Damiano

by R. A. MacAvoy

  The black gelding, however, stood with its legs braced against the earth as though it planned never to move again. Its little ears were laid back as flat as a cat’s, and its liquid eyes were rimmed with white.

  “Did I doubt you, noble steed?” whispered Damiano, as with one hand he held Macchiata by the scruff, lest she interfere with the comedy. He crouched to the earth and let his packs slide off his back. At that moment the man on the horse raised his head a fraction.

  Damiano choked on his own breath, and his eyes widened as though he had seen a ghost (or more correctly, as though an ordinary man had seen a ghost). For in that fair and somewhat sullen set of features he recognized a man he had thought never to see again: the uncommunicative golliard, Jan Karl. And the thief had not see him.

  This was too wonderful. Quietly Damiano bent and took his staff in his hands, whispering the words of the spell that was almost his favorite, becoming invisible to prolong the wonder of the moment Then he stepped confidently forward.

  Jan Karl—or Till Eulenspiegel, as he seemed to call himself—was no danger to a wary man, let alone one with the powers of Damiano. His thin, soiled student’s shirt hung on his starved shoulders as on a hanger of wood. His lank fair hair was brown with dirt and lay plastered against his face, which had been touched by that shade of gray-purple that indicated too much exposure to the cold. A rag wrapped two fingers of the thief’s left hand; Damiano suspected frostbite. He remembered the golliards’ frantic flight into the night, sans coat or mantle.

  He remembered the bundle of letters he still carried in his pack, arrow-pierced and written in a strange tongue. And Damiano had not forgotten what Macchiata had said: this thief, at least, had not wanted to kill him. As he stood in thought beside the tableau of obdurate horse and ineffectual rider, the horse became aware of him. Festilligambe’s cavernous nostrils twitched and his ears revolved like mill wheels. Macchiata, who leaned invisibly against her invisible master’s calf, gave an answering whuff. With an audible snap, Damiano broke the spell.

  The horse bucked in shock, and Jan Karl toppled from its bare back to the ground. A totally impossible figure loomed over the golliard, outlined black as Satan against the light of the setting sun. It growled like a dog, or somewhere a dog was growling, and the young blond’s misadventures had made him very sensitive to that sound. “Lieber Gott! Spare me!” he wailed in a mixture of German and French, covering his face with his discolored hands. “It is all too much!” he added in bastard Italian.

  Damiano peered down at his fallen enemy from under a corrugated brow. He sighed, feeling an inappropriate stab of pity for the fellow and feeling ridiculous besides. Even the less forgiving dog forgot to growl, running her tongue over her bristly lips and plopping her backside onto the broken soil. Damiano cleared his throat. “You didn’t do as much,” he said, in tones that were meant to sound menacing and came out more querulous, “to spare an innocent stranger who thought to be your friend.”

  At the sound of Damiano’s voice the northerner raised up on his elbows, his purple visage paling to one of white terror. “No. You’re dead! Donner und Pfannkuchen! Do me no harm—it wasn’t I who killed you. It was that damned Frenchman, and I only met him in Chamonix...” The blond began to cry, in great, hysterical sobs.

  Damiano shifted from foot to foot. “I know,” he began lamely, but his words went unheard. He started again, louder.

  “I know it wasn’t you who killed... I mean tried to kill me. I’m not dead, you know,” he added. “Ghosts don’t generally look like this. But that’s no thanks to you.”

  Karl’s face went blank, then wary. “Not dead? Then why are you haunting me?”

  Damiano snorted. “I’m not haunting you. That’s my horse you’re trying to steal.”

  With a groan and a thump, Jan Karl fell back against the earth. “Donner und... Blast me now. Get it over with.”

  Seeing the scarecrow figure lying there, limp and theatrical before him, Damiano couldn’t hold back his grin. But he turned his attention to Festilligambe the honor of whose word had created this situation. “You’re a good fellow, Festilligambe,” he whispered into the tiny black ear. “No need to stay planted any longer. Go shake your heels in the fields a bit, and then we’ll eat.”

  The gelding made a stiff bound into the air, as though the strings that had held him had snapped. As he descended his teeth clicked playfully into the corona of Damiano’s hair, and then he was off, barreling across the empty field, sending sprays of dirt behind him.

  “Eh! Watch you don’t catch a leg in a hole!” Damiano shouted after him, then he turned back to his captive, whom he half expected to find gone—whom he half hoped to find gone.

  The golliard lay as he had before, passive and shivering on the ground: the very picture of oppression. Macchiata lay next to him, her tail wagging in quiet satisfaction. “Wh... what are you going to do with me?” Karl blurted. Damiano regarded the man irritably.

  “Well, since you won’t run away. Or can’t,” he amended, sparing a glance at the dog, “I guess we’ll have to do something. Let me see your hand.”

  Karl did not oblige. “Are you going to cut it off?”

  “That may not be necessary.” Damiano pulled the bandaged member from the blond’s side; Karl had little strength to resist him. “At least not all of it.” As he unwound the rag, the prisoner stiffened and cried out. The inner layers of cloth were blackened with dry blood.

  The little finger was dead, the ring finger gone to the second knuckle. The hand itself was swollen and veined with red and black like a small map. Damiano swallowed, swept through once more by his ungovernable pity. He took a deep breath and spoke as harshly as he could. “This was going to kill you, man. Didn’t you know?”

  Karl’s water-blue eyes widened. “But it doesn’t hurt much, like it used to. With all the miserable things that have happened in the past ten days, I haven’t had time to...”

  “Eh?” Damiano interrupted, staring gently into the distance, at nothing. “It’s been a hard week for you, has it? Well, things run in cycles, like the moon. And the moon is increasing. Wait here and don’t move,” he commanded, rising to his feet, “while I set up camp. This place is as good as any, as long as the husbandman doesn’t show up brandishing a pitchfork.” Damiano picked his long-legged way over the hummocks of soil to his pile of gear. He returned burdened and threw a blanket down.

  “Here,” he said. “Wrap yourself in this and stop shaking.” When the wondering Karl had done so, Damiano plunked the wineskin on top of him. “Start drinking now, you skinny Swissman. You’re going to need it later.”

  Picking up the leather sack with his right hand, Karl obeyed, asking no questions. After two or three good swigs he stopped to gasp air, his nose prickling with the fumes of alcohol. “I’m Dutch,” he announced. “Not Swiss. And I’m a long way from home.”

  Damiano paused in the process of driving a stake of poplar into the ground. He leaned his hammer-rock against the butt of the stake and cocked an interested eye at Karl. “That’s true,” he admitted. “I know very little about that country, except that it is wet. But with two rotting fingers you would never have returned to the Low Countries. Nor would you have ever read another letter from your dear old mother.”

  “My mother died when I was born,” said Karl, and he took another drink, or series of drinks.

  Damiano shrugged as he pounded. “Sweetheart, then. Whosever letters you keep in a bundle in your pack.” Seeing the dawning of slow understanding on Karl’s face, Damiano chuckled and dove into his saddlebag, from which he pulled the faded, pierced bundle of letters. He tossed them onto the blond’s lap.

  “They’ve shared my dangers with me, Herr Eulenspiegel. That’s an arrow hole through the middle, which ought also to have pierced my chest.”

  “This saved you?” murmured Karl, examining his little bundle with an intensity that was already half drunken.

  “No, not exactly. It was a volume of Petrarch that save
d me, for it was bound in wood. I owe that, too, to our convivial first meeting, for I found it in the sack of one of your friends when I woke the next morning. It was a bad morning, that....” Damiano finished the stake with an extra-hard thump of the stone.

  “For me too,” admitted Karl, whom wine was making more garrulous. “I lost my fingers when the sun came up, because I lay down in the snow. They say you should never do that, no matter how tired you are.”

  Damiano nodded. “Look on the bright side, Jan. At least we’re still alive. Both of us. What about the other two?”

  Karl’s brow furrowed stupidly. “You know, I never saw them again. All I know is that I turned right at the crossroads.” He swigged once more. The wineskin, though very large, was beginning to appear flabby. Damiano looked with approval. With the night’s work that was in store for him, he hoped the blond would pass out.

  “They might have continued up to Aosta,” reflected Damiano. “But when I came there a day later, I didn’t see them. And Macchiata’s nose is good....”

  “They probably went back west, the way we’d come,” suggested Karl. “To Provence. That makes most sense. This is a terrible country!”

  While Damiano made a comfortable camp, Karl talked. He talked a lot. The volume of his monologue more than made up for his taciturnity on the night of their first acquaintance. He related to Damiano the story of his youth on the fishing boats at Amsterdam: he had been a poor boy but brimming with scholastic promise. He told how he had at length journeyed to Avignon, to study Church history where the pope sat. But knowledge did not come for free, nor did bread or the necessary roof. The Dutch lad had borne three years of privation and had reached no other heights than to be elected king of the pre-Lenten fete, when all went topsy-turvy for a week and the clerks ruled the roost. It was after that that he realized he had neither the right nationality nor the right friends to gain advancement in Innocent’s church.

  “Nor the right temperament,” Damiano added silently, looking critically at the figure wrapped in the rough blanket.

  Karl didn’t notice his host’s sharp glance, as he explained how, in great bitterness and with very little money, he had set out east to try his fortunes in old Rome itself. In the pass he had met the youth Pierre Paris, whom he had known slightly at the university, and the Breton who claimed to love Petrarch. Paris had devised the story that the three of them were retracing the poet’s journey to Milan, though it was a silly tale, and the reality was that both of the others were thieves.

  Damiano’s hands were full of tinder. He chuckled as he sparked the evening’s fire. “Both of the others?” he echoed, and turned his head to Karl.

  The blond Dutchman nodded solemnly, closed his eyes and fell into a peaceful, childlike sleep.

  Leaving the dog to guard both camp and patient, Damiano returned to San Gabriele, where without meeting either Gaspare or Evienne, he filled the empty wine bag at the village well. As he trudged back down the hill he could feel the chill of the deeply-shadowed earth rising up through his boots, and his little campfire winked at him like the eye of a friend.

  He was glad he had eaten before this necessity arose; he would not want to eat later. As he approached the light he smelled the alarming odor of burning hair. He dashed the last few yards into camp, the wine bag leaping in his arms like a live thing, only to find a picture of unbroken peace.

  Macchiata lay spread-eagled over the remaining bedroll, two paws on either side, as though she were riding a log. Her dreamy gaze was fixed on her charge, Karl. The gelding quietly stood close by the fire, leaning into the warmth.

  “Festilligambe,” cried Damiano indignantly. “Get away from there! You’re burning your tail!” He dropped the bag on the ground by Macchiata and darted around the campfire to where the big animal was now examining its disfigured tail with calm wonder.

  Damiano grabbed a handful of mane and pulled the black head around. Fixing an ear in each hand, he glared at it.

  “You,” he pronounced, “are a most unhorselike horse.” The gelding swished a tail that was reduced to half its former splendor.

  “If you catch on fire, what am I to do? There isn’t enough water in the entire well to put out a horse!” In response—perhaps in apology —Festilligambe raised his muzzle and lipped Damiano on the nose. It wasn’t pleasant to see the yellow, boxlike teeth so near to one’s face; Damiano turned away.

  He had brought nothing resembling a medicinal dressing in his pack, and early winter was not the season to gather herbs. Nonetheless, Karl’s fingers would have to come off, and Damiano’s father had been known to resort to hot packs and lye soap when nothing else was available. The young witch filled his only pot with water and set it into the fire. Into the water went one of his two linen undershirts, torn into strips. He pulled a bundle of folded cloth out from the bottom of his pack and carefully unwrapped a little knife.

  It was not terribly strong or sharp, because it was intended more for witchcraft than surgery, and its blade was silver. The handle was crystal, and was cut with all the phases of the moon, the full moon sitting at the top, like a tiny sword’s pommel.

  For a few moments he did no more than to kneel on the blanket by Karl, the knife resting in his palm, while his mind settled. He had never done such an operation without an effective sleeping draught for the patient, without compresses, clean linen, and a few men to hold the sufferer still should the narcotic fail. He would have to be very sure.

  With his right hand—the hand that never touched the knife—he reached out and yanked a tuft of dry grasses. These he sprinkled over Karl’s emaciated limbs, while he whispered a spell of binding. The gray strands clung like so many fine ropes, but as they did so his vision blurred a bit and his feet fell asleep beneath him.

  Binding was a very expensive spell.

  Next he consecrated both the knife and his hands to the coming task. The silver blade briefly grew too hot to touch. He twisted the knife in his fingers till it had cooled.

  He lifted Karl’s gangrenous hand and secured it between his knees. The sleeper didn’t move. With the bright blade, no longer than a beech leaf, Damiano pierced the living skin beneath the suppuration that had been Karl’s little finger. He cut around the knuckle joint.

  A little spell to staunch the bleeding. Another to stir the breeze (this job didn’t smell too good). Pray God this poor sinner didn’t wake. The tendon and cartilage broke with small popping sounds, like sticks crackling in a fire. The blade was speckled with crimson, and thick, unhealthy blood ran down the white arm and onto Damiano’s knees. The finger bone pulled free and gleaming out of its socket.

  The ring finger he took off at the big joint, but after a glance at the flesh exposed, Damiano shook his head and cut again, removing the whole of that finger as well.

  When he was done, he regarded the raw wound gratefully. It was simple and clean and would be easy to wrap. He had left a fold of skin hanging on both the top and bottom of the hand, to wrap over the exposed bone and flesh. Later that skin would probably fall way, to be replaced by knotted scar tissue, but for now it would close the wound.

  But before he closed it Damiano held Karl’s hand out from the blanket and freed the blood to flow. The oozing became a fountain that spurted with Karl’s heartbeat. He heard Macchiata whine from her perch on the bedroll; the smell of human blood upset her.

  After allowing the hand to bleed for half a minute, Damiano pinched the wrist tightly and reapplied the spell.

  The water by now was bubbling and hissing. With the blade of the knife Damiano fished into the pot and skewered a length of linen. When he offered the cloth to the night air, a phantom of white steam coiled up from it. “That’s not what ghosts look like, either,” muttered the witch, and while the cloth was still hot enough to redden skin, he slapped it over Jan’s bloody hand.

  Then Damiano looked away from his surgery, away from the steaming rag and the three blackened stumps on the ground with the shaft of white bone protruding. He let his
eyes rest in the fire for a moment, then raised them to the early stars.

  The sky was a field of radiant indigo. The breeze, growing colder minute by minute, seemed to sweep directly down from that eternal, unchanging expanse. In actuality the air flowed down from the Alps, of course, but that was much the same. He let the night close his eyes.

  “I would really rather not be involved in this,” he whispered aloud. “He may still die.

  “And there are others I would rather share my campfire with than this sullen, craven Dutchman.” He longed suddenly for the presence of Raphael, so much like the night sky himself. It was on his lips to call out to the angel, to beg him not for a lesson but for a few minutes inconsequential chat by the fire. But he remembered the dying woman in Sous Pont Saint Martin. Raphael was not permitted to play a part in a mortal’s trial or death, and here was poor, sly Jan Karl, his torn hand scalding under hot rags. He could wake at any moment, and it would be awkward, for he would wake screaming.

  Besides, there was still the matter of his interview with the Devil. Could the archangel know what had passed between Damiano and Raphael’s own, wicked brother? If so, he had not come by to ask for an explanation.

  At least half the reason Damiano did not call Raphael was that he feared discovering the archangel would no longer come.

  It was a weary night, for Damiano had to keep changing the hot packs. And it was a cold one, for Karl began to shiver uncontrollably and had to have both blankets. Before it got too late, Damiano rose, went into town and pounded on doors until he found a householder who would sell him more wine, at a terribly inflated price. He drank none of it himself, for he had to stay awake, but when, toward morning, Karl awoke (not screaming but weeping without pause), he forced it down the man’s throat.