Damiano's Lute (12 page)

They had stopped together, just beyond the duckpond. Together they stood under the sun, amid the buzzing of the season's first dragonflies. And Saara's smile was most maliciously sly. “All right, my pretty, sheep-face Damiano. So if you do love me what do we do about it?”

But if they had forgotten the purpose and urgency of their mission, Gaspare had not. He danced back, his feet impatient and demanding. “First you dawdle,” he hissed. “And then you stop entirely. I'd like to know how you expect to win your bread that way. Are you still bothered that our purpose is not holy enough, Damiano?”

The older fellow glared, but he was really glad of the interruption. A greater interruption followed, as the sound of unhurried footsteps scuffed up the road toward them, their maker hidden by the last hillock between the pond and the house.

With instinctive smoothness Gaspare's face became casual and innocent—far more respectable than its usual habit. He bent down and snatched up one of his cloth-booted feet, and examined the many rents in the material with proprietary interest. He also pointed to his foot, looking up at Damiano so that the approaching householder would see a tableau that raised no suspicious questions.

But to the ruin of his plans, Damiano's barefoot lady began to sing. Perfectly loudly she caroled, and tunefully, too. But her eyes were closed, and the words were quite mad.

“Damiano, Gaspare, me.
There is nothing here to see.
Damiano, Gaspare, me.
There is nothing here to see.”

The fine hairs on Gaspare's arms prickled. He stared wildly at Damiano, but his friend's dark face wore a peculiar expression of listening, colored by satisfaction. His face shifted from Saara to the person approaching as that one rounded the hillock.

It was a girl of perhaps sixteen years, her smooth hair hanging loosely over her shoulders. Her dress was pale homespun. She swung a flat basket, looking as bored as a sixteen-year-old girl may look, when out to gather eggs.

“Nothing but sky above your head,
Nothing but dirt on which you tread,
Damiano, Gaspare, me.
There is nothing here to see.”

The girl passed them by and she did not look toward them at all.

Damiano was grinning broadly. “It has been a long time,” he whispered in his throat, and then to Gaspare, “I don't know how she finds the rhyme so quick.”

But Saara paid him no mind. Still singing, she jerked on Gaspare's sleeve and signaled them both to follow. Feet of pinkish-brown leaped from the dust of the road to the grass bank, and hopped tussock to tussock into the wet. Gaspare and Damiano imitated her steps, Damiano with less agility, for despite adventure and an epiphany of the heart, his back still hurt.

“Damiano, Gaspare, me
There is nothing here to see.
Hear no sound of splashing legs,
Nor ducks' squeal as we steal their eggs.
Nothing but sky above your head
And slimy ooze through which you tread
Damiano, Gaspare, me…”

“It is getting longer,” said Damiano for Gaspare's ear only. “And she changes it a little as she goes. It's a wonder she can remember!”

Gaspare leaped over a freshet and helped his friend after. His spare face was transfigured, and his prominent eyes stood out. “Is this magic?” he hissed back. “Real magic? The goosegirl cannot see us?”

Damiano nodded. “But that is not to say she cannot hear us talk.” But even he could not resist adding, “Well, what do you think of magic—real magic?”

The boy made an owl face. “It is silly! And in terrible taste. But if it works, it's wonderful, of course.”

“Of course. All wonderful things are silly, and most are in abysmal taste.”

Saara, with unerring instinct, took four eggs from three squalling, sitting ducks, and then would search no more. Instead she slipped the eggs down the neckline of her embroidered dress, causing Damiano and Gaspare to wonder what held them there. Saara left the goosegirl rummaging through the nests, cursing the nips on her ankles, and she led her small parade over the grass and to the house.

“There is nothing here to see,
Nothing moves but wind in tree.”

They entered the farmyard, which was marked out by being slightly boggier and more laden with manure than the surrounding grass. A shortish, stocky horse of the Comtois breed stood grazing not fifty feet from the white house wall. The calloused scars of the ox-yoke covered his shoulders.

Damiano spared a moment's disapproval. “A horse shouldn't plow in a yoke. There are perfectly decent horse harnesses. Or better yet, they should get an ox for plowing.”

Both Gaspare and Saara shot him glances of irritation. She took him by the wrist and put a finger to her mouth, all the while singing her simple, repetitive song.

“Damiano, Gaspare, me,
There is no one here to see.
Nothing stirs upon the planking,
Form is missing, voice is lacking.”

“Ouch!” whispered Damiano, and Gaspare (who in all matters of art was sensitive) cringed his shoulders. Saara spared one offended sniff and then pulled them in behind her. Into the house.

It was dim within, and the stones were damp. Yet in this, the largest room of the house, two cook-fires gave their smoky warmth, and the odor of lamb and pastry was overpowering.

In the middle of the room, where the black rafters rose highest, a long table had been set, with benches at either side. On one side sat a man: burly, bearded, short, liberally daubed with mud. He reclined on one elbow, while he played with the last corner of the hard piece of flatbread that had been his dinner trencher. On the far side of the table sat a mug, surrounded by crumbs: remnants of the goosegirl's meal. A tall woman, thinner than either husband or daughter, was tending the fire beneath the iron oven-pot, which was raised on fieldstone to the height of her waist.

“It don' draw none,” she declared in a patois of langue d'oc and langue d'oil even Damiano could scarcely follow. “It needs you to build it again.”

The man turned to his wife with the slowness of seasons revolving. “You want I should build something, the time to say that is winter, not when the ground is open.”

“In winter you say you can't work stone because the ground is froze,” she replied, but without rancor. Indeed, this entire interchange had been conducted with a boredom on both sides equal to that shown by the girl at the duckpond.

Saara took Gaspare by the shoulders and set him down on the far end of the bench from the householder. Damiano she motioned to the bench on the far side of the table. Both young men sat in a paralysis of fear, to find themselves in such close and protracted contact with the people they were robbing. Gaspare's pale green eyes glowed almost white.

Now Saara's song changed, fading into the back of her throat, and the odd words Damiano could pick up were not Italian. She moved with practiced efficiency through the smoky kitchen, carving a quarter of lamb and cutting black bread with a knife as long as a boar spear and thin from much sharpening. Both the meat and the bread she wrapped in a scrap of dirty linen which lay by the potstove. This bag she dropped on the table in front of Gaspare, but as the boy goggled at it between terror and fascination, his mouth wet and working, she shoved it across the boards to Damiano, thinking perhaps that he would be the more trustworthy keeper. Then she went from the kitchen into a darker room behind it. Damiano heard her digging in sand.

The goosegirl returned, her wood-shod feet making a great racket on the floor. Gaspare started in panic, but Damiano leaned painfully across the table and put his restraining hand upon the boy's bony shoulder.

“I can't believe,” the girl announced, setting her basket between the intruders. “Only two eggs.”

Her father grunted heavily. “Not right, this season. There should be a half-dozen, at least, with all the ducks we kept over winter. It must be the foxes again. I'lll set the dog on them.”

This last suggestion infused Damiano with a warm glow—a ridiculous warm glow, as though he had been personally praised. A fox it had been in truth: a lovely, sly, green-eyed fox, and he heard her now in the pantry, stuffing things into a sack.

Magic or simple, whole or sundered, let no man say he did not love Saara the witch. And for a moment, in the middle of peril, with one hand on the racing pulse of Gaspare and his nose full of the smell of food, Damiano convinced himself that this was his own house he sat in, at his own kitchen table, with his own Saara singing from happiness in the next room.

Of course if it were his, the house would be light and dry, the walls fresh-limed, and the floor painted tile. If it were his, there would be rows of books, and one would be able to look out the window and see the clean mountains. And the beasts in the stable would be full-fed and glossy, with never a scar.

And this vision of bucolic contentment raised in him such a dizzying desire that he choked on it, and Gaspare looked up, his own fear turned to concern. Damiano frowned hugely, to show he was all right.

The peasant rose then, moving ponderously for his moderate size, and the goosegirl took his place by the table, staring. No word passed between her and her mother.

One year ago, or fifteen months, perhaps, Damiano reflected, he had lusted after immortal greatness. He had wanted the name of Delstrego to be linked with that of Hermes, the alchemist, and with Dante, the patriot. His only quandary had been whether to achieve his greatness through literature, music or natural philosophy.

And he had accomplished something.

For one night he had led an army (much against its will). On one winter's day he had bested the greatest witch in the Italies in single combat (and there she was in the pantry, singing). He had won a peace for the city to which he had bargained away his rights, forever.

And now, in the spring of his twenty-fourth year, Damiano could imagine no greater happiness than to live an unexceptional life within four rooms by a duckpond, in the company of a woman—a rose-faced, fox-faced woman—who went barefoot through the cold.

Viciously he informed himself that he could not have that form of happiness, nor any other that came upon the earth, for along with his rights to Partestrada, he had bargained away all rights to the future.

Damiano was standing by the table when Saara came singing from the pantry.

Sunlight hit them like a blow; even Saara blinked against it. Damiano gave Gaspare the bag and took from Saara the rough sack she had slung over one shoulder. The witch trotted them up the road the goosegirl had taken.

Without warning, a dog—the forgotten sheepdog, the dog that was to be set on foxes—exploded from a ditch at their feet. It was a heavy creature, almost the size of one of its own wooly charges, headed like a mastiff and bobtailed. Gaspare shrieked but clutched his parcel to him.

Damiano leaped forth. He stood between the animal and Gaspare, raised one arm and shouted, “Go! Go home!” in his most commanding bass.

The beast slavered, crouched down and sprang for Damiano's throat.

It was a sharp stone the size of a man's fist, and it caught the dog exactly over its left eye. Its charge went crooked and it landed on its outsized jaw. It peered at Saara—author of the stone—with a single working eye which was the size of that of a pig. With its little tail tucked down against its rump, the sheepdog backed sullenly away.

Damiano was full of admiration. “Not a beat!” he exclaimed, hefting his sack once more. “You missed not a beat while you jumped sideways, bent down, found the stone and tossed it!”

Saara returned his glance without enthusiasm. Her face was slick with sweat. Yet still the sure line of melody passed her lips, endless as a Breton ballad. She led them back to the wagon.

Out of green brush and long grasses Damiano hacked a nest for Saara. He bathed her face with water from Gaspare's leather drinking bottle, and dried it on his single change of shirt.

“You must keep watch,” she said weakly. “I won't know if someone comes near. I'm too tired.”

“I know,” replied Damiano, as he sat beside her, his head resting on one propped knee, his hand smoothing her braid. “Who should know better than I, how weary song-spelling becomes? In fact, when
the girl came in, I half expected the spell would fray.”

Eyes closed, Saara shook her head. “No. But if I had been singing in Italian it might have. What inspired me to try that, I don't know. I do not much speak the tongue, let alone sing in it!”

She looked up at him. “I guess that was for you, Dami. So you could know how it is I work.”

“I know already.” Damiano smiled. “You sang all the snows of winter upon me, along with a very large pine tree.”

Then Saara looked away again. “Is Gaspare keeping watch?”

“He is keeping watch and eating,” came the reply from above her head. The redhead sat cross-legged upon a spit of rock, with a trencher of black bread on his lap, piled with lamb. “He is very alert, and can do both at once,” the boy added.

Saara's face shifted from Gaspare to Damiano. “You,” she said. “You should be eating, too.”

He shrugged. “I'll wait for you.”

Saara pulled a soft pouch on a string from around her neck, and from it came four perfect, white eggs. She caught Damiano's eye. “I bet you were wondering,” she whispered slyly.

She divided the remaining bread and lamb into two piles, giving the greater share to Damiano. He, in turn, piled the meat back onto her trencher. “I can't eat it,” he admitted, shamefaced. “Not since I was a cow once.”

Saara stared. “I have been a cow before. I have been a lamb, for that matter, and yet I have no trouble.”

Damiano looked past her, and past the clearing off the road where the horse was tethered, to the light of the westering sun. “Ah, but were you ever a cow that someone butchered, my lady?”