Where could they be?
It was a quiet Sunday, and she had checked the bazaar, all the bars, and a few neighbors’ houses down in the sleepier parts of Santa Mariela. The sun was just rising over the last house, gilding the little adobe in a wealth more rich and radiant than any earthly gold could give. Few people were about on the streets yet, but those who were around were bright and cheery, morning people, doing brisk business or greeting friends, bustling about in the mild dawn weather. Soon it would be hot, when the sun was high in the desert sky, and cast its stark shadows and broiling heat on the town, but for now, all was pleasant, and light, and calm. Cadenza Madrigal-Seraph wandered through the streets like a night owl lost at day, belonging to the culture at large and yet at the same time feeling out of place in the peaceful morning scene. Her dark blue mage cloak didn’t help matters, she realized.
“Friiitz! Hey, Merridale, prince, farmer boy, where ARE you…?” she called in to each crowd and store she passed, but all she got in reply were negative answers from friends and neighbors and shopkeepers who hadn’t seen either man that day. The two medieval transplants stuck out like sore thumbs in the country of gypsies and Latinos. The people would’ve remembered if they’d seen them.
“Friiitz! Quit puffin’ on your pipe and get out here!” Cadenza called as she walked by a bar. The place was mostly empty on a Sunday, only a few idlers hanging around drinking and shootin’ the breeze, the same cholos that were always there, the woman thought. They practically lived at the bar.
Her search soon brought her onto a deserted street—a street that she had always thought had a bizarre kind of name, taken after some kind of strange koan or adage. “The Path of the Wise Water Bird Who Walks”—something like that. It was hard to make heads or tails of the thing. It was home to the many small places of worship for various faiths in Santa Mariela, Christian, most of them Catholic, Gaianism, and others alike. Cadenza always felt a little uncomfortable here, but it was not untrue that she herself had sometimes found comfort on this little street of supposed holiness. Her father often dragged her along to the little Catholic chapel here where her mother had been buried in the churchyard.
Well I guess there’s as good a chance as any they coulda wandered over here…
She ducked her head into the first couple of little buildings she passed and found they were empty, being swept out or a service having already ended or not even yet begun. Her father’s own favored chapel was just setting up for a Mass in about an hour. Altar boys arranged candles and hung wreaths from the walls.
Not here…
The gypsy continued on, coming to another little brick-and-clay hovel that served as another modest Catholic church. It was adorned with wooden crosses and someone had taken pains to carve a simple tympanum above the portal door, adorning it with religious scenes and symbols. The woman shrugged to herself, figuring she should peer into this church like the last and give it a chance to bear the men she searched for, and quietly swung the door open to peer down the nave—if you could honor the little main hall of the shack with such a term.
Here, a service was already in session, with a Rubatoian priest and a small gathering of parishioners, all with their heads piously bowed, joined hand-in-hand as the sermon went on. And seated amongst all these tan and Latin faces were two fair-skinned men in feudal era garb—Hunter Merridale, in his knightly armor, and Louis Fritz, in the clothes of a medieval farmer. Louis’ hat was at his side, on the bench, and he sat shoulder-to-shoulder with the prince as if brothers in arms. The two, markedly gringos in that sea of bronzed faces and dark hair, to whom Rubatoian words should’ve fallen on deaf ears, had their heads bowed as all the rest did, and when a hymn began, their voices rose to join the others in song, Louis in his soulful baritone, Hunter in his stately tenor.
“In ev’ry age, O God, you are our refuuge… in ev’ry age, O God, you are our hope…” amidst the accented voices, theirs blended, joined by music to their brothers and sisters of faith, their words carrying the true ring of belief.
Cadenza could hardly believe it—these two, whom she could barely get to come together even when she asked as a friend, these two who had been so separated by class differences and wildly varying opinions on the war back in their homeland—these two had come together, by choice, to go to church and pray together. If the gypsy ever believed in a God, she would’ve taken this as a sign. Had she been one of those in the room with them, her head bowed in belief, she would’ve taken this as a sign of the real power of faith.
“ ‘God help the outcasts’…” she mused, the scene of these two medieval white men amongst the modern, Rubatoian crowd recalling to mind a song from one of Kate’s seemingly simple children’s movies, “us one and all…”
