The Damiano Series (80 page)

The fellow actually LOOKED the part of an ill-tempered man: rolls of fat under his neck burned the color of a village pot, little hands darkening the mule's leather reins with sweat, eyes like those of a pig. Had Perfecto always looked like that? (Had August always been so hot?) Three years the partners had plied their trade together, buying domestics and selling them. Eight times had Hakiim made the voyage to the markets of Africa and returned to Granada with exotics. Eight times had Perfecto disappeared into the wilds of Spain and reappeared with oddly assorted women. It was possible he crossed into Christian lands to gather his merchandise. If so, the Spaniard was ready to risk a lot for money.

More than Hakiim was, at any rate.

Eight times was enough, the Moor decided. Dealing with slaves had given him a certain sense about people, or developed a sense that all are born with. Hakiim could smell when a slave was mad, and when she was dangerous. And he could usually estimate the amount of danger involved.

So with Djoura, Hakiim felt no fear, but neither did he get too close. With the idiot eunuch (not mad, only confused) there was no danger except that of soiling one's clothes.

But Hakiim dropped his mule back behind Perfecto and he watched his partner. Eight times was enough.

Why don't you die, Perfecto silently asked his new acquisition as the eunuch followed Djoura, alternately stumbling and scampering at the end of his iron chain. After a few hours the fellow had learned to hold the links in his hands so that he was not choked every time the black caught him unawares.

If only the creature had curled up and died last night: of cold or of injuries or merely of Satan's malignity. He certainly looked ready to be carried off, with his breath panting and his blue eyes rolling and all the flies on his back. If he had died, then Perfecto would have had the perfect excuse for Satan, and he would not be sitting there now in such a sick funk of worry that his bowels were churning and his collar seemed too tight.

What sort of creature was it? One of Satan's human servants who had failed his task? (Perfecto had never YET failed, he reminded himself.) A recreant priest, perhaps? The robe he had been sold in had a clerical cut. The Spaniard shuddered, and his mule replied in sympathy.

He could be anything—even a eunuch. Perfecto had announced him a eunuch, certainly, but that had been only to smooth over the inconvenience of his arrival in the pack train. He had expected Hakiim would discover the untruth of this claim within minutes, upon which Perfecto would proclaim himself ill-used by the seller and would promise to have this mistake rectified in Granada.

But Hakiim had trusted his word. How odd. And Djoura had said nothing. He glanced mistrustfully at the black woman.

Well, maybe Perfecto had told the truth by accident. The demon had not said the man was entire, after all, and Perfecto hadn't bothered to pull off the gore-soaked dress. Why shouldn't Satan be served by eunuchs?

But what if he were neither a gelded man nor entire? It was still possible the noble fair head would blossom into a thing of horror and teeth.

Tonight Perfecto would sleep under a crucifix, if any of the women possessed such a device. If not, he would piece together a cross of some sort, even if only two sticks. Let the cursed paynim laugh! Perfecto was sick to death of Hakiim's sneers and slurs and Moorish pretense. If he had his way…

Come to think of it, it might be figured that Satan owed him something for disposing of the blond. (If it was not a trick. If it was not a trick.) Once the lot of them were sold in Granada. Once the money was in his hands… It would not be difficult to find another partner.

Perfecto embarked on a reverie which imparted a much sweeter expression to his face. Hakiim was emboldened to speak.

“You know how I call it, Perfecto? You want to hear the order in which they will sell, for how much and to whom?”

Perfecto returned to the breathless, stifling present. “Oh, not that again.”

“Why not?” the Moor replied. “Am I not always correct? About both the money and the buyer? I have a knack for these things…

“First,” Hakiim continued, urging his mount up to his partner's, “the larger of the two locals will go, because her age will make her cheap and yet she is sound. To a miller or a weaver perhaps: some small businessman who doesn't want any fight in his bondswomen.

“The Saqalibah will go next, but not together. As domestics, is my guess: all of them. The little local will sell after that, for a good price and to a peasant.

“The old woman? I don't know, but I think we'll keep her longest. Depends how many households are looking for goosegirls or goatherds this summer.”

Perfecto listened to this involved prophecy without a murmur. He didn't give a damn, himself, as long as the sale produced enough gold to take one man (one man) from Granada to some place far away. But it occurred to him that Hakiim had made a large omission.

“What about the black? Don't you think we can sell her at all?”

Hakiim's eyebrows rose and he gestured one finger in the air. “Perfecto, my old friend, you still do not believe in our dark lily's worth! I have no intention of standing her under the sun in the common market.”

“Why not?” growled the other. “Can't tan her any worse.”

The Moor's eyes shifted under his immaculate headdress. This was better: more like the crude but predictable Perfecto of past years. If only he could rid himself of that prickling down his back when he looked at the Spaniard…

“Djoura is a beautiful girl, Perfecto. Strong and young.”

“Who'd as soon kill you as look at you.”

Hakiim shrugged. “She comes from the desert (Although it would be better, maybe, if we didn't mention that in Granada. At least not around any sons of Islam.) and she has gone from hand to hand, not knowing a steady master. With expert taming, she could be made loyal, and even affectionate. I will advertise her by private treaty only.”

Some streak of pugnacity prodded Perfecto to remark, “So why haven't you mentioned the eunuch?”

The answer was inevitable. “I don't believe we can sell him.” But the silence which followed this answer had a character which terrified Hakiim. He found himself babbling, “I want no trouble about this, Perfecto. How much did you pay for him? If the price was not exorbitant then I will pay you its equivalent out of my own pocket.”

The Spaniard turned in his high wooden saddle. His eyes were set so deep in the seamed and folded flesh that Hakiim could see but one tiny spark out of each. “And then what,” he growled. “And then do what with the eunuch himself?”

“Loosen the chain,” Hakiim replied.

Despite the jouncing weight of Perfecto's face, it contrived to set in hard lines. “Leave the idiot in the desert? He would die before nightfall.”

(How he would love to. If only he dared.)

Hakiim's confusion slid into pure mystification. He had always been the one of the pair whose natural bent had been toward liberality, as long as it didn't cost too much. What was there between the idiot eunuch and Perfecto? A relationship of blood, perhaps? He glanced again at the slave's features.

The eunuch was walking more competently now, and his face bore a very convincing look of deep concentration. His newly washed hair, like silk fabric, fell in waves and folds about his face.

No relationship. Impossible.

“Not in the desert,” Hakiim replied to Perfecto. “In a village, secretly. Or at the walls of Granada itself. He will have as good a chance of charity as any beggar—and he can be nothing else but a beggar.”

Perfecto turned his body back to the front. He looked neither at the eunuch nor at his partner. “Moor,” he announced. “I swear I will sell this boy in Granada. I HAVE sworn it. I will shed blood before denying my oath.”

Hakiim stared at the back of Perfecto's head. Whose, he wondered. Whose blood?

In the middle of the day Raphael was fed once more of the same cereal and vinegar, and he was allowed a few minutes' rest in the shade of a wall.

This was in a small village, where the houses crowded together as though they had been built in the middle of a city and the city then taken away from around them. The slaves in their bird-flock fashion lined the cool stone wall, ignoring the villagers with the same intensity the villagers ignored them. Indeed, in everyone's eyes, the difference of caste between these tattered Spaniards and the slave women was insuperable. Yet each group felt itself the more respectable, for the slaves took their status (in their own eyes, at least) from their masters, and no one in this congeries of huts would ever own a domestic.

Djoura alone bothered to look at the scene around her, with its naked babies and almost hairless yellow dogs. And her gaze was as removed and disinterested as that of an observer at a menagerie.

Her Pinkie looked, too, of course. Raphael gazed about himself with friendly curiosity, unbroken even when an infant of four years scuttled up and threw a wad of dried cow dung into his lap. The blond closed his eyes and listened to the chatter as though it were music.

Once again life erased its miseries for Raphael and he was free to think about his condition.

It had been terrible, and now was only bothersome. The difference between the two conditions seemed to be connected with what he had eaten and drunk, and when. The time of day mattered too. Cold and dark were unpleasant.

But so was hot sun. And hard stone. And flies that bit. And being kicked or glared at.

It seemed to him he was suspended between a thousand little-understood needs of the flesh and another thousand outside sources of pain. These established his course, as the course of a pebble was established once it was dislodged from the top of a hill.

But that reminded him of his own pebble. Raphael's hand felt sweet relief as he opened his fist and looked at Damiano's gift.

It was such a pretty pebble, all brown and rough with faint white stripes, and it looked as much like a piece of a corkscrew as anything.

Damiano had been a man—he had been bora a man. Yet HE had not seemed to let himself be knocked back and forth between pain and desire, like Raphael was. Damiano had called, “If you have the time, Seraph…” very considerately, and had smiled to greet him. Had he been in such misery, then, hiding it all from his friend? Surely Raphael would have seen.

No, it must have been that living as a man was an art which might be mastered. And Damiano, who had done so, was still with Raphael —somewhere, somehow. In a pebble. Flexing his cramped fingers, Raphael stuffed the pebble into the corner of his mouth, beside his back molar.

“I am Raphael,” he said aloud, in Damiano's language. “I am not just kicks and heat and hunger. I was before these things, and will be after. I am my Father's musician.” He raised his eyes to the southern distance, where sand and dust fell away toward the sea he could not see, the sea they were leaving further behind each day.

Djoura heard these foreign words in Pinkie's voice. Surreptitiously she glanced over, and the blond's face startled her.

He looks as stern as a king, she thought. Praise be to Allah, could it be my sieve-head's mind is coming back to him?

But if it were so, why didn't he talk sense? She gouged his hip with her muscular toe.

“Hiss, Pinkie! Who are you talking to?”

He shifted the pebble in his mouth before answering. “I am talking to my Father,” he replied.

She giggled. “I see. Did he answer you?”

“No,” Raphael answered simply. “He doesn't anymore.”

Perfecto was thinking, I will accompany him out of the city this time; he will not suspect anything in that. And with all the money I will buy a hundred Masses for protection.

It was an act of grace to kill a paynim. It was holy.

“My uncle will take me in easily, and with this last profit I can buy a small date-palm planting and a couple of boys to keep it. I will not say a word to him, just get on my ship and disappear.”

Hakiim's mule swiveled its ears, seeming to reproach him for the plan. “A promise to the infidel is no promise at all,” he whispered to the beast.

Djoura observed Raphael narrowly. No longer did he move like a lout, nor roll his eyes like a simpleton. Too much longer and the swine on muleback would realize what they had here, and her new-budded plans would go for nothing. The woman sidled up to Raphael and did her best to trip him.

“The birds in the air,” Raphael sang silently, despite his sore feet and scourged back. “The fish in the water, washing their backs in light.”

Joy came from somewhere to him: a gift as solid as stone.

Chapter 5

The bees were already awake, but then the bees had retired earlier than Saara. She stepped from her hut into the light to find Gaspare stretched on the ground, waiting for her. His orange hair and red face shone like two clashing flames against the green of the bee balm. The young man leaped to his feet.

“I can do it for you, my lady,” he stated, biting off his words with force. “Give me two silver florins and seven days and I can do it.” His frosty green eyes bore into hers, while his long mouth fairly trembled with intensity.

Saara, who had not slept well, was beset with a desire to turn around and go back indoors, pulling the door behind her. Instead she yawned, combed her hair with her fingers, and replied, “Do what, Gaspare?”

“Go to the Devil,” he replied.

Saara lowered herself onto the gray rock which stood beside her door. This rock had a shape rather like that of some quadripedal animal with very round sides and stubby legs. She called this rock her housedog, although the rock had come first, with the house being built behind it.

She considered the possibility that Gaspare was joking with her. He did not appear to be joking, and certainly the boy had had enough stupid ideas in the past, but one could have stupid ideas and still make jokes. Finally Saara said, “I have known men to go to the Devil before without needing two silver florins.”