Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

  She was not a woman. Not a creature.

  Picaro said, “You’re an evil spirit.”

  “Sure I am,” she said. “You better believe it. Listen now. This thing this evil spirit got inside her. It passes on. If the mother gets it this strong, so does her child. You hear me, baby? That was what I came to warn you last time. Just, when I saw you, I hadn’t the heart. This evil old witch, this spirit out of hell—she couldn’t do it, not right off. Now she can. You gonna get this, baby. What you see here, me, this is you. You, baby, in the future.”

  Picaro reached behind him. There was nothing there.

  “Not yet,” said Simoon. “A man, it mostly kicks in when he starts his thirties. That’s how it goes. Older for a woman. Her blood times help keep it away. But when she stops her moon rhythm, then it comes. Men, it sooner. Anytime from thirty, baby. Then here you are, in this Dowi chair, if you can even get one. Here you are.”

  She was smiling, somehow the gourd of face allowing that. Not really a smile, not like Alessio’s expensive smile or like a woman’s smile. Not a human smile.

  “Don’t believe me?” she said coaxingly. “You never going to know till it get you. Undetectable, till you have it. Till it have you. No one can reassure you, no doctor on earth. No test can put you in the clear. Not even this new scan they got. You are healthy, everything shows it, then you better than most, then you get this. Then you are over. Won’t be long for me now. Lungs starting to turn into rocks. Lucky, before the brain. That’s what he said, the doctor. Lucky. Stroke of fortune. Hope you have my luck, darling.”

  Picaro stood, his feet grown into the floor.

  The fat bulb of hanging flesh, which contained the evil spirit, sat smiling with the creases of its eyes.

  Simoon said, “But I haven’t done with you. You left me. You took away my last months when I could have been happy. When I’m gone, you have to live this out. You’ll remember me. I put shadow on you, Magpie. I put on shadow. Listen now. I tell you three things. When you seen each of them, then it will be your time. Fourteen years. Maybe you’d have had ten more years after that, got to forty. Can happen. Before this thing with the dragonfly name begins. But I change that. I put shadow on you. Listen.”

  Her voice. Her voice—never to be erased—her sorcery, these words that he must keep.

  “Listen to me. First thing you see, five years from now, you twenty-one years, man fall from the sky in front of you. You see that. Second thing, when you are twenty-seven years, gray dog with a pig’s face, you see that. And when you are twenty-nine, you wake and a snake on your pillow, a snake coiled under flowers. You see these things. They there, in front of you. I see them clear as the sun that never shines here. Tell you. You listen me, Magpie. I curse you with these three things, to prove, so you know. You going to die. Hear me now. You will meet your death at thirty. You will die under water, though not from drowning. Shadow tells you. Shadow makes it be. You think I was hard on Omberto? That was nothing. You I love.”

  Afterwards, those other times with her, gaps coming to exist in his memory, certain sections of action he could never recollect. Not so with this. This, like her prophecy, her curse, he never forgot.

  But he had begun to move before he knew it. He only knew because the Dowi was abruptly gliding away backwards to avoid him. It hit against the shut door of his rooms.

  And then Picaro stood over her and he drew her up, Simoon, his mother, this welter of fat and stone, heavy as the world must be, drew her up and up by her bulging bloated long giraffe’s neck. She made no sound. He could see the creases of her eyes still watching intently. He smashed her head against the door, which the switched-on security systems had already made impermeable and hard as steel.

  He heard the crack. Blood spilled, slow and too thick, from her nostrils, and trickled skittishly into all the rolls of fat, like the tributary of some river.

  When he let her drop back in her chair among the detached tubing, which also spilled now, and stank, her eyes were still watching.

  From the angle of her head as it dropped over, he saw her neck, as well as her skull, was broken.

  And her eyes, dull now but still intent, went on watching him. Watched him as he pushed the Dowi aside, as he picked up his bags, as he went out and shot the outer locks on the door with his handprint. Watched him go down in the lift. Watched him go over the city to the airport. Watched him. Waking and sleeping.

  I put shadow on you. Shadow makes it be.

  IN THE DAYS AND NIGHTS that followed, somewhere then, he called Alessio. They spoke on a private line. Alessio had contacts. He could deal with it.

  It was dealt with. No comment made or price exacted. Except that, after this, there were no upward turns for Pica ro’s promising career. And no more meetings with Alessio.

  Perhaps inevitable. Or only her success-magic, cast for him, perishing at her curse.

  SO HE MADE HIS LIVING, lived. He, and his music, were known, somewhat. It was all right. It was not now he forgot—only that he forgot in other ways. It sat there, what she had said, what he had done, sat in his brain’s back. He became accustomed to it, sitting there, in its chair.

  Naturally he ceased to believe (did he?) that she had cursed him, or that he would contract an obscure disease for which he was genetically predisposed, or that he had murdered her. (He never researched any medical details, asked no one.)

  When he was twenty-one, getting out of a car on a main boulevard, a suicide crashed from a high block on to the pavement almost in front of him.

  Amid all the screaming, approaching sirens, the uproar, Picaro stood within a place of silence.

  And at twenty-seven, on a stage with the Africara, there was a little gray dog that got up on the stage with him too, and it had on a pig’s pink mask, reducing the audience to joy. And amid all the music, the amusement, Picaro played on, his hands already turning into granite.

  The last time was almost the worst. He had expected it so long, but in those moments, not. The girl, who perhaps meant to frighten him those two years later, when he was twenty-nine, succeeded. She hadn’t told him of the snake, her pet. He woke to find it lying peacefully between her sleeping hair and his. When he looked at the snake, it didn’t stir. It was not poisonous. The flower-printed pillow cover lay half over its back.

  Once he had broken Simoon’s neck, all his life since, till thirty, had been a type of running down. Letting go of the precipice up which humanity doggedly climbed, clinging on, pretending that all that lay either above or below, after the fall, (as perhaps the suicide had done) was feather mattresses and heaps of roses without thorns.

  When the select invitation to Venus reached him, his Proven Blood Line, (Eurydiche, Stone Face) the City under water—he saw what the invitation, and the City, were. By then he had anyway given up his hold. He was already dropping down through the air. Falling, like glass, leaves, angels. Like all men. Into the pit.

  10

  NOW IT WAS NOT A dream. Jula sat still in the dark, her eyelids fastened shut, watching the images evolve across them.

  Her brain gave up to her every last detail, as it never had in her former living of this life. Every page had finally become accessible, every line. Total recall.

  And so, she watched the dinner guests at Julus’s festive supper, that night at the villa in Stagna Maris, long ago.

  There they were, reclining on their couches, Voluminis, the Scroll, Stirius the bald man, each lying on their left side, supported by an elbow, but Drusus, the greedy hog, flat on his belly, resting on both arms, his hands agile in the dishes from much practice.

  That night, obsessed with the Ethiopian, she had not truly noticed them, or so she believed. But she had seen everything. Her eyes moving speedily over the room, lowered always at once, as a slave’s eyes must be—had taken in so much.

  The bellaria was laid out on the tables, the cakes and flowers, the saffron pastries crumbled with almonds. A single yellow bloom lay upon one pastry, there to the side, when all
the other flowers were white or rosy.

  That pastry had been for Jula. She knew she had died of it. The taste of it was in her mouth—so viciously saccharine, though veiled by the scented wines.

  Which of them had wanted her to die before she could fight another match?

  Not her master. Julus profited always from his own gladiators, three of whom he had paraded tonight in this very room. One of his guests, then.

  Stirius was the most apparent candidate. Bald and not gross, yet somehow he sweated so heavily. His gestures toward and attention upon the dancers—the “real” women—seemed exaggerated. He had told the others how he had lost money on Jula, thinking a woman fighter a clownish impossibility.

  Otherwise, the Scroll seemed quite calm and at ease, reading out to them his dirty stories of Greek gods and nymphs. And Drusus, the fat one, pawing in the dishes, selecting left overs to carry home—Drusus who always bet on Jula and benefitted as he had announced … Could it even so have been Drusus? Someone had offered him superior rewards for a Games Girl’s death?

  The kitchen slaves—one slave alone—would have seen to it. He would have been given the poison and coins towards some elusive future hope of buying freedom; or else threatened with a horrible alternative—a false charge even, that would see a slave himself tortured and dead, or crippled, or in the silver mines. Slaves had no rights. This slave then was only an implement. Who was it that had wielded the slave?

  Memory: Jula watched.

  She saw what she had seen that night and not seen at all, for, then, it had meant nothing.

  The young slave picked up the tray of pastries. He was passing first among the guests—there must be a chance the wrong hand might reach for the contaminated cake—yes, the slave was skillfully turning the tray a little, as if helpfully displaying the most succulently tempting sweets.

  Stirius, intent on the dancer he had pulled on to his couch, did not take a pastry, he waved the slave off like a moth. Did that indicate his complicity?

  Drusus, though, shoveled off two pastries, his fingers almost brushing even the cake with the yellow flower—so for an instant the slave’s eyes widened—and then—

  Jula saw what she had seen and not seen.

  She saw the slave half glance behind him.

  She saw precisely where his eyes went in that guilty, uncertain moment.

  Away from Drusus, bypassing the Scroll, and Julus himself, slipping over Stirius—

  A second, answering gaze had risen, frowning, to meet the slave’s. A hand part lifted as if to take hold of time—then relaxed itself. Instead carrying a wine cup upward to a red, and white-toothed, mouth.

  Clear as sun from shadow. The feaster who had bribed or forced a kitchen slave (a boy selected for the task because he was attractive enough also to serve at the tables) to end the days of Jula Victrix. There her murderer sat. He was a gladiator.

  Her own kind, one of Julus’s other prized and cosseted fighters, one of the two brought, as she had been, to decorate the dinner party.

  Like Jula also, he had fought that afternoon. He too had dispatched his opponent. He too had received a laurel crown—and a sword cut, its stitchwork and binding hidden under his robe, mentioned and displayed, with his muscles and teeth, to the guests earlier. Now he lolled on his couch, drinking very deep.

  Jula found she could not name him. She must never then have been told his name. As she had never been matched with him, not even in a practice bout.

  This, her killer. Unknown. Nameless.

  What had been his reason?

  In memory, watching him fade from her vision as everything had done. She heard again that sound of rain which became the sea, heard the noiseless, play battle from The Iliad, the scatter of words around her—heard the deepness of the dark, and there behind her, on the vanishing land, the crackle of the funeral pyre, all that was left of her.

  And he, her murderer, was gone with the rest. With her proud heartless owner, the complacent Roman diners, the frightened slave. All gone.

  Why had he done it, that nameless man?

  Jealousy? Some bet that would bring him, in turn, greater wealth? Fear that he could not match her, and one day soon, put in with her on the sand, she would finish him? She would never know.

  The slave would have set the tainted pastry specifically before her. Yes, look back, and she could see he had. She did not like sweet things. She had taken only a small bite to show the lie of her appreciation of her master’s food.

  The taste—piercingly, singingly, yellowly invading her mouth and throat.

  One small bite. The poison must have been so very strong.

  AS SHE CAME OUT OF THE bedroom, Flayd glanced up. He had given himself the other bed, in what he called the store closet of his unlarge apartment. His, therefore, was the less comfortable of the two rooms, and he had chosen to stay up and go on with his notes and filing, seated by the open balcony window, which gazed out over the canal and the starry, warm-cool night of Venus.

  Jula looked at him. Flayd put down the pen he habitually used before tapping at the machine.

  For a second, he thought he saw her about to ask permission of him to leave the rooms. But he had told her to ask was no longer desired. Fleetingly she met his eyes. She said, formally, “I am going down to the garden. For a while.”

  “Can’t sleep?” he said. “Neither can I.”

  He wanted to go out with her and was aware he should not. She had dispensed with the Victorian dress she’d worn for dinner. Despite Brown’s unwritten code, she had on jeans and a loose shirt, things that, once she had been made conscious of them, she had seemed persuaded to ask for. Her short silky hair, unwaxed, losing its henna from constant washing in the shower, was the color of a faded orange geranium. She stayed barefoot. Her tough arched feet had no need of shoes.

  She was not a child.

  Don’t look on her as a child—let alone as a liberated young woman who might make choices, or could be led.

  “I’ll get on,” said Flayd. He turned back casually to the CX and heard a door softly opened, softly closed.

  BLACK ON BLACK, the night wasn’t dark enough to hide him. He stood out against the furred shapes of ornamental trees, the indigo sky with its freckled pathways of blue-milk white clouds that seemed to summon the brain upward, flying.

  There had been a late ball, circa 1880, in Brown’s chandeliered ballroom. That had been over by the twenty-seventh hour. By the second hour of the new Viorno, the final stragglers, pissed on punch and alcoholic fruit cup, amorously entwined, and with candle-wax splashed shoulders, had departed.

  The garden was empty, even of its tables and chairs.

  Somewhere a fountain sounded, a thin silver-foil of noise drawn through the dark.

  Jula, on the steps between the urns, stared down at Picaro.

  He had been smoking hasca. He cast the dregs on to the lawn and rubbed them out with his foot.

  He walked up the steps and stood beside her.

  At once she turned as if to go away.

  Then did not go away.

  She said, succinctly as the water noise, “I dreamed last night I lived in a city like parts of this one. I was wearing the long red dress. Tonight too I dreamed memory.”

  “Why are you talking to me?” he said. “Telling me things?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t you dream?”

  “Yes. I dream. Everyone dreams. So they say.”

  “I pray to the gods,” she said, “I never dream the memory of my mother’s death.”

  Picaro started. He cursed.

  She looked up at him.

  “I’m sorry,” Jula said, “what have I done?”

  “Hit a nerve,” he told her bitterly.

  “Everytime I hurt you,” she said. (It was the strangest conversation.) “You cause me to do this in some way I don’t grasp.” She added two or three words in Latin. Then: “What is between us?”

  “Nothing.

  “Yes. I know that there is. I think of
you so often, and then I come out into this garden, and you’re here. Something. Some fate.”

  Picaro half smiled. She observed this, wonderingly. The expressions of others often drew her attention.

  He said quietly, “You talk as if …” then grew silent.

  They stared away from each other.

  The garden, for a moment, might have been anywhere, belonged in any era or area. A nocturne of vegetation, faintly susurrous to a fragrant breeze, was gilded by a sinking moon.

  “Why are you wearing modern clothes?” The hasca asked this, idle, loosening him.

  “Flayd found them for me. I wanted them.”

  “Out of costume at last.”

  “Like you.

  “You’re interested in me?” he said. “But I’m afraid of you. You knocked me out, remember. So I think you’d better not be interested. In me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know? You’re sure you don’t know? Nothing like that back in Roman times?”

  She had fixed him once more with her eyes.

  Was she a child? Barbarically naive?

  Perhaps …

  She didn’t seem to know what she had been saying, or what it might imply—that she was keen, and inviting him, as if she were a normal woman in some bar. He had heard it often, responded often. But her feral awkward innocence was daunting.

  He didn’t even consider if she attracted him. How could she? Even if he had been sane and had a life before him, even if none of the past had taken place. This lynx in the darkness. With her fists and her young man’s way of standing and speaking to him, and her slave’s ignorance, all the paucity she had brought with her out of a grave. How could anyone, any lover ever approach this flesh of hers?

  Jula said, “There is a hill in Rome, one of many. It’s covered with temples. They took me there. I don’t know why, but I remember a place underground, and they were burning incense. A man came, and he was blind. His eyes were shut. He was old. He put his hand on my head and he spoke to them, the ones who brought me, but not to me. Now I know what he said because I can hear it, and the language is the one they taught me in those years after.