Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series)

by Tanith Lee

  “Tell me what you’ve been doing, Lucha.”

  “What do I ever do?”

  (He had taught her to read when they were children. But she had, here, no chance for or use for books.)

  “My poor girl. Remember, care also for yourself. You’ve received a blow, a wound. It must have space to heal.”

  “That child? Oh. It means nothing now. If it had lived a few hours, if I’d held it—but there wasn’t anything to hold. I blamed old Maria, it’s true, the mid-wife. Said it was her fault. Foolish. I always lose my children.”

  Perhaps she saw him frown. She said, “Then Maria said it was a girl under the window who was to blame, a witch, who set a spell on me so Maria’s wonderful cleverness was to no avail—”

  Cristiano’s thought wandered. It was the image of a window … The Virgin in her mantle, the delicacy of her face, beyond beauty. And the light which filled him—He brought his mind back sharply.

  Luchita was looking up at him. “You’re so handsome, Cristiano. So splendid in your armor. And your golden hair, so thick it breaks a comb—oh, I remember. What a waste. What a waste to be a priest—”

  Anger moved in him, the dark beast he must resist.

  “You know, Lucha, I don’t like you to say these things. I belong to God.”

  “You belong to the world. Look at you! Any woman could love you. Or a man—”

  “Luchita.”

  “Hold my tongue. Yes. But you might have had sons, Cristiano. Think of that. God knows I mourn the loss of them more than that dead thing Maria pulled out of me.”

  Cristiano got up. Alerted by his closed fury, which seethed invisibly yet white-hot about him, even the servant cowered, and the bird left off its song.

  And at that moment a raucous shouting broke out over the wall.

  Luchita jumped up too, wincing and flushed.

  “It’s mad Berbo, I know his voice. The girl must be there, and he’s seen her. The numskull. There are Eyes and Ears all through the quarter today—”

  And leaving Cristiano, as if abruptly he had lost his value, she ran heavily back into the inn. The servant girl ran after her, clutching the salad.

  Cristiano followed them, irritated, and keeping himself in check.

  The inn had erupted into the alley beyond. From upper windows and from doors too, people pressed to see and jeer.

  A man in decent garments stood shouting, frothing somewhat at the lips. Pointing.

  And from somewhere, probably off the canal, two other men came, in black robes, and took hold of him.

  Cristiano disliked the Eyes and Ears of God. But, impartially, he accepted their necessity—in certain areas.

  Not here, surely? This fellow was crazed, as Luchita said.

  But the madman was turning now, clinging to the two black priests.

  “Praise God that sent you! Brothers—see—that witch—that Making of Satanus—”

  Cristiano turned his head a little. Who was it that this shouting imbecile had singled out for his obsession? It must be the waif there, barely more than a child, skinny and filthy, with matted brownish hair tied up in a cloth. She looked harmless, and unimportant. And yet, thin as a pin, white as sullied snow, she drew his eyes back, and back again.

  Her own were downcast. She seemed not to know the outcry concerned her. Containment—guilt—also madness?

  “Quiet,” said one of the Eyes and Ears to the madman. “What are you saying?”

  “I say she’s a minion of Hell.”

  “Be aware of your accusation. Who is?”

  “That one, there.”

  “What has she done?”

  To his disgust, Cristiano detected a spice of interest in the priest’s nasal voice.

  The Soldier of God moved forward, and became the center of the scene.

  At once the deranged man attempted to kneel to him (the third one this morning) and hung from the priests’ grip, They glared, not liking to be, conceivably, usurped.

  And Luchita spoke up hurriedly.

  “Holy brothers—she’s only a beggar. She wanders about. I feed her crusts and the scrapings of the rice kettle, from charity. I gave her a cloth to cover her hair. She does no one hurt. She’s addled. And Berbo, too.”

  Berbo was kneeling, despite the priests, who unwillingly let him go, only looming over him, like black shadows cast up from his turmoil.

  “Bellatoro—warrior of God—you’ll listen. Let me speak.”

  “Very well.”

  Cristiano pulled his eyes away from the girl. He was almost glad to, and did not know why.

  The kneeling Berbo, no longer shouting, now apparently in control, offered his words with the skill of an actor.

  The crowd which had gathered, attended breathlessly. But Cristiano, resistant to such fantasies, set himself on guard.

  “It was the night—over a month back—when there was a fire on the Canal of the Keys. Oh, protect me, blessed brothers. A fiend comes and torments me when I speak of it. I shout and stammer and no one believes—”

  None uttered a sentence.

  Mad Berbo, if he was, glanced round, then, averting his gaze from the beggar girl, continued without a break.

  He lived over by the next canal, but came through the alleys to watch the fire. Men were drawing up buckets of water, but he saw no need to assist; as he put it, he did not wish to impede their work. Instead he went through another alley to the back of the houses, only one of which was then alight. It was the Red House of Ghaio Wood-Seller, who was said to have a hoard of money.

  The purpose of Berbo was plain to most of those who heard. He had hoped to be able to locate some outer stash of coins and make off with them.

  Reaching the back yard, where the smoke was less, he found all neighbors had seemingly fled in fear of the fire’s spreading. Some refuse by the yard wall enabled him to climb it, and look over.

  In the yard, the timber, in stacks and bundles, shone with the red light of the fire, and sparks spun everywhere, but had not yet caught anything but a tree by the cistern.

  Berbo thought time was short for investigation, and besides it would be chancy. As he hesitated, he beheld a very frightening thing. In the upper story of the house was one narrow window, and this was filled by the fire.

  Until all at once the fire came out of the window, not in flames or sparks or smoke, but in an upright leaping shape.

  This, flying into the air, dropped straight down again to the yard, and landed there.

  Berbo, who had let out a yelp, discerned next instant that this apparition was only the figure of some hapless person, caught alight in the burning room, and jumping frenziedly forth. He expected it to roll shrieking on the ground. It did not.

  Rather, it stood up.

  At this very moment, a gust of flame shot through the house top, and rained spangles in the yard. (Sounds of alarm rose from the front of the house.)

  Just then too, Berbo was aware of a golden liquid ribbon which ran out from the window. Was this Ghaio’s gold, melting?

  Something made him forget the gold.

  The figure which had sprung down in the yard, and which he had expected by now to be dead, was still standing. Indeed, it had righted itself.

  There was no doubt that it was on fire. It blazed. A woman, as he could just make out. Her hair was a vivid red, and redder from the fire in it. He saw her through and in the fire.

  “She was young, and wearing only a white shift. And it all was burning—the shift, her hair, her body—she was furled in flames that never went out—that never ate her up.”

  One of the black priests said, “He’s mad.”

  Cristiano, to his own surprise, answered, “Hear him out before you judge.”

  Berbo exclaimed, “She burned—but she didn’t burn, Signore Bellatoro. She burned but never was burned.”

  “So you have said. What then?”

  Irked at the brusqueness of this blond untonsured priest, standing there in maculum and sword, Berbo rasped, “Doesn’t th
e Bible speak of wonders, eh? And terrible uncanny things that attend the Evil One, Lucefero?”

  “I’m more concerned with what you are speaking of.”

  Berbo pulled a face. He said he had been transfixed by fear, and as he clung on the wall, the woman walked—walked, neither ran nor stumbled—about the yard, and everything—she touched it. And where she touched, that thing took fire.

  “Hadn’t sparks already set the wood alight?”

  “No, signore. It smoldered here and there. But where she put her hands—I could see them in the fire—flames burst up. She was a walking fire-brand.”

  There had been a darkened kitchen in the yard, and until then it had seemed unoccupied, but now it’s roof was smoking, and the uprights of the door. All at once the door opened and an old man came out.

  “I thought he’d been asleep perhaps, and I was sorry for the poor soul—but then I saw he wasn’t in a fix, only standing there looking about at it all on fire, and he was grinning, and praising God.”

  One of the black priests said, “Too many madmen in this tale.”

  “I can’t help it, brother. It’s the truth.”

  The burning girl was by this time at the tree, which had been all but consumed by then. Still she was circling round and round it, like a sort of dance. “That’s when I knew for sure she was a witch. The country witches do it. They dance about the trees. So then I knew the fire was her spell, and that was why she didn’t burn up in it.” But, said Berbo, the old man, a slave, probably, now hurried across, and he stretched out his hands to the fire witch.

  “Excuse me, signore, but I wet my drawers when I saw that. I went cold in my belly. Do you know what he said to her? No, I’ll tell you. I heard him say, ‘You are the torch of God.’”

  The crowd which had laughed at Berbo’s admission of incontinence, now produced a silence as dense as iron. Some of them crossed themselves.

  Cristiano spoke very clearly. “And could you have misheard?”

  “No. Never. But then, don’t witches call him ‘God’ sometimes—him, the other one.”

  “You’re well versed in the manners of witches.”

  “Who isn’t? You have to be cautious.”

  Berbo said that the fire-witch left the tree and went to the old man and touched him. And of course, he too went up like a piece of fat thrown on the hearth.

  “He never cried out once. He seemed dancing, too.

  Round and round, till he fell down and curled up like an insect. And then the wasps came out.”

  “Wasps.”

  “From the burning wood. Must have been three or four nests there in the timber. Hatched ’em. I’ve seen a man die of wasp stings. I got my legs under me and I ran.” Berbo stood up from his kneeling. He dusted the knees of his leggings, the action of a prudent, fussy man, not a mad one.

  “And what has this to do with the girl there?” asked one of the Eyes and Ears.

  Berbo said, mumbling now, as if embarrassed suddenly, “It was her, her in the wood-seller’s yard.”

  “The witch you saw was covered by fire, you said.”

  “I saw her through the fire. It’s her.”

  Cristiano did not want to look at the girl again. She was a shred of human life, pathetic, of no consequence.

  And for Berbo’s story, how many cups of ale had he taken, despite the new taxes, before he climbed the wall? The warrior-priest turned his head once more.

  At that second, the beggar girl raised her own.

  At the movement, the rag slipped back from her hair a little. Not brown hair, but a dull and dirty red. The face a white triangle with pale yellow eyes. A fox’s face.

  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.”

  2

  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?”