Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) (3 page)

She had told no other.

Now she never spoke of it, and Volpa never asked to hear. In imagination only, Volpa relayed the flight of angels. She had seen it so often with the inner eye of her mind, that
now it too had become one with the earthly memories of her infancy in the hills. As if she had witnessed it at her mother’s side.

That winter, after Volpa turned fourteen, was very bitter.

Ice—they said—formed on the great Laguna Aquila, and the smaller lagoon called Fulvia, and ice pleated the hem of the sea beyond the bars of sand and the sea walls.

The canals froze solid. Even the cart was able to be pulled along them to the market, not needing the alleys, slipping a little.

In Ghaio Wood-Seller’s kitchen in the yard, Volpa’s mother kept the hearth going as long as she was able from the meager allowance of wood the master gave them.

They were supposed to use it only to cook his meals.

However, the old man slave stole, a few twigs here, a log there, from the tempting mounds in the yard. Ghaio presumably never guessed. In any case, they were often cold.

During this winter, Volpa’s mother began to cough.

She tried never to do it when serving Ghaio, for then he struck her: “Shut your noise!”

One morning, the air seemed to break. Suddenly a softness came, like breath breathed on a rich man’s glass goblet.

Volpa, waking on the straw at first light, went into the yard, and saw a single pale flower, some weed, that had pushed up against the house.

When she returned with the first unfrozen water from the cistern, she saw her mother still lay asleep.

“Mumma—wake up!” And she shook the woman’s arm because no slave could lie abed.

But the man slave was there, gray as a cobweb gone hard.

“Don’t shake her. Don’t shake the sleeping or the dead,” said this old man.

And reprimanded, a little
aggrieved—what one took from master one could not bear from another slave—Volpa stopped. Then she saw the straw was dark under her mother’s head. As had happened that time with herself, blood had poured out on the straw. Now, though, it seemed to be all the blood the mother had kept in her body. And the soft new light showed her white as the ice which had melted away.

Ghaio blasphemed and complained. She had not lasted eleven years, this useless, slave bitch. He had her body sewn in the customary sack, and thrown on a boat for the Isle of the Dead, where the bodies of slaves were only burned, there being no room for limitless burials.

Volpa stood stunned and weeping. The boat was rowed away in the gray morning. The old man slave said to Volpa, or to the air, “Cry for yourself but not her. Her pain’s done. She is in God’s world now.”

Volpa wept. She said, “That’s no better.”

“Oh yes,” said the slave. “Why else do you think He damns us for suicide? His world is the best of all, and we must earn it.” Volpa only ever heard this man say two meaningful things, and this was the second. (The first had been about the shaking.) Then, as they returned through the alley to Ghaio’s yard, the old man said also a prophetic thing, “How I long to get there. Would this could be done.

I won’t raise my own hand, Lord. But fetch me—by any means you like, by whatever awful way. The road’s stones, but the gates are pearl. Fetch me, Lord. Amen.”

The wood-seller had a collection of debtors, among whom was no longer Juvanni the sweet merchant.

His
house Ghaio had taken in lieu of the loan that
winter. Where Juvanni and his family had gone was anyone’s guess.

Ghaio did not want the better house, though. He preferred his hovel. He sold the other, and put the deeds and the money into a chest in the upper room of the Red House, which was reached by a ladder, and full only of a bed, some candles, and many, many similar chests.

In the evening after the mother’s corpse had been rowed away for the crematory, Ghaio had Volpa serve his meal.

He took no notice of her, but neither did he strike her. This surprised Volpa, who had tried not to displease him, but knew she had been clumsy.

At last, Ghaio sat back.

“You’ll have to take your mother’s place. I won’t waste cash on another.” Volpa waited. “How old are you?”

“Fourteen years, signore. So she said.”

“Now I see you, you look less. Skin and bone.

Skinny red fox. Let me see that hair.” Volpa drew off her scarf with reluctance. “Ah, you’re nothing,” said Ghaio.

“Worthless. I might sell you. What’d you bring me, though? A copper venus and a sneering laugh.” Then he said, “Go up the ladder and open the chest nearest the door. It’s not locked. Inside is a paper with a list of men’s names, men that owe me money.”

Volpa did what he said. Her whole life had been molded in obedience to him.

She knew he looked at her as she climbed.

In the upper room, she glanced about. She had been there often to wipe the floor and collect the night-pot, but always when the Master was from the house.

There was a tiny window, shuttered against the weather and the dark. The bed was low and spread with a moldy fur—normally her mother would tidy the
bed, but today the man slave had done so. In the room was a bad smell, not merely from its enclosure and the accumulation of bodily stinks. It was a corrupt smell.

When Volpa came down the ladder, Ghaio again looked at her. She had to lift her skirt away from her legs to manage the ladder. She gave him the paper.

Then Ghaio reached out and took hold, through slave’s tunic and shift, of Volpa’s center, the mound of her sex. Her instinct—entire and vital—was to leap away. But she was property. She kept still, as she had mostly had to do in the streets and market. Presently, apparently dissatisfied, he let go.

But, “We’ll see,” muttered Ghaio, as if promising her something. He was.

That night, Volpa dreamed.

Generally it seemed to her she never did. Rather it seemed that she went—elsewhere. And coming back at sunrise to the Auroria bell over the marshes, she was dazed from a long journey, exhausted by her slumber. And this lethargy mostly only left her gradually in the hour after she rose.

The place or places she had gone to in sleep she recollected only in fragments—some glimmering piece, like a bit of a broken dish, made of some costly substance, yet worthless since broken off. Besides, it soon faded. As she revived, she lost all memory, all
sense
of the countries of the night.

Her dreams she considered differently, and they were rare—or rarely did she recall them intact. The last one which she could at that time remember had been dreamed at the farm or estate from which her mother and she were sold off. Volpa had been then less than four
years old. She was, in the dream, in an orchard, where all the trees were bold with fruit—perhaps only like the orchards of the foot hills and the Veneran Plain. Yet on one tree, at the orchard’s center, was an unfamiliar crop. The globes that hung from its boughs were of gold and silver—the image not of metal, but of sunlight and moonlight. (Told of gold and silver once by some traveler at the farm, she had only been able to picture them as such.)

The tree of gold and silver, of suns and moons, attracted Volpa in the dream. She went to it, and began the slow circling dance her mother had taught her for trees.

Then, high in the branches, something moved that also shone. She thought it was a cat at first, but then she saw it had no legs, or ears, and instead of a pelt it was smooth and sheened as any of the fruits of the tree.

As she had told her mother this dream, the mother had grown anxious. “What did you do? Did you pick any of the fruits?”

“Oh no,” said the child, “they would have burned me, I thought.”

“And the snake?”

“Was it a snake?”

The mother nodded.

The child said, “It slid down and stared in my face. It had such beautiful eyes.”

“But did it speak—or offer anything?”

“No, mumma.”

Her mother’s face had eased.

“And then?”

“Then you woke me.”

“God forgive me that.”

The night after her mother’s death, and going up the
ladder with Master looking up her legs, Volpa dreamed she was on the plain again, under the foothills. Now, however, there were no villages or towns, and the land was covered by warm powder, or dust, very deep, so that as she walked, Volpa’s feet sank far into it.

Also there was before her only one mountain.

Realizing this, Volpa halted.

The mountain was astonishing. It was long, and had a curved, flattish top, and was colored a lucid flaming red—like a hearth or a sunset. A scarlet red, that had fluted shadows chiseled in it, and veins like living fire. In wonderment Volpa stood, watching the mountain, which seemed to reflect the passage of clouds and suns. Then, she saw between herself and its incredible rock, figures dancing on the powdery plain. They were black, as if being by the fiery mountain had burned them. But something touched Volpa’s foot, and looking down she saw a golden serpent rippling away through the sand.

When she woke, it was night, yet through the high window of the kitchen a full white moon was blazing.

Somehow the contrast of its color scorched the dream of a red mountain into Volpa’s brain.

She got up silently. The male slave lay sleeping in his corner. The houses were soundless, but for the lisp of the spring canal.

When she went out, the whole City of Ve Nera, Venus, seemed laid to sleep. Nothing stirred. No human voice nor cry of any creature, not one bell.

Volpa went to the fig tree and danced slowly around it, as she had done with her mother.

The boughs were silver with moonlight, but showed no hint of renewal.

On the Isle of the Dead her mother would be ashes now, and
tipped in some hole. But the people in the dream were so black, surely they had been in fire and come back out of it, whole, and far stronger, better.

Once she had danced, Volpa leaned on the tree, holding it, and crying noiselessly. Her pain rose and fell like waves, and it occurred to her that perhaps God noted this, and the height of her suffering, and that by her grief she helped to buy the life beyond life in God’s perfect world.

Then something rustled, up in the bare tree. And for half a second, Volpa thought it was her mother, become now an angel, perhaps black, and leaning through the branches to say something kind.

But when she looked, Volpa saw it was a scrap of some refuse, blown up there in the winter, now coming apart and so making movement and sound to deceive her.

As spring took hold, Ghaio felt new optimism. This was almost always to do with money. The untamed scents of sea and fish and sap that now filled Ve Nera, put a bounce in his step, but only so he went up the ladder more quickly to count the money.

Having counted it, he selected a bag of silver duccas and one gold venus, and dressed himself in his tatty best.

(There had been some talk of an edict against usury, when practiced by Christians. Ghaio did not think this could come to anything, but it was wise to stay friendly with the Church.)

The hired boat ferried him out on to the wide Fulvia lagoon. Ghaio Wood-Seller looked about. How much of the City could he now buy? How soon could he buy more?

The gift to the Church was a sensible
insurance.

It was almost midday, and Ghaio was going to attend Midday Mass, the Solus, in the Primo.

The lagoon was a sheet of green silk. The very sort of silk for which Ve Nera had become a rival in the cities of Candisi and the East. After the winter, the buildings crowded round the lagoon looked dank and draggled, matted beasts that had slunk to drink. Then the shoreline opened into the great square, swept, and tinted like Juvanni’s prettiest sweets. From which rose the moon-dome of the Basilica.

Ghaio would not mind the mass. Although impervious to the holy ritual and the ethereal singing, the gold ceiling was of some interest to him, and the jewels and magenta of the priests.

When his boat reached the bank, the bell began to call.

Ghaio got out, paid the boatman (meanly) and strutted across and in at an enormous door.

Black robes moved at the square’s edges. Eyes and Ears noted the pious hurrying in to God.

Ghaio stepped into an alcove, and awarded his gift to the relevant hands, leaving his name as donor for the notice of the Council of the Lamb. He then moved on into the body of the temple. Here the poorest sat on the floor. The better classes had chairs. Several stared up, as now Ghaio commenced to do.

Arch rose through arch, minor dome through dome, until at last the ultimate circle lifted, as if weightless, high above. Gold. It was more like fire. And in the fire, the painted angels flew, pausing to raise their hands in blessing.

There were great treasures hidden here. Relics, standards, icons, thick with bullion and gems…. The apartments above, they said, had riches
like those of Heaven itself—

How many chests of money would it take …?

Angelic voices rang from the balconies, and Ghaio basked in his insurance. With God. If God did indeed exist, and the afterlife. But Ghaio turned his mind from his own demise. He would live long.

O God
, the voices sang,
If I render to You all my heart, I am free. Yet, when You turn to me, You will demand of me everything. For Your love I must forget the world
.

A tavern song—surely?

Ghaio watched the priests, a cross stuck with rubies and chrysoprase.

Nearby a woman wept. They always did.

Not much longer and the show would be over.

Then some dinner at an inn. Then two debtors to watch squirm.

By the time the Venus star stood over this City, Ghaio would be at home, and the Fox would come in her rags, bringing wine.

A twitch of feeling moved in Ghaio. After all the spring had found him, there in church. Sap and sea, milk and salt.

After the first dream of the scarlet mountain, for a time Volpa dreamed every night. Not entirely acquainted with dreams, she did not think to ponder that each one followed from the one before. They were like pages torn from an illuminated book, and falling down into her sleep, one after another, telling a story in bright pictures. In the second dream, Volpa was aware of the summer heat of the wide plain. The sand was a terracotta shade and softly burned the soles of her feet, which in her sleep were bare.