The Damiano Series (45 page)

Damiano did not know what to say—whether he should apologize for Saara, explain her background or merely ask what had transpired while he had been hors de combat.

But Raphael spoke first, and he spoke very calmly. “On what did you want to work tonight, Damiano?”

The young man took a moment to collect himself. His fingers drummed on the thin wood belly of the lute. “I'm all tight again, Seraph.”

Raphael waited the perfect moment before he replied, “Yes. I can imagine.”

Gaspare was still haunting the fire. When he saw Saara approach alone he settled back and squinted at her cannily, as though there were a sly understanding between green-eyed people. “Is there an angel?” he inquired.

With a lift of her chin she repelled this familiarity. “Yes, there is an angel,” she replied. “A great spirit of the air. Did you think Damiano was lying to you?”

Gaspare shrugged. “No, lady. I just thought he was mad.” He snickered ruefully. “You have to admit, when a fellow talks about being a magician and then never
does
anything magical, it's easy to doubt.”

Then Gaspare's interest drifted in a different direction. He poked the fire with a stick. “This angel, Lady Saara. Does he play the lute like old sheep—like Damiano? I mean, is that where he got that style of his?”

Saara stood above the blossom of flame, and to Gaspare's amazement, she thoughtfully began to braid the fire, as she would her brown hair. “I… don't know, Gaspare. I didn't stay to listen.”

When Damiano awoke, the wind was blowing against (and through) the wagon side. Already the sun was well risen. Saara sat at the open foot of the vehicle, combing her hair with her fingers. Her feet swung in the tree-dappled light.

Damiano's back was taut and stiff, as it always was upon waking, and his neck muscles were sore from the lack of variety in his sleeping position, but he could tell he would feel much better today.

He was wearing his rough mountain trousers. He did not usually wear them to sleep, but with a woman so close… His first touch of the morning air caused him to reach for his shirt.

He blundered about, probing and peering, until he had covered most of the wagon. The lute protested hollowly as he banged it with one knee.

Saara observed him idly. Finally she scooted back into the depths of the wagon. “Gaspare has it,” she announced. “He was feeling very cold this morning. He has no blood.”

“Then what is it that makes his face so red?” mumbled Damiano, and he sat back on his haunches, wrapping the wretched blanket around him and over his head. His face he rubbed between his knees, grunting.

“He's got my shirt? Well, what about me; is my flesh less sensitive, or am I any bloodier? And where is he, anyway?”

Saara regarded him with the superiority the quick riser feels for the poor brute who wakes up slowly. “He is out setting rabbit snares. He said he would rather do it while you were sleeping. And since the grass is so good here, we thought we'd rest the day. So you can stay in the blanket.”

“Deprived of all dignity,” muttered Damiano, and he slid to the ground and stalked away, robed and cowled like a monk, to perform his morning offices in privacy.

Breakfast was mashed turnips, and a cup of the goat's milk that Saara had acquired without fuss or explanation. Damiano was not really in a bad mood, but he did not know how to behave around Saara, having grown up without mother or sisters.

One could not remain gallant and lyrical for three days unbroken.

“Speaking of dignity, my lady,” he began, and then reconsidered his angle of approach. “Or rather, I am curious to know why you did not… like… Raphael very much.”

Saara's eyes grew almost round with surprise. “Not like him? But I do like him, Dami. As much as I have liked any spirit I don't know very well. Why do you think I don't like him?”

Damiano folded his large hands around his knees. “You did not seem trustful, Saara. And then you walked away from him.”

Her child-soft mouth tightened. “Should I stay to chat with him, like two women at a well? Him? It is the custom in the North that spirits keep to spirits and people keep to people. And as for trust: you, Damiano, are much too trustful.”

Damiano's hands clenched over his knees. He made a rude noise. “If there is one sort of… of person, spirit or flesh, whom you can trust, it is an angel of God! And speaking of that, why did you call him Chief of Eagles? Raphael is his name.”

Very carefully, Saara crossed her feet on her lap. Her face showed no expression, yet the air in the old wagon was charged.

“I know his name as he knows mine. I call him Chief of Eagles because that is what we call him. After all, he is a white eagle in form, isn't he?”

“No,” replied Damiano, nonplussed. “Of course not. I used to see him quite clearly, and he is a man—a beautiful man with wings.”

“An eagle,” she contradicted. “With human face and hands.”

Damiano recoiled from the idea. “Monstrous! Why would he look like that when the angel form is higher and more beautiful, and he himself is by nature high and beautiful?”

She snickered. “Evidently you think the body of a man is more beautiful than that of an eagle. There are two ways of thinking about that. And as for being higher, well, you cannot dispute that an eagle is much higher than a man. Most of the time.”

His forehead creased with puzzlement as Saara continued. “And I say again you trust too easy, Damiano. Even if this Chief—this Raphael—is all you say, as true as the Creator (and with the way you defend this spirit, young one, it is too bad you cannot marry him), still you place your trust in other strange places.”

“In Gaspare? It is not so much I trust him as…”

She shook her head till the braids flew. “No, Dami. In me. Why should you trust Saara, after all? I hate—hated your father. You killed my lover. I killed your little dog. We have torn at each other worse than wolves. Yet you place your soul in my hands and go off, like leaving a baby at grandmother's.”

Damiano hung his head. “But there is no more to it than that, Saara. Also, we know each other as well as any brother and sister, for I have walked in your mind, and you in mine. You know I never hated you, and… I would like to think you have forgiven me.

“When I broke my staff and gave you my power, I thought it would be a useful servant to you.”

“It is a charge,” she amended. “A burden.”

“It has not made you stronger? When I held your power I was terribly strong, I felt, and could do almost anything I could think of.”

Then Saara stared out the open back of the wagon, and her face was cold, distant and unreadable. “Oh, I am strong now, all right. Damiano—remember how your father told you I was the greatest witch in all the Italies? Well now, holding your fire with my own, I am without doubt the greatest witch in all of Europe.

“And if I wanted, I could go home.” She made a small noise in her throat. “I could go home to the North, where all are witches, and make a tribe around me. My power would stand as a wall of protection against winter and all the lesser enemies. I would be great, and the men of the fens would fight each other for my notice. They would pile skins at my feet: milk-colored skins of the reindeer, soft as butter. They would chant a new kalevala to me.”

Her glance shifted back to Damiano. “The thought makes me sick.”

Damiano was so sun-darkened that when pity drew his face darker, he seemed to fade into the shadows. “I understand. Last year, my own strength made me so sick I had to be rid of it.”

Saara drew closer. “But it is not last year now, Dami. It is this year. Will you take it back, your power? Your broken soul?”

“No.”

His answer was abrupt, almost involuntary. Saara snapped her head back, and bit down on one knuckle in frustration.

“Let me explain, Saara. It is partly the lute, you see.”

“The lute?”

“Yes. When I was a witch, then being
that
came first. It had to. A witch must be true to his senses first, before anything else.

“But an artist—a musician especially—he must be
that
first, and there is not much left over.” Damiano spoke very earnestly, fearing it was impossible to communicate what he meant. “And music is far more important than magic.

“That, at least, is what I believe.”

“You are muddled, Damiano,” Saara answered him, but not with anger. “They are not two things, music and magic. Unless you want to say my small songs are not magical. Or not musical.” And she smiled at this last.

“Neither one, little nightingale.” And with these words the prickle and tension between them dissolved and was gone. In the dim and fusty warmth of the wagon they heard one another breathing. On impulse, Damiano took her hand.

She let her fingers rest on his. “So,” she whispered, “there is an old question unanswered. If you love me, Damiano, what are you going to do about it?”

It was not a large gap between them: two feet at most. Damiano reached across and placed both hands on either side of her waist. He pulled her to him, so that she sat between his knees, both of them facing the green world at the foot of the wagon. The blanket, which had fallen back as he stretched forward, he arranged once more, wrapping them both in.

He laid his chin on her shoulder. “Saara. I also said I had nothing to give.”

“Not even time, you said. Does that mean your practicing the lute leaves you no…”

“No.” He chuckled and softly kissed her at the nape of the neck. “I'm not such a madman. But I have struck a bargain with the Devil. Do your people know the Devil—the most evil spirit?”

She nodded, and her hair tickled his nose. Saara was very warm to hold, and Damiano grinned to think that had he been a little bolder, he might have given his blanket to Gaspare.

“Yes. We know many wicked ones, like the bringer of famine, and the ice-devil, and others whose tricks do harm. But the worst of the devils is the one called the Liar. Any man who deals with him we call a fool.”

Damiano's grin went hard-edged. “It is the same all over. Father of Lies. Yet I struck a bargain with him, and I am no liar and— usually—no fool.”

Saara twisted in an effort to see his face, but Damiano held her tightly. It was easier to say certain things while staring out at the grazing horse. “It was after we fought, you and I, and I felt full of ashes. I traded him my future for the sake of my city. It is to have peace for fifty years, and I may not return to it.

“And I am to die,” he said. “Very soon, now, for he said the situation could not permit my living more than two years more, and that was over a year ago.”

And now he could not hold the woman, who writhed snakelike around and fixed him a look of astonished accusation. “What? Are you about to walk up to his door and say, ‘Throw me in your caldrons of mud and sulfur?' “

He, in turn stared at her shoulder. “No, certainly not. He said it was not he who was going to… to kill me at all, but circumstance.”

“And you agreed to this?”

“Yes, of course. Saara—that was the smallest of my concerns. He also said Partestrada itself would shrivel and die unless fed on the blood of violence, as is Milan. I am an Italian, my lady, and my city means to me what a mother would mean to another man. That was why I came to you, rather than accept the evil one's judgment.”

“And I said to you ‘go away.' I sent a man to whip you away.” Beneath his hands, her shoulders hardened like steel.

“No matter, Saara. He did not succeed. Anyway, all my efforts turned bad; neither my city nor I am meant for greatness. We will be forgotten,” he said, but without bitterness, and he rested his head against hers. “But we will not be murderers: neither Partestrada nor myself anymore.”

Now he turned her face to his by force. “Saara, don't start crying. I was not trying to make you unhappy.”

But the witch was not precisely crying. She was tight and trembling under his hands, but full of rebellion, rather than sorrow. “What is it?” she asked herself aloud. “That every man that I touch…

even as much as touch…” Her gaze was wet and angry.

“Why couldn't I have met you thirty years ago?” Saara took Damiano in a hug that squeezed the wind out of him. “Thirty years ago, when I was as foolish as you are.”

“Thirty years ago I wasn't yet born,” he replied, hugging back. “And I'm heartily sorry for being so tardy. Hey, dry up now. Don't be a mozzarella, like me, crying for every little thing,” he chided, rubbing a large, square finger over her reddening eyes.

And Saara's leaking tears did cease, between one moment and the next. “You're a fool to give up, Damiano. The Liar does not keep faith with men, and does not expect any better in return.”

“I still want the bargain, Saara. It is a good bargain.” He scratched his head furiously, as his eyebrows beetled over a scowl. “It is just—just that this year and a half has been a very long coda for a very short song.”

The Fenwoman's face was stern, but filled with an odd fire, neither cold nor hot, but wild like the green lights of the north. “Damiano— witch—I say to you you are a fool, but you are not as easily killed as you think. Take yourself back to yourself. The Liar cannot hurt you.”

Damiano closed his eyes, bathing in her fierce radiance. “He cannot hurt
you,
my lady. That I'll grant!” His hands held her closer, and his knees pressed against her.

There was a moment's silence, and Saara leaned back her head. Their mouths were very close. “What if I were to say,” she whispered, “that all I want of you is to couple together, and let the future go hang?”

His reaction was something between a snort and a chuckle. “I would say, Saara Fenwoman, that you should learn a more elegant vocabulary. But if you thought I intended to let you go now…”