The Damiano Series (47 page)

“Practice what?” asked Gaspare, for the lute lay swaddled on a table in the corner.

“This,” came the laconic reply.

Gaspare listened, trying to imagine how one would dance to such a rhythm. “What is it?”

“I don't know,” said Damiano. “Yet.”

There were fourteen people sitting at the high table with the Comte de Plessis and thirty-five at the long table just below the dais. They began with a soup of dried mullet and onions, followed by various roast birds decked in feathers that had never been theirs in life. The sweetbread was saffron, and the wine was amaranth purple. A tall honey cake, studded with raisins, had been built into the exact image of the Fortress Plessis; the diners demolished it without superstitious scruple.

More souls than sat under torchlight broke their trenchers in the shadow, on crude slatted benches at the far end of the hall. These did not eat of saffron or amaranth, nor did they pick raisins out of their honey cake, for they had no cake. But they did eat.

Gaspare sat in the shelter of an arras, one leg propped before him and one leg folded. He was neither hiding nor was he precisely there to be seen. His eye was on Damiano, who tuned his lute on a stool behind the main table, and whose garment shone like black damask under the light of torches.

The musician spoke no word, and his face wore the expression of inviolability it always assumed when playing the lute.

Gaspare had given up expecting the player to make amusing patter. Damiano almost never spoke when playing, and when he did it was in a whisper that could not be heard five feet away. But it was better that he should be quiet than to speak at the wrong time.

Before this fearsome Comte de Plessis, for example. The landholder's right arm was the size of Gaspare's thigh, and his blue eyes were leaden. A puckered scar pierced the man's mouth, giving him a perpetual snarl, and he ate with great concentration. Better be discreet before a man of this kidney. Discreet and conservative.

The process of tuning took a bit longer than necessary, Gaspare thought. But then Damiano never would hurry his tuning or apologize for it, and the lute's rather brittle wooden tuning pegs were crotchety. Laughter was heard to rise at the high table, but it did not issue from the comte, whose mouth was full. A rather beefy-faced bald man in soiled white was gesturing at a dark woman in yellow. He pointed with a bird's leg, scaly foot still attached. He chewed with his mouth open.

The dark woman was young, demure, clean-faced, quick-eyed. She divided her attention between the coarse gentleman and the figure in black behind the dais.

The musician's fingers brushed the open strings with harplike effect, while his left hand twitched over the tuners. After a while the left hand hovered, not touching, while the right hand began to dance. Tuning became music imperceptibly.

Damiano did not use a plectrum on the lute, because in the beginning he had not known he was supposed to use one, and later because he did not see the use of the quill. He struck the strings with his nails, playing as many lines as he had fingers, all together. “Devil's music” had said old Marco of Partestrada, and in that opinion he had not been alone. But Damiano's teacher had been the Archangel Raphael.

Now the lutenist was playing in earnest, his left hand spread spiderlike over the wide black neck, his curled right seeming not to move at all over the strings. Gaspare recognized it, and was relieved. This was an ancient piece, just right for Provence, and if Gaspare could remember correctly, by Ventadorn. Damiano played a great deal of Ventadorn; it was popular.

But then the musician inclined forward, rounding over the instrument until his wiry black hair fell over the lute face. He rested his cheek against the wooden neck and swayed from side to side with the beat of the music.

This was not so good. Better not to call attention to oneself in that way. Gaspare watched, wondering if anyone besides himself thought Damiano was looking a trifle mad. The simple Provençal tune, too, was changing. It took on a strange new form under Damiano's fingers, salted with sweet, knotted ornamentation in Hibernian style. Out of nowhere was added a bass line from Moorish Spain.

Gaspare looked into Damiano's black eyes then, and he knew that this night would not be safe: not safe at all.

Where was the troubador's tune? Had the fellow slid into a new piece without stopping? No, for there was the melody again, or a piece of it. But, great Saint Gabriele, what time was this? Three-time? Five?

It was five over three, and it went on and on, under the melody and over it, changing the love song of Bernard de Ventadorn into something lunging and bizarre. For a moment—one cowardly moment only—Gaspare considered sneaking out alone.

But the ancient tune did not die under this treatment; it lived and grew, thrown from treble to mid to bass as a juggler throws a ball.

The player's mouth was open, but no sound could be heard. His head nodded left and right with his music, and he baby-rocked the lute.

He has forgotten we are here, thought Gaspare. He has forgotten the comte.

He has forgotten me.

He is finally unmanageable, decided the boy. Mad beyond concealment. He looked around to see whether by unlucky circumstance any of these doltish noblemen were paying attention to the music.

No. Only the woman in yellow, who watched calm-faced, with eyes Gaspare did not trust.

And then between one moment and the next Gaspare did not care whether Damiano was mad beyond concealment. For the rhythm caught up with his fears and outpaced them, and one particular turn upon the melody took him by the throat.

He was standing; he didn't know how that had come to pass. He was standing between two folds of musty tapestry, gold-chased. He saw Damiano's head nod with the driving beat, moving up and down like that of a horse in the traces. The musician's lips were pulled back from his teeth.

What was he playing now? This was not Ventadorn, or anything Provençal. And it was not Italian, not with that bass, and the great arcing sixths of the melody. Christ! Had he ever complained that Delstrego did not have enough bass?

But what was it? Gaspare had never heard this piece, though tiny licks of melody (tiny, delicate, curled like cats' tongues) were familiar.

And then the boy realized he had heard the piece without knowing it, incomplete and embryonic, through the booming of rain in the darkness. It was Damiano's own music.

The redhead smiled a smile that made him seem old. “This,” hissed Gaspare to himself, “this is my reward for sitting up all the night while he makes noise. For keeping food in his belly, and keeping his pennies safe in his pocket.

“He was created to make this music,” continued Gaspare, speaking quite audibly to no one at all. “He was made to play, but it is I, I myself who nursed him to it. It is I who made this moment possible.”

And wind pulled the arras into billows and splashed the red torchlight over the floor. It turned Damiano's black brocade into embers, deep burning, and struck stars from his black hair. It blew a thick river of music over the dais of the high table and through the cold, dark hall where the bread was also dark. The servants lifted their heads to listen.

And even at the comte's table, conversation had died. The warrior in soiled white still leaned toward the woman in yellow, but his head was craned back and his flat gray eyes stared at the table.

And she stared at the musician directly now, as light played games with her yellow-brown eyes. Her small nostrils flared and two spots of color stood on her cheeks.

“So,” whispered Gaspare at her from twenty feet away, his motley making him invisible among the brilliant threads of the hanging, “so you think you understand, do you? You think perhaps this music is for you, pretty lady with red cheeks?”

Then he snorted. “Well, it is not for you. Nor for you, Plessis, who has finally condescended to stop chewing and listen. You have not the brain nor the training to understand Delstrego. Nor have you suffered enough to pay for the music you hear.

“No, nobles of Provence, or of Italy or China, for that matter. His music and this moment are mine.”

And silently Gaspare stepped out of the folds of the arras and stood beside Damiano, quiet as a young tree, and as straight from pride.

Damiano raged within his music, but could not escape. Sweet Mother of God, that the planets should arc above him and he not see them. That the mouse should squeak in the stone and he not hear. That a horse who served him should speak and be not understood. And that men—and women—should walk by and leave him as numb to them as a dead man.

He
had
died last year in Lombardy, breaking his staff on the stones of a grave. He had died and felt not the pain of it until now.

If only Saara had let him be, dead or alive, but free from pain.

I feel my blindness, he sang, using no words. I am deaf, I am numb. There is nothing in my life left.

Nothing but this, replied the lute.

The Comte de Plessis had a brow that might have been dug with a plow. His right hand was full of cake. Raisins dropped through his fingers. He brooded at Damiano. An ancient in gray doeskin addressed him; he shrugged the man away like a fly.

A peg had slipped. Damiano was tuning. The comte extended an arm as wide and hairy as the haunch of one of his own hounds. “You,” grunted the comte. “Where are you from? Where did you learn all that?”

Gaspare's stomach tightened like dry leather. Genius was a very fragile fire, as compared with feudal arrogance. Genius can be guttered by a stupid man's blow.

Damiano stood respectfully enough, despite his drunken eyes. “I am from the Piedmont, my lord,” he replied, with a three-point bow. “And the music… is from no one place.”

De Plessis settled back on his ebonpoint stool, which creaked beneath his weight. He cast his eyes over the assembly at the high table, which waited in silence for what he might say.

“Good,” is what finally came out of that misshapen mouth. “Good enough for Avignon. He ought to go to Avignon.”

“That is the tack we must take,” repeated Gaspare, bouncing ahead, his shoe heels not touching the ground. “No more playing for loutish dances. It is not the size of your audience but its quality that will make you famous.”

Damiano was leading Festilligambe by a handful of mane. The horse's ears were back; he had been very nervous for the last few days—since Saara left, to be exact. The lutenist leaned against the brute's black shoulder, for he was tired. “Ah,” he replied. “Is that so, Gaspare? Well, I have always thought it more pleasant to play before wealthy people than poor, and before the educated rather than the ignorant. But the problem has always been that there are so many of the poor and ignorant and so few of the educated and wealthy.”

The redhead dismissed this observation with a headshake, as together they passed through the jaws of the portcullis. The echo of hoof-falls rang in the dry ravine beneath the castle bridge. “Yes, but now we have the ruby. We can afford to wait.”

Behind Damiano's weary eyes a curtain was almost drawn away. Almost, but not quite. They flickered, and he put his hand to his leather pocket as he replied, “If it is a ruby.”

“It is genuine; the seneschal recognized that right away. It is your good luck—or, no, your rightful reward after what I heard tonight. We must sell it in Avignon and buy more suitable clothes.”

“Clothes?” Once again Damiano was clothed in his tunic of inappropriate blush pink. “A better lute is what I need. I have to keep hopping over those terrible frets in the middle.”

The boy raised an admonishing finger, which shone like a white worm as they passed a cottage window lit with oil light. “A lute will come, Damiano, but right now respectable clothes are more important. Listen to your manager.”

Amusement lightened the black eyes for a moment. “My manager? I thought you were my dancer.”

Gaspare snorted. “The music you are playing now can't be danced to, sheep-face.”

“Enough of that.” Damiano's whisper was metallic. The horse shied suddenly, almost pulling its mane from Damiano's clutching fingers. “My name is Damiano.”

The boy came to a shivering halt. It flashed upon him like lightning that having gotten the musician to Avignon, to the feet of power and acclaim, it might be felt he was no longer necessary. In fact, to one who silenced the high table of the castle of Plessis, and who sparked the massive Comte de Plessis himself to say “Good enough for Avignon” (much too good, if the hulk really knew it…) and who had in his pocket a gold-set ruby, what use was Gaspare at all?

The black tail of the horse swished ahead of him. Damiano's pale pink shirt was melting into the darkness. Gaspare folded his arms in front of him, hugging himself. They felt like steel bands around his ribs.

Damiano slowed the horse. He turned, his white teeth visible under starlight. “What are you waiting for… manager?” he inquired.

“I have it in writing. I asked him to give it to me in writing.” Gaspare tapped his bony breast. “It is here.”

Damiano sat at the back of the wagon, cleaning his teeth with a bit of chewed stick. Sometimes he didn't shave, or comb his hair for days on end, but about his teeth he was fastidious. “Who—the comte? You were crazy enough to ask the Comte de Plessis for a recommendation. In writing?”

Gaspare sprang from the earth onto the floor of the wagon, landing in a front roll. “I was. I did. Why not, after all, if he liked you? And he did.”

Damiano spat out flecks of wood. “I am rather surprised the man can write.”

Gaspare pulled a rather furtive smile. “He can't. He got his daughter to do it. Do you remember her? She wore daffdowndilly yellow.”

Damiano nodded. “I thought perhaps she understood a little of what I was doing. At least she paid attention.”

Gaspare peered studiously out into the night, where the only sound was that of equine jaws grinding. “She… has an interest. I was told to tell you she will probably be hawking tomorrow, with her ladies.”