Angelica (30 page)

“And he's much better. I think we'll leave in a day or so. But it's made us so lazy you cannot imagine, since we haven't had to cook or hunt for a week. We just walk into
the city and buy whatever we need.” She laughed. “I think it will be
very
hard on Keren when we pull up stakes. She has loved being here.”

“How is she? How are you—how is everyone? I cannot believe—it has been so long, it seems like a lifetime—”

“I wish you could have gotten in touch with us, Susannah,” Tirza said quietly. “We all knew where you had gone and that you must be safe, but it was so difficult not to know how you were feeling, if you were lonely or if you were happy. It was so hard to see you leave like that, without even a good-bye.”

I didn't have a choice,
Susannah wanted to say.
Gaaron stole me from the campsite—what could I do?
But she knew that wasn't true. Tirza knew it wasn't true. That last night in camp, after that strange and disturbing conversation with Gaaron, Susannah had slipped back into Eleazar's tent to find everyone else asleep. She had picked her way through the tangled bodies to find Tirza and shake her awake, and she had knelt beside the other woman's pallet and whispered into her ear the whole transcript of the conversation with the angel.

Tirza had told her to go.

Susannah had said she would not.

But, of course, the next morning, she had.

“I thought it would be easier on me, on everybody, just to be gone,” Susannah said at last. “I did not think—I did not expect to see you now. I don't know that I am ready for it. It is so hard to leave behind one life and embrace a new one. I thought if I did it all at once, it would be easier.”

“And has it been?” Tirza asked.

Susannah gave a small, desperate laugh. “No! I am so lonely at times I cannot bear it. But everyone has been kind, and I think, after I am with them for a while, I will come to love them all. Already I love Miriam, who is the most impossible child imaginable. Think of Keren, only multiply all her sins and all her blessings, and you might have an idea of Miriam. She is so bad and she is so good. And the others—I am finding them already snuggling into the empty places of my heart. I will be content there someday, I know. But for now—I miss all of you. I miss our way of life. I
miss living with the rain and sun and the open land and the new adventure of every day.” She put a hand on Tirza's arm. “I miss the sound of breathing around me every night. That I miss most of all.”

“Do you miss Dathan?” Tirza asked.

Susannah was silent. “I try not to,” she said at last. “Dathan is the reason I agreed to leave.”

“He has been—I would like to say he has been faithful to your memory—” Tirza began.

Susannah shook her head. “I left to marry another man. That set Dathan free.”

“And he has taken advantage of that freedom,” Tirza said regretfully. “Though he is not, at the moment, tangled in any woman's charms. And I know, though he has not said so, that he thinks of you often. He will be happy to see you tonight.”

“I don't want to see him,” Susannah whispered. “I will sleep in Claudia's tent.”

They paused under a brightly striped awning while Miriam and Keren cooed over an assortment of ribbons and bows. Claudia had ranged ahead and was earnestly talking with a vendor about some kitchen pot that looked big enough to boil a horse in. Susannah could not imagine packing that up every night and taking it on to the next campsite.

“You will have to fence Dathan out of your heart before you can invite someone else in,” Tirza said seriously.

Susannah produced a small smile. “Perhaps I will not invite anyone else in. Perhaps it will be my own small solitary garden full of private flowers.”

“What about this angel?” Tirza asked. “Gaaron. If you are to marry him, he may well want to smell those blossoms.”

Now Susannah laughed. She had almost forgotten the easy way Edori talked about relations between men and women, how such relations were a source of constant and personal interest among the other members of the tribe. “We have not planned the wedding yet,” she replied, evading.

But Tirza was not to be put off. “So how do you deal together?” she asked. “I liked him well enough when he was at the campsite, but he may have been putting on his best manners just for show.”

“No, pretty much that is how Gaaron always behaves,” Susannah said. “He is very serious and considerate and kind. He is completely to be trusted. Everyone in the hold comes to him with every problem, from the smallest to the gravest. He expects it. He is used to handling everything and having no one at all to help him. He is not so interested in entering a woman's flower garden and playing at love.”

Tirza did not answer, and Susannah looked over at her. The other woman was watching her with a tiny frown. “That's strange.”

“What is?”

“How you talk about him.”

Susannah felt breathless. She thought her voice had been completely neutral. “How do I talk about him?”

“As if you are aggrieved.”

Susannah laughed nervously. “Aggrieved by what?”

Tirza shrugged and shook her head, as if she could not quite define it. “By how unappreciated he is by his friends—and by how little he appreciates you.”

“Don't be silly,” Susannah said. “I think he appreciates me a great deal. He has told me more than once how he values my judgment, and I know he likes to talk things over with me.”

“How odd,” Tirza said.

“Stop saying things like that,” Susannah said impatiently.

Tirza shook her head again. “He does not seem like the kind of man you would fall in love with. And yet I think you have.”

Susannah looked away. “The god has decreed that I marry him,” she said softly. “And I will do it. The god said nothing about love. That comes at our bidding, not Yovah's. Gaaron is a good man. I will not be unhappy with him. I do not expect more than that.”

Keren came running up with a handful of red-dyed ribbons. “Look, Tirza, see, I can make a headband and wear them in my hair,” she said. She held up the shiny strips of satin, and they indeed made a gorgeous contrast against her black hair. “I will make a red dress and wear it at the Gathering, and tie these ribbons around my braids,” she said
dreamily. “I will look so beautiful when I sing that no one will notice if I miss some of the notes.”

Susannah and Tirza laughed. “Are we all done shopping now?” Tirza demanded. “It is time we got back. Everyone in the camp will be so excited to see our special guests.” Her smile included Miriam in this excitement. “It is selfish of us to keep them all to ourselves.”

They quickened their steps and took fewer detours as they reached the edges of the city. Susannah was feeling more apprehensive by the moment, and when they got close enough to see the Edori tents a quarter mile ahead of them, she felt her heart begin to flutter. She did not want to see Dathan again, she did not.

She did. Yovah be merciful, she did.

For a few brief, painful minutes after they arrived at the Lohora camp, no one realized she was there. The campfires cooked, sending up their pungent, familiar flavors. The children ran yelling between tents, playing some complex, ridiculous game. Voices called to one another, laughter rippled from fire to fire. Everything was so familiar, so sweet. Everything was so agonizingly lost to her forever.

Then—
“Susannah!”
—and the cry darted from mouth to mouth, tent to tent. Door flaps burst backward as bodies shot out, cook pots splashed as the cooks dropped their ladles. Never had there been such a frenzy and commotion. Susannah laughed and exclaimed as she went from one embrace to another. “You've grown so tall! You've cut your hair! Look at you, Shua, a baby on the way! Claudia must be delighted.” It hurt to feel so much love at once. She could not kiss enough cheeks, could not feel enough hands upon her arms and shoulders. She was trying not to cry, but the tears came anyway.

“You should not have stayed away so long, not after leaving like that,” Anna said, scolding her as Tirza had.

“No—of course I should not have—but aren't you looking well—”

She did not see Dathan, not at first. Perhaps he was out with the others, hunting, or down near the Galilee River. She did duck inside Bartholomew's tent and put her hand on the hot forehead and note the way the skin had loosened around
his wrists and collarbone. But his color was not bad, and she believed him when he said he was mending.

“Seeing you will make me well before dawn,” he told her with a smile.

She smiled back. “Who is tending you? Your sister?”

“At night. Most days, Anna has sat beside me and fetched whatever I needed.”

Her smile grew wider. “I am happy to hear that! Did she offer, or did you ask for her?”

“She kindly offered.”

Susannah bent to kiss him on the cheek. “Now you must work to reverse that,” she whispered in his ear. “Have your sister tend you in the daylight, and ask Anna to lie beside you at night.”

He was not a jovial man, but his face looked amused as she drew back to survey him. “I will propose that to her as soon as I have recovered my strength,” he said.

When she emerged from the tent, she found Dathan waiting for her, and everyone else deeply engaged in some urgent task. She rocked back a little on her heels and stood there a moment, unable to move forward.

“Susannah,” he said.

He looked beautiful as a summer morning. The slanting evening sun turned his skin to bronze and his hair a spangled midnight black. The bones of his face were elegant and severe; his dark eyes were soulful and imploring. She wanted nothing so much as to lay her hands upon his skin and soak up the very texture of his body.

“Dathan.”

He stared at her as if she could not possibly be real, a woman made up of dreams and longings. Whenever she had thought of Dathan these past weeks, which was often, she had always remembered him laughing. She had forgotten how devastating it could be to have Dathan focused on her, willing her to want him, to believe him.

“I thought I might never see you again,” he said.

She smiled as much as she could, which was not much. “It is too soon for me to be back here,” she said quietly. “It hurts even more than I thought it would.”

“Have you come back to stay?”

She shook her head. “The god has called me to a new life. I must live with the angels now.”

“The god might change his mind,” he suggested.

This time the smile was more real. “That does not seem to be Yovah's way.”

“I've missed you,” he said.

She swallowed against a tight throat. “Yes. I've missed you.”

Not asking if he could, he reached out and took her arm. She felt that light grip against her skin as she might feel a brand of searing metal. “Walk with me a little bit,” he said.

She could not speak, and so she nodded.

He pulled her away from the tent, away from the campsite, sliding his hand down her arm until his fingers found hers. They interlaced their hands and continued walking, heads down, mouths silent, the busily gossiping camp falling ever farther behind them. It was close to sunset now, and a brisk chill laced the air, though it was not nearly so cold here as it had been at the Eyrie. Still, no part of Susannah was completely warm except the hand held in Dathan's.

“I remember the first time I saw you,” he said at last. “That time at the Gathering. You and your family had just arrived, and you were pitching your tent. And it was hot, and Paul was cross, and Linus had lost a tent peg. Your mother was too sick to help, so she was just sitting outside, looking at everything. And all of them were watching you. You were the calm, still center of that family. Every time you spoke any word, you brought peace. You found the missing stake. You gave your mother her dinner. You laughed your brother back into good humor. You kissed your father just because you loved him. And I thought, ‘I want to be in that tent, with that girl. I want that peace wrapped around me.' ”

Susannah smiled a little, her face tilted down so he could not see. “And the first time I saw you,” she said, “you were laughing. You looked so carefree and beautiful that I thought the sun and the stars themselves must love you. I wanted to stand inside your joy and let it fill me up, let it glaze me in gold. I wanted to be one of the things that brought that happiness to your face.”

He stopped and turned to look at her. He had dropped her
hand, but only so that he could put both his hands on her shoulders. “You are one of those things, Susannah,” he said quietly. “One of the only things that brings me happiness. I have been so sad with you gone from me.”

She raised her hand so she could put her palm against his face. Dear Yovah, the smoothness of his cheek, the roughness of beard stubble along his jaw—how many times had she placed her hand just so and marveled at those subtle contradictions? She felt tears coming to her eyes and she did not know how to form any words at all, much less the ones she needed to say.