The Damiano Series (56 page)

“But you, Signor Delstrego. It has been a good long time since I have spoken with you.”

“A year and three months,” said the witch from behind clenched teeth.

“Ah? You keep a close record. But then, you are a careful worker in all things. I suppose then…” Satan let the worried pulp of the grape slide from his fingers to the dust beneath the table, “that you have kept your affairs in order. No debts outstanding, no good works undone, nothing to make your… passing an inconvenience to the people around you?”

A swarm of flies was circling Damiano. He heard them. And Satan and his repulsive bowl of grapes seemed to be retreating from him, down the length of a black tunnel.

How had I forgotten, he railed at himself. Here I am talking about marriage, when I am only going to die.

Were it not for Raphael behind him, surely he would fall on his face now. Perhaps he would be dead already.

And Satan was coughing again.

“Begone, miserable sufferer, and come not near this man!” It was Raphael's golden voice that Damiano heard. But gold, like any other metal, may be sharpened to an edge.

The angel had stepped forward, his pinions stretched taut in a great circle that brushed the wall of stucco. His face was lit from within by a white fire of anger. Yet he was only as tall as a man, and his wings were made of feathers, not fire. As Satan slouched to his feet, laughing, Damiano became painfully aware of these facts.

“Come not near him?” the Devil mimicked, his scraped-ashen voice no longer bothering to be subtle. “But my dear nest-mate, it is my right and privilege to come near him. You, on the other hand, are overstepping badly. One look at you and it becomes obvious.”

Damiano also looked at Raphael, and his empty heart filled again, this time with a protective fury. He crowded between Satan and the angel, and with a single, unsubtle, inelegant kick, he upended the little round table. Grapes bounced over the strangely empty street. “Worm!” he bellowed. “Twisted snake!” he roared. “I am finished with your lies. Finished for good!”

He spat dryly, like a cat, in Satan's direction. “If you have the power to kill me, then do it. Otherwise, get out of here. You smell bad!”

The Devil stood, letting the three-cornered stool fall behind him, and as he faced Damiano he swelled and quivered like the snake he had been named. His face turned wine-red and his eyes went white. “Piece of mud!” he hissed, with a mouth full of teeth like needles. “Ordure! Worm, you called me? Well, you are food for worms, you walking bladder of blood and scum: bizarre travesty of spirit, created for the amusement of a jaded God…”

All resemblance to Raphael was gone now, for hate had given Lucifer a goat's face. Damiano glanced from one to the other and was glad.

Though it was getting quite hot in this corner of Avignon. Satan had dropped his human form entirely for one red and boneless and loathsome. The leather of the little stool smoldered. The table burst into flame. The smell of ashes was overpowering, and joining it now came the reek of sulfur, like an alchemical experiment gone out of control.

He can do no more than kill me, whispered Damiano to himself. He cannot hurt me more than that. He can do no more than kill me.

And as the Devil threatened and Damiano defied, Raphael withdrew a step and stood motionless and intent, like a man watching the play of actors in a drama.

The witch sheathed himself in a close coat of blue flame as he spoke aloud. “I have fire of my own, Satanas. Not as hot as yours perhaps, but less offensive to the nose.”

The red flames licked out, touching the blue, spreading against it, attempting to envelop it. Where the fires touched, they created a purple glow which reflected in lights of pearl from Raphael's peacefully furled wings. And though the red was the larger and the noisier flame, where it touched Damiano's aura it grew quieter, and its color changed.

Damiano himself stood with eyes closed and hands over his face. He only looked up when the snap of withdrawing energy told him the contest—if it had been such—was over.

Satan had regained his composure in a marvelous fashion, and neither his tight jerkin nor his odd-shaped boots were soiled. “Delstrego,” he said conversationally, “are you aware you carried the plague in your pocket from the north?”

Damiano stared. “I did not. We were all clean. Saara said so.”

“Saara? And who is that?”

“Someone you don't know,” was Damiano's growled answer.

Satan let this pass. “In your pocket.” Satan smiled sweetly. “You had it in your leather pocket all those miles.”

And then he was gone.

Raphael's wings slowly settled. He turned toward Damiano and his eyes were as mild as they had ever been. “Once,” he began, his voice distant, “there were four of us: Michael, Gabriel, Uriel and myself, who stood together against him and his followers. We were the instruments of his downfall, as he does not forget.”

The angel shuddered then, not out of fear, but as a bird will shudder its plumage into place. “Also the instruments of his own desire, since to be cast off from peace was what he most wanted.”

Damiano felt himself returning from that silent fury to his human nature again. It was like climbing out of a hole. He bent and touched the charred table which lay on its side in the road. Its flames went out. “Yet you called him ‘miserable sufferer,' Seraph. Why? Do you pity him?”

One angelic eyebrow shot up while the other pulled down. “Pity Lucifer? No—should I? Remember, Damiano, he is not locked into being what he is. It is a matter of his own choosing, always.”

The stool he treated like the table. The leather seat had burned clean through. Together the two pieces of furniture made a sorry little picture beside the fire-discolored wall. “His own choosing? Of course. Yet one can be locked into his own choosing. As a mortal man, I understand that. When I act my worst, I know I am sinning, and that thought makes me wickeder than ever. I can pity the Devil.”

The mortal blinked nearsightedly from the wreckage to the street beyond. Now, with Satan removed from the scene, he recognized it as one of the shabby streets which led down to the mud of the Rhone. “Though if I had the power I would smash him flatter than a cutlet.”

The Archangel Raphael gazed deeply at the unaware Damiano, then clapped the mortal from behind with an enthusiastic wing. “Dami, Dami! You have a power of philosophy beyond the merely angelic. Perhaps you have hit on the reason for man being what he is.”

Damiano was tired. He remembered he had to play for the Holy Father, and that he had not yet asked MacFhiodhbhuidhe to substitute for him. “Reason? I did not know we
had
a reason for being, Seraph. To understand the Devil?”

“To forgive him. It is more than I can do.”

Slowly the man found the ability to think again, and he thought about what had just happened. “What… what he said, Raphael. About me. Was any of that true, do you know?”

“About your dying? I do not know the future, Damiano, and I don't think he can know any more than I. At any rate, he certainly backed off…”

Damiano shook his head till the black curls flew. “No. With that concern I am through. Whether I live or die is no one's business— and least of all my own. I meant about the plague.”

“Why should that be straight, when all else he says is twisted?” Raphael put his hand once more on his friend's shoulder and drew him in.

“Well, you see, by coincidence I
did
carry something in my pocket from Petit Comtois to Avignon. It was a ruby pendant that some madwoman gave me.”

The angel reflected. “Is it rubies, then, that carry the pest through the world?”

Damiano shrugged. “Who knows? It comes without warning and leaves when it is ready to leave. But I saw, or thought I saw, Satan's face on a man in the plague town.”

“Ah! Then he would be expected to know that you had a pendant. Dami… he is a very clever fool, my brother Lucifer. He would make you believe your own nose was your enemy, if he could. Besides. Is there plague in Avignon?”

Damiano gazed up and down. There were people on the street: a good dozen. Masons, laborers, clerics, mothers, gentlefolk. Where had they been before? He sighed in confusion. “Not to my knowledge.”

Damiano brushed nonexistent dust from his clothes. “Raphael, I am supposed to play before the Holy Father tonight.”

“Good for you,” replied the angel. “Give him something he has not heard before.”

“I am suddenly terrified of it. Please come with me.”

Raphael laughed. “I will. I would be interested to see the man.”

 

Chapter 10

This was just more of the same, said Damiano to himself. Placed here in the corner in insufficient light, playing to a drone of conversation, he might as well be back at the Bishop's Inn. At least in that high gallery, he wasn't half hidden from his audience by an armoire.

Audience? He knew better than that, too. The Cardinal Rocault had not looked his way once, and as for Innocent himself, though he was facing the musician directly, and though he occasionally let his eyes rest upon Damiano's quick-moving hands, it was obvious that his attention was taken by his demanding dinner guest.

Yet Damiano did have listeners. The table servants flashed him quite human glances, and Gaspare (who was in no good mood, having spent all the previous day and part of this afternoon haunting the house of this same ambitious cardinal, hoping for a sight of his sister) was offering his support. The boy, who was wholly hidden from the view of the diners along a passage at the other side of the chamber, stared at him with an intensity designed (by sheer effort of will) to prevent Damiano from making a mistake.

And Raphael had come, too. The angel sat within touching distance of Damiano, curled sideways around a heavy-backed chair. He listened as though he had never heard his protege play before.

To Damiano's slight disappointment, it seemed the Holy Father was as oblivious of an angel's presence as was the great mass of humanity. Of course the Pope was not a witch, but surely some preternatural authority ought to have been vested with his office along with the spiritual. Enough, at least, to recognize an angel when one plumped himself down in your dining room.

At least the acoustics were better here than in the Bishop's Inn.

The voice of the lute neither echoed nor faded within the intimate, muraled chamber, for there were just enough hangings to keep the sound clean. It was as though the room had been built with his art in mind.

“Give him something he has not heard before,” Raphael had said, so that is what Damiano did. Scorning the ballades of Provence and the boring (to Damiano) folksongs of his native Alps, Damiano played what he had composed himself: music so new it was hardly born yet, wild in both time and harmony, colored slightly (almost against Damiano's will) with the ornate ornamentation he was picking up from MacFhiodhbhuidhe.

He had no intention of listening to the dialogue of the Pope and the cardinal, though Jan Karl had arranged his concert with that end in mind. He had no desire to get mixed in with politics he could not be expected to understand, and besides, if he were playing at his best, he would have no attention free.

But the conversation impinged upon his attention, because of its subject.

“They tell me three hundred, in Lyons. Mostly children, of course,” the cardinal was saying. He was a big man, black-eyed, brown-haired, who looked good in the color red. Damiano had a long stare at the back of his head.

“Of course,” echoed Innocent, who appeared much older, but not appreciably frail. The Pope's nose was raptorial, his eyes fine. “These days the plague prefers youth. I have it on good authority that is because those who were subject to it of my generation died in '50.

“But it comes back every year, or every other year, somewhere in Europe. Last year it was Spain and Poland. This year it is France. Next year Italy, perhaps.”

Damiano's fingers kept playing while his mind reeled. Plague again. He could not escape it. He had a fervent, irrational desire that people would shut up about plague in front of him, for he had been through too much lately.

“All very well to take the long view, Your Holiness,” interrupted Rocault smoothly. “But people expect you to do something about it.”

Innocent's elderly-eagle eyes flickered from the cardinal to the lute on the other side of the room. The old man seemed to have no problem seeing at a distance. “Ah? Well, I am, my son. I am praying daily, and offering the mass.

“Or did you—forgive me, did the people—have in mind something different? Something more like a bull?”

“That is what I had in mind,” replied Rocault dryly. He followed Innocent's eyes and regarded the musician with no very friendly stare. For a moment he said no more.

What was Damiano to do? He had been told to play for the Holy Father, and he would continue until that one told him to stop. Surely Cardinal Rocault was not distracted by the sound of a single lute in the corner.

Perhaps he merely did not appreciate the New Music.

“A bull, certainly, Your Holiness, would let the people of France know they are in your prayers. And the best sort would be a bull rescinding your predecessor's protection of the local Jews.”

Jews again. Jews and the plague. Damiano wished momentarily that he were back in the north of Italy, in Partestrada, sans plague and with only one Jew to speak of.

Innocent chuckled, and tapped his silver knife on his golden plate. “Hah, Rocault, my old friend. Here we have gotten half through our dinner without your mentioning this
bête noire
of yours: protection of the Jews. I had even begun to hope you had left it behind.

“You know I think it is silly; Clement's very reasonable exposition of why the Jews cannot have caused the plague did not prevent the burning of the ghettos, nor the murder or exile of thousands. If I should publish a statement turning Clement's logic on its head, would that make the behavior of the populace any different?”