Angelica
by
Jane Yolen
One of the most distinguished of modern fantasists, Jane Yolen has been compared to writers such as Oscar Wilde and Charles Perrault, and has been called "the Hans Christian Andersen of the twentieth century." Primarily known for her work for children and young adults, Yolen has produced more than sixty books, including novels, collections of short stories, poetry collections, picture books, biographies, and a book of essays on folklore and fairy tales. She has received the Golden Kite Award and the World Fantasy Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. In recent years she has also been writing more adult-oriented fantasy, work which has appeared in collections such as Tales of Wonder, Neptune Rising: Songs and Tales of the Undersea Folk, Dragonfield and Other Stories, and Merlin's Booke, and in novels such as Cards of Grief, Sister Light, Sister Dark, and White Jenna. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.
In the subtle little story that follows, she shows us that sometimes even angels must do, not what they want to do, but what they have to do.
Linz, Austria, 1898
The boy could not sleep. It was hot and he had been sick for so long. All night his head had throbbed. Finally he sat up and managed to get out of bed. He went down the stairs without stumbling.
Elated at his progress, he slipped from the house without waking either his mother or father. His goal was the river bank. He had not been there in a month.
He had always considered the river bank his own. No one else in the family ever went there. He liked to set his feet in the damp ground and make patterns. It was like a picture, and the artist in him appreciated the primitive beauty.
Heat lightning jetted across the sky. He sat down on a fallen log and picked at the bark as he would a scab. He could feel the fog imprint itself on his backside through the thin cotton pajamas. He wished—not for the first time—that he could be allowed to sleep without his clothes.
The silence and the heat enveloped him. He closed his eyes and dreamed of sleep, but his head still throbbed. He had never been out at night by himself before. The slight touch of fear was both pleasure and pain.
He thought about that fear, probing it like a loose tooth, now to feel the ache and now to feel the sweetness, when the faint came upon him and he tumbled slowly from the log. There was nothing but river bank before him, nothing to slow his descent, and he rolled down the slight hill and into the river, not waking till the shock of the water hit him.
It was cold and unpleasantly muddy. He thrashed about. The sour water got in his mouth and made him gag.
Suddenly someone took his arm and pulled him up onto the bank, dragged him up the slight incline.
He opened his eyes and shook his head to get the lank, wet hair from his face. He was surprised to find that his rescuer was a girl, about his size, in a white cotton shift. She was not muddied at all from her efforts. His one thought before she heaved him over the top of the bank and helped him back onto the log was that she must be quite marvelously strong.
"Thank you," he said, when he was seated again, and then did not know where to go from there.
"You are welcome." Her voice was low, her speech precise, almost old-fashioned in its carefulness. He realized that she was not a girl but a small woman.
"You fell in," she said.
"Yes."
She sat down beside him and looked into his eyes, smiling. He wondered how he could see so well when the moon was behind her. She seemed to light up from within like some kind of lamp.
Her outline was a golden glow and her blond hair fell in straight lengths to her shoulder.
"You may call me Angelica," she said.
"Is that your name?"
She laughed. "No. No, it's not. And how perceptive of you to guess."
"It is an alias?" He knew about such things. His father was a customs official and told the family stories at the table about his work.
"It is the name I . . ." She hesitated for a moment and looked behind her. Then she turned and laughed again. "It is the name I travel under."
"Oh."
"You could not pronounce my real name," she said. "Could I try?"
"Pistias Sophia!" said the woman and she stood as she named herself. She seemed to shimmer and grow at her own words, but the boy thought that might be the fever in his head, though he hadn't a headache anymore.
"Pissta . . ." He could not stumble around the name. There seemed to be something blocking his tongue. "I guess I better call you Angelica for now," he said.
"For now," she agreed.
He smiled shyly at her. "My name is Addie," he said. "I know."
"How do you know? Do I look like an Addie? It means . . . "Noble hero," she finished for him.
"How do you know that?"
"I am very wise," she said. "And names are important to me. To all of us. Destiny is in names." She smiled, but her smile was not so pleasant any longer. She started to reach for his hand, but he drew back.
"You shouldn't boast," he said. "About being wise. It's not nice."
"I am not boasting." She found his hand and held it in hers. Her touch was cool and infinitely soothing. She reached over with the other hand and put it first palm, then back to his forehead. She made a "tch" against her teeth and scowled. "Your guardian should be Flung Over. I shall have to speak to Uriel about this. Letting you out with such a fever."
"Nobody let me out," said the boy. "I let myself out. No one knows I am here—except you."
"Well, there is one who should know where you are. And he shall certainly hear from me about this." She stood up and was suddenly much taller than the boy. "Come. Back to the house with you. You should be in bed." She reached down the front of her white shift and brought up a silver bottle on a chain. "You must take a sip of this now. It will help you sleep."
"Will you come back with me?" the boy asked after taking a drink.
"Just a little way." She held his hand as they went.
He looked behind once to see his footprints in the rain-soft earth. They marched in an orderly line behind him. He could not see hers at all.
"Do you believe, little Addie?" Her voice seemed to come from a long way off, farther even than the hills.
"Believe in what?"
"In God. Do you believe that he directs all our movements?" "I sing in the church choir," he said, hoping it was the proof she wanted.
"That will do for now," she said.
There was a fierceness in her voice that made him turn in the muddy furrow and look at her. She towered above all, all white and gold and glowing. The moon haloed her head, and behind her, close to her shoulders, he saw something like wings, feathery and waving. He was suddenly desperately afraid.
"What are you?" he whispered.
"What do you think I am?" she asked, and her face looked carved in stone, so white her skin and black the features.
"Are you . . . the angel of death?" he asked and then looked down before she answered. He could not bear to watch her talk. "For you, I am an angel of life," she said. "Did I not save you?" "What kind of angel are you?" he whispered, falling to his
knees before her.
She lifted him up and cradled him in her arms. She sang him a lullaby in a language he did not know. "I told you in the beginning who I am," she murmured to the sleeping boy. "I am Pistias Sophia, angel of wisdom and faith. The one who put the serpent into the garden, little Adolf. But I was only following orders."
Her wings unfurled behind her. She pumped them once, twice, and then the great wind that commanded lifted her into the air. She flew without a sound to the Hitler house and left the boy sleeping, feverless, in his bed.