Raphael was very near. He bent to kiss the misshapen face beside him, for on this point he understood Damiano very well. But the fever was upon the man: a foreign fire he could not master, but that discolored all his senses. He cringed away from the angel’s touch. “Don’t. Go away. I stink,” Damiano growled savagely. “I can smell myself. Go away, you who are so fond of beautiful things. Go away.”
Raphael did not go away, and Damiano, in mad rage, hit him three weak blows on the breast, as he hissed, “What a fool’s game this month has been, pretending I had a life to live, when everything the Devil said came true—even to this. Probably the ruby, too. Probably I carried my own death into Avignon.”
Raphael put his cool hand against Damiano’s cheek. “Hush, Dami. Don’t worry about my brother; even the truth becomes a lie in his mouth, and with my own eyes I saw you defeat him in the streets of the city.”
“Defeat him?” rasped the dying man, shaking with the anger of his feeling. “He fled laughing, if he fled at all. Satan has always toyed with me, cat-and-mouse. I think I have found a way to happiness and he closes the door in my face. Always.”
Then his red-rimmed eyes widened and his head dropped back against the flattened wheat. “Oh, Christ, to whom do I say this?”
“To me, Dami,” answered Raphael, uncertainly. “To me you may say whatever you wish, for I am your…”
But Damiano only shrank deeper away. “How you have played with me,” he hissed. “Pretending there were two brothers with the same face and different souls!”
“Dami!” Wings of pearl sprang stiffly upward. “What are you saying? Do not be confused between Lucifer and me! You know me, and if that isn’t enough, you have seen my brother and me together. It is the fever….”
“Yes, I know you at last, after all these years.” Swollen lips drew back from Damiano’s teeth, revealing a swollen tongue.
“And there is little to choose between you and your brother. Except that you have the greater hypocrisy. You used me, Seraph. Led me with your pretty tunes and your sermonizing—to be the butt of a joke! And what a joke.
“But for you I would not be here now. But for you I’d be a prosperous burgher-witch in Donnaz, or even back home, in Partestrada.
“But for you I’d not be lying here, perishing like a beast. Can you deny that, Raphael?”
The angel said nothing.
“What is it your brother called me, just this week? ‘Bladder of blood and scum. Food for worms.’ Yes, very accurate, for my blood is rotting, and already I can feel the worms. Is it fun to play with such toys as me, Raphael?”
The sick man’s grimace became a snarl of pain. “Aggh! To think I was such a clod, dolt, simpleton—O Christ—that I was glad for your attention.” His attempt to swallow sent trickles of blood down his chin.
“Well, now it’s over, and I hope it was all to your satisfaction. May God curse you to the remotest stinking depths of hell!” With the strength of madness he raised himself head and shoulders off the ground, and his left hand flung wisps of torn wheat and bindweed at the perfect, agonized face of Raphael. “To hell! To hell! Damn you to hell!” cried Damiano, till his voice broke and he sank back into the green sea of wheat.
The angel cowered, as though these airy missiles had power to hurt. Then Raphael shrouded himself in his wings and covered his face with his two hands. His weeping, like his laughter, was like that of a man. He spoke one word: “Why?”
It was a question not addressed to Damiano.
Silence called him out, to find his friend looking up at him. “I am so very sorry, Seraph,” the mortal said weakly. “I must have been mad for a little while. I said such horrible things.”
Raphael gazed at the dying man and was not comforted. “But what you said was true, my friend. If I had not touched you your path would have been different.
“But please believe me, Dami. If I did you harm it was by mistake. A spirit does badly when he makes changes in the lives of men.”
Damiano closed his eyes for a moment, gathering strength. When he spoke it was clearly and after thought.
“If you had not touched me, Raphael, I would not now be Damiano—this Damiano—at all. And I’d rather be the Damiano you touched than anyone else.
“You must know that I love you, Raphael. You should never have let raving words hurt you like that. My teacher. My guide. For whatever you say about your role with mankind, you have always been the messenger of God to me, and by you I have tried to rule my life.
“In fact,” and the black, swollen mouth actually attempted a little smile, “I probably should have loved the Almighty more and his music less, but then… that’s the way I was made.
“Not a saint.”
He tried to lift his left arm to touch the beautiful clean face so near his own, but his hand was tangled in the bindweed, and there was no strength left.
Carefully Raphael freed the long fingers with their broad, knobbed joints, and he lifted Damiano’s hand and kissed it.
This time the smile was a success. “I don’t hurt anymore,” Damiano said. Then he closed his eyes and turned his head to one side. With his free hand he scraped at his face, as though to ward off the tongue of an affectionate dog. “Not now, little dear,” he murmured, and gave a quiet sigh.
After that the breath did not rise again.
Coda
All through the radiant night an owl flew above the city of Avignon, blotting the dust of stars with its passage. It might have been hunting rats, so purposefully did it circle, and so low to the ground. But if it was hunting, then this was a bad night’s hunt, for never once did the raptor fold its wings and plummet toward a kill.
But the rats of Avignon were not a wholesome food, anyway.
In the third black hour, her heavy talons clutched to one of the teeth of the spire of the Pope’s Chapel. Its dry bird’s body panted and quaked beneath its plumpness of feathers and its pinions hung down limp as tassels, for an owl is not an albatross, to take its rest in the air.
Saara, also, had not slept much the night before.
No sight, nor sound, nor smell nor touch of him….
She tried not to think, for it was difficult to think and be an owl at the same time. Besides, she had spent the hours before sunset thinking, and it had done her no good.
He had cured the plague. Gaspare said he had cured the plague (which was an impossible deed). That he had burned it out of the red-haired girl with flame. Saara remembered Damiano’s sweet fire, extinguished in her presence that day, and she mourned it, not knowing if she mourned the man as well as the magic.
He was not in the palace, for she had searched the palace, even to the piled dead under sheets in the infirmary. That search would have been interesting, had Saara the time to care, what with the hidden storehouses and hidden women scattered through the rambling work of stone. There were pictures, both beautiful and curious, and at least one of the Benedictine nuns was born sighted. But she had spent no thought on either the house or its occupants.
No sight of him, no sound….
She had followed the ox wagons, and in the shape of a dog, thrust her nose among the dead. So many. So many.
Too many people here: meaningless, chattering, blind people, whose quotidian deaths meant nothing to her.
The little redhead, too, was a creature that meant nothing. Without brain or bravery, clinging to that wordy bald man who had screamed like a rabbit when the dog bit him. At least they were a pair that matched. Barnyard fowl, the both of them. (She thought, perforce, in owlish images, and opened her beak in what might have been a cruel owlish smile.)
What had Damiano done to himself for the sake of that bit of red fluff? So free with his pity he was, that he might have given anything. She recalled his stricken face when, along the infirmary corridor, one single dying man had seen them pass. She remembered how he had come (a phantom with huge black eyes) to Lombardy, escaping horror and the pain of the lash.
And she saw him as he had
been only one night ago, close above her in the dark, soft-eyed, smelling of grass.
The owl’s talons slipped against the spire of stone, and her shape wavered, for no owl’s body or soul could contain what Saara felt with the image of her young lover filling her mind.
Better not to think. Better, perhaps, to be angry.
At Gaspare’s sister? Yes, why not: fat little hen whining, “Death frightens me so, Jan. Take me away from here.” Or at Gaspare himself—another squawking chicken, occasionally turning nasty. Had she traveled and studied and suffered and endured and built her art upon experience, for her life to become the plaything of such mannerless infants?
She could kill the bitch. Why not? She had killed before. The blond unborn-looking fellow would give no fight at all, and Gaspare? To strangle him would be a sizable pleasure.
One heavy, scaled foot scraped flecks of stone from the spire, but then Saara shuddered. Bits of white feather sailed away in the spring breeze, starlit.
She wasn’t going to kill anyone. That was the owl talking, not Saara herself. Never again would she willingly kill, and especially not the redheaded girl for whom Damiano had…
Better not to think.
Mad orange eyes stared upward, like brass platters set to catch the stars. The only things above her were the stars, and the strange dead-tree symbol of the Christian religion, which had been set at the very top of the building.
Damiano (like Guillermo, like Ruggerio) was a Christian. Maybe he was even more of a Christian than the others. Perhaps she ought to ask the help of the Christian elementals in finding him.
Saara did not know the proper incantations to address that symbol of crossed logs. She ground her owl-beak and did her best.
Other wings lighted beside her own. “You, Chief of Eagles,” she cried in surprise. “Are you a Christian spirit?”
Raphael was slow in answering. “Among other things.”
In the gleam of his plumage and the power of his eyes Saara recognized suddenly that force, greater than her own magic, which had hidden Damiano from her. The owl hissed like a snake. “Take me to him.”
“It is for that I have come,” answered Raphael.
The rising sun turned the back of her head to red gold. Saara sat upon the damp earth with her hands in her lap, hands curled like an owl’s talons. “Didn’t you care to bury him?”
These were the first words she had spoken since seeing the body in the wheatfield. She did not turn her head to see whether Raphael was still behind her.
“I didn’t think of it,” the angel replied quietly.
“That’s all right,” grunted Saara. “I’ll do it. I have a lot of experience at burying people.” Then she added, quite casually, “Why can’t I cry, I wonder?”
A wind blew from the northwest, making Easter Monday much colder than all the previous week. Yet the chill could not muzzle the courting birds, nor take the sparkle from the wax-green leaves of the nearby grapes. In the distance a single horse or mule whinnied his presence, answered at great length by an ass in a field nearby.
Saara felt the bite of the wind and huddled against it. She might have slowed the air, or warmed it, but neither seemed worth the effort. “You knew, did you not, when you led him here, that I could have saved him?”
Raphael sat down beside her. Without interest she noted that the spirit did look more like a man to her than an eagle. She was sure it had not always been so, for her people knew the Four Eagles of old.
“I knew it. He knew that also,” Raphael said. “That is why he bade me hide him from you.”
“From me?” she asked, and then, out of nowhere, the tears came. “From me especially, he wanted to die hidden?”
The angel bent his wings around her and they hung in the air not touching, for his desire to comfort warred with the knowledge she did not want her comfort to come from him. “He knew that to save him, you would have taken the plague in his stead.”
Now her eyes swam over, and the angel dissolved in her vision like a reflection of the moon in disturbed water. “Yes! I would have been happy to die in his place. I am old, and he is—was—young. I have had a life: children, lovers, much travel. It was not pleasant, but it was long and full of things. I would have been happy.
“Can you tell me…” and Saara took a ragged breath, “that he was happy to die in the place of that… sister of Gaspare’s?”
Raphael sat still. There was no softness in his face as he said, “It was very hard for him to die. And part of that was because he feared you would not forgive him.”
“Not forgive… oh, no.” Saara threw herself forward on the earth, so that her head was only a few inches from the abandoned thing in its rich clothing, with its face covered with leaves.
But she lay passive only for a minute, and turned then on Raphael with newly minted anger. “Why did you let him do that for her? Didn’t you know what such a deed would cost?”
Raphael nodded his head. “Yes, I knew.” His blue eyes met hers evenly.
“He couldn’t have done it but for you!” she cried harshly, pulling away from the compass of his wings. “But for you I would have found him. But for you, Damiano would be alive now!”
Again the angel nodded.
“Why, then?”
“Because he asked it of me.”
“You were his friend!”
Raphael’s eyes widened. “I still am.”
Saara opened her mouth and cursed Raphael to his face.
His great wings sank in discouragement upon the green wheat. Their pinions lay all awry. “Please,” whispered the angel, “try to understand. I did not want Damiano to die. I love him, and all he might have become. But what I did was by his choice, for it was his to choose, not mine. You would have done the same, Saara, in my place.”
“Oh, would I?” She could think of nothing to say to this, but after a small pause she observed, “Perhaps spring is not a bad time to die, after all. It is warm, at least, and one is spared the worst of the flies.
“Maybe I will try it out.”
Raphael straightened. His wings bowed upward in alarm. “No, Saara. Please don’t. There is something else Damiano said, when he spoke of his love for you. He said you were to take care of me.”
“Of you? You?” Her head snapped up, framed in disheveled brown hair. “Chief of Eagles, have you need of anyone’s care?”
Then Raphael dropped his eyes. His beautiful hands folded and refolded in his lap, and Saara could see stains of blood and other dirt upon the gossamer fabric of his garment. “I might,” he admitted, and then he glanced up at her again with something like embarrassment in his face. “I think it’s possible that I will, soon. I am not what I once was.”
Drying her eyes, she stared the angel out of countenance. “Yes, I see. You are smaller, I think. Your light is more soft. What happened to you?”
“Damiano,” replied Raphael without hesitation.
She grunted, and then a little grin forced its way onto her face. “I can believe it. Did he come to you with an Italian head full of sad songs, pestering you to do things you didn’t want to do, taking no denial, but talking, talking, and talking always?”
“Something like that.” The angel smiled.
Then her glance sharpened. “And are you sorry now, after he is dead and flown away, while here we sit all soiled with dirt and crying?”
There was nothing but peace on Raphael’s face as he answered, “Not at all.”
Saara was weaving a green shroud from grasses the angel picked for her, when she heard (for the second time in as many days) a commotion of hooves in the distance. She raised her head to discover young Gaspare once more clinging to the neck of the black Barb gelding like a monkey. The horse proceeded by leaps and bounds with a clean disregard for property lines. His elegant black nostrils gulped air and his tiny fox ears swiveled independently. At his side ran a hound the size of a pony. They were heading, more or less, toward Saara.
She rose to greet the boy,
who promptly slid off the animal’s withers to the ground. The dog trotted past her, as did the tall horse.
“I am so glad,” began the redhead, with a painful groan. “I had no idea whether that cursed black jackass was taking me to my friends, or to Cloud-Cuckooland. And that impossible dog!” Gaspare turned his head in irritation at the noise the wolfhound had begun: a deep, resonant, heartbreaking howl. “What is the creature doing now?” He took a step toward the animals.
Saara put a restraining hand upon him. “No, Gaspare. Don’t look. Don’t go near. It is deadly for you.”
But the dog had uncovered enough. Gaspare had no need to approach further.
“Dam…”He fell to his knees, gasping. “Dead? Is he really dead?”
“Yes.” Saara stepped away, feeling that another person’s grief— especially the grief of a selfish hysterical child like Gaspare—would tear her apart.
But the boy surprised her with five minutes of kneeling silence, in which he stared blankly, round-eyed, biting down upon his hand. Then he crawled to his feet. “I… have made a very bad bargain,” he said in a small voice. “My great musician for my slut of a sister. It was not what I asked of him. Not at all.”
“It wasn’t?” asked Saara, feeling her dislike of the boy soften slightly.
With a certain dignity he replied, “Of course not. It was me he was supposed to ask that one…” and Gaspare pointed toward Raphael (who stood in his slightly soiled robe on the far side of the body, comforting the beasts) “to exchange for Evienne. Me, not him.”
And Gaspare’s poor silly face grew longer as he added, “I have a sense of values, after all.”
He blinked the tears from his big pale eyes. “He—he was…” And then he struck his fist into his palm. “I don’t think you really know what he was, lady.” His glance at Saara was once more arrogant. “To you he was a pleasant fellow to tickle under a sheet, hey? And what was better, he might make a song about you, glorifying your name to everyone in Avignon.”
Damiano's Lute Page 28