Santángel had been able to discover that there would be some kind of play about the life of Christ, possibly Satan’s effort to tempt him. Each of the
competitors would be called upon by the vicar and his companions during the course of the performance, and that was where their practice came in, because Luzia would have to pray aloud, even as she drew upon the words
of the refrán in her head. She wasn’t worried. This was a skill she’d learned at her mother’s knee and practiced her entire life. She had always been two people with two faiths, neither of them whole.
She had prepared a couple of different refranes—one that would allow her to bathe the savior in holy light, another that used the miracle of the vines. Thankfully none of the hopefuls knew the order in which they would be called to perform, so Luzia didn’t have to worry about more tricks from Gracia.
“Have you ever seen one of these theatricals?” asked Fortún as Luzia joined the others. “We had a puppeteer come through Jaén. It was
marvelous!”
“No,” said Teoda. “But don’t expect too exciting a performance. The Inquisition tried Federigo Commandino for necromancy when his little wooden men proved too spectacular for sanctity.”
“I heard Gaspar del Águila sculpted a statue of the Virgin with two
heads,” said Fortún. “One happy and smiling, and one for more solemn occasions.”
“My father told me that there was a Christ of Burgos made with real hair and eyelashes,” said Gracia. “It even had a hidden receptacle for blood. But it’s long since been destroyed.”
Teoda arched a blond brow. “It’s amazing what theatrics may be accomplished with a bit of ingenuity.”
Luzia had nothing to add. She had lived in books when she could and in
the dark of the kitchen the rest of the time. She had never been to the theater or inside any church grander than San Ginés. She knew Madrid and its crooked streets and the heat of its long summers. He is in an untenable position, she’d told Santángel, her heart full of pity for Fortún Donadei and his glorious curls. He might very well loathe his mistress, but he was still a man, free to seek his fortune, free to go see puppet shows and play his
songs in the sun.
She was grateful when the drummers flanking the stage found their rhythm. The flutes were next, then a sprightly horn, and the curtain rose.
Luzia was surprised at the scene: a starry night and in the distance, a manger. As they watched, the silhouettes of three magi marionettes appeared atop a hill and descended to give their gifts to the savior. Dawn seemed to rise, glowing golden against the false hills, and around Mary and Joseph and Jesus. A group of animals appeared, the donkey braying, the calf lowing, and even tiny chickens that seemed to hop and peck. Luzia had anticipated fear, even horror, not this dainty enchantment.
Then a new character appeared, dressed in olive green velvet and carrying a tiny vihuela. The guests broke into laughter and applause.
“Fortún,” Gracia said with a smile, “you’ve never looked so well.” “It’s me!” he exclaimed.
From the dais, Fray Diego intoned, “Fortún Donadei, how will you greet the Lamb of God?”
Beside Luzia, Fortún picked up his real vihuela. He played a long chord, then plucked the strings carefully, solemnly, the tune nothing like the lively song he’d played at the first trial. Now it almost seemed he held a different instrument, resonant and miraculous, one that had been crafted only to give glory to God. He touched his hand to the golden cross at his chest and lifted his handsome face to the sky. In the dark woods beside the stage, the leaves began to rustle. Then, from between the branches, stepped a small glowing lamb.
The crowd gasped. Someone cried out in astonishment. The lamb made no sound. Its little hooves barely seemed to touch the ground. It offered a tiny bow to the holy men on the dais and then vanished back into the trees. Only then did the guests burst into cheers.
“Look!” a man’s voice shouted.
On the stage, a new marionette appeared from behind the mountain, a monstrous dragon that roared with the sound of horns and drums, its
gruesome head swaying back and forth on its long neck. “A tarasca!” Gracia said.
Luzia knew that word, a monster that had been bested by a saint. She had seen them in the Corpus Christi parades, sometimes ridden by a woman her father had told her was meant to symbolize vice.
The dragon reared back and gouts of flame sprayed from its mouth, long cords of red and orange silk.
Atop the hill a beautiful girl appeared in a sparkling white gown. The Beauty.
“Gracia de Valera,” Fray Diego demanded, “how will you protect the Christ Child?”
Gracia stepped forward and raised her hands to the heavens, as if beseeching them for help. Her face shone as if she were the very star that had led the magi through the desert. How could anyone refuse such a
supplicant? A cold wind began to blow and against the backdrop of the woods, tiny white snowflakes started to fall, glimmering against the dark trees, the air suddenly chill and damp as the torches by the side of the stage were extinguished.
The crowd thundered mighty approval and the dragon sank to its belly. “It’s done with a magic lantern,” Teoda whispered, rolling her eyes.
“Some ice, a bellows.”
“How do you know?” Luzia asked.
“Because we prepared a magic lantern too! Special lenses imported from Sweden. I have no talent for miracles or illusions, only for long sight.” She winked. “But that makes me an excellent planner.”
Now the dragon reared up again, and this time, it had a woman on its back. She was naked, her pale body wrought from wood, small legs and arms jointed with pegs. She had bright red hair and a miniature crown on her head.
Elizabeth. England’s queen.
Below her, a figure in black with a long white beard capered at the monster’s feet. This must be her sorcerer, John Dee.
There on the hilltop, a puppet Luzia stood, dressed in black, a sturdy, stern little figure.
“Luzia Calderón Cotado, how will you defend Our Lord?”
Luzia’s mind had been racing as she’d watched the others, opting quickly for the second refrán she and Santángel had prepared, seeking the forms of the old, reliable words that felt so right for this moment, the shape of rosica blooming in her mind.
Luzia didn’t lift her arms or raise her voice. Instead, she fell to her knees, her rosary clutched in her hands. “Ave, Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedíctus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.” She spoke the words by rote, the way she was meant to have learned them, a peasant making the sounds of prayer, the only Latin she was supposed to
know. But in her head, in her ears, another language, a new music. Were the two pleas really so different? Hear me. Save me. Grant me comfort. Let me be held in the arms of a mother once more.
Over the walls of the stage, a flood of roses cascaded, pure white, drawn from the garden, blooming as the grapevines had, as Hualit’s iris had so long ago. To the manger the roses turned their glorious faces. But before the heretic queen and her monsters, they formed a wall of long, dangerous thorns.
The applause felt like a benediction. She had survived another trial, and before the prophet killer too.
“Astonishing!” someone shouted. “Miraculous!”
But they weren’t pointing at Luzia or any of the hopefuls. They were gesturing to the stage where the puppets of the sorcerer and the queen on her dragon were cowering before the thorns. Their shadows were not.
The puppet queen raised her tiny fist at the puppet hopefuls. The shadow queen put her hands on her naked hips and stuck out her tongue.
The puppet John Dee tugged at his beard in frustration. The shadow John Dee turned his back to the vicar and lifted his robes, baring the silhouette of his ass cheeks.
The audience’s laughter was nervous and Luzia wondered what the king’s confessor and the Vicar of Madrid would think of such lewd humor.
“How is it done?” she asked Teoda. “What bit of stagecraft is this?”
Teoda shook her head. She was backing away from the stage. “This is no illusion. Something’s wrong.”
“Is it part of the trial?” Gracia asked.
The shadows of the puppets were lengthening now, their shapes changing. The queen’s head was too long, her arms too thin. They ended in
claws. One of them reached out and slashed at the Elizabeth marionette. The body tore and Luzia heard a cry from behind the black batting as the puppeteer dropped the marionette’s strings.
The shadow shape behind John Dee was hairy and hunching, two horns protruding from its shadow head, a tail lashing the air, a massive phallus protruding from between its thighs. It leapt onto the Dee puppet’s shoulders, strangling it as the crowd shrieked and rose from their chairs, stumbling backward.
“It’s a test!” cried Fortún. “It must be a test!”
The shadow queen was on her knees and the shadow dragon was behind her, mounting her. On the dais, the vicar and his holy men rose, seemingly as one, but they didn’t take up their crosses or pray; they ran, fleeing down the steps into the gardens.
“The devil is here!” cried Gracia.
“Run,” said Luzia, grabbing her arm.
But the demon shadow was the size of a cat on its hind legs now and it leapt off the stage. Gracia screamed and it lunged for her, crawling up her skirts.
Without thinking Luzia grabbed for it. But when her hands brushed its body, she hissed in revulsion. It had no real form and yet it filled her with disgust. She forced herself to reach for it again and seized its wriggling body. It squirmed in her hands, hairy and shrieking, and she hurled it as far as she could, desperate to be rid of the crawling, slippery loathing that filled her.
Luzia lurched away from the stage, searching for some kind of help, but the world around her had dissolved into nightmare. She couldn’t see Fortún or Teoda or Santángel. People were screaming and knocking over their chairs, running for the gravel path or back to the palace. The torches had toppled and the tented dais had caught fire. She heard the pounding of
hoofbeats and saw guards on horseback streaming into the garden.
“It’s real,” Gracia said, tears streaming down her face. Her eyes were wide as moons, her whole body shaking. “It’s real.”
Luzia wiped her hands on her skirts and hauled Gracia to her feet. “Run, Gracia! Come on, you gorgeous lump, I can’t carry you!”
They stumbled toward the palace. Surely there had to be safety there.
Light. Order. Sense. Everywhere she looked she saw only smoke and fire, people shouting in fear.
“Why did no one tell me?” Gracia wept.
“You thought we were all pretending?” Luzia couldn’t quite believe it. “You thought we were all frauds.”
“Of course I did!”
“But you couldn’t have hoped to win!”
“I didn’t come here to win!” Gracia bellowed. “I came here to find a husband!”
If Luzia hadn’t been so terrified, she would have laughed. “There!” She pulled Gracia toward the doors that led to the ballroom. Someone had gotten them open.
Luzia lost her footing, her legs tangling in her skirts. Gracia turned to help her, then screamed, her face contorted in alarm. Luzia felt something crawling up her back.
She reached over her shoulder and struggled not to retch as her hands made contact with something shivering and vile. But she couldn’t get purchase. Its claws were in her hair, digging into her scalp.
She fell to her knees and then she was on the ground, as the thing on top of her pressed her face into the muck. She could feel the weight of it on her ribs, her neck, impossibly heavy, shoving her down, crushing her ribs.
Hell had come for her, and her mind was too full of fear to find words of salvation. All she could think of was the Ave Maria. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
She felt herself yanked upward, saw sky and branches, then nothing but the ground racing by beneath her. She let out a grunt as her hip took the brunt of a saddle’s pommel.
“Hold on,” said Santángel, and then they were galloping through the gardens.
She thought they might just keep riding, past the hedges, past the gates, past Madrid.
But then Santángel wheeled his horse around. “You must stop them or they will only grow larger and stronger. They’ll enter the palace.”
“I don’t know how!” she cried.
“You do. You know you do. What do shadows need to thrive?” Light. The very light she’d been running toward like a fool.
Santángel’s horse thundered toward the stage, and in the flames of the overturned torches, Luzia saw the shadow queen and her dragon, the demon
that had been John Dee. They were larger now, taller than men, looming over the guards that tried to skewer them.
Luzia didn’t want to speak the words. She knew what would come next. “You must,” said Santángel.
She didn’t bother to shape the phrase in her mind or to try to disguise it. She drew in a long breath, and she let the words sing free. “En lo eskuro, es todo uno.”
The fires collapsed into ash as if doused by a great wave, the lanterns, every glowing window of the palace. There was only black night.
The words echoed in Luzia’s ears. In the darkness, all is one.
