The Damiano Series (97 page)

Raphael did look up. Around the frosting-white tiled wall, behind the Berber fursan, stood a semicircle of humanity. Raphael stared from face to face.

There shuffled a poor Spaniard with confused, rolling eyes, bearing baskets of fish and of peppers. Next to him stood a proud Moorish householder in silk and muslin, his hands upon the jeweled hilt of a scimitar which had probably never seen use. Here was a woman so veiled neither her age nor race could be guessed at, another woman with tawny hair, sans veil but with the ring around her neck. Two teenage eunuchs, well dressed, who stood carefully not touching anybody. A dark peasant ignoring the squirming horned kid in his arms to stare, stare, stare…

Each casual figure engraved itself into Raphael's stunned brain, as though within the astonishment, fear, or unholy excitement expressed in these faces he would find the clue to every mystery. But finally his eyes found (as they were meant to) the five soldiers who stood with their legs braced, their wicked small bows drawn and aimed at both Raphael and Djoura.

The woman did not move. Neither did she drop her weapon. The steel of her sword sent glints of silver over the white mosaic wall, joined by the spark of gold from the coins in her black hair. Her face not black now but suffused with a ruddy blush, and when she spoke to her companion her voice held a furious elation.

“When I cry out, Raphael, then we will go forward together. We will give them reason to fear us!”

His face filled with pain. “But they will kill you, Djoura!”

She snorted in her habitual arrogance. “What are these but dogs? They will kill us anyway. This way…

“… is freedom.” She took one step forward.

But Hasiim, who had risen cautiously to his feet, heard her fierce whisper. He replied not to Djoura, but to Raphael. “My men are not dogs. I say they will not kill you: neither of you, unless you make it necessary. The woman I have promised to return to her own people and I will do so.

“You…” He stared at the fair figure. Raphael's borrowed clothing had all fallen off and he stood now wearing nothing but his eunuch's trousers. The scars on his back were visible around his sides and shoulders like the tendrils of red clinging vines. “You we will return to your master, and what he may do to you for this scandal is none of our business.

“Though I say,” and here the Moor paused. “Though I say that if I thought I could buy your loyalty with your sword arm, I would trade ten good horses for you.”

Raphael said nothing in reply. Slowly he lowered his blade. Djoura turned upon him a look of infinite bitterness.

“It gets hotter and hotter,” observed Gaspare, shifting his sweaty seat from side to side. “If we have to go much farther south we'll all burst into flame!”

The black dragon smiled: an action which caused Saara's thighs and knees to tickle. “That is mostly my own personal heat. It is actually quite cool at these altitudes, even in the south.

“I could cool down by going slower, of course…”

“Don't listen to the boy,” snapped Saara, who felt she had been sharing this aerial perch with Gaspare for too long entirely. “I'd rather have the speed. I feel time is pressing.”

The dragon's sigh was more disturbing to the riders on his neck than his smile. “I won't ask you why,” he drawled. “It's probably some sorcery and I'd rather not know about it…”

Saara opened her mouth to say it was not sorcery at all, but just a feeling she had, but the dragon was not finished.

“Besides, if I'm not out of my reckoning, that white shimmer where the mountains slope down is Granada itself.”

Gaspare craned over Saara's shoulder. It seemed they had finally reached the bottom of the Sierra Nevada. Good. Mountains were nothing special to Gaspare. “Even if that is not Granada,” he called into the black dragon's ear, “I think that the horse has to do something.” “I know, I know,” came the lugubrious hiss.

They set down to discuss plans upon a rock rubble only a few miles north of the city. Since the dragon was quite capable of firing any house or dry field he touched while at flight heat, it required some thought how to rescue Raphael without setting all Granada ablaze. The horse was released to gather what nourishment he could find.

But instead of offering suggestions, Gaspare stretched himself out with his back against a stone while he played the lute. Saara only paced.

Both of them heard a terrific racket, as though boulders in the nearby landscape were being crumbled into powder. Gaspare started up. It was the dragon, giving himself a good scratch against the rocks.

Gaspare's rhythms were almost as hard to listen to. Saara could not rest. She could not even sit down.

“He can alight on a tile roof,” stated the witch. “That way, even if he does set the timbers ablaze, he can knock the house in and contain the fire.”

“Fine by me,” mumbled Gaspare. “Of course the inhabitants of the house might disagree…” He raised his eyes and seemed to see Saara for the first time.

“What's wrong with you, my lady? You act like you have ants. Can you feel Raphael's presence from way out here?”

“No,” Saara said shortly. “I don't know WHAT it is I feel.” She shot Gaspare a glance under lowered brows.

“I told you, didn't I, that I was going to go home after this?” Gaspare lifted a surprised face.

“What else should you do, lady: stay in Granada?”

Saara grimaced. “I mean home. To the Fenlands. If I live. Home to my people, the Lapps.”

Gaspare put both hands around the neck of his lute and corrugated his young brow massively. “By sweet San Gabriele, Saara, why do you want to do THAT?”

She took offense. “Don't speak of my home in that tone of voice, youngster! You've never been there to judge it.”

With a single gesture Gaspare discounted that fact. “I know it is not civilized,” he replied. “And so no place for the greatest witch in all the Italies. And Spain.”

Saara's ire dissolved in Gaspare's predictable flattery. She produced a nervous grin. “It is a peaceful place, Gaspare, where the greatest enemy is winter. And beautiful, too, for in the autumn…”

“… all the grasses and moss turn a scarlet red, which covers the steppe and shines against the blue sky or the gray clouds like sunset,” said the voice, the familiar soft, deep voice which was not that of the dragon. “And the snows in winter take the color of the curtains in the sky, so bright that the dark time grows light enough for one to walk about and marvel.”

“Dami!” cried Saara, and her voice caught in her throat.

“Here,” he replied, and there he was, clear and only slightly shimmery, sitting on the hard ground between the witch and Gaspare. His storm-cloud wings were scarcely visible behind the mortal image.

Saara put her hand out, but stopped before touching. “I…

wanted you to see that. I thought about you and the russet time…”

“I know,” he whispered and gave her a very comfortable little smile. Then he turned to Gaspare and let him share the wordless joke. Then he stood up, wings rising behind him.

“Listen to me, my friends. I am here to interfere in the affairs of the living, as doubtless I should not!”

Damiano's amused smile faded into seriousness. “If you wish to be of service to Raphael, you must go into the city now. Move quickly. South of the central square you will find a broad avenue lined with orange trees. On this street is a house with a carved gate of cedarwood in a white wall. Enter in.

“There are also within Granada right now some fine horsemen riding fine horses very slowly. These are a sample of my interference, and as such may be of interest to you. But finding the house with the gate is more important.

“Go now; you are needed.” The ghost did not fade; he was simply not there anymore.

Gaspare rose as though on a string. He filled his considerable lungs with air. “Dragon!” he bellowed. “Come quickly!”

“A ghost?” repeated the dragon.

“The ghost of Delstrego,” replied Gaspare importantly. “And he said to hurry.”

The black dragon took to the air lithely enough, springing off his coiled tail, but he refused to be hurried in speech. “I wish I might have seen that.”

Saara had to chuckle. “I thought you would disapprove terribly. Magic being delusion, and all that.”

The great beast considered. “There is that. But spirits have their place in the natural order. If I disapproved of spirits in general, why would I then be adding my small energies to the rescue of one?

“Besides, madam: if this specter had knowledge to communicate… real wisdom, perhaps… What is it he said again?”

Gaspare repeated Damiano's message, word for portentous word.

They came to the city and passed over the wall. The dragon swooped down in a stomach-twisting dive in order to inspect the place more closely. With its regular low rows of daubed buildings and crowded streets (smelling even up here in the air) it looked like —first, a hive of bees, and then like a hive of disturbed bees. “People can see you,” shouted Saara. “They're terrified!”

The dragon writhed contemplatively. He slowed his progress so as to examine the length of one avenue broader than its fellows. “So it seems,” he murmured silkily. He rose a few yards higher.

“That edifice just beyond the city,” he explained for his riders' sakes, “set like a pearl in the red sand. That is the Alhambra, military center of the State of Granada, as well as the residence of Muhammad V, lineal descendant of Muhammad ben Yusuf ben Ahmand ben Nasir, who founded the present dynasty. It is generally accepted to be one of the most beautiful constructions in the world, and into its stones have been set the words of Ibn al-Khatib, that most martial of Islamic poets…”

“Fly!” shrieked Saara, whose sense of urgency had become almost overpowering. “South!”

“I AM flying,” declared the dragon patiently. “And hysteria will make me fly no faster. Besides, if we went faster, I should have missed what I now see below—that small force of either Bedouin or Berber cavalry, whose horses plod with their little teacup muzzles scraping the dirt of the road. Did not the sage spirit speak of such?”

“But he said the house on the street of oranges first, the cavalry after!” Gaspare insisted. “I heard him distinctly.”

Still the dragon, hanging high above the street, vacillated. “Yet we HAVE the cavalry, while the house on the street of oranges is theoretical only. And the prompting of spirits is a very subtle thing. Perhaps we should first investigate…”

“I've had enough of this,” said Saara, and without further ado she turned into a dove. Gaspare, left without a handhold, squeaked and grabbed for the dragon's coronary spines. “Me, too! Take me with you, Saara,” he bawled.

Unruffled the dragon said, “Youngster, I am more than willing to set you down.”

Chapter 12

The dove scouted, dipped, and led the horse on. Gaspare clung like a monkey to the lean black back, with nothing to restrain Festilligambe but a tattered rope bridle. But the young man's cross-continental ride on a dragon had burned away all the nervousness he had once felt around horses.

They passed the central square—a little plot of green, cleverly irrigated and tended with immense labor—and found the avenue that was edged in fragrant orange trees without trouble. This way was wide and fairly empty. The few people they did pass were dressed well in Saracen style. They failed to notice (or pretended to fail to notice) the sight of a horse chasing a little brown bird along the avenue. Gaspare, not knowing which of these strollers might have had a hand in Raphael's imprisonment, cursed the overfed lot of them equally.

He sought the house with the white wall and carved wooden gate. Odd. ALL the houses had white walls and all the white walls had wooden gates. They were almost all carved, too, with inscriptions in Arabic, meaningless to a young man not even literate in his own language. The words of the dragon flashed into his mind. “The promptings of spirits are subtle.” Damiano, too? Gaspare had clean forgotten that the ghost had specified cedarwood as the material of the gate they were seeking. But then, neither would he have been able to recognize cedarwood if he had remembered.

Saara, however, fluttered straight toward a gateway of mottled yellow and orange, which was set into a featureless wall surmounted by red tile.

She stood beside Gaspare. “It's bolted. There's something going on inside: I hear voices and the sound of a bellows. Can he jump it?”

Gaspare turned Festilligambe and trotted across the street. Then he stared at the looming wall of wood and daub. “Sweet San Gabriele,” he whispered. “Never.”

In his frustration he turned on Saara. “He's only a horse, you know: not a Cathaysian dragon.” Then an idea occurred to him.

“Delstrego—Delstrego could have made a flame to burn this door away from in front of me!”

Saara, who had been about to return to bird form and dart over the wall, found herself stung by Damiano's name. “Oh, he could, could he? Well, Gaspare, you stand right there and you will see what I, whom yourself have named the greatest witch in all the Italies OR Spain, can do!”

Gaspare waited nervously.

The desert horses were aware of a presence in the air before their riders. Their dreams of honeyed grass dissolved into the terror of rabbits beneath a hawk.

The black dragon's interest in the beasts, however, was only aesthetic, for he had recently consumed both a large fat mule and several wild Andalusian cattle (scrawny, but serviceable), and dragons do not eat as frequently as men. And neither did the Berber riders interest him greatly, for he did not see among them any select individual whom a spirit might have thought worth noticing.

There was the little fellow who, once thrown from his horse, waved a spindly sword into the air… But the dragon was hoping for something more flamboyant.