God's Fires

by Patricia Anthony

  Banners flapping, the procession wound through the Chão da Feira, and down a street named for homesickness. Vendors and pedestrians ducked into doorways. Wives and children popped curious heads out of windows.

  Afonso called, “Hallo! Hallo!” He shouted so loudly that Doçura pricked her ears and quickened her walk. His flanking guards looked on in alarm.

  Laughing and waving, Afonso followed the banner carriers down the hill, turned with them at the sea-and-mud smell of the Tejo and its fleet of parrot-bright skiffs. He followed the blood-red and grass-green flags through the jostling mob at the fish market, where the captain of the guard began barking orders. Soldiers with pikestaffs cleared a path.

  “King! It is the king!”

  Children gawked. Women curtsied. Men swept off their hats. In the glorious, golden morning, Afonso held on to his helmet and the reins with one hand. Thus precariously balanced, he stood up in the stirrups and waved. Beyond the canvas roofs of the market, he saw wonders: fishermen spilling baskets of silver-plate flounder; hawkers sorting ribboned eels; mussels dangling in their seaweed like purple-black grapes.

  They turned north, toward the business district of the Baixa. In the huge praça that housed the gold traders, commerce paused. Flower vendors looked up from their stalls.

  Merchants lifted their heads from their outdoor cafe breakfasts.

  Afonso didn’t realize the morning had gone awry until Doçura came to a stop—until he saw shock in the faces of the people around him. His flanking guards reined quickly so as not to outpace their king.

  Castelo Melhor, dressed in crimson, was approaching the procession face front. His white Andalusian stallion was in a high-legged prance, tail held proud as a flag.

  The only sounds amid the facades of the money houses was the echo of a single horse’s hooves on stone, the chime of golden bells on a crimson bridle.

  Before that blinding whiteness, that radiant crimson, Doçura’s chestnut coat seemed mousy, and Afonso’s peacock-blue satin plain.

  Doçura saw the stallion coming, lowered her ears, and bucked. Afonso dropped helmet and reins and, before he could fall, wrapped both hands around the saddle’s pommel. The captain of the guard kicked his own horse forward and put a calming hand on Doçura’s bridle.

  Ten meters from Afonso, the white stallion foundered. It went down fast, Castelo Melhor tumbling with it. Gasps rose from a hundred throats. Afonso squeezed his eyes shut. Only the crowd’s oohs and aahs coaxed them open again.

  The stallion hadn’t fallen at all. He was bowed, one knee and his soft dark muzzle touching the cobbles.

  Castelo Melhor, still seated, swept off his hat. “Your servant,” he said.

  “What a pretty horse!” Afonso cried, then felt foolish saying it.

  With the stallion still curtsied, the count dismounted. He offered the reins. “A gift.”

  The captain of the guard’s cheeks went sallow. He turned, round-eyed, to Afonso.

  “Such a pretty, pretty horse.” The stallion’s neck was thick, his mane silken and long. His white was brighter than sun on sea foam. Afonso wanted that clever stallion more than anything. More than his spyglass. More than his Flemish blade. If he had that horse, Afonso could be a champion better than Don Quixote, he could be as brave a king as Sebastião had been, or even his own father.

  Suddenly Jandira was there, nudging her sorrel forward. “But good my lord count—a wise king does not take the battle mount from his bravest warrior.”

  The count’s smile went sour. He jerked cruelly at the bridle. With a wild jingle of bells, the stallion lunged to his feet. “A good slave,” he said, “should mind her place.”

  “Indeed. And a slave’s place is with its owner. Just as your horse, too—”

  “For God’s sake! This is not my battle mount.”

  “Yet so cunningly trained.”

  Castelo Melhor looked past her, to Afonso. He held out the reins again. “My liege. Give me this pleasure.”

  Jandira answered, instead. “I don’t understand, my lord. Why did you not use this as your battle mount? The stallion is so handsome and your clothes so fine, that the Spaniards would have fallen on their faces before your splendor, and the war more easily won.”

  The count blinked.

  She turned to Afonso. “Please, sire. It would be unseemly to accept such a gift from someone to whom Portugal owes so much. Won’t you order your loyal subject count to mount his pretty and ride with us? Wave your hand thus, and he will obey.”

  Afonso did as Jandira said. Castelo Melhor’s face flushed as red as his tunic. After a hesitation, he flung himself into the saddle.

  The captain of the guard let out a long breath. He gently pried Afonso’s hand from the pommel and pressed Doçura’s reins into his palm. Once more, the procession started on its way, the count now riding stirrup to stirrup with his king.

  “It is a surprise to see you, sire. I thought you would cross the river,” the count said, “seeing as you go to the Alentejo.”

  Confused, Afonso looked over his shoulder at Jandira.

  “The king dislikes boats,” she said. “So we ride to Santarém, and the bridge.”

  “Mm. A long ride.”

  “Yes, my lord. A long ride. But the king has his leisure.”

  Castelo Melhor turned around in his saddle. “I see my lady rides astride her horse. Does she feel the need of something between her legs?”

  Afonso turned, too. Jandira was staring straight ahead, at nothing.

  A laugh from the count. “Something large and hot.”

  Then they were past the Baixa. Women leaned out of second-story windows to watch the procession. As if aware of the scrutiny, the white stallion tossed his head. Bells chimed. A touch of the spurs and he pitched back and forth, back and forth: a gallop as easy as a wooden rocking horse, as slow as Doçura’s walk.

  Once more, Castelo Melhor turned about in his saddle. “I shall ride you again, my lady. Take my spurs to you, and make you bolt.”

  Jandira paled.

  “I will tilt at windmills!” Afonso cried, to stop Castelo Melhor from alarming Jandira. Part of Afonso wanted to hurry to his journey, part of him longed to return to the castle. The count had stolen the splendor from the day.

  Abruptly, Castelo Melhor pulled the stallion to a half-rearing halt. “Yes, sire. You tilt at windmills while I stay to safeguard your kingdom.”

  And the people listening, cheered.

  A shake of his shoulder awoke Pessoa. Mid-morning sun was pouring through the open window. A square of whitewashed rectory wall blazed in a headache-inducing fiat lux. He rolled over on the cot. Soares was looking at him.

  “Magalhães is here.”

  Pessoa sat up, rubbing his eyes.

  “I have bread and cheese and coffee.”

  By the smell of it, the coffee was burnt. Pessoa pulled his nightshirt over his head, put his feet to the icy tiles, and groped for his undershirt and cassock.

  “Manoel? Eat before you talk to him.”

  Pessoa lost his place in the cassock’s long row of buttons. “Maladictus,” he whispered, and set about buttoning again.

  “You see?”

  “What?” When Soares didn’t answer, Pessoa raised his eyes. The old Franciscan was skeptical and frowning. “What?”

  “You see how you are, Manoel, before your breakfast?”

  Pessoa got to his feet, still buttoning. “Easy for you. Plain comfortable robe, rope belt, sandals. The same church, the same house, the same pot day after day to piss in. Cats. Salva me. You even have the company of cats. Luis? Where are my boots? What did you do with my boots?”

  Soares gestured toward the hearth. “You begged for this mission, as I recall—not that I do not cherish your occasional company. But I’ve noticed about you a morning’s ill-temper.” Pessoa’s black boots, soles patched and repatched, leaned tiredly against a bench.

  Pessoa drew himself upright. His cassock was only half-buttoned and it flapped open, expos
ing a gray and much-mended undershirt. He snatched the cassock closed. “Mea maxima culpa, Luis. I will be sure to mention my foul moods to my confessor.”

  “Not for your soul. But for Magalhães’s peace of mind.” Soares held a piece of bread-wrapped cheese and one of the fine pottery mugs toward him.

  Pessoa sipped the burnt coffee with one hand, buttoned furiously with the other. In a corner, underclothes and nightshirts burst from his open saddlebags. Dirty plates sat atop the table. “Set up something away from this mess. That table in the grape arbor—”

  “It looks as if it might rain.”

  “If it rains, Luis,” he said with obviously overburdened patience, “then we will come inside.” Stuffing a bite of cheese into his mouth, he spoke around it. “There is a journal in my bag. Find it. Get ink pot and quill. Here is what we will do: If you see me rest my chin in my hand, you will stop writing. Otherwise take down what he says verbatim—every slip in grammar, every graceless sentence. The Holy Office loves their notes. In fact if we are lucky, our little story will be lost amid the flood of trial records. Still, those Dominicans know confession well. We must tell the truth, but only so much. How long has he been here?” Pessoa finished buttoning. There was one buttonhole left.

  “Just now arrived.”

  Pessoa sighed. “Good, good. And alone?”

  “Yes. Quite alone.”

  “Then hurry and find paper and ink,” he ordered, “before he loses courage and flees the kingdom.”

  Soares bent over Pessoa’s bags. Underwear and nightshirts flew. Pessoa found the chamber pot and filled it. When he turned around, Soares was holding the journal, three quills, and an inkwell. Pessoa nodded and they walked outside.

  Magalhães was seated at the table under a patchwork cloud sky. He was petting cats. When Pessoa approached, he arose. “I have been considering what you have said, Father Inquisitor.”

  Pessoa motioned Soares to sit, and noted that he had the sense to take a bench just out of the tailor’s view.

  Magalhães nodded fretfully. “Well. So. I have been thinking. I have not seen angels myself. Not that I believe there are none, mind. Never, never would I say such a thing. But I am a plain man, and no one an angel would wish to appear to. I have been taken in, it seems, by the idle talk of the town’s women. And that is the way of women, is it not?”

  Pessoa took a seat. Magalhães’s whirled to Soares, who stared impassively back.

  Magalhães’s tear-dampened eyes locked on Pessoa. His voice trembled. “Please, Father Inquisitor. Is it a sin to be mislead by lies? Is that heresy? The girls speak of visions, and Neves talks of signs, but I am a poor man. Not someone who hoards Moorish gold like Castanheda. And I am not a rich man who thinks himself above God, like Teixeira.” His voice lowered. “But I can tell you about the heresies of others.”

  Pessoa rested his chin in his hand. Soares’s quill paused.

  A glitter of cowardice sparked in the tailor’s eye. “Would that be helpful, father?”

  In the silence, Pessoa could hear the reedy buzz of a circling horsefly; the hum of bees among the grapes. A plaintive meow.

  Sweat ran down Magalhães’s cheeks in fat drops, like tears.

  He wiped his palms on his coat, then wiped them again. At last the bald little tailor blurted what he had come so far to say: “Father Inquisitor, it pains me to tell you, but just this very morning, Maria Elena Teixeira killed her baby.”

  It was afternoon and the clouds were building, when the king’s procession stopped to rest their horses. In an olive tree-dotted meadow, amid grass as fine as rabbit fur, the royal cooks built a fire. They argued whether to serve pork in Madeira wine or cold slices of roast chicken.

  Afonso was hungry. He asked for chocolate, and an equerry gave him an inlaid box of dipped walnuts. Carrying the candy, he sat on a rock beside a glassy ribbon of a stream. Two little boys who had followed from the outskirts of Odivelas approached. When the captain of the guard tried to send them on their way, Afonso, who in the court liked children best of all, called the pair to him. He gave them handfuls of sweets.

  “Who are you?” one asked.

  “I am the king.”

  The pair grinned at each other and shook their heads. They ate chocolate, and smeared their faces brown.

  Jandira sat beside him. She threw an arm over Afonso’s knee, and her touch made him feel bedtime safe, as good as before his nanny died and his mother went away.

  By the wagons and the cookfire, furious voices rose. Jandira closed her eyes. “They will kill each other over a menu,” she said.

  One boy pointed. “She is a funny-looking lady.”

  Afonso looked at Jandira. He had not noticed the decorative scars in years. “O. That is because she comes from Brazil.”

  They whooped, and rolled in the grass like puppies. “Only monkeys come from Brazil.”

  Afonso noticed how her chin tilted, saw the look in her dark, liquid eyes. He thought of how the count had spoken to her, and how that had frightened him. He reached down and took her hand. “She is a beautiful monkey.”

  He felt her hand stiffen.

  He said, “If you had only let me have the pretty white horse, Jandira, I would have made him bow to you. I could have been your champion, and you my Dulcinea.”

  She cast her gaze toward the distant olive groves, the slope-shouldered hills. “Sire, the count would not have given him to you.”

  “But he offered.”

  “Castelo Melhor offers many things he doesn’t mean.”

  He lifted his head to the featherbed clouds. He took a deep breath and smelled rain. The idea of windmills tickled in his belly. It was easier to think of what lay ahead than of the bad thing which had begun the journey.

  “I brought my Flemish blade,” he told her, “I should have fought like Don Quixote. But I forgot I had it with me.”

  “Fought who?”

  “Castelo Melhor.”

  Jandira’s tears first startled Afonso. When they continued, they made him frantic. He clambered off the rock and sat beside her. “Jandira. I will battle dragons for you. I will kill him if you wish.”

  She pushed at him. “Never say that. Not where others can hear. The count will not hurt you, yet he must ever remind you of your place.”

  “But my place is as the king, and I can do anything.”

  The little boys laughed. “You are not the king. A king wouldn’t ride such an ugly pony. The real king came by here yesterday, on a big gray stallion.”

  “Truly?” Afonso forgot Jandira’s tears. He sat straighter. “Was he fair-haired? Like me, but thinner?”

  They nodded.

  “Astride a gray Barbary with a black mare and tail and one white sock to the knee?”

  They nodded again, their lips pressed against a giggle; their cheeks brown with chocolate, red and puffed with laughter.

  “That was my brother, Prince Pedro,” he said proudly. “And I’m going all the way to Mafra to meet him.”

  “Not Mafra.” They rolled their eyes, as if they had decided that Afonso was the greatest dullard in the world. “He wasn’t going to Mafra. He rode west, toward the sea: the king and his nobles and lots and lots of English soldiers.”

  The maid opened the door to Pessoa’s knock. Her hair was afright, her gown untidy. One look, and she slammed the door in his face. Pessoa could hear her retreating steps and her shout, “It’s Father Inquisitor! Father Inquisitor’s come!”

  He waited on the stoop. The house fell silent. A misting rain began to fall. It beaded on the wool of his cassock. It wormed in glassy trickles down the varnished door. It darkened the stone stairs. He heard the lock click, saw the door open. The cook peered out. “Master says come in.”

  He stepped across the shadowy threshold.

  “Wipe your feet.” Inside was a rush mat and an ornately carved coat rack. The cook inspected him head to toe and, by her expression, found him lacking. She shoved her hand toward him. “Hat,” she said.

&n
bsp; He handed it to her. She threw it in the direction of the entranceway’s chair. “Lunch?”

  “Thank you, I’ve alre—”

  “Right-hand room.” She walked away, her skirts brushing his hat from its perch and onto the tiles.

  Pessoa picked it up and took it with him.

  He found Teixeira seated before a dying and cheerless fire. The windows were open, and the large, dim room smelled of rain. On a nearby table sat a miniature oaken keg and a glass goblet. Without looking up from his contemplation of the hearth, the man asked, “Brandy?”

  Hat in hand, Pessoa halted at the side of his chair.

  “Women,” Teixeira said to the embers. “I live in a houseful of women, and all of them are silly as geese. When they stray, it is our duty to keep them to the path—we, as fathers. God gave us that charge, I think. And yet other men do their best to tempt them. Were we such men once?” He looked up, searchingly. “Manoel Pessoa? Were you ever such a man?”

  The sullen fire snapped. A wood knot flamed a brief canary yellow. Outside the window, rain fell faster. “Are you admitting that the story is true?”

  Teixeira’s face hardened. He bellowed, “Sit down!” Then he said quietly, and with more circumspection, “Please. Sit. Have a brandy.”

  Pessoa cast around for a chair, found a proper straight-backed one, and dragged it before the hearth. When Teixeira neglected to pour him a drink, Pessoa found a clean glass goblet, filled it from the keg, and sipped. Apricot brandy. He had nearly forgotten the taste. The slick weight of glass in his hand brought back pampered memories of childhood. He licked the sugary liquor from his lips, and wondered how his brother was faring.

  “Isadora!” Teixeira’s roar was so sudden, so loud, that Pessoa started, nearly dropping the costly glass to the tiles.

  The disheveled maid poked her head into the room.

  “Something to eat, girl!”

  A shy, “What?”

  “How should I know what you have back there? Sweets. Nuts. Some of those cod cakes that cook makes. Something.”

  She disappeared as quickly as she had come, and the room plunged once more into the background silence.