The Burning (28 page)

When the signal was given, a man hurried to the side of the stage. Even as he translated, he could see nothing but the Englishman’s face and feel nothing but the fear jumping in his guts. The scarf round his neck felt like a noose, as though the embroidered devils on his jacket were digging their nails deep into his skin.

“Tonight the streets will fill with those keen to remember a man they call a saint.” The Englishman’s voice was low, but it reached the back of the room easily. “A man who was hunted and who died in terrible agony. Why was he hunted?” He waited, let the question hang, then drift away on the woodsmoke. “They would have us believe that he had a different faith; a faith that would not be tolerated. They would have us believe that he died for freedom, or for truth, or so that others could follow and not be hunted as he had been. These are
lies
.” He paused again, letting the man finish translating.

“The people on the streets tonight will celebrate this man’s memory, but I will be celebrating for an altogether more noble reason. I will be celebrating his death. Yes, he was different. Yes, he had different beliefs. And your ancestors were right to hunt him down and destroy him before
those beliefs could spread. Because they were not
Earthly
beliefs…

“Do we welcome poison? Do we embrace a deadly virus?” The Englishman stared from face to face, his passion intensifying as he saw the reaction he was looking for begin to spread throughout the room. “No. We isolate it and we wipe it out. It is not wrong to protect yourself, to protect what is yours and what you wish to leave behind for generations yet to come. That was the right thing to do five hundred years ago, when the outsider they now call Saint Rafael came to your city, and it is the right thing to do now.

“And as the descendants of those who acted as they did all those centuries ago, you must do the same thing now, the
right
thing, because
his
descendants are among us.
Here. Tonight
…”

Voices began to speak up in the crowd,
encouraging
voices, and the Englishman’s voice rose up above them. “I don’t need to tell you what you have to do. Your ancestors felt it in their blood and so will you. It is an instinct for survival, plain and simple, and it has been bred into all of us. Believe what I tell you and you will be safe. Your city will be safe. Your children will be safe. I have only one question to ask you…

“Are you ready to follow your blood?” He stared out, turning his face – such as it was – towards every other and asked the question again.

“Are you ready to follow your blood?”

It was as though a switch had been thrown suddenly and a current passed between the men in the crowd. The Englishman watched, smiling as best he could, as they came towards him. A mass of bright yellow streaked with crimson; the bones and beasts and devils dancing as they surged forward.

He watched as each man stooped down at the foot of the stage to collect a firebrand wrapped in petrol-soaked rags. Each man walked past him with a look of understanding and gratitude for the valuable guidance they had been given.

He saw ferocity and commitment in every step of every soldier in his perfect little army.

He saw the blood beating in every face – every one lit up as each man passed his torch through the flames of the open fire.

T
he night buzzed with the chatter of thousands of voices as the population of Seville poured out of restaurants, bars and cafes and into the square. Ropes of decorative lights were lit up like a million fireflies and strands of fringed paper-chains rustled in the breeze.

The procession was forming on the far side, near the church. The parade would take its course round the plaza and through the surrounding streets, ending up where a huge bonfire had been set, at the very point in the square where the saint was thought to have been burned.

Horsemen in tight-fitting suits adjusted their wide, black sombreros and tugged at reins, bringing their dappled, grey stallions into line. Behind them, gypsy ladies in frothy flamenco dresses sat side-saddle on less thoroughbred horses, their manes braided and their coats polished and glossy. Fifty or more flamenco guitarists strummed and tuned their instruments, while a marching band of bugles and drums formed into ranks behind the religious element of
the parade: the priests, monks, altar boys and the choir.

Behind the organized part of the procession, clubs, societies, religious groups and members of the general public turned up in traditional costume. Boys were decked out as bullfighters, little girls marched in gypsy costumes, or in white lace, like tiny brides. Marshalling the parade, the members of Los Hermanos de las Llamas, the Brotherhood of the Flames, were out in force, their yellow and red embroidered jackets bright yet sinister in the light of their flaming torches.

Rachel checked her watch. 11.35. “I thought the parade started at 11.30?”

“The Spanish are not robots.” Inez chuckled, clacking the castanets she held in her hand.

“Nothing runs on time here,” Carmen confirmed, fanning herself.

As if to contradict the Spanish girls, a bugle sounded a fanfare and Rachel felt her stomach fizz with the collective excitement of the square as it rose to fever pitch. Rachel looked at Carmen and Inez. She thought they looked wonderful with their jet-black hair scraped back from their faces into tight buns. The tortoiseshell combs that held their hair in place stuck up from their heads like ornamental crests and the figure-hugging, polka-dot dresses fell in cascades and ruffles to their high-heeled black tap shoes.

Then Rachel looked down at herself. The girls had done their best to pour her into a blue version of the red dresses
they wore, but her athletic, American figure had fought against it; angular and awkward. Her chestnut curls were rebelling against being tied back. She thought she looked a mess, and she had never worn high heels in her life! At least the little twins look cute, Rachel thought. She looked down at Duncan in his devil costume, his red-painted face unrecognizable, and Morag, sweet in an angel outfit, with silvery wings and a little halo.

Gabriel had told them to keep close but to blend in with the crowd. Inez and Carmen had done a good job. If only Gabriel had told her where he and Adam were going. But he wouldn’t, and it was making her anxious.

The procession started to move. Bugles and drums squawked and thundered, whistles blew, and people started to cheer as horses clattered and whinnied. Dotted along the line, the Brotherhood of the Flames, their red kerchiefs now concealing their faces and their refuelled torches burning brightly, started a slow chant in an ancient tongue.

Rachel felt a force moving through her; a chill from across the ages. She began to get a sense of how the saint must have felt…

At the front, the priest had blessed the wooden effigy from the church. It now stood, garlanded with flowers, on a wooden platform carried shoulder high by a group of monks in white robes. On a satin cushion, inside a glass case at the saint’s feet, sat what at first looked like a gnarled and blackened piece of wood. Those close enough to get a better look
could see that the twigs which twisted from the stump were topped by brown fingernails.

It was the hand of San Rafael.

The priest chanted an incantation, sprinkled the group with holy water and led the line forward. An altar boy swung a perforated brass ball full of burning incense, shrouding them in wreaths of fragrant smoke. The drums kept a slow marching beat, and the guitars strummed in unison, joined by straining voices, bugles, castanets and the rhythm of hundreds of dancing shoes clacking across the cobbles.

The people watching on either side of the parade sang, shouted blessings and crossed themselves. They threw handfuls of petals at the participants as they crossed the square towards the symbolic pyre of wood that would be set alight at midnight in memory of the saint.

And then the procession stopped.

As the parade was about to peel off into the street running out of the square, a boy stepped in front of the priest. The priest stopped dead and the procession juddered to a halt behind him, the music dying as bugler bumped into drummer into guitarist. As the music stopped, the chanting faded too, then the chatter, until the square fell silent.

The priest looked into the boy’s eyes and shuddered. This was no youth trying to disrupt a tradition as an act of casual vandalism. This was a boy with a mission. The priest looked into the slanting green eyes and recognized something.

“Move, will you? What do you want?”

The boy held out a hand in front of him.

“What do you want?” the priest repeated. Members of the Brotherhood began to move forward and form a semicircle round the boy, the flames from their torches glittering in his eyes.

“What is my name?” Gabriel said.

“I don’t know!” the priest shouted back. “Now get out of the way.” He waved his arm, but it was clear that something was preventing him from actually moving forward.

“Tell. Me. My. Name!” Gabriel yelled.

The yellow-shirted men began to close in on him and a murmur went up from the crowd as a sense that something was about to happen filtered back through the ranks: the kind of murmur that could infect a crowd and turn it into a mob.

Gabriel opened his mouth. A noise came from him, high pitched at first – audible – but then growing higher and higher until it was not a noise but a searing vibration that hurt people’s ears. They could feel it in their hearts; it shook their lungs and made it hard to breathe. It gnawed at their stomachs. People held their heads, put their fingers in their ears or clutched their ribs. Light bulbs in the garlands above began to pop and shower the crowd with sparks and puffs of powdered glass.

“Tell me my name!”
Gabriel’s voice boomed across the square, hitting the priest like a hurricane, blowing his smooth hair across his face and forcing him to his knees.
The priest clutched his head and his voice came out as a dry croak that only Gabriel could hear.

“Are … you …
Rafael
?”

It was the same question the priest’s ancestor had asked centuries before, as he had ordered the executioner to light the pyre.

Gabriel nodded.

As one, all the lights in the square exploded. Women wailed and children screamed as the frequency Gabriel was creating became unbearable. Then the cortège from the church began to cry out as the wooden saint started to smoulder.

Smoke poured from the artificial, gilded fire carved into his robe, and then the saint burst into flames. The pall-bearers struggled to keep the statue upright, the heat of the flames scorching their hair and faces. Gabriel ran forwards and, as he did so, the case holding the relic shattered, sending shards of glass, glittering with the golden light of the fire, into the night sky. The priest screamed as Gabriel grabbed the relic from the box, barging into and unbalancing the pall-bearers, who, finally giving in to the heat, allowed the flaming wooden saint to tumble to the ground.

A gasp went up from the crowd, now released from the agony Gabriel had created to subdue them. The pall-bearers tried to rescue the statue, covering it with their robes. Riders struggled to get horses back under control and mothers tried to calm crying children. At the head
of the procession – while most of the crowd were frightened of going near him – the men in yellow closed in on Gabriel, fire in their eyes and hatred in their hearts.

Out of the shadows, another boy suddenly appeared. He ran, leaping across the street, and burst through the Brotherhood’s line, pushing past Gabriel, before tearing across the square in the opposite direction and off into the darkness.

Adam had played his part well. The ancient relic was tucked safely beneath his jacket.

The men in yellow dived on Gabriel, throwing heavy punches and flashing blades before realizing, seconds later, that the strange boy had slipped from their grasp. From ten metres away, near the entrance to the church, Gabriel gave them a shrill whistle and waved to get their attention, and moments later they were after him again.

Immune from the noise that Gabriel had used to control the crowd, Rachel, the Spanish girls, Duncan and Morag had only been vaguely aware of what was going on. But whatever the commotion, Rachel had been sure it was Gabriel’s doing. Whenever they were supposed to be keeping a low profile, something like this happened. It was as if he had no concern for their safety. They had seen and heard the screams and pandemonium and were aware of the fire at the front of the parade, some thirty metres ahead of them, through the crowds.

Now, another sound in her head was bothering Rachel. She was getting a terrible feeling of rising panic from Adam; a feeling she knew she could not ignore.

“I need to find my brother,” she said to Inez and Carmen. She looked at her watch. 11.50. They had twenty-five minutes. “Listen,” she said. “Could you guys take Duncan and Morag to the tower? I’ll meet you there in twenty-five minutes.”

The Spanish girls nodded, sensing Rachel’s concern, and ushered the little twins away, blending instantly into the scattering crowd.