Damiano's Lute (18 page)

“Not master,” said the angel, and Damiano nearly lost the wing.

“Teacher, then. You are a vision to rest my eyes. And it has been so long…. I thought my sight would not be so rewarded on this side of death's door.” Behind his grin Damiano's quick mind raced.

“You know, Raphael, I think I know how it is I can see you again. It is because of Saara, and the trick she played on me.”

“Ah? So it seems to you that it's you who have changed?” asked Raphael, and there was a shade of diffidence in his question.

“What else?” Damiano pushed closer to the angel, until he was almost sitting in Raphael's lap. I am clumsy as a dog, next to him, he thought. Like Macchiata, I wag my tail so hard I knock things over. But I don't care.

Aloud he said, “Of course the change is in me. You are an immortal spirit—how can you alter?”

The fair, chiseled face grew serious for a moment. “Not alter? Dami, even if that were true for me, standing out of time and place, once I had set foot upon the earth of Provence or the Piedmont, and spoken with you, who alter so dramatically every moment of your life, and touched you, too… how can I not change?”

Now Damiano let the great pinion slide through his fingers. “I don't want you to change, Raphael. And for me—me to be changing you? That doesn't sound good.” Again he cleared his throat and scooted a few inches across the stone floor, away from the simple, gleaming robe. “I don't want to be a bad influence on you, Seraph.”

Raphael laughed. His laughter was never like bells, or sunshine, or running water. Raphael laughed like anyone else. “Don't worry about it, Dami.” His lapis eye glanced down at the lute in the corner.

“Did you want to play something for me?”

Without taking his eyes from the angel, Damiano scooped up his instrument. “I have a dozen things I could play for you.” His voice took on a note of warning as he added, “They are not like your pieces….”

“I wouldn't want to listen if they were,” answered Raphael dryly.

Of course, contact with the stone flagging had put the crotchety lute out of tune again. As he worked it back, Damiano had a sudden idea, brought on by the splendor of the moment. “Hey, Raphael. Do you think we could… I mean, would you be willing to play with me? I mean, not as a lesson, but for fun?

“It has been a long time that I've wanted to do that,” he added plaintively. “And I think my playing has improved lately.”

Raphael's left eyebrow rose. His right wing twitched like the tail of a thoughtful cat. “I did not bring my instrument,” he demurred, but his fingers drummed his knee as though hungry for work.

“Your lute? Or harp, viella, viol, recorder? My dear teacher, what is it you play when you are not giving lute lessons?” demanded Damiano, and in asking that question (which had bothered him the better part of two years), the young man felt he had crossed a sort of Rubicon.

Raphael opened his mouth to answer, but then his flaxen brow drew down and he turned his head, listening. There were trotting steps in the passage. Raphael extended his hand and shook Damiano gently by the shoulder. “Later,” he whispered. “We have all the time in the world to play. Right now the boy is unhappy.”

White wings and white gown flashed upward, fading into the rising light of day.

Gaspare burst the crude door open. His face was red and white in blotches. “She isn't anywhere,” he growled. He kicked his bedroll and cursed. “Not in the taverns and not in the churches. She's not washing, nor praying nor eating nor drinking nor whoring. Not anywhere.”

An Italian musician, the innkeeper had said. How ironic that seemed to Damiano, whose journey to Provence was largely a pilgrimage for the sake of its music. After a bit of questioning, Damiano became certain that it was not any essential Italianate quality that the man desired in an entertainer, but only that he be an exotic, like the Irishman. Damiano was confident he could give the fellow something he hadn't heard before.

This was no poor establishment, the inn across the street from Monsieur MacFhiodhbhuidhe's house. Had it possessed sleeping rooms, Damiano and Gaspare would never have been able to afford the use of them. But it was only called an inn for lack of any better word to call it, being a place where wine was served by the glass and little tarts on salvers of pewter. Originally, before the Papacy moved from Rome, it had been the house of the Bishop of Avignon, and still, of an evening, functionaries of the court of Innocent VI filtered through the guarded gates of the Papal Palace and lounged about in the great top-floor assembly room, eating, drinking, gossiping and ignoring the music. The Bishop's Inn maintained a pastry kitchen and offered a large selection of wines, both local and imported. In fact, it was almost a cafe, in a country in which coffee had not yet been discovered.

Damiano considered this perhaps the most civilized establishment he had ever seen, and he was glad to be employed in it. He was also nervous. He was—barring the pink-cheeked serving girls—the youngest person in the music room, too. That made him even more nervous.

He sat in the shadow of the pillared colonnade at one side of the room. Above his head a small window let in the twilight and the rooftop breezes of the city. Vine tendrils sharpened one another not far from his ear. He toyed with a spice bun he had been allowed to buy for half-price.

These old men, and churchmen, too. If ever there was an audience before which he ought to play conservatively, this was it. Could he? Touching the top of his lute (damned instrument: poorly made, badly fretted. No hope for it), he knew he could not.

For he was the tool of his music. As once his will had passed like braided winds through the length of his black staff, so now the music which sounded on his lute seemed to come through him from another source. If he tried to play for prudence—if he tried to play as he had played a year and a half ago, he would only play badly.

Gaspare sidled in. Now Damiano was not the youngest man in the room. “Almost ready, the fat man says,” hissed the redhead. His drooping finger curls were oiled glossily. He wore a bright green velvet mantle which pulled his shoulders back and pressed against his neck. Having just bought the garment today, Gaspare was immensely vain about it and would not take it off, even though torchlight and the heat of many bodies had made the chamber stuffy.

“Don't call Monsieur Coutelan that to his face,” chided Damiano, and he fished in his pocket for the piece of soft leather which would keep the bowl of the lute from slipping on his lap.

Gaspare ignored him. “You know, Delstrego, there is a guild in Avignon. A guild of musicians.”

The dark man grunted, lost in tuning. “A guild is a good thing. We should join it.”

Gaspare danced a nervous step. “I told Coutelan you were a member already.”

“Then we will certainly have to join,” said Damiano, and he walked toward the torchlight.

He did what he could, in the beginning. He played the dances of home, which bored him, and he emphasized the treble at the expense of the bass. He played no piece that the average man of Provence might be expected to feel he had desecrated. He did not sing.

Yet, for all that, it was not anyone's usual music, not even in Avignon, where the New Music had been born, for Damiano's polyphony went from two lines to three to four, and sometimes dissolved into a splash of tone in which no separate lines could be discerned at all. He pulled his strings with his left hand till they whined like the viol. And he brushed his strings with his right hand till they rang like a harp.

And after ten minutes, when he realized that none of this plump, balding, oily-eyed crowd was listening, he gave up trying to please them. Instead he did as he had done very often in the past year, when the audience was drunk, argumentative or merely absent. He played for Gaspare.

In a way, this was fortunate. In a way, this made him happy, for with Gaspare there was nothing he could not do without being understood; the boy knew his idiom as no one else could, and could not be satisfied by anything other than the best Damiano could do. Damiano played for Gaspare as one old friend might converse with another: fluently and without theatrics. In his self-satisfaction he began to sing a nonsense descant above the melody, adding sweeping arpeggios to the accompaniment.

“Let the lute be the lute”? Why, this
was
the lute, and anything it did well belonged to it by right. Damiano smiled to himself. He liked what he was doing and how he was doing it. It didn't matter if the audience was not listening.

But it had grown very quiet out there. Perhaps they
were
listening, now. Even the comte had started to listen, after Damiano had quite given up on him. Damiano glanced up without breaking rhythm.

He could see five ornate little tables, each with a small group of men—only men, of course—seated around it. Beyond that distance his eyes couldn't focus.

And these small groups were silent, and their attention fixed not on Damiano, but on a half-dozen well-dressed fellows who stood between the musician and the audience, leaning on brutal-looking wooden clubs.

Damiano blinked at six faces set like stone into bad intention. It took him another few seconds to realize that their hostility was focused on him. Then he was aware that Gaspare was standing behind him.

All his confused brain could do was to repeat to itself, “At least it was never much of a lute. At least it is no great loss.” He was just finishing the refrain of a Hobokentanz. He began it again, and he spoke to the men who he knew were about to attack him.

“If you are all planning to hit me together, I don't think there is much I can do about it, messieurs. However, I would like you to know that I have no idea what I have done to offend you.” And then he kept playing.

One man, a tall, narrow-chested fellow wearing a dagged jerkin of red, hefted his thorn stick. The others followed. “Mother of God,” whispered Damiano, “this is terrible.” He felt Gaspare behind him, shaking like an angry dog.

Then a blond head swam out of the red torchlight into Damiano's shortsighted vision. It belonged to the harper of the impossible name whom Damiano had accosted the day before. The Irishman put out a hand on each side and the ruffians froze.

And so Damiano played on. He played thinking that this might be the end for him—that he might never play another song—and so he played to please himself. He freed the base line. He feathered the strings (let the harper glare). He sang to his lute like a mother with a sleepless baby.

And he finished the piece without being knocked on the head.

There was silence. The ruffians had gone; the harper stood alone. Damiano rested his lute on his boots as the harper approached, stepping with great dignity in his Provençal robe.

“So that is what you meant,” he began, with his odd, shushing, boneless Irish accent, “by all that babble about bass lines and polyphony and my right hand.”

The younger man nodded, half smiling. “Yes. That is what I meant. Does it seem… terrible to you? An offense against the nature of the lute, perhaps?”

The blond man pulled up a chair. “No. It does not. But then I am not particularly sensitive to offenses against the nature of the lute, especially when they seem to flatter the harp.” He shot Damiano a sharply pointed magnificent glare. “Oh, my philosophy is unchanged, young man. It is always better to treat an instrument as what it is. But I cannot criticize your music. Because it works. It obviously works. And when music works, philosophies cannot touch it.

“Now I am going to get a honey and walnut roll from these people, along with a glass of something, and then I shall come back to listen once more.”

Damiano was so caught between confusion and gratitude than that his face grew hot. But as MacFhiodhbhuidhe rose again, the harper
paused to say, “Oh, by the way, monsieur, you cannot play the lute in Avignon without belonging to the guild.”

“Eh? Is that why the… gentlemen were upset with me? Well, I didn't know it was an obligation, and now I most certainly shall join.”

Two black eyebrows arched up and the harper's smile was wry. “It isn't so easy. Men have waited ten years to be accepted into the Guild of Avignon. And unless you have a sponsor, it is very expensive.”

Damiano heard a cry and a stamp of disappointment from Gaspare behind him. He himself stared down at the parquet floor, wondering, “What next? What next?”

“But I wouldn't worry about it tonight,” continued MacFhiodhbhuidhe, as his eyes roved the hall, seeking the attention of a maid. “I myself happen to be the Mayor of the Guild of Musicians at Avignon.”

One more surprise would leave him numb, thought Damiano. “And… you… would consider sponsoring me, Monsieur MacFhoid… MacFhioda…”

With a contemptuous wave of his taloned hand the harper swept away both Damiano's incipient gratitude and the problem of his name. “I said don't think about it tonight.” The maid appeared then, with a wooden tray upon which were piled seven varieties of heart's delight.

As Damiano tuned, preparatory to playing again, the harper downed the last of his honey walnut roll in a long draft of wine infused with violets. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. (Like a cat, the harper kept his hand soft and round, the claws hidden within.) “You know, Monsieur Delstrego,” he said conversationally, “it is part of the duties of the Mayor of the Guild to lead the disciplinary companies.”

It took a moment for Damiano to digest this. “You mean…”

“Yes. To beat the pulp out of any intruder who dares to play an instrument for money within the limits of Avignon.” And MacFhiodhbhuidhe chuckled mildly to himself, took out his block of pumice, and began to file his nails. Damiano and Gaspare grinned uncomfortably at each other.

 

Chapter 7

Last summer, during the excited farewells spoken by Gaspare and Evienne and the more composed ones of Damiano and Jan Karl, Gaspare had arranged to meet his sister again at the door to the Papal Palace in Avignon on Palm Sunday. Jan had said there was such an edifice as the Pope's Door, and the rest had believed. From that ten months' distance it had seemed that to slice through time with an accuracy of one day was feat enough.