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

eye of her mind, thatnow it too had become one with the earthly memories of her infancy in the hills. As if she had witnessed it at her mother’s side.
    That winter, after Volpa turned fourteen, was very bitter.
    Ice—they said—formed on the great Laguna Aquila, and the smaller lagoon called Fulvia, and ice pleated the hem of the sea beyond the bars of sand and the sea walls.
    The canals froze solid. Even the cart was able to be pulled along them to the market, not needing the alleys, slipping a little.
    In Ghaio Wood-Seller’s kitchen in the yard, Volpa’s mother kept the hearth going as long as she was able from the meager allowance of wood the master gave them.
    They were supposed to use it only to cook his meals.
    However, the old man slave stole, a few twigs here, a log there, from the tempting mounds in the yard. Ghaio presumably never guessed. In any case, they were often cold.
    During this winter, Volpa’s mother began to cough.
    She tried never to do it when serving Ghaio, for then he struck her: “Shut your noise!”
    One morning, the air seemed to break. Suddenly a softness came, like breath breathed on a rich man’s glass goblet.
    Volpa, waking on the straw at first light, went into the yard, and saw a single pale flower, some weed, that had pushed up against the house.
    When she returned with the first unfrozen water from the cistern, she saw her mother still lay asleep.
    “Mumma—wake up!” And she shook the woman’s arm because no slave could lie abed.
    But the man slave was there, gray as a cobweb gone hard.
    “Don’t shake her. Don’t shake the sleeping or the dead,” said this old man.
    And reprimanded, a littleaggrieved—what one took from master one could not bear from another slave—Volpa stopped. Then she saw the straw was dark under her mother’s head. As had happened that time with herself, blood had poured out on the straw. Now, though, it seemed to be all the blood the mother had kept in her body. And the soft new light showed her white as the ice which had melted away.
    Ghaio blasphemed and complained. She had not lasted eleven years, this useless, slave bitch. He had her body sewn in the customary sack, and thrown on a boat for the Isle of the Dead, where the bodies of slaves were only burned, there being no room for limitless burials.
    Volpa stood stunned and weeping. The boat was rowed away in the gray morning. The old man slave said to Volpa, or to the air, “Cry for yourself but not her. Her pain’s done. She is in God’s world now.”
    Volpa wept. She said, “That’s no better.”
    “Oh yes,” said the slave. “Why else do you think He damns us for suicide? His world is the best of all, and we must earn it.” Volpa only ever heard this man say two meaningful things, and this was the second. (The first had been about the shaking.) Then, as they returned through the alley to Ghaio’s yard, the old man said also a prophetic thing, “How I long to get there. Would this could be done.
    I won’t raise my own hand, Lord. But fetch me—by any means you like, by whatever awful way. The road’s stones, but the gates are pearl. Fetch me, Lord. Amen.”
    The wood-seller had a collection of debtors, among whom was no longer Juvanni the sweet merchant.
    His
house Ghaio had taken in lieu of the loan thatwinter. Where Juvanni and his family had gone was anyone’s guess.
    Ghaio did not want the better house, though. He preferred his hovel. He sold the other, and put the deeds and the money into a chest in the upper room of the Red House, which was reached by a ladder, and full only of a bed, some candles, and many, many similar chests.
    In the evening after the mother’s corpse had been rowed away for the crematory, Ghaio had Volpa serve his meal.
    He took no notice of her, but neither did he strike her. This surprised Volpa, who had tried not to displease him, but knew she had been clumsy.
    At last, Ghaio sat back.
    “You’ll have to take your mother’s place. I won’t