Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

  She understood all four were dead. That these were not—themselves. But she too, what else was she but one who had been dead, and who was not.

  They came at her together and at once, of course. All four.

  There had been such times—past images of built bridges above water in the stadium, fighting against three men—a fight with wolves made terrible by hunger and mistreatment—a free-fight, seven against seven.

  Then the longer sword of forged ferrum, the nameless provocator’s weapon, arced inward, and for a second she felt its shrill claw on her ribs, before her shield was there instead.

  Already dead, Nameless was not afraid to fight her now.

  IN THE OPEN GALLERY ABOVE, Picaro was aware of, yet did not hear, the clash of blades below, could not hear Flayd’s trumpet-voice thundering—

  Could not hear the storm, the curdling wind, the waves smashing in over the Primo Square, driving before them the wreckage of crushed ships, the crashing of glass and brickwork no longer CX-protected—

  Could not hear rewoken, limping sirens, the shouting, the screaming of fear throughout the City, the pan-demonic of despair—

  Could not hear the sky falling.

  Picaro played the s’tha.

  A pleasing sensual heat, like sunlight or the hot fur of a cat, bloomed up against his face and throat, his chest, his hands that danced on the strings—

  A marvel of effulgence was there, sunlike and wonderful.

  Something

  leaned towards him—

  He felt its touch.

  Not a hand now, nor a cup against his lip, not jealous pain and sickness—

  No, this was the infatuating brushing of an unearthly aura, stroking against him—

  In union—

  Like—

  Like then—

  with her. Simoon—

  Breast to breast.

  Just like that.

  Not even sex. Never love.

  Stronger.

  An emotion that should never have existed in the mortal world, and which never had, till then.

  Till now.

  Picaro, as sometimes he did with a captured audience, half glanced up, toward it.

  So he looked directly at what hovered there against the roof and the parapet of the Torre dell’ Angelo, and against him.

  Probably its blissful glow would blind him, like the sun it had copied. Which wouldn’t matter.

  Its ethereal splendor.

  He too—he too—was partly this—

  It was shining and so bright. He could not look away.

  (Unfaltering, his musician’s hands raced on.)

  And—with things so bright and shining, what do magpies do?

  ABOVE NOW, JULA HEARD the music, and the singing and the sizzling like a conflagration in the air. Below her the howl of the sea, the quake of the City, Flayd’s bronzen calling in a hundred different tongues.

  She had killed the Neptuni Retiarius, as before she had, evading the net, taking the trident against her shield, slicing upward through his side. But the others were at her, circling. … The Gaul, eager now as he had not been in the past, struck her in the side.

  Jula paid the wound no attention.

  This combat could only end in her death. So she believed. She had no care.

  And above Music, and below Prayer—

  Instinctively turning, she ducked under the longer sword of the provocator, the short thrusting sword of Phaetho—she stabbed the Gaul through and through—he tumbled aside.

  She too sprang away, and saw, unstartled by it, how the two upright adversaries she had evaded were suddenly entangled with each other, blade on blade, ignoring her, cursing—believing themselves—not brainless automata of an angel, but actual gladiators, matched together, muddled. For a stupid minute they fought, murmillo with provocator, an unusual pairing. Then that was over.

  As they pulled away, turning to fix their hidden eyes again on her, the new-killed Gaul, and the retiarius, like the remade warriors of the Dragon’s Teeth, were getting once more to their feet.

  In her closed-shut helmet, Jula grunted. It was a laugh.

  This was not Phaetho, and the nameless one who had poisoned her was not himself, nor the Gaul, nor the man with the net. Things, that was all.

  She ran at them, the sword swerving, now here, now there, her metal-edged shield tilted, weapon not defense.

  THE FLAWLESS FACE of the angel poised centimeters from Picaro’s own. Its breath was on his skin, transparent and glittering—visible, and unadulterated as virgin honey.

  What do magpies do?

  The angel

  Spoke

  to Picaro.

  Come to me, said the angel (as the song had said.) And then: I can give you everything. You need no one but me.

  As Simoon had said it, long ago.

  Picaro ceased to play the s’tha. The angel was the music, and he, Picaro. It was they themselves now who played, without any musician.

  “Come to me,” said Picaro. He smiled up into the wondrous face. The longing to throw himself against it, to become absorbed, was very strong, ecstatic, almost—sexual—not. “Come to me. I can give you everything. You don’t need anyone but me. You’re mine.”

  And

  It smiled. The angel smiled.

  In all worlds, there, here, nowhere, never had there been a vision so peerless, or so irresistible. It was what mankind clandestinely dreams of. The love of God.

  THE NAMELESS PROVOCATOR engaged her, while the other three, temporarily, were again down, stunned or slain, believing it themselves.

  As fighters sometimes did, but never wisely, the provocator began to talk to Jula.

  “Why did I have you killed?” asked the provocator. “I wasn’t fearful of you. No. I too was simply paid to see to it. You were discovered to be a Christian, even if you didn’t know. And to our masters, the Christiani were intent on overthrowing all earthly authority. And where most Christiani were passive victims, you, Jula, were not. You had been trained to fight. Have you heard of the rebellious gladiator called Spartacus? He led a revolt that made a cavity in Roman might. Those men he inspired could win against the legions. Rome never forgot Spartacus. They thought you might be one of that kind. And you were so popular, too. Nor did they dismiss you for being a woman. Rome knew women more deadly than any man—all those foreign queens that had hammered against their empire. I was paid. I bullied and bribed and buggered the kitchen slave into doing it for me. Poison on a cake. You died.”

  Unwise to speak. She had no care at all.

  She knew she had heard all the truth at last. Even in this extremity, it intrigued her.

  “How do you know?” she said.

  She had thought too, This thing knows nothing. It is I who know, have known—this voice talks inside me, and is mine.

  Were these things, then, dissembling as gladiators, also hers? Her own demons, which the demon-angel had brought to life—through her?

  Cephus, who was Petrus, had blessed her and given her to his Christ. She thought, to the Christiani—ultimately not to fight was the one true battle.

  She thought of the peacock in the courtyard, and its colors. Green and blue. What did it mean, any of it?

  Jula stood back.

  As once in a dream, she let go her sword.

  The Gaul was standing. Phaetho was getting up—absurdly, for a second, assisting the fallen retiarius—

  Jula let her shield topple down.

  She looked at the gorgon enameled on the breastplate of the nameless provocator.

  “Again, kill me,” said Jula. “I have done enough. I won’t harm you any more.”

  As she said this, a colossal quietude rose within her. She had never felt in all her life—her lives—such stillness. She drew off her helmet and discarded that too. She lifted her head. She looked at the four things that were spatters of etheric dough, bits of a demon-angel. Ghosts.

  She heard the old man say, blind and clear as clarity in her mind, out of the c
atacomb of death: “She is Yours.”

  WHAT MAGPIES DO IS steal what is bright and shining; for that act they’re well known.

  Picaro sighed.

  As he reached to embrace the angel, it too, now enormous, now only the size of a tall man, put out its arms to him.

  Breast to breast.

  Molten.

  Not a cup, but its lips on his own.

  He had kissed Jula.

  That had prepared Picaro. Taught him.

  The kiss of the angel was not like the pressure of a mouth, but like a mending. Nor was its proximity like anything of the body. It was so healingly warm.

  Yet the mouth also—was still a cup. Picaro parted his lips. He was parched, always. He must drink. No water, no alcohol, no drug, could help him. Nothing would do—but this.

  He breathed inward, opening wide, like wings, his singer’s lungs. And drew in the glowing scintillant breath of the angel.

  Drew and drew. In and in.

  He and it—one kind.

  Nor was this inhalation. It was drinking, and devouring. It was thievery. And truth.

  Only then—then—did the angel abruptly stir—move—begin to resist him. Too late. They were linked. He could not stop now, even if he had meant to. For all these years of waiting had formed him to this split second. Made him so hungry and thirsty, so desperately empty—a vacuum, which by mere pressure of its vacancy, would be filled.

  Picaro was a bottomless vent into which the brightness of the angel was sucked down.

  Breathing in and in and in—

  Picaro felt it fill him. He was the vessel. He drank the sea, and the whirlwind.

  The flaming airiness of it was spangling and kindling through every vein, artery, nerve, channel. He felt his organs catch colorless fire and burn, painless, black as his outer skin. Felt his inner self, of which most was almost the same material as the angel’s own, grabbing and pulling and swallowing down and down and down—Greedy. Hungry. Famished. Fill me to the brim.

  Picaro heard himself far off, the music he now made, as he died, as the demon that was an angel, and his brother, and the end of everything, was dragged and drawn and poured and trapped fast inside him.

  It had itself made him vigorous enough to do this. (It, and She.) It had meant them to be one. But never in this way.

  How small it was, the angel.

  It was only like—

  A man—

  Full.

  Picaro dropped backward.

  He lay on the checkered floor of the gallery. He was saturate of nebulae, a nova. It was possible to see this, and the fires, behind his open eyes. The s’tha, snapped in two, lay over him. He was dead.

  Cloudio del Nero, naked and fair as a statue from the dawn of Venus, still leaned, staring, staring, trying to pull back into himself—itself—the radiant immanence Picaro had, by a fellatio of the soul, sucked away.

  Cloudio was taller than any man. He was like the sculpted god Apollo from Aquilla, (patron of birds, inventor of music) upon whose marble face a mask had once been modeled. The very mask that, when Cloudio once wore it, ruined and murdered him—

  Picaro’s lips had remained slightly parted.

  A glimmer, like lit smoke, pierced out between them. And flew up.

  It was a bird, which had come from Picaro.

  It was a magpie.

  Black and white, black head and body and wings, white-collared at the neck and white-fringed at the wings’ edges, and wounded white across the breast.

  It flung itself straight into the face of the statue which was a man, which was not a man, which was an elemental demon-angel, which was the Beast, World’s End.

  The magpie slapped full against the face of the angel, and as it did so, all its black and white changed places on it, its beaked head, its long-feathered tail, the out-fanned wings.

  It was no longer a magpie stuck against the face of an angel.

  It was the Apollo mask—the half-mask, with the noble brows, the thick attached hair, the classical nose, all the black of ink, and the white of snow.

  Picaro’s magpie had become the alchemical mask that had destroyed Cloudio del Nero in the Year of God 1701.

  An angel built of flesh—and the flesh remembering—

  The fair statue wailed.

  It tore at the mask. Which would not come loose.

  Ran across the parapet on human naked feet. Hurled itself off, off into air, as once into a deep canal. It fell. It fell. Screaming. Flightless.

  It fell.

  And when it hit the water and the stone beneath, it broke into a thousand fragments.

  And the light—

  In the lower gallery, Jula felt the phantoms of swords, trident-points, knife, pass through her. Unhurtful, unreal. The four aggressors disappeared.

  She saw instead the lightning-bolt that hurtled by.

  The Tower juddered.

  Beneath, (the base of the Tower, the lowest chakra, cleansing and release) Flayd opened his eyes. He had missed the light but he too felt the impact, and saw the second lightning-splash. And then, a light beyond all light—

  He did not get up, knowing it was redundant.

  Across the City swelled one incandescent shriek. Million upon million voices—

  And then Venus, all Venus, burst like a star inside an eggshell, and the eggshell too, her poreless, impenetrable dome, (a goblet of Venus crystal) blew inward, outward, with a sound so immense it was entirely silent. And through the shattering of all things, the toylike, shaken, pretty sparkle, the sea fell in. Falling, falling.

  And soft as a flower head, the City separated to petals and fell also, upward, into the abyss of the waters.

  6

  PICARO …

  The water closing over my head, my body—I seemed to see through a bulb of obscure glass. And in that fashion I beheld the church of Maka Selena pass, drifting away, and then I saw the bottom of the lagoon … all at once I felt I need no longer suffer this, and felt myself let go …

  Like a ruined pile of brushwood, trodden on, the mess of sails, brave flags, crests, burning, burning, on a water poison green and streaked with oil and fire. Loose spars and floating corpses. And men swimming or going under … mortal voices …

  Like the Flood. The City looking up. Safe under the sea for ever. Streets and domes, towers and squares. The boats grounded. The beautiful faces under green drifting layers, a paving of lilies, or masks. All struggle done …

  IT WAS A SEA OF glass mingled with fire.

  Under the light morning sky of the upper world, a sky unbroken and whole, seamed only with delicate cirrus clouds.

  Everywhere on the water, wreckage, breakage. And glass, fractured glass, and islands of fire.

  The dead went idly by. Their faces scanned, with no anxiety, the real heaven, which was blue.

  Some kilometers off, a host of subvenerines, stabilized and mostly intact, were rising up through the surface, with their cargoes of animals and personnel.

  There were other survivors. They held to unintended rafts of furniture, wood, sails, carpets, pillars, pipework—Some were in a bad way. Others seemingly untouched.

  Here, there was scarcely a noise anywhere.

  High up, up in the real, blue, unharmed and now unthreatened sky, real black gulls circled, calling crankily, disturbed by this strange upheaval of the ocean. And on the distant sweep of the mainland, sirens now were beginning to hoot, and a swarm of VLOs just now cumbersomely lifting.

  As yet, perhaps, they had no notion of the magnitude of the catastrophe. (None, of what it might have come to.) Bizarre forces had somehow kept the event localized. No quake had rocked the mainland, no tidal wave had cast itself across the shore. That they had not was inexplicable. Given the scope of the disaster, nothing—no one—should have survived the dome, or its upper environs. And yet.

  Jula and Flayd, unscathed, as others were, save by the smallest nicks and abrasions, sat together on one of the endless, crowded, improvised boats. (It had no motor, let
alone CX. The passengers, those that could, took turns rowing, using any oar-like flotsam.)

  Picaro watched Jula and Flayd a brief while. He took in their speechless communication, the way the faint morning wind combed out Jula’s wet blonde hair. Picaro saw that Jula and Flayd were crying. In silence. Like many hundred others.

  For a moment then, he wished he might have gone to them and spoken.

  But the moment didn’t last. It never does. It never must.

  He went from them less visible or felt than the breeze. Curiously, however, when this happened, Jula turned her head and gazed after him. He noted that. Her eyes on his, as he moved away inside the unseen door. Her eyes, peacock-colored, vivid blue and green, were the last he saw of the world he left.

  “Look,” Jula said. She leaned a little from the boat. A dove, dead, the color of pearls, lay on the water. She took it up in her palm and held it there.

  Flayd wiped his hand over his face. Then, an after-thought, jettisoned the computer wafer (useless) of codes and keys over the side. “I guess they couldn’t send all those birds up in time. Like the people—down there.” He stared at the dove in Jula’s palm. At the epicenter of the cataclysm, they had been, like heroes in all myths, flung clear. Only he couldn’t remember much about it. And Picaro hadn’t come up with them. Picaro was—down there, under the sea. Down where the drowned City was and all the rest.