Her hair seemed to change its color, and spread over her face, and mix into her clothes, until, by the time she had twisted out of Chrism’s grasp and scampered away, she had become a white-maned monkey. In the open space before the pyre, she turned and squatted on her haunches, spitting, and grinning, and stuffing bits of garbage from the tiles into the pouches of her mouth. Lord Chrism spoke an order, and soldiers formed around her in a circle, but before they could come close, she selected one and leapt at him, transforming in mid-leap into a white tiger. She bore the soldier down and mauled his face between her paws; miraculously, when she left him, he jumped up unhurt. It was a game. The soldiers clustered around her, trying to grab hold, and she sank beneath their fingers into a nest of white cobras, dozens of them spreading out along the tiles. Their bites made the soldiers laugh, and in a little while some were reeling drunkenly, intoxicated by her venom, while the others scrambled over the stones, until the cobras stopped their writhing and melted into a white foam like scum along a beach, and some floated up into the air. The soldiers clapped their hands, and some of the seminarians, too, came forward to join in the fun, ignoring the hoarse imprecations of their teachers. And then the foam seemed to gather into a ball, and while the soldiers stood gaping, it spun itself into a spider, a white stag, a cloud of butterflies, and a crocodile, its white fur slick with oil, lashing its prehensile tail. No metamorphosis lasted longer than it took the eye to grasp it, and each one seemed larger than the last, until it formed into a snake again, a white python of enormous bulk. It coiled and towered above their heads, its mouth dripping milky venom. Laughing, the seminarians and nuns ran to drink it up; they sat in pools of it and splashed, while the snake wove and coiled above them. And then, twisting around them in a circle, it coiled down towards the pyre and disappeared among the logs.

Instantly Lord Chrism’s voice was heard commanding torches to be laid on. Instantly the fire leapt up, for the latticework of logs had been soaked in gasoline and aromatic oil. At its apex rose a wooden stake.

The bishop was to have met death there, tied to it with silken cords. Now she twisted around it in the shape of a python, illuminated by the leaping flames. But then she disappeared, and the stake itself seemed to grow, to flower and take root, roots creeping downward through the burning logs. The stake bloated, and grew bark, and swelled into a mighty tree, its limbs stretching out over the multitude, arching into a canopy of leaves as if it were midsummer. No one there had seen a tree before, not in full flower, and they stared up at it, enchanted.