Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) Read online

  At the square’s margin, the water of the laguna, seldom now called Fulvia, shone phosphorescent and darkly green. Fulvia was the last and only lagoon. The others had passed away, returned into the outer, upper sea, which now, invisible, surrounded all this, beside, below, above.

  Flayd had ordered antipasto and grappa.

  Once they’d stepped into the boat, even after they’d reached the square, he had talked only generally, pointing out churches and palaces and canals. He was a mine of information. Picaro scarcely listened to him.

  Now the drinks and food arrived. Flayd started to pick about through his olives and coils of ham and prawns, fastidious as a greedy stork.

  Picaro tasted the grappa. Bitter and perfumed, different in this place. He waited.

  Flayd said, “We’re fine out here. Probably. I guess it won’t matter anyhow. No one can do a damn thing. They’ve sealed us in and cut communications. And pretty soon some of these innocents are going to realize that, and the questions’ll start. Of course they’re letting out anyone with prior arrangements due to leave today. Last subvenerine out the locks at midnight. After that, anyone in here stays put.”

  Picaro ate an olive. He said, “If that’s true, why?”

  “Because something they’ve been trying to do down here has finally gotten done. They’re all over it. But until they know what happens next, nobody leaves to spread the word. And no one phones home either. It’s our—what did they say to me?—our privilege to be in on the act.”

  Picaro looked outward at the water. The slender wanderers plied to and fro. A weightless ship with sails moved further out, at the limit of the horizon. The moon was rising on the lagoon. Others saw it too. Look, look, the moon, the moon, on the lagoon, the lagoon.

  It resembled precisely the world’s moon upstairs. Better, maybe. But then it was younger and more new.

  “So do you want to know what they’ve done?” asked Flayd. “God, you’re one helluva non-curious guy.”

  “Tell me first why you want to tell me.”

  “I need to talk to someone, pal. I really do. They sprung this on me. I didn’t know, and this afternoon, soon as I dropped by, they called me in that office and, Well, Flayd, what do you think of this? And I goddamn don’t know what I think of it. My mother was a Hindic Buddhist. Christ knows what she’d say.”

  Picaro laughed.

  Despite his apparent anxiety, Flayd grinned, seeming delighted to cause a response.

  “Why should it matter to a Hindic Buddhist?”

  “It could matter to anyone thinks there’s more to life than—life.”

  Picaro said nothing. He drained his glass and poured another.

  Flayd was eating prawns and ham neatly and ferociously.

  Across the square, Picaro spotted the two autograph girls from earlier, Cora and India, strolling like others arm in arm. Tonight they wore replica renaissance dresses with high waists, respectively crimson and sage.

  Flayd wiped his lips on the napkin. He stared morosely at his empty plate.

  “Worry gives me an appetite. Let’s take soup, pasta. What they’re doing is bringing back from the dead.”

  Again—Picaro—silent.

  Flayd said, exasperated again, “Damn it. I’m not giving you all the truth here. You are involved.”

  “I thought everybody was … according to you.”

  “More than that. Much more. You’re on the list.”

  “List.”

  “PRS.”

  “Which is?”

  “Possible Related Bloodline.”

  Picaro shifted slightly. “Possibly related to what?”

  “The dead I spoke of just now.”

  “And they are?”

  “There are two of them,” said Flayd. He waved up a human waiter dressed in Victorian tailcoat. Flayd ordered again several dishes. When the waiter had gone, Flayd said, expressionlessly, “There’s a chance one of these … one of these dead, these people they’ve been working on—may have been your ancestor, I mean the guy who was your ancestor here. Both of them, you see, lived here, but in different times. In fact, there’s a difference between them of around seventeen centuries.”

  “I know about my ancestors here.”

  “I’ve seen your data. It ain’t who you think. Maybe.”

  The moon was now a big white lantern in the purple dusk. Stars were everywhere else, thick as daisies on a field of dusk purple moss. Too many stars. There had never been so many in reality over these Mediterranean shores.

  Soon another hour would strike, and the Primo’s brass horses go trotting around the spire.

  Picaro said, “So tell me.”

  “You mean I have interested you?”

  “It’ll pass the time.”

  “Until what for Christ’s sakes?”

  “Oh, that would be betraying a family secret.”

  Another bottle of grappa came, and Seccopesca, and a bottle of Geneste, all with separate glasses. They were in for a heavy night, if Picaro stayed. Otherwise Flayd was in for it all by himself.

  Across the square, now prettily lamplit in the mode of the mid 1800s, Picaro could see India and Cora drifting through the Primo Suvio’s carven portico.

  Flayd was like a woman, Picaro thought, strong and dominant and impatient, compensatingly over-tactful, blurting. As with a woman then, Picaro felt himself relent.

  “My ancestral line. They were called Furiano and Eurydiche. His name is a pseudonym only.”

  “Yeah, I know that. I know their names. She had a child. She also had a condition known as Stone Face—Strael’s Palsy, which in many medical circles is still reckoned to be impossible, unless caused by hysteria.”

  Something moved in the back of Picaro’s eyes.

  That was all.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The condition made giving birth extra dangerous for her. She couldn’t breathe through her mouth, couldn’t get enough air because the frozen face muscles didn’t allow it. This alchemist, Shaachen, did something to her—put her in a trance, used drugs, it’s hazy—and performed a Caesarian section. He got the kid out alive and kept her alive. Tied her tubes to stop it happening again, sewed her up good as new.”

  “Yes, I’ve read that.”

  “Only it seems Furian may not have been the child’s father.”

  Picaro nodded. “At this remove, hardly seems crucial.”

  “It is crucial. If it wasn’t Furian it was Eurydiche’s previous lover, a man who was a musician and composer—sound familiar to you? He was called Cloudio del Nero. He wrote a song back then that drove the City of Venus crazy with joy. And then he was murdered, very mysteriously, by some weird and wonderful psycho-alchemical method involving a poisoned mask. Nothing to do with Shaachen, however. Del Nero’s body went into the canals at carnival time, in fall.”

  Picaro blinked. “And?”

  “He’s the first they’re bringing back. They wanted to do this with real special people, that was the big idea. And with all the bones we’ve been archaeologically digging up, tossed around, then needing to be sorted out after the reburial laws of the early 2000s—he was DNA identified. Reburied. Accorded an ornamental tomb, one of the few remaining plots on San Fumo—the graveyard island, before it too went under the water.” Flayd poured the Seccopesca into its peach-tinted Venusian glasses. “But somebody kept back—illegally—one splinter of bone. And that’s all it takes. Ever heard of E.S. DNA? No? I won’t bore you. But that is all it takes. So they tell me.”

  “To bring him back.”

  “Regrow him—them. It isn’t cloning. I don’t understand what they’ve done. I’m into the past, not all this scientific crap.”

  “But you’re useful to them because you are into the past.”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “They want you on this—project.”

  “Me and a few others. God you shoulda’ seen them, my colleagues. They were all blushing and dewy with enthusiasm. It’s so exciting. I think the who
le thing yerks. I think it won’t work. To make a human thing over, someone that’s been dead for centuries—bring them back—bring them back out of what? Yes, it can’t work, can it? But they say it already has.”

  “They give you any proof?”

  Flayd shook his head. “No one’s allowed to see, not yet. But all the rest of it—cutting off the call-phones, shutting up the dome—telling us. I mean, Picaro, who is going to make all that up?”

  Two Victorian waiters, greatly laden, came and set out the dishes—pasta, brodo di pesce, a rose-pink lobster that hadn’t ever swum in the dome lagoon—When they were alone again, the two men sat staring at their feast, as if not knowing what on earth to do with it.

  “Who is the other one?” Picaro eventually asked. “You keep saying, there are two.”

  “A woman. That’s worse.”

  “Because of the gender?”

  “No. Because she is much older. Not in age, I mean in the centuries between. Del Nero—what’s that?—a handful of hundred years ago. But she—she’s first century AD.”

  “There was nothing much here then, was there? You said they were both from Venus.”

  “There was something here back then. Rome was here, like it was most everywhere, then. There used to be a Laguna Aquila, named for the Roman’s Eagle Fort, and for the Roman town built round it. Not Venus. They called it Stagna Maris, for the sea lagoons. They had a stadium—a circus—out where the marshes and the sea moved in later. It was forests and woodland then—hence the name of the area, Silvia. All under the ocean now, washed away.”

  “So she was a Roman.”

  “A Gaul.”

  “You sound partisan,” Picaro remarked. The drink had loosened his tongue, and his mind. He had lifted up above it, everything else, and become only a young man again, sitting at a table under a false moon, taking an interest in current affairs. Tomorrow none of this would matter. But tonight—tonight was a kind of holiday from himself.

  “I’m partisan all right,” said Flayd. He cracked the lobster open after all. “I can aquadive. I helped locate and excavate her tomb, in the undersea mud near the drowned circus. She was quite a find. A true rarity.”

  “Why?”

  “She’d been one of the Ludicae—the Games Girls—a gladiatrix. A damn good one—she’d fought regularly in the local amphitheater for five years, before she died. And they buried her like royalty.”

  4

  YOUNG GIRLS DANCED, with garlanded, whipping hair.

  The guests barely looked at them, their quick feet and quivering breasts, the dark-skinned flute girl playing, and her sleepy, cunning eyes.

  Later there would be a battle from The Iliad of the Greeks, enacted by five male dancers with genuinely sharpened blades and little bows. Probably they would incur some injuries, despite their skill.

  The second course was still in progress. After the eggs, snails and lettuce, the olives and white figs, the roast hares had come in, the peacock skewered in his brazen skin, the slices of goose liver and tubs of venison and architectures of thrushes braised with honey and poppy seeds, and the silver cradles of shellfish from the Fulvia district. The sweetened wine had been replaced by a Greek wine of Karia, chilled with splintered ice from the villa’s ice well, and heady with myrrh, aloes, and oil of cinnamon.

  The myrtle fans of the slaves brushed off the heaviness of the evening air. Boys, chosen for their looks, poured the drink into the goblets, each of which was decorated with gold.

  Aside from the dancers, and the attendant slaves, there were no women.

  For the one woman seated at the end of her master’s couch did not count as a woman at all.

  “Oh, Julus, you miser. Lend her to me. You said you would.” (This, fat Drusus, scrubbing his mouth with a napkin now as greasy as his face.)

  “No, dear Drusus. I think I never did.”

  “But you did. For my bodyguard. She can teach the others how to fight.”

  They laughed.

  “What does Jula Victrix say?” asked another of the guests, a bald and sweating man prone to fondling the wine boys.

  Jula looked in his direction. She spoke frankly and emptily, “I am my master’s property.” Nothing was really expected of her here, but obedience, docility—and her own essential show. She was a tamed leopard on a chain, trained to take food at table like a human being.

  The bald man chuckled now. “True. She’s made the wretch richer even than he was.”

  The others made no comment. The gracious dining-room, with its mosaic floor and painted walls, was no place to talk crudely of money.

  But then Drusus mildly offered, “Myself also, let it be said. I bet on Julus’s Jula, as always, and as always I won.”

  “Once she lost me sesterces without number,” said the bald man. He chewed some meat and said, “I never did believe in a woman gladiator. By Minerva, women weren’t meant to do such things.”

  Julus said, “Come now, Stirius. You see they can. Besides, any legionary could tell you as much. In Gallia and Hispania the women will put up a fight like she-bears. In the Tin Isles they ride into battle in chariots. The men have to run to keep up with them.”

  “Harsher and more cruel than any man,” agreed the other, the scholarly guest known as the Scroll.

  “Are you harsh and cruel, Jula?” asked oil-greasy Drusus.

  The gladiatrix looked at him with her lowered eyes, and away.

  This flirtatious carping did not generally last long, though sometimes it occurred in patches. But the wine, with its mix of scent and narcotic, (diluted occasionally by water, or the effusions of roses) blurred the edges of their discourse. They would get on to other matters soon. The dancers would be pulled on to the couches, or the wine boys, if Julus allowed it.

  The bellaria was being brought in and laid out on separate ivory tables, to engage the eyes of the feasters, saffron pastries, and pomegranates, cakes decorated by white flowers, and twisted sweets of honey.

  A couple of Julus’s male gladiators couched across from the diners. Their table, like the others, was of patterned citrus wood. They were served from the same dishes. Yet, unlike Jula, they had been kept a little apart and already shown off, their muscles and teeth admired.

  The dancers finished. They glided from the central floor, over the tesserae of maenads. Stirius caught one and she sank beside him, doll-like and compliant. (Jula noted Drusus and Julus exchange a surreptitious nod. It seemed they had been betting too on which their companion would choose, boy or girl.)

  That Stirius missed. Instead he had an observation.

  “Now this is a woman.”

  His hand detached itself from his wine cup and slipped the dancer’s tunic from her shoulder, revealing most of a round young breast.

  “But your gladiator woman,” said Stirius, “gives no evidence of that. Is she a female?”

  Jula had met such questions before. In the arena her breasts were bound to steady them, and so hidden, just as her red spiked hair, once she had been seen and identified in the processional Pompa, was covered by her secutor’s helmet.

  Now she did nothing, but under her leveled lowered eyelids, she took in the person of Stirius.

  Such faces had come before her belonging to armed adversaries. Ones usually that she found easy to kill. But this time, (obviously) not.

  Her master waved his arm, indicating the messy meat dishes should be cleared to make way for the bellaria. That was all. But as slaves swarmed between the tables whisking things up, mopping over spills, Stirius lay along his couch, one hand on the dancer’s waist, staring, perhaps noting that his coarse remarks, too, were being cleared from the dinner.

  What did he want, the bald man who had lost money on her? So many lost money at the games. Any victory was always unlucky for some.

  A third wine came with the dessert. It was a swarthy and terrible wine, meant to be much diluted, and sipped.

  The scholarly Scroll had interrupted the proceedings, insisting on reading to them all
a tale he had come across in one of his books.

  Julus indulged him. The Scroll was wealthy and influential and, by some distant relationship through marriage, had connections to the young emperor in Rome. The tale anyway was lewd. It concerned girls who fled gods and were changed into animals, trees, or rivers, which, in each case, the god in question then still ravished.

  They’ll let me go soon, then I can sleep.

  She had eaten little. This sort of food was not her normal fare, nor did she greatly like it. Given her always as a reward, titbit or feast were meaningless, of course. For she had no choice but to attempt to please, to fight well. She had wanted to live from the first—unlike the Ethiopian, who determined not to.

  I am like Playful, she thought.

  Playful was the old lioness. Kept now at the town’s expense, after years of her successful slaughterings of those criminals and lesser swordsmen sent against her. Playful had been “freed,” was popular, and might be visited in her cage below the arena. In the Pompa, too, Playful was walked on leash, with flowers around her neck.

  That then, Jula’s fate? To survive and gain freedom—the ultimate reward for her inevitable struggles—to live at the whim and expense of Stagna Maris … in a cage?

  But she would not live. No. Her expectancy of life was, at the most, seven years. The majority did not last even so long.

  And they would never free her. As if they guessed that unlike Playful in this one thing, if ever set free—she would be gone, gone for ever, although she did not know to where.

  But where did any man or any woman go?

  We vanish, she thought. We disappear.

  Strange thoughts. The Ethiopian had done this to her. Had he cursed her truly? And would it claim her, his curse?

  Her wounds, which all night had ached and stung as if biting at her under her actor’s draped gown, had been quite severe. They might have killed her, if the surgeons were not so skilled. (They hurt less now—the wine.)

  So why think of this? … the other country …