The Religion by Tim Willocks Read Free Book Online Page A

smoked around her horse's knees and the first cherry trees were in bloom. The mist concealed Amparo from view and their paths might never have crossed if Carla hadn't heard a high, sweet voice piping like the sorrow of angels across the landscape. The voice sang in some dialect of Castilian and to a melody of its own devising which carried the wing-beat of death. Whatever its meaning, the song's otherworldly beauty made Carla draw in her mount.
    She discovered Amparo in a break of willows. Had she not already known from the voice, she'd have been hard-pressed to say whether what lay curled around a trunk, half buried under a mass of rotting leaves against the frost, was female or male, or whether it was human at all but a woodland creature of fantastic origin. Apart from a filthy pelt drawn about her throat, and the remains of a pair of woolen hose, she was naked. Her feet were large for her build, and blue, as were the hands clasped together between her breasts. Both of her arms, from shoulders to wrists, were blemished by livid bruises, as was the pale, translucent skin stretched across her rib cage. Her hair was raven black and coarselychopped and pasted to her skull by clots of mud. Her lips were purple with cold. Her eyes of different hues showed no sign of anguish or self-pity, and in not so doing seemed to Carla more piteous than any she'd ever seen before. Amparo would never say how she came to be in the forest, starved and filthy and frozen near to death. She would rarely speak of any past at all, and only then to answer yes or no to Carla's guesses. But later that day, when she submitted to Carla bathing her with hot water, there was blood and slime clotted around her pudenda, and some of the marks on her body were from human teeth.
    On this first encounter, Amparo would not look her in the eye. It would take weeks before she would do so and it remained an honor seldom granted anyone else. When Carla dismounted and took her by the arm, Amparo screamed so piercingly that Carla's horse almost broke free of its tether. The animal's distress brought Amparo springing to her feet. She comforted the horse and murmured softly in its ear, quite unconcerned for her own pathetic estate. When Carla wrapped her cloak around Amparo's shoulders, Amparo didn't demur, and though she declined the saddle, she was content to walk alongside holding the bridle. Thus, seven years ago, had Amparo arrived at Carla's household, accompanying her mistress home with the long green cloak trailing behind her, like some barefoot and ragamuffin page in a tale untold.
    The members of Carla's household, her priest, her very few acquaintances in the village, and those local gossips whose numbers were far greater, were unanimous in thinking Carla ill-advised-indeed, as mad as the girl herself-in taking the waif to her bosom. Amparo, then hardly in her teens, was prone to violent outbursts at obscure provocations and to spending hours in conversation with the horses and dogs, whom she serenaded with a passion in her silvery voice. She refused to eat meat or fowl of any kind, sometimes disdained fresh bread, and on her preferred diet of nuts, wild berries, and raw vegetables never added an ounce to the emaciated condition in which she'd been found. Her refusal to look the priest in the eye, and the fact that her own were of different colors, were sure signs, it was commonly agreed, of diabolic leanings.
    Carla stood by the girl through tantrum and trance, through the sudden disappearances that could last for days, through the social humiliations and offers of exorcism, and through Amparo's apparent inability to reciprocate her affection. She seemed insensible to the feelings of others;or if not insensible, entirely indifferent. Yet in the loyalty Amparo developed toward her, in her sharing of the discovery of her vision glass and the revelations it provoked, in her struggle to learn basic etiquette and the tenets of proper bearing, and most of all in the