Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

  Picaro heard himself ask her, “What did he say?”

  “She is yours. That was what he said. He gave me to my masters—or to one master. That must be who they were. The ones who sold me to Julus. I don’t know what it means. It seems to come clearer. Perhaps it means nothing much. Some custom there.”

  Before he could say anything else, or move off, her hand caught hold of his.

  In all the garden, all he could feel was the firm still grip of her cool hand. His entire awareness seemed to center on it. He couldn’t pull away. Or let go.

  “What do you want?” he asked her harshly.

  “Where I was born,” she said, “there were pine trees that held up the sky. We baked bread on the fire and my father would bring raw meat from the hunting. There was beer in a clay pot in the thatch. The firelight shone. My mother’s hair was the color of the moon, there, where it’s going down. The Romans came and killed her. I can see it, and how it was done, though I look away. My father died elsewhere.”

  “What you are,” he said. “How can you stand next to me and talk to me—don’t you begin to know?”

  “I am what you are. A living thing.”

  “No. You were grown—not even born.”

  “Once, I was born. The first time. I think I’ve begun to remember that too, the battle to live, the sudden light.”

  Unable to let go of her hand, he shook the hand angrily in his.

  “In Christ’s name—what are you? You’re not like the other one—del Nero—but you’re not a human being. You’re not like her. She was … a demon … You’re not like her but I’m afraid of you, like her. Why are you telling me all this?”

  “There is a fate between us,” she said.

  “What are you saying? You fancy me? No.”

  “Fancy?” she queried. She appeared, for an instant, puzzled, nearly laughable. “No, it’s that—I have found you here.”

  “You haven’t found me.” After all he shook her hand out of his. After her touch, the air stung him. It was, like the garden, rife with vacancy.

  “I’m going in,” he said. He moved. She took a step. “Don’t come with me,” he said. “What do I have to say to make you stop?” Then she raised her head, put it back. Her eyes on his now made him veer from her, turn his back on her to walk away.

  The moon slid down and was lost among a net of tree boughs. The sky grew for a second more luminous, and then more somber.

  He himself hesitated. He looked round at her.

  In the dimness now she might be any girl, a tanned white girl, with funny reddish hair and fashionable, uncomplex clothes. Something seared inside him, not anger now, not sex.

  Picaro walked back to her, took her face between his hands, like some new instrument he must learn to make music with.

  When he set his mouth down on hers, there was neither resistance nor response, in either of them.

  He kissed her, noticing randomly her clean young healthy mouth that was centuries too old, too old for him, too old.

  Then her arms coiled around him. She was strong, of course. She held him. It was familiar from a million other ordinary times, but only as if every woman he had ever embraced had been some version of this one. Yes, even that unwoman, the evil spirit, out of whose womb he had been spat like a burned star.

  “Let go,” he said.

  She let him go.

  “All right,” he said. “That’s enough.”

  “Only my mother and father kissed me. And I’ve seen them kiss each other, as you have kissed me.”

  “All right. Let’s leave it there.”

  “Why?” she said. Her voice was frank, undemanding.

  But now he strode off across the garden, alone.

  He walked quickly, until he came up on the terrace, to the doors. She hadn’t followed. Unlike Picaro, lighter skinned, she had managed to disappear into the night. He crossed the paving, under the fluttering, guttering paper lanterns left from the ball, which, CX motivated, could never go out.

  11

  A SMALL RIOT, ONE OF FOUR that morning, was taking place all along the Blessed Maria Canal. The others were located, one in the silk market, another in front of the Temples of Art and Justice. The last was out on the lagoon, near the restored church of Maria Maka Selena, inside which a group of the agitators had barricaded themselves. The disturbances were all to do with those who wished to leave the City, and who had found this would not be allowed them. Soft-soap was changing in heavy hands. The main concern—at no point must any of Venus’s reconstruct buildings be damaged. Detachments of police, clad as henchmen from the times of the Borgian Alliance or the masked 1700s, their natty garments CX-proofed, armed with flecxs and cannisters of lacrimogeno, massed ready in the wings. The University Auxillary, Flayd noted, as the boat chugged slowly through police-audited channels, were not openly involved.

  Jula hadn’t seemed concerned, her impartial face turned to take everything in. When he asked her what she thought, she said she had seen a riot just outside Stagna Maris. It had been brutally put down. She described legionaries from the Aquilla, shields locked, swords ready, marching forward in phalanx, to crush and slice men, women, and children, against the town walls.

  She wasn’t inclement, or uninvolved, only pragmatic.

  Pragmatic too about the other thing. Some turmoil he could see behind the gemstone luster of her child-perfect eyes. What was it? What had happened to her? Something had.

  Aside from themselves, no other passenger was in the boat. The tourists seemed mostly off the waterways and alleys, scared of the rioting—the smashed chairs slung at CX-impervious windows, the wrecked wanderers by the Primo steps, with their swearing, raving wanderliers—either that, or they had themselves joined the riots.

  Who had called them riots, anyhow?

  It was just guys trying to get home.

  THEY WENT THROUGH A CANAL named Fulvia, for the lagoon. Under the watersteps close to the Centurion’s Bridge, their boat stilled its engine.

  She had said she wanted to see the real animals, in the Equus Gardens. Flayd had been glad that she wished to do something and had told him. She’d progressed well, but he wondered how much of that even, was simply due to her slave’s essential ability to mimic what she was instructed to be.

  They walked along an arched arcade, and went up into the Gardens. Cypresses, transplanted and tampered with, and already with a growth of several hundred years, towered from the terraces.

  He spoke to her about the past—it was always mostly unavoidable, though he tried sometimes to curb it—wanting to wring every last droplet of authentic remembrance from her, then scurry to the laptop and make notes. She seemed not to mind his questioning, to expect it. Occasionally she would add another detail she said had just come back to her. She spoke English absurdly well, along with her excellent Italian. Linguisticx could only take credit for so much. She was intelligent and versatile.

  Now and then, however, in the clarity of her eyes, that newly disturbed movement came. She had said nothing about that.

  By the groves where the lions were housed, they stood at the low, CX-protected fence.

  Flayd thought her like a slim young lioness herself.

  The lions, of course, were still in slavery.

  She began to speak to him (without a prompting question, maybe only to please him) about the lions used in the arena. How they were kept hungry and savage—they were only for killing men, or being killed by them. Unlike these pampered icons, swishing their tails against their lean, dieted, pale flanks, a male lying on his back to sun himself, taking no notice of the human audience, which came and went at the outer limit of lion life. Then Jula told Flayd about Playful, the lioness who had survived so many fights and finally had been pensioned off in the Roman town.

  Afterwards they ate ice cream at an umbrellaed table. Then they walked down and viewed the horses, trotting or galloping about a wide meadow, apparently railed off only by laurels.

  The big roan horse reminded Flayd
of himself, though it had not a spare molecule of fat.

  He had ridden, years back. As a boy, with his mother, Rose, and then again not so long ago with his wife.

  Surprising him, his eyes filled with tears.

  That hadn’t happened, tears, thinking of these two women he loved, not for a decade.

  She had seen. This quick, ancient Roman daughter of his.

  God, Jesus, yes. Yes, she was like Alicia. Ali could have been her mother. Perhaps. Or was it only one more self-deception?

  She looked at him, the girl. Then she touched his arm. That was all, nothing said.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I just remembered someone. Sometwo. We lose people, then we lose ourselves. All tipped down that fuck of a drain. Nowheresville, Death County.”

  She was silent. He sensed her forming a question — of him. And he was embarrassed by himself, at speaking out in this manner. To her, of all people in the world—she had enough to deal with, without his neurotic tantrums over the Inevitable—which she, anyway, had already experienced. (He could recall what she’d said before. I went elsewhere … yes, I know that I did. And to his blurted Where? she had replied, I don’t remember that. Only … nothingness.)

  Now she asked, (shaming him further) “Death County—is this your name for Elysium?”

  “No. Not for Elysium. Elysium would be kind of wonderful.” She stood looking at him, as the horses bounded around, uncaring of tomorrow. Flayd said, apologetic, “I was just mouthing off, Jula. About total bloody annihilation—Elysium, Hades, afterlife—wishful thinking.”

  He, now, did not meet her searching gaze.

  Jula said, “But I have been in Elysium.”

  Flayd shut his eyes. Opened them. Saw horses. Dully said, “What?”

  “I was in Elysium. Heaven is how they say it now, is it?”

  “You have been in—”

  “Where else? I’d died.”

  Slowly he turned and stared at her. Her face was so damned honest, so composed and—almost ordinary. “All right, Jula. OK. Tell me about—heaven.”

  “But I don’t remember,” she said. She smiled. (Since that first time, she had begun to smile on occasion. Generally it would have cheered him. He wanted, now, to shake her.)

  “If you don’t remember, lady, how the hell do you know?”

  “Because I’ve been there, and the other places.”

  “Other? No, I don’t buy this. You don’t remember anything else because there’s nothing out there. You went and were nowhere. Sorry.”

  “Flayd,” she said, “have you never hoped for life to go on beyond this? For the freedom of it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why did you hope?” she asked.

  “I’m a coward, I guess. Can’t face personal obliteration. Like most of us.”

  “No,” she said, “I mean, how do you know how to hope—for anything else? Fear doesn’t give hope. Fear takes hope away.”

  “OK. How did I think to hope. We’ve all been told, over and over. The great blue yonder. Sure we have.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Priests, preachers. All the teachers they claim have lived—Christ, Mohammed, Buddha. The whole list.”

  “And why did they tell it to you?”

  “To manipulate—to help—who knows? Because they made it up, a nice fairy story. Or they just plain hoped for it themselves.”

  “How,” she said, “did they know to make it up, or to hope for it? How could they—imagine it—unless somehow it was there and they knew? Without that—such a thing—isn’t to be imagined.”

  “Imagination is the word.”

  “How can you even know to imagine,” she said quietly, “something of which you have no knowledge at all?”

  “Riddles. We’re going round in circles.”

  “Flayd, I can’t remember—that other place—because while we exist in flesh—the flesh of us doesn’t go there. Things here, even if we forget them, the brain memorizes everything it experienced. I’ve heard you say this. But how can the brain memorize a place it’s never been?”

  Flayd heard himself breathe. “Jula. Oh lord.” He took hold of his mind. “Unrecorded data,” he said.

  She said, “It’s like these languages they taught me. Until I learned them, I couldn’t make words in these languages.”

  “Heaven is a language we forget how to speak,” he said, dreamily.

  “And yet, something remains. The idea that Elysium is there. I can recollect,” she said, “the passage into death … It wasn’t empty, only dark, like the River they told me of—perhaps that’s why they thought it was a river. But it wasn’t a river. The light of the pyre faded behind me, and something else began—but then I was free. Only that freed part remembers. But it uses images I can’t see, words I don’t understand.”

  Flayd thought of the teachers and saviors, of the gods. He thought of Rose and how she had known. And of Alicia who hadn’t. Alicia and her fear. And of a dark river that became something else, and Alicia was free, and speaking another language.

  And then he took a firmer grip on his heart or mind or, God knew, his soul. He said, “Listen to me. Don’t say any of this to any of them—Leon, that crowd. They’d never let you out of jail, even this little distance. They’d want to test you, find out a whole lot more.” And thought, But they’ll be watching, listening in, somehow.

  “They had no interest in that,” she said. “They didn’t think of it perhaps. Only you ever asked me anything like that.”

  A black and white horse, streamlined and dangerous, ran up the meadow—was it like Picaro?

  “Tell me this,” Flayd said, “if you knew all this, why did you fight to stay alive in their arena? Why did you bother?”

  “That’s why we come here,” she said, “to live. So we must fight to do it.”

  She had been calling him Flayd. Had she done that before? She wasn’t the same as she had been. Or perhaps, rather than change, she’d simply become more herself.

  The religious beliefs of ancient peoples—unshakable? “Jula, if—”

  She interrupted him. She had never done that before. Maybe never to anyone, in her slave life.

  “The man called Chossi is walking along the path toward us.”

  12

  FROM WHERE HE LAY, he could see it moving about. He wondered how it had got in, but the windows at the Ca’Marrone were sometimes undone, in old-fashioned style, by the rooms’ human cleaners.

  A magpie.

  It must be real. Picaro thought he had seen one already somewhere else in the City.

  Like Shaachen’s bird, called Beloved, or Darling, so the disc had told him when he was a child.

  Darling—Caro.

  It was a big bird, with a round solid body tapering to a long black tail that, when the light caught it, glinted with smoky green, just as the sides of the white and black wings sheened blue. Its head was all black, as if hooded, the beak black, and the eyes pale, so he remembered Coal’s jackdaw. It strutted, arrogant and unsafe, across the floor.

  Picaro sat up.

  (How late was it?)

  He could call the room service that Brown’s supplied, ask them to catch the bird and release it back into the City.

  Picaro had wanted a magpie, once, as a child.

  And the magpie could write?

  The murmur of his father’s voice, Says so … but you can’t have one … magpie’s a wild bird.

  And her. Her voice—I put shadow on you, Magpie.

  The signal went in the outer door.

  At the noise, the bird spread its fans of wings and flew up through the high-ceilinged room.

  Picaro thought it would be Flayd at the door. Not the Roman girl, surely not her. India?

  He sat on the side of the ornate canopied bed, looking into space, considering whether to admit the insistent (still signalling) visitor. And then the door was opened. And in walked the UAS clerk, Chossi.

  “I kn
ocked,” said Chossi, uncaringly.

  “So you did. But I didn’t let you in.”

  “Oh, I have a key.”

  “I thought that must be the case.”

  Chossi scowled. His nose had entirely recovered from the blow Picaro had given it, but not his demeanor. “Leonillo sent me. I’m to give you this.”

  Chossi came forward and threw a thick late-Victorian-type envelope, thinly lettered in gold, written over apparently by hand, on Picaro’s bed. Picaro left it there.

  “Better open it.”

  “Whatever it is, I’m not interested.”

  “It’s an invitation,” said Chossi. “I’ve already hand-delivered several others, one to your friend here.”

  “I have no friends here.”

  “The fat archaeologist who thinks he’s so unusual. Sin Flayd.”

  Picaro did nothing. Chossi stamped from one foot to the other, urgent for response. “Tonight,” Chossi said.

  Picaro got up and walked across to the bathroom. He stood by the bowl, urinating, as Chossi fidgeted in the doorway. When Picaro turned to the basin, “I say invitation,” said Chossi, “you are requested to be there. A gala occasion. The Orpheo Palazzo—the auditorium seats six thousand people, even allowing for the security equipment. Many more persons have been issued tickets for the square outside.”

  Picaro shut off the faucet.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He already knew, and a sound began in his ears. It was far away. Unrecognizable, unspeakable.

  “The great musician, del Nero, is to perform some of his works. That is, works written since his rebodiment. It should be worth an hour of your precious time. Of course, the general public aren’t aware of what he is—they believe he’s some composer who has chosen the medium of the 1700s to express his genius. None of them know what a crucial affair this is to be. The security, of course,” officiously chatty, Chossi letting go of some of his resentment now that Picaro was his audience, “the administration—we’ve had to work all nights. Indeed, ever since we were told. There’s never been anything like this. What will the music be? Astounding? Boring? What a magnificent gamble. Personally, I believe any health problems are now sorted out, and the screening is only provisional. The most up-to-date medical scans reveal nothing wrong with him. Is he a carrier? I doubt it. None of the rest of us has displayed the slightest symptom, even those who spent the most time in his vicinity. No one’s even sneezed. They were unlucky. Jenefra. The others. Whatever it was, they took the full force of it and now it’s over.”