Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (12 page)

“You going to let him off the leash?”

Simoon turned her head to look at him. It was—like the movement of a snake that smiled. “What do you say?”

“Picar. You going to let him out of jail a while, so we can move on?”

Omberto had always been the most eager and flirtatious with Simoon, as he was the most rational and placatory during any argument among the band. No longer.

“He isn’t in jail,” she said.

“Yes,” said Omberto. “You’ve got to let him free. Christ, even the jackdaw gets to fly about sometimes.”

Simoon slightly shook her head. It was like a ripple over foliage, no more.

She kept looking at Omberto.

He drank the second half of his drink, straight down.

“You look pretty good,” said Omberto. “But you’re too old, way too old, for Picar. What are you, sixty, sixty-five? Old enough to be his gran’mumma. You’ve got to look it in the face. You’ve got to get your claws out.”

Picaro, standing just beside her, hearing these words come out of Omberto’s drink-wet mouth, as if they came out of his own dry mouth, shuddered. Picaro tried to speak, to tell Omberto to close his wet mouth.

But Picaro didn’t speak, and it was Carlo, rolling his eyes, pulling at Omberto. “Don’t—shit—shit—shut up, shut up.”

“No. I want her to know.”

“You don’t—shut up. Shut up.”

“Yes, she has to know. Let him go. You and he, Simoon, you can’t go anywhere else. You’ve had him sewn on you all summer, but now it’s fall.”

“Fall,” she repeated. The Amerian word, so apt for autumn, for the time of falling leaves of rust and yellow.

Picaro pushed his mind around into the bar, from which it had fled, and put out his hand to grasp Simoon’s arm. As if to protect her—or to hold her back.

But somehow he hadn’t, he didn’t have her arm.

Instead it was Simoon who had reached out. She took Omberto’s hand, his right hand, and as she took it, the emptied glass fell out of it, one more falling leaf, and it fell so slowly that it would never hit the ground. And between the letting-go of the glass, and the moment when it did hit, did shatter, Picaro heard Simoon speaking low to Omberto.

“What a beautiful pale hand you have, Omberto. How strong it is. So flexible. A musician’s hand, and you so clever with it. Is there any instrument you can’t play? And you play very well, and you love to play your music, love it like your life, eh, Omberto, with your beautiful strong white clever hand.”

All that, while the glass was still falling.

And then the glass met the tiled floor of the bar and burst like a firework.

Simoon was not in contact with Omberto.

She moved away, and as she did so, she said to Picaro, “I’ll just get some air. It’s hot in here.”

Did he see her face? For an instant. He saw, Picaro, she looked older, old as Omberto had said even, when ten minutes before she had seemed like a woman of forty. And her face, in the dimness, was so velvet black, it
was like a panther’s mask. And in the black, her eyes the color of Saké.

Then she had gone, and Picaro stood and looked at Omberto, who was shaking visibly, from rage or some kind of horror.

“I had to do that,” Omberto said. “Didn’t I? Yes. What is she? She’s smothering you—”

Picaro stared at Omberto, still trying to find something to say, but before he could, the lights went out.

The whole bar reeled in a kind of liquid twilight, where almost nothing but shadows were visible. A cry or two went up. Some inebriated laughter. These lights didn’t fail. So it was another ploy, some piece of fun thought up by the management of the bar. Or a trick, so watch your pocket, watch your purse and jewelry—

But they were close to the slide where the drinks were served, and Omberto slammed around and stood there, ready for the light to return and another tray of beer.

And then Picaro saw something, something so soft looking, light as a feather, or a puff ball from some seeding flower, drifting delicately down through the almost-dark. It appeared such a gentle and curious thing that Picaro watched it, captivated, intrigued—to see what it might be. It dropped just where Omberto was, by the slide, where Omberto’s hand was, on the steel of the counter. And then, like the beer glass, the falling autumnal softness struck a surface too. Just there. Just where Omberto was. Where his hand was. His right hand.

The violence of the noise was impossible—so loud and harsh, full of a crack and splintering, and a spurt of silvery flame that for a second illuminated Omberto, balancing awk wardly, as if half blown over, and screaming. Until the whole bar began to scream too.

And then the lights splashed on again full pitch, and Picaro could see where the one chemical light bulb, detached from the ceiling, had fallen and detonated against the bar, smashing Omberto’s hand, every bone, cutting and burning Omberto’s hand, every inch—so that it was now a
thing
, not a hand, and to this blackening and minced
thing
, this other thing still partly attached, which screamed and drew breath and screamed.

N
O MEMORY EITHER
of going back. A gap.

Just the door open from the CX-key. And the loft, lit mellifluously by a scatter of candles.

And, in a chair. She, sitting. A cameo in her blackness and her pale frock and the candledark all around.

Was it that he hoped she could still say to him, But how would I do
that
?

Was he so naïve and spent even then in the net of the spell she had woven around him?

Like father, like son.

Did he speak? No memory of it.

Simoon was the one with speech.

“I came home. It’s way too hot out there. Would you like a cold drink?”

What did he say? Nothing? Anything?

He didn’t walk any closer to her.

She said, “Here you are.”

He said, “He taught me to play the korah, Simoon.”

“Who’s that?” she said.

“He taught me,” said Picaro. Then he said something about the hospital. Something about the screaming. The bones. How they had had to—

Did she try to pretend a minute, look concerned? No, she’d never have done anything like that.

Then, what did she do? From there on, like the other things, that time, her face became something he remembered in words, not pictures.

“It’s time you took the lead part in your own life,” she said. And next, perhaps at once she said, “You don’t need anyone else. I can give you all of it. I can give you everything. You’re mine.”

And then the memory—not in pictures, in words—her body pressing on his, against the wall, the line of her through her dress. Her breasts feeding on him, her hand between his legs, disgust exquisite, foulness and delight. Her tongue probing his mouth, which had given way. Even the wall, giving, giving, giving way.

Fall.

Only in words. Not pictures.

“Do you like this, baby? Yes. You like this. Yes, you’re mine, I made you, didn’t I? I can give you everything. You don’t need anyone but me.”

U
NTIL FINALLY THE VIRTUALITY
movie was back. It was a train in the night. It was blackness and lighted halts. It was the luta-citarra on the seat beside him; all he had kept in the room, all he had brought away.

L
IFTING HER HEAD
, she looked around at them, the howling thousands. She raised her supplicant hand a second time. Seeing only the death signal—thumb compressed and hidden, symbol of a
man
hidden,
buried
. Knowing this mob would never relent.

He lay on his side, near her feet. He had pushed himself on to one elbow, elegant, like a citizen on a dinner couch. His skin, flawless black. His eyes, proud and angry, hard as the black iron they resembled.

“They won’t have it,” Jula said to him. She remembered his name, “Picaro—before the gods, why didn’t you put up a fight? You’re able—I’ve seen you train in the court behind the Forum, where Talio’s school is. You’re good. Look how you’ve cut me about. Not many can boast of that. We’re both their slaves. What would it have cost? You fool,” she said bitterly. “What am I to do?”

Above, the blue closed sky of Stagna Maris. A scent of the incense of pine-cones. Away along the paved road that began between the stone-pines, a gate to the town, an entrance to the villa of her master. Life going on.

And at her feet, just one more man she must kill.

Jula raised her short sword and the crowd bayed with a single throat, and grew silent.

Jula threw the sword away. It plummeted and landed,
point-down in the sticky sand, then toppled over, defeated. Before the hubbub could erupt, she yelled, high and savage as a bird, “
No
and
no
—and
no
—” Even the top tiers might hear it. She thought they did.

The roaring that came in on her cry meant nothing. She knew they would throw things down, ripe fruit, stones they had picked up beforehand to cast at others—never at her, their favorite. And the sticklers had abandoned her, were hurrying off to the sides of the arena, to save themselves from misdirected missiles. In a minute, the amphitheater authority would send out others, to force her to her task, or to complete it themselves. This also—was nothing.

When she turned, he had sat up. She gestured impatiently to him to stand.

“We’re both disgraced now. Rat meat. They’ll soon send to butcher us.” She added sharply, “Stand back to back with me. This time,
fight
. Show
them
—not
me
.”

He rose. He stood far taller than she did. She had not thought, fighting him, Phaetho was this tall. But his name was not Phaetho, but Picaro—for the black and white bird.

Her helmet, which she had removed as she often did when her foe was down, lay over there. Never mind that. The helmet could not save her now. But somehow she had retrieved her sword.

The far doors were opening. Men in brazen armor were coming out, gladiators, these helm-masked, unknowable. Ten, twelve, fifteen—enough for the task.

“Why?” he said, standing with his back to her, so near she felt the heat of him against her shoulder blades.

Indeed, why? Jula had achieved nothing for him, and had ended her own life. Even if they overcame these others sent against them—which was unlikely, for both
this man and she were scored with deep cuts and had fought each other some while—the crowd would not allow them to leave the amphitheater breathing, let alone walking.

She said nothing. Nor did he speak again. She felt the heat of quickness from him.

They stood back to back, and watched as death came trotting, shining, toward them.

S
HE REMEMBERED THAT TIME
, seeing him as she waited in one of the two-horse chariots, by Talio’s yard. She, and others, Julus’s prizes, dressed in their well-to-do actors’ garments, had been put on display in the town. Now their master had business with his plebian rival, Talio.

Phaetho fought there in the dust, near the training post, with a thickset man.

In Rome there had been black Ethiopians, and some were free men. The Emperor Narmo had inaugurated among the legions several cohorts of such soldiers. But in Stagna Maris black men and women were rare. This fighter was finely made, powerful and glorious in the dust that clouded but did not conceal him. His long hair, coarse black and thick as a horse tail, was tied up on his head. As no gladiator should, when in combat, he had no look of a slave.

Jula had noted her master’s evaluating eye settle on Phaetho.

But Talio, himself a one-eyed villain (others said) would hardly be parted from such a specimen, just as Julus refused to part with the specimen he called Jula.

One day, maybe, they might be matched, Phaetho and she.

But she had not considered that then. She had seen only a man who was, as she was, a possession. And presently, because she did not think much about those who were not immediate to her, she forgot him.

T
HE ARENA CROWD
no longer belled. She heard the sea. No, it was the sough of pine trees.

She lay across the knees of a giantess.

It must be that the goddess had her, Bhrid, Arrow of the Sun, who dispensed warmth and plenty from the earth.

Her hair, moon blonde, fell over her shoulders and touched Jula’s face so mildly, like the caress of grass. She smelled too of her healthy warmth, and of pine resin, and of the blue smoke rising from the central hearth. There was a smudge of the smoke on her brown cheek. Her bright eyes were nearly shut. She rocked Jula, and sang to her in the voice of love.

Yes, I remember
this
, better than all else. I remember—almost I do—how I lay inside her. But then I am almost still inside her body now, yet joined to her, not a year old, a golden circle once baked in the oven of her womb, having her impression still.

I was not
Jula
then. What was my name? Oh, Mother, sing me my name, so I can hear it, and know.

But her mother sang instead of love.

And Jula—still not having her other name—saw how a man came in at the low door, bending, and his hair was light in color.

My mother, my father. And so—

Jula thought—Don’t let me see—no, don’t let me see and remember what comes three years after. And there was a flush of fire and a sound of calling—but it
was gone instantly, swept away by some phantom hand in her brain. Then Jula was a woman full-grown, and she was in the forest, as she had never been.

But she stood, glancing everywhere, taking lungfulls of the balsamic wind, seeing the shafts of smoldering sunlight which rayed between the pines, seeing the tracks of deer and the white tusk-marks of boar. And then, up through the trees towards her, breaking the shafts of the sun, strode the man she would meet, as her mother had met her father in that other time, before Rome came and the world ended.

But it was impossible to see him, against the brilliant breaking shafts of light.

And it was impossible to keep hold of a world that the Romans had ended.

I
N DARKNESS
, J
ULA OPENED
her eyes, to one more incomprehensible and unimportant foreign place. She was awake now, however, dreaming over, and had to stay in it.

Tears ran out of her eyes, the lament for all she had lost: land, home, mother, father, lover—never met, her own
self
.

Had she shed tears before? As a child, sobbed and been sick out of the side of the wagon taking her into Rome. Cried when she was beaten. When her monthly blood began. Not often, or for long, these economic tears. Then anyway she unlearned the recourse of weeping, as she did any wrath other than the controled fury of a swordswoman, a games girl, or any care other than for life itself.

Yet now—now, in this place, this
dark
that was also false, so she had been told—here she wept. At last. Too late.

Even for Phaetho she wept. Of course for his senseless death and the curse he had laid upon her—not only to die, but to endure rebirth in her slavery—but also since he too was lost to her. For there had been tonight the dream of the arena, when she had done as surely she had once secretly wished to, and, like him, rebelled and given up her survival in
contempt
. And in that dream she had mistakenly replaced Phaetho with Picaro. And having seen both of them then, in the dreams, she knew finally that Phaetho and Picaro were not at all the same. Were as unlike each other as fire and water, though both were young and strong, handsome, and black of skin.