Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series)

by Tanith Lee

“Have you seen a dead person?”

  “My mother.”

  “Forgive me, I forgot. Are you brave? You must be firm. There’s no need to do much. Only pass among them. But if they call to you, what will you do?”

  Wonderingly she looked. “Answer,” she said.

  Christ had told them, be as a child. Be simple. Knock upon the door and it shall open. Live as the flower lives and let God have care of you.

  Doubt left Danielus.

  “Go in then and change your clothes.”

  The dead, the dying, the crying, were coming in like cargo.

  Torches sheered off the night in sulfurous rips.

  Much too far away, the square about the Primo Suvio, to see the ruined ships lying crippled out by the bars.

  This was enough. A scene from an artist’s painting of damnation.

  Cristiano stood on the square. He had watched Aretzo taken directly in to the hospice of the knights. (His bleeding had been staunched with heated iron. Now Aretzo was in the rambling stage, feverish, a stranger. Cristiano had seen it often; when sometimes wounded, had entered the state himself.) Elsewhere soldiers, and the crews of the ships, were being put on boats for the infirmaria by the wall of Aquilla. Others, luckier, (or not) had paid or promised payment to be ferried to a church, or to relatives.

  Most were, for this while, piled up waiting at the Primo’s walls, about the great doors, under the Angel Tower. From which, all but three of the torture cages had been taken down.

  His eyes went to those, nevertheless. A pair of criminals, too near death now to move or complain, hung out above the dying army of the City. And in the third cage, now he saw, the momento mori, a skeleton gulls had picked almost naked.

  Cristiano felt his gorge rise in a thick wave. Against what he wanted to do, he must sit down by the torch pole, lean there, and catch his breath.

  His body was cut all over, torso, limbs. The enemy steel had been superior. Blocked by his mail, the slicings were shallow, but had let out quite a lot of blood. He had felt none of it when he fought, of course. Not even the blow to the temple, which now ached and gnawed, a wolf trying to get in at his brain.

  The world was dross. He had always known.

  But tonight, Ve Nera was the city of Magni-Diabolon in the Pit.

  There was a slight stir, over there by the Lion Door. More priests coming out to add the vapor of incense to the reek of butchery? Yes, here they came.

  Cristiano clenched his teeth against a second wave, this one of fury, bitterness.

  Here in Hell, what could they do, these black robes, those purple robes behind them? Swinging the censors, chanting over the groans and howls like a menagerie—

  This horror was God’s world, the making of God—

  No—man’s world. Man-made—

  God’s.

  Cristiano bowed his head on his knees. He heard his own strangled whisper. “Let me lose everything, O Lord, even my life—but not my faith—Oh, God, not You—”

  Never before had this come to him. Why now? He had been in twenty battles, more—

  Dimly, through the rushing in his ears, the echoes of the awful whisper, he heard another noise.

  He took it for some delusion. He ignored it. But it grew much louder, a single cry quickly taken up, concentrated by a score, a hundred, two hundred throats.

  He turned his head on his knee, and looked.

  After the priests, a young man was walking out among the crowd of vandalized men.

  The Ducem. It must be Joffri. Odd, the story was Joffri had already fled.

  “Maiden—” Close to Cristiano, a man on a blood soaked pallet, was holding out his arms.

  Maiden. That was the cry.

  Not a young man, a girl. Now Cristiano saw her hair as the torches burnished it. He had not seen her for some while, had not ever been among those who were about her in the chapel. Did he recall how she looked?

  She wore her white clothes, and the gold cross on her breast that was only just perceptible as feminine; the gem winked scarlet.

  The priests had halted, standing aside, lips closed.

  The girl too had stopped, gazing about her.

  She seemed serene, yet veiled, as if returning from a distance

  Cristiano heard a man whimper, “See, she’s been with God, but she sees us now.”

  And the crying became louder still.

  “Maiden! Maiden! Maiden!”

  It rose to a crescendo, breaking on her stillness like the sea. To silence.

  And in the vacancy the shout had left, one man again cried out to her. This time the name Danielus had given her.

  “Beatifica, pray for me.”

  She turned towards the voice. Then, she stepped aside, through the crowd. It was a crowd for the most part lying on its back. Nevertheless, Cristiano stood up, holding to the torch pole, to watch her.

  When she came to the man, she kneeled directly down beside him.

  He had lost both his legs, and was nearly gone with them. It was a wonder anyone had heard him. But the silence had been vast, and even now it was, and the Primo Square was a sounding-stage.

  She knelt in the blood and filth. At once her whiteness was sullied.

  Then they heard her silver voice, rising up.

  She was doing what he asked. She was praying for him.

  It was a minor prayer, quite short. Perhaps, by now, she had even come to know what it meant.

  The rumors of her had spread. Been helped to, no doubt, as the clever architecture of the square helped spread the utterances in it. They knew her. They listened.

  When she stopped praying for him, the man murmured, “I’m afraid to die, Beatifica.”

  They heard this, too. They heard her reply.

  Beatifica said, clear as a silver pin, “Don’t cry. Your pain will be done. God’s world is better. Why do you think he damns us for suicide? His world is the best of all, and we must earn it. Long to get there. He will fetch you, by whatever awful way. The road’s stones, but the gates are pearl. Fetch him, Lord. Amen.”

  Something broke in Cristiano. Possibly it was his heart, or some other enclosure less fragile. He seemed to stand in space, all the void about him, in which men lay bright as stars from the souls inside them, and across which Beatifica burned like a risen sun.

  He could see the face of the dying man, lit now, radiant and careless. He let her go without any more entreaty.

  And only the crying and calling began again, all the others, begging her. And she went to them, everyone. She went to everyone that called.

  She went because she was a slave, and taught by vicious tyranny always to obey. He knew that. He knew.

  He knew also the sentences she had spoken had been learned from someone else—maybe from Danielus, although they seemed unmannered, fluid—accessible. (He could not guess she had heard them from an old slave man by the wood-seller’s Red House.)

  But the words had come out of her at the moment of perfection. And she was like the words, made for this time, this arena of history and fate.

  Not the pawn of the Magister. The pawn of God. As were they all.

  Cristiano stood by the torch, watching her. Watching all she did. Kneeling, praying, answering in the simplest way their questions. So gentle. So soft. Even to the corpses that she passed, or was asked to touch or bless.

  (The male slave’s instructions had stayed. The second of the meaningful things he had offered her. Don’t shake the sleeping or the dead.)

  Had Cristiano been told this, he would have said, “That too. It was put into her hand for use. God also works most simply. You may see it in everything. Complication is a human failing.”

  She went by quite near him, once. She was trailed by two Bellatae, Cristiano now saw, one of whom was Jian. But he did not greet Jian, nor Jian him.

  Beatifica did not see Cristiano, he thought. He would not have anticipated her to, at this moment. He could not know, of course, how Danielus had warned her.

  But, seeing her near,
Cristiano saw her for the very first. As other men did, who were on their feet, Cristiano knelt. Some hem of her cloak brushed over his head, and he felt it like a thread of running light.

  She was mired in the blood and filth of hundreds, by now. And out of it she shone.

  Not until every man who had called to her had individually received her presence, did she go in again.

  By then the bell was ringing for the Prima Vigile, two hours after midnight.

  They let her go without remonstrance. She had earned her reward, and they knew the Maiden loved best to pray.

  8

  Not baggage now, but bleeding men were being carried up the passages and stairs of Santa Lallo Lacrima’s sister-house.

  The nuns pressed back against stone walls. They were in awe. Less at the gravity of wounds, the largesse of damage, than at this general peacefulness. Even men writhing in agony, turning to say through pain-black lips, “Bless you, sister, for your charity.” As if to reassure.

  Word had come with them.

  “It’s true then. This girl who flaunts about as a man—”

  “But look at her effect.”

  “Don’t doubt, little sister,” said a soldier carried by, “God sent her.” He laughed, eyes shining.

  There had been the usual dispensation of a war. Even the nuns might hear the last confessions.

  “I thought I was damned, sister. She convinced me I’d paid, and never was.”

  Behind the officiating sister, another pursing her lips. “Only God can decide that, soldier.”

  Shaming her, as she needed to be shamed, the dying man said, “He promised, through her. But He prefers a tender voice, doesn’t He, to a spiteful one.”

  As Veronichi hurried about the church, her arms full of salves, basins, bandages, fresh candles, her hair tied up under her cap so her face looked like a pip, and her gown streaked with ordure and blood, she too thought of Beatifica, this being she had never seen.

  But in the rooms, in and out of which she went, she heard the difference Beatifica had made.

  Waiting in rows, the soldiers drowsed fitfully, drugged with herbs and pellets of Inde. While a surgeon worked, splashed head to foot in the debris of his trade.

  But this man under his knife was bearing it all, choking out between gasps and whines, that the pain of the world was but a lesson. Its suffering cleansed and brought one to the Kingdom beyond life, fit to companion God. It was good to bleed.

  At which the surgeon’s assistant blurted out, “So it isn’t a punishment we’re sent?”

  “No—she says—she says it’s only to learn from. Even God suffered.”

  At length he fainted.

  The surgeon grimaced. “Heaven spare me chatterers.”

  But the teaching of Beatifica was everywhere now to be found. (Actually, her mother’s teaching from the early years of Volpa’s life.)

  Veronichi labored tirelessly. She was strong and toughened by her first existence among the plagues and illnesses of the ghetto. Also, it seemed, passionless.

  Sent on new errands, she passed Sister Purita on the stair behind the cloister.

  They went by without speaking, yet each glancing once, curiously, furtively. Danielus linked them, but tenuously.

  Veronichi thought, however, prudent and wily, I must come to know her, I think.

  Purita thought nothing of Veronichi, except that she did not have the Fra’s handsomeness, looked properly a Jewess, and had sent all her servants to safety on the Veneran Plain.

  All in all, Purita felt prosaic. She had been told her brother had survived the battle—at which had come a gush of relief—and, peculiarly, irritation. Must his way be made always straight?

  Then she came about the corner, and scratched at the door of the Domina’s chamber.

  The fat grasshopper was propped up high in her hard bed. Purita was glad to see she had been made more comfortable.

  All about the bed, despite the turmoil of the war casualties below, fourteen of the nuns of the higher offices stood in a pale cordon. Were they reluctant to allow Purita by? Then one stepped aside, lowering her eyes.

  Candles burned, but dawn was near. In the window a sort of nothingness had replaced the opaque immensity of night.

  “I stayed to see, to behold one more sunrise,” said the Domina. “I love it so, how could I leave before—and He has allowed me this.”

  So she was dying too. With what a guard of men she would go up. But she was worldly in her ascetic way. She would not mind.

  Purita was sorry. The Domina was a fair woman. And what came next would undoubtedly be difficult.

  Purita had given over trying to deny or evade. Luchita had previously let go her chains, her tribulations. Purita did not mean to take them up. Although, if allowed, the other burden she would accept.

  Her own arrogance in that had amazed her, at first. But arrogance and amazement too she had let go.

  The nuns in the room, some of whom must also know, struck her now as more friendly than expected. They were conceivably only uneasy. After all, what might Purita turn out to be? She must have already surprised them very much.

  The Domina said, “I’ve been shriven, my own concerns are done. And now I have called you here to witness me.”

  Purita stood among the other nuns, head bowed, seemingly attentive.

  As the old woman detailed her thoughts and wishes, sometimes pausing while they gave her sips of watered wine, Purita’s mind strayed back and forth. These sisters had been in the order since girlhood. While Gratzilia there, had entered the religious life as a child.

  Gratzilia stammered, but she was often impatient and often brutish. She sneered at the infirm, pinched the novices. In the garden she had, as Purita saw, killed helpful bees, and once shut a little frog under a bucket for no reason but malice. When Purita lifted the bucket, allowing the frog’s escape, Gratzilia reviled her, stammering, and incomprehensible. Later Gratzilia scalded Purita’s foot with water spilled from a pan.

  Now Gratzilia was mute, and her habit had bloodstains as did almost all their clothes, from the assistance given below.

  The window was changing further.

  This was like any summer dawn. Bird song, color re-invented. There was a trace of golden cloud painted high on the thinning sky.

  “Therefore,” said the Domina, “it is my wish that Sister Purita take on my mantle. And to this end, I have written to the Primo. Here’s my favorable answer, signed and sealed by Fra Danielus, Magister Major of the Upper Echelon of the Bellatae.”

  The nuns poised like petrified wood.

  Purita thought distinctly, Will they round on me and rend me in pieces?

  Then she heard their murmurings.

  “Yes, Mother. God guided you.”

  “I have prayed for it, Mother.”

  To her own astonishment Purita felt her eyes let out two rushing streams of tears. They poured down her face. More fell.

  She groped for the bed and crouched beside it.

  “Domina. I’m not worthy. Oh, Domina, not me. How can I carry this authority?”

  And again astonishing her, she felt the quick light touches of the nuns, smoothing her, softly, almost amusedly reprimanding her lack of faith. And the warm hand of the Domina holding hers.

  “There, there, child. Remember how you told me you couldn’t do justice when you read from the Bible? And then you read as if you had been accustomed since infancy. Rely on Christ. Then you need never be afraid. And here is my dear walking stick, for you to lean on if ever you have need to.”

  The window flamed suddenly rose-red. The old woman sighed and died, and her warm hand went abnormally cold. It was as if she had been dead some while, yet somehow stayed animate to see the dawn as she wanted.

  Purita wept on, soothed among the flock of thirteen nuns. She did not think of the fourteenth now, the stuttering Gratzilia, gibbering in the corner, her mouth so full of maleficence she could not get it out.

  9

  The terror came
after one more day.

  Men fear the worst, and pray the worst will never be. They live only by forgetting that the worst must sometimes find them, as they fear. And sometimes, so it does.

  The Jurneian fleet, lit foremost now by a sinking madder sun. Dipped in blood, like the wreckage of Veneran men washed in one day before them.

  Up to the sand-bars and the walls that held off the sea. Up to the silver mirrors of the great lagoons.

  Jurneia pressed her carmine tiger face against the looking-glass of Venus and was reflected there.

  The pitiless enemy.

  The ravenous infidel.

  And sometimes, so it does.

  Joffri had run away. He had been sobbing, as he did it, with humiliation. But he had done it. Taking his dogs, horses, friends, mistresses, and—an afterthought?—his wife. Now the City that had not so far emulated him, began to.

  Barges loaded with baskets, furnishings, people in tears, or wailing, toiled through the waterways. There were collisions, drownings. Families fought and cursed each other and began feuds that would last for generations.

  Some of the rich and noble had fled, like the Ducem. Others had shut themselves inside their palaces. Yet others opened their palaces and took in the less fortunate, out of the poorer houses and the hovels, before closing and barricading their gates.

  Blocks of stone and hand-carts of rubbish were thrown into certain of the canals, in the hope of making them impassable to any of the enemy’s smaller craft.

  Under the direction of various officials who the Ducem had left with the charge of Ve Nera, soldiers manned the sea walls and the inner islands. Falling back from the former when the Jurneian cannon spoke, just after dawn the following day. This was when the Jurneians had finished their prayers, and the bells in the City were ringing the Auroria. Jurneia was ahead in everything, it seemed.

  Belatedly boats had been put across the ocean end of the two lagoons Fulvia and Aquila. These too were all successfully splintered by cannon shot not long after noon.

  In the Primo, priests had begun to pray on the previous morning, continuously, at the Great Altar under the Dome.

  They prayed in batches. As men sank down exhausted or took sick, they were replaced.