Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series)

by Tanith Lee

  Had he not once thought her hair like fire? Yes, for so it was. It blew out from her head, framing the whiteness of her body. In length, it fell below her knees. It could be worth cutting, this hair, and selling. But he might let her keep it … It gave him quite a thrill, the sight of it, that red mantle round her white.

  Indeed, she was like a flame. The blanched center, the carmine rim.

  “Come over here,” he thickly said.

  He could scent her, this vixen, this flame. Her rufus tang, the youth of her body. Sweet—

  When Ghaio caught hold of her and spun her down on the stinking bed, Volpa thought she had again enraged him, and prepared at once for cuffs and slaps or worse.

  Instead, perhaps only slightly less brutal, his hands clenched, one on her right breast and the other on her sex.

  Ghaio laughed in her face.

  “Now we come to it, eh, Volpa?”

  Before, when he had grabbed hold of her, (on the evening of her mother’s death) she had not questioned it, though it had filled her with panic. That sexual affront had seemed only one more lashing out. (Another more ferocious extension of the assaults in the market.) Now, a recollection surfaced. She saw again the cart in the rain, and her own mother under the awning and under Ghaio, her body wracked and shaken by his use of it.

  This use Volpa had never understood. Nor did she now. Simply, she was afraid. Yet it was a dread beyond anything she had ever known.

  “Give me a kiss, girl,” said Ghaio. “That rosy mouth. And those white teeth—oh yes. Let me taste you.”

  And Ghaio kissed her.

  At this she managed, her horror acting as a bow, to fire herself away from him.

  Ghaio fell on his face and breathed, in place of fragrant youth and charming fear, the smelly bed.

  “Come back, you slut. Where are you off to?”

  She had stumbled away, but before she could get up from her knees, he caught her leg. Ah, so smooth, like marble, yet not so hard, nor so unfeeling.

  “Stay still. I’m your master.” He dragged her back and now, turning, not even thinking what she did, she hit him in the mouth.

  Ghaio yowled.

  No other had smitten him, not in twenty years, and certainly not a female, nor a slave.

  His face darkened. A new stench, the effluvia of rage, streamed from his pores.

  “You’ll lie down here with me, or you’ll be made sorry.”

  She was across the room. She stood by her discarded clothes, not bending yet to snatch them. A weird pose—her arms not clamped protectively to her body, coyly shielding breasts or loins, as even Venus, in certain lewd pictures, sometimes did.

  No, the arms of Volpa were outflung. Her head poked forward a little, like a snake’s. And the scarlet wind of hair blew all about her, seeming sentient.

  Its color—it had increased, become extraordinary—orange, like the golden citruses brought on trees from the East—some effect of the candles, no doubt—he scarcely noticed.

  “Lie down, you trull. Lie down and take what I give. Or I’ll flay your back and peaches for you. Do you want that, eh? Have your master or have the flail—want that eh? Or me?”

  Through Volpa’s brain things flashed. Not thoughts, let alone words. Lightnings, gusts of intolerable brilliancy.

  She let out a barking scream.

  It checked Ghaio.

  What was she, this bitch, truly some beast?

  A motion, of her body or of some other thing which was in the room with them, put out the candles, every one.

  But they were not needed. For now Volpa herself gave light.

  She was incandescent. The white of her flesh was blazing, blinding him. He could no longer make out her features, eyes or lips—not even the fleece at her loins.

  Yet the outer hair—surely it did burn? Oranges and gold, lava that poured from some erupting mountain Ghaio Wood-Seller had never seen.

  “Stop this, you scunny harlot.” He got up off his couch. He rubbed his hands together, as he thought, to ready them for violence. But they were slick with sweat. That posture of hers. It was like that of some bird of prey, the wings out, the head thrust forward.

  Ghaio stood on the mattress. He could not credit what he saw.

  The hair of his slave—was bursting.

  Who made that noise? It was Ghaio now, screaming.

  “Holy Virgin spare me—God save me—”

  The hair of the slave had exploded outwards, and for a moment the girl was the core of an incendiary storm. It swirled upward, to either side, behind her. Her hair had filled the room.

  Ghaio’s eyes scorched. The shrill hair dazzled him.

  Abruptly he was freezing cold. He clutched his arms about himself and shrieked as flames rushed up them. He was naked too, his robe burnt off, but clad in fire. Ghaio danced. In the middle of the light, he was turning black. And the shell of the room broke like an egg.

  When the roof flew off, he might have seen the night held in a net of glory. But, screeching, he only danced, and swallowed fire, and was made dumb.

  Volpa had lost interest in him. She felt herself droop, and as she did so, her mind grew cool and dim.

  Two wings seemed to fold about her, and her eyes shut fast. She rolled into a silent emptiness, exactly like a sleep that had no dreams.

  “What’s that glow? Is it morning?”

  “No, Lucha. A house is on fire on the Seven Keys Canal.”

  “Fire—!”

  “Lie still. It’s not so close. We doused the inn roof with water, to be sure.”

  Luchita looked out wearily, between the pains, at her husband. “Only one house?”

  “Three, to be exact. But they’re dipping up water from the canal. It’s almost out.”

  Another pain came, and Luchita cried aloud.

  Her husband hurried from the room.

  She would lose this child. It was too early.

  “Oh God—why do you make me suffer like this? I never even enjoyed it—”

  She hated God. Pointless to dissemble. He would know.

  In the window the red glare faltered, then waxed again.

  The girl came in, with the old midwife from the marshes, old Maria with her ten black teeth.

  “Best be quick,” said this crone, “Venus is afire.”

  The girl looked scared and sprang from the room.

  Luchita said, “Three houses only, so he told me.”

  “Three so far. And the alleys full of wasps—”

  Luchita stared. The witch pointed straight at the window. Some insects were buzzing there drearily, dropping in and crawling on the floor. “A nest in his wood-stacks.

  It was the wood-seller’s Red House. The heat of the fire hatched them too early. Only one body’s brought out. The slave man from the yard, curled up and black. But they say there was a girl, and the miser himself, Ghaio.”

  Pain came. Luchita cried loudly.

  Dying wasps hardly born drizzled in twos and threes into the room. Poor things, like the child, forced on too soon.

  The witch trod on the wasps. She would be as blunt with the woman and the baby.

  But the fire was dulling now.

  The crone peered from the window. “There’s a beggar at your door,” she said. Everything was of interest to her save her trade, she had seen too much of that.

  Below in the street, the beggar looked up at the window as Luchita howled.

  Two men, shouldering from the inn to visit the fun on Seven Keys, strode by the beggar, knocking her aside.

  Volpa sat down on the ground by the inn door. She had forgotten who she was, and where she was, if she had ever known either. Lusterless wan brown, her long hair flimsily veiled her. Her skin was like unleavened dough. She had been reclothed in something, perhaps her shift—but did not know it. She was cold, so cold. She rested her head on her knees and forgot the world.

  Above her, meaningless as bells, the cries came and went for another two hours, until Luchita had brought forth her stillborn boy.<
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  PART TWO

  Then saw I a vixen seeming starved.

  DANTE ALIGHIERI

  The Divine Comedy

  1

  THE NIGHT TURNED SLOWLY as a wheel, spiked with stars. But he had forgotten that. The heat of new summer had brought scents and miasmas. These were shut out. The thick walls fortressed a lagoon of coolness, and the flavors, solely, of olibanum and myrrh.

  Heaven was like this. Pure, chilled, perfumed, and silent, save with faint fair musics. A sky of burnished ghostly gold.

  The window rose behind the altar. In darkness without tints, until a flutter of summer lightning briefly and inaccurately colored it, the white face of the Virgin, framed in a damson mantle. She maintained her vigil, as did he, the knight of God kneeling at her feet.

  It was required of them. But some kept the Vigil (from the midnight bell until the dawn Auroria) only for the six watches obligatory during the course of one year.

  Cristiano was of that number who kept the Vigil once in every month, save during times of war. In winter, evidently, it was the most taxing. Kneeling straightbacked before the altar from midnight until sunrise—some seven or eight hours. (Some slept, slumping. Others regularly got up and marched about the chapel. Some fainted.)

  After his very first watch—he had been seventeen years of age, and it was winter—Cristiano, who had not moved all night, had gone out into the courtyard, his legs had failed him, and he had vomited. Within a year though, he had grown accustomed, physically, to the ordeal.

  There was no overt competition among the Bellatae Christi, the Soldiers of God. The proofs of faith, both in arms and in prayer, were a private matter. So Cristiano perfected his skills as a worshipping priest in the same spirit that he honed his fighting ability. By the age of twenty, few could outmatch him in the practice yard of the Militarium. None, in the church.

  Of course, the Vigils had long ago ceased to be for him a test of endurance. While he himself had never seen the act in that way. He had understood and believed that the Vigil would bring him nearer, not only to God, but to the Will of God. So, even pain had not delayed him. Perhaps, in fact, had driven him the faster to his goal.

  For there was always pain, in the first hour or two.

  Under the lashes of it, Cristiano would rise up into his mind, which soon became then a clear sparkling crystal, not unlike the substance of a star. Here he would wait, timelessly indifferent to the qualms of a body which only youth—and considerable reserves of trained strength—kept in the desired position.

  As his soul stood above the body, pain was next burned away by a sheer white radiance.

  When the radiance began, which was usually in the first or second hour, but sometimes in the third, Cristiano would tremble. For this coming of white light was the announcement, the herald, of the approach of God.

  Although he would give way to nothing human, to this Cristiano surrendered.

  And then, he would enter into a sphere of ecstasy so otherwise unimaginable, and afterwards so unretainable, that all things, world, time, reason, life itself, seemed stopped or left behind. It was the foretaste of the immortal state, this transcendence. It was beyond any physical pleasure, impossible in its wonder and effulgence, yet nearly always now achievable, by him.

  Only the sounding of the dawn bell could bring him down from the height. Then he would sink back, drained yet renewed, into the leaden casque of flesh. Thin sun beams on the stony floor would scatter as his shadow finally crossed them.

  That he relished such delight was unavoidable. Was it thus greed, to keep the Vigil so often? No. He had faith that nothing would be given him, should he be found unfit. And once or twice, when the supernal had failed him, that is, he had failed it, he had felt a horrible downfall. But despair was a sin. He threw depression from him swiftly, and working the harder at his office of priest, fasting, scourging his body, so pushing this body further off from him, he would find always that the next Vigil brought him again into the realm of the Divine. Into the exquisite duality of awareness and oblivion, which he knew to be God.

  Cristiano was a virgin. Among the Bellatae chastity was the code, as with every priest. If any broke the rule and were discovered to have done so, the order thrust them out.

  To Cristiano such a thing would have been insanity to contemplate, too stupid to consider. Besides, what joy of the flesh could compare to the crucial and excruciating ravishment gained by communion with God?

  In war, there was another joy, it was true, which came also, since such wars were holy, from God. Then the crystal of the mind was not diamond white, but a deep red, like the bloody spinel. The vigor that coursed through the knight was like fire and wine, carnal enough, permissible only since God had willed it. (Such had ignited the Crusades in prior centuries.) When Cristiano rode in a sea of gore, swinging blades of steel in hands of brass, he was, even then, God’s instrument, less a man than a battle chariot, and Christ astride him, the Charioteer.

  To take life in the service of the Creator was neither sinful nor cruel. It was just.

  Returning to the world was always strange. The City, the beings which peopled it, were alien and curious.

  Cristiano had attended the Dawn Mass. Now he visited the knight’s castra, broke his fast, with bread dipped in wine, and washed in the cold water from the Primo’s clean wells. He was no longer tired, and would not look for sleep until this evening.

  Less than an hour later, the boat took him through the Silvian Marsh. Today, before the full heat of morning arrived, the smell of salt was strong. Green reeds and brown grasses grew along the water channels, taller in places than a woman. Gulls and other birds soared and sailed, and here and there in the reeds nests were visible, stocked with young chicks. Elsewhere, some men waded with nets and slings.

  Houses still stood in the marshland. Many were ruinous. Gardens had become lakes, from which rose dying cypresses. The old amphitheater was only a ghostly hump on the horizon towards the sea, but they passed close to the Roman temple. Ragged boys, who were fishing there, shouting, went stone-still, seeing the warrior-priest rowed by. Between the greened-over columns, they squinted out at him.

  Even the boatman was wary. They always were.

  When the boat bumped home against the bank of the channel, the Silvian Quarter rising in its yellowing summer tones behind, he took his payment and dropped to one knee.

  “Bless me, brother.”

  Cristiano gave him the blessing—it was a fault, but with indifference. The man did not seem yet quite real.

  Nor any of it.

  Only Christ Himself, a deity who had once been human, could take in the fall of sparrows after the height of the sun.

  Cristiano walked up the alleys to the inn. The morning was loud with living bustle, like the activity of the birds in the marsh. Washing hung out, and there came the clang of pots, a fug of cooking and dirt.

  By the inn door two or three beggars sat on the ground, their backs to a wall. Cristiano paid them no heed. Men had their stations from God, or a calling to some task, as had happened with himself.

  His bother-in-law, the drunk, slunk out. “Soldier of God—Cristiano—welcome, welcome. She’s much better today. Will you have a cup?”

  “You know I won’t.”

  “Yes, Cristiano. She’s in her garden.”

  In the room, the early drinkers glanced uneasily.

  But the Soldier of God barely noticed them.

  He went on through the corridor and out by the little door where he had to stoop.

  The garden was not large, but high-walled. Peaches and vines stretched on frames. In the beds were herbs, and salads and vegetables, with his sister moving slowly among them.

  A servant girl, one of the inn slovens, carried the basket and a knife for weeding.

  Luchita looked no better, he thought. Her body had lost its shape with the last birth. Until this one, that had not happened. Besides, she had borne healthily three sons and a daughter. The dead baby was a shock
to her. She had caught Cristiano’s hand on his first visit. “You’ll say it’s my punishment.” Cristiano said, “If you feel it to be so, then perhaps it is.” At which she had railed against him so violently, he was afraid for her, took her in his arms and said, “No, Luchita. Your sin wasn’t such a powerful one. And you repented, you told me so. Be glad for the child, He spared it the agony of this world.” But Cristiano did not believe anything he said. She had committed adultery, which only Christ could forgive. And the world was the Militarium of the soul, where it learned to fight and fine itself for Heaven. To be spared was to be cheated, and God cheated no one, only gave what was earned.

  Now Cristiano’s sister walked to him along the path, and even her walk had changed, less graceful. She kneeled down suddenly, as the boatman had.

  “Give me your blessing.”

  So he stretched out his hand and blessed her, and she became real for him. And the garden, warming, and a bird singing in a small twisted fruit tree.

  “How are you doing, Luchita?”

  “Oh, well enough.”

  They sat on a bench by the house wall, and the servant moved alone about the plants, now cutting something, now tying something up.

  “This is a thriving garden.”

  “Yes. I’m the Good Housewife. I do my best. It’s never easy. But I like these things. The way they answer care. I sometimes think,” she paused, then said, “kindness and love might improve humankind. Better than struggle and suffering.”

  “God tells us this very thing, Luchita.”

  He expected her to say sullenly, in her unlessoned woman’s manner, “Then why does He never show it us?”

  But she only sighed.

  The servant cut off a large head of salad stuff with a crisp snap. It was forward, he thought, but then the garden caught the sun at this time of the year. He was going to congratulate his sister again, and realized that she bored him, and this was another fault.