God's Fires

by Patricia Anthony

  Ahead he spied the silvered leaves of an olive tree, the dark of a laurel. Smells of wild carrot and red clover pursued him past a forested copse, then through an expanse of grass and past a fallen stone wall and a climbing rosebush, long overgrown and riotous with petals.

  His pulse jumped. For she was there, her back turned to him, her burro grazing nearby. She carried a basket on her arm, and she was gleaning herbs.

  Lifting his hem, he hurried, jumping thistles, his boots crushing lavender. He was at her as she turned, the basket falling, spilling foxglove and rose hips, calfsfoot and yarrow and nettles. He cupped her small face in his hands.

  “The king … It has all gone badly. The Holy Office will know.”

  “Manoel. You speak nonsense.”

  “Listen!” At the shout, those flawless cheeks paled in shock, that all too fragile neck reddened in anger. “The king is come, and there are strange creatures fallen.” How could Soares find wonder in the black orbs of those creatures, and not in these perfect eyes?

  “The king? I don’t…”

  “Go! Word will out. There is no way to stop it. Take your burro and flee. I brought you all my money.” He tried to give her his purse. She tried to push his hand away. Their gestures were too reckless, the ground uneven. They fell to their knees in the late-summer grass, holding each other like children.

  “Go, Berenice. Please go. I can save no one.”

  Bernardo was overseeing the packing of Monsignor’s feather bed when the gates to the monastery opened and Castelo Melhor and his men galloped through.

  The count jerked his white stallion to a halt by Bernardo. “Where is he?”

  Bernardo peered up through his lashes. The count was ill-shaven and slovenly dressed. His mustaches were shedding their fraudulent indulgence of hair. “Pax tecum,” he said.

  “Damn your pax tecums and shit-filled gloria tibis!” Horrified, the monks halted their packing. “Tell me that I do not spy the Marquis de Paredes’s men there lounging on the steps. Tell me!” The count’s voice rose to a hoarse scream. “The Marquis de Paredes! What betrayal is this? Tell your master to stop skulking and come out to answer!”

  The oak door flew open with a crash. Monsignor stood, scowling and fearsome, at the top of the steps, a gaggle of wide-eyed monks behind him. His voice rang through the courtyard. “Kneel when you come before this office. You rule only by the consent of God.”

  Bernardo shifted his gaze. The marquis’s two lawyers sat quietly at one end of the steps. The rest of his men, snickering and elbowing one another, sat at the other.

  The count flung himself from the saddle and dropped, as if momentarily tripped, to one knee. Monsignor hurled a benedicto. “What right have you to question my choice of familiar? The marquis is pledged to the Holy Office. Since he cannot wield a sword himself, he sends his men.”

  The count clasped hand to sword hilt and stalked closer. The monks behind Monsignor retreated. “You ride to Quintas. Tell me you do not.”

  An eloquent lift of the Monsignor’s eyebrow. “Of course I ride to Quintas. There is heresy there.”

  The count’s confusion broke surface and was as quickly drowned. “Heresy? No. I meant that the king was to ride to the Alentejo, yet he arrived in Quintas.”

  “Circuitous route.”

  Bernardo dipped his head farther to conceal a smile, but not so far that he failed to see the count blink.

  “And so…” the count began. “And so … as I come directly to inform you of what I have learned, I see you about to leave the city, surrounded by the armed men of my sworn enemy.”

  “The marquis always speaks well of you.” Monsignor strolled past the count and down the steps. He paused to inspect the wagons and their lashings.

  The count whirled and trotted down the stairs after him. “What heresy?”

  Monsignor pulled at a strap, turned to a nearby monk. “Make this tighter.”

  “What heresy?”

  The monk came forward and bent to repair his work.

  “The heresy that the earth moves about the sun.”

  The count bobbed his head to peer into Monsignor’s face. He flapped his arms. The intense frustration made him look like a goose. “And?”

  Monsignor studied the strap, pronounced it fit.

  “And?”

  “And the king’s soul is in deadly peril.”

  Monsignor walked to the next wagon, the count at his heels. “I don’t understand,” the count said.

  “The king agrees with the apostate Galileo Galilei.”

  “But the king is an idiot.”

  “An idiot, certainly. But heretic.”

  The count’s cheeks went pasty. “You would not.”

  Monsignor whirled. “Well, we cannot have that, can we? A belief that all natural order is out of place. And especially not in a king. It would be the same as Hobbes saying that the Church must bow to the state.” He put his hand to the count’s shoulder and firmly, if politely, moved him aside.

  “You know of a plot!”

  Monks scattered, robes aflutter, like chickens from a yard. Monsignor turned, his hand on the wagon.

  To Bernardo’s surprise, the count’s tone thickened with grief. “Dear God, please. Do not do this. Twenty years of war. Do not force us to take up arms against each other. Portugal will be a graveyard and all her women widows. For the love of Christ, man, consider. Pedro would align himself with Protestant England. Whatever you think of me, I cleave to Catholic France. I am the only hope you have.”

  Monsignor fixed him a glare. “God is our hope.”

  The fearsome light had not burned itself out, but Afonso could not wait. Despite its cruel glow, the acorn summoned.

  “Were they honorable,” Jandira said, “they would come out and greet their king.”

  Before him stretched a promise of wonders better than spyglasses, more grand than etched swords. Afonso raised his foot, put heel to the silver floor, and heard such a contented sigh from within that it made him go chilblained.

  “Sire.” The captain’s voice was thinned by worry. “Let me come with you.”

  Afonso shook his head. Marvels waited. Things so important that only a king deserved to see.

  His other foot. The floor was neither hard nor soft; the air not warm or cold. The acorn was a place of eerie in-betweens.

  He turned. It seemed that Jandira and the captain stood behind a gossamer wall.

  “Come out, sire,” Jandira said.

  He heard her well enough. But he heard, too, at his back, a breathed welcome.

  “Please, my sweetling. As you love me, do not go.”

  The corridor bid him come, and so he went where the honeycomb walls leaked light. He went, and was not as afraid as he expected.

  He looked back, but could no longer see Jandira, no longer see the warm yellow of day. What if there were demons at the end of his quest? What if Death was waiting?

  Yet that inviting whisper summoned. Ahead stood banks of jeweled lights: topaz and amethyst and ruby. A sapphire diadem gleamed in the wall.

  The whisper in his head birthed pictures clear enough to be words: Ready.

  One step. Another. He clutched Mario’s dagger so hard that the hilt nearly sprang from his sweated palm. His heart beat, fast as a sparrow’s. Another step and the walls fells away to vastness.

  The great silver room welcomed him with a pageantry of ideas. They came and went in his head—so many ideas that Afonso could not follow their flight, ideas so quick that he could never hope to catch them. He fell to his knees, overcome and trembling.

  Colors flared behind Afonso’s lids: pink happiness and orange expectancy. Speaking in colors, God asked, What is your command?

  He dared not command, and he had aught to request. It was enough to kneel in this place that smelled and felt of nothing, where colors were words—this spot of God that was like the soul itself: caged and finite from without; limitless within.

  God asked again, in patient blue, Your comm
and?

  Afonso cradled his dagger to his breast, holding it as the likeness of his father held the sword that adorned his tomb. “Please,” Afonso said. “If it is all right, Lord, I would like to see Heaven.”

  And from one beat of his heart to the next it was there—a starry void, velvet and wide and deep. He clutched the dagger and cried out, for the walls were gone, and the floor, and nothing was left but a fall into dark Heaven.

  At his wail, God returned the world. Afonso said a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria, the way he had been taught. Still, he could not stop shaking. He got to his feet in the huge room and bowed. “I need to go now, Lord, but thank you for showing me Heaven. And I’m sorry that it made me so afraid. Maybe I can see some of it again. Maybe one day I can even go there.”

  I would take you, but there is damage.

  Ah. Afonso’s soul. Of course he could not yet see Heaven. He nodded, resolute. “It cost many, many pages for even Don Quixote to become a hero. I promise I will try to do better.”

  The colors went dark, and Afonso became afraid. “Lord? I’ll try very hard, really. And every day I’ll come to see you,” he said, for it seemed to him that God sounded lonely, as he himself often was. Rulers understood such things.

  Afonso bowed one last time and then took his leave, letting the tunnel swallow him.

  From the room behind came sad violet, and a jumble of images so curious that Afonso knew he had misunderstood: Can you mend me? There is damage.

  “Did you see him, Bernardo? Our wicked and decadent boy?” Monsignor swayed with the wagon, his shoulder bumping his satin pillow, his expression that of a cat with cream. “Ha. Thinking to impress me because he discovers the king gone to Quintas. Even now he must wonder how much I have paid for my spies, and if he is getting value for his coin. Close that curtain.”

  Bernardo leaned forward and pulled the wagon’s curtain to, protecting Monsignor from an unwelcome invasion of sun. The confines of the carriage were bothersomely close. Outside, the clop of hooves was as steady and slow as a heartbeat. Wagons groaned, wheels squeaked. A narrow strip of radiance fell across Bernardo’s lap, turning the sooty wool of his habit to gold. He moved his fingers through the sunlight, feeling in his pulse the warmth of glory.

  A belch came from the opposite seat, and with it, “Take a letter.”

  Bernardo took up the writing plank and balanced it on his knees. He plucked a quill from the box and set the ink pot in its hole. He opened the red ledger. The carriage wheel struck a rut, jarring the ink pot, causing the ledger to slide. Bernardo caught it before it could fall and quickly opened to a loose page of foolscap.

  “ ‘To my esteemed, illustrious Count Castelo Melhor.’ Are you keeping up, Bernardo?”

  “Yes.” The carriage swayed around a corner. “Yes, thank you, Monsignor.”

  “So. ‘Illustrious, et cetera, as you have been anxious for the fate of our mutual friend, I may now write with glad’—wait, Bernardo. Let us say hopeful. Yes. ‘Glad and hopeful heart that, as I have now reached Quintas, I find the heresy perhaps not so grievous as feared. Yet ever in the command of God, I remain to shoulder the burden. Look for me not in Lisbon for at least a fortnight’… Maledictus. Strike that. ‘Look for me not until my task is done.’ If I am granted a vacation, let it be without limits. Good God, Bernardo. Don’t take that part down.”

  “No, Monsignor.” A rough patch of road made the ink pot dance in its holder.

  “So. ‘Look for me not until my task is done.’ I should add a small ‘to God’s pleasure,’ I think. ‘Pray for us all’ … No no no. Far too much melodrama. ‘May God be with you and’ … Wait. That could be misconstrued, should—salva me—the note fall into the marquis’s hands. And we must not get our boy’s hopes so high that he again turns headstrong. Better an insipid ‘Yours in Christ.’ Blah, blah, blah. Affix my signature. Tonight, Odivelas. Tomorrow, Quintas. As soon as we arrive there, charge one of the king’s men with the delivery. Do not allow the marquis’s soldiers, please, to see.”

  “Yes, Monsignor.” He scrawled Monsignor’s name, pressed the letters with a lamb’s-wool blotter. The carriage squeaked and rocked.

  “Is God not perfection, Bernardo?”

  Bernardo’s hand paused. He dared not look up. “Yes. Yes, Monsignor. He is.” Actions slow and deliberate, he folded the thick paper thrice.

  With a fingertip, Monsignor pulled the curtain back. In rushed a fanfare of sunlight, a smell of horses and dust. One soldier called to another, words overwhelmed by the ringing of harness and the low complaint of wood. “I tell you, this intervention is divine. What better to call us away at such a time than a little heresy.”

  From Monsignor’s direction there sounded a meditative fart: brief noise, and lingering brimstone. “Graveyards and widows apart, Bernardo, let the nobles squabble among themselves. I will not have them running hither and thither, pulling at the Holy Office like a brat at his mother’s skirts. The Church’s place should be over the state, not part of it.”

  Bernardo put the letter in the box. He repacked the ink and the blotter and the writing plank. When he looked up, Monsignor was still staring out the window, his ruddy face cheerful with sun.

  Bernardo asked, “Who will win, you think?”

  “Um?”

  “The rule of the country. Monsignor. Who will win?”

  “Who always wins.” Monsignor loosed the curtain and, disinterested, let it fall. “The Inquisition.”

  A miserable “no no no no no no.” Black-frocked Father de Melo sat forward, plucking at Afonso’s sleeve like a fat crow at a corpse. “Now, please. Think carefully, sire. We cannot have the Galileo heresy followed by something like this. I beg you to consider what you say. I doubt that you mean—”

  “God lives in the acorn.” Beside him pressed, with a rustle of silk and the smell of vanilla, the warmth and heft of a body. Jandira put a hand on his arm. Afonso said, “Well, He might live elsewhere, too. I didn’t ask Him.”

  Father held his head as if his brains threatened to leak from his ears. He whispered, “Misericordia,” then: “Please, Your Majesty. Let us not be swayed by the oddity of the moment. If you will stop to consider, you will realize that the earth remains forever stationary, and it is the sun which moves.”

  “But the cherubs told me not. Well, at least they showed me pretty pictures.”

  “If you will forgive me, I think perhaps not cherubs, sire.”

  “The soldiers gossip that the other priest said cherubs. I don’t understand, father. When you saw the star before, you fell to your knees. If it was holy then, why can’t it be holy now?”

  Westering sun transmuted a side of the tent into stripes of fire and brass. Wind sang in the rope supports. Pollen drifted past the open door as if Heaven were misting gold.

  “The star fell, Your Majesty. Do you not see? And—remember your lessons, now—what are the fallen angels?”

  “But God was in the acorn, and He spoke to me in colors.”

  Father de Melo covered his eyes. His plump body wrung itself into a knot. “Culpa Satanas est.” He peered out through spread fingers. “Sire. There are rules: no meetings with God without a proper intercessor, a saint preferably, an archangel, a pope, a priest, perhaps even Christ Himself—not to say that it is impossible, not at all. For Moses did, although one might consider the burning bush a sort of—”

  Jandira said, “Who are you, Father de Melo, to naysay a king?”

  “Goodness’ Not particularly naysay…”

  “I want the wine,” Afonso said. “You must give me the wine now. It is Sunday, and past midday. You always read me from the Bible and then give me the bread and the wine.”

  “Yes, well, we’ve had our little reading, haven’t we? And our homily, but I do not see how I can—”

  Afonso slapped his thigh, not so hard that it would hurt, but hard enough to get father’s attention. “It is important to receive the Corpus Christi every week. You taught me that. Every week without fail,
for otherwise I cannot be a good and blessed king.”

  Father de Melo scratched his jaw until he raised a pink welt. “Ah. You recall that on Fridays before the midday meal we have the king’s confession?”

  “This time greed and gluttony.’’ Afonso bounced in his chair, proud to remember. “I hoarded toys and ate too much chocolate. I lied to Castelo Melhor—”

  “Exactly so! Venial sins. And had you died with a venial sin on your soul, you would go to…?”

  “I know! Purgatory!”

  “Yes!” Father de Melo went limp with relief. “O, yes! Wonderful, Your Majesty! Purgatory! But now, what if you died in mortal sin?”

  Afonso furrowed his brow and thought. “I would go to Hell?”

  “Very, very good, sire! Yes, absolutely! You would go to Hell. Fire and brimstone and gnashing of teeth and wailing and no one to save you: Hell. And so, and so…” Father de Melo’s amiable face became, by fits and starts, utterly woeful. “I feel there may be a grievous sin here, Your Majesty. I’m a bit unsure what it is as yet. Perhaps hubris. Do you know ‘hubris,’ sire? No? The sin of Lucifer? Very like the sin of pride, only much, much greater. And then, too, we have the Galileo heresy, although we shall not speak of heresy, as that is not my field of expertise. A simple parish priest, really, going about my duties best I can. But definitely, sire, without any doubt, the two taken together form some sort of dreadful mortal sin.”

  From the storehouse of his mind, Afonso brought out the memory of those colors and ran them through his fingers like jewels. “It’s all right, father. Don’t be afraid for me. God is too nice to send me to Hell. We understood each other because He sounded lonely, the way I get—and indeed all kings get—sometimes.”

  Father de Melo flung his gaze aloft. “Let us pray…”

  “But I want the Corpus Christi.”

  “Let us pray and then we shall see. Another confession, perhaps. An Act of Contrit—”

  “You must give me the Corpus Christi.” Afonso had never gone a Sunday without. How could he sleep tonight? How could he rule on the morrow?