two sparrows

Even educated laymen don’t think any more about daemonology than absolutely necessarily, and even then in the same halfway-pagan terms they inherited from nurses and schoolmates — but for men of their Society no human behavior is outside the scope of their concern. Their end is to know reality — the reality of husbands and wives, parents and their children, the anterior, the personal, the humane principles. Among these principles are the constitution of the soul and laws governing the appearances of daemons — governing mechanisms as steady and knowable as the motion of the planets or the laws of mathematics.

They are forerunners of the science of souls. They’ve left their families behind long ago, so their principal laboratory for the study of daemonic behavior in is amongst themselves. In a Lisbon schoolroom, each scholastic with his daemon twining around him or waiting patiently a few paces behind — Rodrigues’ daemon is a reddish-brown hare, she’s sleek and attentive and prone to rising up on her back legs when something she hears in the classroom catches her interest. Or walking in the streets — Garrpe with the black shape of Sixta circling overhead, conversing soberly on the great work ahead of them. Or squinting in full sun, watching for the tall figure of Ferreira moving up and down in the courtyard with the gray she-wolf following close behind him — the shape of her a familiar addition to his silhouette, lean and shining-eyed.

(The next time he’ll see his teacher, the both of them will be faded into shades of gray — Eleutera’s muzzle will be whitened and ragged, and she’ll her yellowy eyes at him when Ferreira can only pretend to be reasonable. The she-wolf will be gaunt and withdrawn, shaken, warped at the edges — like a child’s daemon testing out a new form, as if she’d never settled at all. Ferreira will hardly look at him.)

*

They’ve come halfway around the world for this work of theirs, and Rodrigues has been afforded much opportunity for observation along the way — he’s watched sailors’ daemons sporting with the dolphins that flanked their passage to Macau, and woven his way through streets broad and narrow packed with every imaginable kind of life, sailors and gamblers elbow to elbow between scarlet-plumed birds and jostling boars and little ruddy deer with forkless horns. The filthy travelers on this road are in single file, flanked by their spirits — and none of them are especially lovely or lively. Ordinary animals with ordinary names, and all of them eerily quiet — they speak only with their masters and seldom even acknowledge one another. Among them are many birds and many housecats and other animals Rodrigues only half-recognizes, green snakes twining around necks, surly silent animals and vermin. He struggles to commit to memory what he sees, recalling his lessons instead with a bitter kind of longing.

These are the men he’s here to serve, and the spirits that accompany them are useful, busy, diligent — but not noble, except in their faith. None of them are recognizable for their outward dignity — even the bird of prey that had startled the two priests in their hiding place belonged to one of these men. Had he expected lambs and doves? Some other sign to distinguish their spirits from the same countrymen they call gentiles? Christ had a dove, and the Virgin had a lion, or a white cat, or a stork. Any one of them. That’s the least of Rodrigues’ concerns now.

He can admit at least that these spirits are well-adapted to a forbidding country — clawing through the high grass, swooping over the sea cliffs. There’s no fundamentally different quality in them or in their behavior except the shapes they’ve taken.

Is there something he isn’t seeing? He prays for discernment, and watches his step.

Their guide’s daemon is a red-faced gray ape, who watches the two of them coolly whenever the chance presents itself, resting on her haunches. Hollow-cheeked and severe, unsettlingly human — the man who’d made their introduction in Macao seemed to find it funny, man and ape slumping side by side in his backroom looking equally dejected and equally filthy. Rodrigues had been startled to hear the answers to their questioning come from the ape’s mouth — likely because the man himself was too drunk to speak. She’s a spirit, and her home is nowhere — her home is wherever her master is, but the stamp of their shared homeland is still on her. Her master sweats and shuffles and refuses eye contact, but the ape stares back at human inquirers with strange brazenness.

He’ll see the two of them side by side, her shambling or capering while he walks familiar paths, or Kichijiro at rest with his head in his hands and the ape leaning her weight on him, running her stubby fingers through her fur like an old scholar stroking his beard. There’s something uncanny about a daemon that walks like a man might, hunched and leisurely — more debased and debasing than spirits who crawl on the ground or scavenge in the dust. But unlike her master, the gray ape is even graceful, in some attitudes — loping alongside him in the tall grass, smoke-colored fur standing out like a beacon in the green dark. One day he stumbles out and sees Kichijiro with his legs drawn up to his chest and his thin bare feet crossed in front of him, and the gray ape leaning against his back, working her fingers through his long dark hair — “for lice,” she says, in a raw contralto voice that comes as such a surprise that Rodrigues stumbles back on his heels.

Kichijiro’s face is downcast, hard and smooth, completely guileless. He meets Rodrigues’ eyes again with something like knowledge.

*

In captivity Fructuosa huddles listlessly against her master’s body, bunched up into a protective bundle and no longer sleek — which must suit him now, shaggy and sunburned as he is. They are both caged. Her dark glittering eyes are still shrewd, but it’s as if she has nothing to say to him, nothing she could possibly say. His guest’s daemon is something Rodrigues doesn’t recognize, a handsome animal something midway between dog and bear — the interpreter gives her flank a pat and she twists her thick-ruffed neck to look up at him with something like complicity.

The interpreter’s daemon has keen black eyes and golden fur, and the heat’s made her drowsy. She noses at Fructuosa periodically, but with no particular interest.

“You’re wanted,” he says, tugging on Rodrigues’ bonds with his other hand. Fructuosa shrinks from her warily, thumping with indignation — the dog sneers with furrowed brow and rises up on her front legs.

“Though I can’t imagine for what,” the sandy-colored bitch says. The interpreter shoos his daemon out the narrow door, and she shoots him a resentful look before padding off. Rodrigues straightens up with aching joints and Fructuosa disentangles herself from him, her nails snagging in his clothing.

“Where are you taking me?”

“It doesn’t matter. It won’t be a long journey, and you won’t have to trouble yourself with walking. Only bring her with you,” the interpreter says. His hand closes around the sleek brown body of Rodrigues’ daemon and Rodrigues feels his heart stop — he can feel her heart lurch and batter with wordless animal fear, he can watch her body wheel and claw at the air in resistance to his fist in the scruff of her neck.

Fructuosa screams, thin and sharp. The pain is like someone gripping Rodrigues by the heart and squeezing. The interpreter scrapes a knuckle down her belly, tracking a line like a hunting knife — his scholarly hand dangling her in the air with her legs wheeling, her frail fine-boned body thrashing like a fish. “She could escape between the bars, if it weren’t for you. How far could she run, do you think? Until she couldn’t any more.”

Rodrigues doubles up on himself — when the other man tosses his daemon to the ground like discarded trash it’s as if he can breathe again, sucking deep painful breaths and hugging his arms to his chest. He’ll follow where he’s told to go.

It’s happening again, this repetitive ordeal — and he can’t steel himself against it any more, every time it’s as gutting as the very first time. But the look on his face had been more poisonous than hate — absolute disinterest.

*

The inquisitor’s own daemon is a fat green partridge with tail-feathers trailing in the dirt, alternating between chattering on the doorstep with a guardsman’s sleek-bellied vixen and scratching up dust out in the courtyard — it takes Rodrigues a moment to recognize it speaks in a man’s voice. That had been its own shock in the course of their impromptu field research in daemonology — men and women with daemons of their own sex, completely unconcerned with that fact. The woman who’d begged Garrpe to let her make confession had a little white hen for her daemon; the crew of the ship who’d brought them to shore here had drakes and tomcats —

“Your Xavier had strong opinions concerning spirits,” Inoue calls out, conversational. Insects are buzzing in the air. Rodrigues tries to fix his eyes on the welts on his own unbound wrists; anything not to look at the inquisitor’s daemon enjoying itself. “He wanted to know what to call them.”

Rodrigues’ vision is blurring with sleeplessness; he can feel a smile creeping across his face like a blackfly. “He did.”

The confirmation seems to amuse him. “What did your order agree on?”

No doubt he’d hunted for the right word, struggled with inappropriate connotations and unfamiliar etymologies — monsters, spirits, ghosts, lesser gods, gênio, genius, daemon, kami. He’d pulled away from the subject, realizing his own grasp of the language was inadequate and that his translators didn’t know any better than he did what to call their companion spirits to distinguish them from local divinities. Whether these spirits were the soul itself or a representation of it, or something else entirely, some third thing unknown to anyone.

For the first time they were passing through a landscape on fire with spirits — spirits in temples, spirits by waysides, spirits in lonely places. He must — Rodrigues sees it clearly now, clearer than he ever could before — he must have been deeply troubled by it all. The landscape and its spirits were fundamentally hostile, fundamentally irreconcilable — you couldn’t call the spirits of the wilderness by Latin names any more than you could catch a dying man’s daemon in a cage. The spirits themselves must mean something. This whole ordeal has to mean something, at the end of it. Rodrigues just doesn’t know what.

“They never did. They never did agree.” Rodrigues thinks of the haunted gray ape.

*

San’emon’s wife seems at first to have no daemon at all — it’s one of the first things Rodrigues notices and she must see it on his face, what he’s searching for and not finding. Like the entire process, the first-time introduction of secondhand spouses, it has an air of farce. He knows next to nothing about her — that she’s a respectable woman with a growing son, that her husband suffered before he died, that she observes all the rites of local religion but that her husband narrowly avoided becoming a Christian martyr, that he died for politics instead, the brittle framework under the Church’s first great promise here in Japan. Other people must think it’s funny, or at least fitting, that her second husband is a fallen priest.

She wants nothing from him — to have a husband, and nothing else. What does she need from him?

Only later, much later, does her daemon emerge — a broad freckled moth with long antennae poking its head out of her collar or trailing its fringes like eyelashes against her sleeve. Rodrigues has never heard him speak — fluttering against the backs of his wife’s fingers, or whispering in her ear in a tone that’s barely above a dull rasp.

Okikaze, she says, when she catches him looking — like the poet. As if that’s imperative for Rodrigues’ understanding.

One late night Okikaze flutters onto Rodrigues’ sleeve, a fawn-colored blotch against the spreading blue — their obligations as uneasy hosts have lasted late into the evening, the happy couple showing off for distant relatives of the original master of the house, and his eyes ache. For a moment it seems like another defect of the imagination, something that can’t possibly be there. Fructuosa is bunched up in front of his knees, silent and wary but as much on display as her master is. She can sense the pity radiating off Rodrigues’ wife like heat from a flame — and even in a sidelong look Rodrigues can see it in her face. She’s older than he is, pretty and collected, the widow of a better man than Rodrigues — she must know married life well, husbands and wives, good housekeeping and all the events of the yearly calendar. Did she ever hold her first husband’s daemon in her arms, or lay a friendly hand on it?

The weight of her daemon against his wrist is tentative and fluttering — as if their hands had brushed for a moment without meaning to, or like fingertips touching through prison bars. A gesture of solidarity between two prisoners. If anyone else notices, no one remarks on it. They’re man and wife now.

They pray together that night, deep into the morning — like the last two survivors of a shipwreck, like desperate seekers in the catacombs, a reformed barbarian and a lady, locked up together in the middle of luxury.

He doesn’t feel anything for her and that’s a mercy — he doesn’t come to hate her, and he’ll never really be a husband to her, not as long as any part of him remembers what it was to be a priest. (And in her eyes, he is a priest — the first priest she’s seen in a decade.) As long as they’re here neither of them will want for anything except their freedom — she’s as much a prisoner as he is, barred from returning to her own family and chained in wedlock to a gutless foreign stranger. A husband is a punishment for her as much as a wife is for Rodrigues, even one she’s under no obligation to surrender herself to. A loveless marriage and a permanent reminder, or two allies together in a lonely place, a covered flame and the faint sound of wings.

Studying his own sleeve in the light of morning Rodrigues spots a silvery powdering of moth scales, left behind.

 

*

The storm outside is raging, the sun snuffs out early and the air is pregnant with cold foreboding. In his nightmares he still sees the face of Christ, the holy dove as still and calm as a graven image. When he wakes from feverish sleep, Kichijiro is still with him. His hand is on his sleeve.

Kichijiro is dressed for sleep, with a lamp in his hand; in the bloom of reddish light his face is drawn and his chin prickles with new-grown beard. Rodrigues rubs his face in both hands and tries to stop his teeth from chattering.

“What is it?” His language comes stumblingly at first, almost not at all — casting around in the dark room for some sign of trouble. But they’re alone, and the only sound is the continued rattle of rainfall.

“You came in from the storm,” Kichijiro says. “No one knew where you’d went. So they sent me. Better me than a guardsman.”

Sent him with a lamp burning and a bundle of dry clothes under his arm? Kichijiro sets both aside, and Rodrigues tries to sit up, still shivering. They’ve met here before in this utterly innocuous room, with its absence of hiding places. There are no reassuring words etched in the corners or last testaments stashed under the floorboards — nothing but the two of them in their loneliness, marked by the things they’ve disavowed.

They aren’t supposed to be here, in this decaying room with its loose screens and decaying timbers. The two of them hang there face to face — Kichijiro goes to brush back the priest’s hair from his cheek with one uncertain hand and Rodrigues catches both hands in his, horrified of being touched.

He’s grown soft — he’s gone from steeling himself against the elements and every wild thing to shivering in a cold room, knotted up in his damp clothes but he still sleeps on silk-edged bedding and ties up his hair.

Kichijiro strips his wet coat from his shoulders, tugging him in close. His face is wet with tears, twisted with dark humor and severe, and Rodrigues’ own eyes are stinging.

They lie there for a while together. Rodrigues tells him why he’d braved the storm in the first place, what he’d been hoping for. And in turn Kichijiro tells him — or she tells him, the snowy ape in her raw urgent contralto voice and in her own language, not her name but her history. She’d been something else before, she’d been a snake and a spotted cat and then a bird, he’d been happy then — she’d settled as a white-bellied swallow and lived that way for years on years, one bird in a flock. His sisters had doves and cranes — the sisters he’d watched burn.

She’d been one thing then and now she’s another — it was worse than being dead, being changed. She’ll never fly again; she’ll limp along on the ground and be grateful for it.

It’s the other half of what Kichijiro had confessed before, the smell of burnt flesh hangs around around it too — but it’s a complete confession in itself, one he hasn’t heard before. He reaches for her and she doesn’t lurch back or flash her yellow teeth at him, she meets his hand midway in the air and presses her muzzle into his palm — his fingers on her hairy brow like a small and careful blessing. Her fur is extraordinarily soft, and the sensation is startling.

It doesn’t feel like an intrusion, and she doesn’t shrink from him — one hand is on her head and the other is on Kichijiro’s chest, feeling in the folds of his shirt for his heartbeat. He knows what it means now when believers watch his face — he shows things too easily, and they’re looking for those signs, for disgust or disappointment to flash across his features before he can stop them. They can watch his daemon stirring in his arms, watch her crow with anger or kick with relief. It’s not right. He has a responsibility

Afterward — after trampling the image of Christ he’d expected his own daemon to dwindle and die, had waited for it, had hoped for it. He had wanted — wanted — to be alone, without her scrutiny. But neither of them is alone now.

He can feel a heartbeat under his hand. Rodrigues’ eyes blur for a moment with salt tears; he blinks them clear again only with difficulty, and focuses on Kichijiro’s face, that hopeless hateful bruised face turned to him for absolution.

There are prayers without words. They are united in one plea.

In another decade or another country they could be here together without this pain — if he’d never been a priest they would never have met, and he can’t regret it, not even now. Fructuosa scrambles past them in their clinch. Rodrigues shuts his eyes, with the angry heat of his own tears on his cheeks. They are cast away together, their grief is bright-edged with joy. Fructuosa rubs against him with her white-grizzled snout, cautious at first and then emboldened — broad black-rimmed ears fanning back and velvet nose brushing his cheek.

Rodrigues rises up on his knees, with his arms wrapped around Kichijiro’s neck — fanning out his dark hair with his hands. Kichijiro leans into the touch with a pained smile. If he knew what to say to give him strength, he’d say it, but there’s nothing left to confess or advise. Their mouths meet once, then meet again.

Breathing kisses against his mouth, his jaw, the scars on his haggard face — the warmth of their bodies is fused together, in the surge of confused joy he can feel the rapid beat of a small stubborn heart and the slide of fur against his robes. His wild hare twining happily in the arms of Kichijiro’s gray ape, her strange inhuman hands supporting Fructuosa’s twitching hind legs, soothing her bunched fur down flat as they murmur to each other.

The two of them are tangled together like a pair of shipwrecked men. His own hands lock around Kichijiro’s wrists, and he doesn’t resist the contact, desperate and clumsy as it is — he lets himself be held, and Rodrigues upholds him with the weight of his body. Staying upright is no longer the problem, instead it’s remembering how not to melt away, sinking down into a single spirit. Touching and being touched, knowing and being known — like some lesser sacrament he doesn’t know the name of, here in the middle of the storm.