The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Damiano blinked against the sudden brilliance.

  “I want your master, boy,” growled the soldier. He spoke surly, being afraid.

  “You will find him in the earth and above the sky,” answered Damiano, smiling. The sergeant was surprised at the depth of the voice issuing from that reedy body, and though he did not trust the words, he involuntarily glanced upward.

  But Damiano continued, “Dominus Deus, Rex Caelestis: He is my master and none other.”

  The sergeant flushed beneath his bristle and tan. “I seek Delstrego. God I can find on my own.”

  Insouciantly, Damiano bowed. “Delstrego you have found,” he announced. “What can he do for you?”

  The sergeant’s left hand crawled upward unnoticed, prying between the leather plates of his cuirass after a flea. “I meant Delstrego the witch. The one who owns this house.”

  Damiano’s unruly brows drew together into a line as straight as nimbus clouds. “I am Delstrego the alchemist: the only Delstrego dwelling in Partestrada at this time. This house is mine.”

  Snagging the flea, the sergeant glanced down a moment and noticed a patch of white. That hideous dog again, standing between the fellow’s legs and half concealed by the robe. Her teeth shone white as the Alps in January, and her lips were pulled back, displaying them all. Perhaps she would open her mouth in a minute and curse him. Perhaps she would bite. Surely this Delstrego was the witch, whatever he looked like or called himself.

  “Then it is to you I am sent, from General Pardo. He tenders his compliments and invites you to come and speak with him at his headquarters.” This was a prearranged speech. Had the sergeant chosen the words himself, they would have been different.

  But Damiano understood. “Now? He wants to see me now?”

  “Certainly now!” barked the soldier, his small store of politeness used up. “Right now. Down the street in the town hall. Go.”

  Damiano felt Macchiata’s rage vibrating against his shins. He restrained her by dropping the heavy skirt of his robe over her head. “All right,” he answered mildly. I’m on my way.” He stepped out onto the little, railless porch beside the sergeant. A twiglike, white tail protruding from the back of his robe pointed stiffly upward.

  The sergeant noted the gold and scarlet velvet of the robe and its foppish sleeves. Inwardly he sneered. He further noted the black wand, man-high, ornamented like a king’s scepter. “Not with that,” he said.

  Damiano smiled crookedly at the soldier’s distrust. “Oh, yes, with this especially. Pardo will want to see this.” He spoke with great confidence, as though he, and not the sergeant, had just left the general’s presence. Glowering but unsure, the sergeant let him pass.

  “Aren’t you coming along?” inquired Damiano, turning in some surprise halfway down the stair. The sergeant had stood his place at the open doorway, his ruddy bare knees now at Damiano’s eye level. “—To see that I don’t play truant by darting over the city wall or turning into a hawk and escaping into the air?”

  “I am to guard the house,” answered the soldier stolidly.

  Damiano stared for a moment, his mind buzzing with surmises, then he continued down the stairs.

  Under the arch of the stairway, beside the empty stables, stood another of Pardo’s soldiery: a tall man with a scar running the length of one leg. He too watched Damiano pass and kept his place.

  The street was not so bare as it had appeared earlier. It was scattered with swart-garbed soldiers, who stood out against the dust and stucco like black pepper on boiled frumenty. Damiano had never been able to abide boiled frumenty. No more did he like to see the streets of Partestrada dead like this. He was quite fond of his city.

  Damiano could feel, using a little witch-sense—which was nothing like sight or sound, but rather like the touch of a feather against the face or, better, against the back of the palate—that there was no one at home in any of the square plaster houses around him. He gripped his staff tighter and strode forth, immediately stumbling over Macchiata.

  “Get out of there,” he grumbled, lifting his skirts and giving the dog a shove with his foot. “Walk before, behind or beside, but not under.”

  Macchiata laid back her ears, thin, white, and folded like writing paper. “You put me there, and I couldn’t see.”

  Damiano started forward again, hoping no one on the street had noticed. “That was to keep you away from the soldier. He might have spitted at you in a moment, and there’s nothing I could have done about it. Then where would you be?”

  The dog did not respond. She did not know the answer.

  Someone had noticed. It was old Marco; even war and occupation of the city by the enemy could not keep him from his place beside the well, squatting on his haunches with a bottle of Alusto’s poorest wine. Damiano, at this distance, could not make out his face, but he knew it was Marco by his position and by the filthy red wool jacket he wore. Damiano would have to pass right by the old man, and he would have to speak to him, since Marco had been one of Guillermo Delstrego’s closest friends. Perhaps his only friend.

  Marco was, however, insufferable, and as Damiano passed he only bowed in the general direction of the well and called, “Blessing on you, Marco,” hoping the old sot had passed out already. Quite possibly he had, since it was already the middle of the afternoon.

  “Hraaghh?” Marco had not passed out. He jackknifed to his feet and strode over to Damiano, holding the wine bottle aggressively in one sallow hand. Macchiata yawned a shrill canine yawn and drooped her tail, knowing what was coming. Damiano felt about the same.

  “Dami Delstrego? I thought you had flown to the hills three days ago, just ahead of the Green Count’s army.”

  Damiano braced his staff diagonally in front of him and leaned on it. “Flown? Fled, you mean? No, Marco. You haven’t seen me for three days because I’ve been tending a pot. You know how it is in November; people want my father’s phlegm-cutting tonic for the winter, and when I say I’m not a doctor, they don’t hear me.

  “Why did you think I’d run away?”

  Marco waved his bottle expansively, but very little of the contents splashed out. “Because they all have. Every man with any money in the village…”

  “City, not village,” corrected Damiano under his breath, unable to let the slight pass, yet hoping Marco would not hear him.

  “And every young fellow with two arms that could hold a spear, and all the women of any age, though some of those old hens are flattering themselves, I will tell you…”

  “Why did they leave, and for where?” Damiano spoke louder.

  “Why?” Marco drew back and seemed to expand. Damiano sighed and cast his eyes to the much disturbed dust of the street. Nothing good had ever come from Marco swelling like that.

  “Why? You juicy mozzarella! To save their soft little lives, of course. Are you so addled with your books and your devil’s music that you…”

  “What do you mean, ‘devil’s music’?” snapped Damiano in return, for nothing else Marco could have said would have stung him as sharply. Macchiata vocalized another yawn and flopped upon her belly on the ground.

  “Maniac, pagan… The church fathers themselves called it cursed.”

  Damiano thumped his staff” upon the ground. It’s vibration, smooth and ominous as a wolf’s growl, brought him back to reason. “They did not. They only said that contrapuntal music was not suitable to be played in the mass. But that too will come,” he added with quiet confidence, thinking of the hands of Raphael.

  Marco listened, sneering, to Damiano’s words. To the deep humming of the staff, however, Marco granted a more respectful hearing. The old man plucked absently at his felt coat, from which all the gold embroidery had long since been picked out and sold, and he raised his bottle.

  “Well, boy. You should still get out. You have two arms and two legs and are therefore in danger of becoming an infantryman. And Pardo isn’t from the Piedmont; he may not be intimidated by your father’s name.”
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br />   “I thank you for your concern, Marco. But I am much more valuable as an alchemist than I would be as a soldier. If Pardo is a man of vertu, he will see that.”

  The bottle did not quite drop from Marco’s hand. He stared at Damiano slack-jawed, all the stumps of his front teeth exposed. “You will go over to the monster?”

  Damiano scowled. “The monster? That is what for forty years you called Aymon, and then his son Amadeus. He was no friend to Partestrada. He ignored our city, save at tax time—you yourself have told me that, and at great length.”

  “The old tyrant grew softer once he’d filled his belly from us, and his son at least is mountain born,” snorted Marco.

  “Perhaps Pardo will be different. Perhaps he is the one who will realize he can ride to greatness along with the city of Partestrada. If he has a mind, and eyes to see, I will explain it to him.” Damiano spoke words he had been rehearsing for the general’s ears. Marco cleared his throat, spat, and turned his back on Damiano to shuffle toward the sun-warmed stones of the well.

  “Wait, Marco!” called Damiano, hurrying after. He grabbed the greasy sleeves of Marco’s jacket. “Tell me. Are they all gone? Father Antonio? Paolo Denezzi and his sister? Where is Carla? Have you seen her?”

  Marco spun about, vermilion-faced. “Tell you? That would give you something else you could explain to General Pardo.” Without warning he swung the clay bottle at Damiano. The staff took the blow, and the bottle fell in purple-stained shards at his feet. Only a swallow had been left in it.

  “Your father,” called Marco, stomping down the street in the direction from which Damiano had come, “was an honest witch. Though he burns in hell, he was an honest witch.”

  Damiano stood staring at the drops of wine beading the dust, till Macchiata laid her triangular head against his leg. “He shouldn’t have said that about your father,” she said.

  Damiano cleared his throat. “He wasn’t insulting my father. He was insulting me.

  “But I can’t believe Marco thinks I would betray my friends, let alone my city. He is just old and angry.”

  Damiano shook his head, took a deep breath, and jerked his sleeves from his hands and his hair from his eyes.

  “Come,” he said. “General Pardo is expecting me.”

  Damiano hated being reminded about his father, whom he had last seen dissolving into a green ichor. Guillermo Delstrego had died in pain and had stained the workroom tiles on which he lay. Damiano had never known what spell or invocation his father had been about, for there were many things Delstrego would not let young Dami observe, and that particular invocation Damiano had never had any desire to know.

  Guillermo Delstrego had not been a bad father, exactly. He had certainly provided for Damiano and had taught him at least a portion of his arts. He had not beaten Dami often, but then Damiano had not deserved beating often, and now it seemed to Damiano that his father would have liked him better if he had. A mozzarella was what Marco called him. Delstrego probably would have agreed, being himself a ball of the grainiest Parmesan. But after their eighteen years together, and despite Damiano’s quick sensitivity to people, the young man could say that he’d scarcely known his father—certainly not as well as old Marco knew him.

  Damiano was like his mother, whom Delstrego had found and married in Provence (it was said no woman in the Piedmont would have him), and who had died so long ago she was not even a memory to the boy. He had her slimness, small face, and large eyes. And though his nose was rather larger than hers had been, it was nothing like the strongly colored and very Roman appendage that Guillermo Delstrego had borne. Yet Delstrego had had to admit the child was his, because witchcraft did not run in his wife’s family, and even as a baby Damiano had given off sparks like a cat.

  Was Delstrego in hell? There was gossip that said a witch was damned from birth, but the Church had never yet said anything of that sort, and Damiano had never felt in the slightest bit damned. He attended the mass weekly, when work permitted, and enjoyed involved theological discussions with his friend Father Antonio of the First Order of San Francesco. Sometimes, in fact, he felt a little too sure of God’s favor, as when Carla Denezzi let him sort her colored threads, but he was aware of this fault in himself and chided himself for an apostate whenever the feeling got out of hand. His father, though, who died invoking the Devil, alone knew what… Who could be sure about him? When he asked Raphael, he was told to trust in God and not to worry, which was advice that, although sound, did not answer the question. Damiano prayed both at matins and at vespers that his father was not in hell.

  It was quite frosty, even though past noon. Cold enough to snow. The sky was heavy and opaque, like a pottery bowl tipped over the city, its rim resting on the surrounding hills and trapping all inside.

  Except it had not trapped anyone, anyone but old Marco and himself. Where had the people gone? Where had Paolo Denezzi gone, taking his whole family? It was not that Damiano would miss Denezzi, with his black beard and blacker temper. His sister Carla, however…

  The whole city was one thing. An undifferentiated mass of peasants and vendors and artisans called Partestrada; to Damiano it was all that Florence is to a Florentine, and more, for it was a small city and in need of tending. Damiano was on pleasant terms with everyone, but he usually ate alone.

  Carla Denezzi was another matter altogether. She was blonde, and her blue eyes could go deep, like Raphael’s. Damiano had given her a gilded set of the works of Thomas Aquinas, which he had gone all the way to Turin to purchase, and he thought she was the jewel around Partestrada’s throat. Damiano was used to seeing Carla at the window of her brother’s house or sitting on the loggia like a pretty pink cat, studying some volume of the desert fathers or doing petit point. Sometimes she would stop to chat with him, and sometimes, if a chaperon was near and her brother Paolo was not, she would permit Damiano to swing himself up by the slats of the balcony and disturb her sewing further.

  In his own mind, Damiano called Carla his Beatrice, and if he was not being very original, it was at least better to liken her to Dante’s example of purity rather than to Laura, as did other young men of the town, for Petrarch’s Laura had been a married woman and had died of the plague, besides.

  Now Damiano passed before the shuttered Denezzi house front and he felt her absence like cold wind against the face. “Where are you, my Beatrice?” he whispered. But the bare, white house front had no voice—not even for him.

  The town hall had no stable under it, and it was only two stories high. It was not a grand building, being only white stucco: nowhere near as imposing a structure as the towers of Delstrego. It had not been in the interest of the council to enlarge it, or even to seal the infected-looking brown cracks that ran through the wall by the door. Except for the weekly gatherings of the town fathers, discussing such issues as the distance of the shambles from the well and passing judgment on sellers of short-weight bread loaves—such were commonly dragged on a transom three times around the market, the offending loaf hanging around their necks—the town hall had been occupied by one or another of Savoy’s captains, with the half-dozen men necessary to keep Partestrada safe and in line.

  Damiano knew what Savoy’s soldiers had been like: brutishly cruel or crudely kind as the moment would have it, but always cowed before wealth and authority. No doubt these would be the same. It was only necessary for a man to feel his own power…

  His confidence in his task grew as he approached the open door of the hall, which was guarded by a single sentry. His nod was a gesture carefully tailored to illustrate he was a man of means and family, and a philosopher besides. The soldier’s response, equally well thought-out, was intended to illustrate that he had both a sword and a spear. Damiano stopped in front of him.

  “I am told that General Pardo wants to see me,” he began, humbly enough.

  “Who are you, that the general should want to see you,” was the cold reply.

  A bit of his natural dignity returned to Dam
iano. “I am Delstrego.”

  The sentry grunted and stepped aside. Damiano passed through, leaning a bit on his staff, allowing any casual observer to believe he was lame.

  “Not with that,” spoke the soldier, and Damiano paused again. He could not lie barefacedly and tell the man he needed the stick to walk, but he was also not willing to be parted from it. He squinted nearsightedly at the guard, mustering arguments. But the guard pointed downward. “The general doesn’t want to see your dog.”

  Macchiata’s hackles rose, and she growled in her throat. “It’s all right,” Damiano said softly to her. “You can wait outside for me. And for your sake, do it quietly!” The dog lumbered out the door, watched by the amused guard, and Damiano proceeded into the hall.

  General Pardo was the sort who looked good in black, being hard, neatly built, and of strong color. His height was impossible to judge as he sat slumped in the corner of an ornate bench-pew, his legs propped on a stool beside it. He was dusty, and his face sun-weathered. He regarded Damiano in a manner that was too matter-of-fact to be called arrogant. Damiano bowed from the waist.

  “You are the wizard?” began Pardo. To Damiano’s surprise, the general addressed him in a clear Latin.

  The young man paused. He always corrected people who called him witch, though everyone called him witch. No man had ever before called him a wizard. The word was one Damiano had only read in books. It rang better than witch in the ears, but it also sounded pagan—especially in Latin. It did not seem right to begin his conversation with General Pardo thinking him a pagan, and yet it wasn’t politic to begin matters by correcting the general. “I am Delstrego,” he replied finally, knowing that at least his Latin accent was above reproach.

  “Not a wizard?” The question was sharp.

  “I am… an alchemist.”

  Pardo’s response was unsettling. His mouth tightened. He turned his head away. It was as though something nauseated him. “Deusi An alchemist,” he muttered in southern-accented Italian. “Just what I need.”

  Damiano leaned against his staff, puzzled. He also dropped into Italian: the Italian of the Alps, heavily flavored with French. “An alchemist seeks only to comprehend matter and spirit, and to raise each to the highest level, using the methods of Hermes Trismegistus »»