Saint Fire (Secret Books of Venus Series) Read Free Page A

be able even to recognize her own face—was at first aware only of slight changes. The ill-treatment which had, perhaps, kept her mother barren, delayed the onset of womanhood. But finally it came. Soreness blossomed into breasts. A thunder of pain broke like a crystal and spotted the straw Volpa slept on with ruby drops.
    Then she saw her mother with her hands to her lips. Afraid.
    “What have I done? Mumma—I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to.” (Like the day she broke the pot—and was whipped.)
    “No, it’s not your fault. It can’t be helped. It’s what I told you of—do you remember?”
    “That? This—is
that
—”
    “Yes. Don’t cry. It’s good. As it must be.”
    “But
you’re
crying, mumma—”
    “Only from the sun in my eyes.”
    For Volpa’s bleeding had begun in her birthmonth, late summer, the time of the sun lion, patron of the Primo, the great Basilica of Ve Nera.
    Volpa—even her mother now called her that—was fourteen.
    Soon, trudging up the alley after the old man, who hauled the cart, behind the creaking wood and picking up any which fell out, Volpa heard fresh abuse. Before she had been pushed about, slandered as a slave child.
    Now she was man-handled as a slave who was a woman.
    In the market-place boys and men stole up on her and cupped the shallow rounds of her body, breast, thigh, buttock, in unloving hands. Squeezed her like the vegetables. “She’s a hot piece.” “No, not ripe yet.”
    Sometimes she was glad when the black-robed priests moved nearby, although they spread fear like the aroma of their incense. Then men left her alone.
    The adult Volpa did not confide much in her mother.
    Intuitively she knew her increasingly silent parent had enough to bear. Volpa bore her own dismay, unspoken. It was life.
    It was God’s school.
    But sometimes she thought of the story her mother had told her, at the farm in the hills, and maybe again, once or twice, in the first two or three years of the Red House.
    The mother was the heroine of this story. It was a real story, true.
    Already carrying her daughter in her womb, but not yet knowing it, Volpa’s mother had been one night at dusk on a hill.
    The day’s work was over, and perhaps she was in those days then, allowed rest; she had never said. But pausing, she had looked up above the bare winter fields, into a palesky that had seemed, she said, the color of the emeralds on the fingers of the mightiest priests. And stars were set out in this polished sky, fierce, and prickled as hedgehogs with their lights.
    Suddenly the air, which was cold, grew warm. A warm wind blew up the plain, thick as the gusts of summer. And on the wind, high, high up in the orb of the emerald that was sky, Volpa’s mother saw a flight of angels pass.
    “At first I took them for birds, Blessed Maria pardon me. They were against the light, and yet they had a gleam on them. And the wings, moving slowly, as gulls’ wings do when they catch the currents of the air above the City. But they didn’t have any shape of birds, beyond their wings.
    They were long, like men with their legs stretched out, their arms crossed over the chest. And on the head of each, a flame—like a star come detached, and going with them.”
    This story of the angels never varied, or only here and there an iota. Now and then some slight extra detail was added—as of hearing a cock crow in the valley, as if at sunrise, and thinking the cock had seen them too—but never anything left out.
    “Where did they go, mumma?”
    “Away, upwards—into the dome of the sky. Until they grew so small they vanished.”
    “Did they look at you?”
    “I don’t know. Perhaps.”
    “Why did you see them?”
    “Because they were there, and I was looking up,” Volpa’s mother had replied, with dignified simplicity.
    She had told no other.
    Now she never spoke of it, and Volpa never asked to hear. In imagination only, Volpa relayed the flight of angels. She had seen it so often with the inner