Chapter 68 The Bishop
The Bishop
The flames lick her feet as ash lands softly on her cloak.
Great snowflakes of ash, particulate and singular, show briefly against the crimson wool.
Then the hem of her dress catches, at first playfully, then in earnest, and she is suddenly ablaze.
The bishop has witnessed burnings, knows how skin will blush and blister and that flesh will hiss like a boiling kettle. The terrible smell. The screams.
But she is silent, eyes to the sky.
In the future, from Rome, he will wonder at what happened next.
Robed men will ask him. He won’t be sure, and the doubt will puncture his days and tatter his nights.
For what he saw is not what others saw, and the paths that diverge from that moment are antipodal, inconceivable, cannot be held together. He saw what he saw. Others saw more.
In that moment, this moment, several things at once possible and impossible happen.
Throughout the city, weathercocks twist on their steeples, gold and iron birds turning north, twisting south, wrenching to the east, pivoting west. A strange static excites the atmosphere.
The faithful feel a tingle mount their spines.
The chanting stops. Gray slabs of cloud and pearl begin to scrape against each other like layers of ocean current, moving out from the square, forming branching roads in five directions.
The air flickers. Some will say it was a sudden haze, others remember a halcyon clarity.
People look to the sky; people look to the ground.
Jan feels his lungs fill with the smell of scorched flesh.
His eyes burn with the reflection of Aleys’s distorted face, the grimace of a woman consumed by fire.
But the legate sees what the bishop does not, that the flames are consumed by the woman, she is burning the fire, the glory is blazing and she is become a whirlwind of light and faith.
A holy perfume, the smell of flowers, infuses the air.
Sparks of spirit dance throughout the square in a contagion of wonder.
The legate witnesses the people witnessing, the tears that course their faces. He wipes his eyes and is grateful.
The beguines keep their vigil. That day and that night, they are a gray wall, immovable.
They will not permit the guards to approach.
There are rumors later. She vanished. There were no remains, no relics.
Some believe she was burned, entire, whole, by fire.
Others saw, between the flames, the flicker of a cloak of the purest sky blue. They believe she survives.