Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) (21 page)

The disapproving priests froze, scandalized.

The girl turned, and said
quietly, “No one has taught me how to bless. But the priests know how.”

One or two of the scandalized were caught by this.

They nodded. She spoke the truth, and was modest.

Of course, she had only been speaking a fact.

But the Bellator left his place and went to her, and before she could become unnerved—he was tall and vigorous—he kneeled at her feet.

Beatifica thought. She had an inspiration.

“I’ll ask the Virgin to bless you.”

And she said one of the prayers to Maria, which began although Beatifica did not completely know it,
O most rare Mother, we entreat you, comfort your earthly sons, and beg from God, who will not refuse you, pardon and deliverance.

“She dares to intercede—is she a priest then?” one of the still-scandalized exclaimed.

But another one said, “This is a prayer a mother would use. She makes herself their mother, and sister.”

And Beatifica’s tutor, who had come to the early mass, said quickly, though blushing, “This prayer is allowed to women, brothers. I myself taught it her.”

Now, before the Virgin icon, Beatifica at last finished her general praying. She might lie down. Although she slept less well than she had in Ghaio’s house, where exhaustion had always felled her.

She went to the window and looked into the night garden below. All blossom had left the peach, its leaves were dark. Thin light fell from another high narrow window, and colored a single red rose.

After all, in an hour she could get up again for the Luna Vigile.

Just then the door was knocked.

This always alarmed her. Not the summons, the recent courtesy.

“Yes, I’m here,” said Beatifica.

A servant of the Golden Rooms
was outside.

“Maiden, will you come, the Magister Major is waiting.”

Beatifica smiled. She was happy: something to do.

She followed the servant at once.

As she entered, Danielus regarded Beatifica closely. A nicer life, coinciding with the ripening of womanhood, had been kind to her. She had not gained any weight, but a soft bloom was added to her skin, and great luminosity to her eyes, and the remarkable hair. She must be almost sixteen.

“Are you well, Maiden?”

She accepted the name. She had always accepted the names given her, and the titles, whether benign or crude.

“I’m well.”

No thanks, obviously. Her presumed superiors she would never think to thank, or to inquire after.

“Were you told of the sea-fight?”

“Yes. My tutor told me.”

“You know it was lost.”

“Yes, Magister.”

“This City also lost a great many men. And of the Bellatae Christi, our Soldiers of God, five hundred went out, and less than one hundred and sixty return to us.”

No response. No one was real to her. But wait—her eyes stole up, fixed on his, stared straight through him. What did she look for, in that unseen area—which others took for some divine, visionary place, or Hell, perhaps. Which he himself assumed was a kind of vacancy she studied when unsure, to see what might appear to her. Or was she really so uncomplex? Very likely. Light poured through the clearest vessel. Genius and intellect
cloudily impaired the way. Most saints were simple. The Apostles had been, mostly, peasants.

She said, contradicting everything, “The Bellator Cristiano?”

Cruelly—was it being cruel ?—he delayed.

Her eyes had focused on him. Nothing to be read from her. Not self-control—more, surely, the inability to demonstrate her emotion.

“Cristiano,” Danielus said, “survived the fight.”

She looked away again. She said, “Yes. What else.”

“What do you mean?”

“God wouldn’t let him die.”

“Why not?” He spoke slowly. “Beatifica, answer me. Why not?” And for a second, a breathlessness was in him, not unlike the pressure he had felt, waiting as the first ship back to the outer quays sent in its messages of survivors.

“God,” said Beatifica, “loves Cristiano.”

“He loves us all, Beatifica. Yet sometimes, through the evil and unwisdom of men, He must let us perish. Cristiano is subject to this law.”

She astounded him. She moved, shaking her head. He noticed a wildness in her, as he had thought he had, long ago. “No, no.” But her voice was not raised.

Danielus was torn between a strange delight, and a foreboding. That she might love Cristiano tickled him in a hundred ways, both spiritual and profane. Partly, surely, he had wanted it—these two extraordinary beings. Beyond that, she must
never
be caught out in it by another.

“Beatifica, you can have no favorites. Do you understand? That would be dangerous. I warn you now.”

She said, flatly, “No, Magister. But he is my angel.”

“In the name of God—what makes you say such a
thing?”

“You say God shows me things.”

“Yes, I have said so.”

“The serpent and the angels and the red mountain. And my mother, who taught me to make the fire.”

“Yes.”

“God showed me my angel. I didn’t remember at first. Then I did. It was as I was praying. The image of the Angel Micaeli in his armor, in the chapel here. It reminded me. But my angel was Cristiano.”

If she was in love, she was cool. No alteration in her color. Her breathing slow and even. Only insistence had made her wriggle in her seat and shake her hair at him.

Danielus got up. He lifted her to her feet.

“Look at me, Beatifica. Listen to me. Never speak of this to anyone else. Do you grasp what I’ve said?”

“Yes, Magister.”

She learnt quickly. He must trust in that. He was sorry, though, her eyes drooped away, losing for a moment their luster.

“You’re our hope, Beatifica.” Did that mean anything to her? He thought it did not. “Jealousy is everywhere. Treat all equally in deed and word.”

“Yes.”

And now, at this crisis point, he must take her to do the other thing, so vital and so risky. But all of it was risk. She had been put into his waiting hand, this slender fiery sword of God.

“Seven ships have returned from the sea-fight, Beatifica. And another five may come. Boats are rowing in the wounded and the dead, over the lagoon. Your white clothes have been brought. They’re in the closet there, where you can put them on. Then come out with me. I want
you to walk among the survivors and the dead. Beatifica, will you do that?”

She glanced. “Yes, Magister.”

“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.”