Damiano's Lute

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Saara smiled in spite of herself, and the cold wound in her heart warmed unexpectedly, as though it might possibly heal someday. “With only you around, Dami, I feel… overwhelmed by life!”

  She snuggled into the bed of greenery.

  By the taste in the air it would be dawn soon. Damiano (in spite of never feeling more “hale” in his life) felt it would not be a bad idea to sleep Easter away. Sinful, of course, to miss the mass, and especially for such carnal purposes. But sin was man’s nature, he had been told, and Damiano had a lot of carnal sinning to do if he was to catch up to the human norm.

  Besides, he could not really believe there was sin in anything touched by Saara.

  “. . . has taken my fancy,” he was saying. “It is a well-built house, with a good view and at least a rod of flat land on all sides of it. We could do worse than to settle here, at least for a while.”

  “Mnnh?” Saara was more than half asleep.

  “I will go into Avignon to play—for I must play for people, or I will decline—and of course we will use the city as our market, but here we will have both ease and privacy.”

  “Have what?”

  “Oh, we will live very well, Saara, you and I. Between the money I can make from my lute, and that which can be charged for purifying wells and assessing metals (always assuming there is no guild restriction in that area) we can live very respectably.”

  Damiano felt an impulse to remind Saara that he had begun as a respectable fellow, and of good family. But as he remembered Saara’s position as the outraged mistress of his father (which now seemed so poor a reason not to love) he decided that the thing was better left unsaid. Instead he added, “Or we will live respectably once we are married, of course.”

  He felt her stir in his arms, and her long hair glimmered in a beam of the first light of Easter. “Married? You want to marry me, Damiano? How… cute.”

  “What do you mean—cute?” Damiano was stung. “I offer you a lifetime’s protection and devotion and you call it cute.”

  Saara’s eyes were limned clear and colorless in that single intrusive beam. Her lips remained in shadow. “It is cute, Damiano. Ruggerio always said that marriage was not courtly, while your father called it the death of love. Jekkinan …”

  “Shut up about all these other men,” snapped Damiano, hot in the face. “Especially my father. If I were not a very mild man, you would drive me to hit you with such talk.”

  Saara took a deep breath. “Then we would have another battle on our hands, wouldn’t we, dear one? The walls of Avignon would shake, I think, if we went to war again. But you must let me finish. My people know no courts, so they don’t care if a thing is courtly. I did not cease loving Jekkinan because I married him.

  “I think it would be very sweet to marry you, Damiano. It is only that I did not know the men of Italy ever wanted to marry. And also, I don’t know what you would do with a wife like me, all stubborn and full of teeth.”

  She showed him her small white teeth then, and he pretended to be cowed by them. Then he craned his head over the edge of the bed. “What is that?” he whispered.

  Saara listened also, with senses honed by wilderness. “A horse,” she answered.

  Damiano twisted onto his stomach. “My horse,” he corrected her, full of curiosity. “I know because he comes down especially heavy in front. He has never had proper training.”

  He ought to get down from the loft. He ought to wait for Festilligambe by the road: the poor brute wasn’t fullsighted, after all, but just a beast with a beast’s instinct knowledge. But a strange reluctance to move paralyzed Damiano. He lay poised at the edge of the loft, half out of the blanket, listening to the urgent pa-rump, pa-rump of galloping hooves. Saara put one comforting hand between his shoulder blades. She kissed him on his unshaven cheek.

  The horse needed no fuller sight than he had. His hooves left the road at the spot Damiano had, that previous Friday. They plashed heedlessly through puddles and scrabbled over slopes of wet grass. The two in the loft heard a squeal of protest that did not come out of the throat of a horse.

  “Hmph. Gaspare. He is stiff as a stick, on horseback,” snickered Damiano, but still he did not move.

  The horse approached the door at a trot and then stopped. Damiano heard great equine sniffs of nervousness, as the beast passed under the lintel.

  “Where the hell are you going, you filth, you sow?” cried the horse’s rider between gritted teeth. “I can’t see my hand in front of my face in here.”

  The tall horse stood immediately below the loft. It nickered to its master, who dropped a hand down to the rubbery nose. The horse sniffed the bed of greenery and settled back onto his haunches to reach for it.

  Gaspare cursed, grabbing handfuls of mane.

  “Up here,” whispered Damiano. “We’re up here in the loft. Don’t let the horse eat this grass—it isn’t fresh.

  “What’s wrong, Gaspare?” he added, though Damiano’s tone itself denied that there could be anything wrong anywhere on this dawning Easter Sunday in Provence.

  Gaspare choked twice before he could speak.

  “Plague, Damiano. The plague has struck Avignon. People are dead on the streets.

  “And Evienne—she’s gone. She’s been stolen.”

  Chapter 12

  The walk back to Avignon in the Easter sunshine had not so much the character of an awakening from a good dream as a descent into nightmare. Damiano and Saara hurried south, following Gaspare, whose preoccupied steps tended to weave across the broad, rutted road. Damiano’s belief in Gaspare’s words was fragile, for his own personal happiness was strong enough to force the misery of others out of his mind.

  But plague. Happiness could not conquer that. Nor love, nor witchery.

  I would stop time, he thought. If I could, I would stop time before we reach the city. Before I have to see them die again.

  But as Damiano could not stop time, he walked on.

  Behind the three paced a winded, halterless horse, whose own progress went by fits and starts: fits of grazing interrupted by explosions of catching up to the humans.

  The breeze came down from the north, pressing Damiano’s shirt against his back and whipping Saara’s dress against her calves till her skin reddened. It was fresh but not cold, its Alpine origins having been softened by hundreds of miles of Provençal indolence.

  Traffic upon the road for the most part was heading straight into the wind, as a parade of souls issued from Avignon, dressed not for Easter but for a long journey. Their horses and oxen were burdened and their small children cried. None of those who fled the city spoke to Damiano’s company, and he had nothing to say to them.

  So the procession he had thought was going into Avignon for Easter was actually going out of it, escaping disease. Yet Avignon was a big city, and these few dozen people hardly constituted an exodus of fear. Perhaps conditions within were not so bad. His memory also told him exactly how stable Gaspare’s emotions were and how far his word could be trusted.

  Saara stepped beside Damiano, saying nothing, her face unreadably thoughtful.

  But there would have been no room for her to open her mouth, had she so desired. Sharp-faced, shaky-voiced, young Gaspare held the floor.

  “It was only the day after you left the rumor came, that a man had died all black and swollen. Whether it was the plague that did for him, though, no one knew.

  “I myself could have told them,” continued the boy with a vicious slap to his own chest, “having seen more of the world than these sheep of Avignon.

  “But no one asked me. Besides—who wants to get so near the pest as to diagnose it? Anyway, old Coutelan shut up the inn. No more soirees for the cardinals. Our own hovel, too. No pillow where Gaspare of San Gabriele may rest his head.”

  “Is it only a rumor, then?” broke in Damiano. “Before you said there were people dead on the streets.”

  “I said… I said”—the boy lost his tongue for a moment in his excitement—
”it was a rumor on the day after you left. The day following that it was no more necessary to ask what sickness was making a fellow retch and wheeze and pop out in aching boils.

  “Now the vendors are gone from the streets and the shops are boarded. No one goes anywhere except the man with an ox and an open cart. It is just like Pe’Comtois. Chhhaah!” Gaspare spat in the street.

  His reedy voice had held a peculiar horrified satisfaction as he cataloged the plight of Avignon. His exophthalmic eyes glinted.

  “But Evienne,” asked Damiano, trying to put concern behind his words. “How does this affect your sister? Have you reason to believe…”

  Gaspare’s odd cockiness collapsed like wet paper. “I have no reason to believe anything good. I went to see her and…”

  “How? How could you find your way into the cardinal’s house without me?”

  Gaspare curled his lip. “How do you think, sheep-face? A sop for the dog and rope with a hook of applewood. The old, reliable methods. But Evienne is gone, and her dresses and blankets with her. They left nothing behind worth taking away.”

  Saara spoke for the first time. “This is your sister who is going to have a baby?”

  “Yes, the slut. They say the cardinal is in conference in the Papal Palace, and I don’t know if that means he is in chains or he has old Innocent in chains, but I can’t believe he took my sister with him.”

  Gaspare snorted and his long nose twitched. “Evienne is not the proper stuff for the Papal Palace.”

  Damiano’s head lifted. The soft wind tunneled through his hair. “I hear bells now,” he admitted. “Surely they would not ring the Paschal carillon if the city were infested?”

  Saara, who could not follow Gaspare’s rapid speech, had been listening to the peal for some time. “No, Dami. There is no joy there. I think those are black bells. They ring because people are dead.”

  Now the wind shifted and the note came clear. It was a slow, tedious, effortful tolling, and as he listened to it Damiano’s last armor fell away from him. He tasted fear on the wind, along with something worse.

  Avignon was now a dome of white rising up the hill from the Rhone, scarcely farther from them than an arrow’s good flight. The city swam in the morning light, but approaching along the pale pink and busy roadway was the oxcart Gaspare had only just described, driven by a thick and brutish man whose shape Damiano found familiar.

  The three people stepped out of the wheels’ path, while Festilligambe shied onto the road’s shoulder. A great bronze-burnished ox nodded its head solemnly as it passed them, as though to say “Yes, yes. This is the awful truth.”

  The driver of the cart tugged his beast to a stop before them. As he peered down from beneath the brim of a rough straw hat he sighed hugely.

  Damiano was relieved to discover that the man wore neither the features of the Devil nor the mad cart driver of Petit Comtois. Because it was Damiano who regarded the driver so closely, it was to Damiano that the man spoke.

  “Turn back, young gentles,” he said earnestly. “There is no purpose so urgent it should take you into Avignon today.”

  Damiano’s eyes slid back to the tall solid wood wheels, doweled to their axle, and to the high wooden slats that sided the wagon. “You are certain it is the plague, then?”

  At the word “plague,” the driver pulled off his woven hat and held it in his hand. “It was fifty dead yesterday, good monsieur. Today there will be a hundred, I am certain.

  “Turn back,” he repeated, his gaze on Saara’s fair face. “For this plague is merciless and it seeks out the young.” With those words the driver lashed his ox into movement.

  Gaspare, who had stood silent during this interchange, staring with dread at the uncommunicative slats of the wagon, now ran after the man. “Hello, hello! Tell me, have you seen a redhead?” he asked in halting langue d’oc.

  The driver mauled his beast to a stop again. “Seen what?”

  “A girt with red hair, very pretty,” shouted the boy, and as the driver blinked without comprehension Gaspare added, “with a biggish belly. Pregnant.”

  After a moment the man shook his head. “Going your way on the road there has been no one but you. Or did you mean leaving the city?”

  Gaspare grimaced. “I didn’t mean on the road. I meant…” And then, without another word, he turned on his heel and dashed the fifty yards back to where his friends were waiting. They asked no questions.

  The gate stood open. When Damiano expressed some surprise at this, Gaspare only shrugged. “Why not? It’s too late to keep the plague out now.”

  “But to keep it from spreading…”

  “Is it the business of Avignon to watch out for Lyons?” replied the cynical fourteen-year-old. He made to step under the arch of stucco.

  Damiano, stepping behind, felt a cold, premonitory sweat. He grabbed at the boy’s jerkin. “Wait a moment, Gaspare. I think it would be better if you returned and waited for us at our house.”

  “Your… house?” Gaspare’s lank hair had fallen inside the collar of his shirt. Frowning hugely at Damiano, he pulled it out. “Where do you have a house?”

  Saara interrupted. “You are thinking he should not go into the city, Dami? You are right. He is simple, and it would be very dangerous for him.”

  Gaspare turned from one to the other, insult darkening his uneven complexion. “Simple? From you, sheep-face, that is laughable.”

  Damiano refused to be offended. “You don’t understand, Gaspare. We are witches.”

  “So you keep telling me….”

  “And if we are careful, we will not get the plague. You, however…”

  Two white patches appeared amid the crimson mottling on Gaspare’s face. “Everyone gets the plague. Even Jews get the plague; remember the Pope saying so?”

  “Wait for us in the clean air and sunlight, boy,” suggested Saara, using what was to her the most pressing argument against Avignon (or indeed any city). “We will bring your sister out to you.”

  Gaspare glared his scorn upon both of them and entered Avignon.

  There was no crowd upon the streets, no press of bodies in the cobbled court before the Bishop’s Inn and no one at all sitting at the inn-yard tables, which had been turned upon their ends and now stood ranked against the ground-floor wall.

  “This,” reflected Damiano aloud, “is not like Petit Comtois, where all was madness and buffoonery. This resembles more my own city, Partestrada, on a fast day with the shops all closed. It doesn’t look like plague at all.”

  “Nonetheless,” grunted Gaspare stolidly.

  Saara stepped lightly over the cobbles. Her toes grabbed and curled, like those of a stalking bird. One slim arm settled on Damiano’s shoulder. “Don’t be fooled, dear one. This place has evil in it,” she said.

  And Damiano could feel that. Despite his words, he could feel trouble in the air, and fear in the smell of the bodies hidden by walls all around him.

  How odd, to stand in the middle of a disaster which could not touch one. I am a witch again, he thought. I have a power of flame so strong the plague cannot enter in. My lady, too. We could stroll together among piled bodies and suffer no hurt.

  And in spite of this knowledge (or perhaps because of it) Damiano felt a surge of hopelessness, almost like despair. He turned to Saara. “We have to help these people, beloved,” he whispered, out of Gaspare’s hearing.

  Her eyes were windows over the sea. “We can’t. Years ago, don’t you think I tried? In Lombardy, when I felt sickness in the village below, I came down to them. I sang till I became so weak I might have sickened myself. Not one lived who had caught the plague. Not one.

  “This plague has jaws like a trap, and those who fall into it, die in it.”

  “What are you saying to him?” Gaspare whined shrilly, stepping between them and hopping from one foot to the other. “Is it about Evienne? Can you tell me where she is?”

  Saara looked down upon him from a height of years. “You should leave thi
s place, boy. You cannot help your sister by dying.”

  Gaspare cursed. He swore before them both that he would never leave the trail of his sister until she was found: not for food, nor drink nor rest, and especially not for safety’s sake. He kicked the pavement and called Saara crude names in Piedmontese argot. She listened with the calmness of a person who understands so little of a language she cannot be offended in it.

  The black horse, who was also out of temper because there was no grass in Avignon, and because he had to step so very carefully over each round cobble, brushed by the irritatingly noisy boy on a search for some growth of green among the stones. Festilligambe found what he sought behind a small garden gate, which swung open at the touch of his nose.

  “That’s MacFhiodhbhuidhe’s gate,” murmured Damiano, cutting into Gaspare’s tantrum. “He doesn’t leave it open.” And the dark witch followed the horse through.

  The little garden was empty. With some difficulty Damiano shooed the gelding away from a pot of herbs and back into the road. He closed the gate on the animal and then crossed again toward the courtyard door.

  Open also. Damiano stepped in, and although his senses told him there was no one within, he called out his presence.

  The harper’s house was dim and tidy. Downstairs nothing moved. Damiano took the steep, uneven stairs two at a time. MacFhiodhbhuidhe’s bedstraw was swept into a corner and his bedclothes were folded. Gleaming balls of brass wire lay in a smug sunny row on a bookshelf. There was no sign of MacFhiodhbhuidhe or of the ancient who did for him. The young witch clattered down the stairs again.

  This house gave an impression of age. It seemed all the heavy furniture, neat-dusted and smelling of beeswax, had stood in place unmoved for a long time. Like the harper’s music, which probably hadn’t suffered alteration since he left his Leinster academy. Damiano once more felt his spasm of irritation at MacFhiodhbhuidhe, tempered by the knowledge that the man was kind. On impulse he crossed the downstairs room. He stopped before the low cabinet to peep again at the exotic Irish harp.

  After a minute, he picked up what he found and carried it to the door.