Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (10 page)

“It’s OK, Jula—yeah, maybe you need your gods to protect you but—”

“—istrum mihi inimi cissimum qui constituit se ab me—”

“Jula.”

“—vindicare et iam instat.”

Flayd drew in a breath. “He isn’t—
he’s
not your
enemy, not like that.” Flayd repeated this, cautiously, in Latin. But her eyes were fixed as her prayer had been unstoppable. Where she’d hardly ever met Flayd’s glance, now she stared at Picaro, on and on. Her face was frightened, and behind the fear, the inevitable ingrained readying, the mental weapons taken in both hands, as even in exhaustion and near death they would be.

“Jula, this is Picaro. Picaro, meet Jula.” Flayd said lamely, spuriously.

But Picaro too only stood there, looking back at her, expressionless, dazed (hurt in some unguessable way?)

What was it?

What it was, for Jula, was that she had just seen again after such a long, long time, the Ethiopian who had cursed her, and whom she had killed in Stagna Maris, all those several centuries ago.

“Y
OU SHOULD BE DEAD
,” the dead Ethiopian said, in his quiet and musical voice.

Jula stared at him, she didn’t even blink.

All her awareness—on him.

“Like the other one,” he said.

And then he sprang at her, across the lawn.

He was extremely fast, far heavier in build and taller than she.

Flayd had no time to react.

But she—her reactions were integral as her bones, as the ESDNA that had enabled these creeps to bring her back.

Flayd, hurtling himself forward, grabbed some of the braids of Picaro’s hair, the nearest thing he could reach, but Picaro was already spinning away, going down.

The woman had not attempted the evade him. She had crouched instantly, and driven her fist, small and hard as a stone, with all her considerable compact strength behind it, directly up into Picaro’s solar plexus. He was out cold.

Flayd loomed in limbo, dumbfounded, feeling grimly sorry for him, and for her, and for the whole bloody world.

J
ULA STOOD OVER
P
ICARO
.

It was a stance she had assumed more than a hundred and twenty times in her past. But her adversary was not dead, not now.

She looked down at him.

She remembered very well his face, the strong sculpted bones, the blackness of his skin. She recalled how his eyes, so large and terrible a moment before, appeared when shut fast. But that had been in death.

And his blood was red. She knew. No need to see it.

She tasted something too sweet in her mouth then, another recollection, like those instants in the arena. But this … it was a feast after victory—it was—the saffron pastry the slave had brought her, with the saffron-colored flower lying on it. But all the other flowers among the cakes and sweetmeats of the bellaria were white.

The impression was random, it seemed to have no purpose. She pushed it aside.

Just then, the tall man—called Flayd—took a step nearer.

Jula held up her hand. “Ne me attingas,” she said.
Don’t touch me
.

Flayd did as she told him. He waited, marooned on the lawn, as if outside a pane of unbreakable optecx.

The pica bird, Jula noticed, was gone. She knelt down by her senseless enemy, who, as she had, had come back from Hades.

And when Flayd took a half step after all, Jula said, clearly in English, “I won’t harm him.”

She could hear the Ethiopian breathing raggedly, see the judder of the heart in his throat. She touched him with one finger of her left hand, there in the
center of his wide forehead, from which the endless ropes of hair fell back like chains of black silk and white wool.

“Quid a me quaeritas?”

What do you want from me?

P
ICARO LEANED ON THE RAILING
, to either side of him the square-paved lungomare, stretching like a neoned chess-board, and beyond, the midnight sea done in lacquer black under stars of fire.

Another coast, another city, another time. He was sixteen. He had played a set with the Soundless Band, and the crowd had gone wild. It was an appreciative crowd. The best they’d had, in the months of traveling. It was full of women, too, some very rich and some very young, and all of them with that pleasure glaze on them like pollen. Everyone here on the shore wanted to be happy tonight, and many of them had made it, and Picaro was one of those lucky ones.

All that music, and then there had been iced beer too, and vin’absinthe, and hasca in a silver clip. Now, for the moment, all he needed was the night.

“Well,” said the soft voice on his right, just behind him, someone unseen—but he could smell her perfume, and the scent of her body, warm and alluring though not especially young.

“Well,” Picaro said.

That was introduction enough, maybe.

So he turned, and he saw her. She was slim, but curved like a vase, and heavy-hipped, and her breasts were big, beautiful, and her hair was long and thick like a thick black smoke, and edged with flame from the neon lamp behind her, which hid her face from him, yet
gave him everything else. Even her rose-red shoes with their stalks of thin, tall, heels.

She
was not very tall, even in those tall heels. A lot shorter than he. And yet, crazily, he felt—for one split second—she was the taller of the two of them, and bigger than he was. Dark as darkness and big as darkness. But there had been the hasca, and he
liked
the dark.

“I rate your music,” said the woman. “You’re fine.”

She had cash. He could see it all over her. It hung in the gold ring around her long, smooth neck, and the platinum ring around her left ankle. Her dress was some constructed fabric, the kind that cost. He didn’t care about this particularly, he had been with rich, not-so-young women, and rich
young
women, too. Only—somehow the money on her didn’t fit.

“You’re talented,” she said. “I always thought you’d be that way. Best thing I ever did, perhaps. Leave you. Let you alone to grow.”

And then her head turned so the light fell sidelong, and he saw who she was. And then she laughed, and in her mouth the little jewel sparked snakes-eye green. But her own eyes were Simoon’s, and she
was
Simoon.

He took a step away, and the railing pressed in his back.

“Honey,” she said, “you really believed all what your daddy told you about me? Listen, if I was one little third what he said, how could I be standing here? Someone would’ve killed me, sure. Or I’d be in jail. Or dead. Wouldn’t I?”

Picaro stayed still. Nothing moved, not even the sea.

“Listen,” she said, “he and I—an old argument. I saw you were afraid, after he died like that, because you ran away. Anyone can die like that. You think I did it to
him? If I even could, why would I? He was eating out of my hand right then.”

“No,” Picaro heard himself say.

“
No
? No what, baby?”

Picaro eased off the railing and went fast away, along the lungomare.

Light cohorts of the fortunate, the crowds were drifting over the esplanade like clouds. So they seemed to him—insubstantial.

But she was solid and present, still right beside him even though he had left her eight hundred kilometers behind.

He looked back once. She was no longer there. Where then?
Here
, next to him—

Shadow
was what she could send, and what she was. Look at her, (in his mind, bobbing among the light laughing crowds). He examined Simoon. Two years older, she looked about ten years younger than when he saw her last. And she had lost weight, and her short tight hair had grown long and straight. Her skin was like that of a woman in her early thirties and no more than that. But Picaro’s father had told him her age, the age of the witch, which anyhow maybe she had lied about, taking off a few years, and she had been, when Picaro was born, supposedly forty years old. So now that made her fifty-six.

He kept thinking he’d see her, in front of him, sliding out of the people-clouds, or simply stepping from the doorway of some lit-up bar. But she didn’t do that. Not right then.

T
HERE WAS NO ONE
in the big room the band had taken, but for Omberto, asleep in one of the screened-off beds with a girl. Coal’s jackdaw sat on the roof of its opened
cage, preening itself. Picaro fed it a few nuts it could anyway have fetched for itself from the table.

Later, in his sleep, he heard it fly out through the window, but it always did at dawn, anytime they left it free.

The next day, he saw the jackdaw had yellow in its eyes.

Perhaps this had always been the case. But he had thought its eyes were a kind of gray, like Coal’s eyes.

And sometimes, the jackdaw watched Picaro—but it always had. It was used to him, as to the rest of the band, and took a friendly interest in all of them.

They played in a couple of spots. It was all right, not as hot as the first time. They talked of moving on.

“What is up with you?” Coal said to Picaro. “You don’t eat, you don’t sleep. I hear you up all night walking about.”

“Your bird keeps looking at me.”

“Sure he does. You can’t play that guitar no more. Or that korah neither.”

Omberto, the peacemaker, who had taught Picaro some of his own skill with the korah, drew Coal away to a game of cards.

Tuning the kissar, a recx instrument, temperamental despite its technological insides, the string burned through Picaro’s fingers, so his blood dropped in the sound box.

They moved on.

A
ND NOW HE WAS STANDING
on a roof, with another railing, and looking down at a street. Thinking back, the whole scene was somehow a whiteout. Like the magpie dream, he could only recall it in words, not images. Except for her. Her he could see.

She had come walking up the ancient redundant fire escape, which (unseen, described in words) had been painted a vivid color and had a honeysuckle grown up and through it. As she trod on the blossoms, the fragrance flared, mixing with the scent of her.

“What do you want?” he said.

(Had they said anything else first? Perhaps. Or not.)

She said, “I like to look at you.”

Picaro felt a kind of despair. The only exit was to jump off the roof, and he wouldn’t do that.

“You keep after me,” he said. “Why?”

“I have to tell you something,” she said. “But not yet.”

Then Omberto ran up on to the roof, and he saw Simoon, and he grinned and shook his head, and leaped away again.

Simoon said, “He thinks I’m not your mama.”

“You’re not.”

“Who is then? Huh? Tell me, I should like to know.”

He remembered all this, and remembered remembering how she had sat in the cane chair, shelling peas, and how she had made the meal, and put out the bottle of wine and the costly cola.

How did she have money for that then? And how, now, so much. For she wore a summer dress that was made of thin
real
silk. He could see her blackness through it, so like the shade of his own blackness, blacker than most black skins, blacker than his father. Black as the jackdaw, and a magpie’s wings.

He thought, then, she’d put out the wine that night when Picaro was fourteen, and cooked enough for Picaro’s father, too. She didn’t reckon the man would die. Maybe it upset her.
And I ran away
.

In the drowsy, light-losing evening, he could make
out faint lines by her mouth, under her eyes, see the ebony string that came and went in her marvel of a neck. Not much—something. So, she didn’t quite look her age. If she had money, there were ways of doing that too.

“Are you rich, Simoon? How?”

He’d spoken her name.

He hadn’t meant to.

She said, “I’m not rich.
Been
rich, once. Now and then. And I keep a few things by me for great occasions, like visiting my son. Do you think I look rich?”

“Yes.”

“I am triumphant. What else do I look, to you?”

He said nothing.

“You think,” she said, “I look like a witch, and a whore. I’ve been both. Nothing left of that. It done. I’m clear as crystal. I’ve paid for what I have.”

Then she put the bottle on the parapet, and the cork was already out.

“You’re grown up now,” she said, “I can bring you wine.”

N
OT UNTIL SHE MOVED
away did Flayd go forward.

He checked the felled man rapidly. Saw, even in this extremity, with slight startlement, she had turned Picaro’s head sideways, the recovery position, to clear the airway. So they knew that in ancient Rome? Probably a gladiator school would know things like that, teach them.

Picaro’s breathing was easier, pulse slower, but he was still well gone.

Flayd stood up again. She was over by the pillars, sitting on a stone bench there. Her head was raised and her eyes set and open wide. To Flayd, it was the stance she would have adopted when waiting, under the arena, for the minute she would be summoned up on to the sand.

His other bewilderment was that no one else had come in.

Of course, they had their other emergency, whatever that really was. But was absolutely nobody able to register events down here? It seemed that right now they weren’t.

Flayd crossed the cloister and went into a long room like something from a medieval monastery, through that into some other rooms that were still—to him—mostly Roman. Here he found two men in dalmatics, drinking coffee from old brown monkish beakers.

“A guy out there needs some attention.” They looked at him, stupidly alert. “A little amateur practice bout with Jula Flame-Hair. He shouldn’t have done it.”

“Shit,” said one of the men. Coffee spilled as he rushed out past Flayd. The other said, “The security apparatus has been faulty. Screens are down. You’re UAS? Maintenance is on it now.”

“You mean the
CX
?”

“Yes.”

“Can’t happen, can it?”

“It did.”

“Any connection,” said Flayd, “to the problem on the canals this morning?”

He saw the man decide Flayd was not really UAS. “I wouldn’t know,” said the fake monk. He had pressed a key concealed under a wooden table. Soon there was the sound of running feet, just like Flayd thought he’d heard earlier. He left and went back fast to the cloister. There he sat down on the half bench, near the girl, about half a meter from her, and watched as three or four UAS organized a stretcher and carried Picaro away, and Flayd thought of ants.

Had Picaro been brought here because of the other one, the bloodline related musician from the 1700s—

The cloister and the lawn were oddly empty again. Even the construct magpie had vanished.

Flayd looked at Jula.

“Their observation devices are out, it seems. You knew they watched you, I guess.”

“Yes,” she said. They were speaking Italian. Then she said in Amer-English, “Is he like me? Did they bring him back from death?”

“Christ—no—
no
, Picaro is—how do I put this? First time alive. Even now, after you hammered the daylights
outa him. He’s like someone you—like someone from
then
?”

“I fought him in the sand. He was handsome and skilled. He could have been popular and lived. But he wouldn’t fight me until I made him. And they wouldn’t forgive him that. I had to kill him, for the crowd. No mercy.”

She continued to look straight before her. Waiting for a trumpet that now would never sound.

Instead, Flayd
saw
her hearing that punning chant from the tiers:
Jugula Jula! Jula jugula!
Kill, Jula! Jula, kill!

He said, in a low voice, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Then she did glance at him.

Flayd said, “Some of the CX—the machines—are down. The bastards are in a bit of a bloody mess. I don’t know if any of this affects the dome locks, if we can really get out—it might. But failing that, maybe we can at least get you free into the City.” And Flayd thought he was mad, and she could never understand, and what was out there could, in its incongruous alienness, actually drive her insane. But he said, “We can risk it. What do you say?”

“You ask me?” she said in Latin.

No one asked a slave. Not even perhaps a fellow slave. No question marks could ever truly exist.

“I’m asking you,” he resolutely said in English, in Italian, in Latin. “Come on.”

And she stood up and they walked out of the cloister, and along to the elevators, of which she seemed to take no notice at all, except to adjust her balance as they rose. And when they emerged and moved through security, in all its forms mechanical and human, not a vid blinked, not a hair was turned.

Too late then, only as they came out into the sunlit corridors of the University—renaissance, Victorian—did he think,
Are they letting us do this
?

But they trod down the marble stairs, negotiated a polished floor, walked out a wooden side-door. They arrived at the brink of a green canal in the light of the noon Viorno-Votte.

Venus lay before them, under her air-and-sky-filled invisible dome. And she displayed, without any disguise, a million edifices that never, in the most lunatic dreams and nightmares, could this woman have envisaged.

But she had been a barbarian captive child in Rome, among the unimagined towering tenements and hills of palaces and temples. She had been brought to Stagna Maris. She had had to fight and kill to live.

Flayd, when he turned to her again, saw all that. Her eyes were wide again, questing now, but still not
questioning
. Not alarmed or unnerved. She was fearless. Almost—contemptuous? These glamours belonged to her masters. What could she ever care about or for them? They would never be hers.

“Venus,” Flayd said flatly. He shrugged.

And thought of the goddess-face of Venus on Jula’s shield, the deity favored by soldiers and gladiators alike, since she was also the consort of the war god, Mars.

And then Leonillo spoke, behind them.

Flayd shot around and saw him, composed and pallid and infuriating.

“Do you like the view, Jula Victrix?”

She said nothing. Flayd said, “I believe the lady has no strong feelings either way, on the view.”

“Only on her Ethiopian?” asked Leonillo. “We wondered if she’d make that error. The first black man she sees after the last black man she saw. The ancient world
wasn’t noted for its racial flexibility … I’m sure you know what the Romans said about the British, your own ancestors, Flayd … They all look alike, and so ugly. She’s told you all about it, I expect.”

“Sorry. If your CXs are fucked, that information is classified.”

“Oh my. My dear Flayd. The CX function isn’t completely fucked. And we have some backup. We did hear a word or two.”

“We are not,” Flayd said, “about to return inside.”

“Naturally not.”

“So we’re meant to be doing what we are doing?”

“And why shouldn’t you?” said Leonillo, with a ghastly expansiveness. “Who better than you to show our favorite gladiatrix the City. To explain and accustom her, to be her guide.”

“She doesn’t need a guide, Leonillo. But you need your head examined.”

“The need is universal perhaps.”

“Go screw yourself. I guess you’re the only one’ll oblige.”

A wanderer with wanderlier was approaching along the canal, stirring the limpidness with the oar-pole, the man easy and smiling, seeing only, as you expected, some guy in 1860s gear, some girl dressed for 1490, like a hundred thousand others. Unless he too, the auspicious boatman, was part of the general conspiracy.

When Flayd told her, she got into the wanderer, graceful and coordinated as a puma. Flayd rocked in, crashed down.

Silent Leonillo watched them float away, and raising his hand, urbanely waved them off.