Damiano's Lute (23 page)

“Not under these c-c-circumstances,” replied Gaspare, whose teeth chattered despite the wool and velvet. “Can't we hurry, please?”

Lowering his eyes from the painted grandeur, Damiano obediently strode on.

The black wood doors were plain along this wall: like what one imagined of the rooms of vowed religious. But still by their spacing the doors said that these were not poor quarters inside, and the wall itself was inset with parquetry. Damiano stopped and leaned against the stone, sighing.

“We're lost?” quavered Gaspare, drawing his cloak around him.

“No,” whispered the witch. “We're not lost. He's found. Jan Karl. He's within.”

His was an unfortunate head for a tonsure, being pointed slightly off-center. That head and the drawn, ascetic face below it were all that was visible of Karl, poking out of a roll of soft blankets on a bed with sheets.

“Nice situation,” mouthed Gaspare to Damiano, who was singing and therefore could not reply. The witch fed his pet flame to a candle, then shook his hand out. He knelt tenderly down beside the sleeper.

Oddly enough, it was when Damiano stopped his singing that Jan Karl awoke, to see figures standing over him by the light of his own devotional candle. Before he could open his mouth Damiano had clamped a hand on it.

“Early for matins, I know,” he whispered cheerily into the man's ear. “But after all, it
is
Holy Week.”

Jan gurgled, and when Damiano brought the candle close to his own dark face (the flame touched the skin) and to Gaspare's (he was more careful) the Dutchman seemed in no way reassured. His deep-set blue eyes shifted warily and his swaddled form thrashed about.

“No fear, Jan,” crooned Damiano. He removed his hand. “It was only that I did not want you to wake your saintly neighbors in your surprise at seeing us.”

Gaspare was standing behind Damiano. He pushed forward. “Where's my sister?” he demanded. “Why weren't you at the Pope's Door, like you said you would be?”

Karl sat up, dragging his blankets with him against the night chill of the stone walls. “Gaspare,” he began in his wretched Italian. “And Delstrego, of course. I did not forget our appointment. No, not at all. But there is a story behind that…”

“Evienne!” spat the boy. “Tell me now. Is she alive or dead?”

Karl raised his hands to his head in a gesture of horror which turned into an admonition for Gaspare to be quiet. “She is alive, of course, and may Christ preserve her in health.”

“Where? Where is she?” pressed the boy with unabated volume.

Jan Karl turned to Damiano as the more sensible member of the pair. “We cannot talk here,” he said. “Let us meet someplace later.”

Damiano smiled beatifically. “I'm afraid later may lead to another story, Jan. Let us go someplace else and talk now.”

The blond head (bald in the middle) shook from side to side. “No. Impossible. I'd never get out of this building unnoticed.”

The dark musician rolled a little ball of blue fire between his hands. He squatted convivially next to Karl and showed the trick to him. “Oh, yes, you will,” he whispered. “You'll be surprised at how easy it is.”

And again he began to sing.

They sat like three rooks on the stone step of the dolphin fountain, under cover of the plash of water. Jan Karl was in the middle, with Gaspare and Damiano crowding him close on each side. Both Gaspare and Karl, wrapped in wool, shivered in the predawn chill. Damiano, who shone like a ghost in his white linen undershirt, felt not the cold at all.

“You have to understand,” repeated the Dutchman for the third time, “it has been a year. Things change in a year.”

“Things change in a day—in a minute,” replied Damiano. “Gaspare cannot forget it has been a year since you left with his sister.”

“Where is she?” One of Gaspare's bony hands flexed painfully on Karl's thigh, causing the cleric to wince. “In a single word, you can say it.”

Karl stared peevishly at the boy. “At Cardinal Rocault's great house. There. I've given you five words. Are you any the wiser?”

“Explain,” suggested Damiano, and he dealt Karl a comradely blow upon the shoulder, using a hand from which fire only lightly flickered.

Jan turned on him between fear and anger. “Delstrego, you have it in you to be a real bully, do you know that?”

Damiano only smiled.

“This child's poor sinful sister has had the spiritual elevation of finding a place in the household of a very important man, in the cardinal. I rejoice in her good fortune.”

Though Jan was speaking Italian, not French, it took Gaspare a few seconds to translate. “In the household of a cardinal? What is she doing for this cardinal—scrubbing pots?”

The Dutchman tried vainly to hide his smile. “I think her position is more delicate than that.” He smirked.

Damiano blinked at Karl as earnestly as a dog. “Cardinals are all very old men, are they not, Jan?”

The grin on the Dutchman's wide mouth grew and grew, but it didn't change his blue stone eyes. “Some are, some are not. Cardinal Rocault, for instance…”

“Yes. It is about him I ask.”

“He is not an old man at all. But very learned.” The Dutchman's smile went out. “And powerful.”

Gaspare took some time digesting this information. “My sister,” he began at last, “has attained to high position?”

“High position?” Jan considered. “You could say so. A position under the cardinal, anyway.”

Once more, he cringed away from the witch's licking flames.

“I have some authority,” he stated, his face expressionless, though his eyes sought back and forth to see what effect his words had. “I translate when necessary from the Dutch and German. I manage the Holy Father's ordinary dinners occasionally. I have been able to find work for… friends.”

“My sister's work,” grumbled Gaspare, feeling that the conversation was departing from its proper channels. “Did you find
that
for her?”

The Dutchman opened his cold-sea eyes very wide and innocent. “I did, though I did not know the trouble it would cause.”

Damiano broke in. “You mean, you did not know that the cardinal would become enamored of Evienne?”

Jan's long face grew wry. “I didn't know that the cardinal would become enamored of the Papacy. That is the problem between Evienne and myself. And—that is why I had to miss our appointment today.

“Yesterday, rather,” he corrected himself, gazing with obvious forbearance at the black heavens.

There was puzzled silence from his two listeners. Jan pulled the foot of Gaspare's mantle over his knees and elaborated further. “Cardinal Rocault, you ought to know, expects the Holy Father to die at any time. He is an old man, and not very sound, and Rocault helped elect him, judging that Innocent would live just long enough for his own campaign to come to fruition.

“Well, how long has it been? Six years? Six years of Innocent VI, and the old fellow is in better health than when he started. All the world knows that Rocault is getting impatient.”

Damiano's eyes were most earnestly doglike than before. “Are you saying, Jan, that Cardinal Rocault has designs upon the life of the Holy Father?”

Karl recoiled against a stone dolphin. “I did not say that, did I?”

“But it seemed to be your meaning.”

“Seeming and meaning are free, Delstrego,” pronounced the Dutchman. “Saying can cost you your head. If you are to live in Avignon, you must remember that.

“But to return to the subject. When first I returned to Avignon, the party of Rocault had not come into open confrontation with Innocent, and I used my position on the household staff to introduce Gaspare's sister…”

“Your lover…” interjected Damiano, just to keep things clear.

“Evienne of San Gabriele,” countered the Dutchman, “to the cardinal's steward. It was a happy circumstance, at least for a few months. But now there is a great deal of tension between the cardinal's staff and those of us already here in the palace.

“I am watched,” Jan Karl announced. “Always watched.”

Damiano was not impressed. “So what does it matter, then, if you are seen with us? I, for one, am not of any Papal party. I am not even a thief.”

Because of his wide mouth and the length of his jaw, Jan Karl's grin seemed to cut his face in half. “It is true, Delstrego, that your language does not give a bad impression, and your manner is haughty enough. But you and Gaspare are both so raw to Avignon that you may compromise me any time you open your mouths.”

The open earnestness died from Damiano's face. “It is true,” he whispered. “I can think of very little truthfully to say which would not compromise you, Jan.”

Jan stood. “I can have you thrust out of here on the point of a pikestaff, Delstrego.”

“I can send you to hell at the point of a pitchfork,” answered the witch, as fire of three colors bloomed in his outstretched hand.

“Please,” hissed the boy Gaspare, whom both the others seemed to have forgotten. “Please do not argue with him, Damiano. He has yet to tell us how to find Evienne.”

But this exchange of unpleasantries had the contrary effect of cheering Jan Karl considerably. His lean shoulders wiggled under the wrap of bedding and he chuckled at the dark and glowering Italian. “I will tell you how to find her, Gaspare. The rest is your problem.

“But Damiano—I just remembered. Do you still play the lute a little, like you did last winter? If so, maybe I have a job for you. Private dinner, on Easter Saturday. For the Pope and the terrible cardinal together.”

Damiano felt the blood drain from his face. “To play? For the Holy Father?”

“And Cardinal Rocault. It is to be quite an occasion. Keep your eyes and ears open and you might learn something. Which you must relate to me, of course.”

Damiano said nothing. He was breathing hard.

“Are you afraid, Delstrego?”

Gaspare spoke up. “Of course he is not! He is merely planning what he should play.”

 

Chapter 9

Damiano woke because the lute was gouging his skin. He wormed his hand in between the neck of the instrument and his cheek to feel a rectangular gridmark of strings and frets. He felt alert and ready for the day, though he had slept only a few hours.

Last night (this morning really) he had known ten minutes' panic that his change of state had destroyed his ability to play. But that had been only nerves, as well as a confusion of sensations to which his past year as a simple man had left him unaccustomed. And since the other occupants of the inn-chamber were already waking for the day, he had been able to practice until sleep took him.

Gaspare was still asleep. Of course—yesterday had been harder on him than on Damiano. Deliciously, Damiano stretched his feet out over the yellow straw and yawned, feeling more at home within himself than he had for long months. He could not think why he had allowed himself to remain immersed in melancholy all that time, when life was really quite enjoyable.

Tomorrow he was going to play before the Holy Father. That was enough to make one nervous. But it would quickly be over, and why should he think Innocent would be listening anyway, with Cardinal Rocault across the table from him?

More important to Damiano's practical concerns, he had five days more at the Bishop's Inn. Five days of playing in the corner of the high gallery, being alternately praised and ignored, while smiling respectfully at both Coutelan and MacFhiodhbhuidhe, (who spent more time in the inn than the innkeeper). And on the last day maybe he would say to them, “Messieurs, your interests are very limited. I myself am going off into the countryside, to make my music with a lovely white dove.”

No. He would say nothing of the kind, for he would want to come back. Besides, he should be nice to the Irishman, for he intended to ask him to take over at the inn for him tomorrow.

And also, such proud words could prove false, for Saara might not come in the shape of a dove at all. She might be retaining the form of an owl.

Or she might be a woman. Most likely she would be a woman.

Suddenly Damiano was very nervous: more nervous about Saara than about the Pope. He threw back the blanket. It was quite warm out.

Had he crawled off among the vines with a wine-stained Alusto grape crusher at the age of fourteen, like other boys, his heart would not now be assaulting his lungs in this manner. Had he not panicked under the covers with Saara herself, a few days ago, he would have no more reason to be nervous.

Damiano pulled on his clothes, all the while telling himself that a man ought either to fornicate like a dog as soon as he was able or keep his chastity for life.

Half-measures just made a body awkward.

Yet he felt unshakably committed to the impending effort at sin, and even his attack of nerves could do no more than spice his expectation. He trotted down the corridor and stepped into the sun.

Along the white cobbled street strolled Damiano, accompanied by the Archangel Raphael. Early afternoon sunshine liquefied the air around them, and the cries of hawkers (for Avignon was a huge market that never closed) echoed against the limed stucco, meaningless and ornamental as birdsong.

The mortal felt very privileged that Raphael had decided to come along, for as once before the angel had said, he was no great walker. He could no more walk without moving his wings than a Latin— Damiano, for instance—could talk without moving his hands. The great shimmering sails arced up and out, or down, or rolled together behind or in front, or pointed like great fingers to the sky. And it seemed an effort of concentration for the angel to put his foot to earth and keep it there.

Yet his progress was not clumsy but terpsichoric, and Damiano regarded the seeming fragility of his companion with great fondness. Whenever there was no one else within hearing, he spoke. “Seraph, your feet are not really touching the ground, are they? I mean—you are barefoot, and these cobblestones are dirty.”