Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (6 page)

Even the fools he was supposed to call colleagues had stopped gabbling.

They all stood staring at her as she sent the second guy flying on to his butt.

Session completed, she did not bother to turn, as yet.

Like he’d said to himself, she was used to gawkers.

Though they had bothered about the initial architecture and some other things, clothes styles weren’t designated as a difficulty. They had all come down here in their various fancy dress, ranging from Leonillo’s high collar and narrow trousers, through some riotous gowns, hose, and wigs, to Flayd’s conservative Victorian cravat and frock coat. She knew after all she was among non-Roman savages. But then she herself, once, had been a “savage,” a child of the great forests of Gaul.

“Jula,” Leonillo called.

Flayd felt himself swell with anger.

Leonillo had no rights to call her. To call her by
name. No rights
.

For Christ’s sake, what had they done?

But she did turn now, and came toward them, padding barefoot, a brown lynx, through the virtuality dust.

Her hair was a deep, improbable, nearly cherry red, from the Egyptian henna they had remanufactured. She wore it short and spiked up like the punk girls of the late twentieth century.

In one ear there was a little earring. As she drew closer, Flayd could make out it was a tiny lion of gold. And he was looking at the earring to avoid her face.

Her eyes were large and clear.
Reborn
clear. Even in the past, at the age she had been, around twenty-one—which then was more like thirty-one—no eyes stayed as clear as that. Though she hadn’t been able to read and so ruin them that way, there was the smoke of clay lamps and candles, of braziers, torches; the sun, the wind, the dust, the wine. But the color of these brilliant eyes, unmarked as a child’s, was the weirdest pale blue-green.

Her other scars had grown back. The healing
process memorized them—only surgery and regrafting would take them away. But then, they were hers. Perhaps she wanted them, that ragged line along her arm, from the armpit almost to the elbow, that little wedge gouged out of the perfect honey of her left upper thigh, the cicatrize, amethyst like a flower, on her arching instep.

She stood and looked at her “visitors,” glancing in each face, then lowering her eyes before it, respectfully.

These people were conceivably important, maybe rich—or why else were they here?—and she was only a slave.

Having glanced at them all, Flayd included, she gave a quick little half-bow, and he wanted to yell at her, tell her not to do that, not to them, to us, because we have played God with you, and if you had hold of your own destiny, that gladius in your hand would be forged iron, not wood, and you should be splitting us with it.

She looked like a boy, and for a boy she was, really, beautiful. But for a woman, she was something else. She was a lynx, a lioness, or a wolf.

Leonillo spoke then in cold flowing Latin. Flayd didn’t follow a word, though he could read the language fine. But then Leonillo continued in modern Italian.

“Please greet your visitors, Jula. You’re a special person. They’re here to help us help you.”

Jula raised her modestly lowered head once more, and oh, the utter indifference, the utter control in those seawater eyes. She had an accent. The strange rough brogue of ancient Roman Stagna Maris. And what she said:

“I greet my master’s guests. I am my master’s property.”

I
NSIDE THE ROOM
there was a small grim altar, and on it a winged figure with balance and axe, that Flayd
believed to be Nemesis, Fate-as-Judge. She had an ugly face, neither Greek nor Roman—something older and more unkind. But the gladiators had worshipped her, and sometimes the other one, Temidis, the goddess of fame and riches through lucky chance.

Jula stood as a boy would, quite a confident youth, feet slightly apart, hands loose but not ungainly at her sides. Her head was raised, but she kept her eyes firmly on his upper lip, no higher.

She’d been a slave. No one had told her this no longer applied. But of course, it
did
, in the most perverse of ways.

When Leonillo had taken the others away, that prick Chossi caught Flayd in the passage and said, “Go back and have a talk with her. Why not. Leon says it’s what you should do.”

“Why’s that?” Flayd had demanded.

“Always alert for conspiracy, Flayd? Leon says only you deserve to talk to her alone.” But then Chossi leered. “You two match.”

“What does that mean?”

“Red hair,” fleered Chossi as he waddled away.

And Flayd was left, just left there, to go see her, alone, if he chose.

There would be full CX in every wall, every
brick
. He would be seen and monitored, as she would at all times. And there were a few others about, all of these ones dressed in Roman garments, carrying on the pretense of a provincial villa and a school for gladiators.

When he returned across the yard, he had stopped thinking. He stood at her doorway.

The curtain was pulled back, and she was sitting on a stool, adjusting one of her sandal straps neatly. The everyday action made his stomach lurch. Yes, for this
moment it could have been 96
A.D
. When he cleared his throat, she looked up, then stood.

“Don’t bow,” Flayd said. He spoke carefully in Italian. “Haven’t they told you, you don’t need to do that now. That’s over.”

But the clarity of her face was clear of all things, including any belief in him or what he said. And she would not meet his eyes.

Flayd said, not planning anything, “The emperor—that’s Narmo, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“He followed Domitianus—the last Flavian, the old man’s bastard—put up by the Praetorian Guard, like Claudius, fifty odd years earlier.”

She said nothing. It wasn’t down to her to comment on the emperors, their succession, the doings of Rome—did she grasp how
long
ago?

“Were you ever in Rome?” Flayd asked.

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“A few days. I was a child.”

“Do you remember it, or have you only been told?”

She hesitated. He saw, her eyes being so clear, the thoughts swim through them before her inner shield once more came up. “I was told. Now, I think I do remember.”

“How old were you then?”

“Three or four, so they said.”

“Tell me about Rome. What you saw.” The eyes, full on him a moment. He said to them, honestly, “I’ve never been there, your Rome. I’d really like to know.”

She looked away and said, “There were very tall buildings. I didn’t know how people could live in them, up so high. Wide streets, and narrow. And smoke. And noise. The cart bumped on the road, and I was sick.
There was a temple, high on a hill of temples. Everything there shone—marble columns, and other marble things, and the fires on the altars—but then we went down to a dark place below. The sky wasn’t blue when we came up again, but amber—it was colored with evening, then the moon rose.”

Flayd sat down, unthinking, on another stool in the corner, staring at her,
into
her, into her memory.

“There was a house where I was kept, with a garden in the middle. There were trees and a tame peacock. When it screamed I ran away. But I wasn’t there so long. I went north with the others in the big wagon. We went by a river, the one they called Tiberinus. And then on a paved road …” She paused.

Flayd said softly, “The Cassian Way?”

“I don’t know its name. There was open country after that, fields and woods. Olive groves. It was a long journey. I don’t remember coming into the town at Aquilla. I think I was asleep.”

She stood, eyes distant. Flayd collected himself, slowly. He had no suspicion this creature was not genuine. He had seen the filmic footage, and the verifications that none of that was tampered with. He had seen, like the others, enough of how she grew, behind the milky yet translucent wall of the tank. Seen her with the machines exercising her, feeding her. Seen the seconds when she woke and looked at the man beside her. Seen the panic in her eyes like torpedoes in water, and how her brain, only just awake, gripped the panic by the slack of its neck, leashing it in, because it served no purpose.

Jula had survived five years fighting in the stadium just outside the town of Stagna Maris, for the enjoyment of the soldiers at Aquilla Fort, the wealthy townspeople, and the rabble of the lower streets.

He too had a memory. It was of finding her tomb out there, in the deep green mud, all those years ago. Her victories—147 of them—were numbered proudly on it, with the remains of fine carvings of Minerva, Mars, and Venus, victory wreathes and the symbol of the Missio—the dismissal from the arena with honor, and on your feet; allowed to live even after surrender. Though she never had surrendered. The last fight, she had killed her opponent, a black warrior named Phaetho, but later she died of her wounds. (Although there had been, Leonillo had teasingly said, something else about that …)

In the tomb, when they water-sealed and opened it, along with the mostly burnt bones of Jula, were her jewels, her bracelets and earrings (one of which, reconstructed, she now wore) her secutor’s helmet, shield and sword, and other weapons, rich garments belonging to her, priceless statuettes in gold and silver, glass cups and porphyry lamps decorated with Mercurius-Anubis, Conductor of the Dead. The stone tablet read,
JULA VICTRIX, FLAME-HAIRED JULA OF THE BLOOD OF FIRE. EVEN THE GODS, WHO GRANT GLORY, CANNOT HOLD BACK DEATH
.

And here she was before him.
Standing
here.
Here
—and
now
.

Flayd got up again. He towered over her. The men and women of Roman times had rarely grown so very tall, and Flayd was tall for his own era.

“What do you know,” he said, “about yourself? Do you know—where you’ve been?” It was an astounding affrontery—a fearful risk—he did not know how he could say it, yet couldn’t keep it back.

But she said, very quietly, “They told me, I’d been dead.”

“They
told
you. Christ, they did, they told you.”

“I know it to be true,” she said.

“You believed them—

“I went elsewhere,” she said. “I’ve been gone a great time. Everything is altered now.” She glanced about at the Roman room, with its painted walls, the courtyard beyond. She seemed thoughtful. “This is like no other place I recall.”

Flayd grinned. He felt a fool. “They tried to make it
just
like the places you’d recall. How’s it so different?”

“In every way. I can’t explain. Like a copy—as a statue could be like a man—but not the man.”

Flayd frowned. He swallowed and said, “You say you went elsewhere. Between then and now.”

“Yes. I know that I did.”

“That’s the big question,” he said. “
Where’d
you go?”

Jula Victrix turned her head completely, so he saw her profile, which was classical. They might have graced a Roman coin, the aquiline nose, the great eye, and intelligent forehead. Yet she had been from Gallia, a barbarian.

“I don’t remember that. Only the things then, in the town, and after those—nothingness. And now, this.”

Despite himself, Flayd felt some tidal surge sink through him, heavy and inert, cold as the mud had been about her grave.
Nothingness
. That then was where they all went down to, where all the dead went, all the ones you loved, or hated, where he too would follow in due season. It was what you suspected, despite the several sumptuous religions of the world, the marvels and miracles, supernatural rumors, the sweetness of the ideas. Despite even his lovely mother, Rose, with her long dark hair, who had died fearless, knowing exactly where she went, which, she believed, was to another sort of life.

The gladiatrix wasn’t afraid of it either, however. She had been brought back from it, that nothingness. And anyway there was
nothing
to be afraid of—in
nothing
.

O
N THAT DAY, WHEN HE WAS
fourteen, that hot, gray winter day, he came back up to the apartment, and there she was.

He had expected to find his father. As he swung in the door, Picaro had called out the usual greeting— “Papa—I’m home—” for he still called his father that, “Papa.”

And then there Papa was, by the open window that looked down on the teeming traffic (always that sound in these remembrances, that smell of Safe Ace Gasoline and geraniums). But Picaro’s father was looking back into the room. At her.

The front room of the apartment was quite large, with cream-washed walls, beads and mats hung there. The neighboring cat, who visited from time to time, lay on the coolest spot of floor under the spice fern. But even the cat hadn’t closed his eyes. He, like Picaro’s father, looked only at her.

She filled that room. Not because she was big or fat. She was heavily built but shapely, blacker than the man, or the cat, black as Picaro. Her hair was short and tightly curled, and showed off her long smooth black neck, the angle of her jaw, which was like a carving of a princess from the east of the Africas. She had a gorgeous mouth.
But her eyes were flat and yellow, like those of some kind of animal.

As Picaro halted there, she turned and the animal irises shone at him. She said, “This is my son.”

Her name was Simoon.

Picaro’s father said, “Sure. He’s your son. But how would you know?”

And then she turned her long neck and her yellow eyes fixed back on the grown man.

And Picaro saw that his father was afraid of her. Just as the cat was. So then Picaro too became afraid.

Later, much later, after she had gone, he said to his father, “She can’t take me, can she?”

“Not legally,” said Picaro’s father.

“Why does she want me? She left me when I was a baby, didn’t she?”

“No. Was me she left. She said you were mine, and you are. Now she’s been spying, and she’s seen you’re not a baby any more but a human being. She’s interested. She travels around. She’d take you with her—”

“I don’t want to go with
her
!”

“No,” his father said again. “I don’t know what she wants. She be want anything. Things. Here is a bus ticket I sent for. Pack your bag and go get the bus over to your Aunt Ethella’s. Don’t argue. Do it. Before she comes back.”

“She’s a witch,” whispered Picaro.

“She is. I never lied to you about that. I’ve seen her put
shadow
on a girl, some girl she was jealous of. That girl she gets no luck from that day on, till she goes to Simoon with all her own long hair cut off, and lays it at your mother’s feet.”

“Come with me,” said Picaro. “Ethella will like that.”

“I’ll stay here,” said Picaro’s father. “I’ll stay here and talk it through with Simoon.”

The cat had slunk away out of the window. (Picaro never saw it again.) Picaro got the bus and rode across to Ethella’s in the Red House District. And three weeks later, after he could never get through on the old-fashioned call-phone at the apartment, when he was going insane over that, and Ethella trying to cheer him, and saying to her man, “Get over there, you hear me, get over there and see to it—” and he saying “Not in a thousand years, baby. Not if
she
there with him—” and after this, then, the incoming call, Picaro’s father telling him, “We settled it. Come home.”

But when he got off the bus, went up in the lift, put his hand on the apartment door and it let him in; it was almost back to the first scene over again.

Only this time she was in the cane chair by the window, sitting there in a long, pale, cotton dress, shelling blue peas, singing to herself under her breath.

“Where is my father?”

“At the store,” said Simoon.

She smiled. When she did that, he saw her mouth wasn’t gorgeous, it was greedy. But he had never made a mistake about her eyes.

She cooked a meal, good food; it smelled marvelous if not as good as the things his father could make. There was a bottle of red wine on the table, and ice-cold cola for Picaro. But his father didn’t come in.

“I’ll go look for him,” Picaro said.

All that while, he had sat by the wall, on the floor, watching her moving about, watching her glamorous giraffe’s neck, the curve of her backside that would have moved him if she had been anything but his mother and an evil sorceress.

Now when he spoke, trying for ordinariness, she only said, “Fine. Your dinner will be spoiled. That’s your
affair.” And she laughed. In one of her teeth was a blindingly green jewel, a peridot. His father had told him about that.

Picaro left the apartment. Hungry and thirsty, he hadn’t wanted to take a bite or a sip of anything she had made, even touched. He ran through the hot sunless day, down to the store where his father worked, constructing lutes and sombas, sanding, polishing, twisting out the silvery strings on pegs of plastivory.

Picaro found his father, where the others had already found him. No police or medics had yet arrived, but they knew they must not move him. He was dead anyway. Just lying there, his quiet face shut, his eyes half open, not a mark on him.

So Picaro lay down by him and held his hand until the medics finally came through the deadly-ending traffic. And they had to strike Picaro to get him to let go.

An aneurysm, the autopsy established, (Ethella telling him, on the crackly line). It could happen. No prologue, no illness. Like a blow, not
on
the head but
inside
it—a breakage, and explosion of blood, and nothing visible to the layman’s eye. Quick as a blink. He had not suffered.

Picaro didn’t go back to the apartment, the “spoiled” supper, the expensive cola. Nor did he go back to his Aunt Ethella’s. He had enough money in his pocket. He ran.

It was two more years before Simoon caught up to him.

“C
AN’T YOU SLEEP
, ’Caro? Let me do something to help you sleep.”

Cora’s silky flesh, her warm succulent mouth, wrapping about him in the dark.

After the things he had been thinking of, that other mouth, the mouth of a toad-goddess, devouring …

“No, Cora. Thanks. Not now.”

In half-light, the flicker of canal reflections through the glass, her head lifting like a snake’s.

Unresistant, she settled beside him again, and presently he heard the renewed rustle of her sleeper’s breathing.

Outside the room, the music had ceased. India too must be alseep.

Picaro stayed gentle with women always. Simoon had schooled him in that, in how to see women, how to react to them, despite herself. How had she done that? Through his utter antipathy to and horror of
herself
. For she was only something
disguised
as a woman, and all the others, the real ones, elicited his gallantry, his tenderness, even in indifference, because of a kind of relief that he had met only one Simoon, and perhaps she was alone of her kind.

W
HAT WOKE HIM MUCH LATER
, were the vague, subtly intrusive,
external
sounds of movement and disturbance, which he had never heard before in any other part of the Palazzo Shaachen. He lay listening. There seemed to be a lot going on, furniture perhaps being automated up through the channels in the walls, and unloaded into chambers of the building. Once also a burst of shouting came outside, not from the canal but in the alleyway between this palace and the green one adjacent.

Cora was already up and in the Victorian bathroom, lying to her neck in bubbles. India was nowhere to be seen.

Picaro showered and dressed. (Cora did not speak to him, nor he to her. A sort of decorum.)

In another of the rooms he suddenly found India, drinking Masala tea, with cardamom, cinnamon, sugar, and black pepper, all of which she must have brought with her, since he had allocated only water to the recessed store cupboard. The CX point, to which she had attached the heating container, still glowed. He wasn’t surprised when she next served herself a heap of spun eggs and rice.

She offered him nothing. The container dish—where had she concealed it on her person yesterday?—she simply left for the taking.

Then Cora came in and ate from the dish and drank some tea, and Picaro went to the Africara in another room, standing tuning the strings of the black-brown bull, thinking of his father tuning strings of lutes and sombas, until all at once he heard the two girls at the outer door, leaving, and the door quietly closed. Uniquely, they had gone without a single further avowal or demand.

Soon after, from below, far down in a lower apartment, he detected the faintest jangle, some keyboard instrument, and waited, again lifting his hand from the musical bull. He could turn the noise-conditioning up. He might have to, if he, or someone else, began to produce conflicting music. Or, maybe he might listen.

The instrument must have been taken manually into a room, too fragile, evidently, to travel all the way in the walls. An old instrument, then, a genuine Victorian piano, or even its ancestral harpsichord.

A harpsichord was normally the quiestest of keyboards …

All the other sounds had fallen still. In any case, he walked across and turned up the noise-conditioning.

Yet again, even so, (near noon) as if through layers of nothingness, Picaro momentarilly heard—or thought
he did—the tuning of a keyboard far down in the brickwork of the house. And then he heard Cora’s laughter, high and rippled, (like the sounds she made during sex) down where the harpsichord was, in that other room. Or only in the backrooms of his mind.

L
EONILLO STOOD IN A CHURCH
, gazing up at the votive paintings by the altar. They were rich in colors, and in gold leaf, delicious recxs from the 1500s, lit now by down-hanging lamps and tall night candles.

He tended to walk about by night, having nothing else to do when his duties were seen to. Of course, he was on call always. Usually, after his solitary perambulations over the bridges, through the alleys and inner streets of Venus, he returned to his bedroom at the University. He was still dressed as an upper clerk from 1906. His face was still a pallid nutshell.

The votive paintings had been offered, in their original form, the text informed one, to end a plague in Venus. How simple everything was then, Leonillo believed, God in His heaven issuing His decrees, needing only to intercede, or conversely let loose a thunderbolt. It did not strike Leonillo that humanity had itself now fully taken over this role. Or that no votary on earth could stop
them
, probably, if the ecstatic energies of gods no longer prevailed.