God's Fires

by Patricia Anthony

  “Stupid geese,” Teixeira muttered darkly, and took a drink. “There was no blood.”

  “Sorry?”

  “No blood, Father Inquisitor. And, from being present at the birth of animals, I know there must be blood. I looked. I made my wife show me chamber pots. I studied the laundry, the girl’s bed.” He gave a puh of disgust. “Women and their secrets.”

  Pessoa said, “You realize that this is a legal question, Duarte, not an inquisitorial one.”

  He shrugged.

  Pessoa held the goblet up to the light, saw bubbles trapped in the glass like little silent rooms.

  The maid brought a silver tray with neat ranks of cinnamon rolls, dishes of salted almonds, and a centerpiece of cold cod cakes. She left. Teixeira didn’t eat. Pessoa didn’t either. They filled their glasses again.

  “Duarte?” Pessoa asked. “Would you like me to call a constable for you?”

  The wind shifted. Rain splattered the granite sill. Outside, the world turned gray. Streams ran either side of the cobblestone alley. A cat huddled under the shelter of a washbasin.

  “She says it was angels.” Teixeira covered his face. His knuckles were scraped. His hand trembled. “I beat her and beat her, and still she said it was angels.”

  Pessoa put his goblet down and quietly left the room. Sen-hora Teixeira and the cook were waiting for him in the kitchen.

  “Where is Maria Elena?” he asked.

  The cook glared. Senhora Teixeira rose. “Who told you?”

  Pessoa said, “Please bring her here.”

  Cook stalked from the kitchen. He heard her heavy footsteps on the stair.

  “Who told you?” Senhora Teixeira asked.

  Pessoa took in a breath that smelled of old smoke and stale food. The shutters were half-open, and rain beat in, wetting the floor tiles.

  “May they burn in Hell for it,” she said.

  Slower footsteps came down. Pessoa turned, watched as the cook led Maria Elena inside. One eye was swollen shut. Her lip was split, her nose flattened.

  “Child,” he said, and put a hand out.

  The cook steered the girl away and set her safely out of his reach.

  “Has the herbalist seen to her?” he asked.

  “Your whore?” cook shot back.

  “Someone should see to her.”

  The two women stood, frowning.

  He sat at the kitchen table. Across from him sat the girl, her long hair down, her head lowered. A crust of black blood ringed one nostril.

  “She is still a virgin,” Senhora Teixeira said. “Put your fingers in her, Father Inquisitor, and see for yourself. Don’t gawk at me so! Go ahead! Or will you be like her own father and, given the evidence of your fingers, still not believe? Puh! How much proof do men want? Narrow-minded, all of you. And brat-spoiled. That is why the two Marys had only to see the rock rolled away, but the Apostles required a personal visit.”

  “Leave the room,” he said.

  Senhora Teixeira put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Maria Elena didn’t look up.

  Pessoa said firmly, “Leave the room.” He stared straight ahead until he heard the rustle of women’s clothing, quiet footsteps, breathy worried whispers, and the click of a closing door.

  The girl’s hands plucked at a discarded crust of bread. He rested his own atop hers. She froze. “They took it back,” she told him, “because I wasn’t worthy.”

  He stroked her fingers. Her hands were pudgy with childhood. “Maria…”

  “The baby was spirit, you know. Like them. Like the angels. I begged them to let me keep it, but I had sinned some way, father. And I don’t know how.”

  He let her cry, and listened to the patter of the rain. Her brown hair was matted with blood.

  When he tired of waiting, he asked, “Child? What did you do with the body?”

  “I will see it in heaven,” she said, “when I die.”

  He squeezed her hand. “Listen to me, Maria Elena. You lost your baby. Such things happen.”

  “I think I should die now. That is what I should do. I keep wondering if my baby is lonely without me.”

  She raised her head and stared out the window. It was hard to look at her—the single written page of her future; those illuminated wounds. “Say after me, child: De profundis clamo ad te, Domine, audi vocem meam. Fiant aures… Please. Please say it with me.”

  “Fiant aures,” she breathed.

  She followed him, whispering, into the ascension, through blessed-by-Thy-name, into God’s peace. And when they were finished, he arose and bent over her, gently cradling her head against him. He told her that everything would be all right.

  Then he went out and down the corridor, brushing past the cook. He told Senhora Teixeira to come. Before leaving the house, he paused in the front room, and speaking to Duarte Teixeira’s back, he told him that his daughter belonged to God and the Inquisition now, and Duarte was not to touch her.

  Outside, he and Senhora Teixeira stood together in the gray drizzle. “I don’t wish to hear talk of angels,” he said. “Find the body. If the skull is crushed, let it be a civil matter, not mine.”

  Rain wet her hair and ran down her face in rivulets. “But there is no body,” she said.

  The late afternoon was chill, and when the wind blew, he shivered. “The court might have mercy, Dona Teixeira, if she has gone insane. Easier to enter that as a civil plea than to come before the Holy Office with it.”

  “The angels took the baby.”

  “Dona Teixeira…”

  “They came in the house. I saw them.” She shivered, too. “Bright, they were. And they never looked at me. And they went into her room, and later I heard her screaming.”

  “Listen to me carefully, for I dare not warn you more than once: the state is allowed to arrest only her. The Holy Office could take the other children. Yourself. Your house. If she killed her baby, let her go, and save the rest. And after all, if worse comes to worse, which would be easier on the girl: to hang, or to be consigned to the flames?”

  The fine lace of her bodice had wilted in the damp. Her hair lay against her forehead in a cap of tiny ringlets. “Father Inquisitor, the proof lies a finger’s length inside her. Why is it so hard for you to believe?”

  His eyes fled hers. “You have two days,” he said. “Make certain her story is ready.”

  Afonso went to follow Pedro, but the captain of the guard dropped to his knees before him and said, “Forgive me, sire. We are but half a company, and ill armed. I am willing to die for your sake; but please, we must go to Lisbon and gather more soldiers. If we do not, I cannot protect you from this terrible danger.”

  “Danger? But it is only my brother, and if there are English, my sister. I would show them my quest, and have them play games with me, and we could tilt at windmills.”

  Jandira said, “The weather! The weather is such a danger, is it not, captain?”

  The captain knit his brows.

  “I will speak for you, captain, if you are too timid to make such a request of your king. You fear gripe—do you not?—if your troops get wet in the rain. So, as the day is damp, the troops should huddle by their fires. We should not travel—neither to see Pedro, nor to return home, else many soldiers get fevered, and some die, and what would you and the king tell their mothers? Should not captains and kings make everything right?”

  Somewhere by the sea his brother and sister were waiting. Afonso thought that if he rode far and fast enough, he could catch up with his mother and his father, too, and in that distant, happy land his father would be king again, a king over peace this time, rather than war. And Afonso could put the scepter down.

  He peered longingly down the western road that led to the sea.

  “Sweetling.” Jandira lay her warm hand atop his own. “Can you cure the sick? Can you raise the dead?”

  Afonso shook his head.

  “Well, then.” Jandira motioned for the captain to rise. “The captain will see to the soldiers’ co
mfort, for if you cannot do these things, we must pitch our tents and stay.”

  During indigo dusk when the rain had blown clear and the sky was full of stars and tattered clouds, Pessoa went to Berenice. Her house smelled of straw and baking bread, of eye-watering unguents and bitter teas. She was at the hearth, where a flat loaf toasted on a slate, and an iron pot gave off an acrid, smoky reek. Her sleeves were rolled to her elbows. She was kneading something that was a noxious shade of green. He put his hat on her table, sat, and pulled his boots off, wondering: Did medicine ever fall into cook pot? Food into curative?

  He was undoing his sash when she at last looked up, snorted, and looked away.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You make it too obvious that your pau needed a visit.”

  He pulled the cassock over his head and threw it onto a bench. In his gray, frayed undershirt he sat, rubbing the back of his neck. His muscles ached, not as if he had worked, but as if he was fevered. “I’m tired, Berenice. And this is the only place I can come,” he told her, “where I needn’t be a priest.”

  He watched the play of muscles in her slender forearms, the strength of her delicate hands. “Will you not greet me?” he asked.

  She sat up, brushing her hair back from her forehead with a wrist. “Please, yes. Let me stop what I am doing, and spread my legs.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  She went back to her labors. The glow of the hearth fire ruddied her cheekbones, shadowed her lashes. Each time he visited, he took memory away with him. Riding alone on the empty road, he would close his eyes, pluck a picture of her from his mind, and study it.

  “I would not fault you, but did you give the Teixeira girl something to abort her baby?”

  Her hands paused. She raised her head. The look in her eye frightened him, in the same way that a small, enraged dog would give him pause.

  “She had no baby,” Berenice said.

  “I saw myself—”

  “Duarte Teixeira called me to the house when the girl began to show. I felt inside her. She was intact.”

  Without his cassock, her house was cold. He made his way from the damp shadows and crept to the fire. He sat near her on the packed earth-and-stone floor. Berenice was kneading again.

  “There is something more,” he said. “I see it in your face.”

  A nod. “Her breasts were full. Her nipples darkened. And the colors told me there was life in her, yet not a life. I didn’t know what to think.”

  “O Berenice. O please. Not angels. I am sick to death of angels.”

  She sat back on her heels and wiped her hands on her apron. Apparently the kneading was over. With her fingertips, she nudged the flat bread from the slate shelf onto a plate. “Will you dine with me?”

  A single loaf. A bite of hard cheese on the table. Near that, two small roasted potatoes and a dish of some boiled wild greens. “No. But I’ll bring you food on the morrow. The townsfolk overindulge—”

  She got up, balancing the plate. “I would rather feel you in me, Manoel, than hear lies about your damned Christian mercy.”

  As she strode past he sighed. From behind him came an angry rattle of pottery. In the next room, her burro snorted and stamped restlessly in his straw.

  “Commerce, then?” he asked. “Certainly you Jews understand money. Will you go there if I pay you? To the Teixeira house?”

  He heard one loud clack, then silence.

  “Bring your poultices and salves and needle and thread, Berenice. She has been beaten.”

  “Her father?”

  “Yes.”

  “And does she bleed between her legs?”

  “Libera me! As if I would look.” He spun around.

  She was chuckling. “Did you even ask?”

  “It was not… Teixeira said sheets and chamber pots. Who knows? I suppose.”

  “Suppose?”

  “He said no blood.”

  There. That impish smile. That is what he best liked to remember. “I hardly credit it, Manoel. You blush.”

  His gaze recoiled from hers. “Her own mother told me to put my fingers in her, Berenice. As if she were a sheep, and not a girl who … if I were of an age, I mean… And to be absolutely truthful, spirit ever wars with flesh … such as Marta Castanheda. At least when, salva me, she keeps her mouth shut. And do people not realize priests harbor desires? There she was, the coitadinha, all bruised; and yet here is the mother’s offer. To my great shame, part of me—”

  She fell on him so hard, she knocked him down. He might have thought her irate, but for the laughter. Her hand was up his undershirt in a way he very much liked.

  He rolled atop her and pulled her skirts up. His own urgency surprised him. He thrust hard, harder. He put into her all of his day, so that at the end he cried aloud, never minding that the neighbors down the hill might hear. And in the lull after, he found that his ovos ached, and that he was too spent to move.

  She stroked his face. Her fingers smelled clean and salve-pungent. Her breath held the odor of baked bread. He rested his head on her shoulder.

  She grunted and nudged him off her. As they so often did, they had lain exactly where lust had seized them, her back to the flagstone floor. He thought that it must be in pleasure’s nature, to bruise.

  Before she got up, he grabbed her wrist and kissed it. Then she returned to her table and her meal. He crawled to her cot and settled her blanket about him.

  “There is an herb for abortion, is there not?” he asked.

  She raised her head.

  “Well? Isn’t there? Deo gratias, Berenice. I do not accuse, I merely ask.”

  “Yes,” she said, and went back to eating.

  “To me, she looked at least a month from term. You think? Perhaps someone else gave it to her. Does it work? Have you ever used the herb to abort someone?”

  She broke off a piece of bread and dipped it in the boiled greens. “Only myself,” she said.

  For a moment his lips still wore the same puzzled smile, and the blanket that smelled of her felt safe, and her small house still seemed so familiar. Then his smile dropped and his chest emptied. Too late. Had he known… but still, would he have wept for his children?

  “No, Manoel,” she said softly. “Not yours.”

  That confession made him want to get up and pull on his boots.

  “As much as we’ve lain together, your seed has never taken.”

  “Well.” A short word. But by the end of it, his breath had failed. He lunged to his feet pulled on his cassock, fumbled with the sash.

  “It was when I was raped,” she said.

  His fingers halted.

  “I was sick, you remember. And afterward, I was weak. It was hard for me to walk to the well, and impossible nearly to walk back. I liked to go in the evening time, when no one else was there, so I would not meet up with anyone who was afraid to look at me.”

  Beyond the drawn curtain came the swish of hooves in straw and the burro’s contented whuffle.

  “He came from the bushes and threw a sack over my head, and pushed me down. It happened five times, five evenings. It got so that I thought it better to die of thirst. He hurt me, because from behind that way… and not being willing… and he forced. But he never hit me, really. And it was over very soon. Probably he was terrified someone would see. And when I was stronger, he stopped.”

  From the burro came a long, sleepy sigh.

  “Who?” She was eating again. His voice rose. “Damn you, who?”

  Her eyes snapped to his.

  “I swear I will bring the power of the Holy Office down on him, I’ll—”

  “Ask Luis Soares.”

  Breath exploded from him in a bark of laughter. “Luis? And you did not have the strength to push him off? That’s doubtful. He is an old man. Even sick… And damn you! What I have said about priests, things I am ashamed to tell my confessor. Between myself and God, Berenice. Me. But not Luis!”

  “It is a mortal sin.”

&nbs
p; “I know that. Who are you, a Jew, to—”

  “Fornication and adultery. Not rape. Never rape. Your church teaches that it is not the hurt and the shame which are wrong, but only the putting in. Without marriage, always a sin—for whatever reason. Do you confess me when you return to Mafra, Manoel? Do you promise that you will never lie with me again? Do you say Pater Nosters and Ave Marias? Do you?”

  And he understood. “O,” he said.

  Her face was crimson from more than firelight. “Do you skip meals and wear a hairshirt and scourge yourself? Do you weep and beg forgiveness for what your pau has done?”

  His mouth moved long before he had the strength to speak. “Luis heard the man’s confession.”

  She rose, clapping her knife to the table. “Get out.” She brought his hat to him, shoving. He stumbled. “Get out!”

  “Yes. Perhaps tomorrow?”

  Slapping him savagely, striking anyplace her little hands could reach—face, shoulders, upflung arms—she drove him out the door and slammed it.

  He stood there in the dark, dazed, unsure whether to be ashamed or indignant. When he was certain she would not open the door again, he walked off, tripping over stones and bushes, cursing in whispers as he went. He was halfway up the third hill when he noticed that the grass before him wore an eerie sheen, and that the foliage around him was casting shadows. The back of his neck prickled. His steps faltered. He turned in the direction of the light.

  Brighter than the moon, larger than the morning star, luminous and eerily silent, it was the greatest glory in the heavens: God’s white, pure fire. Pessoa sucked in a breath and told himself that the bright thing was merely tired vision, his own imagination, a fever of the brain. He rubbed his eyes. The star did not vanish.

  A lance of green shot out, striking not two meters away. The hilltop meadow dawned a bright emerald morning. Pessoa howled and fell to his knees, babbling an Act of Contrition.

  Then it was over. God’s eye winked closed. Shaken, breathing in hard, fast whoops, Pessoa got up and looked around. There was no evidence left to show the star had ever been.

  Ah. That was strange. But no sense panicking.

  When his legs were steady, he crept to where the lance had struck. He saw grass, stones, a stand of blossoming meadowsweet. No proof of a dramatic manifestation. And as to his earlier fight with Berenice, well, the Lord—if in truth He existed—knew fully well that Pessoa confessed her. And even though Pessoa could not in good faith promise to stop, he knew his sin was not so grievous that it merited a fiery star and the accusing finger of God.