But would Avignon accept a crown that did not wear shoes? There would be no use in buying Saara shoes.)
Her glance held a child’s slyness. “Which would be better? I don’t know what a cardinal is, but a thief I understand.” Saara shrugged an Italian shrug. “If the child is strong and handsome, that is what matters.” With practiced hands she braided her hair.
Damiano had a wonderful thought—a thought that made him feel both young and old, which turned him both to stone and to jelly. “Saara. Perhaps we will have a baby?”
Her green eyes darted to Damiano and her mouth opened. “Why —are you worried about that, Damiano? You need not be.”
“I would love it,” he said, and he laid his head in her lap, mussing his hair back and forth against her belly. “Nothing could be better.”
The northern woman turned her head away in some confusion. “But I thought, Dami, you did not… believe… in your own future.”
He raised his head to hers and there was fire behind his black eyes. “I was a fool,” he stated. “But since then I have met the Devil and called him a liar to his face. I am free of his words, Saara.”
She said nothing, but continued with her braiding. After a moment his mood softened again and once more Damiano yawned. He let his feet dangle from the edge of the loft and swung them back and forth.
“What a fool I have been, Saara: wrongheaded and self-centered and backward, as well. Everything I did around you was always the wrong thing.”
Saara primmed her mouth in superior fashion, but then spoiled the effect by giggling. “It couldn’t have been too much the wrong thing, Damiano, or we would not be here now, yes?”
“But Ruggerio…”
She put a slim hand on his lips. “Dami! I will bury my dead if you will bury yours.”
He kissed the hand and said no more.
“Besides,” she continued, “it would be a miserable sort of young man who did not act like a fool now and then.”
Saara slid from the high shelf with no more fear than a bird, and landed almost without noise. “Come out, Damiano, and show me what you know about magic.”
They lay down in meadow flowers, side by side. “Eh!” Damiano protested. “We are going to get wet if we stretch out on this hill.”
Saara laced her hands behind her neck. “So?”
Damiano went up on one elbow. From here he could see the red tile roof of the empty house be bad already begun to regard as his, and the reddish ribbon of the road beyond, which his dim eyes could see was busy with people. Easter pilgrimage, most certainly. “All my clothes are new.”
She played his rich overshirt between her fingers. “Take them off, then.”
“If you will.”
She gave him a canny glance and giggled.
They lay down naked in meadow flowers, side by side.
“Now, little witch-man,” began Saara, “make for me a cloud.”
Damiano only stared at her.
“Come now, Dami. You have all the earth and all the sky to work with. Make one little cloud.”
He shook his head. “Show me.”
The pretty girl yawned. Idly she knotted her braids together under her chin. “It’s easy. First you sing your water out of the earth; there is a lot of it sitting there today.”
Saara began to sing, not in Italian (thank God) nor in langue d’oc, but in her own far northern language. “DAH dah DAH dah DAH dah DAH dah” went the rhythm of her verse. It did not seem to have a rhyme scheme, but the sounds of her speech were so limited, and so harsh in his Latin-tuned ears, that he could not really tell.
Damiano flipped over to watch her as he listened. In only a few moments he felt a chill against his damp back, while the hair on his head was gently pulled away from the scalp. He scratched his head.
All around the two witches the air wavered, like that above a boiling pot. The grass on the hillock was complaining in a slow hish and hush as it gave up its glut of moisture.
Damiano opened his mouth to exclaim, and immediately his tongue and palate went dry and powdery. He swallowed and blinked sandy eyes.
Saara’s own eyes were closed, and her hands folded on her breast. But her pink, rosebud lips were not dry, and a glistening drop balanced on her chin.
“Then, when you have the water in the air…” With the cessation of Saara’s droning song, the electric pull in the atmosphere vanished. A wet heaviness settled over Damiano’s shoulders, as fog shut their wild hillock away from the world. “. . . you must send it high into the sky, where it belongs.”
It was the same insistent, repetitive melody as before, but sung at least an octave higher. Damiano smiled to watch her, for the Fenwoman singing high in her nose sounded and looked about twelve years old.
Now her green eyes were open, gazing vacantly at the misted sky. Damiano noted a large spot of golden-brown in her right eye, which he thought quite charming. Water beaded on the wisps of hair in front of her ears, water that sparkled like adamant when the sun reclaimed the sky.
Once again Saara yawned. “There.” She pointed straight above them. “See my cloud.”
Damiano’s bare back fell upon the chilled, sodden grass. He repressed an unmanly shudder. In the blue heavens from horizon to horizon there rode only one cloud: tiny, fleecy, slightly translucent.
And directly overhead.
He commended her. “It is very pretty. The whitest cloud I have ever seen. But for a little while I thought it was going to take my teeth with it.”
“Keep your mouth closed when someone is making clouds, Dami. I should have told you that. All Lappish children learn very early.”
Damiano regarded the shapeless wonder in the sky at some length, chewing on a stem of sorrel. “Is there nothing to clouds but water?”
“What should there be?” asked Saara. “Fish?”
“Some binding element,” he replied, frowning with thought. “Something to make steam adhere to itself—for you know that the steam from a kettle doesn’t make a cloud in your kitchen. It merely dissipates and runs down your walls.”
Saara giggled. When she turned on her side her right breast hung above the left one, almost (but not quite) touching.
Damiano found this fascinating. He ran a trilobed sorrel leaf between her breasts. Not quite touching. He had to ask Saara to repeat what she had been saying.
“I said the sky is all the binding element you need. Take water high enough and it will be a cloud. And now it’s your turn. I will try to translate the song for you and…”
“No,” replied Damiano, not raising his head from his interesting task. “I don’t use words in spells anymore.”
The Fenwoman’s eyes opened very wide. She snatched the sorrel leaf from his fingers. “That tickles. Well, what do you use?”
“Just… song,” replied her lover, giving only half his attention to his words. “One melody or another. Or three at once. It doesn’t seem to matter.” Deprived of the sorrel leaf, he tried using his nose.
Saara scuffed away over the squeaking grass. “That can be very dangerous, Dami. If you have no shape to put your meaning in, you can lose control.”
He smiled. Snickered. “I do lose control, Saara. I am losing control right now.” He dived after her and bit her gently on the softest part of the belly.
There is no soft part of the belly of a great white bear. Damiano recoiled, skidding down the grass on the slope of the hillock.
“Weren’t you the one who trusted yourself so little you kept your magic locked in a stick, like it was a criminal?” asked the bear.
Damiano, who lay naked with his feet pointing down the hill, face on a level with the bear’s paws, realized that each of those black-clawed feet was about the size of his own head. He answered the bear very politely.
“I always clothe my spells in shape, Saara. My music has a lot of structure—Raphael has made sure of that. And anyway I find I cannot make up words on the spur of the moment, or even remember ones I knew before. With tunes I h
ave more facility.”
The huge, deadly animal sat on its haunches and scratched its side with one front foot in very human fashion. “That is only a matter of practice. First you learn the basic songs by heart, and then you change them as you need to. There is really very little you make up new.”
“Then, with all due respect, Madame Bear, I would rather continue my own way. After all, I cannot have the advantage of a Lappish childhood, and my personal methods, though unorthodox…”
The bear rocked back and forth. “You use too many big words,” it whined in a deep bass. “And you talk too fast to understand.”
“I’m sorry,” said the human contritely. “But what other weapons have I against a beast of your majesty?”
“Make a cloud, Dami,” begged Saara. “Any way you want to, just get on with it.”
Send his song into the earth? No, it was more that his song was the only part of him which remained above as Damiano probed through the soil after water.
Once before he had descended beneath the earth’s wrinkled skin: that time after fire. This was a more gentle journey—gentle and permeated with a coolness which could not chill the spirit as it chilled the body. He had to wander far to find water that Saara had missed. He sank down into rock (rock is no barrier to the spirit) and out beneath the rough, silver grass. Here was a river running sunless between two beds of stone, deep underground. There lay a pool where the water had not trembled its surface since the birth of Christ. Everywhere in the deep soil was water bound to stone, bound to rotten wood, or filling the feathery lace within the bones of the dead.
“You are taking a long time, Dami,” came the voice from everywhere. It pulled him regretfully from a search which was becoming a goal in itself.
Shape. His magic needed shape, if he was to control it, instead of the other way around. He sang (in his head) a song of marvelous symmetry, in which the two lines of music followed one another at a distance of two bars, like horses in tandem. Then he added a third line, which took round part with the first, while the second line went into a contrasting rhythm. He was no longer pretending to sing. He played in his mind and spirit a lute, and then (dissatisfied with its five courses of sound) an entire consort of instruments.
He called the waters from the ground and led them into the air.
Saara was right. The thin, high atmosphere imposed cloud form on the rising moisture. The problem was structure, of course. He was to be in control, not the vagrant breezes or the roiling weight of water itself. He dictated structure upon his creation.
“Damiano,” spoke Saara again. “Is that what a cloud is supposed to look like?” Her words held no criticism, but a vague uncertainty.
He opened his eyes and beheld the enormous, stark-white lenslike formation which covered a third of the visible sky. It was ovoid, regular and pierced in the middle, making a perfect setting for the noonday sun.
“Ah?” He repressed a smile of pride at this, his maiden effort. “What did you ask for? A spell with shape to it will create a cloud with a shape.”
In the loft of an abandoned house two miles north of Avignon, there was no light by which ordinary eyes might have seen. But neither the black snakes who curled together beneath the loft or the witches who curled together upon it had ordinary eyes.
It was the middle of a black hour of the morning before the dawn of Easter Sunday. It was the hour of the soldiers’ amazement: the hour of the rolling of the stone.
And Damiano, though he was not thinking of stones, or of soldiers, was all amazed. His mind was lit with a mystery—not the Paschal Mystery—which set him glowing.
“What joy is this,” he whispered, half coherently, to his mistress, “. . . that dissolves my body and soul together, so that I lose my name and my voice… and though I give all away I am richer in my heart. Though this is called debauchery—though it is called sin —never have I felt more holy nor more hale.”
Saara chuckled gently, in part because she did not understand Damiano’s words, and in part because she did.
“I did not know I could be so happy,” murmured her lover, his lips brushing lightly over smooth blushing skin, “. . . not on this earth. In fact I had been told that happiness was not meant for us; a close friend assured me that misery was our lot, and I… I believed her.
“But had I known—had I known before what it would be, to lie with you, Saara of Saami, I would have died years since, with the impatience of waiting.”
Saara lay curled against the wall. In her long hair was tangled the stems of clover and mustard and vetch: sweet weeds the witches had plucked together, along with bundles of spring grass, to make a fresh bed upon the rough wooden platform. She cradled Damiano’s head on her breast and gazed down at that tousled head with a wondering care.
“It was only yesterday you said to me that you were not alone, Dami. Not a solitary nor a boy, you said.”
A smile pulled his mouth wide. With a single motion he rolled from Saara’s lap and rolled her on top of him. “I am contradicting myself, bellissima. Nonetheless…” and Damiano paused, sniffing left and right. He drew Saara’s head to his and buried his nose in her hair.
“Your hair smells a little of pond water, Saara. That’s what we get for playing the part of frogs.”
“Better than what we might have smelled like by now, my dear,” she giggled. “It is my practice to bathe every day, even when I have to break the ice to do it.”
Damiano snorted. “You have strange tastes, beloved. Rose water and a steaming ewer—that I understand, but to immerse one’s body …”
He combed the offending tress with his fingers. “No more breaking ice, Saara. No more cold beds shared with a pregnant goat.” Then his musing smile faded.
“Saara. Your life has been so sad. You have loved proud men, violent men, vainglorious men. I may be a madman—Gaspare tells me so often enough—but at least I can be gentle about it. I will live to make you happy.”
The forearms which locked about Saara’s breast were very hard and strong, laced with the muscles and tendons used on the lute. Damiano’s upper arms and shoulders were less well developed. His body, except for the face and hands, was the greenish olive of dark skin which has not seen the sun. He nuzzled the nape of her neck, rocking all the while from side to side.
Saara was rosy all over, though her shoulders, her nose and the upper surface of her nipples were dusted with bronze from the previous summer. Her eyes were closed, as she relaxed into Damiano’s slow, rocking embrace. She leaned back and bit his ear gently, whispering something which made him chuckle as he replied:
“I spoke the truth. I have not been solitary. I have even had creatures I could love, and who would love me in return: not women, it is true, but dogs and angels at least.
“And none of that is wasted. Oh, no, I would be a churl to say it is wasted….” Releasing Saara, he propped himself up on one elbow and sniffed to clear his nostrils of the intrusive dust of the mustard flower. Half mockingly, Saara rubbed his nose with a wisp of grass. He sneezed. She stuck the white globe blossoms of clover into his black hair.
“But this, beloved. To lie here sleepless on rough-hewn boards all the night of the most sacred day of the year, while you tease and abuse me this way—biting me, hitting me with sticks—with no regard for my dignity, my manhood, my comfort…” He turned his face slightly, for Saara was now kissing his neck with a predatory passion, and biting a bit harder, “. . . for this I was created. Ah, woman! My queen. My paradise. My great good friend.”
For some while now the Fenwoman had not been listening to anything her lover said. Italian was difficult enough, for her, and impassioned Italian of a poetical cast, uttered with a strong Piedmontese accent and half smothered by blankets—that was beyond her. By Damiano’s tone of voice she gained enough understanding to make her happy, and in turn she endeavored with a forthright Nordic sort of enthusiasm to transcend her own limited vocabulary. But his last sentence she understood, and it made her laugh.
“Ho! Damiano. I have been called a queen before, by Ruggerio (although he did not really mean it, since he did not usually do what I wanted him to do). And I have been called a friend. But never have I been a friend and a queen together. I think you will have to choose one or the other.”
His response was a huge, mauling hug. “No! No, I can’t choose. I am Delstrego the madman—just ask Gaspare if it’s not true that I’m mad—and I have to have impossible things. You are to be my queen and my heaven, and my friend to love and play games with, and my teacher and my singer and…”
His touch quieted into something feather light as he concluded “. . . and maybe the mother of my troublesome children, heh?”
Having the eyes of sight and the eyes of love and the black eyes of a man, still Damiano could not see the look of pain that lashed over Saara’s face. She hid her eyes against his shoulder.
He could not see her face, but he could feel her stiffen. “What is it, beloved, what have I said?”
Fear dripped cold in Saara, like blood from a stabbing wound. She thought, He will not want me when he knows. He has youth, time…. He has the world, and I am only the first of many….
And though Saara dreaded the truth, she was not tempted to lie.
“I can’t have your children, Damiano. The children I had are dead: they are all I will have.”
The silence that followed was terrible. Then Damiano said, “I am sorry I spoke, beloved. I didn’t think. But it is no matter. If we can’t have a child ourselves, we will merely buy one.”
“Buy one?” Saara nearly hiccuped in surprise.
“Certainly. Of course, such a child would almost certainly be simple: not a witch. If that would disappoint you too much, then we will have dogs instead.”
“Dogs?” she echoed.
“Or horses. Or the big, flat-footed deer your people raise. The important thing, bellissima,” and Damiano gave her hand an urgent little squeeze, “is to be surrounded with life, don’t you think? Creatures that are young and growing, that look to the future.”
Damiano's Lute Page 23