God's Fires

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God's Fires Page 13

by Patricia Anthony


  Father de Melo’s hands fluttered like startled birds. “Would you pray with me, sire? Please? O please? Clasp your hands, yes, clasp them thus. Say after me: Veni, sanctificator, omnipotens, aeterne Deus…”

  Afonso bolted up, overturning his chair. His heart pounded as if it would escape his chest. If he could not have the Corpus Christi, he would be no king.

  Father de Melo recoiled, flailing and gasping. He caught himself before his chair toppled, and scrambled to his feet.

  “Say Corpus Christi!”

  At Afonso’s shout, three guards rushed in, swords drawn. They cast about for danger, found none.

  “I order you!” Afonso said.

  Father de Melo clutched the beads he wore at his side. His voice shook so, it was difficult to understand him. “O God help me, sire. For I cannot.”

  It was a difficult subject to broach. Pessoa waited until day I was done and they both had sat down to dinner and the blessing said. He watched Soares spear a slice of roast pork.

  “Priests are not safe from the Inquisition, Luis.”

  Soares looked over the dancing candle at him.

  “Even high-ranking clerics have been jailed, and worse. Yet here I am, faced with the arrival of the king, and you on your knees weeping and talking of cherubs. There were probably ten or more witnesses to your self-indulgent heresy.”

  The old Franciscan clapped his spoon to the table. “Then will you arrest me?”

  “No, damn you. And how could you ask me such a question? You know that I care not whether you see God in those imps’ eyes, or Vasco da Gama, or João de Avis, or even Lucifer himself, just please, please—can you not be more circumspect about it? You have a responsibility to your flock.”

  Soares shoveled food into his mouth and spoke furiously around it. “Quite right.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I meant that you are absolutely right, Manoel: you do not care, neither for your mission nor for faith. If you seek sin, look to the mote in thine own eye.”

  “Maledictus!” Pessoa shoved his plate away. Gravy slopped, fava beans spilled. “Who are you to judge me? You, who gave the Teixeira girl the sacrament? I warrant, if she confessed to murder, you should encourage her to go to the constables with it. If she did not—”

  “Maria Elena is of my flock, and her confessions are none of your affair.” He gestured with his spoon. Flecks of potato flew. “Besides, who are you to judge anyone? For I assume you beg forgiveness for your fornication, but I do not see how you can sincerely vow to sin with her no more.”

  Pessoa’s cheeks went hot. “I need not justify myself to you. And all heresy is my affair. I tell you, Luis, it is difficult enough to contain this outbreak of lunacy. I need help, not maudlin superstition!”

  A flurry of knocking at the door interrupted the argument. Soares threw his knife down with a clatter, then rose and went to answer.

  A priest, plump and mild-expressioned as a pigeon, stood in the twilight. He was Augustinian by dress, and by manner, overwrought. He wrung his pale hands. “Father Inquisitor?” he asked Soares.

  Soares pointed to the table. Pessoa said, “I am inquisitor for this district.”

  “O, dear! And here I bother you at dinner… .”

  Soares murmured politely, “Not at all.”

  “Well, then. Dominus tecum.” The little Augustinian shifted his weight, scratched his ear, cleared his throat. “My name is Joachim de Melo, and for the past four years … No! Five! Yes, five years last autumn—O, forgive me. I digress. What I am trying to say is that I am the king’s confessor.”

  “Yes?”

  “Manoel, where are your manners?” Soares said. “Come in, Father de Melo. Et con spiritu tuo. Sit yourself. Have some dinner. I am Luis Soares. This is Manoel Pessoa.”

  The Augustinian came in timidly, head bobbing, eyes darting as if looking for assassins in the corners. “Bless you, but I’ve already eaten. Attached to the king’s service, and the royal cooks feed me until I groan for mercy.”

  “Wine, then?” Soares asked.

  A haunted flicker in his eyes. After a panicked hesitation, he said, “O! O, I see! O yes, thank you. I’ll have a drop.” The Augustinian clapped palm to breast and collapsed onto the bench next to Pessoa. Straightaway he drank the cup Soares offered and began downing another.

  “Is this concerning the Galileo heresy?” Pessoa asked.

  De Melo bobbled his cup. Wine sloshed, ran the joints of the table like royal purple blood.

  Pessoa cast a forgiving, if condescending smile toward Soares. He would demonstrate what compassion was. “Have no fear, Father de Melo. If you tell me that the king recanted, that is enough. He need not recant personally to me. The king is certainly young, and thus outspoken—and, if you will permit me—seems to be of a somewhat simple mind. No. The inquiry will end in this room, and I will be glad to consider that the ill-conceived statement was never made.”

  Hand trembling, de Melo filled another cup. He drank, and searched Soares’s face. “It was gossiped that… and I do hate to ask you so directly, but—cherubim?”

  After a glare in Pessoa’s direction, Soares shot to his feet and, with a furious busy work clatter, gathered his empty plate, Pessoa’s full one.

  “O, dear,” de Melo murmured. “I am being too forward. I would not ask at all, Father Soares, but believe me the answer is very… well, I should say, vital.”

  Crimson fury climbed Soares’s neck. Keeping his head lowered, he turned and took the plates to the soaking tub.

  “Please.” De Melo stared beseechingly at the old priest’s back. “Are these creatures messengers from God?”

  “No,” Pessoa said.

  With thumb and forefinger, de Melo massaged his eyes. “I find myself in a muddle, then. But there is no other remedy. I must pass the responsibility of the king’s soul to you, Father Inquisitor. There is more heresy than what at first it seemed, for His Majesty has entered the fallen acorn and it seems—well, at least he seems to believe—that God spoke to him there.”

  Afonso lay curled in his bed, gloomy with fear.

  When the sun set, Jandira came and bathed his hands and face with rosewater. She sang a song that had no words. With her fingertips she brushed the hair from his forehead. She told him, as his mother often had, that he was a good boy.

  “Please, Jandira. I don’t want to go to Hell.”

  She shushed him and stroked his face. “No, my liege.”

  “God is in the acorn, and He spoke to me.”

  “I know.”

  “And I cannot help it if the cherubs told me things. I don’t understand how Father de Melo can know that they didn’t, if he was not there talking to the cherubs, too. Tell me truly, Jandira. Will I go to Hell for making Father de Melo so angry?”

  “No, sire. For kings are never wrong.”

  But Afonso was no king. Kings were splendid and sat astride their horses like warriors. Kings were always certain of things. They busied themselves with grave decisions and affairs of state. Afonso had not known his father well, yet he was sure that his father was a real king. He remembered him clearly, and in all acorn colors: proud purple, gold, and regal blue.

  “You shiver. Let me hold you as I used to do.”

  He made a place for her. She wrapped her arms about him, and they lay in the smell of roses, her heat against his back.

  He put his palm to her. Strange, but just as he had thought: under the extravagance of robes her belly was swollen. He laughed. “Jandira! You get fat.”

  She kissed the nape of his neck. “No, sire. I ate a melon seed with milk, and now it grows inside me.”

  Fear cut him like a knife, a fear sharper than Hell’s bludgeon. “You will not die?”

  “Shhh. No. I bear a child.”

  “O.”

  He drowsed and thought of nursing babes with round melon heads and black seeds for eyes—eyes that told him stories. And when Jandira’s body made him think of things that he should no
t, he told her to get down. When she went, she left his back sweated, his pau a little achy. He slipped his hand under the covers, and until he fell asleep, he held himself the way a girl would hold a favored doll.

  Pessoa saw the gap of light around her door, so had time to prepare for dismay. He put his hand to the rusting lock, lost his courage, and knocked instead.

  Footsteps inside. So she was not gone yet. Not safe. Berenice opened to him, pleasure and surprise lighting her face, then dread shadowing it.

  “No,” he said, offended. “I have not come to arrest you, no.”

  She stepped aside to let him in. The room was as it always was: nothing disturbed, nothing packed. A poor dinner sat on the table, his full purse beside it.

  He breathed in the strawflower scent of her hair, the house’s smells of thyme and rosemary. His concern for her was as potent as lust.

  He turned away from her sight, her smell, so that words could come. “Listen to me carefully, Berenice. Just tonight I am told that the king is embroiled in a grievous heresy. Soon I will be caught between the crown and the Holy Office. I haven’t the luxury of worrying for anyone else’s sake. Go.” And then Castanheda’s words: “Take the money.”

  “No use.”

  He seized her slender arm hard enough to bruise. “Take the money! There is nothing for you here! Nothing but me, and I can offer you naught but a blessing. Get out. Go to Palestine. Be among your own people—”

  “Jews?” She pulled free. “I am no Jew!”

  At the sound of her rage, her burro became unsettled and trampled his straw.

  “I don’t know how to be Jew.” She rubbed her arm where he had grasped her. “How do Jews act? How do they talk? What are their holy days, the prayers?”

  “Surely you remember a little some—”

  “I remember a book that was not the Bible. I remember that my father sometimes wore a tasseled stole. I remember that we hid things when visitors came.” She gave a dry laugh. “Do you think that enough?”

  She left him for the solitary place she had set at her table, and pushed her plate away.

  He said to her back, “You could learn.”

  Facing the hearth flames, she said, “Find a Jew in all the kingdom, then. Have them teach me.”

  The fire smoked, pine-fragrant. Burning resin sizzled.

  “I know all about Palestine. Manoel,” she said, her tone as indifferent as a draft. “For when I was six, my parents went there. They left, and apprenticed me to a woman who spoke not a word but to tutor or chide. A woman who did not smile. And now that she is dead, I wonder if she mourned her Jewishness and grieved for being made Christian—if it was your church that turned her spirit wormwood. My Jewishness meant nothing to me, except that it took my parents away—that being Jew was more important to them than I was. I spent my whole childhood waiting for them to come back.”

  He came up behind her, near enough to touch that dark silken fall of hair. His fingers ached for it. “Anyplace, then. Another town, another name. Lose yourself in the kingdom. Come back in a few years when it is safe.”

  “Too many burnt,” she said. “Portugal will never be safe.”

  Her hopelessness sparked in him a tinderbox of rage. “You think to control me, Berenice. But you will not. I tell you I will let myself be arrested before—”

  “Manoel. You don’t know me.”

  “Know you? I see through you like water. You are lonely. You feel you have no one, and here am I to grasp at, perhaps. And yet, sadly, I am forsworn. Now you think to revenge yourself—”

  She lunged up from the bench. Prudent, he stepped back.

  “So I am lonely? What but that useless meat between your legs ever told you that I needed you?”

  “Well?” His rage foundered. “Well? Why else would you stay except to punish me by having me jail you? Else you cling to me, and cannot let go. You must learn to live for yourself, Berenice, not me.”

  She snatched up the purse and shoved it into his cassock pocket. Her touch was a dizzy surprise, like the taste of brandy. He caught her in his arms. She pushed him away.

  Her words cut. “I do not stay for your sake. I would not risk myself for you.” Then more words, ones that gouged to the bone. “My man of light bids me stay.”

  “Well.” A log in the hearth charred through and fell in an avalanche of burnished cinders. “So. You would stay and die for a fantasy. Well. How excellent.”

  She walked away and poked at the flames. Although the room was warm, she took her shawl from a peg and wrapped herself in it, an embrace more reliable than his.

  He sighed. “Berenice, don’t give yourself up to delusion. I love you, you know that. I am sure that your parents loved you, too. They must have fled in mortal fear. And I’m sure they would have come back, had they been able. They most probably died.”

  Her shoulders heaved. He went to comfort her, but before he could get there, she turned, expression merry. “God bless, Manoel!” She laughed. “If I fall ill, do me the favor of not offering consolation.”

  With an angry wave of his arms, he retreated. “And … what? Better to heed a fantasy than sense? Why not drink wine and hyssop, then? Be all besotted by vision. Holy Mary! Are you blind? Can you not see that we attract the notice of the Holy Office? The wrath of the Inquisition will soon strike here, and careful as I try to be, innocents will fall. And you. You do not dare to be brought before a tribunal. If you are asked, you do not know your catechism. You know nothing of sacraments or blessings. Why, I doubt your mouth has ever tasted the Host.”

  She snickered and held her sides.

  “Stop laughing! I have seen such Inquisitions before. When it starts, Berenice, all of Quintas will accuse each other. They tolerate you, and only because of your healings. But I warrant that, as soon as it begins, you will be brought to answer accusations, and me sitting in judgment at the bench.”

  Watery-eyed from hilarity, she slapped his chest. “I absolve you.”

  “Stop!” He pulled her to him, and despite her struggles, he would not let her go. “You cannot do this to me.” His fury changed, and he was kissing her, and she was no longer struggling. Then their mouths met, and her fingers were on his cassock buttons, and his hands were lifting her blouse.

  She led him to her pallet. She put a blanket around them, and they lay together on her sweet woodruff-scented straw.

  “Berenice,” he whispered. “Berenice. Do not do this to me.”

  She put her fingers to his lips.

  “Please,” he said. “I fear that you will die, and I will not know what to do.”

  Her hand slid down face and chest, down stomach, down belly. The world shrank to the size of the room, shrank further until it was so small that she held it in her arms, then between her legs. And when they were coupled, and he had long ceased caring about resolutions, he heard her say, “Don’t be afraid for my sake, Manoel. Dying was the best tenderness I’ve known.”

  DAY 6

  It was not a thing which could be made easier by accustomation; nor a thing any officiousness could assuage. The armed guards made Pessoa no braver, lent him no company, made him no more secure. During his life, on how many stoops had he waited? On how many doors had he knocked?

  Three magisterial raps of his knuckles and the door flew open. Senhora Teixeira stood there, the scowling cook behind.

  Pessoa stared at a spot on Senhora Teixeira’s forehead. “I come for Maria Elena.” He knew without looking that her eyes would be fixed on the guards. He knew what expression her face would wear.

  A chill breeze, herald of autumn, trumpeted through a dying jasmine’s lattice. From a geranium, ruby petals dropped like spatters of blood.

  She said, “You are a coward, Manoel Pessoa. Five armed guards and a priest to take a small wounded girl.”

  The wind blew, flapping the hem of his cassock. It harried a lock of gray hair free from her bun.

  She craned her neck to look past him. “Cândido Torres! I see you there! Don’
t turn your face away. Are you so afraid of my daughter that you need four field-workers with swords to arrest her? Will you clap her in chains? For I warn you, she may turn and slay you all.”

  Pessoa heard a restless shuffling of feet behind him, and a nervous cough.

  “Call out Maria Elena,” Pessoa said.

  Senhora Teixeira came at him so impetuously that only shock caused Pessoa to stand rooted, his nervous sweat turned to ice.

  “Why my daughter, Manoel Inquisitor? Why not all of us? You know the names of those who have seen the signs, who have talked to the Virgin, who have slept with angels. Why, I myself saw them.”

  Cook clamped a warning hand on her arm.

  “I would speak with Duarte,” Pessoa said. “Go fetch me Duarte.”

  Eye to eye now, and Pessoa dared not waver. As she spoke she misted him with spittle. “Fetch him yourself, priest. See if you can wake him, befuddled as he is by drink. You will find him snoring hard by the hearth. If God is sweet, he will blow an ember onto his clothing. That would cure one affliction. I must be patient, I suppose, to see what God will make of you.”

  Pessoa looked to the cook. Her face was set; she held a wooden spoon like a club.

  “Angels,” Senhora Teixeira said. They were so close now that he could smell the juniper she wore in her pockets to banish the gripe. He could smell the sharp, rank scent of her; the fennel and onion on her breath. “Angels came into the house. And bright and terrible they were.”

  What deadly game did she play? “Dona Teixeira. I ask you: where is Maria Elena, your daughter?”

  She leaned forward as if she meant to kiss him. “Maria Elena is within.” Hot breath stirred the hair near his ear. “For men are like the angels. When the angels had their way with her, they left her downcast and ruined.”

  Cheek to dank cheek, her sweat-smell ascending like a vapor. He bent to her and whispered, “You have other children. Think what you do.”

  She stepped back. Her voice was loud. “I think more of my daughter than any man ever thought of woman. I vow before you and God and these witnesses that hers was a virgin conception, her womb quickened by angels. Will you not take me, too?”

 

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