The Damiano Series (63 page)

Gaspare snorted and his long nose twitched. “Evienne is not the proper stuff for the Papal Palace.”

Damiano's head lifted. The soft wind tunneled through his hair. “I hear bells now,” he admitted. “Surely they would not ring the Paschal carillon if the city were infested?”

Saara, who could not follow Gaspare's rapid speech, had been listening to the peal for some time. “No, Dami. There is no joy there. I think those are black bells. They ring because people are dead.”

Now the wind shifted and the note came clear. It was a slow, tedious, effortful tolling, and as he listened to it Damiano's last armor fell away from him. He tasted fear on the wind, along with something worse.

Avignon was now a dome of white rising up the hill from the Rhone, scarcely farther from them than an arrow's good flight. The city swam in the morning light, but approaching along the pale pink and busy roadway was the oxcart Gaspare had only just described, driven by a thick and brutish man whose shape Damiano found familiar.

The three people stepped out of the wheels' path, while Festilligambe shied onto the road's shoulder. A great bronze-burnished ox nodded its head solemnly as it passed them, as though to say “Yes, yes. This is the awful truth.”

The driver of the cart tugged his beast to a stop before them. As he peered down from beneath the brim of a rough straw hat he sighed hugely.

Damiano was relieved to discover that the man wore neither the features of the Devil nor the mad cart driver of Petit Comtois. Because it was Damiano who regarded the driver so closely, it was to Damiano that the man spoke.

“Turn back, young gentles,” he said earnestly. “There is no purpose so urgent it should take you into Avignon today.”

Damiano's eyes slid back to the tall solid wood wheels, doweled to their axle, and to the high wooden slats that sided the wagon. “You are certain it is the plague, then?”

At the word “plague,” the driver pulled off his woven hat and held it in his hand. “It was fifty dead yesterday, good monsieur. Today there will be a hundred, I am certain.

“Turn back,” he repeated, his gaze on Saara's fair face. “For this plague is merciless and it seeks out the young.” With those words the driver lashed his ox into movement.

Gaspare, who had stood silent during this interchange, staring with dread at the uncommunicative slats of the wagon, now ran after the man. “Hello, hello! Tell me, have you seen a redhead?” he asked in halting langue d'oc.

The driver mauled his beast to a stop again. “Seen what?”

“A girt with red hair, very pretty,” shouted the boy, and as the driver blinked without comprehension Gaspare added, “with a biggish belly. Pregnant.”

After a moment the man shook his head. “Going your way on the road there has been no one but you. Or did you mean leaving the city?”

Gaspare grimaced. “I didn't mean on the road. I meant…” And then, without another word, he turned on his heel and dashed the fifty yards back to where his friends were waiting. They asked no questions.

The gate stood open. When Damiano expressed some surprise at this, Gaspare only shrugged. “Why not? It's too late to keep the plague out now.”

“But to keep it from spreading…”

“Is it the business of Avignon to watch out for Lyons?” replied the cynical fourteen-year-old. He made to step under the arch of stucco.

Damiano, stepping behind, felt a cold, premonitory sweat. He grabbed at the boy's jerkin. “Wait a moment, Gaspare. I think it would be better if you returned and waited for us at our house.”

“Your… house?” Gaspare's lank hair had fallen inside the collar of his shirt. Frowning hugely at Damiano, he pulled it out. “Where do you have a house?”

Saara interrupted. “You are thinking he should not go into the city, Dami? You are right. He is simple, and it would be very dangerous for him.”

Gaspare turned from one to the other, insult darkening his uneven complexion. “Simple? From you, sheep-face, that is laughable.”

Damiano refused to be offended. “You don't understand, Gaspare. We are witches.”

“So you keep telling me….”

“And if we are careful, we will not get the plague. You, however…”

Two white patches appeared amid the crimson mottling on Gaspare's face. “Everyone gets the plague. Even Jews get the plague; remember the Pope saying so?”

“Wait for us in the clean air and sunlight, boy,” suggested Saara, using what was to her the most pressing argument against Avignon (or indeed any city). “We will bring your sister out to you.”

Gaspare glared his scorn upon both of them and entered Avignon.

There was no crowd upon the streets, no press of bodies in the cobbled court before the Bishop's Inn and no one at all sitting at the inn-yard tables, which had been turned upon their ends and now stood ranked against the ground-floor wall.

“This,” reflected Damiano aloud, “is not like Petit Comtois, where all was madness and buffoonery. This resembles more my own city, Partestrada, on a fast day with the shops all closed. It doesn't look like plague at all.”

“Nonetheless,” grunted Gaspare stolidly.

Saara stepped lightly over the cobbles. Her toes grabbed and curled, like those of a stalking bird. One slim arm settled on Damiano's shoulder. “Don't be fooled, dear one. This place has evil in it,” she said.

And Damiano could feel that. Despite his words, he could feel trouble in the air, and fear in the smell of the bodies hidden by walls all around him.

How odd, to stand in the middle of a disaster which could not touch one. I am a witch again, he thought. I have a power of flame so strong the plague cannot enter in. My lady, too. We could stroll together among piled bodies and suffer no hurt.

And in spite of this knowledge (or perhaps because of it) Damiano felt a surge of hopelessness, almost like despair. He turned to Saara. “We have to help these people, beloved,” he whispered, out of Gaspare's hearing.

Her eyes were windows over the sea. “We can't. Years ago, don't you think I tried? In Lombardy, when I felt sickness in the village below, I came down to them. I sang till I became so weak I might have sickened myself. Not one lived who had caught the plague. Not one.

“This plague has jaws like a trap, and those who fall into it, die in it.”

“What are you saying to him?” Gaspare whined shrilly, stepping between them and hopping from one foot to the other. “Is it about Evienne? Can you tell me where she is?”

Saara looked down upon him from a height of years. “You should leave this place, boy. You cannot help your sister by dying.”

Gaspare cursed. He swore before them both that he would never leave the trail of his sister until she was found: not for food, nor drink nor rest, and especially not for safety's sake. He kicked the pavement and called Saara crude names in Piedmontese argot. She listened with the calmness of a person who understands so little of a language she cannot be offended in it.

The black horse, who was also out of temper because there was no grass in Avignon, and because he had to step so very carefully over each round cobble, brushed by the irritatingly noisy boy on a search for some growth of green among the stones. Festilligambe found what he sought behind a small garden gate, which swung open at the touch of his nose.

“That's MacFhiodhbhuidhe's gate,” murmured Damiano, cutting into Gaspare's tantrum. “He doesn't leave it open.” And the dark witch followed the horse through.

The little garden was empty. With some difficulty Damiano shooed the gelding away from a pot of herbs and back into the road. He closed the gate on the animal and then crossed again toward the courtyard door.

Open also. Damiano stepped in, and although his senses told him there was no one within, he called out his presence.

The harper's house was dim and tidy. Downstairs nothing moved. Damiano took the steep, uneven stairs two at a time. MacFhiodhbhuidhe's bedstraw was swept into a corner and his bedclothes were folded. Gleaming balls of brass wire lay in a smug sunny row on a bookshelf. There was no sign of MacFhiodhbhuidhe or of the ancient who did for him. The young witch clattered down the stairs again.

This house gave an impression of age. It seemed all the heavy furniture, neat-dusted and smelling of beeswax, had stood in place unmoved for a long time. Like the harper's music, which probably hadn't suffered alteration since he left his Leinster academy. Damiano once more felt his spasm of irritation at MacFhiodhbhuidhe, tempered by the knowledge that the man was kind. On impulse he crossed the downstairs room. He stopped before the low cabinet to peep again at the exotic Irish harp.

After a minute, he picked up what he found and carried it to the door.

There, in the sunlight, stood Saara and Gaspare, with the horse. Gaspare was looking sulky. So was the horse. Saara had one hand wrapped in the black mane, and she had evidently been bestowing a few home-truths upon both of them.

Damiano came out blinking against the white light. In his arms he cradled three lengths of black wood, wrapped in a twist of brass wires. “It has been taken apart,” he announced. “The harp. He said… he said to me…”

“That he would never take it apart again,” added Gaspare.

“Not… while he lived to play it.”

“He was your friend?” Saara asked gently.

They had been walking with great purpose toward the river for some minutes before he answered her. “I guess so. He was very good to me. I did nothing for him.”

Gaspare giggled awkwardly. “What were you supposed to do? He had money and position. You didn't. And we only knew him for a few weeks.”

Saara watched Damiano rub his eyes with his shirt-sleeve. He noticed. “Pay no attention to that,” he barked at her. “I do it all the time. It means nothing—no more than a sneeze.” Then, in an excess of frustrated feeling, he drew back his fist as though he would slam it into the nearest wall.

But as he was a musician and that wall was made of stone, he thought better of the action and hit his fist into his opposite palm. “Curse it all to hell!” he shouted, and then stared wildly from one friend's face to the other.

“Wait for me here,” he commanded. “There's something I must find out.” He darted down a side street. There followed a disgruntled whinny, and the tall horse followed his master at a trot, a small pot of blooming violets hanging from his mouth.

“He is mad, our Damiano,” said Gaspare complacently.

The door was locked from within, the hanging sign was missing, and the windowless face of the jeweler's shop gave no clue to what lay within. Yet Damiano's senses told him that there was someone alive in the shop or above it. He pounded on the door repeatedly.

Finally a voice cried out from a slot window above his head. “Closed! Go away.”

Damiano backed into the street. “Ormerin, let me in. It's Delstrego.”

“Who?”

“The man with the ruby pendant.” There was no answer, and Damiano added, “I swear by all the saints, man, that I am not sick of the plague. In fact I am probably the safest man in all Avignon to let in your door.”

After a moment's reflection, the jeweler called out, “What do you want, Italian? Do you want to buy your ruby back?”

“You still have it, then?”

The jeweler cleared his throat. Damiano could see one small brown eye and half a mouth at the burglar-proof window. Ormerin was watching Damiano's horse as the beast tried its black nose into all the ground floor windows on the street. “It's not the sort of thing one sells every week or two. I haven't even shown it yet.”

“Ah?” Damiano nodded his head forcefully, as though this bit of information was important. “And your family, Monsieur Ormerin. Your wife and little ones. Are they well?”

Ormerin, who was small and smooth-faced, regarded Damiano with his other eye. “So far, and may God maintain us.”

“That is all I wanted to know,” replied Damiano, and he ran away again. Festilligambe followed reluctantly.

Damiano returned breathing hard. He had twisted his foot slightly on a stone and walked gingerly. “He hides his lies in a shell of the truth,” he gasped. “Like a worm in a hazelnut. You think you have learned to ignore him, and then you find he has struck you in another level of deceit.”

Saara stared at her lover without comprehension. She bent down and took his ankle in both her hands. After a few moments the pain departed. “What are you talking about, Dami?” she asked at last.

“The Devil. He told me I was responsible for the plague in Avignon.”

Gaspare's gooseberry eyes rolled. He put one arm at the small of Damiano's back and marched him forward. “When was all this?” asked the boy indulgently.

“Last week,” replied Damiano, testing his leg.

“Last week there was no plague in Avignon.”

The sprain was gone entirely. At the end of the street the Rhone sparkled, its surface shattered by the breeze. “That was what made him so convincing. He said the sickness came in my ruby, which I sold. But the jeweler is well, along with his family. I think if the ruby
were
a plague stone, they'd have been the first…”

Saara's child-pure features expressed anger. “You said you had thrown it away, Dami. You said you believed nothing that he said.

“No more do I,” he replied shortly, and ran his hand over Saara's sleek braided head.

“You did not bring the plague to Avignon.” She pulled away from his touch. “It came on a bat, I think.”

“A bat?” Gaspare snickered. “A ruby is easier to believe.”

“A bat or a rat.” She shrugged. “Something with a squeak. Or that's what the earth tells me.”

The peach trees were past their best bloom, which is to say that tiny green leaves peeped and pried among the pink petals. The three stopped beside the house, while Festilligambe trotted down to investigate the river.