It all began with a rumor: an Indian girl who sang with the voice of an angel. A tiny girl, perhaps only nine years old. No one believed it at first, but the rumor persisted. Finally one day a runner arrived bringing news... And so the journey of th...
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The Cantora
♫The Native Singer of Colonial Brazil ♫
(Book II of The Cantora Series)
The Cantora
Standing alone on her balcony above the abbey's courtyard, a nun stares at the workers finishing the construction below. Bathed in the yellow light of the late afternoon sun, two structures extend their grim silhouettes across the rough cobblestones, a gallows where she will die in the morning, and a burning stake for her ward, the little girl known as The Cantora.
One of the workers notices the nun and calls to his fellows. At the same time he makes a circling motion around his neck and jerks an imaginary rope upwards, lolling his head to one side. The others laugh. She looks away from this familiar taunt as her thoughts turn to the child. What must it be for Cantora imprisoned two stories below in a cell where no light enters? The little girl has never known such cruelty in her short nine years on this earth. And now before morning prayers we are to die. She considers further, knowing that life without this child is truly no life at all. If I die to save her, so it will be.
The nun goes to her desk, retrieves her journal, and places it on the wide wall of the balcony. The fading sun now partly hidden behind the jungle canopy at the west edge of the settlement briefly illuminates her features revealing a pleasant oval face with a fringe of black hair ringing the wimple at her forehead and temples. Her light blue habit—that of the Portuguese Coimbran Order—compliments the sister's fair skin and penetrating brown eyes. She is a woman who often shows a generous and welcoming smile, but someone equally capable of a contentious, censoring frown.
As she routinely does before Vespers, the sister pulls a stool forward, opens the journal and begins to record the day's events, her Hebrew script flowing evenly across the page.
I write of this, perhaps my last evening on earth if I fail to save the child. Then tomorrow I will inhabit Heaven with Cantora, we two condemned by the very Church I serve and she so wished to serve. Surely she will serenade at the throne of God, and I will swell with pride.
Are these Catholics fools? Secretly, I've always suspected thus. There is no one here, not even Bishop Damião or any of the wretched tribunal who can read my Hebrew. They may send my journal to Lisbon, but I do not care. Tomorrow I will no longer need it.
She gazes to the east, across the courtyard wall to the bay and the docks usually littered with people waiting in turn like insects to deposit their shards of wood bound for Europe. But today, for the first time in her memory, the harbor is deserted. There is smoke too, smoke rising from biers in the death yard and the remains of native huts burned in the uprising. The nun wonders, what is the significance of two more deaths after so much killing? She sighs and turns to a journal entry recorded the evening following her first visit to the docks, an entry nearly two years old, written shortly after her arrival in the New World.
