The Damiano Series (42 page)

“Oh, Christ!” groaned Gaspare. “I have done it!” He hid his face in his hands. “He is beyond recovery.”

And now Damiano was pointing. “Look! Look, Gaspare. It is coming. Can't you see?”

The boy peeked. “I see a little bird,” he said in a flat voice. “A little bird bobbing and flapping, like little birds do.”

“She is
looking
for us,” the other insisted. “She is looking for me, I think.” Now he gesticulated with both hands, nearly overbalancing on the flimsy seat.

The horse snorted. Unobtrusively Gaspare sidled to the edge of the seat. The little bird (it was a dun-gray dove, with a ring around its neck) passed overhead, banked in the air and circled the wagon.

Gaspare glared from the dove to Damiano. The action was too perfect. He suspected this whole scene was a trick arranged especially for him, but for the life of him, he couldn't think how it had been done. As the bird circled again, Gaspare began to feel silly. He watched the dove descend to the dust of the road, where the horse sniffed it and uttered a very wise, deep nicker.

And then, while Damiano clambered down from the wagon seat, capering with what enthusiasm his striped back would permit, and as Gaspare's vision swam, the dun dove turned into a very beautiful— not lady, certainly, not with that blue felt dress which showed feet and ankles and more besides—a most exquisitely beautiful brown-braided, barefoot peasant maiden.

She put one hand upon the horse's shoulder, perhaps with the apprehension that her sudden appearance might have upset the beast. But Festilligambe might have been accustomed to transforming people since foalhood. His left ear twisted around but his right ear did not feel it was worth the effort. His head neither inclined nor flinched away. He inched away from her touch with only his usual diffidence.

She looked at the horse and the wagon and she looked at Gaspare (and at that moment the boy knew that this one
was
a great lady after all, even barefoot and in felt, so he swallowed firmly and bit down upon his unruly tongue) and then she looked through him and finally she allowed herself to look upon the young man standing in front of her.

“Where is this plague?” she said, speaking Italian with a strange, broad, bouncing accent. “Neither of you has such sickness in you.” Her small face showed concern, along with a certain shade of accusation, but as she frowned at Damiano, the tiny hairs that escaped her braids caught the sun. “Your only trouble is that you don't eat right.”

Damiano was looking at the gleaming bronze hairs instead of at the frown, while he himself was smiling so that he thought perhaps he would not be able to talk. “You—you came all the way from Lombardy, Saara. To see me? Because of my strange visit to you? Gaspare here was just telling me that you were a fever dream, like the time he had the spots and saw his sister as Saint Lucia.”

Then, before his bubbling triviality might have time to irritate Saara, he added, “Yes, my lady, there is plague behind us, and if we have escaped it I am only too glad. And the flogging I mentioned, which caused me to flee to you—that was real, too, though nowhere so terrible as the plague. But I did not think you would trouble yourself so….”

Saara the Fenwoman put her hand on Damiano's bare arm, intending to turn him around. As they touched she saw some shade of feeling in the movement of his eye and she said, “Don't worry, Dami.” Her frown dissolved. “Now that we are both present in body, it is no longer dangerous for me to touch you.”

Damiano's eyes opened wide. He scratched his own bare shoulder, and from his confusion he rescued some element of gallantry. “No longer dangerous? My sweet lady, it is because of our bodies that danger enters into it.” But as he spoke, pride turned his mangled back away from her.

“It is nothing worth looking at,” he declared. “No more than bramble scratches. Forget I ever spoke of it. I took off my shirt because the day was warm.”

Damiano met Saara's eyes slowly, for he was not a good liar, and he found in them a swirling, green-brown angry fire at this silliness of his.

As around Saara (and around the power of Saara) all things had unexpected color and focus, so even her anger took on brightness. Though once Damiano might have met, or at least understood this light of anger, now he could not even look at her. For she was the greatest and most assuredly the most beautiful witch in the Italies, while he had not even the fire with which he had been born.

So he was silenced and his eyes slid away. And as Saara saw this, her anger faded into something like pity, or like hurt, and upon that emotion yet another sort of anger fed.

“You fool! What under all the winds have you been doing to yourself? Don't you know that plague is death, and not all the magic that is in the earth can overcome it? And this…”as she spun him about and pointed to the scabbing weals, “how did you let
this
happen? Do you forget who you are? You! You who were once strong enough to carry half of my soul away with you, and then wise enough to bring it back!

“I know you, witch, for I carry around a dark child you have abandoned, and all it does is whisper your name! You cannot lose your self-respect without bringing shame to me. And if you should die, witch—Damiano—if you should die of plague in a far country, then what am I to do with that little shadow?”

Self-possession returned to Damiano between one moment and the next. His head snapped up and he rested his own large hand upon hers. “When I die, Saara, then you must release anything of mine that you hold. A dead man should be dead.”

Saara blinked: catlike, green, but uncertain. “Not ‘when,' but ‘if,' Dami. You are not sick, remember, but only underfed.” And in a whisper she added, “And I am much older than you.”

In that instant their positions were reversed, for the young man stood with quiet assurance, while Saara stepped back a pace, slipping her hand from his.

“And I ask again…” She raised both her arms in a world-embracing gesture. “Damiano, in a land filled with food, why have you starved yourself?”

During the prior conversation, Gaspare had sat on the wagon seat as motionless as the whipstock, while magic and talk of magic turned his head around, and while talk of dark children turned his ideas of Damiano on their heads.

But at this last question Damiano himself turned from Saara to Gaspare, and what he saw in that pinched, ruddy face caused him to break out laughing.

The boy took this as a sort of permission, and his own strong need pulled him from the wagon seat to the presence of the terrible, angry, beautiful barefoot lady, where he knelt and clasped his hands about her knees.

“Oh, signorina bellissima! He will never admit it, being too stiff-necked and mad besides, but he is starving to death in truth, and I am also. And if you are as great a lady as your appearance declares you, you will have pity on us and give us a little something. If you have no silver, then bread will do. Enchanted bread is very good, I have heard. Or enchanted roast pork, or even enchanted boiled greens….”

Saara had been aware of Gaspare on the wagon seat, just as she had been aware of Festilligambe between the traces, but when the boy fell at her feet, and clasped her embroidered dress she gaped from his red face to Damiano's dark one.

“Who?” she asked.

Gaspare's gesture began at Damiano and ended theatrically, slapping his own breast. “I'm his dancer,” he announced. “And if he has lost a little of his looks, signora, do not exclude him from your graces. Some of his decay is age, of course, as he is all of three and twenty, but most of it is only hardship, curable with a little kindness.”

His gooseberry green eyes stared wildly into her green ones as he stage-whispered, “I beg you only to remember the dark child!” Then, seeing in the elven face no perceptible sign of softening (indeed, Saara's expression was frozen by complete incomprehension), Gaspare added, “But if after all these entreaties, it still seems the fellow is beyond saving, it is perhaps worth noting that I am only fourteen at present, so my best years are certainly before me.”

Saara shifted within Gaspare's unslackening knee-clasp. She looked up once more at Damiano, who was so trapped between anger at Gaspare, sympathy with the boy and a general desire to laugh at the picture he made, that his face had gone nearly as red as the redhead's.

“Why do you need a dancer?” Saara inquired of him.

He cleared his throat. “Gaspare. Let the lady go now,” he commanded.

Obediently Gaspare released. Then in a reaction toward dignity the boy stood upright, brushing himself off.

Damiano brushed one hand through his hair as he continued, “I need a dancer, Saara, because I am a musician. I play. He dances. People pay us—when they feel like it.

“That is also why we are starving.” He laughed at his own words, not because they were very funny, but because he found it easy to laugh around Saara.

“I don't mean because we're bad, so no one wants to hear or see us. I don't think we're bad, either of us.”

“We're certainly not,” interjected Gaspare with a great deal of confidence.

“But no one in Franche-Comté knows us yet, and we don't even know where and when the markets are, so… it is not easy.”

Saara continued to stare, and though Damiano believed, or wanted to believe, that he knew the woman well, he could not read her expression. From somewhere within him a spark of defiance rose. “So why should I apologize?” He shrugged. “Being hungry isn't a sin.

The woman started, in abrupt, birdlike fashion. “Ruggerio would talk like that; he would say, ‘If I want to sleep till midday, so what? It isn't a sin.' Or in the summer he would say, ‘When you walk around without your clothes like that, Saara, you are sin waiting to happen.'

“Someday I must learn what a sin is,” she concluded.

Gaspare's guffaw at the mention of walking around without clothes was rather overdone. But then he thought that line expected a guffaw, and was rather annoyed that Damiano had missed his cue.

Because he did not like to be reminded of the Roman he had killed, Damiano remained sober. “I myself am never certain, my lady. But I have found that harm done to another person is usually a sin, while harm done to myself usually is not.”

Saara took her left braid in her right hand, and her right braid in her left, and she yanked on them both. Thoughtfully she regarded the sweet hills of grass and trees.

Behind them rose a height of vines, their leaves just breaking, waxy green against the chalky soil. Down ahead the road looped around water, and the rough calls of ducks rose in the air. Set back from both pond and highway was a house: a rural mansion, limed white and possessing at least four rooms. To the right of the road spread pastureland, dotted with sheep. As though apprehending her notice, a sheepdog began to bark.

The witch stood motionless, her lips twitching slightly. Gaspare opened his mouth to speak, but Damiano elbowed him neatly, for he knew what Saara was doing. “There.” She pointed. “Three people are in that house. There is a whole new lamb hanging over a smokefire. Also a barrel half filled with sleeping roots: turnips, maybe. And in the oven, pot pies are baking now; I think even the simple nose could smell them.”

Gaspare emitted a strengthless whine and leaned against Damiano, who could scarcely support him. Saara, with the forced patience of a mother with very slow children, spoke slowly and distinctly.

“You go down there and clap at their door, and tell them that you are hungry and have nothing to eat.”

A dozen expressions chased themselves across Gaspare's features.

He whispered, “And you will enchant them into feeding us, O great and beautiful lady?”

Saara's smile was scornful. “Of course not. I will do nothing. They will give you food because it is what they ought to do, and they will be glad to do it.”

The boy deflated, and even Damiano looked a trifle wan. “I'm sorry, Saara,” he said. “But they will not. These are the civilized peasants of France, and they will give away nothing for free.”

She looked at him sidelong, but the honesty of his regard was convincing. “But how do they expect to live themselves, when their sleds are empty, if they do not feed the unfortunate now?”

“They rely on providence and their own management to prevent that from ever happening,” he replied, and Gaspare chimed in with, “They are hard, the people of France. Very hard!”

Saara sought advice from the black, disinterested eyes of the horse, and failing there, from her naked toes. She nibbled delicately at the end of one braid. Finally she raised her chin and nodded.

Her face was stern. “I believe what you tell me, Damiano, though I cannot see how a land can work so. Things are more just in the land of the Lapps….” Her words fell away, as though her memories had changed in midsentence. “Well, no mind. If they will not feed you, you must take what you need. It is only fair.”

Gaspare jumped up and down in place. “Hah. That's what I've been telling him since November last!”

Damiano did not respond to the boy. “Saara,” he said instead, “if we are caught stealing we could be hanged, or could have our hands chopped off. Without a hand I will not be able to play the lute.”

Saara sputtered, and her pink feet danced over the road. “Is that all it would matter to you? That you would not be able to play the lute? Well, Damiano, I will try to see you do not get caught. What more can I say?”

Pain added an extra glitter to Damiano's eyes, for he had donned his woolen shirt. The three thieves strolled casually along the dry and empty road, with Saara's witchsense keeping watch. Damiano walked stiffly, and the Fenwoman kept to his side, so that left Gaspare to lead the foraging party.

As was only appropriate.

Stepping her sun-browned feet in the dust next to Damiano, Saara was touched with meaning, with an importance of line, of color, of gesture that was almost deadly to him. It was nothing she did, for she did nothing but patter along childlike on his right side. It was not the beauty of her face or form, for though her skin was infant-fine, her green eyes were tilted like those of a fox, and were foxlike sly, and of her figure, though Damiano felt that he knew quite a lot about it, still all he had ever seen was the shapeless, felt dress.