Damiano

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “I’m here, monster,” growled the bass voice Damiano knew and disliked so well. Though his full beard hid most of the expression on Denezzi’s face, the small, ursine eyes held more challenge than fear. Damiano met his gaze and said nothing.

  “My sister,” Denezzi announced, “is locked in the convent at Bard. She is of no use to anyone, that way, but at least she’s safe from you.”

  Damiano nodded. “Good. To be locked away is by far the best kind of life.” Then he turned his attention to the men huddled by the fire.

  “I am going to take Pardo tonight, men of Partestrada. I thought you might like to ride behind me.”

  “Behind you?” repeated Denezzi, in tones evenly divided between hate and scorn. “We will take Pardo, all right, Devil’s spawn, but not behind you.”

  Damiano shrugged. “As you like.” He turned away. Over his shoulder he called, “We will all be going to San Gabriele soon, however.”

  He returned to the middle of the camp, in front of the gay tent, which night had reduced to a lumpish shape like a couchant cow. Ogier stood there, weaponless, saying nothing, his face taut and sharp. Damiano ignored the man, for he was preparing himself for his work.

  He gazed left and right into the distance, examining his canvas.

  The half-moon beat down on the low hills as though its light and nothing else had flattened them. The grassland before San Gabriele and the half-forested hills behind the village lay open and empty of man. The sky was clear and translucent, not yet black. The Savoyard camp was a small blot of shadows on the soil. The ruined village was another.

  Wind blew Damiano’s mantle back from his shoulders, and its silver chain pressed against his throat. With his right hand he pulled against the chain. His left hand held his staff—held it so tight he felt it pulse and knew that pulse for his own.

  “You are perhaps planning to slip through Pardo’s sentries in secret, Monseigneur Demon?” Ogier’s dry words broke the witch’s concentration. “Or should I call you Monseigneur Lost Soul? Either way, your peculiar... ornamentation will make it difficult.”

  Damiano was aware the men were slipping away into the darkness. He could feel the terrified feet stumbling over the barren fields like ants on his skin. He took the staff in both hands. “Why so, my lord Marquis. What is it I look like, anyway?”

  Ogier smiled with an odd satisfaction. “You are aflame,” he said.

  The dead white face split in a laugh. “Appropriate, Marquis,” it whispered, “for you are about to see quite a lot of flames.” As he spoke a serpent of fire hissed and spat from the swart head of the staff. It wriggled after the fleeing men, who screamed at the orange light. Some fell to the earth, while others huddled where they stood, praying and cursing together.

  But the gaudy snake passed them, burning nothing but the ground and the night air. Damiano slid his hands to the foot of his staff and swung it over his head.

  The serpent of fire became a ring, a wall, a prison for the Savoyard soldiery. When the witch set the foot of his staff back upon the earth, the ring of fire remained, taller than a man and booming thunder. Ogier put his hands to his ears. The cries of men faded and were lost in the wail of the fire.

  “But as you see, Marquis, I am not planning a secret approach.” Damiano shouted above the noise. “Such would be a mistake, I think. My weapon is terror.

  “Using terror, I will save men’s lives,” he added.

  With an effort, Ogier dropped his hands to his belt. “Save men’s lives?” he repeated. “You are the tool of the Father of Lies himself. May Saint Michel the archangel fling you to the bottom of the deepest hell if you destroy my good and true men!”

  Damiano stopped, a word on his tongue concerning another archangel, but he turned his face to the sky again, and the word went unsaid. “Weave me a storm,” he whispered to the foreign powers trapped within his staff.

  The stick throbbed and went warm in his hands, warmer than it had been belching flame. A wind whistled somewhere far away, from the north.

  Dusky clouds snarled and tumbled over the distant Alps, moving with impossible speed. Out of the west, where the land was flat, blew skeins of mare’s tail. The gleaming hills emitted white fog like breath. Minutes passed while Damiano watched this tumult in the sky.

  Fire shrieked a protest, and two cloud-soaked winds smashed together above the circlet of fire that held the Savoyard forces. The sky was ripped by lightning, again, again, and again, and thunder drove men to their knees.

  A spatter of rain caught Damiano across the face. “Enough,” he muttered absently. “We don’t need to put out the fire.” He fingered the staff. “Wind, little instrument. Not wet.”

  The wind raged, and the circle of fire bent like the black shadows of the trees. East it went, then south. The silk tent took sparks and blazed suddenly. The men crawled to the middle of the circle, hugging the bare earth. All the air smelled of pitch and metal.

  Like a flute, the black staff sang, and Damiano fingered it gingerly. It was not meant to channel such power, let alone to imprison it. The silver bands burnt his hands when he touched them.

  He took a deep breath of the clamorous air and let it sigh out again. “This will do,” he announced. “Now we ride.”

  “Ride what?” shouted Ogier, terrified and angry. “The horses are all on the other side of that... that...”

  Damiano glanced around and noted the truth of the statement. “Eh? Well, I ride. Everyone else walks. After all, the village is very close.” And he whistled for his horse.

  The black gelding cantered over, eyes rolling and ears flat. In another instant it had become the grinning mount of Death.

  “Forward!” he cried to the despairing company. “Follow me, soldiers of Savoy, men of the Piedmont. Follow me, and you need not fear the fire, for it will be your friend.” He added in a lower tone, “And with that as your friend, I doubt you will find many enemies to fight.”

  As he nudged the horse forward a hulking man’s figure appeared in the way, blocking him. “Give me a horse, Delstrego,” rumbled Paolo Denezzi, “and I’ll ride beside you. Not behind.”

  Damiano peered down. With the staff whining in his hand, he had not much mind to spare for this. But as he glanced up past Denezzi at the ring of fire, a dark gap in the brilliance appeared, and a confused chestnut mare trotted through, dragging her tether rope. The beast was blind to the fire and heard nothing except Damiano’s undeniable call. “There’s your mount, Paolo,” the witch snapped. “Don’t ask for a saddle to go with it.”

  Awkwardly Denezzi hefted his bulk onto the chestnut’s back, and the two men started forward.

  The fire parted before them and ran, twin trellises, toward the hill and the village. Behind them it herded the Savoyard soldiers like sheep.

  The air was seared with the unending lightning. All sight was confusion. Damiano’s left ear was stunned with the bellow of the elements, and in his right ear was a passionate, seductive keening. He had the staff in his hands, it whispered and moaned. He could suck all the power from it and be free. He could fly over the village, alone, bodiless. He could pluck Pardo from hiding and carry the Roman high, up past the storm to the lucent air where the stars sang. The heavens themselves, then, would kill the fleshly man. Or he could drop him.

  Or better, far better, sang the voices in his right ear, he could simply forget the onerous task and fly away.

  He raised the black wand before him. After tonight, he said to the voices, you will be free. After tonight.

  A white-hot bolt smacked down ahead of them, at the top of the hill of San Gabriele. It spun over the earth and hit the dusty oak by the broken village gate. The old tree flamed.

  San Gabriele itself was coming apart: dark fragments rolling and scuttling down the hill in all directions. “Pardo’s men are deserting,” commented Damiano quietly.

  Denezzi glanced at Damiano. The man’s heavy face might have been made of wood. “Where?” he asked. “I can see nothing but blackness
and the fire.”

  “And you call me Owl-Eyes,” was the witch’s answer.

  They were at the base of the hill. There the repellent corpse-thing stopped and descended from the horse of bones.

  The wall of flame split again, and a black gelding trotted through, followed by the pretty chestnut.

  Damiano and Denezzi climbed the rutted market road to San Gabriele. Ogier followed, with his empty scabbard, and then the Savoyard troops, all slave to the constricting fire.

  Pardo was not one of those who fled; Damiano was sure of that, as he had been sure of the general’s presence since first riding out of the woods and beholding San Gabriele. Pardo was unforgettable, like a blister on one’s palate. But the general was not in the open, at the barricades of rubble by the gateposts. At that moment, to be exact, there was no one manning the barricades. Damiano smiled and passed under the blasted oak. Almost three hundred men followed him, their faces gleaming with the heat.

  Then the fire trellis parted, and two raging streams of orange raced each other over the heaps of rubble Pardo’s men had built. They met behind the ruined village with a smack like canvas against water. San Gabriele was enclosed, as were both the panicked Romans and their terrified conquerors. Now there was only finding the general himself.

  But Damiano glanced around uneasily. Pardo was not the only person in town whose feel he could recognize. Other presences licked his skin, tiny as the tongues of mice. He felt, obscurely, that these presences were not things he should ignore.

  “Wait here,” he called over his shoulder, but seeing Ogier’s expression of open, though impotent, insolence, he stopped in his tracks.

  The Savoyard troops were huddled in sullen unity just inside the gates. The displaced men of the Piedmont made another group. Ogier’s blue gaze was hard steel directed toward the witch. And Denezzi—well, Denezzi stood by Damiano’s left hand, hating him.

  These were not horses or dogs, or even human friends, who would stay at a word. These men had wills and plans of their own. If the Savoyards engaged with Pardo while Damiano was following his own curious nose, there would be unnecessary death. And it was to avoid that that Damiano had devised this bizarre attack.

  With a gesture he drew a fiery chord through the circle of fire, separating the forces of Savoy from those of Pardo. Two rams in a pasture, he thought with some amusement as he turned away.

  He strode down a street made unrecognizable by the ruin and by the multiplicity of dancing lights and shadows. Halfway along its length, on the right-hand side, stood a shed of dry stone, its stucco facade crumbled. This edifice seemingly had been too solid for the soldiers to destroy. Perhaps it was old Roman work. Damiano’s smile flickered wider. He stopped at the door of brass and wood.

  “Gaspare,” he called. “You are in there, aren’t you? And... is that your sister? Or no... that’s my old friend Till Eulenspiegel, no?”

  There was a buzzing of speech, and then the heavy door rattled. Damiano flattened himself against the wall.

  “Don’t come out! Don’t look at me. Just talk through the door.”

  But a pale, freckled face, topped by greasy red hair, peered around the doorjamb. “Festilligambe!” shouted the boy. “Why not? You’re alone on the street. Is the village burning? How could that be? There’s no wood or thatch left in it. What a time for you to return, you old...

  “Eh, Jan, did I ever tell you about this one? He can make lute strings cry for Mama....” Gaspare reached out and took Damiano’s wrist in his scrawny, strong grip. He pulled him in.

  Within the stone shed, the air smelled of old wood and wine. Light filtered between the naked stones, and Damiano’s eyes discovered rows of barrels. One of these had been rolled into the middle of the shed and turned on end, and on it lay a huge sheep cheese, broken and gouged at random all over its surface.

  Jan Karl slouched next to this makeshift table, seated on the rounded surface of another barrel. His bandaged hand rested on the greenish, mold-cased surface of the cheese wheel in proprietary fashion. Beside him, very close, sat the beautiful Evienne in her dress of green.

  Damiano took a slow breath and felt his shoulders relax. “What do you see when you look at me?” he demanded of the company.

  Methodically, Karl reached out and clawed a morsel out of the cheese. Methodically, he chewed it. Evienne giggled. “What should we see?” asked Gaspare. “It’s pretty dim in here. You look tired, I think. That’s understandable, considering the political situation.”

  Damiano closed his eyes in simple thanks. “I am under a curse,” he tried to explain, as he sank down onto the barrel across from the redheaded woman. “Or perhaps it’s not a curse but a premonition. People tell me I appear to be burning alive. They run. They cover their faces.” He sighed and leaned on his staff.

  “It’s been very useful to me.”

  Jan Karl swallowed. His narrow blue eyes regarded Damiano doubtfully. “Maybe you are the butt of a joke, Delstrego. You don’t look different to me.”

  “Nor to me,” added Evienne. She looked like she might have added more to that but for the restraining presence of the Dutchman next to her.

  Damiano shook his head. He realized there was too much to explain, and he could only devote a part of his attention to the amiable scene before him while his fire imprisoned both the village and the Savoyard forces.

  “Where’s your lute? And your dog?” asked Gaspare, standing near the open door. He didn’t wait for answers. “Have some cheese and put your mouth to the bunghole of the barrel under it. You spill a lot that way, but we’ve got a lot.

  “I really do think the village is burning.”

  “Broken,” replied Damiano distantly. “And dead. No, thank you. I don’t feel like cheese, tonight. Nor wine.”

  Gaspare stepped over and looked his friend in the face. “I’m sorry, Festilligambe, if your dog died. I liked her. I like dogs. And your lute, well...” The boy shrugged. “These are terrible times to live in.”

  Both Jan Karl and Evienne grunted in unison. “Midwinter, and they tear all the buildings down,” continued the boy. “Then they make campfires of the thatch and furniture. Was that sensible, I ask you? Everyone with anywhere to go gets out.

  “Me, I stay to watch over Evienne, but it’s no good for her, either. Lot’s of business, yes...”

  “If you can call it that,” introjected the prostitute, glaring vengefully at the wheel of cheese.

  “But they don’t pay,” added her brother. “And Jan Karl here... Where’s he going to go with a hand like that, too tender to touch anything yet and not a sou to his name? Where is San Gabriele when we need him?”

  Damiano shook his head to all these questions. “Well, my friend. It’s over, now, for Pardo. The army of Savoy is in the town.” He rose to his feet.

  “As a matter of fact, I must get back to them, now,” he said, and turned to the door.

  “The Green Count?” Gaspare gasped, and he danced from one foot to the other. “You are with the Savoyard army?”

  “They are with me,” corrected the witch. “And they don’t like it much.” He stepped out.

  “Gesu and all the saints guard you,” Damiano added, quietly, and with a certain formality. The door creaked shut.

  The flames flapped and roared, and he passed through them. The Savoyard company turned to him as one man. “I know where Pardo is hiding,” he announced briefly, and the fire that bisected the village stuttered and died.

  Ogier snapped a word, and the men, for the first time that night, made ranks. Damiano led the way along the central street of the village.

  He found Paolo Denezzi at his side. The man’s bearish aspect was much reduced, for the hair of his face and head was singed to the root and his naked skin gleamed a taut and ugly pink.

  “You attempted my barrier,” remarked Damiano. “That was a mistake. The fire is not an illusion.” Denezzi made only an animal noise.

  Damiano turned to the commander. “My lord Marquis,” he be
gan. “Do I still look as I did before? Burning?”

  Ogier concealed his amusement behind a mock civility. “You must forgive me, Monsieur Demon, if you have been engaged in la toilette, and I did not notice. To me you appear much the same.”

  Damiano merely nodded, and they passed through the smoke and wind to the center of San Gabriele, where a few stone buildings stood undamaged.

  “He’s here,” said the witch. He stood with his eyes closed before a squat square tower. His head moved right, then left, as though he were rubbing his face into a pillow. “He’s in the cellar, with a few men. Follow me, please.”

  Before Ogier, or troublesome Paolo Denezzi, could object, Damiano raised his staff before him and leaped onto the outside staircase. He bounded up.

  At the door to the interior he was met by a sentry with a sword. The man cried out and dropped the glowing weapon. Damiano passed in.

  It was like home, this place: the well-built tower of a family with means. The floor of the entranceway was tiled in red and blue, and the walls were soot free, washed fresh white. None of these carved oaken chairs or velvet divans had been burned for campfires, and woolen tapestries added their warmth to the rooms.

  Damiano passed down the long stairs; no man dared to face him. Behind him was a cry and the sound of massed footsteps. Damiano ground his teeth against the knowledge that someone had slain the weaponless sentry.

  The cellar had not been meant to be lived in. It was a warren of boxes and barrels and furniture stored on end. Though he could see reasonably well in this darkness, certainly better than any ordinary man, Damiano sent light into his staff.

  General Pardo, neatly built, clothed in black leather, lounged amid the clutter on a chair upholstered in cloth of gold. His sword lay on his lap. Before him stood three swordsmen wearing his colors, each with sword and round shield. These men wore hauberks of link-mail. Pardo did not. All four faced the apparition without flinching, and the three guardsmen advanced upon Damiano.

  At the moment Damiano saw Pardo his attention snapped away from the fire, and all around the village it fluttered and died.