Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) (35 page)

Some days after, on the coast northward of Ve Nera, Danielus married a woman and a man who were no longer Beatifica and Cristiano.

The chapel was a Roman one, but had been sanctified for God. It was a scanty wedding. In its manner also a Christening, for each had been renamed in Christ.

Demetrio—the name of a saint chosen, perhaps, at random by the recipient. Since Beatifica did not seem to know her mother’s name, nor properly any others for her sex, Danielus gave her that of the stone-mason’s wife. Although this would be
kept a secret always, the original Ermilla, he guessed, would take a rich satisfaction in it. Beatifica had been a saint.

Saint, and warrior … vanished. They were, for sure, two different people Danielus had joined. A bridegroom not stunned, yet very silent. A bride as silent, lucent, and in a gown. Much more than that. Much more. The service which created them one flesh—
superfluous
.

Without festivity, and at once, the couple went inland and turned back to the Veneran hills. The farm Danielus rendered them was far away, the mountains close. If ever they must, they could cross them, and be done with the City forever.

But that they might never need to do.

He had never dreamed of any of that, in the windowless cell beneath the Primo, which was always night, and which always soundlessly
roared
. There Danielus had stayed, (dreamless.) Waiting.

Eventually, as expected, guards came. Only ten of them. They marched him up to the surface. He had
not
expected that. Or, not yet.

Despite himself, he was rather disorientated. It was daylight, besides. Once he could see, he saw the blue sky.

Which seemed unending, reducing all this below, to mere stupidity.

There were crowds on the Primo Square.

They were not spent and half-ashamed, as he had assumed they would be, having burned their victim—nor boisterous and seeking new carnage, which he had encountered too, in such mobs.

Most were still sooty from her fire. They spoke in mouthings. And seeing him, went mute.

Then Danielus saw the Council. Twelve men, as ever, for the number of the
Apostles. Sheathed in black, and more like avengers from the classical abyss. The Council of the Lamb, which he had wanted, and intended, to be rid of.

It was Jesolo who stepped forward. And then Danielus saw the Bellatae Christi, perhaps all of them that were left, hardly any of them in a maculum, but with swords, knives, burnished in their belts.

Had they risen, done what he forebade? They too did not have that look.

Jesolo reached Danielus. He looked deeply at the Magister from pouchy eyes. Jesolo said, “Isaacus died. At the foot of her pyre. The people are saying he was struck down by the Most High. For his sin.”

One of the Bellatae moved forward too. It was Jian.

He seemed unsteady, dizzy, or drunk. He said loudly, “She was the saint of God.”

The crowd, murmuring, murmured more vibrantly.

Danielus tried not to search the Bellatae, the crowd, for Cristiano, whom he loved. Danielus, Magister Major, succeeded.

Jesolo said, “Some men are here. The men you had charge of. Once our adversaries.”

Danielus looked, and saw the twenty Jurneians, and Suley-Masroor. He had not seen them because none of them wore their turbans. Their hair, wealths of it, and blacker than ravens, tumbled about them. They had shaved their faces. Both these things, for them, were fearful crimes.

In the name of God—what had these Christian clods done to them—Danielus felt a whirling fury. He could not quite control it, it was so long since he had needed to take control of such vast rage.

Then Suley-Masroor walked forward.

He called out, in his strongest voice, which seemed
to quake the square, “Here is our savior, the Magister Danielus, who brought us to the light.”

The sun beat down. God had made the sun. Or caused the sun to be. Or was the sun … And Danielus knew, from his reading of the Greeks, that the Psalm which spoke of this had been in the form of a song composed in Egypt, by a Pharaoh, praising the deity of the sun …

The guard was falling back from Danielus.

His eyes, stung by the sun’s light, blurred.

He saw the Jurneians kneeling. Abominably, they were kissing a cross a priest was offering them, and the crowd murmured, murmured.

Danielus wanted to snatch the cross away and wipe their lips. For them—such sacrilege. As if they smeared themselves with dung—and worshipped that.

He had wept that day they had remade his sister, the Jewess Yaelit, as the Christian Veronichi. Even though he knew it did not matter. God was God. There was no God—but God.

But the skin of Danielus was ill-made glass, and all the light shone through and changed his blood to dust.

He heard Suley cry out, in a lion’s voice: “It is he, this great priest there, who has brought us to the one true God. And only he could do it.”

And then Jesolo stepped back, and Cristiano stood in front of him. He was white as a new skull. His eyes were black. He put his arm about Danielus, and, helpless, Danielus leaned on him.

“They say you made them Christians, Magister, by your preaching. After the fire—after that thing Isaacus died—the mob was turning. Then these men came up.

Sarco brought them. See, he’s there, in the Council, the twelfth man,
to replace Isaacus. You converted twenty-one intransigent Jurneian infidel to the truth of Christ.”

Jesolo, a little further off, said, “It’s saved you, Fra Danielus. How can we doubt you? Thank God, and Amen.”

Then Danielus was kneeling. He did not know why.

His legs giving way, no doubt. Cristiano, who had lost his one great love, kneeled by him, holding him up.

Cristiano, who was almost dead.

Everyone in the square was kneeling now, and praying. Including the twenty one Jurneians.

They think they damn themselves. And they do it for me. Oh God, how can I bear this sacrifice?

Danielus thought, as he had done before, of Christ’s rejection of the Cup of Agony, the cross, before he put away his human terror, and godlike, drank from it.

But had it been the agony He dreaded or the colossal power, the
godhead
itself, which suffering and death must bring?

No human thing could bear this. Even God-in-flesh could not. How can I?

Then Suley was there, leaning near.

He clutched the Jurneian’s hand—“Suley—Suley—

No
—you must—”

Suley-Masroor’s lips were at his ear.

“For a great one, great things must be done. But do you think our God cannot
see
—or forgive? Or that
we
cannot
lie
?”

And then Danielus wept. He wept because they had overthrown him quite. He had been returned to infancy, was a baby. And a baby cries.

All this the crowd saw and reported. Misread, it was considered appropriate.

Later, as Danielus, no longer a prisoner, and in command
of himself once more, told Cristiano of the plan for Beatifica, and of the message he had received of its success, the first three benign miracles took place.

Although they were not broadcast for some days.

The carcass of the dog, put into the fixed part of the pyre as evidence of the Maiden’s death, went mostly to black shards. Only the heart did not burn.

And, as the City learned later, a beggar, entreating for alms, when the Heart passed over him, though muffled in a bag, regained the use of both his legs. The executioner’s son meanwhile, employing foul language and blasphemy in a wine-shop, took a fit of sneezing and had to desist. And beside the Canal of Seven Keys, where Beatifica, the story went, had once been a slave, a hen laid three score eggs in an hour, and lived.

Cristiano, it was Beatifica you loved, not me.

If ever I am proud, let me remember those twenty-one men who risked their souls for me, speaking the idolatrous prayers of infidels. And let me remember Cristiano, strong as steel to hold me up, until I could stand, and tell him she was not dead.

When I am a child, then I am invincible.

When I am most strong, weaker than any infant.

“Magister—your bed’s ready.”

“No, Demetrio, I wasn’t asleep. We should talk—”

“Tomorrow, Magister.”

Am I old, that he treats me so tenderly, like a father?

And he had been in error. Not Demetrio, but Lauro.

Danielus got up from the chair, and now it was Demetrio-Cristiano who went with him. And then the girl came, slipping from darkness.

“Ermilla—thank you. What lovely bread you baked.

Yes, a candle. I must light it, mustn’t I? Tomorrow then. Tomorrow.”

There was a stair, but narrow,
wooden. Beyond the parlor and the kitchen, only shadows.

But now he saw her lean forward. Her fox’s smile. What a wicked face she had, he thought, this strange girl, like a Maenad almost, from the Grecian myths. Seen in a smooth glimmering—a lamp somewhere …

She put out her hand, and set there on the unlit candle stub Lauro had brought him, a tiny light. Not rosy. A hyacinth petal of flame. From her fingers’ ends.

“Yes, Magister. It came back to her. She can still call the fire.”

Was
this
a dream?

He looked at her clandestine face. Demure now.

She was held fast in Cristiano’s arm, as he had been, on the Primo Square.

Back there in the shadows, had Lauro seen the flame come? Danielus thought not. And Suley was gone.

It was for him alone.

“Thank you,” Danielus said, again.

The stair, as he climbed it, was like a mountain. So life was. Only in the afterlife could one reckon to fly.

Before going up to their bedroom, Demetrio went out to look at the horse. It was a fine one, malt-black. He had exercised and groomed it himself. Tomorrow he would show Danielus, ask his opinion on it—which could be nothing but favorable. Startle him with the gift.

He had seemed exhausted, the Magister, and fallen asleep after the meal. That would never have happened—
then
.

Demetrio did not admit to himself, was mostly unaware, that Danielus meant far less to him, now.

Demetrio’s feelings were of friendship, gratitude, and solicitous respect. Cristiano had seen in the Magister a figurehead, and a man standing
in the sky. God, then the Magister. Not much else. And now—still God, but God reflected from the mirror of his wife. Who, in his inner mind, he still named Beatifica.

Before they ended their evening in the world, he should finish reading the letter that Danielus had brought, from Jian. Jian was with the Bellatae Christi at Rome. He served a higher power now. When he wrote to Cristiano, conscientiously, he never called him that. The letter spoke of mundane things, organized combats, monuments, and pageants of the Virgin. It was as if he tried to reassure Demetrio that the cosmos of earthly spirituality safely continued in the absence of a Cristiano.

Or to make him envious.

Jian never spoke at all of Ermilla. Just as he did not know where Cristiano had hidden himself, he did not know the name of the woman Demetrio had married.

Jian believed the Maiden to be dead.

Danielus had mentioned that Jian, in his other letter to the Magister, had inquired after the Heart and its miracles.
That
now,
was
the Maiden.

There was talk in Rome of another venture to the Holy Land, less a crusade than a processional. Jian would be part of this. He described his ambition to visit the Tomb in the Rock, the way-stations of Blessed Maria on her mule, heavy with the unborn Christ. The desert of fasts and visions.

Was I like Jian?

The horse was peaceful, its coat silk. Demetrio left it, and went to complete the letter under the lantern in the yard.

Jian’s world, now, did not seem real. Nor this one.

Demetrio’s pulse drummed. He put the letter away, still unfinished.

On many nights, he and
she—farming folk worn out—would embrace, and lie down on their pallet on the floor, side by side, to sleep. Sleeping, they went away together, or alone, and in the morning, recounted their dreams. But they seldom did dream, either she or he.

Tonight, they would not sleep.

He looked up at the higher window, soft-lit by a single candle. He looked at the window some while, his body tensed, attentive all through. Then he left the yard of the unreal farm, and climbed towards her light, through the unreal darkness.

When she saw the mountains again, she had remembered them. As the year passed, she watched their calendar of winter white, and later their lower mantles of green.

This farm was planted high, almost beyond the foothills.

The life was pleasant to her. At dusk, sometimes, she would gaze upwards, but no longer to watch for flocks of angels. It was her homage to the sky.

In the small room which was their bed-chamber, she sat combing her hair, hearing it crackle, and seeing the sparks fly out, bright blue.

Waiting for her beloved, she had no thoughts for anyone else, not even for herself. None for the past.

“Am I really to die then?”

The executioner had assured her she must.

She said some sentences to him in return. But she was going already to a great distance. She felt sleepy. She climbed the ladder, just as she had in the house of Ghaio.

She was on the pyre in the amphitheater at Silvia.

There were men around her. She flinched from them, although she had become
used to the nearness of men, unthreatening and dependent, at the Primo chapel and after Ciojha. These were not like that. And they stank.

They did not surround her long. Having tied her to the stake, they jumped away.

Some shouting was going on below. Crowd noises.

Then a sound like the wind, rising. It carried up to her the smell of smoke.

She had been told to breathe the smoke. But already she did not like the smell of it. She looked outwards.

So many people. But now a silence.

They were burning her. She had no actual fear.

What had fire been, but her familiar. Yet, she might have recaptured the pain of the live candle against her palm, Isaacus’ penalty after the Ducal feast. No, she did not.