But he managed to emerge out of the experience alive. All the accounts agree that he was found on the slopes in the morning, crazed. They say that those who found him saw his prized lion of Castille—which had mauled many town lasses—shrunken visibly to the size of a thimble. This punishment was attributed to the underground folk or the vengeful elementals.
But whoever his punisher may have been, Fray Domingo was a wasted man. The captain of the guard could not explain how he came to be wandering in the forest. After being washed and clothed, he was interviewed behind closed doors by the provincial of his order, who thereafter sent him home to Spain within that very month. Then no more was heard of him.
Nobody too, can remember his full name now. Fray Domingo de la O____ is all anyone can come up with, in whispers, because they say that the elementals stole away his name and that was how he came to be mad. Some explain that the night of retribution was a Sunday, purposely chosen, and that this was the truest bit of the story that had stuck through the years.
For retribution it truly was, not done for a mere scare. For a decade as cura, he had deprived many young men of their sweethearts and had possessed their dreams of becoming fathers and familymen. Thus, for the sheer number of deflowered young girls and violated women, he deserved nothing short of being killed. But as no one dared murder the cura, the next best thing was to bring him over to their side, to the care of their own gods.
Whether he had died as an old man plagued to the end by a livid insomnia, or shortly after his return had been found stiff on the cold floor of his room in the fortified castle home of his order, baffling purple thorns sticking out of his skin, as some say, after but a few years Fray Domingo passed into legend. The year 1896 came to pass, and the new century opened on a world where he had become as mythical as the beings that had taken him away from it.
It was into the new century that Inday Candila came of age. I myself met her when I was a child; I had always been sickly but one night I woke up feeling like I had been rolled over needles, able only to call out feebly to my mother. After reciting a dozen rapid Hail Marys, and seeing that nothing—not the crucifix, nor the small robed image of the Sto. Niño could alleviate my suffering, she gathered all her courage and brought me on her back, to Inday Candila. By then she was a harmless-looking crone, almost a century old, her irises as pale as the flame of the candle she passed over my rigid body. A poultice smelling of herbs and coconut oil was applied to my chest, and in my swoon I could hear her rapid whispers assuming different volumes all at once, as if a whole chattering chorus was bending over me. Through a haze I saw the darkness over her shoulder shift, assume eyes and mouth. Then her waxy palms on my knees and shoulders, and as soon as done the pain drained out of me like liquid.
As soon as I could open my mouth I bawled, grasping my mother, but Inday Candila’s hand darted out and clutched my chin. “Shut your mouth, boy. It will come back in.” For all my youngness I could sense the power tempered in her slight, shrunken frame, her milky eyes, the vise-like grip of her small bony hand. “It is the ill wind,” she told my mother, waving away the proffered bill. She locked her eyes on me, and I could feel the hair on my nape tingle.
I remember the many rooms we passed through on our way out, as we stumbled through the maze-like corridors after the servant. In one of them somebody was singing a sad melody. I snatched away from my mother towards one of the rooms, shuffling after the sound. No sooner had I peered in than I knew for certain that I had been cast with the most powerful of spells.
Inday Candila had been baptized Fortunata and was the daughter of Felicidad, the sole offspring of the Jalandineses, a rich family whose relatives possessed five of the eight mansions surrounding the plaza. Felicidad was by no means spectacular in looks, her sole commendable trait being her enormous piety and devotion to Our Lady of Candles, which led her often to the cathedral. Don Licaro Jalandines’ own house sat right beside it, and it was here that life took leave of Felicidad after she delivered the tiny, pitiful infant that Don Licaro, in a rage at her condition, had unsuccessfully attempted to dissolve in her belly by forcing her to drink cupfuls of a bitter concoction of various roots.
They were at a loss at the child’s tenacious will to live. Twice its grandfather accidentally dropped it on the steps, and still it recovered from its injuries. Don Licaro lost sleep sweating in his bed, recalling how the child’s eyes stared unblinking at him as it fell. For nights he kept looking over his shoulder at the door to the adjoining room, where the bassinet was.
The girl grew into an unnatural beauty, for though she had skin desirably fair as well as a full head of light brown curls and an aquiline nose, she had an eerie, brooding air that was almost terrible, because around her people felt like they were being watched though her gaze was elsewhere. At the dances in Don Licaro’s house she unnerved the guests by coming into the room clad in his nightshirt. She upset the servants and workers by following them around and predicting their deaths in extremely grisly detail. She had a habit of staring fixedly at Don Licaro at dinner, accusing him of wanting to murder her until he would throw up his hands and exasperated, command her to stop.
As Fortunata became an adolescent her behavior became more and more bizarre. She neglected her appearance—her rich hair becoming alarmingly matted and filthy, her restless gaze frightening in its intensity. The house buzzed with whispers about her parentage, and this sharpened her hostility. That she further felt unloved and unwanted may have prodded her odd behavior around the family, but the final straw came when she caught her grandfather astride one of the servants on the floor of his study. Don Licaro had closed his eyes for a moment atop the submissive girl and when he opened them again he met Fortunata’s bold, open stare. He disengaged himself from the girl with a start and hopped away with his trousers around his ankles. By the time he had gotten them back up around his waist, his granddaughter had vanished and the anxious maid was proposing telling the señora.
During succeeding attempts with the servants, time and again she would be there, staring down at him with an opaque look which nearly gave him heart attacks. He took his wife aside and told her to find a way to get rid of Fortunata. She suggested that the girl be sent to boarding school. Better a sanatorium, Don Licaro muttered.
At the dinner party at his house on the day he was elected alcalde mayor, Don Licaro explained his granddaughter’s absence by bemoaning that she had left them for the gardener. Fortunata was already an hour away from Jaro, on foot to the next town, the voice of the only father she had known ringing in her ears: “Come back and I will set the dogs on you.” He had called for her and the dark look she gave him when he asked where she wanted to be sent to for schooling had caused him to lose his temper wildly. “You are a bastard and no charity on my part can ever hide it,” he spat out as he grabbed her by the elbow and pushed her to the window looking out on the countless beggars harassing churchgoers. “Look at them,” he thundered, “the town is crawling with your cursed siblings!”
Nothing substantial was heard of Fortunata in Jaro for the next few years, yet here and there arose rumors: she had made a pact with the dark forces, as a way of redeeming her disgraceful lineage. She quit Iloilo, journeyed to Siquijor where she learned the black arts, came back and hid out in Dueñas where she hobnobbed with the asuang folk. She went up to the mountains to beg nature for her secrets.
After twenty years an astounding epidemic descended on the living Jalandineses and their closest relatives: they started dropping dead in the middle of mere everyday activities—dressing up, tending the garden, chattering at the dinner table. The elderly died in their sleep. The explanation offered by the family doctor was that a deadly hereditary disease had surfaced after scores of genetic slumber.
A stranger was seen attending all the funerals. This woman expressed a desire to acquire the various properties of the former Jalandineses and after a few months she had moved into the sagging old house by the cathedral.
The town’s m
emory refreshed itself. It was Fortunata, much aged, yet the oldtimers recognized her through the little girl she brought with her, who was a spitting image of Don Licaro’s long-lost granddaughter.
All sorts of gossip sprouted: Fortunata had worked death on her kin as revenge; the father of her small child was the famous enkantado of Madia-as. Her powers were supposedly so great that she could kill anyone she wished by the aid of the spirits she called to her bidding.
She came to be regarded with fear, but not without a degree of awe and respect. She kept quietly to her ways all the while projecting an aura of immense power. And although people were afraid of her, she developed a peculiar image as a protector of the town. The same folks who rushed, trembling, out of her way whenever she took a walk in the plaza were the same ones who went furtively to her house in the early evening and came out of it with jars of magical remedies. The name Fortunata was forgotten, as was the doomed family she had supposedly extinguished.
She married her daughter off to a planter from Negros and by the time the war came round she had already established the most powerful of Iloilo’s witch families, and thoroughly enjoyed the rest of her days as its almighty matriarch, under the auspices of the same forces that had tormented the father she had never known.
The beauty of the women in this family has always been short of being supernatural. Throughout the years they have retained their Castillian looks, and it is said that to look them directly in the eye would render one vulnerable to their magic. The young girls don’t venture out of the house until age eight, not even to be sent to school, until they supposedly acquire some sort of spirit-guide. Come eighteen they are introduced to the town with a lavish feast that crowds Jaro and leaves the townspeople with full stomachs for a week. They never cut their waist-length hair even when the beauty salon craze washed over Panay in the 50’s like a cold wave. It was also said they have healing powers, and the ability to make anything, be it man, spirit or nature, obey them. During my growing up years, there has never been a time when the queen of the fiesta was not one of them.
For these women there would be no love, only its shadow; the sins of men and fathers, had incurred for the friar’s descendants the fate of giving their lives to nurturing the old ways. Inday Candila herself had accepted the curse as willingly as she had renounced her past. They married only for money, and even then chose reticent, weak-willed men who would always be too afraid to look behind the cold, polished veneer of their mysterious wives. Every few years, a girl would go astray but her lover would encounter an abrupt, premature death—drowned where there was no water, suffocated where there was plenty of air. The luckier ones went mad or disappeared. Not too long after Inday Candila had cured me, a young man was found dead in the plaza, his body swollen to twice its size, angry veins almost bursting from his skin. He was a student from Manila; his visit to distant relatives had coincided with the birthday of one of Inday Candila’s great-granddaughters. He had seen the parade and the float of the young woman dressed in an ermine cape, like a queen. The last person to see him alive was the street sweeper stationed in the plaza, who reported that the young man had run past him the previous night from the direction of Inday Candila’s house, sobbing unabashedly. The chief of police had glanced briefly at the imposing mansion across the street, and called for an ambulance from the morgue. I stood in the crowd, shivering in the sun as they covered the corpse with a white tablecloth.
Still, we conducted our lives normally with these strange folk in our midst though of course there were the usual scary tales about them that every child grew up with, even as they rubbed elbows with the witch family’s children. Everyone had stories of the girl who was feared in class, who had stewed offal for recess and lunch, and introduced other children to invisible beings—sudden laughter slithering into the ears of those who walked home alone at dusk. Some had tales of befriending them, being invited to the family’s ancestral home and finding heads of strange animals mounted eerily on the wall, dogs howling in the backyard, phantom fingers skipping on necks. And always, the lore of merienda: dinuguan so thick and black it seemed to be alive.
You asked me once if I believed all of it. I hadn’t known what to say, even while marveling at how your thin summer dress the color of fresh leaves billowed in the breeze. Your face an upturned flower. I told you of my dream of becoming a doctor, of saving lives. You smiled sadly and said I was meant for bigger things than an uneducated country girl. I wanted to tell you that all I wished was to save both of us—from the fear palpable in the heart of every one born in that town, wary of the somber little girls with wild eyes and streaming hair in every era. And the stories: Inday Candila and her sorcery, Fray Domingo and his haunted forest, the hundred-year old wind brushing against our skins.
It was too late when I realized that these stories would keep us apart, though it wasn’t fear that gripped my heart when on that faraway night—the last night of my childhood—I lost myself in a magical forest of my own imagining, seeing you in that room for the first time, your hair the only darkness about you.
NIKKI ALFAR
EMBERWILD
Nikki Alfar has been a flight attendant, a bank manager, a magazine editor, a radio newscaster, an office administrator, and a copywriter. Her stories and articles have appeared in The Philippine Star and the magazines Smart Parenting, Stuff, milk, Seventeen, and Jam. She has written more comic books than she is readily able to remember, and edited the Manila Critics’ Circle National Book Award-winning anthology Isaw, atbp. She has also won a number of Anvil awards for her copywriting, as well as the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature for her Short Story for Children, “Menggay’s Magical Chicken.” Alfar currently runs her own content development firm, Kestrel Studios, out of the home she shares with her husband and their three-year-old daughter, Sage.
“EmberWild” is a classically-told fantasy set in an imaginary world, both fresh and familiar to perceptive readers.
YOU MUST UNDERSTAND that all of this occurred some thirteen years ago, when I was young still and the Empire had but newly begun its campaign to rid the realm of the Wildness.
We were told—and not without foundation—that the Wild represented a threat to the ongoing unification of the realm, dispersed as they were throughout the lands, yet uncontrolled by any form of sanctioned governing body. Moreover, rumor had persisted over a course of decades that certain members of the Great Families had been pursuing some sort of complex schema of interbreeding, intended to result in the birth of a child with unprecedented affinity for all aspects of the Wildn ess. It was therefore generally agreed that reining in the Wild, particularly among the Families, was not merely a judicious course, but a necessary one in order to ensure the continuance of the Empire. No one strongly objected, as I was far from the only one who had heard some story or knew someone who knew someon e who had experienced some calamitous upheaval wrought by an untutored expression of the Wildness.
It is known, of course, that not all of the Wild were eradicated. Some of the affinities were deemed to be of use to the realm and therefore permitted to endure, albeit under the constraints of that wondrous Cantment that regulates every moment of its subject’s life, from breeding to breathing. To this day, maritime commerce and conquest alike are sped onward by the billowing winds summoned by the indentured SkyWild, always with a stalwart adept of Cant at hand to ensure that his charge’s Cantment is loosed only enough for the time and task required. The FlowWild, likewise, are kept in isolated reserve against instances in which rain may be required to alleviate drought; or conversely, when torrential downpours threaten the more flood-prone cities of the realm, such as the densely-packed, haphazardly-grown capital itself.
But now I misremember, for that was the old capital. The new one, it is said, is a triumph of planning and architecture—brilliantly conceived, meticulously executed. I have never been there myself; it is the old capital that I remember, and of which I speak.
*
THERE
IS ALWAYS work for soldiers in an Empire so vast and so ancient that any other name it once had has long since been forgotten; in those days, however, the Wildness campaign kept the garrisons so busy that entire companies of soldiers were constantly in and out of the capital city, conveying intelligenc e, receiving orders, reporting for direct commendation or censure, and so on. They were celebrated by the general populace as well as generously compensated during that time, more so those that had managed to especially distinguish themselves on campaign. These heroes of the Empire were frequently accorded promotions upon presentation at court, and invariably awarded a significant purse in recognition of their valiant efforts on behalf of the realm. And the contents of very many of these purses inevitably found their way into the coffers of Madame Astranzia’s House of Boundless Bliss.
Then, as now, there was of course a plethora of pleasure houses to be found across the capital, and indeed throughout the realm wherever soldiers were known to be detailed. Many of these boasted courtesans reputed to be every bit as lovely and willing as those at Madame Astranzia’s; and every one of thes e other establishments was certainly considerably lighter on a man’s (or woman’s) purse. But the House of Bliss was exceptional, and not only because one of its ladies was rumored to be the favorite of the eldest prince of the realm.
From the outside, it appeared to be no more than another luxury establishment amid the prosperous hostelry district in which it was located. It was crafted of costly stone, with tasteful fretwork at the eaves and true glass, not shimmersheen, at each of its sumptuously curtained windows. It had a modest yet lush lawn, well-maintained with a carpet of green grass regardl ess of the heat or cold at any given time of year, though not a single flower graced the House’s premises on the exterior.
Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 Page 5
