Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) (7 page)

The fox which, in legend, was the devil’s familiar dog, even his disguise.

“And you, girl. What do you say?” It was a black priest again who addressed her.

And Luchita, again, interposed. “Gentle brothers, she doesn’t speak. I never heard her. No one has. Look at her—does she look burned? Does she look cunning or supernatural?”

Yes
. The thought jumped starkly forward in Cristiano’s brain. Cunning, supernatural, both. And—
holy
, holy in some incoherent, awful and total way, as a fallen angel might, perhaps, that once had been bright winged in Heaven before its fall.

Berbo shook himself. He said, “All
right. None would listen before. I’ve told it now. I’m done with it.” Both of the Eyes and Ears watched Berbo as he marched abruptly away. They would learn his house. He might well receive a call from them, or from others. To accuse, as to be accused, was not always simple.

The girl had lowered her head and her eyes.

One of the priests said, to Luchita, “Will you sponsor her, then? Swear that she’s innocent?”

Luchita opened her mouth. Cristiano was quicker.

“The inn-wife is my sister. I vouch for her as an honest woman. But she can’t pass judgment on such a thing. She’s fed the wretch to save her from starving, no more.”

“What then to do, Bellator?” The priests stared resentfully and arrogantly at him. “Should we take her to the Primo and question her?”

The crowd muttered. Ve Nera knew that some taken to the Primo on such business did not come out, or came out damaged. The Council of the Lamb was determined in its service to God: it was better to kill a man than risk his soul.

A woman cried, “She’s only a kit! What does Berbo know?

But a surly man remarked, “If she’s a witch, she needs seeing to.”

Cristiano too was well aware of the interrogations which sometimes were carried on in the under-rooms of the Basilica. They had been a cause of discussion in his own mind. It was a fact also, if he had not stood in the path, they might have been off with her already. He took a chance, rashly, like a boy. Half offending himself.

“I vouch for my sister, and she vouches for the girl. That’s enough. I myself will see to it.”

“But,” began the fatter of the
Eyes and Ears.

“You will leave it with me and save yourselves the trouble. You’ve enough work in the City as it is.”

That winter, a high tide had flooded the square before the Primo Suvio. Now artisans were commemorating, in black and gold mosaic, the large octopus found washed up by the Lion Door.

Fra Danielus, who had not partaken of the—reportedly tasty—corpse, looked down at the work from a gallery above.

On this sunny day, with its promise of heat, the Magister Major was conscious of much pleasure in the world. In the beauty of the Primo. Its enormous dome which, from the Fulvia lagoon, looked like nothing so much as a gigantic pearl. The courtyards with their busy yet sedate procedures, the cappella and castra (barracks) of the knights, their roofs of silver and gold, the pure fountain which plunged into a basin of white marble, supported by four lions done in gilded bronze. From the gallery of the Angel Tower, where Danielus stood, all this, besides the artisans, was visible.

Moving on, around the Tower’s huge side, it would be easy to see, too on such a cloudless day, the phantom forms of distant mountains. While the Laguna stretched like silvered glass to the sea wall and the lit curve of ocean, the faint drifts of insubstantial islands like aberrations of some fine mind, profligate only with loveliness. Yet, to every rose, a thorn.

Fra Danielus considered also this. Like the thorn, it was perceptible, (in the paper he had left lying in his book-chamber.) Like the thorn, it would
not be felt until one put one’s hand thereon.

Danielus turned his eyes down to the City. Which thrived and moved. Not having felt, yet, the thorn.

Last summer, from this very tower, the priesthood had hung out seven “bird-cages,” low enough that the citizens might observe how the six men and one woman swung in them and starved to death.

They were persons of wickedness, thieves and murderers, the woman also a whore. But worse than breaking the commandments of God, they had been caught out in sins against God Himself.

The Council of the Lamb was forthright in its punishments. Without example, half-blind, Man would stray.

Yet the prolonged death of the malefactors, their cries and contortions, finally their corruption, had been aesthetic blasphemy. The Angel Tower was for angels to alight upon, not to hang out dying men like washing.

Though he had thought it, he would never have said it. He said very little, generally.

Fra Danielus was not much more than forty years, and looked youthful for that age. His hair was more black than gray, and his eyes were black still. The thin long nose, the thin but well-formed lips, the long, thin fingers—even without his belted magenta habit, and jeweled crucifix, his body itself revealed him as a man of thought and learning, a calm selective man, self-pared to the service of Almighty God. He had no vices, even those which the Church permitted. He drank no wine, ate sparingly, avoiding all meat, wore beneath his finery the most ordinary undershirt.

All excess, it seemed, recoiled from him. Perhaps miraculously. Fair women became, they said, in his presence more plain. A dog which had once run snarling and foaming
at him, dropped at his feet, dying without delay.

At the age of thirty, Danielus had attained his present position, third of the Magisters Major, one of the Primo’s highest religious authorities, beside the Council of the Lamb. More, he was the Master of the Upper Echelon of the Bellatae Christi. Perhaps an equal, in all but inherited luxury, to the Ducem in his island palace.

The Soldiers of God were in themselves a power, an essential asset to the City and provinces of Ve Nera.

Their Upper Echelon was as famous through the world as some emperor’s crack guard. Of course. They were the mortal guard of heaven.

Danielus was not thinking of this. He walked down the stairs of the Tower, then down the ramp, beyond which the cages had hung out. He reached the ground, and crossed through the inner gate to the courtyards of the Primo.

A young man, one of the Bellatae, was in the first court. He had paused by the lion fountain, but now came straight towards the Magister.

Danielus extended his hand. The cool lips of Cristiano pressed the emerald in the Magister’s ring.

“Magister, can you grant me a few minutes speech?”

“Yes, Knight. And in turn, I shall speak to you.”

“Have I offended?”

The pride, almost insolence, with which Cristiano had responded, amused Danielus slightly. He masked his amusement. He always did. Amusement, rancor, any vivid emotion. Even natural beauty he could regard unsmiling.

“No, my son. This is something our order must soon hear of. You and your brothers first of all.”

They walked through a second court, from which led the castra of the Bellatae, and their chapel, in which Cristiano had kept his Vigil. A wide
marble stair took them up into the Primo’s flank. From here, an indoor stair of stone ascended to the Golden Rooms.

The majesty of these apartments was lost, in a way, on Cristiano. As he expected everything of God, (seemingly this was mutual) so the magnificence of the Primo Suvio was inevitable. Not a marvel, merely a law obeyed.

“Sit, if you will.”

Cristiano took a chair in the book-chamber.

Indirect sunlight from a window, paned in glass, burned his hand.

Danielus sat down at his desk, and rested, as he often did, one hand on a polished human skull of abnormal size.

To either side of him, on the wall at his back, were two panels, painted a century before by an artist unnamed, for the glory of God. In one panel the Biblical Danielo faced the lions in the pit. In the second, a single lion, now become the Primo’s symbol, was subdued once more by the Christ Child riding on its back.

“I will speak first, if you permit,” said the courteous Danielus.

“Naturally, Magister.”

“It will be a war.”

Cristiano thought, and nodded. “You’ve had a letter from the Ducem?”

“That’s so. Ve Nera’s ambassadors have failed in the Eastern city of Jurneia. Failed so profoundly as to have had their heads put up on spikes in that place.”

“The Jurneians are savages,” said Cristiano.

“So we hear. And infidels, such as we fought in the Crusades. They haven’t forgiven us that, the spoiling of their city and capture of their wealth, nor the saving of so many of their kind from damnation by conversion to the one true Faith. Three hundred
years and more have passed; they don’t forget.”

Cristiano said, flatly, “I thought, Magister, it was a war about the price of silk.”

Although he seldom smiled, Danielus had a way of conveying a sort of smile, by something in his eyes and brows. This happened now. “So it is. Mankind tends to that, don’t you find, Cristiano—the use of new excuses for an ancient grudge?”

“Then it’s both a war of trade and holy war.”

“As you say. The armies of the Ducem will be called for the first. The Soldiers of God for the second. In tandem, obviously.”

“And the fighting ground, Magister?”

“There’s some debate. Jurneia is readying her fleet it seems, and building more ships besides. So Ve Nera is to equip hers. But it may take a year for the enemy to be ready.”

“Then we go to meet them?”

“As yet, the Ducem makes no decision.”

“But that will come?”

“The decision, of course. What it will be is with God.”

Both men left off speaking a moment. It was well known the Ducem of Ve Nera, unlike his predecessor, was a weak and idle man, and his advisors supposedly corrupt. Where the Church could over-master the sins and failures of lesser men, the highest-born could, for the most part, only be regarded.

Danielus said, after a while, “There is the letter. Read it, if you so wish.”

Cristiano took the letter. It was written clearly in Latin and black ink, on fine parchment.

It was very polite, exact and vague at once. But, without any doubt, it smelled of war.

“You see, Cristiano.”

“Yes, Magister.”

“There will be a lot
to do. I think the Primo herself will need to buy in commodities to safeguard the people of this City, and ensure our interests in the markets of the outer world, to the same end.”

Cristiano’s eyes, fearsomely clear and steady. “Trade again, Magister?”

“You don’t see it, I think. What the delay may mean, if Jurneia is as powerful as she may be, and the Ducem slow, or his decision on the matter—ill-advised.” Cristiano blinked. “And now you do.”

“Unthinkable—”

“If their ships reach us, those who refuse or are unable to fly, will be besieged here.”

“By the Christ—”

“Of course, you don’t swear. It’s a prayer you uttered.”

“Pardon me, Magister—yes, a prayer for Ve Nera under siege—”

“The Jurneian ships are narrow, and oared, reportedly by slaves, although all sources do not agree on this.

The rigging is heavy for the vessels’ shape. They have the new weapon, unperfected here, cannon. The men wrap their heads in cloth and worship their mistaken notion of God, facing towards the dawn. A strangely spiritual image … Other than siege, they may wipe this City from the face of the earth.”

Cristiano rose. His hair burned white in the glow of the costly window. A halo.

Danielus said, mildly, “Please sit, Knight. And tell me your own news.”

Cristiano stared at him.

“It’s nothing to this. Some witch by the Silvian Marshes. But she isn’t. The products of ignorance and
malice hitched to one cart.”

Danielus stroked the smooth pate of the giant skull on his table. A pious man kept always before him a
Memento Mori
. There was no life save through God.

He had come across Cristiano when, at fifteen, the boy entered the novitiate of the Bellatae Christi. Even so young, Cristiano was striking, and despite his start among the slums, intelligent and strong. It would be easier to doubt one’s faith perhaps, than Cristiano’s sincerity, his absolute steely
belief
.

A Magister Major had no favorites. Of course.

“Do I assume, Cristiano, that you intervened.”

“Yes, Magister.”

“It had caught your eye. I don’t mean the witch, evidently. The situation.”

“This happened by my sister’s inn. The story’s a fantastic one. If they put such imagination to the service of God, they’d do better.”

“Let me hear the story, then.”

Sometimes, she thought that she was in Ghaio’s house. But the big room was larger and had many tables. The kitchen was attached to the house, though entered by a separate door. There was a garden, she had seen it. It reminded her somewhat of the farm, or estate, from which she had come. She did not see many people. The blonde woman who was now, presumably, her owner, kept Volpa mainly in the kitchen. Here she did much as she had done in the house of Ghaio, cleaning pots, sweeping the floor, carrying nastier substances outside to tip into an open drain leading to a canal.

Sometimes people stared at Volpa.

No one spoke to her aside from her new owner.

But who had ever spoken to her, much?
Even her mother fell silent. Only in the dreams following her mother’s death had there been conversations. And all those words, now, she had forgotten.

She had forgotten a great deal.

Volpa did not know why or when Ghaio had sold her, and did not recall the process at all. She had one half formed memory, of fierce light, and of being very cold. And someone had helped her pick up her shift, and put it on, and then led her outside into the yard. Who had that been? She had seemed just woken from sleep at the time, and still not fully aware. Was this helper the blonde woman? The helper had been gentle, yet firm. The blonde woman was neither. She pushed Volpa aside or into place as though not liking to touch her. And she vacillated in her orders: Go and do that—no, do this instead. Leave this and go there—no, come back, stay put.