Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (21 page)

But the sights they saw—

The sights they saw, Jula, Picaro, Flayd, were now anyway so terrible and
terribly
familiar—that they did not hesitate—save only once or twice to hasten death for what must have death hastened, since it had now no chance but to die.

Each of them was able to do this. Jula because she had been trained to do it. Flayd because he had been trained, long ago, to know
how
to do it. Picaro because he had killed once before; but more because death itself had lived with him so very long, he had learned its ways, he had learned its inevitable and utter omnipresent banality.

There is, too, in the heart, always that dread, that what is seen must afterwards always be carried, just as what’s
done
must be. And now—how short a distance they would have to carry it. Any of it. Anything.

F
LAYD FOUND
L
EONILLO
in his private rooms. The security-laced door gave at a push. Leonillo had not managed what he had tried to do, his easy barbiturate death—the evidence of the attempt lay everywhere. Along with its failure.

But Flayd spent no time on that. He searched for and found a computer wafer with codes, code-keys, and official overrides. He had known such things must be here. The thing might be useful. But again, this dichotomy. For Flayd was simply acting something out, as if escape were feasible, or mattered.

J
ULA STOOD ALONG THE
passage, by a window. She looked across the inanimate roofs, out to the Primo’s pinnacles. And beside them, the crown of the Tower called Angel.

She recognized the Tower.

Not from having lived here, or from any picture ever seen in whatever other life.

The Torre dell’ Angelo was a symbol, and to a mind once Roman-trained, along with the stuff of the arena, to an everyday sensitivity to omens and portents, the Tower, with its fateful name, rose sharp as a sword on the flatness of the sky.

And even as Jula watched the Angel Tower, there came a spurt of dazzling daffodil light, a lightning flash, across the smoky nothingness above. Nero had stirred again in his sleep. Turning on his bed of human-educated dreams, the flesh-formed demon was, as would a human man, slowly preparing to wake up.

P
ICARO HEARD SIRENS
, a burst of them, somewhere. Then they too became dumb.

He thought of the ambulanza which had borne Omberto away, his arm closed in a sort of half-bubble; the rush of a city night, and they in its midst, outcast in calamity, and held static as if already ended.

He thought of his father’s dead body, lying motionless among the musical instruments.

Then Picaro went through a door in the here and now, in Venus, what was left of it. And he
saw
musical instruments, hung up on the wall of this chamber in the University. And one of them was a s’tha.

It had been, he’d believed back then, like her.

Like Simoon.

The long giraffe’s neck, the wide round hips that held the core of its music-making. Since that night, the night on Arrow Street, Omberto’s night, Picaro hadn’t played a s’tha ever again.

From the East, they said it came from there. Now he read the non-CX printed label, which told him that, too. He touched the silver lines of the seven strings, (like seven thin flames). They sang a curious, wiry sound.

He lifted the s’tha by its strap from the hook. (CX security lit and niggled feebly in the wall, powerless to stop him.)

Picaro held the s’tha across his body.

The wood was smooth, oiled and tended to, the whole body nearly flexible, the strings supple.

Picaro thought of holding her, his mother, the demon, of fucking her, with her breasts against him and the snake of her tongue in his mouth—flexible, supple, singing a curious wiry sound—

Kissing. Making the music.

And in that moment, for a moment, the sky flamed again, yellow, (like Saké, like wine, like the flesh of a rotten apple.)

And as the sky went dead again, Picaro found his hand on the s’tha’s long neck was intense as that of a strangler. And only then –

He knew.

J
ULA HAD FOUND
and put on the carefully-crafted replicas of her gladiator’s armor. They were based exactly on accoutrements placed in her tomb and had been brought to the University no doubt in order that Leonillo’s team might get her to wear them, and so conduct some further psychological archaeological test.

These things felt known. (Their remodeling was that good.)

Helmet—whole head covered, tiny eyeholes like bullet holes, thin slits by the ears. The
Fishhead
. Silver-skinned.

Straps binding breasts in firmly against her torso. Beadwork of snakes.

Greave on the left leg, chased thin bronze, figured with Minerva, the warrior goddess who was also sagacious.

Bands of bronze and leather on her arms.

Shield. Rectangular. Scarlet. Central boss the head and face of Venus, lover of the war god Mars.

Feet bare.

Knife (iron blade, reconstruct ivory hilt) in belt (ropework and linked bronze).

Sword. Iron-steel compound. Short in length and with a point like a sharpened thorn. The hilt bound for
grip, fresh, yet seeming used a hundred and forty-seven times and more already.

Kilt, thin linen, narrow, unimpeding.

Narrow leather drawers.

Her scars: on arm and below ribs, (latter partly visible) left foot. Upper thigh, (not actually visible.) Scatter of smaller thinner white scars, some less than six millimeters in length and hair fine, here and there on legs, arms, and trunk, especially the left shoulder.

Red hair (now almost blonde) concealed, as was the face.

Fiery Jula Flammifer, Jula Victrix, walked out into the Primo Square, as so many times into the arena named for its burning sand.

To fight. What else? But why?

Because she had become, maybe, the symbol of the fight all mankind must take on, the battle of the battleground. And because, like the fleshly thing once named Cloudio, and possessed by an angel, she too had come back out of a grave. Like Picaro, though in such a different way, Jula also was
kindred
to the demon. Her role was fixed. She must defy it, on whatever level and in whatever way. A fight to the death. As it always was.

She stood, looking up and up the length of the Angel Tower.

Now Picaro walked back into the square, with Flayd directly behind him.

Flayd was a tower himself, so tall, bulky, solid. The earth giant who, felled to the ground, was only revitalized by its bruising contact. His hair was tied firmly back. He had thrown off the Victorian coat and cravat and resembled a beefy gentleman going out for some amateur cricket on a village green. He carried nothing.

Picaro was in new clothes pulled on to replace the
soiled horror of the others. A magpie costume, white shirt from the 1600s, black leggings, and boots. His hair not tied back but hanging out its daggered stream-lengths, with the white striping among them. And on his body, balanced from its strap, the instrument of music, the s’tha, with seven strings that gleamed like water.

He did not, alone of the three of them, look at the Tower. His face was serious and empty. Indeed, as they had once said of him, cut from a coal.

A flash of light, brilliant as an erupting moon, blasted around them. They were, the three, blasted out gold-white, their shadows slashed away and away, black as voids.

Then the flash dying down. Then the flash waking again. Dying. Waking.

It was close.

They reached the Tower of the Angel, from which, once, bodies in cages had been hung to perish. Under which men and women had strolled, argued, lovers met, destinies crumbled. Saints given their blessing and brought down fire from heaven.

The sky back across the dome lagoon was darker, it seemed, against the wakening light show. And out there, there was trouble in the water. As if the ancient serpent, always rumored to haunt the under-lagunas and canals of Venus, were rousing itself, the great Leviathan.

The lagoon was high, if you looked. The water had just begun to slop in on the paving. The ships, most of which had remained unfilled, stood up heavy on the risen tide, as long ago in the real first City they would have done, in times of winter storm.

A
S HE CLIMBED UP
inside the body of the Tower, along ramps, then stairs, Picaro considered how his father had
taught him music, sitting there in the store. And of the enormous lutas and sombas, which gradually, as Picaro grew older, grew themselves
smaller
.

Could he remember the first notes he had struck? Yes. And his father’s voice, “That’s good.” And the sound of his first name, the one his father gave him, which, for so long, he had never used now, so it wasn’t his any more.

The outside of the Angel Tower was the way such Italian towers were—towers for bells, campaniles. The Angel Tower had no bell. The clock, and the decorative horses that moved, were up on the Primo’s spire, not here.

For what had the Tower been built? For angels to alight upon?

The brickwork was brownish red. The pointing top, which possibly had not always pointed, dragon-scaled with verdigris. But that was above the gallery. He would not be going up quite so high.

It was a long climb. But he was strong, he was quite young, his singer’s lungs were excellent.

When he reached the gallery, he walked around it, slowly.

The general light was so dulled, a kind of
deafened
light. (Not when the angel stirred, of course, not then.) Picaro stared through the deadness at a checkered floor, and at the parapet railing, which was a stone balustrade, cut with the distinctive keyhole-shaped arches that formed arcades and windows for so many palazzos.

Once, you could look out from this place toward the distant mountains marching at the brink of the Ve Neran Plain. But now there was only the mounting surge of the lagoon beyond Venus, and the emptiness that earlier had been the seeming perimeter of a summer sky.

On the other side of the Tower, down in a trough of shadows lay the Primo courts, formerly always swarming with tourists, deserted. Over there, the chapel and the barracks of some ancient order of knights, roofs of silver and gold-like lead. A fountain basin in opaque marble held up by lions in dead bronze.

Who had ever stood up here? So many.

Now, not one in sight. As if death had already entirely come and swept them up, crying and pleading. Swept them all away.

Above, the sky blazed up again. No longer lemon yellow, now it was yellow-golden and blinding white.

Picaro sat on the broad top of the balustrade, and began to tune the s’tha. And the plastivory pegs felt like hard fingers, resisting his own.

He had forgotten the other two. He was quite alone.

Below him by one long floor, Jula the gladiatrix, having stood aside to let him enter first, had reached the area where a closed-in gallery ran under the open one above.

She paced around this square space, which only the stair split and occupied, entering from beneath, leaving to ascend to the higher floor.

This was her station.

She knew it, as she had known the feel and inevitable dimension of an arena.

Having put on her fighter’s gear, she had nothing else to do but, as in the centuries-ago past, wait.

And so, as then, she sat down on a wooden bench. She began to rinse her mind, as her instructors had told her to.

But now there was more clutter in it. She must dispel the images of this City, and other fragmentary cities—a garden here, a street, a building. She must turn
even from the sweet sight of her mother in Gallia, bending to the smudgy fire in the dusk, with a star behind her head through the open doorway—

And lastly Jula must put from her Picaro, who in her mind she saw, walking up between the forest trees, barred with sunlight. He could never have been
there
. He could never have been that one. She had never
known
enough as Jula to know that she loved him. But different women—and different men—that somehow, since, she had also been—
they
knew, and had, little by little, told her. The sadness of her love, unrequited, unwanted, unique and total, this too, last of all, must be poured out from her thoughts.

Jula poured it out. And was vacant of it.

Now truly only the waiting remained.

She was no more frightened than, after the first few times in her youth, she had ever been of combat and always likely death. But she was only Jula now. She had made herself forget.

Through the window slits of the under-gallery, she saw the yellow-white fire flare up in the sky. Flare up and stay. It was like the sound of the trumpets. Once more Jula got to her feet. She was ready, and alone.

When the fire burst out again, and lit the whole inner scape of Venus, igniting the sky end to end, and turning the surging tumult of the lagoon a nuclear flaxen, Flayd had been thinking about Alicia, his wife.

About how she had died one pleasant evening, in his arms, by the subway at the corner of Dale and Charity. (The words from the Bible had for years after become awful, and tortured him,
Faith, hope, and charity, but the greatest of these is charity
, until Rose had pronounced that
Charity
was better translated as
loving-kindness
.)

The guy who snatched Ali’s ID credit chip, and cut her hand open to get it, also stuck his knife in her when
she resisted. Flayd had been up the street buying them both a mint cola. By the time he had whirled around, dropped the cola and run, it was over. She held on to him so determinedly he thought she might live. He told her she would. In terror she argued, knowing she couldn’t. In the end, she had to let him go. He watched her pulled struggling away from him along the remorseless river. He couldn’t hold her back.

But if all that didn’t ultimately matter—then—

Oh Christ, then—

What was he doing here, in some way expected to defend, by means he could not guess, the world of pain and death and horror?

But then the fire came in the sky, and it was here and now. It was going to happen.

And Flayd, not knowing why, lay face down on the floor of the Tower of the Angel, holding fast to the ground—the earth—real or false.

He heard from far away the prayer begin to come out of his mouth. It was, to start, the sort of prayer his mother had taught, the Eastern prayer that had to do with God and gods, with the Infinite, with dharma, karma, the ever-turning Wheel. Yet mixed in it presently began the calm cadences of a medieval and renaissance Europe, a Christianity paramount at its inception.

And then Flayd heard, still coming in his own voice, which did not and
could not
know them, the words of the Koran, also pure and paramount in their birth—

And too the words of ancient beliefs he had, perhaps, or not, studied, but whose languages he did not know how to speak—

The orisons of Babylon, of the Inca, of Africa’s most secret heart, of ancient China and Rus, of Egypt, of each hinterland, height, or depth.

Every empathic god, these Faces of a God otherwise invisible since It might not, without incineration and surcease, be physically witnessed. To every benign Power the world had ever claimed and clung to (as Alicia had clung to him) the breakers of chains, the gods of compassion, of love and loving-kindness—

For there is no god save only God.

And all things therefore are God—are part of God—the gods among them.

To these, Flayd heard himself praying, in a great, loud organ-note of voice, which, even as the cracking sky began to loose its thunder, the City to shake, the sea to rush upon the land, made the larger noise, a noise of trumpets.

And Flayd, praying for the world, forgot the world, and was alone.

A
ND SO THEN
, as the light of darkness came, the Tower.

It was so black now in silhouette against that vast radiance.

At its base, prayer, the anchor, spirit’s essential communion with Source.

At its upper center, fight, the guard, endurance and the body’s battle for its rights.

At its head, music, the magician, creativity, the nearest echo in the flesh the soul can find.

Heaven opened.

S
EATED ON THE PARAPET
, (in a position that, in the chakras of the body, would approximate the Third Eye) Picaro began to play the s’tha.

It was—peculiarly, aptly—as it had always been.

Despite the surrounding volcanic disturbance of all things, he was instantly in private with the music.

The instrument, (until then unplayed?) gave up a rough, rich tone.

Only over this, kilometers away, the groan of the rising sea. The wind.

A smell of sulfur stank out of the plum-yellow cloud mass. Where it had broken, it bled. A sort of rain was falling (fall). Grayish, yellowish rain, blackish rain. Stinking. It was the false weather-system of the dome, ruptured and going wrong.

But the smell itself was ancient as Hell, the underworld, prophecy, and damnation. The rainfall added to the churning overflow of the lagoon.

And the s’tha played a song. This was old, too. It came from a region Picaro had only ever been in his mind, the back of Africa, beyond mountains made of moons, beyond the blackness of forests and complexion.

Picaro sang.

He had a freak gift with his voice, not often used, sometimes not always attainable—now it was. An upper range, and very deep lower range, and between the two no disparity or friction.

He slid his voice upward, downward.

Up into the collapsing sky, and down into the Tower and the roots of the earth under the sea.

All that while,
he
was there. The angel.
He
was hanging there, perhaps still invisible.

Picaro didn’t look to see.

He knew how an audience was, listening, attached to every phrase, heart beating in rhythm. Like sex. Waiting on the magic, on the music, on the magician, to find out the orgasmic core.

The angel too. For he and the angel, he and
he
, were
kindred souls
.

No wonder Simoon had wanted Picaro, and in every way. He was so much more than her son. He was her own
kind
.