Damiano's Lute

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Were it not for Raphael, Gaspare would have no cause to think Damiano a madman.

  All these reflections took the time of one long sigh and a shift of weight from left elbow to right. Damiano continued his interrupted sentence. “And in the beginning, the horse liked me least of all men.

  “But, Gaspare, I want you to listen to the strange thing that happened to me when I was being whipped in Petit Comtois.”

  Gaspare’s laugh was not kindly. “I can think of many possible strange things….”

  The half-naked man ignored this interruption. “I sort of blacked out. But not really, for I found myself standing somewhere else. In Lombardy, I was, in a place I have been once before, though I never talked about it to you. A beautiful garden.”

  The ironic light died behind the boy’s eyes. “That happens,” he admitted. “When a man is in pain, or sick. When I was five and had the spots I had such a fever Evienne says I thought she was Saint Lucia, though why Saint Lucia, I have no idea….”

  Damiano raised his chin again and frowned fiercely at Gaspare. “I spoke, not with Saint Lucia, but with a woman I know. A very beautiful woman….”

  “A beautiful one? Sounds less and less real all the time.”

  “And she was surprised to see me standing next to her. I was like a spirit, for my body was left in Petit Comtois. We both agreed I should not have come there, and she sent me back.”

  One rusty eyebrow shot up. “She sent you back? Isn’t that the way with beautiful women? But you should learn persistence, musician. Otherwise there will never be any little black-haired, sheep-eyed babies running around.”

  Damiano pushed himself off the floor of the wagon. It seemed the heat of his own irritation was lifting him.

  “This woman I speak of is a great lady, Gaspare. The most powerful witch in the Italies, if not in all of Europe. You must learn to think before you speak of people, or you will never grow old enough for there to be any little red-haired, pointy-nosed babies running around.

  “And surely by now you know me enough to take seriously what Gaspare’s small brow beetled enormously. The reins dropped from his hands and lay on the footboard of the seat. “Do you think I’m not old enough already, lute player? I’ll have you know that I may only be fourteen, but some fourteen-year-olds are men already, while some twenty-three-year-olds…”

  Damiano would not be sidetracked. Not even by this subject. Especially not by this subject. “. . . to take seriously what I say on the subject of powers unseen. I was trained from birth to feel and manipulate these powers, by a father who was no mean witch himself.

  Gaspare’s eyes dropped with queasy self-consciousness. He plucked up the reins.

  “And on top of his training, and my natural predisposition to magic, I have added a thorough course of study in the works of the great Hermes Trismagistus, along with the additions and commentaries of Mary the Jewess. If I, out of all mankind, tell you I have visited Lombardy in immaterial form, then me you can believe!”

  Gaspare set his long jaw. Rough-mannered as he was, he had always avoided this particular confrontation with Damiano. Now it seemed inevitable. He pulled on the reins with a long, exaggerated “Hoa.” Festilligambe stopped out of sheer surprise.

  “Damiano. My dear, close friend,” he sighed. “You have no magical powers.”

  Damiano blinked. “Of course not. Not since last year. I gave them all away.”

  Gaspare’s regard was steady and pitying. The horse shook his glistening, sweaty mane under the sun and opened his nostrils hugely.

  “You gave them away.”

  Damiano blundered stiffly onto the seat beside him. “Yes. But I still had them when I first met you in San Gabriele. Don’t you remember? I disappeared in front of you and scared you half to death.”

  Gaspare was affronted. “I don’t remember being scared half to death by you. You had a trick or two, I grant. You could make it seem your bitch-dog talked. That was fine, and I’m really sorry you lost that dog. I like dogs. Much better than horses.”

  Damiano pulled his hair in consternation, while he bit down on his large lower Up. “Gaspare! What are you saying? I’m always talking about how I was a witch, and how my staff worked, and about Raphael, whom I summoned—or rather requested audience of—and so learned to play the lute. I know you don’t believe everything I say, but if you don’t believe that I was a witch, then you must think I should be locked away in a cellar!”

  Gaspare glanced up and away again. He brushed a stray fly from his colleague’s back. “Not at all, Damiano. But I think that it is important to you to feel special.”

  “Eh?” The dark, curly head jerked up, and the black eyes opened round.

  “It is important to every man to feel special,” continued Gaspare moderately. “But what you don’t realize is that you are special. You are singular. You are the finest lute player—oh, God’s bollucks, the finest musician—we have seen in all our travels. I doubt there is another here or back in Italy as original and progressive as yourself. Being a magus or a wizard fades to nothing next to that. You need not wish to be a sorcerer. You need not ever think about it again.”

  “I was not a magus, or wizard, or sorcerer. Just a witch.” And he stared and stared at Gaspare. “But what you are saying is simply that you do not believe me.”

  “I do not believe you,” replied Gaspare quietly.

  Damiano snorted. He folded his large hands together and his eyes wandered over the gentle Provençal horizon, where stood small cots and ricks, and ponds of water floating with ducks. Five seconds of silence grew into ten. Into twenty.

  “I feel very strange right now,” Damiano announced.

  Gaspare shot him one wary, concerned glance. “Perhaps that is how it feels to come to your senses,” he suggested, trying to say it as inoffensively as possible.

  But Damiano spared only one distracted glance. He stood up on the footboard, and then climbed on the seat itself, holding to the wagon eave for support. Both Gaspare and Festilligambe looked up at him standing above them.

  “No, Gaspare. I mean I feel magic. Even now. There is power in the air above us.” He waved hugely at the empty sky.

  “Oh, Christ!” groaned Gaspare. “I have done it!” He hid his face in his hands. “He is beyond recovery.”

  And now Damiano was pointing. “Look! Look, Gaspare. It is coming. Can’t you see?”

  The boy peeked. “I see a little bird,” he said in a flat voice. “A little bird bobbing and flapping, like little birds do.”

  “She is looking for us,” the other insisted. “She is looking for me, I think.” Now he gesticulated with both hands, nearly overbalancing on the flimsy seat.

  The horse snorted. Unobtrusively Gaspare sidled to the edge of the seat. The little bird (it was a dun-gray dove, with a ring around its neck) passed overhead, banked in the air and circled the wagon.

  Gaspare glared from the dove to Damiano. The action was too perfect. He suspected this whole scene was a trick arranged especially for him, but for the life of him, he couldn’t think how it had been done. As the bird circled again, Gaspare began to feel silly. He watched the dove descend to the dust of the road, where the horse sniffed it and uttered a very wise, deep nicker.

  And then, while Damiano clambered down from the wagon seat, capering with what enthusiasm his striped back would permit, and as Gaspare’s vision swam, the dun dove turned into a very beautiful— not lady, certainly, not with that blue felt dress which showed feet and ankles and more besides—a most exquisitely beautiful brown-braided, barefoot peasant maiden.

  She put one hand upon the horse’s shoulder, perhaps with the apprehension that her sudden appearance might have upset the beast. But Festilligambe might have been accustomed to transforming people since foalhood. His left ear twisted around but his right ear did not feel it was worth the effort. His head neither inclined nor flinched away. He inched away from her touch with only his usual diffidence.

  She looked at the horse
and the wagon and she looked at Gaspare (and at that moment the boy knew that this one was a great lady after all, even barefoot and in felt, so he swallowed firmly and bit down upon his unruly tongue) and then she looked through him and finally she allowed herself to look upon the young man standing in front of her.

  “Where is this plague?” she said, speaking Italian with a strange, broad, bouncing accent. “Neither of you has such sickness in you.” Her small face showed concern, along with a certain shade of accusation, but as she frowned at Damiano, the tiny hairs that escaped her braids caught the sun. “Your only trouble is that you don’t eat right.”

  Damiano was looking at the gleaming bronze hairs instead of at the frown, while he himself was smiling so that he thought perhaps he would not be able to talk. “You—you came all the way from Lombardy, Saara. To see me? Because of my strange visit to you? Gaspare here was just telling me that you were a fever dream, like the time he had the spots and saw his sister as Saint Lucia.”

  Then, before his bubbling triviality might have time to irritate Saara, he added, “Yes, my lady, there is plague behind us, and if we have escaped it I am only too glad. And the flogging I mentioned, which caused me to flee to you—that was real, too, though nowhere so terrible as the plague. But I did not think you would trouble yourself so….”

  Saara the Fenwoman put her hand on Damiano’s bare arm, intending to turn him around. As they touched she saw some shade of feeling in the movement of his eye and she said, “Don’t worry, Dami.” Her frown dissolved. “Now that we are both present in body, it is no longer dangerous for me to touch you.”

  Damiano’s eyes opened wide. He scratched his own bare shoulder, and from his confusion he rescued some element of gallantry. “No longer dangerous? My sweet lady, it is because of our bodies that danger enters into it.” But as he spoke, pride turned his mangled back away from her.

  “It is nothing worth looking at,” he declared. “No more than bramble scratches. Forget I ever spoke of it. I took off my shirt because the day was warm.”

  Damiano met Saara’s eyes slowly, for he was not a good liar, and he found in them a swirling, green-brown angry fire at this silliness of his.

  As around Saara (and around the power of Saara) all things had unexpected color and focus, so even her anger took on brightness. Though once Damiano might have met, or at least understood this light of anger, now he could not even look at her. For she was the greatest and most assuredly the most beautiful witch in the Italies, while he had not even the fire with which he had been born.

  So he was silenced and his eyes slid away. And as Saara saw this, her anger faded into something like pity, or like hurt, and upon that emotion yet another sort of anger fed.

  “You fool! What under all the winds have you been doing to yourself? Don’t you know that plague is death, and not all the magic that is in the earth can overcome it? And this…”as she spun him about and pointed to the scabbing weals, “how did you let this happen? Do you forget who you are? You! You who were once strong enough to carry half of my soul away with you, and then wise enough to bring it back!

  “I know you, witch, for I carry around a dark child you have abandoned, and all it does is whisper your name! You cannot lose your self-respect without bringing shame to me. And if you should die, witch—Damiano—if you should die of plague in a far country, then what am I to do with that little shadow?”

  Self-possession returned to Damiano between one moment and the next. His head snapped up and he rested his own large hand upon hers. “When I die, Saara, then you must release anything of mine that you hold. A dead man should be dead.”

  Saara blinked: catlike, green, but uncertain. “Not ‘when,’ but ‘if,’ Dami. You are not sick, remember, but only underfed.” And in a whisper she added, “And I am much older than you.”

  In that instant their positions were reversed, for the young man stood with quiet assurance, while Saara stepped back a pace, slipping her hand from his.

  “And I ask again…” She raised both her arms in a world-embracing gesture. “Damiano, in a land filled with food, why have you starved yourself?”

  During the prior conversation, Gaspare had sat on the wagon seat as motionless as the whipstock, while magic and talk of magic turned his head around, and while talk of dark children turned his ideas of Damiano on their heads.

  But at this last question Damiano himself turned from Saara to Gaspare, and what he saw in that pinched, ruddy face caused him to break out laughing.

  The boy took this as a sort of permission, and his own strong need pulled him from the wagon seat to the presence of the terrible, angry, beautiful barefoot lady, where he knelt and clasped his hands about her knees.

  “Oh, signorina bellissima! He will never admit it, being too stiff-necked and mad besides, but he is starving to death in truth, and I am also. And if you are as great a lady as your appearance declares you, you will have pity on us and give us a little something. If you have no silver, then bread will do. Enchanted bread is very good, I have heard. Or enchanted roast pork, or even enchanted boiled greens….”

  Saara had been aware of Gaspare on the wagon seat, just as she had been aware of Festilligambe between the traces, but when the boy fell at her feet, and clasped her embroidered dress she gaped from his red face to Damiano’s dark one.

  “Who?” she asked.

  Gaspare’s gesture began at Damiano and ended theatrically, slapping his own breast. “I’m his dancer,” he announced. “And if he has lost a little of his looks, signora, do not exclude him from your graces. Some of his decay is age, of course, as he is all of three and twenty, but most of it is only hardship, curable with a little kindness.”

  His gooseberry green eyes stared wildly into her green ones as he stage-whispered, “I beg you only to remember the dark child!” Then, seeing in the elven face no perceptible sign of softening (indeed, Saara’s expression was frozen by complete incomprehension), Gaspare added, “But if after all these entreaties, it still seems the fellow is beyond saving, it is perhaps worth noting that I am only fourteen at present, so my best years are certainly before me.”

  Saara shifted within Gaspare’s unslackening knee-clasp. She looked up once more at Damiano, who was so trapped between anger at Gaspare, sympathy with the boy and a general desire to laugh at the picture he made, that his face had gone nearly as red as the redhead’s.

  “Why do you need a dancer?” Saara inquired of him.

  He cleared his throat. “Gaspare. Let the lady go now,” he commanded.

  Obediently Gaspare released. Then in a reaction toward dignity the boy stood upright, brushing himself off.

  Damiano brushed one hand through his hair as he continued, “I need a dancer, Saara, because I am a musician. I play. He dances. People pay us—when they feel like it.

  “That is also why we are starving.” He laughed at his own words, not because they were very funny, but because he found it easy to laugh around Saara.

  “I don’t mean because we’re bad, so no one wants to hear or see us. I don’t think we’re bad, either of us.”

  “We’re certainly not,” interjected Gaspare with a great deal of confidence.

  “But no one in Franche-Comté knows us yet, and we don’t even know where and when the markets are, so… it is not easy.”

  Saara continued to stare, and though Damiano believed, or wanted to believe, that he knew the woman well, he could not read her expression. From somewhere within him a spark of defiance rose. “So why should I apologize?” He shrugged. “Being hungry isn’t a sin.

  The woman started, in abrupt, birdlike fashion. “Ruggerio would talk like that; he would say, ‘If I want to sleep till midday, so what? It isn’t a sin.’ Or in the summer he would say, ‘When you walk around without your clothes like that, Saara, you are sin waiting to happen.’

  “Someday I must learn what a sin is,” she concluded.

  Gaspare’s guffaw at the mention of walking around without clothes was rath
er overdone. But then he thought that line expected a guffaw, and was rather annoyed that Damiano had missed his cue.

  Because he did not like to be reminded of the Roman he had killed, Damiano remained sober. “I myself am never certain, my lady. But I have found that harm done to another person is usually a sin, while harm done to myself usually is not.”

  Saara took her left braid in her right hand, and her right braid in her left, and she yanked on them both. Thoughtfully she regarded the sweet hills of grass and trees.

  Behind them rose a height of vines, their leaves just breaking, waxy green against the chalky soil. Down ahead the road looped around water, and the rough calls of ducks rose in the air. Set back from both pond and highway was a house: a rural mansion, limed white and possessing at least four rooms. To the right of the road spread pastureland, dotted with sheep. As though apprehending her notice, a sheepdog began to bark.

  The witch stood motionless, her lips twitching slightly. Gaspare opened his mouth to speak, but Damiano elbowed him neatly, for he knew what Saara was doing. “There.” She pointed. “Three people are in that house. There is a whole new lamb hanging over a smokefire. Also a barrel half filled with sleeping roots: turnips, maybe. And in the oven, pot pies are baking now; I think even the simple nose could smell them.”

  Gaspare emitted a strengthless whine and leaned against Damiano, who could scarcely support him. Saara, with the forced patience of a mother with very slow children, spoke slowly and distinctly.

  “You go down there and clap at their door, and tell them that you are hungry and have nothing to eat.”

  A dozen expressions chased themselves across Gaspare’s features.

  He whispered, “And you will enchant them into feeding us, O great and beautiful lady?”

  Saara’s smile was scornful. “Of course not. I will do nothing. They will give you food because it is what they ought to do, and they will be glad to do it.”

  The boy deflated, and even Damiano looked a trifle wan. “I’m sorry, Saara,” he said. “But they will not. These are the civilized peasants of France, and they will give away nothing for free.”