God's Fires

by Patricia Anthony

  Tadeo scripted the last of it and put down the quill. A pall had fallen. Rain peppered the window and shutters banged.

  Solemn now, Tadeo said, “Yes. Good to remind him that you, too, are Jesuit. That might give us an edge.”

  Soares asked, “How do you deliver it?”

  “King’s messenger,” Tadeo said.

  Pessoa held up a hand. “No. Let us use our own inquisitorial guards.”

  “But how?’’ asked the seculars, looking at each other. “And under whose authority? They will not be guided by us. And certainly not by you.”

  Pessoa leaned across the table so urgently that he nearly fell down atop it. “The monsignor’s own secretary.”

  “Excellent,” Tadeo whispered.

  Emílio said, “He is an odd, quiet boy. Think you we can trust him?”

  Pessoa said, “Yes, yes. Absolutely. For he believes in the angels. Does he not, Luis?”

  Soares was staring morosely at the fire. He shook his head. “How will it get to Lisbon?”

  “Inquisitorial guard,” Tadeo said, patience overtaxed.

  “But how?” Luis asked. “Are you all so giddy with brandy that you fail to notice the rain? Do you? And do you not realize that the roads are certainly out?”

  The room seemed suddenly darker, and bitter cold.

  “O, then…” The seculars looked at each other.

  How dare he? He who had never loved her. Pessoa said, “It will get through. The message will get through, and word sent back, and there is plenty of time to stop this. Two days, why, that is time enough.” Into Soares’s skeptical frown and the seculars’ uncertainty he shouted, smacking the flat of his hand to the tabletop. “Damn your eyes! Did you not hear me? The message will get through!”

  Bernardo returned to his room to find the dove weeping. “I want pai,” he said.

  Bernardo knelt before him, touching his face. “Your Heavenly Father is coming. Shhh. Do you not hear him? He chases all the demons out of the Abyss. I have brought you an orange.”

  The boy wiped his face with his sleeve. “I want pai.”

  “Soon.” There, in the dove’s warmth, a tender protectiveness bathed him. Bernardo pictured gathering the boy in his arms and felt demon Desire stir.

  “I want pai,” the dove said.

  Bernardo told him, “Sleep. Perhaps he will come.”

  Then he told him that it was time for bed, and that he must lay his clothes aside for the morrow. He dared not lift hand to help, but watched the milk-pale skin be exposed, watched thighs quiver in the chill of the room, saw round buttocks blush in the heat of the hearth fire. His hands ached to hold, his chest, all of a seclusion, pained him.

  “Wrap this blanket about yourself and crawl into bed, Rodrigo. Might I join you? For the night is loud and dark, and the day has been so strange that I find myself frightened of shadows.”

  The dove told him that he might, and so Bernardo went into the dark of the corner and removed his robes and his undershirt. Naked, he wrapped himself in a blanket. He lay down behind the dove, whose face was to the hearth. He put his arm about him and asked if he was warm.

  Bernardo was warm all through himself, and he considered the angels, for the cherubs also had been led into temptation. How they, too, must have fought. Bernardo rested his head against the dove’s and drank in his clean boy-smell.

  “Are you still scared?” the dove asked.

  Cupped together, wool between them, boy-scent in his nostrils, he said, “Not so much now.”

  He listened to the boy’s breathing. “Can’t pai come home? It’s cold in the jail. It’s lonely, because the angels won’t talk.”

  “Still, Rodrigo. What a glory to be among angels.”

  “Not if they don’t talk,” the boy said.

  Bernardo felt the pressure of leg against leg. He tested his resolve by slipping a hand under the dove’s blanket and stroking the velvet skin of that arm.

  The boy shrugged his shoulder. “Can’t we go see pai?’

  “Shhh.” Down velvet arm to silken waist. Bernardo shivered and knew he dared go no farther.

  “I want to go see pai.”

  His fingers ventured into dangerous and intimate warmth, down the swell of that small belly. “Tomorrow.”

  “I want to see him now. Please, father? Can’t we see him now?”

  He stroked that satin chest. “He is sleeping. As all good children should sleep.”

  The boy’s body twitched—crying again. Bernardo stroked the length of his leg to give comfort.

  “Please, father. Can’t I visit pai now?”

  He kissed the nape of the dove’s neck. “We will hold each other,” he told him. “For I must do battle against the demon if your pai is to be freed. Can you understand?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Then lie still, for I will not hurt you. Do not move, for if you move I may forfeit mastery over myself, and the demon win, and your pai lost, and we do not want that to happen.”

  A small “No.”

  Bernardo pulled the blankets from between them and put a single blanket over them both. When flesh met warm virgin flesh, it stole his breath, nearly set the demon loose and howling. Bernardo buried his face in the boy’s hair.

  Into him poured such fellowship that wondered how he had lived so much of life in monks’ cells, in lonely cots, in divine isolation. This was the answer, this being owned. For the dove owned him, down to the marrow.

  God lifted the veil and showed him the other side of lust. Bernardo shuddered and held the boy tight. He opened his eyes a slit and saw that he had won: how in the reflected hearth fire, the room raged with orange brilliance, and black carnal imps danced death agonies between.

  A disturbance started up at the door. Bernardo blinked, but was so blinded by visions of defeated Hell that he could not see its cause. Then came a shout of “God!” in Father Manoel’s voice and the dove was snatched from out his arms.

  Cold at the loss, Bernardo sat up. The door was open. How had that happened? The two seculars were standing agape.

  The dove was weeping, and his sweet voice was high with panic. “The father there touched me, and I didn’t like it, but he wouldn’t stop. I said I wanted to go see pai, and he told me to lie still and said if I let him, he might let pai go.”

  Father Manoel wrapped a blanket about the dove. He understood, did he not? Bernardo expected no discernment in the seculars, but surely, surely Father Manoel could see.

  Salus mea, Jesu. O, but the revulsion in his face.

  Pessoa was cold and sober by the time he brought the boy back to the rectory. Soares was at the table, finishing the last of the brandy. As they entered, Soares downed his troubles as easily as he put down his cup. He held wide his arm. “O Rodrigo. Don’t cry. What is it?”

  The boy flew to that shelter.

  Pessoa put down the boy’s bag of clothes. “I found him together in bed with Monsignor’s secretary. Bernardo is stranger than we thought.” Then he held up a hand. “Not hurt.”

  Soares led the boy around to the hearth fire and sat him on a bench. He rummaged around in the bookcase, came up with an enameled box, and brought it over. The box was full of chocolates.

  “You are a squirrel, Luis.”

  The comment won Pessoa a mischievous smile, then a more serious “And the message?”

  “Emílio has some small acquaintance with the king’s captain of the guard. He took a horse and rode out to the camp. He assures me that the man will help.”

  Rodrigo put a chocolate into his mouth and chewed listlessly. The boy was so exhausted that he looked dazed.

  “And the secretary?” Soares asked.

  “Jailed in the inquisitorial prison for now. Tomorrow to be handed over to the state. Gomes himself came downstairs, all agitated, and Bernardo weeping and trying to explain. But how to justify such as that? He will be hanged, I’m sure. Rodrigo! Time for bed. I’ve made the cot for you.” The boy gave him such a look of suspicion that Pessoa
snatched a blanket and withdrew completely from that side of the room. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  “Go,” Soares told the boy.

  Rodrigo ran and threw himself on the cot with such boyish abandon that Pessoa feared it might collapse. Still clothed, he wriggled into the covers and, by the sound of the snores, was soon asleep.

  Pessoa and Soares sat and drank together. The storm died, the wind growing quiet, the rain coming down in gentle showers.

  “The rain ends,” Pessoa said. “Sunny tomorrow. It will be no chore for a rider to get to Lisbon and back.”

  Soares yawned and said bleakly, “I am drunk.”

  Just as glum, Pessoa said, “I am sober.” He drained his cup, took his blanket, and spread it by the fire. He pulled his travel bag to him and made of it a pillow.

  When he looked around, he saw Soares seated on his cot, head bent, his fist slowly, softly, striking his chest.

  “Luis,” he hissed.

  The old Franciscan lifted his head.

  “Not your fault. Nothing is. Please forget that I ever accused you of it.”

  A nod.

  “Everything will end well, you’ll see.” Pessoa hiked the blanket and contorted his body until the warmth of the hearth unthawed his feet. A flagstone poked his rib. Something in his saddlebag jabbed his cheek. He peered over the bag toward Soares’s cot. The Franciscan was practicing his mea culpas again.

  “Luis!”

  The fist paused mid-strike.

  “What ails you now?”

  Soares squeezed his eyes shut and covered them with his hand. “I denied them.”

  “The angels? Salva me. Of course you did. Better to protect your own flock. Besides, I coerced you into it. You did the wise thing, and if they are truly angels, they will understand the wrong that duty caused you to do.”

  “Not duty.” Soares slammed a fist into the bedclothes. He fell back on the cot and slapped the blankets over his face. Through the wool came a muffled and remorseful “I did not want to burn.”

  DAY 12

  In the silence of the night, in the hush of his cell, I Bernardo lay prostrate, seeking God in the flagstones. Once more he prayed, “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus.” Once more it was not God who answered, but the cold.

  “Dominus Deus Sabaoth.” Bernardo would never have hurt the dove; and if Father Manoel could not see that Bernardo had conquered sin and thus been unfairly accused, surely God knew the truth—God, who looked upon the heart.

  Bernardo’s tears rolled quietly. “Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua.”

  But Heaven and earth were so without comfort that Bernardo could not bring himself to say the Osanna. He got up, dropped his habit over his nakedness, then sat against the wall in the corner and looked about. He thought he would possess the courage to face the gibbet that was to come; yet demons were all arrived to greet him. Demons, for bars were no impediment. They came for him in legions. They came in ranks. They capered amid the flickering shadows. They whispered in his ear but, as he turned to catch a glimpse—o, so cunning—they concealed themselves in the straw.

  He held his rosary beads tight. “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.”

  Blessed is he.

  Blessed is he who is not alone.

  All the company Bernardo had ever needed was God, yet what had that adoration got him? By his hip was a crack in the floor, in the corner where he sat, in the solitary reaches of the cell. A crack which opened to a black and opaque Nothing. Bernardo could feel a dank, beguiling draft rise from there.

  What had he done which had so offended Him? Had damnation lain within him all along, a puzzling flaw like the crack in the stone? While he stood and wrote his journals and practiced his mortifications and made himself busy, he could not see his sin; and now that he had so utterly fallen, it was close as a kiss, and far too late.

  He looked across the cell. Guilherme Castanheda lay so far removed that Bernardo could scarce hear the man’s snoring, could see aught else but a pile of blankets. The cherubs stood apart. The funeral candles around the fallen angel had burned to stubs.

  I am so heartily sorry.

  Would He not love Bernardo again? The radiant arms which had forever wrapped Bernardo had opened, nothing to sustain him but air. The little life left him gaped, as cold and hushed a void as absolution. How could one continue in such absolute silence?

  He whetted his rosary’s cross on the rough mortar, the silver turning more jagged than sharp. No matter. What would not cut, would tear. He wanted to say his Act of Contrition, but knew that Christ would not save him—he who had assumed himself easy to forgive. Before Quintas, it had all seemed so uncomplicated. Had he really marked others’ iniquities in his book? So many flames for gluttony. So many for pride. Was that it? Had hubris damned him where lechery could not?

  The wanton weakness of women, that foul, dank bunghole of temptation. With the Pinheiro woman, he had considered falling; and then with the dove, he mastered lust. Or had he?

  Why did God—who knew All—look into Bernardo and find him detestable?

  Bernardo dug the cross into the blue pathways of his left wrist. Mortification had toughened him to pain, and he went to his task with vigor, as was his habit with chores. He sawed into his unworthy flesh. Skin welted, seeped red. He labored until his muscles ached.

  Of a sudden blood spurted up in a fountain. Ruby life spilled down his hand, so much life that he could never hope to stop it. All his warmth, spilling into the crack like ink into the mouth of ajar.

  Alarmed, he clamped his wrist, but blood sought and found a way, overflowing the dam of his fingers and pattering onto the floor. Jesu dulcis, suscipe deprecationem meum.

  Was this a mistake? O Jesu. Such a careless one. But he determined to let God show him the truth of it and so into the darkness Bernardo poured his most dulcet and adoring prayer. He saw love sink without changing aught; subside as easily as his life sank into that headless, fathomless hole.

  Bernardo’s strength had ever been measured in ink-stained fingers, in the artfulness of a hand. Even the ruined and bleeding wrist had the power to open the other and let its wretchedness out.

  Strange. Bernardo had always thought that death would hurt. Its numbness troubled him. His hands felt cold and foreign. His fingers lost their grip and the rosary dropped, chill climbing his arms.

  The lethargy of despair was a surprise: downy as a bed, and as welcome. When he felt the touch, he found to his amazement that he was already dying—and so gently that he had not noticed. It was hard to open his eyes.

  An angel was leaning over. He smelled of honey and flowers and his eyes were so wide and black that Bernardo could see his own reflection there.

  No. He was wrong. What he saw was not his own reflection. Father Manoel had come. Bernardo had something to tell him, but he could not remember what he wished to say; and besides, the room was fogged and shadowy, and there was so little time.

  No. The face was not Father Manoel’s, but Christ’s.

  Ah, God had not turned His back after all. Even in despair, Bernardo had somehow been absolved. Domine probasti me et congnovisti me. For God knew him. And when Bernardo called, God had searched him out. Tu, Jesu. Tu cognovisti sessionem meam, et resurrectionem meam. Christ knew all that was, knew where Bernardo had sat down, ah Jesu dulcis, knew without a doubt where he would rise up.

  “I’m sleepy,” Bernardo told him, and he spoke in a voice as weak and pure as childhood. He fought to keep his eyes open, but fought only for a while; for Heaven stretched, a wider and more measureless ocean than he had ever suspected, a deeper and more starry sea than he had ever dreamed.

  He sailed, his cheek in Christ’s hand.

  A knock at the door woke Pessoa. His face was roasted, his backside cold. He rolled over, pulling angrily on the blanket, and saw that Soares and the boy were seated at the table having breakfast.

  The second knock caught Soares already on his feet. Pessoa closed his eyes again. His back was stiff. H
is whole body ached. Salva me. Even his toes pained him.

  From the door, he heard Soares’s query: “Yes?”

  And a stranger’s voice: “Sorry to bother you, father, but something has happened with the Monsignor’s secretary.”

  Pessoa sat up. One of Monsignor’s jailers stood just inside the room, hat in hand. Soares said, “What?”

  “Well…” The man shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Happens that Monsignor is not awake, and no one has courage to rouse him, but it looks like a priest should come straightaway, for the creatures—whatever angels they are—are around that secretary close, and him all gathered into a corner. And he does not answer when his name is called, father. And that Castanheda, well, even being a soldier, he hasn’t the belly to go see what’s amiss. Can you come?”

  Pessoa was already on his feet at the basin, splashing his face and shivering in the chill.

  “Rodrigo? Stay here,” Soares said. “Finish your breakfast.”

  “I want to see the angels,” the boy said.

  Pessoa scrubbed his face with a towel. “There is nothing to see.

  “The angels did something to him. They could do something to my pai.”

  Firm-voiced, Soares said, “Eat your breakfast. The angels did nothing.” He picked up the satchel for the extreme unction.

  Pessoa followed the two of them out the door. The morning was a dull gray, with clouds like fish scales. The wind blew, spitting rain into Pessoa’s face. His cloak was dank, but better than the morning, and so he gathered the damp wool about his neck.

  Everywhere lay the debris of storm. The cobbles were muddy and leaf-scattered. The oak tree inside the old rectory walls, the tree that had grown up in that spot where a priest had been crushed, was itself now dead—blasted by lightning, its top burnt, its trunk split in two. Soares crossed himself. Ahead, the pomegranate by the fountain was down, a laurel uprooted. Pessoa looked into the sky again, received an eyeful of rain for his trouble.