bishop-myriel43

Treacheries and writs: this choir once sang the Maid to her pyre. Later they—by stage and pen— slew Jeanne all over again.

1521 Ay, we've seen so much in our life here on earth of strange wonders, formed far from this land of our birth, strange tongues, and manners—but we hadn't yet seen a foreign Prince come himself with his Mother, the Queen. The pale strangers with them are spinning tales: not the patter and palaver of a thousand previous sales but news of their Hara, a virgin who conceived, and their eternal Hari who was killed, and yet who lived. Then spirit-touched Cristo and Maria in their turn gaze at me: Ay, how their gazes burn! We've come so far to see you, love, here at world's end: won't you take us to your heart and home? Won't you be our friend? The strangers left so long ago. Some in battle died, the rest ran to their fortress ships, sailing with the tide. The Misa is forgotten, and fades from memory— still Cristo and Maria came to build their home with me.

Pelaez at the chapter cites canon law and Trent, chasing the trail of an argument through tomes and memorials to a faraway throne: The Church in these islands⁠—a Church of our own. At his parish, Gomes hurries to his Mass like a student, a scholar eternally in class. He turns to his townsfolk, his people, and sees a purpose, a mission, his certainties. Burgos is in his study, buried in books, awake and too mindful of all the looks cast his way from the shadows, and what they say: Burgos is going to get his someday. Tracing the breviary's worn page, Gomes sighs: a tiredness more than age deep in his bones, he offers, looking up to the stars, a holiness from ledgers and boxes of cigars.

Of starlight, here's what I know: in untold millions they glow in the night for us—and then they're gone. The sky's new again. From the ether may I shine like starlight someday: a sign and smile for an hour of doubt long, long after I've burned out.

Like a whirling seaborne storm, this nameless tale took name and form: the moments, weeks, and months that groan under the weight of a life that isn't their own. Like the rush before Valentine's I charged in, heedless of all the signs, and found, beyond the smiles and laughter, nothing—no tears, just silence after.

Fairy tales we told ourselves from old books on dusty shelves glow wisp-like on distant shores: Come, let's reach for them once more!

We heard the song faintly on the King of Spain's road: the army and the nation, bound by multiplex of code, marching forward, fast, followed by the unseen hallowed dead, to the noonday sun, bright and hot and revolution red— a shrill, discordant harmony, fraying at the seams 'til stumbling, and faltering, and losing its steam it died down to embers flinging their gripes and grudges at the eagle and the stars and stripes. I heard the song more clearly on the busy avenue, dusty and dirty and all brand new. A tale cut into place like an old record's grooves: the people, together, again on the move to a hymn both ancient and never out of style twinkling and flashing like Our Lady's smile— and the song was there, so long ago, an apparition fair, but when I turned to look for it, it wasn't anywhere.

Waiting for my task I gaze north in wonder. Sigh: No kundiman here.

Narrower, narrower grow the bars of red and blue, while the moment's stars and their cohorts counting digits hour by hour to name and number and measure their powers just as they've done since yesterday now flicker, and fade, and drift away. Then I'll turn off to a dimmer screen in search of a smile and a friendly scene here, in my dear, familiar clime, in another place, in another time, silent, and dark, and untouched as yet by my faraway friend whom I've never met. - 4:18 a.m. Philippine Standard Time