Ikalabing-Walo (Tagalog-English)

Prologue: The Promise

Tayabas, 1944

The forest above Lantayan had no name. Naming a thing is a way of calling it, and no one in the barrio had ever wanted it to come.

The girl knew this the way she knew her prayers, without having to think about it. You said tabi-tabi po when you passed the balete. You did not take the trail after dark. You did not eat the fruit that fell on the far side of the creek, no matter how sweet it smelled, no matter how hungry you were.

She was very hungry now. She had been hungry for a long time.

Below her, the town was burning.

She could see it through the gaps in the trees: the church bell tower black against an orange sky, the schoolhouse where her father taught, the market roofs catching one after another like a row of matches. The smoke had followed them up the mountain all evening. It was in her hair. It was in her mouth. Somewhere behind her, in a hollow under the rocks, her mother was pressing her little brothers' faces into her blouse so they wouldn't cough, and a wounded man was bleeding quietly into a rice sack, and her father was praying the rosary on his fingers because he had dropped his beads while they ran.

The soldiers were on the mountain road. She had heard their boots an hour ago. She heard them again now, closer.

So she had come to the balete.

It was older than the town and older than the church. Its roots came down from its branches like the bars of a cage, and the space inside them was darker than the night around it. Her lola used to say the balete was a door. Her father, who read books from Manila, used to say that was superstition.

Her father was praying to a God who had not stopped the fire.

So she knelt in the wet leaves, her own rosary wound so tightly around her fist that the crucifix bit into her palm, and she said it.

"Tabi-tabi po."

The forest went quiet. Not the quiet of animals hiding. The other kind. The kind that listens.

"Hindi mo kailangang gawin 'to."

The boy stepped out from between the roots as if he had been standing there all along. He was her age, or looked it. Barefoot, like her. In the moonlight his face was an ordinary barrio face, except for one small wrong thing she had stopped noticing months ago, the way you stop noticing a scar on someone you love.

"Kailangan," she whispered. "Papatayin nila kami. Lahat kami."

"Alam ko." His voice cracked on it. "Alam ko. Pero may kapalit ang lahat dito. Alam mo 'yan."

"Kung gano'n, ako na lang."

Something moved across his face then, fast and terrible, like a shadow crossing water.

"Hindi."

Behind him, the dark between the roots began to move. Not the leaves. The dark itself, folding and unfolding like breath. When it spoke, it was not one voice but many, layered over each other like wind through a thousand leaves.

Ano ang iaalay mo?

What will you offer?

The girl opened her mouth. The boy was faster.

He turned his back on the dark, which no one should ever do, and knelt in front of her so that their faces were level. She would remember his face for the rest of her life. How sorry he looked. How certain.

"Makinig ka nang mabuti," he said. "Ikaw ang magsasalita. Pero ako ang pipili ng mga salita."

You will speak. But I will choose the words.

So she listened. And she said what he told her to say, word for word, into the dark.

She did not understand all of it. She understood enough.

When it was done, the forest exhaled. On the mountain road, the boots stopped, then turned, then faded. Fireflies rose out of the balete in a slow green spiral, thousands of them, more than she had ever seen in her life, and in their light the boy's face was wet.

At dawn she walked down the mountain with her family and the wounded man, alive, every one of them.

She never went back to the balete. She never told a soul what she had promised, or to whom, or on whose behalf.

But the forest remembered. The forest always remembers.

It waited sixty-four years for the debt to be born.

Then it waited seventeen more for her to grow up.