Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) (20 page)

The ship groaned as her slaves rowed.

He felt the straining strokes, although his feet did not seem in contact with the deck. He himself, by his will, powered the ship onward. He and all these men, with whom, now, he was one.

The atmosphere bristled, glowed. From everywhere came the yells and growls of an army, readying itself, bracing itself.

When the first Jurneian cannon spoke to them, they were less than a quarter mile off.

A combusting scatter, like flashing gems—

The roar and hiss of approach.

It was often called
flying fire
.

It flew.

But the range was too great. The
Christians saw the Jurneian infidel shot go down into the sea, with gargantuan splashes, sizzlings. Applauded and jibed.

On the
Virgo Maria
, the alien cannon poked its snout forwards. Men swarmed there. Along the line of Christian ships, one or two of the iron monsters had answered too quickly. The boom came of detonations, black fume, men shouting. And this shot too falling short.

But the fleets glided nearer to each other. Now Cristiano, partly out of his body, judged which vessel they would first come to grips with. They were slender craft, this one he had spotted with sails half looped in for the fray. She had Jurneia’s picture writing on the side, curlicues and dabs—her name. No,
his
name. Their ships were male.

He noted fresh scurrying about their artillery. Around him, soldiers swore. Cristiano merely waited.

From the forward ship he watched, and from a hundred others, the cannon blast exploded now in a tempest. At almost the same moment, Ve Nera’s armed ships replied.

The world reeled. Cristiano saw the great mast of the opposing vessel he had idly chosen, split cleanly. It cracked and tumbled in a billow of broken sheets, holing the deck as it went down. Splinters sprayed like rain; screaming came in another tongue.

But to either side of
Virgo Maria
the Christian ships had also been struck. Through one erupted a mighty water-spout like a dragon, venting. Others were at once on fire. All that beauty spoiled. Figures springing in the boiling sea.

The shots had missed
Virgo Maria
. Through a wall of upsurge
and flames, in sudden spark-lit darkness, she closed with a Jurneian vessel—not after all the one Cristiano had selected. That one was listing, going down.

Near enough now to see these enemies—

Through darkness, dark faces they had wrapped about with cloth, as women might. Bearded nuns—Eyes that glittered, white beast teeth—nothing familiar, nothing human.

The sword in his hand was like lightning. Cristiano raised it. It became alive. Eye to eye with them, their animal faces to his mechanical face of metal—nothing human
anywhere
.

The Soldier of God flexed. Marvelous, glorious, the wine red—

The red wine became himself. He stretched now to fill the world, and heard himself bellow far away. Head touching sky. Heart and lungs of sounding brass. The ecstasy sharp as any other sharpest joy, the battle-wrath.

The sides of the two ships bumped, then ground together.

Cannon barked. Another missile tore by above and this time clipped
Virgo Maria
’s topmost mast. A section of wood crashed behind Cristiano as he leaped, oblivious, over the bows.

God—I am Your slave—Nothing save You.

Sword was arm, arm sword. Body unbreachable shield.

He hacked and lunged. No one could come at him. A grinning man of metal, teeth bared—the machine of Heaven.

His voice thundering,
Ve Nera of God!

God’s holy war. They would win. They were unstoppable.

He smashed a man’s jaw, treading over him,
and cut two others free of life.

On all sides, the holy army, the slick of steel, blood bursting like a poppy.

Ve Nera of God—

(The third ship he had leapt to? The tenth?)

Miles below the stink of gall and offal, blood and excrement, the tinder smell of the ballistas and their iron cooking.

Jumping now across another rail. Ocean irrelevantly glimpsed and gone. Sword and arm, hack and lunge. Roil of brass and red.

A face—quite young—a handsome boy with honey skin and fawn’s eyes black as jet, yet with a silver rim—sometimes these momentary images caught in the red net—then vanished—dead of Cristiano’s war sword, and that other man-beast, knifed under the chin, both trampled underfoot.

This ship too was going down. (The fifth he had leapt from? The seventh?)

Aretzo punching at Cristiano, dragging him—”Come this way. Jump. She’ll pull us under as she goes—”

“He, Aretzo.” Lucid a moment, inappropriately lucid for Aretzo, who did not understand.

A scramble, up over the side—help forthcoming—which ship this one? Oh, a Christian vessel—blood-red darkness, heavy, and settling.

Cristiano shuddered.

“Drink this.”

He drank the water mixed with wine. It tasted of soot.

This ship lacked any cannon. One mast was gone, chopped like a tree. The sails like wrung-washing on the deck. Men lying weeping, holding in their guts … He was coming up
from the redness. Movement. Rowers working at the oars.

“What?” he said.

The ship’s master, a third of his face a mask of blood: “We’re standing off, Bellatoro.”

“Yes,” he said. Then, “We have won.”

The master of the ship that was not the
Virgo Maria
, spat. “No, Bellatoro. Look, can’t you see?”

“He’s battle-crazed yet,” said Aretzo. He sounded sulky. Cristiano saw abruptly that Aretzo had somehow mislaid his left arm. Which was bizarre—it could not have occurred.

Aretzo, losing consciousness, sank back against the washing-sails, coloring them.

Cristiano looked out from the ship.

A bank of cannon was belching once more, from somewhere. The missiles arced and dropped, flaming and smoking, into a wreckage of smoke and flame.

Like a ruined pile of brushwood, trodden on, the mess of ships. Those white sails, the painted crosses and Madonna-Venuses, brave flags, crests, burning, burning, on a water poison green and streaked with oil and fire. Loose spars and oars and planking rammed each other, and floating corpses. And men were swimming everywhere or going under. Heads that bobbed like strange fish, called in mortal voices.

Beyond, towards Ciojha across an interval of sea, the fleet of Jurneia, still clean and whole, grouped in a gracious cluster. Surely one thousand ships still. It was impossible. He—they—had killed Jurneia. But like the Hydra, she had grown these other heads.

The wounded ships of Ve Nera straggled away, picking up survivors, sometimes, where they could.

And now it seemed, Jurneia let them go.

“Ship’s master, turn back. I order it.”

The master, a head shorter than
Cristiano, buckled into leather for the fight, his face divided, squared up to the Knight of God pugnaciously. “I will not. Scan about. Any vessel we have left is making off. If you’re so razor-keen for death, signore, there’s your way.”

Aretzo, surfacing, let out a silly laugh.

“He would, but he doesn’t swim.”

From the ships of Jurneia a kind of ululation was going up. Mockery—triumph—who knew. They did not follow the retreat.

Not yet.

“Ve Nera requires we return and fight,” said Cristiano.

The master spat again, at the feet of this steel-clad fiend. Then turned and left to go about the business of escape.

Cristiano lowered himself beside Aretzo. He bound the gouting stump that had been Aretzo’s arm. They must cauterize soon.

Aretzo did not speak again.

The sky beyond the smoke, like the sea, was weirdly green. In it they saw the moon, as clearly as if by night.

When he came from the Chapel of Micaeli, by the Primo’s South Door, Fra Danielus met Brother Isaacus among the pillars there.

They were like the trees of a wood, the pillars, gray carven trees, with gilded branches. You might expect to meet some creature lurking in a wood, after sunfall.

“Good evening, brother.”

“Stay still. I’ll speak to you.”

“If you wish.”

“You keep a woman in the Primo,
Danielus. Not a holy sister, a nun. A
woman
. In this sacred place.”

Danielus waited.

Isaacus snarled in his half-voice, foul breathed as any bear or wild dog, “You don’t speak. Can’t. You transgress, Fra.”

“Then I must answer, must I not.”

“You cannot.”

“The woman kept here under my protection, is not a woman.”

“Oh, a conundrum, Fra, is it? She is a
woman
. That bitch you paraded before the Ducem, like her whoresman.”

Danielus said nothing.

Isaacus swelled like a toad. “If you were not what you are—I’d have our men come to you, our Eyes and Ears of God.”

Danielus did speak. “They’re welcome, brother. Meanwhile, there is other news than the Maiden Beatifica.”

“What news? What?”

“Has no one come to you, Brother Isaacus? This grieves me.”

“Ah—the ships. God favored the righteous. There was a victory. The acts of the Council were not in vain, and saved this contaminate City.”

“No.”

Isaacus drew back. His face in its hood quavered, then slammed itself shut.

“You say no.”

“Most of the Veneran ships went to the bottom. A handful are limping home. They sent a messenger, one of the doves they carried for the purpose. Jurneia had the victory. We’ve only to wait for her.”

Isaacus clamped tight his lips. Then
rasped some incomprehensible sound.

“Your throat seems worse, brother.”

Isaacus turned and went away, leaving only the ghosts of his odors, and the memory of his venom.

She had had her supper, a herbal gruel, and was in her room. Before lying down on the floor, with the blanket and cushion, Beatifica was praying to her pink-veiled Madonna.

Finishing three Latin prayers suitable for the Virgin, Beatifica crossed herself and rose.

Then she felt dissatisfied, kneeled down again, and began another prayer.

Her enjoyment of religion was very great, and had been noticed by very many. “She loves to be at prayer,” they said. She attended every one of the services, including Prima Vigile, in a small chapel adjacent to the Golden Rooms. Here her tutor, the young priest, accompanied her for Prima Pegno and sometimes the Solus. Other higher priests came there on their own account, and sometimes Bellatae of the Upper Echelon.

Although clad always as a male, Beatifica’s garments at these times were the soft gray of a nun’s habit. She had no ornament and carried her little plain cross in her hand.

She should have covered her head, of course, as a woman. She did not.

Some of the priests evidently sought the chapel only to squint and frown at her. These she seemed not to see. (Even now, she expected nothing generous from people. While they did not lay harsh hands on her, she accepted and forgot them)

Jian too was frequently present, for the Venusium, or Luna Vigile. Before
the ships had sailed, some hundred or so others of the Upper Echelon crowded by relays into the tiny, elegant chapel, for one office or another.

It was suspected they were her guard of honor, although she scarcely glanced at them, nor did they look at her more than once or twice. They were gazing at her instead clandestinely, with the eyes of the soul.

“It is unwise for these young men, sworn to a celibate life, to hang about so round a female. Especially a female dressed so shamelessly.”

Jian had responded, not realizing the Magister Major had somehow laid such concepts in his mind, “To us, holy-brother, she isn’t a woman. She is the vessel of God.”

“Take care. You’re perilously close to the sin of blasphemy.”

“Revered brother, I mean, in the same sense as a window may let in the light. She is so clear and open. One sees through her, to the Power beyond.”

Besides Danielus, her patron, was himself a power. He had, in all his twenty-eight years with the Church, and by dint of his noble birth, made sure of that. Arguments were suspended.

And the Bellatae remained irreproachable. And the girl—she seemed properly aware, it was true, only of God.

Yes, she enjoyed all the matters of religion. She loved—although she did not fully know it—her hours of talk with the gray-haired priest Fra Danielus sent her as confessor. (She
relished
talking, and to be asked questions with such interest, to know so much—but what?—depended on her answers.) And the kind ancient confessor was swift to say to one and all, “I can tell you, there’s no seal of secrecy to break with
the Maiden. She is devoid of any crime or failing. I give her penances sometimes because, once informed of their purpose, she asks them of me. She loves to pray. She thinks only of Christ, the Virgin and God.” And now and then he had been led to add, “Woman is a weak straw, prone to error. At certain times, God causes to be born a woman who may come to serve as an example, both to women and to men, that even for these faulty ones, grace is possible.”

Danielus had always chosen well.

After the ships sailed, for four days, only Jian, with two other Bellatae, had come to every office in the chapel.

But two days before setting out, nearly four hundred of the Upper Echelon had come, in changing groups. And when Beatifica left the chapel, they had stared, for the first, intensely at her.

She felt their eyes, but she had felt eyes searing on her before. She did not look. They did not harm her. Even the few flickering touches of their fingers on her cloak’s edge or sleeve, were not the prologue to abuse.

She had got used to them in a way. Perhaps, in a way, she was moved by them, just a little. (Their faces, fierce looks, the young male scent of them, the maculums of mail, their strength, the yearning that sang and trembled when they spoke their orisons.) One more interesting thing. Something else which was pleasant to do.

In the chapel, on the night before the fleet sailed, after the Auroria, one of the Soldiers of God—one only—cried out to her.

“Beatifica—Maiden—before this great battle, give us your blessing.”