God's Fires

by Patricia Anthony

  With one swift glance, Marta took his measure. “I do not know why the Virgin chose me, either, Father Inquisitor. She tells me her bidding, not her reasons. You are more dedicated to her service. Perhaps you could tell me why she did not select you.”

  His cheeks burned. Maledictus. Couldn’t anyone control her? Pessoa saw the answer in Senhor Castanheda’s face. He was obviously afraid for his daughter; yet the burly war hero was frightened of her, too.

  “All right.” Pessoa waved an arm. “All right. It is pointless to be uplifted at Mass, then stand outside the church afterward to gossip and to quarrel. Neves. I wish to see you. Everyone else, go home.” He stalked down the clay road toward Neves’s farm, his angry steps raising dust. At the bend he slowed to look back. Marta was at his heels, Neves two paces behind. The rest of the town—Soares included—followed at a cautious distance.

  “Go home!” Pessoa ordered.

  They halted. Some looked at their feet. Some studied the roadside trees.

  “By the power of the Holy Office, I command you to go home!” O libera me, Domine. Idiotic for him to have used the mightiest weapon in his arsenal. Without the Holy Office, Pessoa was unarmed. He didn’t have the courage to check and see if he had impressed the crowd into submission. Head down, stride purposeful, he scattered a flock of grazing sheep. He trudged up a manure-scented rise and down the other side. He lifted the hem of his cassock and forged a watercress-fragrant stream.

  Beyond Neves’s modest hillside of mustard was a potato field. What Pessoa saw there brought him to a sudden halt. In the center of the field was a circle, as clear as Marta’s circle of dead grass. The vines were alive—but potatoes were swelling from the earth in a mockery of Judgment Day.

  Neves said, “Grown this large in a single night! I looked out and saw the wheel spinning, and a lance of light from it. I woke my wife. I crossed myself. It was so bright, the rooster woke and crowed.”

  A rooster crowing in the dark of night—the most somber of all death omens. And the bloated potatoes in Neves’s field caused Pessoa to wonder what monster grew in Maria Elena’s womb. Too much of the supernatural to repudiate, even for a Jesuit. He broke into a sweat. His voice shook. “You mistook what you saw, Gregorio. You awoke with your mind befuddled by sleep. There was a storm outside, and lightning.”

  The townsfolk had caught up with them. Magalhães, his wife, and his four children wandered the rows, marveling. Sleepy bees hummed through the mustard-scented air. Sen-hora Teixeira walked the circle of potato plants slowly, hand in hand with her waddling daughter.

  Marta said, “I think it was Archangel Michael, announcing the birth.”

  Pessoa couldn’t breathe. His throat closed so tightly that it seemed the pressure would stop his heart. “If you will both just stop to consider, you will see it had to be a storm, as I’ve said….”

  Neves shook his head. “I don’t know, father. I’ve seen a lot of storms. This is the first cloud I’ve seen spin or glow like that.”

  Marta agreed. “I’ve seen the angels, myself, Senhor Neves, and they are so bright, so beautiful.”

  “No. I’m afraid you are both mistaken. A lightning strike has caused a disease in the field, don’t you see? Look. Can’t you see how swollen and tumored the potatoes are? How can you believe this ground sanctified when the earth itself seems to be spewing the diseased things forth? Really, Gregorio, they look quite unhealthy. They should not be eaten, lest they cause—”

  “Chest high!” Magalhães called. Next to him, Maria Elena, waist-deep in potato vines, hand resting serenely atop her belly, was beaming.

  Neves shouted back, “I’m thinking to make this a shrine. Charge visitors to see it—”

  “Damn you!” Pessoa threw his breviary at him. Neves backed up so quickly that he tripped and fell. “Safer for you all that you clean your souls of this heresy!” Pessoa should have been better prepared for the gasps, for the hurried signs of the cross.

  In the fell silence, Soares bent and picked up the breviary as gently as he might have lifted one of his kittens. He dusted it with his sleeve. “Manoel?” he said quietly, and went to him. “You dropped this.”

  The leather cover was soft from a lifetime of handling; the seams worn and split. As the Church had ordered, Pessoa memorized and pondered it, and still had not found faith. Yet habit had made it a living part of his hand.

  Pessoa slipped the breviary into his pocket. He was trembling. “Neves?”

  “Yes, Father Inquisitor?”

  “Plow this field.”

  Afonso wanted to take the Quixote and his copy of Camões. “You will read to me.”

  Jandira was seated next to him on the Turkish rug in the middle of his room. “Every night, my king. Will we take the Swiss compass, also? So we can find our way?”

  “Yes.” He watched as she wrapped the compass in cloth and put it into the chest. “And don’t forget to pack the golden bell Salvador de Sá gave us, so that I may ring for you.”

  She wrinkled her nose.

  “It makes a pretty sound.”

  “Pretty. Can you tell the difference, my king, between screaming and singing?”

  A trickster’s question. Because he was not clever enough to guess the answer, he rocked back and forth until the scrapes on his knees stung. “A joke?”

  “I don’t know, sweetling.”

  She looked so sad that he grabbed her hand. “I will tell you a joke, Jandira. When is a book not a book?”

  A man’s voice came from the doorway. “When?”

  Castelo Melhor was standing in the shadows. The French girl was beside him. He was wearing a forest-green velvet tunic sewn with gold thread, and the girl had on spiderweb-fine lace. “Are you not going to finish the jest, sire?”

  “No.” Afonso picked up a marble globe and tried to wrap it in a handkerchief; but he was shaking, and the silk was too airy and fine.

  “It began like a good jest.”

  Afonso rocked again. “The world is round,” he said.

  Suddenly Castelo Melhor was squatting beside him, his velvet sleeve brushing his arm. Afonso felt trapped in the count’s heat. Castelo Melhor’s perfume reeked of ambergris and flowers. “Yes, my liege,” the count said. “The world is round. I have a present for you.”

  Afonso looked at the floor, but caught sight of Castelo Melhor’s hands: the short powerful fingers, the dark veins, the scar running up the wrist and into the sleeve.

  “We go away tomorrow,” Afonso said. “Jandira and my soldiers. All my soldiers. We will camp in silk tents, and tilt at windmills, and Jandira will read me about Esmeralda.”

  “Ah. Where do you go, sire?”

  “To—”

  “—the Alentejo,” Jandira said.

  Afonso was afraid to look up. The silence in the room was huge.

  “The Alentejo?” Castelo Melhor asked.

  Jandira was trying to warn Afonso about something, but he wasn’t smart enough to know what it was. His hand shook. The globe dropped onto the stone.

  The count picked the world up and turned it over. “Ah, sire. It seems you have chipped India. But I have a new plaything for you.”

  Two playthings. Carved dolls. The count put them on the rug, just short of Afonso’s lap.

  “From your colonies in Africa, sire. Yoruban, I believe, although perhaps Jandira could tell you best.”

  Afonso laughed and held them up. “Look! Presents!” Such funny presents. The male doll’s pan was as long as his arm and as thick as his leg. The dugs on the woman sagged as far as her knees.

  “Said to promote fertility, sire,” Castelo Melhor said. “Isn’t that right, Jandira?” He squeezed her knee. “Answer me, um? At least look at me in the eye. Bashful? Surely not bashful—not a mongrel bitch whose father was whelped by a slave and a miner with too little to do. And whose mother, I might add, wore only a breechcloth and climbed trees.”

  She pushed his hand off her.

  He put it back. “A true bastard daughte
r of Brazil.” He rubbed his hand up and down Jandira’s leg so slowly that it made Afonso want to stare and yet not look, all at the same time. “See who I brought to visit?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Afonso saw the count gesture to that French girl. When she sat down on the rug, Afonso clambered to his feet.

  “Sit down!” At the count’s bellow, the guards at the door flinched. The three servants who were packing, froze.

  More gently, he said, “Come. Sit down, sire. For God’s sake. Don’t tremble so. You look like a beaten dog. See? Your queen pines for you.”

  She was sad, but Afonso didn’t think she was sad for him. He wondered if she missed her family.

  “She doesn’t speak,” Afonso said.

  The count rolled his eyes. “She speaks French.”

  “Her words are all wrong.”

  “But you are married, my king. You don’t have to speak to put it in her.”

  “She frightens me when she does not speak.”

  Castelo Melhor said something to the French girl which was neither Portuguese, nor Spanish, nor the language that priests use. She answered with a shrug.

  “See?” Afonso said.

  “This needs no speech, sire.” The count unfastened the front of the lace shift and drew it back. The French girl’s breasts were twin bumps not much bigger than his own. She sat, face lowered, shoulders hunched. The count put his forefinger under her chin and lifted her head. “What pretties.”

  The French girl’s eyes were squeezed shut. Her cheeks were bright red. Tears streamed her cheeks. Afonso wanted to make her stop crying, but he didn’t know how, so he made a fist and pounded his thigh.

  Jandira said, “Don’t, my king.”

  A moan came up his throat, filled his mouth, and did not want to stop. He hit his leg harder.

  Jandira rose. “Cover her, my lord. You upset him.”

  Afonso danced in place while the French girl wept. She wept silently, and those strange quiet tears made Afonso’s stomach feel funny, and so he began to cry, too. He always made a great clamor when he cried, that’s what Pedro said.

  “Cover her!” Jandira ordered.

  Castelo Melhor pulled the lace bodice to. He grabbed Jandira’s wrist and jerked her off her feet. Afonso had seen men kill, and so he recognized the hard killing gleam in the count’s eye. Castelo Melhor leaned over until there was but a knife blade’s distance between them. He whispered, “Guard him well on his journey, my brown lady, for without issue, Afonso is all that stands between Portugal and civil war.”

  Jandira turned her face away. “He is not interested.”

  The count snatched his purse from his belt and threw it, clanking, into her lap. “Teach him an interest,” he said.

  Pessoa awoke near vespers to find a covered plate waiting on the table. The rectory was silent but for the snapping hearth where a fire was dying to embers. The room was empty even of cats.

  He arose. The front door stood open. Outside, sunset buffed the rocky hills until they shone like brass. No cow lowed, no donkey brayed, no bird sang. Pessoa was overcome with senseless fear: that the Rapture was more than fable, that God had turned His back, and everything in the world had gone away.

  Heart in his throat, he walked outside. Soares was at a table under a bower of grapes. Cats sat on the benches nearby, attentive as a choir. Soares was telling them the story of Daniel.

  Pessoa longed to stand and listen, but at the sight of him, cats bounded away. Soares stopped preaching.

  As always, he’d broken the magic. “Tomorrow we begin an informal inquiry, Luis. You will serve as my notary, and you will take down what I tell you to write—no more, no less. There are no other ecclesiastical lawyers to form a consulta da fé, and I do not intend to ship the accused to the provincial tribunal at Mafra—my point is, in fact, not to call any of this to the tribunal’s attention. So. All the accused are to abjure. We will see to that. Agreed?”

  From a safe distance, cats watched him with harvest-moon eyes.

  “For God’s sake. Luis! We keep this between us. Do you agree?”

  Soares nodded.

  “Good. You will speak with Cândido Torres. He will act as my familiar. Tell him to strap swords on some of his field hands and to arrange for a jail. Assure him I will find some way to recompense him.” Pessoa ran out of breath. When air came into his lungs, it came with an anxious, snicking jolt. Someone nearby was burning hardwood, and the fragrant smoke reminded him of Evora, and how clean the fires in the praça smelled before flames reached flesh.

  Memory stuck in his throat, and he coughed to clear it. “To be frank, since I cannot afford to ignore such a public heresy, I intend to strike as much fear into your parishioners as I am able—enough fear to silence them all. If we are careful, when the Holy Office finds out how I have proceeded, the most that can befall either one of us is a reprimand for stupidity. But we must do something. I will not risk imprisonment over a townful of overheated imaginations and loose tongues.”

  The old Franciscan sat rigid, his gaze lowered to the table-top, while a pair of kittens batted and chewed the ends of his rope belt.

  Pessoa said, “I’m not hungry, but still, thank you for saving me dinner.”

  He walked away fast, past the stables, down the hill to the granite fountain where a boy was watering a sorrel mare, through an olive grove and a gray-green stand of pungent sage.

  His steps slowed as he reached the church and the ruins of the old rectory—its roof fallen from an earthquake.

  Moors still farmed the Algarve when the church and rectory were built. Ventum est. Only a year after its construction, God found fault with the priest. Factum est.

  Because of superstition, the town had never rebuilt the rectory. Never cleared the rubble. Dictum est. Berenice once said that for God to make Himself heard to Pessoa, He would need to crush him under a slate roof, too.

  The sun lost its grip on slippery heaven and sank beneath the waves of the hills. The road went blue, the shadows violet. In the village warm lights appeared in windows.

  He passed an alley, and a woman singing a fado as she took her clothes off the line. He smelled dinner on a dozen tables: salt cod and pork and cabbage. His boots slapped a lonely rhythm on the cobbles. From the houses came snatches of conversation, the clack of plates, the clang of pots.

  He wound up a hill, down another, turned into a narrow, twisting path, slowing nearly to a halt at the laughter and raised voices issuing from the town’s inn. Should anyone have seen his attentiveness, his measured tread, they would have thought he was gathering evidence. It was fellowship he longed for.

  Up an alley, down another short street, then he stopped at a sign shaped like a coat that read: alfaiate. He sighed, turned at the iron railing, and took the four steps down to the door. At his knock the youngest girl answered, and curtsied.

  Although it was not obligatory, Pessoa took off his hat. “I wish to see your father,” he said.

  She led him to the back room, past bolts of Egyptian cotton and English linen and Alentejan wool. The family was in the quarters at the back of the shop. They were eating dinner. Magalhães put his knife down when Pessoa halted in the doorway, hat in hand.

  Magalhães’s wife stood. “José Filipe has been good. I swear it before God.”

  The little tailor was deaf as a post. His eyes were weak. Still, he must have known the dark figure who stood in the shadows, must have known why Pessoa had come. The man’s cheeks went pasty. “Some chicken?” His voice sounded hollow. “No, no use refusing—I insist.”

  Gently. Pessoa said, “José…”

  “Catarina!” Magalhães ordered, his gestures, his eyes, wild. The eldest girl stood. “Quickly, girl! Give Father Inquisitor the breast meat, some fava beans. A dish of that sweet rice—”

  Louder now. A harsh shout: “José Filipe Magalhães!”

  The wife grabbed Pessoa’s arm. “O, please! He would never—he knows he had but one chance. He—”

  P
essoa jerked free and tossed the words over his shoulder, “Search your heart.” He wasn’t quick enough. Before he could reach the front door, he heard Magalhães’s cry.

  DAY 3

  Afonso proclaimed that it was not proper to take a carriage to a quest, and so they brought Doçura to him. As the sun rose and the last of the wagons were packed, Jandira took him to the busy courtyard and lectured: he was not to go before the banner carriers, yet no one else was allowed to ride before the king. Too, no one must ride beside him except his flanking guards. There was much to remember.

  Jandira tucked Afonso’s peacock-blue cloak over his shoulder. She buffed a smudged spot out of his steel breastplate. She asked if he was comfortable.

  Since awakening hours before dawn, Afonso had been impatient to start his journey. Now satin and armor trapped the morning heat. Afonso’s boots pinched him. Sullen, he shrugged.

  She smoothed the feathers of the helmet he had tucked in his arm. “Remember: don’t smile overmuch,” she told him. “And don’t wave to the crowds so fiercely that you forget to watch where you are headed. Doçura is well trained, but still…”

  The little chestnut mare nuzzled Afonso. He gave her carrots that he had stolen from the kitchen. Doçura never mistook finger for tidbit; neither did she shy at sudden noises. Afonso rarely feared her.

  “I will be riding right behind you,” Jandira said. “And if you become uncomfortable, or forget what to do, look to me or to the captain.”

  The captain of the guard stepped forward and asked if he was ready; and Afonso said that he was. A footman boosted him into the saddle. Two grooms fit his boots snugly into the stirrups, and the procession started through the gates.

  The drummer’s beat was lost amid the clatter of hooves on stone. Afonso forgot what he had promised Jandira. He forgot the princely lessons that his father had taught him. Excitement caused him to stand up in the stirrups and peer eagerly about.