sing anything light-hearted before the hour of noon.

He paused at a small family-run booth and stared meditatively at the items for sale, predominantly items of clothing embroidered with the blue crescent moon that was Bael’s standard. Vests, shirts, scarves, reticules, all bore the sapphire sliver, sometimes one big scythe of it across the whole broad back of a blouse, sometimes hundreds of tiny moons duplicated in a random pattern across an entire bolt of silk. He wondered if Bael knew what license the vendors were taking with his personal monogram, which he wore in sapphire jewels on silver bracelets around each wrist.

Jared glanced down at his own bracelets, plain gold bands set with emeralds, each cluster of three gems arranged to form a simple leaf. All angels wore such bracelets, to mark their lineage and their hold; angels from the Eyrie wore sapphires, those from Monteverde wore emeralds, those from Cedar Hills wore rubies. Jared had seen some of Bael’s Jansai wearing the crescent badge, but this was going a little too far.

He looked up, debating a stern reprimand, but the merchant was busy totaling up a sale and looked quite happy about it. Jared hesitated, shrugged, and moved down to the next booth. Ah, glass sculpture featuring representations of angels in flight, in prayer, in dramatic poses. Hardly, one would think, an improvement over the merchandise in the last booth.

“Shopping for home decor, I see,” said a man’s voice behind him. “I cannot wait to see which exquisite piece you choose.”

Jared turned, a grin already on his face. “I am guided by your taste, Christian,” he invited. “Choose for me.”

Christian obligingly stepped forward and began examining the statuary. “Well, of course, this is a nice effort—I particularly like the agony in the angel’s face. What is she praying for,
do you suppose? It cannot be something so mundane as rain or sunlight.”

“She is asking the god for enlightenment,” the young shopkeeper said, suddenly entering their conversation. He was enthusiastic and sincere, and most probably was the artist as well. “See? She looks to the heavens, but her hands are spread toward the earth. She knows that despite her wings, she will live a mortal life, grow old and die, and she asks Jovah to help her reconcile that with her divine nature.”

“Ah,” said Christian, and gave the glass angel a friendly pat on the head. “Sort of a universal theme, then.”

“Could I show you anything else? We can customize our pieces, you know. See, she wears tiny bracelets around each wrist—I can set them with whatever gems you desire. Well, gem chips.”

“They would have to be chips,” Jared agreed.

“Let us think it over.” Christian nodded to the artist, taking Jared by the arm. “We have a little more shopping to do.”

“Good prices!” the young man called after them. “And remember the customizing!”

“Jovah defend me,” Jared said when they were a few paces away. “And the sad thing is, I’m sure he does a tremendous business.”

“A guardian angel for every room,” said Christian. “Does he do silver and bronze in addition to crystal?”

“If we asked, I’m sure he would. He customizes, you know.”

“Well, if I ever need to buy you a gift—”

“Which, thank the god, I cannot imagine you ever will—”

“I’ll know just what to get you.”

“So!” Jared exclaimed. “Before you had a chance to torment me, had you been enjoying the Gloria? I looked for you last night, by the way, but could not find you.”

Christian pointed behind them, in the general direction of the hotels set up toward the northern edge of the plain. Less than fifty years ago, Archangel Joel had finally given permission for a few wealthy business investors to build permanent structures on the Plain of Sharon to act as housing units for those who attended the Gloria. Up till that point, everyone who journeyed in for the event stayed in progressively more elaborate tents and pavilions, so that setup and teardown could take all week. It had seemed foolish to build hotels that would only be used for two
or three days a year, but the Manadavvi and the river merchants—and even the angels—were getting used to their comfort and did not relish camping out on the night before the most important social event of the year.

The hotels, of course, were an instant success, usually completely reserved more than a year in advance; Jared could not imagine attending a Gloria under any less civilized conditions. And the hotel owners had almost as instantly come up with ways to increase their revenues, by sponsoring summer music festivals and autumn merchandise fairs on the broad grounds of the plain. Jared assumed that within a few decades the plain would become so booked with other major events that there would hardly be a day open for the Gloria itself.

“I wasn’t staying with the rest of the Semorran contingent,” Christian was saying. “I was a guest of Isaiah Lesh.”

Jared’s eyebrows rose, though it was hardly a surprise. Christian Avalone was the most influential, and probably the most wealthy, of the Semorran merchants; the fact that Jared liked him personally didn’t make him any less of a politician, his finger always on the fluctuating pulse of the Samarian market. And Isaiah Lesh was the patriarch of the oldest Manadavvi clan in Samaria. The two men had much in common, not the least of which was a complete and utter fascination with power. Christian was the younger of the two, a sleek, attractive, charming, and possibly dangerous man in his early forties; Isaiah, well manicured and faultlessly civil, was at least fifteen years older. But they had been allies for years—and not always friendly to the angels.

“So you stayed up talking late into the night,” Jared said lightly as they strolled forward. They continued to glance into the booths they passed and Silently pointed out anything of particularly gaudy interest. “Let me guess. And one of your topics was the inadequacies of the angels and how you could make them see reason.”

“Certainly Bael’s name came up once or twice, but I wouldn’t say we were dwelling on his flaws. I like that picture of Mariah, don’t you? The grimace seems particularly dead-on.”

“Perhaps she posed for it. Was it the new tax that irked you, or the ban on technological imports?”

Christian waved a hand dismissively. “Old news. Old topics.”

“But still very real grievances.”

“We’ll bring them up at the next council meeting. Again. Eventually Bael will come round to our way of thinking. Or you will.”

“
I
will?”

“Or Mercy. Or whoever is named Archangel,” Christian added.

Jared couldn’t help grinning. “Then you’d better start cultivating Mercy, because it’s unlikely to be me.”

“No, not if ambition has anything to do with it,” Christian agreed. “Though there’s no one I’d prefer to see—”

Jared chopped a hand through the air to cut off the discussion. “So, no new complaints? Just the same old grumbling?”

“You know the story,” Christian said mildly. “The Manadavvi and the river merchants are never content. We always must be complaining about something. But in the end, we’re compliant.”

Jared let it go. As Christian said, unrest among the power enclaves was constant, even in the historical context; as far back as Archangel Gabriel’s time, these two groups had been trying to wrest power from the angels. Jared made it a point to stay on good terms with Isaiah and his brethren, and let Bael fight the real battles. But he made sure he was never less than fully apprised of what the Manadavvi did and thought at all times.

Christian had come to a stop in front of another booth and picked up another portrait This one was done in charcoal and showed a certain aptitude for art as well as a familiarity with its subject “Now this I’m half-inclined to buy,” the merchant said. “It’s good, don’t you think?”

Jared looked over his shoulder. “She’d kill you,” he said. “Mercy isn’t one to encourage these sorts of excesses.”

“But it’s caught her look, don’t you think? I’ve seen that expression on her face a hundred times.”

“Ten dollars,” the artist said quickly, standing up and coming over to wait on them. “Or one gold piece.”

“I can’t resist,” Christian murmured, and pulled a wad of bills from his pocket. Jared rolled his eyes but forbore to make another comment. He waited while the young man carefully inserted the portrait in a protective cardboard jacket, and then he and Christian continued down the broad aisle of booths.

“She’ll see it when she comes to Semorrah,” Jared warned him. “You’d better hide it away somewhere.”

“Nonsense, she never comes to visit. You don’t either, now that I think of it.”

“Name the day. I’m always glad to sample the sophistication of the city. Monteverde is lovely and calm, but every once in a while it’s a little tame.”

“How about—two and a half weeks from today?” Christian suggested, so smoothly that Jared wondered if somehow this invitation had been the point of the entire conversation. “Can you get free?”

“Mercy will tell you that I’m always too willing to get free,” Jared responded. “I’ll be there. Perhaps I can stay a day or two.”

“I’ll tell the boys to expect a debauch,” Christian said. His two young sons had always been rigorously polite every time Jared had met them, but then, he had only seen them for a few minutes at a time under the direst of social pressures. Christian’s wife had died shortly after the youngest one was born, and Jared didn’t imagine that Christian had much time to provide a warm and nurturing home for them.