Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

by Tanith Lee

  In the drowsy, light-losing evening, he could make out faint lines by her mouth, under her eyes, see the ebony string that came and went in her marvel of a neck. Not much—something. So, she didn’t quite look her age. If she had money, there were ways of doing that too.

  “Are you rich, Simoon? How?”

  He’d spoken her name.

  He hadn’t meant to.

  She said, “I’m not rich. Been rich, once. Now and then. And I keep a few things by me for great occasions, like visiting my son. Do you think I look rich?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am triumphant. What else do I look, to you?”

  He said nothing.

  “You think,” she said, “I look like a witch, and a whore. I’ve been both. Nothing left of that. It done. I’m clear as crystal. I’ve paid for what I have.”

  Then she put the bottle on the parapet, and the cork was already out.

  “You’re grown up now,” she said, “I can bring you wine.”

  3

  NOT UNTIL SHE MOVED away did Flayd go forward.

  He checked the felled man rapidly. Saw, even in this extremity, with slight startlement, she had turned Picaro’s head sideways, the recovery position, to clear the airway. So they knew that in ancient Rome? Probably a gladiator school would know things like that, teach them.

  Picaro’s breathing was easier, pulse slower, but he was still well gone.

  Flayd stood up again. She was over by the pillars, sitting on a stone bench there. Her head was raised and her eyes set and open wide. To Flayd, it was the stance she would have adopted when waiting, under the arena, for the minute she would be summoned up on to the sand.

  His other bewilderment was that no one else had come in.

  Of course, they had their other emergency, whatever that really was. But was absolutely nobody able to register events down here? It seemed that right now they weren’t.

  Flayd crossed the cloister and went into a long room like something from a medieval monastery, through that into some other rooms that were still—to him—mostly Roman. Here he found two men in dalmatics, drinking coffee from old brown monkish beakers.

  “A guy out there needs some attention.” They looked at him, stupidly alert. “A little amateur practice bout with Jula Flame-Hair. He shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Shit,” said one of the men. Coffee spilled as he rushed out past Flayd. The other said, “The security apparatus has been faulty. Screens are down. You’re UAS? Maintenance is on it now.”

  “You mean the CX?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t happen, can it?”

  “It did.”

  “Any connection,” said Flayd, “to the problem on the canals this morning?”

  He saw the man decide Flayd was not really UAS. “I wouldn’t know,” said the fake monk. He had pressed a key concealed under a wooden table. Soon there was the sound of running feet, just like Flayd thought he’d heard earlier. He left and went back fast to the cloister. There he sat down on the half bench, near the girl, about half a meter from her, and watched as three or four UAS organized a stretcher and carried Picaro away, and Flayd thought of ants.

  Had Picaro been brought here because of the other one, the bloodline related musician from the 1700s—

  The cloister and the lawn were oddly empty again. Even the construct magpie had vanished.

  Flayd looked at Jula.

  “Their observation devices are out, it seems. You knew they watched you, I guess.”

  “Yes,” she said. They were speaking Italian. Then she said in Amer-English, “Is he like me? Did they bring him back from death?”

  “Christ—no—no, Picaro is—how do I put this? First time alive. Even now, after you hammered the daylights outa him. He’s like someone you—like someone from then?”

  “I fought him in the sand. He was handsome and skilled. He could have been popular and lived. But he wouldn’t fight me until I made him. And they wouldn’t forgive him that. I had to kill him, for the crowd. No mercy.”

  She continued to look straight before her. Waiting for a trumpet that now would never sound.

  Instead, Flayd saw her hearing that punning chant from the tiers: Jugula Jula! Jula jugula! Kill, Jula! Jula, kill!

  He said, in a low voice, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Then she did glance at him.

  Flayd said, “Some of the CX—the machines—are down. The bastards are in a bit of a bloody mess. I don’t know if any of this affects the dome locks, if we can really get out—it might. But failing that, maybe we can at least get you free into the City.” And Flayd thought he was mad, and she could never understand, and what was out there could, in its incongruous alienness, actually drive her insane. But he said, “We can risk it. What do you say?”

  “You ask me?” she said in Latin.

  No one asked a slave. Not even perhaps a fellow slave. No question marks could ever truly exist.

  “I’m asking you,” he resolutely said in English, in Italian, in Latin. “Come on.”

  And she stood up and they walked out of the cloister, and along to the elevators, of which she seemed to take no notice at all, except to adjust her balance as they rose. And when they emerged and moved through security, in all its forms mechanical and human, not a vid blinked, not a hair was turned.

  Too late then, only as they came out into the sunlit corridors of the University—renaissance, Victorian—did he think, Are they letting us do this?

  But they trod down the marble stairs, negotiated a polished floor, walked out a wooden side-door. They arrived at the brink of a green canal in the light of the noon Viorno-Votte.

  Venus lay before them, under her air-and-sky-filled invisible dome. And she displayed, without any disguise, a million edifices that never, in the most lunatic dreams and nightmares, could this woman have envisaged.

  But she had been a barbarian captive child in Rome, among the unimagined towering tenements and hills of palaces and temples. She had been brought to Stagna Maris. She had had to fight and kill to live.

  Flayd, when he turned to her again, saw all that. Her eyes were wide again, questing now, but still not questioning. Not alarmed or unnerved. She was fearless. Almost—contemptuous? These glamours belonged to her masters. What could she ever care about or for them? They would never be hers.

  “Venus,” Flayd said flatly. He shrugged.

  And thought of the goddess-face of Venus on Jula’s shield, the deity favored by soldiers and gladiators alike, since she was also the consort of the war god, Mars.

  And then Leonillo spoke, behind them.

  Flayd shot around and saw him, composed and pallid and infuriating.

  “Do you like the view, Jula Victrix?”

  She said nothing. Flayd said, “I believe the lady has no strong feelings either way, on the view.”

  “Only on her Ethiopian?” asked Leonillo. “We wondered if she’d make that error. The first black man she sees after the last black man she saw. The ancient world wasn’t noted for its racial flexibility … I’m sure you know what the Romans said about the British, your own ancestors, Flayd … They all look alike, and so ugly. She’s told you all about it, I expect.”

  “Sorry. If your CXs are fucked, that information is classified.”

  “Oh my. My dear Flayd. The CX function isn’t completely fucked. And we have some backup. We did hear a word or two.”

  “We are not,” Flayd said, “about to return inside.”

  “Naturally not.”

  “So we’re meant to be doing what we are doing?”

  “And why shouldn’t you?” said Leonillo, with a ghastly expansiveness. “Who better than you to show our favorite gladiatrix the City. To explain and accustom her, to be her guide.”

  “She doesn’t need a guide, Leonillo. But you need your head examined.”

  “The need is universal perhaps.”

  “Go screw yourself. I guess you’re the only one’ll oblige.”

/>   A wanderer with wanderlier was approaching along the canal, stirring the limpidness with the oar-pole, the man easy and smiling, seeing only, as you expected, some guy in 1860s gear, some girl dressed for 1490, like a hundred thousand others. Unless he too, the auspicious boatman, was part of the general conspiracy.

  When Flayd told her, she got into the wanderer, graceful and coordinated as a puma. Flayd rocked in, crashed down.

  Silent Leonillo watched them float away, and raising his hand, urbanely waved them off.

  4

  BECAUSE HE WASN’T UNCOMFORTABLE, he stayed, lying flat, for some while. He thought that was why. But when he moved, the pain stabbed hard through his guts, and Picaro saw he had instinctively kept still only to avoid it. Muscular, outside and in, the pain. Where she had punched him. Who? Why? Surely, that had been a dream—or he was remembering that other time, that time when he was sixteen. With Simoon.

  Somehow he saw his father, sitting across from him, frowning. “You never hit out at a woman, son. No matter what she does.” But it was only a memory, sitting in the chair. It was an apology also, for Picaro’s father had never struck the witch either—and was that ethics or terror?

  “This is another kind of woman, Papa,” said the child in Picaro’s mind. “I never had a chance. Look what she did to me.”

  But it hadn’t only been that. It was the sickness which had filled the Palazzo Shaachen, the thing they had said was faulty CX, bad air—that first. Then her.

  Her … Who? … What had he done?

  Picaro sat up, spat like a cat at the deadly wrench of pain, and swung off the bunk. A light melted up in the wall. Someone would be coming.

  He tapped his wristecx for the time. It gave him 16 VV.

  They had been observing him since they brought him in. They had performed various medical checks, not particularly intrusive—blood count, tissue sample, urine, shining pins of brilliance through his eyes, a flash scan in a medibooth. They told him he was in faultless health. And then they gave him something, some drug they said was necessary, an insurance against any future problems. And he had slept after that. Deep, so deep, like …

  Like death.

  And after—or in?—the sleep, he now remembered, thought he did, (was that yesterday?) getting up and leaving this clean antiseptic cubicle, and walking down a long hall, and a few people were there but no one stopped him. A door opened by itself, and he came into another area, and then … now a kind of blank was in front of him, with the thinnest razor cuts in it, through which he could almost see things, and one of these things was a woman with red hair and in a red dress, and he had meant—but she—

  Picaro put his hand flat on the wall.

  He looked at his hand. It was his.

  The hand, and the wall, felt real. But … his hand a little less so.

  Then the cubicle opened and the 1906 man walked in.

  “You’re back,” said Leon-Leonillo.

  “Am I?”

  “Always a question for a question. Your life is made of questions. Back after your adventure.”

  “Which one?”

  Leonillo smiled. To an unseen audience, aware of both their performances, he could not resist awarding a tiny nod. Then he sat down cozily in the chair Picaro’s father had for a moment occupied. “There’s a slight disorientation? That is the medication. It will wear off quickly. You’d be feeling much better already if you hadn’t tried to take on the fabulous Jula.”

  “Not Jula,” Picaro heard himself say. “Cora.”

  “Cora. Ah. The young woman who—”

  “Yes. In the palazzo. Like the rest of them.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t,” said Picaro, “from a fault in the CX system, was it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s something to do with him—with the musician.”

  “Yes, I am afraid so.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Safe, Picaro. Not dead. Better concealed from you than Jula, I can assure you. Jula doesn’t seem to present the same difficulty.”

  “Which is?”

  “As yet,” Leonillo flicked his hands, “the most likely cause is a form of carried germ—something latent in del Nero’s bodily make-up, usual and unremarked on during his own era, not affecting his, or anyone’s normal well-being, but now inimical to the contemporary immune system. He, you understand, shows no symptom of anything, except unimpaired vitality.”

  “How about he shows distress?”

  “One must expect he would, under the circumstances. He saw them dying all around him and was powerless. Of course he is dismayed. It was very awful. Even you, isolated above, were involved. As you know only too well. And of course many of us have had continuous and direct contact with him, and so we are all being most carefully monitored. But it would seem, that particular evening at the Shaachen Palace, unfortunately—some sort of surge took place.”

  “Yes. Unfortunate.”

  “Jula Victrix, however, aside from her fighting ability, is not apparently harmful. Nothing has happened to anyone, even those most often in close proximity. Something of a mystery there. Why one and not the other one? But meanwhile, why exactly did you go after her?”

  “Is that what I did?”

  “Some of our surveillance was out of order for a while. They say it can’t happen, but evidently it does. And when everything was rather lax, you left the medical area. They let you because you are free to go about as you wish. Besides which, certain parts of the section are theoretically sealed to anyone not authorized. But the inoperative CX again—you were let through into the second area, Jula’s.”

  “Jula.”

  “Yes. Her master in Roman times, Julus, gave her his name, a great honor, to show her value.”

  “She is your female gladiator.”

  “What else.”

  Picaro said, “I can’t remember. What did I do?”

  “Nothing much. Rushed her with obvious murderous intent, having announced she would be better dead—like the “other one.” Innocently forgetting that she had been trained to fight since the age of five in one of the most exacting sword schools of Rome’s provinces. She’d slaughtered over a hundred and twenty armed men. You were rather lucky.”

  Staring into the mental blank, trying to pull the thin cuts in it open, and see.

  Picaro said, “I actually wanted del Nero. He was the one I was looking for. I found her instead. But she is the same, even if she isn’t a plague carrier. Your clever resurrection that’s gone wrong. Perhaps I thought I could make do. If I killed her at least. Sent her back. Cleaned up your filth.”

  “Well,” said Leonillo. “You had an added disadvantage, it seems. She thought you were the last man she dispatched in the arena. His name was Phaetho. A black man from the Africas, a Roman slave as she was. She finished him, but he had hacked her about. She was said to have died of the wounds. In fact she was poisoned, or so we now suspect.”

  The blank would not give way. Even the woman in red he could glimpse there, had no visible face.

  Leonillo rambled on. “Both deaths are rather a puzzle. Del Nero, you may have heard, died from the action of an alchemically poisoned mask—how it worked none of the team has any idea, and in his case, no trace of a venom remains. We do know, however, it was a beautiful mask, half-face but with a sculpted nose, made after the likeness of a statue of Apollo. Pure white with black brows and luxuriant black hair attached. We have a written record of that, although the mask itself has never been found. What a challenge it would be if it were …”

  Picaro, ignoring this, hearing it on some other mental level only, could feel instead the shift of new questions inside his brain. How had he found the way to the second area? And the faulty door that failed to keep him out—and no one trying to prevent him or even ask him what he was at—free to go about? Never, not in this sort of establishment. A kind of sleepwalking, perhaps induced, and choreographed?

  Conspiracy. Plot.

  He
thought of Flayd.

  But the drug they said would help him lined his veins heavy as lead. And then he thought, maybe not the drug. Not the drug, or Cora dying, or any waft of disease brought back from 1701. Not even the punch of the gladiatrix, who thought she had killed him once before. Maybe none of that.

  Maybe only—it was beginning.

  And the world opened, and nothing lay there, gaping wide.

  Leonillo had finished his lecture on the mask.

  “I want to leave now,” Picaro said.

  “There’s no reason to keep you. I’m afraid, though, you can’t return to the Palazzo. We can’t be sure it would be safe. Your clothes and other belongings, and your musical instruments, have been moved to—let me see,” Leonillo listened to his wristecx, “Brown’s Guest Palace on the Lion Marco Canal. Someone will see that a boat is waiting for you by the University steps.”

  Behold me, the mighty lion named Marcus. Whoever resists me I will bring low.

  5

  THE TIME HE HAD MOVED into the room, doing that hadn’t seemed so curious. It was a large, wide, airy loft, high over the streets. The walls were painted white, and there were deep red furnishings, and a splash of blue flowers in a bowl that never died. The band seemed envious. “Stick with that one,” Coal said, “she got money.” But that was not so. The room was rented, she had only had it, she told him, a month.

  She kept her bed in a little annex, where her make-up mirror was, ringed in soft rosy lights like an actress’s from fifty years before. There was still old-style electricity in the building, but sometimes, when the weather got very hot, or stormy, the lights flickered and the Intel-V screen broke up any picture into stripes. There was a wall-bed Picaro slept on, when he was there. And down the hall there was a bathroom, exclusive to this room, which Simoon had maintained, and to the door of which, as to the door of the room, she had had fixed an expensive lock that could be undone only by a personal CX-key. She gave Picaro a copy of the key. When he said he couldn’t pay her for that, or put much toward the room, she laughed. “Who cares. When my credit runs out we have to move, that’s all.”