Free Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) by Tanith Lee

the mostly burnt bones of Jula, were her jewels, her bracelets and earrings (one of which, reconstructed, she now wore) her secutor’s helmet, shield and sword, and other weapons, rich garments belonging to her, priceless statuettes in gold and silver, glass cups and porphyry lamps decorated with Mercurius-Anubis, Conductor of the Dead. The stone tablet read, JULA VICTRIX, FLAME-HAIRED JULA OF THE BLOOD OF FIRE. EVEN THE GODS, WHO GRANT GLORY, CANNOT HOLD BACK DEATH .
    And here she was before him.
Standing
here.
Here
—and
now
.
    Flayd got up again. He towered over her. The men and women of Roman times had rarely grown so very tall, and Flayd was tall for his own era.
    “What do you know,” he said, “about yourself? Do you know—where you’ve been?” It was an astounding affrontery—a fearful risk—he did not know how he could say it, yet couldn’t keep it back.
    But she said, very quietly, “They told me, I’d been dead.”
    “They
told
you. Christ, they did, they told you.”
    “I know it to be true,” she said.
    “You believed them—
    “I went elsewhere,” she said. “I’ve been gone a great time. Everything is altered now.” She glanced about at the Roman room, with its painted walls, the courtyard beyond. She seemed thoughtful. “This is like no other place I recall.”
    Flayd grinned. He felt a fool. “They tried to make it
just
like the places you’d recall. How’s it so different?”
    “In every way. I can’t explain. Like a copy—as a statue could be like a man—but not the man.”
    Flayd frowned. He swallowed and said, “You say you went elsewhere. Between then and now.”
    “Yes. I know that I did.”
    “That’s the big question,” he said. “
Where’d
you go?”
    Jula Victrix turned her head completely, so he saw her profile, which was classical. They might have graced a Roman coin, the aquiline nose, the great eye, and intelligent forehead. Yet she had been from Gallia, a barbarian.
    “I don’t remember that. Only the things then, in the town, and after those—nothingness. And now, this.”
    Despite himself, Flayd felt some tidal surge sink through him, heavy and inert, cold as the mud had been about her grave.
Nothingness
. That then was where they all went down to, where all the dead went, all the ones you loved, or hated, where he too would follow in due season. It was what you suspected, despite the several sumptuous religions of the world, the marvels and miracles, supernatural rumors, the sweetness of the ideas. Despite even his lovely mother, Rose, with her long dark hair, who had died fearless, knowing exactly where she went, which, she believed, was to another sort of life.
    The gladiatrix wasn’t afraid of it either, however. She had been brought back from it, that nothingness. And anyway there was
nothing
to be afraid of—in
nothing
.

2
    O N THAT DAY, WHEN HE WAS fourteen, that hot, gray winter day, he came back up to the apartment, and there she was.
    He had expected to find his father. As he swung in the door, Picaro had called out the usual greeting— “Papa—I’m home—” for he still called his father that, “Papa.”
    And then there Papa was, by the open window that looked down on the teeming traffic (always that sound in these remembrances, that smell of Safe Ace Gasoline and geraniums). But Picaro’s father was looking back into the room. At her.
    The front room of the apartment was quite large, with cream-washed walls, beads and mats hung there. The neighboring cat, who visited from time to time, lay on the coolest spot of floor under the spice fern. But even the cat hadn’t closed his eyes. He, like Picaro’s father, looked only at her.
    She filled that room. Not because she was big or fat. She was heavily built but shapely, blacker than the man, or the cat, black as Picaro. Her hair was short and tightly curled, and showed off her long smooth black neck, the angle of her jaw, which was like a carving of a princess from the east of the