Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) (8 page)

Once she slapped Volpa. “Didn’t I say don’t let them see you?” And then the woman snatched at her own hand. “Oh—I never meant to strike you, poor thing!” While Volpa, used to blows, waited, puzzled.

The woman was called Luchita. She was the wife of the innkeeper. This was an inn. The patrons did not like to see Volpa, so she must be kept from their sight. The persons in the kitchen did not like her either. There was a lean piebald cat kept for the mice and rats. Nor did he like Volpa, and sometimes, without reason, approached and bit her. Seeing this, some girl had cried out—“Now the cat’s poisoned!”

Volpa remembered a red mountain in a dream—or had she and her mother really wandered there? (Had the mountains been scarlet above the Veneran Plain?) Once they had been on a hill, and looked up, and in the green sky angels passed. Volpa remembered
that well. And a snake in a tree.

Luchita rose from her knees. She had been praying to the Virgin, but only in the upper room, while her husband, laved in wine, snored an accompaniment. She had heard the Prima Vigile sound from Santa La’La—two hours after midnight. Useless to pray here. God heard only those who went into a church.

There was never time to make the journey. She was so tired. Too tired to sleep beside the jolting snores. She struck the tinder and lit the candle-stub. She went down the narrow stair and into the corridor.

It was summer, yet still not warm at such an hour.

She suspected none of the three inn servants slept now in the kitchen. It was a cause of resentment, her letting the girl come in, letting her sleep there. But what else was there to do? Cristiano had insisted the girl have some care. He would speak with his superiors, he said, find a convent where she might be taken in. That was always his answer. Everything was only to be found in God. Long ago, he had told Luchita herself she might be happier out of the world—she, a
nun
! Damn him, his loins were made of ice and his heart of stone.

No, no. Not so, not so. She loved him, he was good.

He gave her money after the sot drank it away. He was beautiful—oh, to be chaste when equipped with such an armament. For certain, he was a godly man.

Luchita cried tears. Wiped them off. Went out of the door and three steps over the yard and into the kitchen which was built against the house.

Yes, as she thought. No one was there, only the mad girl lying by the hearth. Which was out, black and cold as a grave.

Luchita felt angry. Her moods were easily
upset after the still birth.

She shouted.

“Wake up, you slut! Don’t you know to keep the fire going?”

As the form stirred—slender and fluid as a serpent—Luchita glared about to find the tinder. The kitchen was untidy, greasy, and smelled stale. The tinder was nowhere to be seen. She must use the candle then, make the fire, put on some herbs and water in a pan for comfort and perhaps sleep.

At, least the fool was setting sticks on the hearth now.

“That will do. Where did they stow the flint for the fire? You don’t know. Curse you, you wretch. Your brain’s turned like milk. No, I know you’re dumb. You can’t speak.”

(Volpa gazed up, thinking, trying to remember if she could.)

But Luchita was crouching by the hearth, thrusting in the candle. As it met too hurriedly, the sticks, the wick was quenched. The flame went out.

Luchita laughed with fury. She sat back.

“There. That’s how this world is.”

The tears returned. She let them drop. Who was to see but this idiot.

Through the high window a faint light stole. The moon sailed above Venus, changing every canal, every channel of the marsh, both of the great lagoons to opal.

A soft, crackling was in the air. It had a sound of burning. Luchita looked, and saw the mad girl running her hand through and through her dirty, sticky hair. Yet how brilliant the hair was, after all. Its redness shone out, merely from the moon.

She had pulled some of the hair
loose. It fluttered in her fingers. She let it pour, liquidly, on to the twigs—“
Jesus our Lord
—”

Volpa seemed diffident and barely awake. Her voice, unused for almost two months, was hoarse. “My mother showed me how.”

Flames sprang briskly along the sticks, from the fire Volpa had made in her hair. The hearth burned with a cheerful domestic light.

Down all the winding corridors, the nun glided precisely three paces ahead of him. Either she, or he, maintained the distance, despite his Soldier’s stride.

It was a bare place, blank stone, cut here and there with the harsh shape of a crucifix, or a window looking on an empty court.

Then a gallery, steps, a wooden door.

Cristiano entered the narrow room. The door shut. His sister sat at the table, her hands on a small cross the nuns must have given her. Her face was scrubbed and her hair plaited and put in under a long white cap.

She looked older, and younger, both at once. Her eyes were dark and flat.

“You see. Here I am. Where you told me to go.”

“Luchita, I never said you must.”

“No. Someone has.”

“Who—has he thrown you out? I’ll speak to him.”

“My husband?” She looked momentarily incredulous. “
Him
, that sop? I left his house. I’m to serve here, and then I’m to be taken in among the lay sisters. After a year I can begin my novitiate.”

“It’s unusual. You’re not a widow.”

“I told them who my brother
was.”

“I see.”

“You’re not happy. I thought you’d rejoice.”

“Luchita, you yourself admit you’re not a woman for such a life—”

“Now, I am. The rest—was burned out of me.”

Cristiano went to the window. He looked down at the empty court. There was nothing in it, no well, no shrub. Only the high walls at its sides.

“You lost a child, Luchita. This—may have been a fancy.”

“No.”

“She has yet to be questioned. Suppose you were mistaken.”

“I never was. She created fire. I saw it.”

“Then suppose, Luchita, Berbo was correct and her gift comes from the Devil?” He spoke almost mockingly. He had never, she thought, credited contemporary miracles, only the stupendous wonders of an earlier world.

“If it was from God or the Devil, what do I care? It proved to me, Cristiano, it
proved
to me—what I have
never
believed.”

“Which is?”

“Life other than this one. Omnipotent power other than the power of men. God exists.” In her face he saw, and did not recognize it, his own adamantine certainty.

“You won’t shift me. Recollect, you never could. God Himself has done so.”

This, she knew, was
not
the house of Ghaio Wood-Seller. She had been brought here in a black boat, over a vast sheet of water she thought to be the sea. It had been night, when she entered some equally vast building.

The room was small and dark, windowless and lit by candles even now,
at noon. Yet there was a sweet smell. Volpa sat on the stool they had given her, which was uncomfortable, but she never noticed this, being used to discomfort.

Three priests sat at the table, on chairs. Two looked at her, and one wrote down apparently their questions, what she answered. She recalled such priests from the byways and market-place. Everyone feared them, but Volpa did not. It was not courage on her part—she had never been brave. Was there a word for what she had been? It was that she knew that she, a slave, and perhaps insane—as others said of her, she had heard it—was of no importance.

Secure in abasement, she felt no specific awe, and showed none.

The priests for their part had noted as much. Yet neither was the girl rude in her manners. Her eyes were kept down, save now and then. She sat modestly. A humble and demure creature, who answered with a seeming honesty.

Any wrong-doer, blasphemer, murderer, witch—would deny the practice, until the full questioning began. Then all was brought out. But they had not been permitted to speak of torture, not even to show her the instruments. Was she then only mad? She did not seem to be. She knew her name, her position. When asked if she knew of God, she had said that she did, and crossed herself. Only in the matter of her former master was she somewhat vague. Witnesses had been found to identify her as the slave of the wood-seller on the Canal of Seven Keys. She acknowledged this. But when the priests demanded to be told what had become of him, and his house, (and three other houses besides) she affected not to know.

“The house burned, did it not?”

“Did it burn?”

“I said that it did. And you, girl,
burnt it.”

Her eyes were raised then, strange eyes the color of the wine of pale grapes. “When I lived there, it didn’t burn.”

She had told them, in response to their interrogation—apparently not frightened by their voices and louring, used to such things, glad only not to be hit—that since about five years old, she had lived in Ghaio’s house as a slave. But one morning, she woke up in an alley and did not know where she had got to. Then, wandering about, she had, she acquiesced, seen some houses that were burned. She did not recognize them. Also, sometimes women gave her a crust or some clean water to drink and she came across an inn, where they gave her food, usually in the evening.

Why had she woken in the street?

She thought Ghaio had sold her. In fact, she had thought he sold her to the inn-woman with blonde hair, because subsequently Volpa had been in the kitchen there, and performed duties. But later she remembered that before this, she had been homeless in the alleys. Did she remember too making the fire come to the hearth at the kitchen of the inn?

Volpa here seemed to hesitate.

The priests’ large white faces swelled. Even the clerk glared up at her.

Volpa said, “Mistress wanted the fire. So I made it.”

“How was it made?”

“How mumma showed me.”

“The mother was also a witch,” snapped one of the priests. Volpa heard him say this, but, it made no sense.

Her mother had been a slave. “
How
did she show you?
What
did she show you?”

“In a dream. After she
died.”

The priests recoiled. As snakes do sometimes, before they strike.

“A ghost? A
demon?
Where did she appear to you?”

“In a beautiful place. With a fiery mountain.”

“
Hell
!” exclaimed one of the men.

“
Beautiful
—” said the other—“in what way?”

The girl raised her head and her eyes again. Her eyes were very clear, as if washed in light.

“It was easy and happy there,” said the girl.

The priests sank back.

Hell could not be described as easy, nor happy, even by a malefactor. Nor beautiful. But the Devil was cunning.

One of the priests rose. He moved around the table and came to stand by Volpa. He put his hand on her shoulder.

“Now, my girl you’re not helping yourself. This business at the inn. Don’t you know what you’ve done?”

She was a slave, with whom obedience was paramount. She said, without guile or omission, frankly, “I lit the fire.”

Perhaps she was in that room five days and nights. She was allowed, as most were not, intervals of rest, and to eat, and to void herself.

On the sixth evening, two women came, nuns, with only one man as guard. They took Volpa away up many flights of steps.

In a chamber which had several windows, but these high up, showing only a summer sky fading, Volpa was stripped and washed by a servant, in a bath that had a fountain running into it. Then her hair was also washed. As this went on, both nuns stood by (the guard was outside) and chanted, holding their crosses.

Volpa was dressed in a shift and a
plain long gown, and her hair and neck covered by a scarf and cap. This dress, that of a woman neither well-to-do nor poor, most relevantly a
free
woman, surprised Volpa. She said nothing. The non-slavish questioning nature of youth had mostly ended with her mother’s silence.

The two nuns then conducted Volpa up further flights of stairs, the guard walking behind.

Until now, the inner landscape of the building had not attracted Volpa’s notice, or not very much. Presently however there was a passage, whose deep red walls were patterned by golden flowers. Then came a sort of circular space, in the middle of which rose a marble pillar, painted around in plummy colors, with pictures of robed men. Beyond was a door of iron. Here stood another guard. Unlike the guard who had come with them, and was clad only as a lay brother of the Church, this one wore leggings, and a tunic embroidered by the sigil of the Primo, the Lion ridden by the Child.

The nuns did not accompany Volpa beyond the gate, nor did the lay brother. Instead, a lean, stooping man in black, and hooded, stepped through the door. “Is this the woman?”

“It is.” The nuns seemed taken aback, anxious.

“Is she named Vixen?”

“Yes, brother.”

And turning on her his thin eyes—thin both in width and tint—he beckoned Volpa.

The iron door was shut behind her.

The second corridor was patterned by golden beasts—all of them rare, and mostly uncanny. It opened into a hall less large than high.

Those brought here had been sometimes overcome.

Like the vast Basilica that ran below and alongside these apartments,
the Golden Rooms suggested the glories of Heaven.

The walls were blood red, so thickly painted and inlaid by gold and gems that they gave the impression of a metallic tapestry. The ceiling was sheathed in silver and gold. There were seven great arched windows, set with diamond glazes of saffron, red and water-green. All this shone into a floor of polished obsidian, and so gave a sense of ultimate light floating on a lagoon—or in a sea of glass.

They crossed the floor, Volpa hesitating, her balance interrupted.

A door, painted and gilded like the walls, let them through into a rose-walled annex. A second door gave on a golden room.

On a backdrop this time of rich yellow, golden angels ranged. Candles burned like stars against a roof that was a sunburst.