Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) Read Free

Venus—now a city, next a goddess. Not the Virgin, the only goddess the child had heard of until then.
    Finally, the carter lay over hermother in the cart.
    Outside the awning rain lashed miserably.
    The carter grumbled, “Took you on—hope you’re worth it. And that pest of a baby, that little curse. You women. Breed like conies. Don’t dare bud from me. You hear, I’ll beat it out of you.”
    The carter was Ghaio Wood-Seller. Master.
    In memory, entering it, the City was indeed a darkness. They were put into a boat—never before felt, the motion of a canal. Arches of shadow, and blocks of night.
    Water rippling black.
    Christian slaves did not matter, the Church had said so. Bodies might be in chains, souls stayed free.
    A month later, Ghaio beat her mother. He made the child, already new-named “Fox,” watch the proceeding, as a lesson.
    Volpa’s mother was never pregnant again. Perhaps the beatings saw to that, or simply the generally harsh life in the Red House. Yet, although life was bad, they clung to it, as if to some granite rock-face. The alternative was to fall into the abyss.
    Or was it? Volpa’s mother, in the early years, spoke sometimes of God, and sometimes of the Virgin. Later, she mentioned them less.
    “We suffer on earth,” said Volpa’s mother, “so that we can be happy in another place.”
    But why must we suffer
? Volpa might have asked.
    Possibly she had done so.
    Certainly an outlandish answer seemed to have evolved to just such a question: The world is a school, a cruel and exacting one. Only here can we learn from terrors and mishaps, which, beyond life on either side, are never encountered.
    Why then learn? Why is it needful
?
    “Because only then,” said Volpa’s mother’s sweet tenor voice, “canwe be one with God, who has already experienced, and surmounted them.”
    So God did not send sorrows against mankind to punish or chastise?
    No, simply to cleanse, to refine. God, lonely in omnipotence, longed for the company of creatures purified as He had been. He wished that every single soul should achieve such greatness and such wisdom as were already His.
    Ghaio, truly, was a diligent exponent in God’s school.
    Master. Apt title?
    Volpa knew to fear and avoid him from the beginning. But it was normally easy, since she lived in another country, the kitchen and the yard.
    The yard of the Red House was almost entirely filled with timber, logs, bundles of wood, and the shed where the cart was kept. There was also a cistern to catch rain, whose water was not of the best. (Nicer water was fetched by the woman from the nearest public well.) Over Ghaio’s cistern, however, there grew a fig tree. In summer the leaves were like dusty metal. Green figs appeared irregularly in autumn. Bare in winter, the branches had a rheumatic look.
    Whatever the season, on nights of the full moon, when Ghaio slept or was from home and the other houses dark, Volpa and her mother would dance about this tree in a strange, silent circling. The old male slave, coming across the yard to the privy one night, saw this, hid his eyes and went away, Volpa had no other indications that the dancing might be profane.
    Unlike the lesson of God, she never queried it. They had danced in this way, shethought, in the foothills long ago.
    Ghaio slept with her mother—that is, had swift, rough intercourse with her mother—two or three times a month, in the early days. In the past four years, far less often.
    Volpa saw and knew nothing of these couplings.
    Thus once, Volpa’s mother said an odd thing. “He’ll be too old before you’re grown.”
    It was less a statement, of course, than a prayer.
    Ghaio had shown no inclination to violate the child, who, besides, was kept dirty and muffled and as much from his sight as was feasible.
    But time, which leached off some of Ghaio’s libido, and some of his strength, was working an opposite magic on the woman’s daughter.
    Volpa, who had never seen in a mirror—would not