The Damiano Series (19 page)

Damiano blushed. “Those four coins are all I want,” he insisted. “For memory's sake.”

Gaspare shot him a glance of disgust and spat on the wall. “Do you really want to insult me that bad? Or are you merely an innocent from birth?

“Besides—if you leave the pile with me, I'll have to share with Evienne, unless she has had better luck. Which I doubt.”

“With E-Evienne? The whore?” Damiano stuttered. “Do you mean…” and his voice trailed off, for he could think of no delicate way to phrase his question. The boy seemed hardly old enough to employ her services, and far too hungry to spend his little bit of money in that manner.

“I mean she is my sister, and the only family I have, may Gabriele pray for me!” As the boy spoke he was dropping his harvest into the leather bag.

“But you said she was worthless.”

Gaspare peered at Damiano from under a ragged red brow. “She is,” he stated. “She can't make a decent whore no matter how long she's at it. You saw her today, wasting time with a musician while the town is full of fat peasants with full pockets. Evienne is like me in that way—we are too civilized for our own good.”

The boy obviously enjoyed Damiano's discomfiture. “I think maybe you are one of God's innocents, my friend. What's your name, eh? When you are famous, I want to be able to say I danced with you.”

Damiano chuckled, opened his mouth, and then closed it again. “If I tell you my name, Gaspare, I may never be able to play the lute for you again.”

Gaspare's breath hissed in. “I thought so. You play by magic!”

“No. Not magic. Just human nature. You see, I don't usually play the lute so… spiritedly. But today I forgot myself. If I tell you my name, it will remind me.”

The boy burst out laughing, and the scarlet cloak slipped to the ground. Damiano felt a silly smile stretching over his face. He dropped his eyes to his knees, which were propped in front of him. “Just call me Festilligambe,” he mumbled.

“Festilligambe! Is that your nickname, musician? It's hardly elegant.”

Damiano shook his head. “That's my horse's nickname. And he's really a rather elegant horse; I gave him that name after a storm, when he tried to crawl into bed with me and it felt like sleeping on a pile of sticks.

“And speaking of Festilligambe—
Dominus Deus!
I left him in the field with the oxen, all this time ago. I'd better go.” Damiano rose and began the task of piling his gear once more on his back. Gaspare helped him. “I'm not used to having a horse,” Damiano added. “I never should have left him alone so long.”

“No. You'll be lucky if he's still there,” the boy agreed. “I hope you at least tied him well.”

Damiano shook his head abstractedly, while he peered about him to see what he had forgotten. “No. I don't own a rope, and anyway I'm better at untying things…”

He turned then and stared full at Gaspare, as though he were trying to memorize the freckled, peaked face. “Gesu be with you,” he said. “Gesu and the Virgin. I hope we meet again.”

Gaspare glared, as though parting itself were an insult. “Where are you going, musician? Don't you need a dancer, maybe, and a man to pass the hat?”

Damiano blinked, startled, and almost overbalanced beneath his heavy burdens. “I'm going to the lakes of Lombardy, Gaspare,” he said, “where the witch Saara dwells. Though exactly where her house is I don't know. I won't have time to play the lute on my journey, except around the fire at night, and there'll be no one to hear me at all.”

The urchin's scowl grew more fierce. “Why? You could make a name for yourself with that lute, and it wouldn't be Festilligambe.”

Damiano shrugged, and his gear rattled in sympathy. He took a step backward, away from Gaspare's disappointment. “I'm doing it to save my city,” he explained in a whisper. “If I could do that by playing the lute, things would be much better, but…” He shrugged again, noisily, and turned away from the boy and the street corner in San Gabriele.

At his feet Macchiata spoke, breaking a silence that had lasted all the afternoon. “He gets upset very easily,” she remarked. “I thought maybe he was going to hit you. Then, of course, I would have bitten him.” She sighed and trotted on.

“You must understand, little dear, that he is poor. And being poor is one continuous disappointment.

“But even if he is poor, Macchiata, our Gaspare is never mean. He is generous and fair, and a lover of the arts, besides—which is a quality that runs in his family.”

At the top of the path sloping south from the village, Damiano stopped to drink in the sight of the quiet, tended fields, where the colors were already growing dim. As a man of his time, he found a greater beauty in tilled soil than in wild grass, and he favored orchards over forests. But then, in his travels he had seen far more wild than tended land, and he knew how hard it was to break the earth with a hoe.

Perhaps he would set his camp where he had left the gelding: by the paling of live poplars to the right of the road. The weather promised to be fair—though Alpine weather was notoriously faithless regarding its promises. It only remained now to see whether Festilligambe had also proved faithless.

Damiano peered ahead as he clambered over the roughly broken soil. He touched his staff to sharpen his vision and could see what might be the dark outline of the horse against the trees, silhouetted against the setting sun. But if it was the horse, it possessed light spots that were bouncing about in most unhorselike fashion.

Then the witch's vision cleared (the moon was waxing), and at the same moment Macchiata started a growl in her belly that threatened to shake the earth. Damiano stared, and understood, and finally broke out laughing. He stepped steadily forward toward the poplar fence. “Don't get upset, Macchiata. This is really quite funny,” he said.

The black outline was indeed Festilligambe, while the white shape bouncing upon it was not part of the horse at all, but a frustrated human rider, in shirtsleeves, who had tied a crude rope bridle upon the animal and was now bounding in his seat while his heels kicked, his bony hands slapped, and in other ways he tried to encourage the horse to move.

The black gelding, however, stood with its legs braced against the earth as though it planned never to move again. Its little ears were laid back as flat as a cat's, and its liquid eyes were rimmed with white.

“Did I doubt you, noble steed?” whispered Damiano, as with one hand he held Macchiata by the scruff, lest she interfere with the comedy. He crouched to the earth and let his packs slide off his back. At that moment the man on the horse raised his head a fraction.

Damiano choked on his own breath, and his eyes widened as though he had seen a ghost (or more correctly, as though an ordinary man had seen a ghost). For in that fair and somewhat sullen set of features he recognized a man he had thought never to see again: the uncommunicative golliard, Jan Karl. And the thief had not see him.

This was too wonderful. Quietly Damiano bent and took his staff in his hands, whispering the words of the spell that was almost his favorite, becoming invisible to prolong the wonder of the moment Then he stepped confidently forward.

Jan Karl—or Till Eulenspiegel, as he seemed to call himself—was no danger to a wary man, let alone one with the powers of Damiano. His thin, soiled student's shirt hung on his starved shoulders as on a hanger of wood. His lank fair hair was brown with dirt and lay plastered against his face, which had been touched by that shade of gray-purple that indicated too much exposure to the cold. A
rag
wrapped two fingers of the thief's left hand; Damiano suspected frostbite. He remembered the golliards' frantic flight into the night, sans coat or mantle.

He remembered the bundle of letters he still carried in his pack, arrow-pierced and written in a strange tongue. And Damiano had not forgotten what Macchiata had said: this thief, at least, had not wanted to kill him. As he stood in thought beside the tableau of obdurate horse and ineffectual rider, the horse became aware of him. Festilligambe's cavernous nostrils twitched and his ears revolved like mill wheels. Macchiata, who leaned invisibly against her invisible master's calf, gave an answering whuff. With an audible snap, Damiano broke the spell.

The horse bucked in shock, and Jan Karl toppled from its bare back to the ground. A totally impossible figure loomed over the golliard, outlined black as Satan against the light of the setting sun. It growled like a dog, or somewhere a dog was growling, and the young blond's misadventures had made him very sensitive to that sound.
“Lieber Gott!
Spare me!” he wailed in a mixture of German and French, covering his face with his discolored hands. “It is all too much!” he added in bastard Italian.

Damiano peered down at his fallen enemy from under a corrugated brow. He sighed, feeling an inappropriate stab of pity for the fellow and feeling ridiculous besides. Even the less forgiving dog forgot to growl, running her tongue over her bristly lips and plopping her backside onto the broken soil. Damiano cleared his throat. “You didn't do as much,” he said, in tones that were meant to sound menacing and came out more querulous, “to spare an innocent stranger who thought to be your friend.”

At the sound of Damiano's voice the northerner raised up on his elbows, his purple visage paling to one of white terror. “No. You're dead!
Donner und Pfannkuchen!
Do me no harm—it wasn't I who killed you. It was that damned Frenchman, and I only met him in Chamonix…” The blond began to cry, in great, hysterical sobs.

Damiano shifted from foot to foot. “I know,” he began lamely, but his words went unheard. He started again, louder.

“I know it wasn't you who killed… I mean
tried
to kill me. I'm not dead, you know,” he added. “Ghosts don't generally look like this. But that's no thanks to you.”

Karl's face went blank, then wary. “Not dead? Then why are you haunting me?”

Damiano snorted. “I'm not haunting you. That's my horse you're trying to steal.”

With a groan and a thump, Jan Karl fell back against the earth.
“Donner und…
Blast me now. Get it over with.”

Seeing the scarecrow figure lying there, limp and theatrical before him, Damiano couldn't hold back his grin. But he turned his attention to Festilligambe the honor of whose word had created this situation. “You're a good fellow, Festilligambe,” he whispered into the tiny black ear. “No need to stay planted any longer. Go shake your heels in the fields a bit, and then we'll eat.”

The gelding made a stiff bound into the air, as though the strings that had held him had snapped. As he descended his teeth clicked playfully into the corona of Damiano's hair, and then he was off, barreling across the empty field, sending sprays of dirt behind him.

“Eh! Watch you don't catch a leg in a hole!” Damiano shouted after him, then he turned back to his captive, whom he half expected to find gone—whom he half
hoped
to find gone.

The golliard lay as he had before, passive and shivering on the ground: the very picture of oppression. Macchiata lay next to him, her tail wagging in quiet satisfaction. “Wh… what are you going to do with me?” Karl blurted. Damiano regarded the man irritably.

“Well, since you won't run away. Or can't,” he amended, sparing a glance at the dog, “I guess we'll have to do something. Let me see your hand.”

Karl did not oblige. “Are you going to cut it off?”

“That may not be necessary.” Damiano pulled the bandaged member from the blond's side; Karl had little strength to resist him. “At least not all of it.” As he unwound the rag, the prisoner stiffened and cried out. The inner layers of cloth were blackened with dry blood.

The little finger was dead, the ring finger gone to the second knuckle. The hand itself was swollen and veined with red and black like a small map. Damiano swallowed, swept through once more by his ungovernable pity. He took a deep breath and spoke as harshly as he could. “This was going to kill you, man. Didn't you know?”

Karl's water-blue eyes widened. “But it doesn't hurt much, like it used to. With all the miserable things that have happened in the past ten days, I haven't had time to…”

“Eh?” Damiano interrupted, staring gently into the distance, at nothing. “It's been a hard week for you, has it? Well, things run in cycles, like the moon. And the moon is increasing. Wait here and don't move,” he commanded, rising to his feet, “while I set up camp. This place is as good as any, as long as the husbandman doesn't show up brandishing a pitchfork.” Damiano picked his long-legged way over the hummocks of soil to his pile of gear. He returned burdened and threw a blanket down.

“Here,” he said. “Wrap yourself in this and stop shaking.” When the wondering Karl had done so, Damiano plunked the wineskin on top of him. “Start drinking now, you skinny Swissman. You're going to need it later.”

Picking up the leather sack with his right hand, Karl obeyed, asking no questions. After two or three good swigs he stopped to gasp air, his nose prickling with the fumes of alcohol. “I'm Dutch,” he announced. “Not Swiss. And I'm a long way from home.”

Damiano paused in the process of driving a stake of poplar into the ground. He leaned his hammer-rock against the butt of the stake and cocked an interested eye at Karl. “That's true,” he admitted. “I know very little about that country, except that it is wet. But with two rotting fingers you would never have returned to the Low Countries. Nor would you have ever read another letter from your dear old mother.”

“My mother died when I was born,” said Karl, and he took another drink, or series of drinks.

Damiano shrugged as he pounded. “Sweetheart, then. Whosever letters you keep in a bundle in your pack.” Seeing the dawning of slow understanding on Karl's face, Damiano chuckled and dove into his saddlebag, from which he pulled the faded, pierced bundle of letters. He tossed them onto the blond's lap.