“To the Bishop’s Inn, for now. Later—when the baby is closer— then we can find you a little house somewhere. We’re not so poor as we once were.”
Gaspare mouthed the word “baby.” Then he exploded. “Baby! Baby. By Saint Gabriele, woman, don’t tell me you are pregnant!” The boy gave such a perfect imitation of a brother whose honor is outraged that both Damiano and his sister sat silent for the next few moments.
“Hush,” hissed the witch, pointing meaningfully toward the door. “There are limits, Gaspare, to what a spell can do for you.”
“Yes,” answered Evienne sullenly. “I am pregnant, Gaspare. Is that any of your business, I’d like to know?”
“How’d it happen?” demanded Gaspare, in unreflecting rage.
Damiano beheld his friend’s behavior with rising irritation. The only creature more volatile and irrational than Gaspare of San Gabriele was Gaspare when in the presence of his sister.
“Are you going to challenge the Cardinal Rocault to a duel, perhaps?” The question slid away from song and ended in a tone of disgust.
Evienne decided to ignore her brother. “It is because of the baby I must stay. If it’s Herbert’s, you see—well, I know him enough to say that he’ll take care of it very well. And take care of me also.”
“And if it’s not?” growled Gaspare, as his limber fingers snaked a choker of blue beads into his pocket, to he beside the earrings.
She shrugged. “Then it’s Jan’s.”
Gaspare mock-spat into the corner. “Tell me how you were such a fool as to get pregnant. You never did before.”
“I didn’t have any girlfriends in Avignon,” she said simply. “What was I to do? Besides, Gaspare, I want this baby. If it is the cardinal’s, then it will be my fortune. If it is Jan’s…” Her face softened, till Evienne appeared about five years old. “I really love Jan. Even when he does awful things, like not coming to see me for seven weeks together. I feel sorry for him, I think. He can be so bad.”
Into Damiano’s mind came the words of Raphael. “Perhaps the purpose of man is to forgive the Devil.” He smiled sadly at the pretty, pregnant girl.
When had he stopped singing? He couldn’t even remember. But he was very tired. It had been such a day. And the cloying, close air. And the muffling drapes of woolen. Damiano yawned. He ceased to follow what Gaspare and his sister were saying. He gave his fire to an oil lamp on the dresser.
It was Gaspare who first heard the footsteps. “Hisht! Damiano!” the boy whispered sibilantly. “Someone’s coming.”
Damiano came bolt upright out of a dream in which Saara the Fenwoman had red hair and dog’s feet. His heart lurched.
Gaspare was gesturing like a mad consort conductor. “Sing. Sing!” In another moment the boy had given up on his friend, and seemed to fling himself out of the third-story window. Evienne was standing with both hands on her mouth, her green eyes circled by white. Couchicou, on the other hand, sat with his nose pressed expectantly against the door, his whip-tail banging.
Damiano could not remember the lullaby he had used to quiet the house before. He could not remember any lullaby. Any song. His hands lusted vainly for a staff.
“It’s Herbert,” the girl said, in a teeny-tiny voice.
Damiano, too, went out the window.
“Evienne—what’s that dog doing in here?” demanded a voice which Damiano, who was hanging by his fingers from the window ledge, recognized as Rocault’s.
“He has been here ever since I got back from dinner,” Evienne replied. She lied with professional skill. “I have been too afraid to have him removed. He might get angry and bite me!”
Male laughter, half contemptuous, half amused, and the sound of a door opening and shutting again.
“What the hell happened to you?” snapped Gaspare in Damiano’s ear. The two hung side by side, like banners—or pots of kitchen herbs—from the window.
“I fell asleep,” whispered Damiano in reply. His hands were slowly slipping from the angled wooden sill. He regripped with his right, causing his left to lose what it had gained.
He was developing a bad case of splinters in his fingers, and that worried him almost as much as the fact that there was thirty feet of air between himself and the ground. Of course the peach trees were immediately below. They would break his fall before bouncing him out to the pavement of the river road. Perhaps he would survive the fall. It was unlikely, but not impossible that both of them would survive.
He stared down into the illusory softness of the blossoming trees. From here he could smell them again. And out of nothing swam the memory of a sprawling rosemary bush that at the Fenwoman’s command had snarled his feet in its twining embrace. He heard again the drone of bees and Saara’s clear voice singing words he couldn’t understand.
Then, he hadn’t been able to understand. Now—
Well, why not? Though Damiano’s special skills were with animals, and his sympathies did not extend to the vegetable kingdom (he ate carrots with gusto), still he would make the effort.
“I’m going to drop,” announced Gaspare, “into the peach trees. I’ll try to grab the branches to break my fall.”
“No.” Damiano fixed him with a desperate glance. “Wait just another minute.” Then his face went blank with his interior effort.
“Wait for what,” hissed Gaspare. “Sunrise? My hands are slipping now!”
But even as he did lose his grip, something hard touched the sole of Gaspare’s foot. He fell no more than two feet and then crashed forward, bumping his long nose against the wall itself. Slowly Gaspare rose again, his legs tangled in a wildly expanding growth of blooming peach.
Damiano let the green wood embrace him. He sighed. He blinked unhappily at his wounded hands. “Damn!” he whispered. “Right in the tip of the first fretting finger.” He stuck the damaged digit into his mouth.
Meanwhile, Gaspare was kissing the peach boughs with great passion with a face to which the sweat of fear had stuck bruised petals. He swung to the ground, nimble as a monkey.
Damiano followed, favoring his left hand.
Once on the pavement (still shiny with rain) he turned back to his handiwork, scratching his head with his right hand. He had no idea how to properly terminate such a spell.
But Damiano was nothing if not mannerly. “Thank you, peach trees,” he called out to the growth. And within five seconds the trees had sucked back into themselves their unnatural extension. Gaspare swore in awe.
“Everyone is taken care of,” sighed Damiano, slumping against Gaspare’s shoulder. “Gaspare, Evienne, Jan, the Holy Father, the Devil: everyone.
“Now it’s Dami’s turn. He’s going to bed.” And he leaned on Gaspare all the way home.
Chapter 11
It was an awkward and lumpy bundle of blankets, clothing, cheese, dried pears and bread. Inside it, like the golden yolk within an egg, was hidden an exquisite lute. Wine went in a separate bag; that also for the lute’s sake. “It will hold, anyway,” grunted Damiano. “With all that rope, it will hold.”
The constraining rope went from end to end of the bundle. Damiano slung it bandolier-style, groaned, took it off, padded the rope with a rag and tried it again.
“Better. And then, of course, the horse will carry it easier than I.”
He had decided to meet Saara in the open, out of the city. The Fenwoman, after all, didn’t like cities, and among the trees and grass there would be more of what his euphemistic mind liked to think of as opportunities. He had no doubt that Saara would be able to find him.
“You look like a fool,” stated Gaspare, although the boy had not turned from his position in front of the window, staring at the dark street below. “It does your reputation no good to be seen like that.”
Damiano glared. He foresaw this night’s mood being ruined by another of Gaspare’s seizures of temperament. “Well, if that’s all that’s worrying you, the moon is half-past full and I doubt anyone will be able to see me at all.”
“Another reason to wait until morning.”
“Why? I can see well enough by half a moon. Saara can see excellently at all times. We are witches, remember.”
“Heathen,” said Gaspare in the same dry, suppressed tone.
The lutenist, who had a temperament of his own, was straining to be away. Yet it would be a shame to leave Gaspare on that word. He stalked over to the boy and spun him around by the shoulder.
“What is this, Gaspare? Don’t I deserve a rest, after all that has happened in the past month? You, too—you’re always complaining how hard it is to live with a madman.
“That is, when you’re not telling me I am not a man at all because I have no mistress. Well, now I have a mistress, and I’m on my way to meet her.”
The boy stood with his hands in his jerkin pockets, one hip cocked —an attitude that mimicked carelessness very unconvincingly.
“Go, if you’re going already. We’ll talk about it if you come back.”
“If?” cried Damiano. “If?” A curse issued from the far end of the room, where an early sleeper had had his first rest broken by the noise. With one accord Damiano and Gaspare stepped out of the room and down the corridor.
“If? Mother of God, Gaspare. Do you believe I’m running out on you?” The heavy bundle banged along the narrow hall.
Gaspare cleared his throat and spat. “I believe nothing. It’s much safer that way.”
Once under starlight, Damiano desired urgently to bolt and run. His mind rebelled at the thought of one more depressing wrangle with the redhead. But he took a deep breath and began again.
“Two weeks at the most, I will be gone. The room is paid up and you have enough money for food till I get back—if you don’t spend it on clothes.”
“This is not good for your career, you know, musician,” said the redhead distantly, peering into the darkness toward the city gate. “In two weeks Avignon can forget. You can’t expect to find a job waiting vacant when you come back.” Then he looked straight at Damiano. “How can I reach you if I need you?”
Damiano stared back. “Why should you need me?”
Gaspare ignored this. “I am your manager. I must be able to reach you. If you turn into a dove and flap off to Lombardy with that woman…”
The dark man leaned back against the white wall, where his hair made a shadowed halo. “Ah. So that’s it. I’m not turning into a dove, Gaspare. I feel little enough human sometimes as I am. And a long journey is not the purpose for which I am…”
Cursing the limitations of the simple man, who would not be able to locate a friend hidden in the countryside outside the city, who indeed couldn’t even find his sister when she was hidden behind a plaster wall, Damiano stood and cogitated. An idea came: not a good idea, for it interfered with his plans a bit, but one that might pacify the boy.
“I will leave Festilligambe with you,” he said. “Since he is a horse and not a man, he will have some notion of where I am. If you have to find me, just get on him and give him his head.”
In the middle of Damiano’s explanation, Gaspare had begun to shake his head. The movement gained both speed and power, until at the end it shook the boy’s entire frame. “Oh, no, I won’t. The last time I tried something similar…”
“He found me right away, as I remember.”
Gaspare snorted. “And almost killed us both. I wouldn’t touch that beast with anything but a butcher’s blade.”
That was enough. Damiano’s patience snapped like a lute string, and he turned on his heel.
Already, as Damiano disappeared into the darkness, Gaspare was beginning to regret the violence of his words. He was reassured to notice that Damiano left the horse anyway.
Each rustle was a mystery, and more a mystery as the witch’s ears put a name to it. That rhythmic pinging was this week’s rain, still dripping in a pipe somewhere. It rang in his head like the music of the spheres. That tiny interrogative shriek was a bat, chasing insects by the light of a pedestrian’s swinging lantern. The lantern itself hung by a cord from the man’s wrist, and creaked of rust and leather. The man’s breathing, too, creaked. He was ancient.
A second squeaking joined the first, but from below. This was not a bat, but a rat, making sad complaint about some rattish problem or other. While passing the next block Damiano heard a louder sound: a thumping, also rhythmic, from behind an upstairs wall, accompanied by a duet of heavy breathing. Though recognizable, like the call of a bat or rat, this sound seemed to Damiano the very essence of mystery. He stopped still, listening. His hand tightened on the rope of his bundle.
Finally he reached the North Gate of Avignon, where he had entered the city less than two weeks ago. As he passed under he gave a silent prayer of gratitude.
What a clear sky, and what good fortune that three days’ rain should have cleared when it did. Even the mud underfoot had been half dried by today’s ambitious sun. Damiano nearly tripped over the broad flat road, then, as he remembered that Saara was a weather witch. Could she have worked this change for his sake? Or her own? For both, really…. The thought made him blush. He looked about him.
Twenty years ago Avignon had been threatening to burst her gates. The fields beside the road were dotted with small stone huts and large stucco houses, some roofless or without doors, either unfinished or subsequently cannibalized for materials.
All were abandoned now, for who else but a barbarian would live outside of Avignon when there was plenty of room within? They shone like ghosts, rain-washed, moonlit, surrounded by the susurrating new grass.
Two miles from Avignon, Damiano left the road, high-stepping over the soft earth, to look into one of the most imposing of the skeletons. (After all, why hurry when you don’t really know where you are going?) This dwelling was in better shape than most; because it was so far from the city gate, no one had yet stolen its roof of tile. It possessed three large rooms through which the wind blew at fancy.
He entered. The stucco walls still stood, though cracked and sea-blue with mildew. The roof did not appear to leak much. Damiano placed his bundle carefully in the driest available corner and leaned out a front window.
No fortress, this, but the house of an ambitious peasant. The windows were square—indefensible, perhaps, but more pleasant for viewing the road. The rooms were big enough that a large family would not bump elbows too often, and the largest of them—the stable—had a loft which still appeared serviceable. Damiano scrambled up and peered down. Then he dropped to the floor and peered up.
He liked this house. He wondered if it were still owned by a man who had plans for it one day, and that was why it had not been pillaged like so many others. It was not too far for a man to live in and work in Avignon—if he had a horse.
Owned or not, the building was still occupied—by a nest of black snakes, many of whom were spending the evening within, their whip-bodies lumpily satiated. Damiano went over to talk with them.
“Boy, boy, solitary boy.” The song approached without noise of footsteps. The hair on Damiano’s neck rose. Three snakes lifted sleek heads and listened with their tongues.
“Your playmates are the beasts of the fields.”
Outside the window where Damiano had lately leaned stood a shining girl, her loose hair whipping back from her face. Her dress was sprinkled with stars, and her eyes bleached silver by the colorless light of the moon.
“Saara,” whispered Damiano, thickly. The snakes all slithered away.
He came to the window, and gently he caught her wild hair in his hand.
“In what way am I solitary, Pikku Saara? And how am I a boy?” He kissed her.
Saara stared vaguely at the rough beams of the ceiling above the loft. “The sun is beautiful today. It would be warmer out there than in here.”
Damiano lay beside her, his head comfortably wedged between Saara’s neck and her pink shoulder, his knees clasped around hers. He felt perhaps he should be examining himself this morning, assaying both the state of his witchery
and the state of his soul, to see what the loss of virginity had cost him. But that seemed such a dreary enterprise. Much more interesting to examine Saara’s hair. “That one,” he observed, “is coppery-red, almost as red as Gaspare’s. And it is straight. But the one next to it is dark, and it has more curl to it.”
She giggled, for his breath tickled her ear. “Probably it’s your hair.”
He grunted. “So it is. But this other one is not—my hair is never so fine—and it, too, is dark. And all around and between you have lemon-pale hairs, and ones of rabbit brown….”
“Don’t tell me about the gray ones,” Saara murmured, and she cuddled in closer, making her own investigation of his neck.
“Eh?” Damiano gave a scornful snort. “You have no gray hairs. Don’t be silly.”
One wisp of hair fell across the woman’s face. She regarded it cross-eyed. “Not yet, maybe. But it will come. We all grow old, Damiano.” She squirmed in his grasp until she could reach his own shaggy head. He bent to allow her fingers in his hair. “What are you looking for, fleas?”
“Whatever,” she murmured in reply. “You don’t have any gray hairs, which does not surprise me. Nor fleas, either.”
“I tell them to go away.”
“But your hair, Dami! So thick. If it didn’t go in circles, I would think it belonged to a horse.”
He smiled and kissed the base of her throat. His head slid lower. “I thought I was a sheep,” he said, his words muffled between her breasts.
“You are a thousand creatures,” whispered Saara, and then nothing else was said for a quarter of an hour.
“Did I tell you Gaspare’s sister is going to have a baby?”
Half his words were lost within a yawn. Saara made him repeat them.
“I have never seen Gaspare’s sister, Dami, but my good wishes to her nonetheless.”
“It is either the child of a cardinal or a thief,” added Damiano, grinning up at his mistress, who was slipping her nakedness into her blue embroidered dress.
(He would dress her in silk satin, and in cloth-of-gold, and buy green velvet ribbons to wind in her hair. She would be the crown of Avignon.
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