The Damiano Series (88 page)

Rashiid felt a mouthful of eggplant stick halfway to his stomach. His face prickled all over. He turned to Raphael, who sat tailor-fashion on the hard floor behind the guests.

But there was no need to direct the slave, for at Hasiim's words Raphael had put the wooden ud down at his feet. “Shall I sing, then, for you?” he asked, his blue eyes staring directly at those of Hasiim.

Rashiid's terror of nerves resolved itself into a fury, that the boy should dare speak to an honored guest in that familiar voice.

But Hasiim forestalled his discipline, replying, “Yes, of course, if you can do so without impropriety.” (For among the things which do not impress a fanatic are manners.)

Raphael closed his eyes. He took a breath, let it out slowly, and then began to chant the same evening song he had shared with Djoura on his first day in chains.

In the kitchen the woman heard him. She raised her head and her hands clenched the handles of the cauldron she was dragging from the fire (black hands, black cauldron). Her eyes stung with tears she did not understand.

In the chamber of cushions, no man spoke until the song was over. Then Hasiim stood up and walked over to Raphael.

“You!” he hissed. “Could it be you are a Berber?”

The blond smiled as Hasiim lowered his leather-tough body beside his. “No, I am not. But I sing that song together with my friend, who is a Berber.”

“His name?” pressed the other, for Hasiim knew the name of almost every desert soldier quartered in Granada.

“Her name,” Raphael corrected him gently, “is Djoura.”

Now, in spite of himself, Hasiim Alfard smiled, and his face creased into dozens of sun wrinkles. “And how, in the name of Allah's grace, did a barbarian like you meet a Berber woman?”

“We are slaves here together,” the blond replied innocently.

“No, a Berber cannot be a slave,” stated Hasiim, as though saying, sheep cannot be green. “Not even a Berber woman.”

“Djoura is,” Raphael dared to say. “She is cleaning pots in the kitchen right now.”

There was a hideous silence.

Chapter 7

Saara's second procession through the worm hole was less eventful. The dragon was gone, but Gaspare stepped out into the cleft of sunshine, where that creature had so long been chained, and squinted. And sniffed.

“Doesn't smell bad, considering.”

Saara didn't bother to turn. “Why should it, when he wasn't fed for twenty years?”

Gaspare made a worried noise at that, and followed Saara into the next dark tunnel. “Speaking of which, do you think we can trust its —his—promise, not to eat Festilligambe?” His words rang and echoed through the darkness so that they were barely understandable.

“He didn't eat you,” was the Fenwoman's reply, and then she put her fingers to her lips for silence.

Gaspare didn't see the finger. Indeed, he saw very little of anything in the deepening gloom, and soon began to stumble. The witch was forced to take his hand.

It was long, this tunnel, and as sinuous as a serpent. But like a serpent it was smooth. It became more and more difficult for Saara to walk cautiously. But the amiable builder of the tunnel had been chained in the middle of it since its first construction. The Liar might very well have made changes; the very regularity of the walls and floor might well be designed to delude the wanderer away from caution, so she goaded her ears to hear and her skin to feel.

While feet are moving, time is passing, but neither Gaspare nor Saara had any sense of time's progression, and the weariness of their black march turned into irritability.

Gaspare fell, twisting his body like that of a cat in his effort to keep the lute from striking the ground. The instrument was saved, but its back-curving neck smacked Saara sharply on the thigh as it fell. She hissed her annoyance.

Gaspare himself whispered his curses to the floor, but as he clambered to his feet again (disoriented in the darkness), he remarked very calmly that a witch ought to be able to call fire to hand at need.

Delstrego had.

Saara was still massaging her leg, but this implicit criticism stung her worse than the blow. “I have heard a little bit too much about Damiano Delstrego lately,” she said between clenched teeth. “And what a great witch he was. There is a difference between accomplishment and simple talent, you know. Or perhaps you don't know!

“Of course Damiano could call fire. He had fire coming out of the top of his head! But it took me to teach him to make clouds.”

Gaspare snorted. “So who wants to make clouds, except a peasant in a drought?”

Both had forgotten the necessity for quiet and for caution as well. Gaspare strode bullishly down the corridor, one hand tracing the right wall for support.

Until he fell again.

Saara heard the thunk, followed by a small weary whine like that of a child. All her anger melted away.

“Don't get up,” she told Gaspare, and she lowered herself beside the young man. “And don't talk. Give me a minute to think.”

Damiano ran through Saara's memories like a bright but tangled thread. Her powers had been his, for a while, and his powers had been hers, for another while. Bodies, too, had shared as they might.

For a short time. Such a short time.

But surely Damiano's favorite magic should be accessible to her. To make a fire without anything to burn…

She fished into the unsorted depths of her mind and came up with brown eyes. A lot of curly brown hair, in snarls.

There was a dog, an angel (in all this she mustn't forget Raphael), a girl's face with blue eyes, a wonderful face with braids and green eyes (oh no, put it back, put her own face seen through Damiano's eyes at the bottom of the blackness), a plow horse with raw and pussy shoulders, seen once outside of Avignon…

There. There it came, with the image of the abused, fly-bothered beast. Hot anger welling up out of the floor of her mind…

“Lady Saara!” yelped Gaspare, scooting across the floor away from the smoldering woman.

“Hush,” she chided him, and she turned down all the vents of her emotions. Her dress—last of the two she owned—was discolored, and it smelled of burning hair. She sighed.

But at last Saara raised one hand like a torch.

“There, Gaspare. Behold the world around us!”

“Wonderful,” replied the redhead, staring not at the cave but at the flame itself. “Though Delstrego's was blue and did not flicker.”

When they found their way under sky again, the sun was already descending. A path worn into the mountainside led away from the tunnel, treeless, grassless, winding up to a broken tooth of a peak above.

So high had they come that the air was thin and it tasted of ice. Gaspare began to shiver.

“There is steam ahead,” murmured Saara, who rarely felt the cold. “Hot springs, maybe. Either that or someone is boiling a kettle.” She peered narrowly at the single fang above them. It was a bit familiar-looking; seen from farther to the west, it might become quite familiar. She examined it keenly for any sign of entrance. Blood rushed to Saara's cheeks, not entirely because of the wind.

“Does—does not the Devil… have cauldrons?” stuttered Gaspare in her ear. “Could it be?”

She shrugged. “If so, it means we have come the right way.” With a sigh and a stretch, she strode forward.

The steam wavered in the frozen air. One more rock and they would see it. Hot springs? There was no smell of brimstone in the air. Cauldrons? She herself had spoken of the Liar's cauldrons of steam, but they were part of the world of Lapp children, not of grown witches who themselves had a power of hot and cold.

She stepped carefully around the last rock.

No cauldrons. No hot springs. Just the glistening length of black serpent with floral head and eyes like miniature suns and the hot, moist air of his body hitting the cold.

Something else black was amidst his coils.

“I could not help but notice that you produce fire, too, madam. I could see your spark down the length of the passage. You are a remarkable human in all ways!” chuckled the dragon. He greeted her with a white and steaming smile. “I believe, however, that you left something behind.”

It was Festilligambe the dragon indicated. The horse stood spraddled with head and tail drooping, ears flat out sideways, and made no move.

“You found him!” Saara padded up and began to climb over the smooth-scaled sections of dragon. “I didn't think anyone would ever find him again, the way he ran when he saw you.”

“He was nervous,” drawled the huge creature, revealing his canines further.

Saara came up to the gelding and stared into his black, blank eyes. “Well, he is not nervous now,” she commented. “Is he alive?”

“I believe so,” replied the dragon, and he, too, turned to examine Festilligambe, but he did not let his armored head get too close.

Saara lifted the horse's unresisting chin with professional interest. “A spell?”

The dragon wiggled, causing Saara to sit down hard. “Please, madam! Do I look to you like a wizard, that I should be casting spells hither and yon? It is only that I am a dragon—that alone produces such an effect on certain animals.”

Saara spared him an eye as she got to her feet. “You ask me what you look like quite a lot,” she said. “Don't you know what you look like?”

“Mere rhetoric.” The dragon used the Italian word, since the Lapps had none fit to the purpose, but he glanced at Saara sidelong, as though he suspected her words to him of having more than the obvious meaning.

Saara put her hand on Festilligambe's withers and shook her head with regret. “I don't know what we're going to do with him,” she said. “What good is a horse, for attacking a fortress at the top of a mountain? Especially this fortress.”

The jeweled eyes met hers, and in a moment Saara understood what the creature had meant by “that alone produces such an effect on some animals.” For a long moment neither the green eyes nor the gold eyes blinked, and at last the creature laughed softly. “I think,” he said, “that we should leave the horse here and come back for it later.

“Along with the little flame-head.”

“We?” Saara stepped back and sat down on a length of swart tail, moving the spines out of the way.

“We. You and I, woman,” added the beast. “Who else has a hope of succeeding against the fallen Star of Morning?”

Saara grinned at the huge, expressionless mask of a face. “And have we a hope, Black Dragon?”

A red split tongue played over the teeth. “Perhaps not.”

“Then why do you want to come?”

The dragon turned his head away, to where a tiny and very brave Gaspare was struggling up and over his outermost coil. “Because you freed me. I owe it.”

“I release you from the debt,” Saara said formally.

The head twisted back along its own neck. “You cannot,” the dragon hissed. “It is MY debt. “Mine!”

Gaspare acceded with surprising grace to the scheme; perhaps it was because it was the dragon, rather than Saara, who explained it to him, saying that he should take the horse and explore farther along the road, while Saara and the dragon prowled the air.

Gaspare did not feel comfortable throwing temperaments in front of a ninety-foot-long steaming creature with teeth like scimitars. But he had enough boldness left in him to inquire how the dragon was to fly, lacking wings.

The great creature curled his tongue once around his muzzle before answering. “That is a reasonable question, little naturalist. I don't fly like a bird, you must understand. I swim. I ride the wind. And I can do this because I am hot.”

Gaspare frowned thoughtfully into the gaudy, metallic face. Having endured heat, cold, devils, and a shape-changing witch, there was little that one dragon, however well equipped, could do to overawe him. “Delstrego had a power of fire,” Gaspare remarked, “but I never saw him fly.”

Curiosity lit the amber eyes. “Delstrego? Delstrego you say? Who or what would that be?”

“Never mind,” Saara broke in. “If you stay around Gaspare, Dragon, you will hear a lot about Delstrego. But now is not the time. Let's go.” In another moment there was only a dun-colored dove on the cold stone path, its wings lifted for flight.

The dragon peered at it closely, as a man might focus on a flea. “More magic,” he breathed in tones of disgust, then added more politely, “I fear that in that shape I will fry you without even knowing it, woman of the north.

“Besides, you might have difficulty keeping up with me.”

Saara blinked back. “Then how?”

The dragon slid his chin along the ground. Scales rippled in the light of the setting sun. “Behind my head,” he hissed.

Using the corona of spikes for footholds, Saara hoisted herself up and looked. There, directly behind the last crimson starburst was a length of smooth neck which did not support a dorsal spine. It fitted Saara like the back of a very round horse. To her surprise she found two small raised scales with handholds cut into them. She fit her fingers with difficulty into them.

“You have been giving rides to… children?”

He raised his head off the ground. Saara, used as she was to flight, felt her stomach lurch. “No. Not a child. A small man. A man of India. A little ugly man with a face like a frog's.”

Coils scraped by Gaspare, not touching. The dragon oozed a short way down the mountain slope, head elevated. Saara was no more than one more spine on the spiny head. Suddenly the air wavered strongly. As the smell of hot metal reached Gaspare's nose, the beast was aloft.

It squirmed in the air, like the flecks of paper ash tumbling out of a chimney. Gaspare's heart was in his throat as the black tail sliced the sky over his head. The whip shape in the air loomed even closer, perhaps it was out of control and would crash with Saara, crushing himself and the dazed horse in the process.