Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) (11 page)

Standing with her, under the tree, he felt an awkwardness. He had expected nothing else.

His lowly beginnings he had left far behind. He could read and write, he could do battle, he was a Soldier of God. She was a slave, illiterate and, at her depth, unmotivated, and amoral as any beast. She was a woman.

Long ago (it seemed to him) he had lashed and starved any fleshly craving for women from him.

And a woman, stripped of her potential to satisfy male hunger, or produce therefrom children, was nothing. God’s afterthought, made from a rib. Perhaps stronger, as Danielus had mooted, merely in order to bear her lesser life. For what man could bear to live as a woman must? And what woman could tolerate her life, if she had possessed the capacity of a male brain?

Even so, what he had seen—felt—in those brief instants before the sun vanished in a cloud, before she left off her prayer—disconcerted
Cristiano.

There had been holy women, transformed by the mysteries of God, and, above them all, the Virgin.

Woman was, by the miracle of the Divine, sometimes able to ascend from her body and her lot, and from all things.

“Do they call you Beatifica?”

“Yes, signore.”

“Don’t call me that. I am one of the Bellatae Christi. God’s Soldier.”

She hung there in front of him, eyes down. Said nothing.

He said, “They tell me you’re a good girl, here.”

Nothing.

He said, impatient, “What do you say for yourself?”

She mumbled again.

“
What
? Try to speak out as you say your prayers.”

“I mean not to offend,” she said, “signore.”

“Didn’t I say, don’t call me that. Say, Soldier of God.”

She looked up and straight into his face.

Her eyes grew larger, when she stared at you, or so it seemed.
Yellow
eyes. He had never seen that color save in an animal, a dog or cat. (Woman, the beast.)

“Soldier of God,” she said, and then, in clear Latin, “Bellator Christi.”

She had been a slave, and the Magister’s nuns here had told him, too, her back was scored with previous whippings, one of five and a half ragged scars, perhaps many years old. The stripes would never go.

Inside her white skin he seemed to glimpse now, clusters of bruises, preserved like fossils in marble.

“Sit down, Beatifica.” She sat on the bench by the tree.

Sufficient men had been unkind to her. At a loss, thinking dimly
of Danielus’ words, Cristiano said to her, “Say one of the prayers for me.”

“Which one shall I say?”

Naively, although he did not guess himself naive, he said, “One which you like the best.”

He had forgotten nobody might have bothered to explain the meaning of the prayers and that she must have learnt them (like the title Bellator) from phonetics alone.

And she any way obeyed, always obedient. She chose a prayer whose
sounds
she liked. And because it had one word she knew.

“I will raise my eyes to the mountains, where God is …”

Cristiano was to write: ‘She selected the prayer of a king, Magister. She spoke it eloquently. And then there was a change in her, I must admit it to you. Her face became transparent with a kind of brightness. Perhaps only a trick of the sun.’

As he wrote these words in the letter, Cristiano felt suddenly oppressed by the heat of the summer evening.

Moving to the window of his cell in the castra, he saw sailed fisher-boats like dragonflies on the surface of the lagoon. But imposed upon them, the image of the Virgin in the Primo window, her damson mantle wrapped about her.

A slave was not to be compared with Maria. Tonight he kept the Vigil. Before then, he must empty his mind and spirit of this clutter. It came to him again to wonder, as he sealed the letter, why Danielus had sent him to the girl.

During the night, as Volpa-Beatifica slept on the floor, two nuns entered the cell.

“Get up, Beatifica. Put on your clothes.”

When they took her through
the Little Church and out into the yard, whose gate stood wide, Volpa-Beatifica was uneasy.

Torches burned, and on the canal, black with night, a covered boat rocked up and down.

Another woman would have protested, pleading to know where she was to be taken.

But Volpa was a slave. The small chances of free will she had had in the cappella were swiftly mislaid. And she had expected change.

She got into the boat without speaking, trembling, and sat where they showed her.

There were also some casks in the boat, smelling of wine.

She was rowed away into the night of Ve Nera, between the high black walls. In some, gratings and narrow slots evicted loud light. Stars littered the sky, forgotten candles.

Some of the nuns stood crying at the water’s edge.

They had been told Beatifica was to go to a religious house on the plain. They feared their care was not deemed adequate.

All the remaining year, past Christ-Birth Mass, Beatifica was at a farm on the Veneran Plain. How many properties, aside from the Island of Eels, and these one or two farms, belonged to Fra Danielus, was unknown. But a Magister, particularly a Magister Major of the Primo Suvio, must have revenues, and also places he might loan or give away or sell, as the Church’s needs dictated. Even recently, there had been a sale of another house, in order to supply the coffers of the Church, which in turn leant gold to the City’s ship-building.

Beatifica knew nothing of this,
of course.

She was aware mostly that from the farm buildings she could see, far off, the mountains. Either she recalled them from memory, or from her mother’s told memories. They did not, certainly, seem familiar any more. They were gaunt and gray, and soon helmed with snow. Neither in the brazen sunrise of fall, nor the red setting sun of winter, did they turn to scarlet.

At the farm, she saw slaves. This was a stumbling block, but having stumbled on it, she righted herself and beheld the difference. They demonstrated by their activities, their segregation—unlike her own—that she, now, was a slave no longer.

Like the prayers she still regularly said and sang, this too she had needed to, and did, learn, by rote. Yet, she remained a slave.

She slept in a bare, clean room. When she ignored the bed, which had frame, mattress, and curtains, they removed it. But they gave her for the winter chill three blankets, and a cushion for her head. These she took to. Also there was a brazier for wood. It was kept alight for her, as if she could not have lit it herself. She could not—not, as it were,
cold
. She must have impetus. She would need to be freezing to draw from herself the power—and, still slavish, might only have endured the freeze, as she had always done.

She had candles, too. And a cross the nuns had sent with her, which she liked to hold. It was made of tarnished silver, which with her caresses, grew brighter.

After only a day or so, the woman who came in the morning, (like the nun) a servant not a slave, brought Beatifica new garments.

The girl looked at them, and the woman said, “The Magister Major says you’re to wear these, now. They’ll be warmer,
and handier for your work.” A sentence prepared by others; the woman said it with an expressionless face.

Presently she took Beatifica, as usual, down to the farm chapel. It was a vacant stable, perhaps a theosophic pun of sorts. The altar had been sanctified, but stood among wisps of straw. Here were some men of the farm, couth and combed always for the Dawn Mass, and two women, both elderly.

None of them looked at Beatifica any more than they had ever done. Her clothes may have escaped them. Or not.

She ate alone by day. At night, she ate with a man and woman of the house. They corrected her actions at the table as diligent parents might have done. The manners taught her, however, were higher than their own. She did not question this. Could anything surprise her? Little. In her limited world, most had been a surprise, and mostly a surprise that hurt or harmed. Amazements without pain she did not resist. But then, she had not resisted pain either, until it seemed to threaten life itself. (Eventually she might have ceased to resist even that.) She liked the honey and milk she was given, and the raisins and olives. These became an indulgence.

Beatifica learned the use of spoon and knife and linen napkin, the trencher of bread that was not to be eaten but might be thrown to a dog, should she wish.

Probably she did have a memory of farm dogs, for some reason friendly ones. Where the man and the woman had thought they would need to coax her not to be timid of the huge shaggy animals, they found her careless. Now and then she petted one. Never for long. She was not affectionate, or not in a physical way. And what was lost to her she did not search or lament for. (She had
learned so many tenets of the priesthood in her slavery.) Unless, nothing had ever been worth lament or search.

After the dogs, maybe her tutors wondered if she would be frightened, even so, of the horses Ve Nera’s means of travel, as a rule, was by her canals and other waters. It was true, the Ducem maintained some horses on his island, for riding in the gardens. And more on his estates on the plain, Forchenza principally, for purposes of hunting. Even the Primo kept horses on the plain, for its knights. And sometimes too it was possible in Ve Nera to behold horses, transported on some barge, or gathered, fabulously decked, for a ceremony in the Primo’s great square beneath the Angel Tower. But Beatifica had never seen anything like that. To her, a horse was surprising. Therefore, not unusual at all. Not until two men set her on a horse’s back, did Beatifica become alarmed.

For a month before, she had been exercised, given things to do with her body in the new clothes—which were those of a boy, leggings, tunic, cloak. Her body, already firm and supple and spare, had loosened and knit further.

So she kept a grip on the horse. But her mind plunged off. Another would have screamed for help. The horse was a steady creature of the farm, used to plough and plod. They led him round, and Beatifica sat on his top, her long hair tied off her face and falling down her back in a tail much like his own. Seeing her going like this about the fields, those who did not know—most—took her for a boy.

She kept in her seat; when they took her off her legs gave way, both from the unused posture and from terror. The woman said to the man, “Is he insane, this Fra Danielus? What
does he want from her? To ride like a man—”

“Shut your lips, woman, till you have some sense. How do I know? He’s our landlord. We do what he says. Besides, for God’s sake, have you forgotten what he did for
us?
Would we be living still, if not for him? So, she’s in our charge. If he gave you a priestly robe to sew, you’d use a fine stitch.”

“It’s a woman we’re stitching.”

“Shut your lips if you want to stay wife of mine.”

Nothing made much sense to Beatifica. No warnings such as were habitual to her tutors’ kind of servitude, a
servant’s
slavishness, for gain; from thankfulness. Beatifica obeyed, as always she obeyed. What sustained life she did.

So, next day she was put up on the horse again, without cries or struggle. She did her best. By example, doing what she was shown, feeling out the country of the horse’s back, Beatifica once more learned.

(She was fifteen. Her mind, unfilled by knowledge, gaping like a hungry mouth of sharp white teeth.)

The lessons she devoured. Unconsciously mostly. From fright she moved to acceptance to an almost—interest, and so to aptitude. She rode.
Bold
as a man now. And when they brought the other horse, sword-slim and brown as malt,
immodest
as a man, she mounted him. She trotted with the horse and her escort through the bare fields, through the woods lashed by the tusks of winter boars. The air was spiked with coming snow. She had never known such freedom. Freedom which had come through obedient enslavement. The goal of the priest.

Nine days before Christ’ Mass, the Magister Major Fra Danielus went to inspect one of his farms. Three of the Bellatae rode with him, Aretzo, Jian
and Cristiano. Snow was down in the foothills, and dusted on the plain. The high woods wove nets of snow-blossom. Wolves were seen, a black wind that passed across the distance. A boar appeared near the village of Mariamba, ten miles from the City, and menaced the cavalcade. The young knights killed this boar. It would make enjoyable eating, save for the Magister. But it was not a time for traveling. Fra Danielus rode in the customary litter jolted between two geldings. The Bellatae rode their horses. Villagers pointed out the white-haired knight, on his silk-white horse.

Snow fell as they approached the estate.

The faces of the young men were flushed with triumphant exertion and cold. (Cristiano had needed this color.) Danielus regarded them from the swaying litter. He himself seemed fatigued. He had been called to his sister’s island once more. It was patent she wore him out, this Veronichi, chronically unhealthy, an obscure woman with no proper existence.

The boar gurned on its pole, gutted and dropping thick clods of black blood.

When they reached the farm, everyone came out.

The women were kissing the Fra’s hand, his ring, the men bowing low. Slaves ran to and fro. Chickens scattered, and on a post the cock crowed, not knowing six of his wives were due for the pot.

“Is there news of the Infidel War, Magister?”

Jian said, interposing himself between Danielus and his retainer, “No, not yet.”

Danielus spoke gently, “I’ll send you word, as always. But you will need to butcher and salt down this winter.”

“Yes, Magister.”

“Don’t look so vexed. The number of their
ships is exaggerated.”

“Over one thousand, so we heard—”

“Less than five hundred. And Ve Nera’s fleet will match them, by the spring.”

“Thank God, bless the Virgin.”

Aretzo said, on the outer stair, “You didn’t forewarn us, Magister, to lie.”

“Yes, but do lie. A little. For now.”

“It’s no sin,” said Jian, “not a lie of this sort. To save them distress.”