Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) Read Free Page A

even at one point, some dispute along the Canale Alchimia. An hour changed, then another, and bells rang from all the churches as they had rung from these churches always, before the sea came in.
    Then the wristecx rang like a tinier non-bell. Angry a moment, Picaro took it off and shut it in the carved cupboard under the skull. Let the skull keep it quiet.
    No matter how you obscured your tracks, in this present world, people could always find you. Even here, where a private wristecx, ruled by the City’s machines, was not supposed to be capable, of relaying incoming calls, unless you applied for an override.
    The call signal was silenced.
    He stretched out his body full-length and slept, head pillowed only on the many braids of his hair.
    “W HO THE FUCK is this?”
    “Flayd—it’s Flayd. We met on the plane.”
    “Yes. What do you want?”
    Pointless to ask how Flayd had found the call number. And no wish to ask why he had kept on signaling until the skull cupboard rattled.
    “I’m at the University Building,” said Flayd. “Come and have a drink with me.”
    “No. Pleasure meeting you and good-bye. Chi’ciao, Sin Flayd. Don’t use this signal again.”
    Outside, sourceless sunset now spilled over the canal and the coppery roofs and the palazzos. On a slight rise, a church flashed a gold spire. The sky became sand pink and geranium red.
    And then a wanderer being poled along the canal was stopping, the male passenger scrambling out and up the watersteps, a tumble of muscle and weight and hair the color of the roofs.
    As had the autograph hunters, Flayd the archaeologist now stood below the balcony, beady eyes upon it.
    “Don’t lose your cool,” cautioned Flayd. “I have to talk to you.”
    “Is this a sexual proposition?”
    “Christ, no.” Flayd grinned suddenly. “Sorry to disappoint.” Then his face fell heavily. “Come down, or do I come up.”
    “Tell me what you want?”
    “That’d be telling the whole block, wouldn’t it. Come down then, I’ll wait. We can go visit Phiarello’s—Victorian ice cream—I have to talk about something. I mean it, Magpie.”
    “Don’t call me that.”
    “It’s your professional name.”
    A terrible rage, evil and sentient of itself, took Picaro’s face. He felt it do so, felt it remake him, and turned to Flayd in obscuration the profile that had once been described by Magpie admirers as “chisled by a sculptor from black coal.” Picaro thought about that, until he became only one more re-created carving. Then he glanced down at Flayd, bulky, immovable, still staring.
    “Goodnight,” said Picaro. He shut the Amerian, and Venus, out behind the shatterproof glass of Shaachen’s window.

2
    T HAT NIGHT, UNDER THE CURSE of the dead Ethiopian warrior, Jula had considered her first memories. They were very spare.
    Houses built of packed earth and branches—huts, a Roman would say—woodsmoke and half dark, the shadows of trees in mist. And that was all. No recollection survived of the destruction of this place, the crying and blood. Nothing either of how she, presumably with other infants, was taken away.
    She thought next of the Ethiopian,
his
homeland. (That was while they were sewing her up under the arena, the gut thread pulling like the biting of ants.) What had his homeland been? Lush, with a river of crocodile green—or some desert?
    It was a while before the surgeon had finished with the long gash in her left arm, the wound below her ribs—the Ethiopian had just missed her intestines. Yes, in the end Phaetho had fought well—few others had, in recent years, come so close. But the crowd had not seen his skill or valor, because he had delayed at the start, and by the finish they hated him.
    When she went up into the ending afternoon, the last matches in the arena were over, the horns silent, the crowds dispersed, the corpses carted away. The victors,with their palm leaves, or—as she had been—crowned with laurel from the precincts of Apollo,