Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) (32 page)

Through the black of night, Beatifica-Volpa saw the tides of day rush in. Sand, not water, filled Venus to her heights. Sand shimmered in her canals. The lagoons a desert.

We suffer on earth, so that we can be happy in another place
.

Why? Why? Why?

Let us only be happy. There, and here.

The procession of boats had at last entered Silvia.

The girl did not know, (who would have told her?) they had been building the pyre for her two days already, the platform and the shape of logs and dry tinder. For, without doubt,
they
had known she would be needing it.

In the marshes, the fitful torch light. The boats like a black serpent, some antique story of a monster which lived under the lagoons, surfaced now, glimmering, flashing gold and red.

There were other banks of boats, drawn off. People stood on them to watch.

The bell of Santa Lallo Lacrima, Lullaby
of Tears, tolled like the rest. Did she isolate its individual note?

And there, another church going by, with a high and gesturing spire. On an islet in the marsh, desolate, and bell unrung. Gargoyles peered over, and behind, a hill rose free of the encroaching marsh, but a hill bare of anything much, some hovels clinging on there. (From which, people stared.)

Next, Roman pillars marching on either side of the boats, or standing like whitish nails hammered in, and on their tops, the nail-heads, weird beings of wings and draperies, wreathes, chariots—that once had been gods.

But they were so high up, like the gargoyles, hardly to be seen.

A square, not unlike the Primo’s, but empty, and this waterway carving through it, and on a pedestal a god with beard and weaponry fork—Neptune, the patron, long ago, of Venus, trident lifted, catching fiery crimson from the lights. (And would this god have saved her? He had been partial to maidens, Ovid said, liked them when they looked like young men.)

After that, a hump of darkness, just defined somewhat by other torches, that sprang out like flaming weeds. Ve Nera’s little Colosso. The amphitheater where, in the time of the Crusades, the City had burned alive all those who were the foes of God.

Beyond that place, the marshes opened. Though half clotted, spilled with veils of grass and sand, they finally ran outwards to the silvered black of void. It was the sea. Perhaps. Or some other elemental thing that always rings the cities, bodies,
being
of mankind.

To the girl, nothing. Everything—was nothing.

A smell of pitch and salt and stagnancy. Of water.

Of fire.

The priests far ahead and far behind, were
dolorously chanting now.

Her mountain floated in the air.

Was it only an afterimage of flaming torches, left on the curve of her eyes?

In the day of the Romans, the sea had been farther off. Tunnels had led it in towards the stadium, for their shows of ship-battles and drownings.

Tonight the crowd itself brought a sea into that place.

They were scrambling in among the old crumbled tiers of seats, inconveniencing those already seated there.

In the mouths of entryways, up which victims had been herded or gladiators stalked, the crowd now jumbled. There was no longer an old smell of lions and bears to distress them. The moans of terror had died away.

The platform was at the center of the great arena. It had been built very large, as if for a giant. In former centuries, the pyres had stood in rows, twenty or forty at a time. But she was only one—so things must be exaggerated to display her importance.

There was a causeway. Out of the boat, and along this road of stones, they took Volpa, who had been Beatifica.

As she came into the amphitheater, an awful, incredible sound went up. Itself, the amphitheater knew it well enough. The walls had taken the impression of such noises, kept them better than the odors and whimperings.

One entity, a mob. Wordless. Yet there were words—
Feed me
.

The black and glittering procession, headed by its dayspring of a golden cross, (dragon-like) rippled over the arena floor.

It formed another pattern, with the center left
open—for the girl, and the pyre.

Volpa looked up at the pyre. A huge, leaning, stacked pile of wood. It reminded her, the ultimate irony, of the yard of Ghaio Wood-Seller.

A man in black was before her.

He called, in a wild chant of voice, so all the crowd could hear:

“One last time, woman. Will you renounce your wickedness, and disown Satanus? Your body we can no longer, through your stubbornness, save. But we long to cure your soul. It is so easy. You need only throw off your crimes and beg God’s mercy, even here at the foot of the stake. And though we, and He, must punish you for your sins, yet you will not altogether die. Oh turn from your vainglorious corruption. Turn from it, Beatifica. I entreat you!”

Volpa stared at him, as the crowd did. A spectator.

He might have cried out in another language.

And now indeed, relinquishing her salvation, the priest belled in Latin, long gross sentences of excommunication she did not understand. But the crowd did, even the most untutored of them. They knew, and hung above and about, congealed in a wondrous revulsion at this fear which had missed them.

After that there was some delay. There had been a difficulty with the structure of the platform, or the pyre.

The arena was old and ill-maintained. Engineers had had to come and make it sure. Or try to do so.

The eyes of Volpa wandered.

But everything was the same. The reeling tiers of seats, the circular-seeming space. Human figures, in similar attitudes. Craning, pointing, mouthing—or, like her guards, the dragoncoils of priests, motionless.

Her eyes any way were dazzled, and very
tired.

She did not see two men, clad in black like countless others, standing to one side.

If any of the Bellatae Christi—Warriors of God, perhaps, Knights of the Maiden—had entered this place, which had been
forbidden
them, they did so unknown, and disguised. How many, Echelon and Militia, were there? Careless of the Council of the Lamb, or God, but not quite of summary imprisonment or death. Many.

They were known, too, found out, among the crowd. But the staring mob did not denounce them or go after them. They had prey already.

Cristiano and Jian had come up by one of the ghastly entrance ways of reeking, broken stone. Strong, young and male, no one quibbled that they pushed to the front.

The pyre was perhaps eighty feet from them. But it was much further. Beyond the moon. Under the sea.

Cristiano stood expressionless. He might have lashed and denied and forced himself on, for this one express moment. And he was sure, was he not, that no Hell awaited her. He was sure. And inside the case of steel, he burned already, molten and screaming.

Beside him, Jian, almost as armored. Not quite.

Jian’s mouth worked. It was as if he tried to remember speech.

Everything was lost. The world was lost.

Cristiano, burning in Hell fire, accepting.

Jian, writhing in the fire of earth, unable to accept.

Volpa saw neither.

And now, courteously, (at last) the priests and guard were propelling her to the steps, a wooden ladder, of the type she had often seen in the first hill farm, and in the house of Ghaio.

The executioner met them there. He bowed to the
priests. A brown man with thick muscles and a brutal face. But the eyes were not brutal. They glared out in nervous agony at what the body and face consigned them to.

The priests drew off. Somehow, decorously.

The executioner spoke to Volpa.

“Too high, Maid. My boys can’t get up again to you. We do, when we can. Break the neck. Make it quick. But not here, not with an audience like this. I’ll say what to do. There’ll be a deal of smoke. Breathe it up. It’ll numb you, take you off a bit. You may die from that. But if the flame gets you, I promise, girl, I’ve seen it hundreds of times, it never takes so long. Trust me. It’ll be over soon. Then you can rest.”

Volpa turned and looked at the executioner. He was to say, after, he had never seen a woman or a man so serene. (This being how he interpreted her state.) And she said, “Am I really to die then?”

“Yes, girl. Yes. Don’t fret. It’s soon over. I swear it is.”

And she said, “Cry for yourself not me. My pain is done. I am in God’s world now.”

The words of the male slave, by Ghaio’s house, had again come to her. The executioner was not crying. His eyes always watered at strong light. His eyes wept, but he did not. He caught his breath, though. He did not know she had said these words because, in the shambles of her thoughts, the talk of burning had recalled her mother’s cremation, as his watery eyes put her in mind of tears. Because all she had been told was that death was the end of pain.

Not the beginning, as a zealot might have assured her.

Or did she say it because some vast intelligence, beyond her and all things, let fall the words on her tongue?

“God will be
compassionate,” mumbled the man.

Then, “Do you need my help, climbing up?” (Sometimes their legs would not carry the condemned to the scaffold.)

“No,” she said, listless, almost—he thought—bored.

“I’m used to ladders.”

After tying her securely to the post, the executioner’s assistants leaped down.

They had paid her no attention, treating her like a side of meat, or bit of furniture, which needed only to be secured. In the same way, if so instructed, they would, under cover of the smoke, have gone back and snapped her neck, or punched her unconscious. Normally it would be several more decades, if they lived, before they realized what their job entailed.

The executioner came forward with a torch, and then his assistants with three more.

The priests were to bless these brands. How else could the fire work upon this witch who called fire?

Matteo, a Magister Major of the Primo, stood out before the Council. He too wore a black cowl and mantle.

He blessed the torches, calling on God.

The Council of the Lamb raised their hands.

A tableau.

It was spoiled.

Isaacus rushed out of the knot of priests. He jumped forward, and seizing one of the flaring brands, he held it high.

His face was livid, lurid. He waved the flaming staff at the tiers of seats, and at the sky where God must sit, watching.

And the crowd bayed.

How often, long, long ago, some
Roman butcher of the ring, in such a stance. And such a crowd.

It was unseemly. The Council folded itself. Jesolo spoke stonily. “Stand back, brother.”

“I never shall.”

“This isn’t your work.”

“Yes. My work. God has touched this flame. It will swallow her up into Hell.”

And turning, he strode straight forward, and the executioner and his men moved aside.

So it was Brother Isaacus who stuck the first torch in at the platform’s base, to light the pyre. (Years after, the executioner himself would remember this. He would say,
The Church lit the fire. Not I, or mine
.)

But the flames at once took a grip on the dry wood, and on the straw packed in behind. Presently, where some of the logs had gone in dampened, there would be, as prophesied, smoke. But not yet.

The crowd, silent again, saw the fire catch. And made its noise once more.

Then the executioner and his men circled round the platform, thrusting in their torches.

And more noise rose. Then slackened off. To a complete silence, in which the rising crackle of fire and wood was plainly heard.

Cristiano looked up at her.

He did not know who she was. Inside his body his psyche seemed riven and pulling apart. He began to pray for her. But the words were meaningless, and even when he knew he was speaking softly but aloud, it did not seem to matter, being irrelevant.

He had been practical. He had willed it to be quick.

Then she would be free. Now he saw it would not be quick. Hours would go by. She would see the flames fluttering, like golden birds, towards
her. Feel the fangs of them. She would begin to scream.

Instead of Beatifica, better if he had died. He could have borne it. How could she?

Why had he not saved her? Why did he stand here now?

(And over all this, his voice quietly speaking for her.
I shall not be afraid for the sun by day, neither the moon in night
…)

Shall I climb up? Die with her?

Half moving. No. They had taken the ladder. He might manage to vault over any way—but the sides of the pyre were not able to support him, now. Or—would they? Why had he not gone up before?

She was not looking at the fire. She was staring away. She did not appear frightened—only—bleak. Like a child abandoned. Acclimatized to it. Indifferent.

Again, he half-moved forward.

As this happened, Jian went by him.

Jian was standing now, in the wide space between the crowds, the priests, and the pyre.

Jian, now, gazing up at her. His mouth working.

The priests over there were conferring. And a guard, summoned, turned towards Jian in his nondescript black.

And Isaacus, prowling like a mangy tiger at the pyre’s foot, slavering, all his corded neck showing, as he stretched it to watch the girl. And on the neck a muddy scar, an old injury, that, to Cristiano now, looked like the lusterless loop of some ancient serpent—but which was the bruise of a hangman’s rope—

Two guards reached Jian. One spoke. Jian reacted with an off-hand blow, and sent the guard sprawling. The other seized Jian.

Jian arched his whole body towards the
top of the pyre, as if to shoot himself upwards and join her in the flames.

And his voice came breaking out of him. It was loud and very precise. His mouth had worked and worked to form this and have it right. Not one who did not hear. Like the Primo Square, this arena of death had been fashioned to relay, with trumpets and swords, a footfall or a whisper.

“Beatifica—you are God’s own light! And this is the fire of wickedness—of the devil’s putrefaction. Oh God, send her your divine spark—let her blast their bloody filth of fire with God’s own flame—
Beatifica
—make the
fire
burn!”