Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

by Tanith Lee

  Just the door open from the CX-key. And the loft, lit mellifluously by a scatter of candles.

  And, in a chair. She, sitting. A cameo in her blackness and her pale frock and the candledark all around.

  Was it that he hoped she could still say to him, But how would I do that?

  Was he so naïve and spent even then in the net of the spell she had woven around him?

  Like father, like son.

  Did he speak? No memory of it.

  Simoon was the one with speech.

  “I came home. It’s way too hot out there. Would you like a cold drink?”

  What did he say? Nothing? Anything?

  He didn’t walk any closer to her.

  She said, “Here you are.”

  He said, “He taught me to play the korah, Simoon.”

  “Who’s that?” she said.

  “He taught me,” said Picaro. Then he said something about the hospital. Something about the screaming. The bones. How they had had to—

  Did she try to pretend a minute, look concerned? No, she’d never have done anything like that.

  Then, what did she do? From there on, like the other things, that time, her face became something he remembered in words, not pictures.

  “It’s time you took the lead part in your own life,” she said. And next, perhaps at once she said, “You don’t need anyone else. I can give you all of it. I can give you everything. You’re mine.”

  And then the memory—not in pictures, in words—her body pressing on his, against the wall, the line of her through her dress. Her breasts feeding on him, her hand between his legs, disgust exquisite, foulness and delight. Her tongue probing his mouth, which had given way. Even the wall, giving, giving, giving way.

  Fall.

  Only in words. Not pictures.

  “Do you like this, baby? Yes. You like this. Yes, you’re mine, I made you, didn’t I? I can give you everything. You don’t need anyone but me.”

  UNTIL FINALLY THE VIRTUALITY movie was back. It was a train in the night. It was blackness and lighted halts. It was the luta-citarra on the seat beside him; all he had kept in the room, all he had brought away.

  6

  LIFTING HER HEAD, she looked around at them, the howling thousands. She raised her supplicant hand a second time. Seeing only the death signal—thumb compressed and hidden, symbol of a man hidden, buried. Knowing this mob would never relent.

  He lay on his side, near her feet. He had pushed himself on to one elbow, elegant, like a citizen on a dinner couch. His skin, flawless black. His eyes, proud and angry, hard as the black iron they resembled.

  “They won’t have it,” Jula said to him. She remembered his name, “Picaro—before the gods, why didn’t you put up a fight? You’re able—I’ve seen you train in the court behind the Forum, where Talio’s school is. You’re good. Look how you’ve cut me about. Not many can boast of that. We’re both their slaves. What would it have cost? You fool,” she said bitterly. “What am I to do?”

  Above, the blue closed sky of Stagna Maris. A scent of the incense of pine-cones. Away along the paved road that began between the stone-pines, a gate to the town, an entrance to the villa of her master. Life going on.

  And at her feet, just one more man she must kill.

  Jula raised her short sword and the crowd bayed with a single throat, and grew silent.

  Jula threw the sword away. It plummeted and landed, point-down in the sticky sand, then toppled over, defeated. Before the hubbub could erupt, she yelled, high and savage as a bird, “No and no—and no—” Even the top tiers might hear it. She thought they did.

  The roaring that came in on her cry meant nothing. She knew they would throw things down, ripe fruit, stones they had picked up beforehand to cast at others—never at her, their favorite. And the sticklers had abandoned her, were hurrying off to the sides of the arena, to save themselves from misdirected missiles. In a minute, the amphitheater authority would send out others, to force her to her task, or to complete it themselves. This also—was nothing.

  When she turned, he had sat up. She gestured impatiently to him to stand.

  “We’re both disgraced now. Rat meat. They’ll soon send to butcher us.” She added sharply, “Stand back to back with me. This time, fight. Show them—not me.”

  He rose. He stood far taller than she did. She had not thought, fighting him, Phaetho was this tall. But his name was not Phaetho, but Picaro—for the black and white bird.

  Her helmet, which she had removed as she often did when her foe was down, lay over there. Never mind that. The helmet could not save her now. But somehow she had retrieved her sword.

  The far doors were opening. Men in brazen armor were coming out, gladiators, these helm-masked, unknowable. Ten, twelve, fifteen—enough for the task.

  “Why?” he said, standing with his back to her, so near she felt the heat of him against her shoulder blades.

  Indeed, why? Jula had achieved nothing for him, and had ended her own life. Even if they overcame these others sent against them—which was unlikely, for both this man and she were scored with deep cuts and had fought each other some while—the crowd would not allow them to leave the amphitheater breathing, let alone walking.

  She said nothing. Nor did he speak again. She felt the heat of quickness from him.

  They stood back to back, and watched as death came trotting, shining, toward them.

  SHE REMEMBERED THAT TIME, seeing him as she waited in one of the two-horse chariots, by Talio’s yard. She, and others, Julus’s prizes, dressed in their well-to-do actors’ garments, had been put on display in the town. Now their master had business with his plebian rival, Talio.

  Phaetho fought there in the dust, near the training post, with a thickset man.

  In Rome there had been black Ethiopians, and some were free men. The Emperor Narmo had inaugurated among the legions several cohorts of such soldiers. But in Stagna Maris black men and women were rare. This fighter was finely made, powerful and glorious in the dust that clouded but did not conceal him. His long hair, coarse black and thick as a horse tail, was tied up on his head. As no gladiator should, when in combat, he had no look of a slave.

  Jula had noted her master’s evaluating eye settle on Phaetho.

  But Talio, himself a one-eyed villain (others said) would hardly be parted from such a specimen, just as Julus refused to part with the specimen he called Jula.

  One day, maybe, they might be matched, Phaetho and she.

  But she had not considered that then. She had seen only a man who was, as she was, a possession. And presently, because she did not think much about those who were not immediate to her, she forgot him.

  THE ARENA CROWD no longer belled. She heard the sea. No, it was the sough of pine trees.

  She lay across the knees of a giantess.

  It must be that the goddess had her, Bhrid, Arrow of the Sun, who dispensed warmth and plenty from the earth.

  Her hair, moon blonde, fell over her shoulders and touched Jula’s face so mildly, like the caress of grass. She smelled too of her healthy warmth, and of pine resin, and of the blue smoke rising from the central hearth. There was a smudge of the smoke on her brown cheek. Her bright eyes were nearly shut. She rocked Jula, and sang to her in the voice of love.

  Yes, I remember this, better than all else. I remember—almost I do—how I lay inside her. But then I am almost still inside her body now, yet joined to her, not a year old, a golden circle once baked in the oven of her womb, having her impression still.

  I was not Jula then. What was my name? Oh, Mother, sing me my name, so I can hear it, and know.

  But her mother sang instead of love.

  And Jula—still not having her other name—saw how a man came in at the low door, bending, and his hair was light in color.

  My mother, my father. And so—

  Jula thought—Don’t let me see—no, don’t let me see and remember what comes three years after. And there was a flush of fire and a sound o
f calling—but it was gone instantly, swept away by some phantom hand in her brain. Then Jula was a woman full-grown, and she was in the forest, as she had never been.

  But she stood, glancing everywhere, taking lungfulls of the balsamic wind, seeing the shafts of smoldering sunlight which rayed between the pines, seeing the tracks of deer and the white tusk-marks of boar. And then, up through the trees towards her, breaking the shafts of the sun, strode the man she would meet, as her mother had met her father in that other time, before Rome came and the world ended.

  But it was impossible to see him, against the brilliant breaking shafts of light.

  And it was impossible to keep hold of a world that the Romans had ended.

  IN DARKNESS, JULA OPENED her eyes, to one more incomprehensible and unimportant foreign place. She was awake now, however, dreaming over, and had to stay in it.

  Tears ran out of her eyes, the lament for all she had lost: land, home, mother, father, lover—never met, her own self.

  Had she shed tears before? As a child, sobbed and been sick out of the side of the wagon taking her into Rome. Cried when she was beaten. When her monthly blood began. Not often, or for long, these economic tears. Then anyway she unlearned the recourse of weeping, as she did any wrath other than the controled fury of a swordswoman, a games girl, or any care other than for life itself.

  Yet now—now, in this place, this dark that was also false, so she had been told—here she wept. At last. Too late.

  Even for Phaetho she wept. Of course for his senseless death and the curse he had laid upon her—not only to die, but to endure rebirth in her slavery—but also since he too was lost to her. For there had been tonight the dream of the arena, when she had done as surely she had once secretly wished to, and, like him, rebelled and given up her survival in contempt. And in that dream she had mistakenly replaced Phaetho with Picaro. And having seen both of them then, in the dreams, she knew finally that Phaetho and Picaro were not at all the same. Were as unlike each other as fire and water, though both were young and strong, handsome, and black of skin.

  7

  INDIA WAS STANDING at the top of the watersteps.

  Behind her rose Brown’s, the Ca’Marrone, a baroque palace from the late 1600s, its flat façade anchored along the ground floor by heavy blocks of stone, made weightless above by two stories of recessed windows, carved cherubs, masks, and horses’ heads. Everything reflected in the Canale Leone Marco. Even India, and her little Victorian portmanteau.

  As the wanderer approached, her head turned slowly. She didn’t look agitated or distressed, or even as if she had expected him. She had that sullen expression he recollected from the first time, when Cora balanced on his balcony rail, and she, India, remained below.

  “Christ,” said Picaro softly.

  “Ah, signore—a demisella.” The wanderlier, congratulatory that this nice young woman stood waiting for Picaro by the Ca’Marrone, in the sunny afternoon.

  When he had climbed up the steps, Picaro held out his hand. India put her own into it. He had seen she knew, if not how. He did not see why she was there. Perhaps simply because he was one of the last to meet Cora in the state of life.

  They walked into the guest palace without speaking, holding hands, as they had that day at the Equus Gardens, during the storm.

  Brown’s was the remodel of a Victorian hotel, evolved, as it once already had been, within the baroque frame of the seventeenth-century casa. Maroon marble columns upheld a ceiling painted with (Victorian) Italian renaissance gods. The floor of the wide, opened-out lobby was also marble-white. You saw straight through this area to the vast courtyard remade as a Victorian exotic garden, with blue banks of lupins, vermilion stocks, gladioli, palm trees. Some tables were scattered along a terrace.

  “They’ve given me an apartment here,” he said. “You can be in private there, if you want.”

  “Not yet,” said India. She moved ahead of him into a kind of glassed-over conservatory, up against the terrace and garden. Here there were also tables and chairs among the plants, and a handful of people eating and drinking. Everyone wore Victorian garments, it was apparently the tradition if you stayed at Brown’s. Even India had dressed in a high-necked blouse and demure bulb of a skirt.

  Picaro didn’t want to sit down here, but he followed her.

  They sat. A waiter came.

  India ordered black tea.

  Then they only sat, she looking at her narrow hands, now crossed one on another on the marble table, he out into the garden.

  At last India said, “You know I know she is dead.”

  “I realized you must know.”

  “You wonder what she was to me? Lovers? Related, perhaps? None of that. I’ve always known her.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Please believe—”

  “I believe you are sorry.”

  Then they sat in silence again. This time, she looked into the garden, too.

  And then she said, “I went to the University and a man interviewed me—Leonillo, he was called. They let me see her again."

  Picaro’s heart stumbled against his ribcage. He said nothing. He had never known India to say so much.

  She said, “They’d arranged her, and she looked very sweet. She would have preferred that, to look charming. Of course, they won’t dispose of the body as yet. They have to investigate. Even I was only permitted to see her through a window, you understand.”

  “Yes. Did they tell you why?”

  “They intimated there’s some illness. A virus.” Their eyes met, and Picaro saw quite clearly that India, whatever she had been told, knew much more, either from Cora before her death, or from some other source.

  India said, “They told me you would be coming here, the Ca’Marrone. I know you weren’t,” she said, “with her when it happened.”

  Picaro said, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Do? It isn’t up to me.”

  “Are you angry with me?”

  “Of course I am,” she said calmly. “I could hate you. It’s your fault she was there, in that place, and you weren’t even with her. But there is no use in anger or hate.”

  He thought, almost pettily aggravated, You weren’t with her either. He said, “I didn’t know—If I’d been there too, I’d be dead. So would you.” She lowered her eyes. “Like all the rest.”

  “Not all the rest,” said India.

  Picaro focussed on her. “Who lived?”

  “One woman. She is in isolation—in those rooms under the University Building. Her name is Jenefra.”

  “How do you know?”

  India’s eyes, still lowered. “You must trust me that I do. If, whenever I tell you something, you ask me how I know, or ask yourself if I am lying or inventing, then each conversation we have will become difficult and time-wasting.”

  “How do you know, did they tell you—show you?” India looked down into the marble of the table. “Why are you telling me?”

  “You ask too many questions, Picaroissimo. We must live by more than questions and answers. That is what is wrongly termed Blind Faith. It means—”

  “Don’t give me a lecture on theosophy.”

  “It means sometimes we must simply get on. Have you never done anything without first asking why or how or if or when?”

  “Yes.” Picaro got to his feet. “I’m sorry about Cora. I wish it could be changed. Charge anything you want to my account here.”

  And then he saw, across the drifts of lupins, an auburn bull which had also stood up, and up, towering over the neat shrubs in its bulging morning coat and fat-muscled trousers, elaborate cravat, and hair.

  “PICARO.”

  “Flayd.”

  “He thinks I followed him,” reported Flayd, to India. “Listen, buddy. I always room at this place, when I’m in Venus.”

  “Then,” said Picaro, “I was sent to room here too.”

  Flayd said, “Seems they want us all in one spot. You too?” he asked India. She nodded. “We
’re over there,” said Flayd. India at once went walking across the garden in the indicated direction. Flayd went after her, leaving Picaro standing.

  Picaro saw, at the table to which they went, a woman in another Victorian dress, with a combed-up mass of fair hair. Suddenly he realized it was the Roman gladiatrix. She was transformed, but not entirely enough.

  He too crossed the garden, through the lupins, between the palms in tubs.

  He stood looking down at them, these three people from 1888, and the English afternoon tea, (one of Brown’s specialities) laid out before them.

  Fantastically (in keeping with the scene), Flayd was giving India a guided tour of the dishes of hot boiled eggs, grilled coppery fish, the toasts and various butters, preserves, cakes, muffins, strawberries. Flayd, Picaro could see, had not been stinting himself. An extraordinary tea service dominated the table, a mint-green salt-swan teapot, a duck milk jug, water lilies as spice and sugar bowls—plates that were the china leaves of water-plantains or lily pads.

  A terrible sense of utter, childlike loneliness swept through Picaro. Once these things might ironically have amused him, pleased him even, as they did almost everyone else. But something had happened. Simoon had happened. And what she had left with him. And now, shut out, shut into the frozen snow beyond the lighted window—he hadn’t even the refuge of scorn.

  He found he sat down slowly. He sat then, staring at them, one after another, round and round the table. It was all a fantasy. The ducks and swans, the archaeologist stuffing himself with cherry cake made to a recipe at least two centuries old, the sulky self-contained adolescent girl, who spoke like someone older, nibbling fruit from a silver fork. And the female gladiator clad as a fashionable young Amerian lady from the Boston or New York of Then.

  Picaro reached out and caught her wrist. She stayed nearly immobile, only turning her head to look at him.

  Flayd said, a tired father, “Come on, Picaro. You know what happened last time.”

  Picaro spoke to Jula. “What are you doing here?” Her eyes reminded him of the eyes of an animal, intelligent, cunning, swift, and dangerous, except for the blue-green color of them.