The juncture in Francis’s life arrived some ten years later. The plague wandered its way into their town and made a martyr of Father Guillaume, who Francis secretly wished was his father. Grief struck him like lightning, jaundiced him; hollowed him out like a river through the bedrock. There was no return to nobility after that, only the clergy: the fixture of his idyllic childhood.

  He was on the cusp of thirty-three when he arrived in the Far East, legs jellied from the endless journeys at sea. Alongside him was Father Phillip, a man who preferred the language of the locals and reduced himself to wordlessness around Francis. The men, brown-skinned and quick-witted, pointed somewhere inland at the great expanse of pale earth locked between grey skies. The priests rode on black donkeys and carried their bibles in cloth bags that slung over both sides of the saddles, gently thumping against the donkeys’ backs with every step. Some weeks later they arrived at a village. News travelled fast: the village chief, having gotten the letter days ahead of time, saw them and bellowed out a welcoming. He shook their hands, shifting his eyes between them like a nesting bird.

  The villagers gathered in the square. Most oversaw their presence with casual curiosity, the arrival only a facsimile of what they had heard all over the trade routes, what seemed almost overdue. By mere afternoon, the news relayed its way to the bedridden uncles and small children.

  By night, it reached Rui, who had avoided the crowd in favour of sitting in the field all day. She had been half-contemplating killing herself. Two meters of rope tucked in the mice-chipped corner of their barnyard, no date in mind – a tangible promise, nonetheless. If not dead, her father would sell her soon. Her age planted the mark, and the winter made sure of it when the frost choked out half their crops overnight and stunted the rest. In the yellow light of dinners, the lamp emanating so weakly with only a lick of oil left in the font, she could see her daddy growing tired, had thought he only needed to tolerate her until the men or the fever took her. She already held the reputation of a spinster, but was a woman nonetheless, and could fetch a price higher than the neighbor’s stud pig. The thought closed around her neck like a fist, and uprooted her from the smoke of the village, far into the blusterous open air of the fields.

  In the field, the sweet earth smell eased her throat open; let her breathe again. Dusk was carving across the sky, sifting through streaks of white cloud. She turned and headed home, slipped past Auntie Huang who clicked her tongue then gestured to the newcomers. The two small figures were right across the river, still talking to the chief. In the reddening light of sunset, they looked like canine teeth jutting out of the ground, a mouth closing around the whole bloodied sky.

  —

  The first real business for the priests to undertake turned out to be grisly. An early morning in late spring, Liu Ping unlocked their barn door to the sight of her son’s feet swaying above their bed of straw. She collapsed on the ground and howled until her husband came, who held her and shuddered, wretching himself into a belly ache. Francis pushed his way through the simmering crowd and gripped their hands.

  “You will see him again,” he began. “We’ll pray for him. We’ll pray for your family, too.”

  The husband looked up; his eyes soldered shut with tears. Francis’s pale, foreign face pressed close enough to anger him. “You’re not needed here,” he said.

  Francis nodded. “You can always come to me,” he whispered. “I’ll be there.”

  A day later, after the weeping, the mother came and knocked on the priests’ door. “I want you to explain what you meant by what you said.”

  He opened his leather-bound bible and read a passage to her, then another. By the time they finished talking, the sun was dipping past the burnt bronze sky, a gentle chill weaving its way across the room.

  She wanted to believe it. The force of wanting intoxicated her, had her light-headed the whole walk home. By the end of the week the couple convinced each other of a Christian burial. Both priests read at the service: Phillip in Mandarin, Francis in their native French. The parents, transfixed, left footprints so deep that the dusty soil pressed into something clay-like, yellow tiles split at the edges. Both would be baptized by in a month’s time.

  In Rui’s dreams, she’d see the son’s sweet breathless face, a ripple of bruises hooked around his neck like a collar. Then he’d pull her under. My wife, he’d say, you’ve come for me. She opened her mouth and swallowed earth, the soil and maggots, her father working the shovel. The boy smiled up at her, teeth bloody. I love you, he said. I love you; I love you—

  Rui blinked awake. Her limbs were calescent and leaden, the sweat on her back flashing cold as she rolled under the open air. Her father would not marry her to a dead man, she thought. Too little money, too little pride. She thought of the wildflowers nestling at the edge of their crops, the white bursts of stardust, and the leathery leaves with veins running deep from the stem. The image put air into her lungs, and she drifted into sleep again, easier this time.

  It was an uncharacteristically hot day, body heat clinging to her like gauze. At dinner her father leaned in close and peered into her face. “Did you know the Lius converted? I wonder if they still want a bride. The poor son,” he shook his head, “he would have wanted to be married.”

  “He killed himself,” Rui said.

  “Don’t you think his parents would have wanted to see him married?”

  “Maybe.”

  In the night, sleepless, she watched the moths quiver around the dying oil lamp. Outside the crickets were sizzling, and the sound sliced through the heat wave. A stray dog barked at a phantom prey, and a voice broke the skin of earth like sapling: I love you; I love you…

  Rui snuck out, half-drunken on shame, half-sobered by fear. She skidded down treacherous footpaths, skinny mud lines that twisted and dropped down in fits and starts, through the thorny tall grasses, not caring where she was going until she saw the gap in the trees ahead of her, the emptiness dipping down into the cemetery. Right in front was the boy’s grave, the mound of earth still freshly dark brown.

  It occurred to her then that her father could still kill her. Bitterness washed up her chest and cut at the base of her throat. She wanted to see if the boy was buried in wedding clothes. The sight swam up to her face, the two of them laid side by side. She clawed at the soil, starlight spilling into her mess. The grave yawned open, inchmeal, into a chasm. Then slowly she hit softness, the pink of flesh where a coffin should be: something feathered. She could not stop. She pried away clots of soil from the grave. A grotesque knot of torso, gleaming with streaks of blood and iridescence, a fractured tangle of feathers, and pallid bones that ran thick and tumorous into its spine. The face was lodged beneath the earth still, but the soil shifted and moved over the planes of its jaw: my wife—

  Rui woke up to dawn. Her forehead was wet. A bat was softly jostling its body into her window, the paper outlining its silhouette. She wanted to spit something out, held her hand up to her mouth, and saw black soil lining the beds of her fingernails.

  —

  Spring rolled into summer, brought forth dandelions and pear blossoms in full bloom, turned the riverbanks pink with blankets of newly dead flowers. The priests had dedicated themselves to the building of the new chapel and school. Every day, men paraded into the village, carrying carts of brick and mortar on mule-back. They kicked the dirt up into the air; the chapel perpetually suspended in yellow ash, mottling the once-white glare of daylight. Father Francis spent his afternoons preaching in the square. Some days, at dinner time, they’d knock on his door and ask for a piece of his mind on a philosophical dispute. Some days, he was led around by a worried local to see the mother’s persistent cough or the uncle’s diabetic foot, asked to pray on it for a little good luck. By then the plague had slid off the sad shrine of his soul like debris, and sickness had returned to its primordial beauty, encased in oil and writing. He enjoyed his work immensely, thought it was proof of his own righteousness.

  Increasingly, the villagers came to his door to confess their sins. Many stayed outside, unwilling to show their faces. Some came in, kneeling at his feet, asking for his forgiveness. There was petty theft, and gossip, and beatings, and rape. Men and women who scoffed at religion during the day came to him like scorned children and heaved up decade-long secrets. Always he promised them of the mercy of God. They brought food in return; thought he was a godly conduit like the Emperor or Bodhisattva. Their old gods sat polished and portly inside temples, with fruits left to rot in the lingering smoke of incense. They were no strangers to worship; Francis began to realise.

  Rui tapped on his door late one night. By then, the summer light stretched out forever like a strange, ossified purgatory. She hid at the side of the building with her back to the wall. Francis opened the door, saw nothing but the barren footpath and the lake-grey sky.

  “Hello?” he asked.

  “My father is trying to marry me off,” she said.

  Francis paused at the voice beyond the door before speaking again, staring straight ahead. “Do you want to be married?”

  “No,” Rui said. “But I can’t fight it.”

  He pondered this for a second. “I want to see you,” he said.

  Slowly she twisted her body and came around to the front door. A young girl with a round face and short figure, hair coiled into a knot. The priest lodged his body in between the doorway. Recognition was crawling up his nerves.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Eighteen,” Rui said, feeling that her age was a grievous matter.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Zhang Rui.”

  “Rui,” Francis said. “Your father has told me already.”

  She frowned. “What?”

  “I cannot divulge what was shared with me in confession.” He ruminated over the conversation. Prices and self-pity and jealousy — of not having a coveted daughter, of having all his sons die on him; his woman, too. Life laid bare to him as a desolate, losing war. He wanted God in his graces.

  “What does he plan to do?”

  He thought about how to answer her. “Have you ever been outside of this part of the country?”

  “He means to sell me faraway?”

  “I cannot answer that—”

  “You have to help me,” she interrupted, red in the face. “You’re meant to stop this.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  Francis chewed on the inside of his lip. He did not know what to do. Rui nodded, turned around, and left. At night she dreamt of the boy again, grabbing her under, no feathers anywhere. She was certain she had conjured the scene from her own imagination.

  —

  Francis stood outside Rui’s house for an hour before seeing her and her father, their slight figures heaving baskets of wild chives on their heads, the flaxen cords fraying at the edges. Will you eat with us? Would you come inside? The priest needed to talk to Rui alone. Old Zhang closed his mouth and felt disrespected, looked on at their distancing figures with skepticism.

  “When I was a child,” Francis began, “I was raised by the clergy. I was surrounded by men and women who had devoted themselves to God, sworn never to be married. I swore the same vow myself.”

  Rui tilted her head up at him. The afternoon sun pierced through the atmosphere like a knife; she had to squint at his head, half-shrouded by light. “Can I do the same?”

  “We can arrange that, I think,” Francis said.

  —

  She moved into the priests’ residence soon enough, facing little hassle except for her father grabbing Francis by his arm and whispering you’re an arrogant bastard into his ear the day she finally left. The priests called out her name one morning at mass; said that she felt a calling to God and was graciously supported by a magnanimous, poor, widowed father. Eyes swarmed the Zhang household, held him hostage: he could not leave a conversation without praising his devout Rui once or twice. Francis recalled Old Zhang’s tallowed sight, milky with gauze. He’d want revenge, he thought, and knew it to be the truth.

  He was teaching Rui to read. Like most peasants, she was illiterate in even her own language. But Francis did not deem Mandarin important, and thought he did her a favour by choosing Latin, its balletic vowels and gossamer-like consonants. He made her memorise the first line of the Nicene Creed. Rui repeated the sounds so often that it sounded more ambiance than language, like the whipping of river reeds under the wind.

  At mass, he made her stand up and recite the line to the rest of the attendees.

  “It is God who made this possible,” he told them. “It is God working through this girl.”

  The children, sitting cross-legged on the ground, gawked at Rui, astonished. She sat down and felt the gaze of the villagers burning into her back.

  She was getting used to it. Every morning they sat down and he read the bible to her, fiddling with the recurring words. Deum. Lumen. Verum. She was a slow learner, perplexed at the endeavor of pronouncing anything polysyllabic.

  “De-um,” Francis said. “Not Day-on, not Day-m.”

  “Deum,” Rui said.

  “Watch how my mouth moves,” he said. “My lips close at the last consonant.”

  She mirrored him as he mouthed the word.

  He shook his head. “Open your mouth wider at the first syllable. Hold it.”

  She stretched her mouth around the “De—” like a listless smile.

  The priest reached out and pushed her jaw down, his thumb on her bottom teeth, grazing her lip. His hand was so cold that the fingers on her chin almost stung, tender like scabbed new skin hours after he moved away.

  “This is how open the word should sound,” he said. “You understand?”

  Rui shut her mouth and closed her teeth together, then nodded.

  Francis got up and moved to his chest of drawers, got out and unfurled the letters they had gotten from other missionaries. He pushed them across Rui’s desk. They were curled at the edges, moth-bitten and yellowed. On the page, sinuous, undulating lines looped across in black ink.

  “I wanted to show you,” Francis said, “how these letters were written in French, Spanish, English and Portuguese.”

  She peeked at a page beneath the writing, a drawing slipping out in sight. “What’s this?”

  Francis pulled it out. An inked portrait of Mary and the angel Gabriel, him pleading to her, wings stretched skyward.

  Rui’s face went pale. She recognized those wings, those wide patches of feather, thickly layered like a raven’s. Only she had seen them white and greasy with bone marrow, laid in a boy’s shallow grave.

  “Who are they?” she asked.

  “That is Mary, the mother of Jesus, at the moment she was asked to conceive the child of God,” he answered. “The creature asking her is an angel, whose name is Gabriel.”

  “What’s an angel?”

  “A messenger of God,” he said. “It’s beautiful, is it not? The sacrifice she made?”

  She could not answer. She stared into the soft curves of Mary’s cheeks, her dark eyes upturned to the face of the angel. The black ink of the angel’s wings had bled into the coarse paper, ran thin like the bristles on an evergreen pine. Then she felt sickened, and moved away.

  The weeks fused into each other like viscera, business hemorrhaging into daybreak. Francis lost track of mornings talking with Rui and afternoons overseeing the chapel, dust collecting on the barren floorboards.

  He had not lived with women before. In his youth he grew up under the shimmer of Mother Mary, outlined with gold and crushed purple, the oils and egg yolks congealing under the hard air. Coarse brushstrokes weathered into cliffs and canyons, the paint rising where her robe meets her face, where her halo splits from the desolate ruins behind her figure. In church he saw the sisters at choir, harmonies lapping over each other like a retreating tide. He knew their innocent faces, milky-white, freckled like eggshells. In town, then at the ports, he saw women, in cotton bodices crosshatched with flowers and heavy gowns falling around their feet. They looked out of the balconies of brothels and the windows of horse-drawn carriages, their eyes grazing past Francis’s robes and cloak. Heat flushed down to the base of his neck. The understanding came to him: he could not be absolved from temptation. He peered into their faces and grasped at the meekness and the God-fearer in them. Faith was an olive branch. In faith, he was clean.

  But Rui knew nothing of sin, anyway. She came to him as a helpless maiden and grew to him like a disciple. He fell asleep to the procession of missionary work and woke to the impasse of her beliefs, her irreverence at all things sacred and her humility at work. He began to like the sounds of his words in her mouth. Rui talked like all the peasants, fast and harsh, hardened the words up like chewed meat. He wrote to his brothers in the clergy and described how the scriptures sounded then, like a folk song passed through hard-laboured men.

  —

  At the bottom of the creek, the ceaseless current flowing into the river, a slate of rock jutted out like an overbite. Autumn leaves floated across the stream, orange-tongued and brown on the underside, hearth fires speckled with rust. But the days still held the last flashes of summer, baking the water into fog on sweltering days where the rock itself shimmered with heat. In the crisscross slashes of sunlight and water, Rui glimpsed the angel again. The refractions of his hunched body, caught between the humid air and the crest of the waterfall as it hit the ground. The twisted cords of his wings were water-logged and bloating, curled forward. From here she could smell the fester of skin and muscle saturating with parasites. Then, before she could step into the water, he was gone.

  She dreamed of the boy again, of outstretched hands, white and swollen with water. A trail of algae cloistered around his mouth. He could not speak, only open his lips and let blood trickle out, drooling past his chin, snaking down his neck.