But the clothes were not really like this. Nor like any of it. They were female clothes. And until then, in the first installment of her existence as Jula Flammifer, she had been clothed always as a male.
The materials—which were luscious velvets, silks—neither attracted nor repelled her. She fingered them, found out how they fastened.
Conscious she was watched, she partly guessed they might be taking bets on her (she had always been bet upon) as to what she would select, and if she would then be able to get into it, wear it.
Included among the stuffs were quite simple flowing tunics, from post-Flavian Byzantium, or the Easternized chlamys.
Jula instead drew up this blood-red dress which had been designed some eleven centuries later.
Did the color persuade her? All the new clothes were highly colored, magenta, purples, flame orange, emerald. But then again, she was red-haired Jula, Fiery Jula—was it that? Some latent wish to affirm her personality? No, for Jula was not Jula, nor red-haired. She herself was well aware, even in this second installment of her existence as Jula, that this had not been her true name, and that her hair was, unhennaed, not red.
Why then? Why this one?
She liked it, perhaps? Just as she left the drinks that went too uncomfortably to her head and that therefore she disliked. Yet was it not strange? Had she ever, in adult life before, dressed as a woman?
The watchers must have seen, she had negligible trouble with the renaissance dress, the same with the undergarments that accompanied it. Astonishment? Bets lost?
She put the gold net over her short hair, not spiked up today lying smooth. And then she took the lion earrings, both of them, and slipped them into her ears.
She had worn the earrings often, one, or the pair. They were a symbol of her status as Valuable. She had got used to them.
At first, walking and sitting in the dress, there was a slight awkwardness. It soon went. By the time she walked out between the pillars and saw the tall heavy man standing on the lawn, Jula had mastered the dress entirely and barely noticed it. Or the effect it made.
And when he strode towards her, she only stopped. And when he asked, “Why are you wearing that?” she only replied, “They gave it me to wear.”
“You mean,” said Flayd, angry again at all of it, “they took your other clothes away and said put on this?”
“No. There was a choice of many garments.”
“But—” he said.
Suddenly something in his face, tanned and glaring under its flopping mane of auburn hair, made Jula smile. At once, alarmed, she snatched the smile back. He too seemed startled.
Why the dress? Unanswered to Flayd’s satisfaction.
Why the smile? Unanswered to hers. Worse, dangerous. You did not smile at them, your masters. And he was not, as she was, a slave, at whom anyway she would not smile either. Perhaps, past the age of four, she had never smiled at all, save in secret, when still very young. At some unexpected beauty of weather, or some victory she had not anticipated, some feeling even, inseparable only from the springs of youth. Fleeting, all these, and never wise; doubtless hidden.
“What’s funny?” said Flayd. His voice was mild, carefully receptive.
She heard the coaxing quality and noted her worsening mistake. Once or twice, some man, some patrician, thinking she made up to him.
At her fellow warriors certainly she had never ever smiled. A smile or laugh could, there, be interpreted a hundred wrong ways—as mockery, boasting, as ingratiation from cowardice, as madness.
She was silent.
“OK, no, I don’t think you meant to be amused. I guess you do find me funny. And you speak Amerian English now. How’s that?”
“The round pearls that talk in my ears.”
“Linguisticx. What else?”
She stood waiting on him, politely observing his upper lip.
Flayd said, “You’re not a slave. Haven’t they told you that still? Look at me. When you did, you smiled. Is that so bad?”
Again she said nothing.
He thought, I guess it’s bad. Lowering the shield. Being one human with another. Or are we just creatures from another world to her, as she is to them?
A capital offense, equally, to murder anyone, or to bring anyone back from the dead.
He thought, What in hell do I want to do about this? What can I do?
There was a sound behind him, someone coming through the cloister, the slapping of a skirt or sleeve.
The girl looked up. Lagoon eyes—seeing something above Flayd’s head—
He dived around, and saw it too.
It flew towards them, an impossible undone, done-up jigsaw of black and white. Then swooped down on to the lawn between them, its perfect, somehow Egyptian markings like some hieroglyph meaning flight or eye.
“Pica,” said Jula.
“Magpie, yeah. That one ain’t real, ’s only thing. A recx or even VP—virtuality projection. What the heck. It looks good.” What am I saying? Nervous as a boy on his first date, no, not that. A guy with a brand-new daughter sprung on him when he was young enough to reel, old enough to wonder—No, nor that. Not everything was that neat.
The magpie picked through the tiny flowers, its black legs, the black knife of a beak, questing delicately. On its back, among the so-white, jet-black feathers, the elusive water glimmer of alien blue.
Someone else came out of the pillared cloister.
Flayd goggled at him. Too many surprises now.
He was wearing one more set of his non-Venus black jeans and a poured dark green shirt. His body was excellent, but for God’s sake, the guy was only thirty or so. He had that look he always had, so cool it froze you, so far off no use to shout, and so courteous you wanted to punch him in the kisser. But the eyes … they seemed a bit—dazed.
How had he got here, and again why?
The woman was saying something. It was Latin. Flayd understood her and turned back to gaze at her instead.
“O di magni, obsecro, intercedite pro me contra istrum—”
“It’s OK, Jula—yeah, maybe you need your gods to protect you but—”
“—istrum mihi inimi cissimum qui constituit se ab me—”
“Jula.”
“—vindicare et iam instat.”
Flayd drew in a breath. “He isn’t—he’s not your enemy, not like that.” Flayd repeated this, cautiously, in Latin. But her eyes were fixed as her prayer had been unstoppable. Where she’d hardly ever met Flayd’s glance, now she stared at Picaro, on and on. Her face was frightened, and behind the fear, the inevitable ingrained readying, the mental weapons taken in both hands, as even in exhaustion and near death they would be.
“Jula, this is Picaro. Picaro, meet Jula.” Flayd said lamely, spuriously.
But Picaro too only stood there, looking back at her, expressionless, dazed (hurt in some unguessable way?)
What was it?
What it was, for Jula, was that she had just seen again after such a long, long time, the Ethiopian who had cursed her, and whom she had killed in Stagna Maris, all those several centuries ago.
2
“YOU SHOULD BE DEAD,” the dead Ethiopian said, in his quiet and musical voice.
Jula stared at him, she didn’t even blink.
All her awareness—on him.
“Like the other one,” he said.
And then he sprang at her, across the lawn.
He was extremely fast, far heavier in build and taller than she.
Flayd had no time to react.
But she—her reactions were integral as her bones, as the ESDNA that had enabled these creeps to bring her back.
Flayd, hurtling himself forward, grabbed some of the braids of Picaro’s hair, the nearest thing he could reach, but Picaro was already spinning away, going down.
The woman had not attempted the evade him. She had crouched instantly, and driven her fist, small and hard as a stone, with all her considerable compact strength behind it, directly up into P
icaro’s solar plexus. He was out cold.
Flayd loomed in limbo, dumbfounded, feeling grimly sorry for him, and for her, and for the whole bloody world.
JULA STOOD OVER PICARO.
It was a stance she had assumed more than a hundred and twenty times in her past. But her adversary was not dead, not now.
She looked down at him.
She remembered very well his face, the strong sculpted bones, the blackness of his skin. She recalled how his eyes, so large and terrible a moment before, appeared when shut fast. But that had been in death.
And his blood was red. She knew. No need to see it.
She tasted something too sweet in her mouth then, another recollection, like those instants in the arena. But this … it was a feast after victory—it was—the saffron pastry the slave had brought her, with the saffron-colored flower lying on it. But all the other flowers among the cakes and sweetmeats of the bellaria were white.
The impression was random, it seemed to have no purpose. She pushed it aside.
Just then, the tall man—called Flayd—took a step nearer.
Jula held up her hand. “Ne me attingas,” she said. Don’t touch me.
Flayd did as she told him. He waited, marooned on the lawn, as if outside a pane of unbreakable optecx.
The pica bird, Jula noticed, was gone. She knelt down by her senseless enemy, who, as she had, had come back from Hades.
And when Flayd took a half step after all, Jula said, clearly in English, “I won’t harm him.”
She could hear the Ethiopian breathing raggedly, see the judder of the heart in his throat. She touched him with one finger of her left hand, there in the center of his wide forehead, from which the endless ropes of hair fell back like chains of black silk and white wool.
“Quid a me quaeritas?”
What do you want from me?
PICARO LEANED ON THE RAILING, to either side of him the square-paved lungomare, stretching like a neoned chess-board, and beyond, the midnight sea done in lacquer black under stars of fire.
Another coast, another city, another time. He was sixteen. He had played a set with the Soundless Band, and the crowd had gone wild. It was an appreciative crowd. The best they’d had, in the months of traveling. It was full of women, too, some very rich and some very young, and all of them with that pleasure glaze on them like pollen. Everyone here on the shore wanted to be happy tonight, and many of them had made it, and Picaro was one of those lucky ones.
All that music, and then there had been iced beer too, and vin’absinthe, and hasca in a silver clip. Now, for the moment, all he needed was the night.
“Well,” said the soft voice on his right, just behind him, someone unseen—but he could smell her perfume, and the scent of her body, warm and alluring though not especially young.
“Well,” Picaro said.
That was introduction enough, maybe.
So he turned, and he saw her. She was slim, but curved like a vase, and heavy-hipped, and her breasts were big, beautiful, and her hair was long and thick like a thick black smoke, and edged with flame from the neon lamp behind her, which hid her face from him, yet gave him everything else. Even her rose-red shoes with their stalks of thin, tall, heels.
She was not very tall, even in those tall heels. A lot shorter than he. And yet, crazily, he felt—for one split second—she was the taller of the two of them, and bigger than he was. Dark as darkness and big as darkness. But there had been the hasca, and he liked the dark.
“I rate your music,” said the woman. “You’re fine.”
She had cash. He could see it all over her. It hung in the gold ring around her long, smooth neck, and the platinum ring around her left ankle. Her dress was some constructed fabric, the kind that cost. He didn’t care about this particularly, he had been with rich, not-so-young women, and rich young women, too. Only—somehow the money on her didn’t fit.
“You’re talented,” she said. “I always thought you’d be that way. Best thing I ever did, perhaps. Leave you. Let you alone to grow.”
And then her head turned so the light fell sidelong, and he saw who she was. And then she laughed, and in her mouth the little jewel sparked snakes-eye green. But her own eyes were Simoon’s, and she was Simoon.
He took a step away, and the railing pressed in his back.
“Honey,” she said, “you really believed all what your daddy told you about me? Listen, if I was one little third what he said, how could I be standing here? Someone would’ve killed me, sure. Or I’d be in jail. Or dead. Wouldn’t I?”
Picaro stayed still. Nothing moved, not even the sea.
“Listen,” she said, “he and I—an old argument. I saw you were afraid, after he died like that, because you ran away. Anyone can die like that. You think I did it to him? If I even could, why would I? He was eating out of my hand right then.”
“No,” Picaro heard himself say.
“No? No what, baby?”
Picaro eased off the railing and went fast away, along the lungomare.
Light cohorts of the fortunate, the crowds were drifting over the esplanade like clouds. So they seemed to him—insubstantial.
But she was solid and present, still right beside him even though he had left her eight hundred kilometers behind.
He looked back once. She was no longer there. Where then? Here, next to him—
Shadow was what she could send, and what she was. Look at her, (in his mind, bobbing among the light laughing crowds). He examined Simoon. Two years older, she looked about ten years younger than when he saw her last. And she had lost weight, and her short tight hair had grown long and straight. Her skin was like that of a woman in her early thirties and no more than that. But Picaro’s father had told him her age, the age of the witch, which anyhow maybe she had lied about, taking off a few years, and she had been, when Picaro was born, supposedly forty years old. So now that made her fifty-six.
He kept thinking he’d see her, in front of him, sliding out of the people-clouds, or simply stepping from the doorway of some lit-up bar. But she didn’t do that. Not right then.
THERE WAS NO ONE in the big room the band had taken, but for Omberto, asleep in one of the screened-off beds with a girl. Coal’s jackdaw sat on the roof of its opened cage, preening itself. Picaro fed it a few nuts it could anyway have fetched for itself from the table.
Later, in his sleep, he heard it fly out through the window, but it always did at dawn, anytime they left it free.
The next day, he saw the jackdaw had yellow in its eyes.
Perhaps this had always been the case. But he had thought its eyes were a kind of gray, like Coal’s eyes.
And sometimes, the jackdaw watched Picaro—but it always had. It was used to him, as to the rest of the band, and took a friendly interest in all of them.
They played in a couple of spots. It was all right, not as hot as the first time. They talked of moving on.
“What is up with you?” Coal said to Picaro. “You don’t eat, you don’t sleep. I hear you up all night walking about.”
“Your bird keeps looking at me.”
“Sure he does. You can’t play that guitar no more. Or that korah neither.”
Omberto, the peacemaker, who had taught Picaro some of his own skill with the korah, drew Coal away to a game of cards.
Tuning the kissar, a recx instrument, temperamental despite its technological insides, the string burned through Picaro’s fingers, so his blood dropped in the sound box.
They moved on.
AND NOW HE WAS STANDING on a roof, with another railing, and looking down at a street. Thinking back, the whole scene was somehow a whiteout. Like the magpie dream, he could only recall it in words, not images. Except for her. Her he could see.
She had come walking up the ancient redundant fire escape, which (unseen, described in words) had been painted a vivid color and had a honeysuckle grown up and through it. As she trod on the blossoms, the fragrance flared, mixing with the scent of her.
“What do you want?” he said.
(Had they said anything else first? Perhaps. Or not.)
She said, “I like to look at you.”
Picaro felt a kind of despair. The only exit was to jump off the roof, and he wouldn’t do that.
“You keep after me,” he said. “Why?”
“I have to tell you something,” she said. “But not yet.”
Then Omberto ran up on to the roof, and he saw Simoon, and he grinned and shook his head, and leaped away again.
Simoon said, “He thinks I’m not your mama.”
“You’re not.”
“Who is then? Huh? Tell me, I should like to know.”
He remembered all this, and remembered remembering how she had sat in the cane chair, shelling peas, and how she had made the meal, and put out the bottle of wine and the costly cola.
How did she have money for that then? And how, now, so much. For she wore a summer dress that was made of thin real silk. He could see her blackness through it, so like the shade of his own blackness, blacker than most black skins, blacker than his father. Black as the jackdaw, and a magpie’s wings.
He thought, then, she’d put out the wine that night when Picaro was fourteen, and cooked enough for Picaro’s father, too. She didn’t reckon the man would die. Maybe it upset her. And I ran away.