Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) (22 page)

She went by quite near him,
once. She was trailed by two Bellatae, Cristiano now saw, one of whom was Jian. But he did not greet Jian, nor Jian him.

Beatifica did not see Cristiano, he thought. He would not have anticipated her to, at this moment. He could not know, of course, how Danielus had warned her.

But, seeing her near, Cristiano saw her for the very first. As other men did, who were on their feet, Cristiano knelt. Some hem of her cloak brushed over his head, and he felt it like a thread of running light.

She was mired in the blood and filth of hundreds, by now. And out of it she shone.

Not until every man who had called to her had individually received her presence, did she go in again.

By then the bell was ringing for the Prima Vigile, two hours after midnight.

They let her go without remonstrance. She had earned her reward, and they knew the Maiden loved best to pray.

Not baggage now, but bleeding men were being carried up the passages and stairs of Santa Lallo Lacrima’s sister-house.

The nuns pressed back against stone walls. They were in awe. Less at the gravity of wounds, the largesse of damage, than at this general peacefulness. Even men writhing in agony, turning to say through pain-black lips, “Bless you, sister, for your charity.” As if to reassure.

Word had come with them.

“It’s true then. This girl who flaunts about as a man—”

“But look at her effect.”

“Don’t doubt, little sister,” said a
soldier carried by, “God sent her.” He laughed, eyes shining.

There had been the usual dispensation of a war. Even the nuns might hear the last confessions.

“I thought I was damned, sister. She convinced me I’d paid, and never was.”

Behind the officiating sister, another pursing her lips. “Only God can decide that, soldier.”

Shaming her, as she needed to be shamed, the dying man said, “He promised, through her. But He prefers a tender voice, doesn’t He, to a spiteful one.”

As Veronichi hurried about the church, her arms full of salves, basins, bandages, fresh candles, her hair tied up under her cap so her face looked like a pip, and her gown streaked with ordure and blood, she too thought of Beatifica, this being she had never seen.

But in the rooms, in and out of which she went, she heard the difference Beatifica had made.

Waiting in rows, the soldiers drowsed fitfully, drugged with herbs and pellets of Inde. While a surgeon worked, splashed head to foot in the debris of his trade.

But this man under his knife was bearing it all, choking out between gasps and whines, that the pain of the world was but a lesson. Its suffering cleansed and brought one to the Kingdom beyond life, fit to companion God. It was good to bleed.

At which the surgeon’s assistant blurted out, “So it isn’t a punishment we’re sent?”

“No—she says—she says it’s only to learn from. Even God suffered.”

At length he fainted.

The surgeon grimaced. “Heaven spare me chatterers.”

But the teaching of Beatifica
was everywhere now to be found. (Actually, her mother’s teaching from the early years of Volpa’s life.)

Veronichi labored tirelessly. She was strong and toughened by her first existence among the plagues and illnesses of the ghetto. Also, it seemed, passionless.

Sent on new errands, she passed Sister Purita on the stair behind the cloister.

They went by without speaking, yet each glancing once, curiously, furtively. Danielus linked them, but tenuously.

Veronichi thought, however, prudent and wily,
I must come to know her, I think.

Purita thought nothing of Veronichi, except that she did not have the Fra’s handsomeness, looked properly a Jewess, and had sent all her servants to safety on the Veneran Plain.

All in all, Purita felt prosaic. She had been told her brother had survived the battle—at which had come a gush of relief—and, peculiarly, irritation. Must his way be made always straight?

Then she came about the corner, and scratched at the door of the Domina’s chamber.

The fat grasshopper was propped up high in her hard bed. Purita was glad to see she had been made more comfortable.

All about the bed, despite the turmoil of the war casualties below, fourteen of the nuns of the higher offices stood in a pale cordon. Were they reluctant to allow Purita by? Then one stepped aside, lowering her eyes.

Candles burned, but dawn was near. In the window a sort of nothingness had replaced the opaque immensity of night.

“I stayed to see, to behold
one more sunrise,” said the Domina. “I love it so, how could I leave before—and He has allowed me this.”

So she was dying too. With what a guard of men she would go up. But she was worldly in her ascetic way. She would not mind.

Purita was sorry. The Domina was a fair woman. And what came next would undoubtedly be difficult.

Purita had given over trying to deny or evade. Luchita had previously let go her chains, her tribulations. Purita did not mean to take them up. Although, if allowed, the other burden she would accept.

Her own arrogance in that had amazed her, at first. But arrogance and amazement too she had let go.

The nuns in the room, some of whom must also know, struck her now as more friendly than expected. They were conceivably only uneasy. After all, what might Purita turn out to be? She must have already surprised them very much.

The Domina said, “I’ve been shriven, my own concerns are done. And now I have called you here to witness me.”

Purita stood among the other nuns, head bowed, seemingly attentive.

As the old woman detailed her thoughts and wishes, sometimes pausing while they gave her sips of watered wine, Purita’s mind strayed back and forth. These sisters had been in the order since girlhood. While Gratzilia there, had entered the religious life as a child.

Gratzilia stammered, but she was often impatient and often brutish. She sneered at the infirm, pinched the novices. In the garden she had, as Purita saw, killed helpful bees, and once shut a little frog under a bucket for no reason but malice. When Purita lifted the bucket, allowing the frog’s escape, Gratzilia reviled her,
stammering, and incomprehensible. Later Gratzilia scalded Purita’s foot with water spilled from a pan.

Now Gratzilia was mute, and her habit had bloodstains as did almost all their clothes, from the assistance given below.

The window was changing further.

This was like any summer dawn. Bird song, color re-invented. There was a trace of golden cloud painted high on the thinning sky.

“Therefore,” said the Domina, “it is my wish that Sister Purita take on my mantle. And to this end, I have written to the Primo. Here’s my favorable answer, signed and sealed by Fra Danielus, Magister Major of the Upper Echelon of the Bellatae.”

The nuns poised like petrified wood.

Purita thought distinctly,
Will they round on me and rend me in pieces?

Then she heard their murmurings.

“Yes, Mother. God guided you.”

“I have prayed for it, Mother.”

To her own astonishment Purita felt her eyes let out two rushing streams of tears. They poured down her face. More fell.

She groped for the bed and crouched beside it.

“Domina. I’m not worthy. Oh, Domina, not me. How can I carry this authority?”

And again astonishing her, she felt the quick light touches of the nuns, smoothing her, softly, almost amusedly reprimanding her lack of faith. And the warm hand of the Domina holding hers.

“There, there, child. Remember how you told me you couldn’t do justice when you read from the Bible? And then you read as if you had been accustomed since infancy. Rely
on Christ. Then you need never be afraid. And here is my dear walking stick, for you to lean on if ever you have need to.”

The window flamed suddenly rose-red. The old woman sighed and died, and her warm hand went abnormally cold. It was as if she had been dead some while, yet somehow stayed animate to see the dawn as she wanted.

Purita wept on, soothed among the flock of thirteen nuns. She did not think of the fourteenth now, the stuttering Gratzilia, gibbering in the corner, her mouth so full of maleficence she could not get it out.

The terror came after one more day.

Men fear the worst, and pray the worst will never be. They live only by forgetting that the worst must sometimes find them, as they fear. And sometimes, so it does.

The Jurneian fleet, lit foremost now by a sinking madder sun. Dipped in blood, like the wreckage of Veneran men washed in one day before them.

Up to the sand-bars and the walls that held off the sea. Up to the silver mirrors of the great lagoons.

Jurneia pressed her carmine tiger face against the looking-glass of Venus and was reflected there.

The pitiless enemy.

The ravenous infidel.

And sometimes, so it does.

Joffri had run away. He had been sobbing, as he did it, with humiliation. But he had done it. Taking his dogs, horses, friends, mistresses, and—an afterthought?—his wife. Now the
City that had not so far emulated him, began to.

Barges loaded with baskets, furnishings, people in tears, or wailing, toiled through the waterways. There were collisions, drownings. Families fought and cursed each other and began feuds that would last for generations.

Some of the rich and noble had fled, like the Ducem. Others had shut themselves inside their palaces. Yet others opened their palaces and took in the less fortunate, out of the poorer houses and the hovels, before closing and barricading their gates.

Blocks of stone and hand-carts of rubbish were thrown into certain of the canals, in the hope of making them impassable to any of the enemy’s smaller craft.

Under the direction of various officials who the Ducem had left with the charge of Ve Nera, soldiers manned the sea walls and the inner islands. Falling back from the former when the Jurneian cannon spoke, just after dawn the following day. This was when the Jurneians had finished their prayers, and the bells in the City were ringing the Auroria. Jurneia was ahead in everything, it seemed.

Belatedly boats had been put across the ocean end of the two lagoons Fulvia and Aquila. These too were all successfully splintered by cannon shot not long after noon.

In the Primo, priests had begun to pray on the previous morning, continuously, at the Great Altar under the Dome.

They prayed in batches. As men sank down exhausted or took sick, they were replaced.

The outer islands were almost deserted—Torchara, Isole. (More inward, also the Isle of the Dead, where the dead had been left to the mercy of God.)

Those who kept the outer
(useless) defenses of Aquila and Fulvia, or on the Silvian Marshes—soldiers and hapless volunteers—soon saw the strategy of the Jurneians was to be as predicted.

Within half a day they had blasted flat the sea walls. (The infirmaria, marooned on its strip of land, took one blow almost incidentally. Laid indecently open, it displayed its two stories like shelves, stocked with corpses, and worse, the partly-dead and screaming.)

As the afternoon tide shifted, also as prophesied, the Jurneians used their sailors and their slaves to lay down wooden rollers on the sand-bars thus exposed. Their slaves then dragged over them the ships, by ropes. Where the sea had its narrow access to Fulvia, by the isle of Torchara, they pulled the ships through by means of little boats, taking no chances.

Into the lagoons, Jurneia came. Making soundings as they came, sensibly. The lagoons were not to be trusted, their floors uneven. Jurneia knew everything. Even not to move in too near. As yet.

Last isolate cannon fired from Isole, Torchara, and the marsh. And from five ships that sailed around the flank of the Isle of the Dead.

Jurneia returned fire, as if in courtesy not to belittle, and the Veneran artillery grew silent.

Like the smashed barrier boats, the five last ships of the fleet of Venus cracked and split, floated, turned over and went down, sails spread out once more like washing, belly full of water. Veneran men swam frantically away, and Jurneia let them.

Bells rang in Venus. Not for prayer. Everyone that could was praying, probably.

The bells, like the ballistas, presently fell silent, too.

Some seven hundred and fifty-eight Jurneian ships had survived
the fight at Ciojha. Now four hundred of them were mounted on the waters of the lagoons. They jostled a while. Then they were in order.

Now, Jurneia did no more. The ships stood there, hiding the water, tall and burgeoned with their rigging.

Seen from the City shores, they were like one more city.

They stood there.

Needing nothing else.

The Master Suley-Masroor, in the fore-tower of
Quarter-Moon
, was looking at Venarh, in afternoon light.

He saw no beauty in it. Like all cities, it had some glamours, the huge gleaming dome of its idolatrous fane, for example. But it seemed strange to him,
wrong
, the way this host of walls overhung, or went down into, the water. Besides, it was there only to be destroyed. Not by his will, but by the will of those he served. And through destiny, which came from God.

He was sorry for Venarh.

In the sea-fight he had not felt that. He slew the Christian devils and assisted in the wreck of their vessels.

This thing lay passive, and not well defended. It had its own unlovely but cogent life. Yet, men had souls, even if they threw them away in non-belief; there would be a chance for those Jurneia captured as slaves and converted to the true faith.

But a city’s spirit died with its body. Crows would wheel above Venarh, and sea-birds make their nests in its ruin. The sea it flirted with would wash in and cover it.

Among the under-rooms of the Primo, the chamber of the Council of the lamb was lit by candles and by torches. It had no window. An iron room, filled full today.

The Council was in session. But
along the great table of polished ebony, there also sat Fra Danielus, and his two fellow Magisters Major, with Ve Nera’s Marshal of Arms, who had come here, swearing, from the quays. Captains of the Marshal sat by or stood at his back, and alongside them, nine of the Upper Echelon of the Bellatae Christi.