The Damiano Series (52 page)

Damiano began to sweat with effort. It seemed he had lost the art of withdrawing which had protected him since losing his powers, and which had once taken him to Lombardy, to the garden of the witch.

Would he need someone with a cat-o'-nine-tails, to whip him into remembering? “Saara,” he whispered, and he closed his eyes. “Saara.”

But in his mind's eye he saw not the winterless, stream-broken garden. Not the goat with flowers around her rusty neck. Not the fairy shape in a blue dress embroidered with stars. He saw the human woman's form: naked, hot against him.

“Yes,” she whispered to him. “Yes, Damiano. I am here.”

He heard clearly but he saw nothing except the red darkness behind his closed eyes. He opened them to find Saara standing before him on the cobbled street of Avignon.

He felt as he had sometimes in the past when riding—when Festilligambe came to a sudden stop and he almost did not. The world lurched, and he put out his hand to brace himself. But there was nothing to hold on to except Saara, so he took her firmly by the wrist.

Her eyes narrowed at his astonishment. “What is wrong, Dami? You called me, didn't you? You are still calling me; I can hear it.”

As he straightened he dropped her wrist. “You are here. You are not in Lombardy.”

And as she said nothing in reply, he added, “Why?”

There was no expression in the witch's face as she answered, “I don't know if I could have gone far, Damiano. Not after… last week. My strength is half yours—more than half yours, I think—and it wars against me. But anyway I did not want to go, for I was afraid for you.”

“For me?” he echoed. “You feared I might do myself harm?”

She shrugged an Italian shrug. (Had she learned it from Ruggerio the Roman? From Damiano's father?) “I have pain, young one. Like I was having a baby and the head would not come out. For you it cannot be any better.”

He said nothing.

“Why did you do it, Damiano?” she continued. “To throw me away like that. In my long life I have never been treated so.”

Damiano's eyebrows disappeared underneath his hair. “I—why did I…? Saara, it was a dirty trick you played me, leading me to think you wanted…”He took a deep breath. “I don't think I want to talk about it,” he said.

The Fenwoman had taken a step backward, and her stomach tightened with a miserable understanding. “You thought I wanted you only to be rid of the burden I am carrying? That is dreadful. It is not true. I will carry it until I die rather than have you believe that.”

“No,” answered Damiano in a voice that sounded foreign to himself. “No. I need it back now.” And as Saara stared, openmouthed, he added, “I need to be a witch again. Tonight.”

The moonlight (and only the moonlight) streaked Saara's hair with gray. She stood in an oddly formal pose, her hands cupping her elbows and her bare feet gripping the cobbles.

“You do? Tonight?”

He nodded. “It is not my need but Gaspare's. His sister is missing, and I need full sight to find her for him.”

One of the woman's hands crawled toward a hanging braid. White fingers clawed into the hair, tangling it. Saara glanced from the foul street to the eaves of the crowding buildings. She did not look at Damiano. From far away, the bark of the bandog could still be heard. “It would be easier if I found the girl,” she suggested.

Damiano shook his head and, leaning against the ancient grapevine, he slid down till he sat on his heels. “I thought of that, Saara,” he admitted. “I also asked Raphael's help, when I first knew there was going to be a problem. But he told me to look elsewhere before asking him to do what he should not do—and since then I have had to think about what I am asking of everyone.”

Saara squatted besides him, her toes splayed out before her like those of a frog. “More thinking, Dami? You think too much, I think.”

Though her words were friendly, he ignored them. “I need witchcraft, or at least ‘sight,' to find Evienne before Gaspare throws himself in the Rhone, or sickens with grief. If I use your skills just because I don't want the responsibility, then I have done the deed and yet tried to evade the price, don't you see? And we both know that does not work, in witchcraft or in life.”

Still she did not meet his eyes.

“Saara. What is it? Don't you want me to take back that… that illegitimate baby that confused Gaspare so much?”

This pulled a smile from her, and a quick green glance that made it hard for Damiano to swallow. “No,” she replied. “Now that the moment comes, I do not. A person gets used to being the way she is.”

Then she reached toward him, a flame of concentration on her face. “Here, Damiano. Take my hand. Quickly.”

He obeyed, but his black eyes darted up and down the cobblestones. “Here? In the middle of the street?”

Saara giggled. She seemed herself again. “All
that
is not necessary, Dami. Nice, but not necessary.” She squeezed his hand roughly and leaned forward, placing her other palm against the young man's forehead. “Only remember,” she whispered.

Saara's touch was warm; that itself was easily remembered. And with that warmth came other memories from beneath the blankets in the old wagon: the mouse in the woodwork, the mole beneath the grass, the planets circling (each with its name, each with its song), the lake of fire which somehow came not out of hell. The corona that lit each living thing from within, and arcing green flame of its extinction. The touch of human presence, like a feather against his face.

Hermes Trismegistus, Albertus Magnus, the broken black staff, taller than his body, banded with silver, crowned with red and gold, through which once (as though it were a great flute) he'd played the wind of his will.

Once, only two years ago, he'd played that music better than he played the lute.

Damiano remembered, completely and without violence to body or mind, all he was born to be.

His blood was singing like a chorus. He felt the hard, rounded stones beneath him, and recognized that they had been pulled from the Rhone. He heard the bandog, and a hundred other hounds crying, droning, quarreling or snoring through the city of Avignon. He heard that segment of the human population which was awake at this hour; they sounded much like the dogs.

As a man orients himself in time by glass or sundial, he felt (with his tongue against the roof of his mouth) for the hour by the position of the heavens.

And in the next street he heard the sorrow-clogged breathing of Gaspare, who had fallen asleep against the Holy Father's wall.

Damiano opened his eyes and was forced to squint against the glare of the moonlight off white walls. Saara's face, too, appeared bleached and colorless. The fingers of her left hand, which had held his, hung limply.

“You are weary,” he whispered, and he helped her to her feet.

“Of course I am. Not you?” Saara disengaged herself from his arms. She inspected Damiano minutely and impersonally: head, hands and booted feet. “You are not tired, nor sick?” With a proprietary shove she turned him completely around.

He submitted to these attentions with the docility of a child. “I feel,” he announced, “as though I will never be weary again. Nor sick.”

Saara smiled wanly. One of her braids was completely undone and hung in waves, like falling water. She looked pale and thin and, despite her height, frail. Damiano could see a pulse pounding in the hollow at the base of her neck. “Good. Then it has been worth all the mice and rats.”

“All the what?”

Saara seemed to feed off Damiano's confusion. The sly smile returned to her mouth, and color to her cheeks. “Mice and rats. I had to eat something in Avignon, you know. Since, as you say, these people will not feed a stranger.”

Damiano felt obscurely guilty, as well as revolted. “Mice and rats? Surely, Saara, if you had let me know…”

Saara giggled then, lifted one leg cranelike, and (since her braid was pulled apart) nibbled on one twisted lock of hair. “It is not so bad, if you are an owl.”

“An owl? You are the bird that has been ruining my sleep since I have been in Avignon?” Her grin spread to Damiano's face. He snatched Saara off her feet, knocking the breath out of her as he spun her around. “Not a fox and an owl, too? Saara. You should be nothing but my little dove!” Her bare heel knocked against the gnarled trunk of the vine. With an apology Damiano put her down.

Forcefully she pulled away. “It is good you feel so strong, fellow.

But you must be careful; you don't know what you are doing, now. You are like a baby.”

“A baby?” Even moonlight could not steal the warmth from Damiano's olive countenance. As Saara spoke he closed the gap she had made between them and embraced her again. He kissed her on the cheek, the chin, the side of her neck. Her skin tingled his lips and tasted like wine. “How a baby? I have been a witch all my life, minus only one year and a little bit, and the whole time has been spent in study. I studied,” he declared fervently, “until my brains began to curdle.”

Then Saara sighed, and the irritation in that single sound chastened Damiano completely. He took a step backward and let her continue. “You were a witch whose magic was locked within a stick. You lost both magic and stick. Now you have had the magic back for two minutes, and already you have both bruised my foot and made me angry.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, and through the glow of his exaltation remorse did seem to be working. “I was just a little drunk with… being able to see and hear. I will be a gentleman from now on.”

Saara muttered something he was not meant to hear. It might have been “Too bad.” Then she spoke aloud.

“You will be all right, Damiano. Come with me and I will teach you to sing-spell. You will be very good at it, I am sure, having made so much music of the simple kind.”

He broke out in surprised laughter. “Simple? My music—simple? Well, each to his own opinion, my lady.” But his antic mood softened again. “Saara, Saara, I will most willingly come under your tutelage. (There is at least one lesson between us still incomplete.) But till Good Friday my time belongs to Bernard Coutelan and the Bishop's Inn. I must remain a baby that long.”

“Then until Friday I must eat mice and rats,” interjected the Fenwoman, and for a moment her eyes went round, bright, orange and moonlike. Damiano sputtered with laughter.

“No, my lady. Return to the Heather Inn with me and eat like a burgher, if not a queen.”

Saara made a prim little grimace. “That place? I have sat in their courtyard every night, watching men and women make their beds in straw a reindeer would not touch. The fleas, mice and bedbugs have an easier life than the people.”

Damiano shrugged. “That is an inn. I have been in much worse.”

Saara wound her fingers in Damiano's coarse hair. She drew him to her for one more slow, thoughtful kiss. “I would rather eat rats than have them run over me.

“Friday,” she added. Then with an odd, almost angry look upon her face, Saara shrank into a white pillow of feathers, orange-eyed. This flew onto Damiano's shoulder, where the outsized talons pricked his skin. Then she hooted maliciously into his ear and rose into the sky on soft, shrouded wings.

 

Chapter 8

When Gaspare was awakened, his first thought was that the deep, commanding voice belonged to the Holy Father's pikeman, or some troublesome soldier whose job it was to keep poor souls from cluttering the streets of Avignon. But the hand that reached down to take his was lean, calloused and very familiar, and when Gaspare raised his head…

“By Saint Gabriele, Damiano,” the redhead hissed, “the moon in your eyes made me half frightened of you!” Then as the boy locked his knees in the upright position and freed his hand from the lutenist's grip, he remembered why he had fallen asleep at the Pope's Door.

“Oh, Christ, sheep-face. She never came. I will never see my whore of a sister again.”

Damiano let the nickname pass. His wide drunken eyes stared from Gaspare to the swarthy face of the night gate guard, and across the wide avenue to where hundreds of black holes in pale walls revealed the sounds and smells of human sleep. His left hand was twitching like a small animal. Once more he snagged Gaspare.

“If Evienne and Jan are in Avignon, we will find them tonight,” said Damiano with sweeping confidence. “Come, little dear,” he added. “Start walking.”

Gaspare's offense at being addressed as “little dear” was drowned completely in his amazement at the rest of Damiano's behavior. He found himself dragged along the wide street, his eyes still grainy from sleep, his long mantle flapping behind.

If the Damiano of the past year had been unaccountable… if the Damiano of the past few weeks had been enough to make Gaspare tread warily… this new Damiano was an Act of God. He strode through the empty streets like the conqueror Alexander, his black eyes flashing, his rather large nose turned arrogant by the force of authority in the shaggy head. Though the night was chill, and Gaspare suffered despite his velvet cloak, the hand that held his was warm—warm like beach sand in the sun.

At the first corner, an abrupt change of direction nearly popped the boy's arm from its socket. “What are we doing?” he yelled in protest. Half a dozen dogs were set off by the noise. “How are we going to find her this way? I have been up and down these streets every day for a week; she's not to be found.”

Damiano looked back over his shoulder. “If she's not here, Gaspare, then we won't find her. Otherwise we will.”

“How?” demanded the boy, pulling free with great effort.

Damiano smiled mildly enough, though his eyes were still dangerous. “I will feel her presence. I am a witch again, Gaspare. I will know.”

Gaspare felt a sinking in his heart, though he would have thought it impossible for him to get any lower. “Oh, no, Damiano. Not that again.”