The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “We’re all dead here,” she said quite calmly. “Ernesto. Sofia and her brother. Me. My little ‘Lonso. Renaud. We are only six and had nothing, and the soldiers killed us all. I am the last, but I’m dead nonetheless. Give me water.”

  “Ahh?” Damiano felt about reflexively and realized he was still carrying his sheepskin bag. His cold hands dug into it. “I have only wine,” he told her, and heard his own voice trembling. He held the bottle to her lips.

  She drank greedily, and Damiano tried not to think of the red wine trickling out of her belly below. “Thank you,” she gasped when the bottle was empty. “It will do me no good, but thank you anyway.

  “Renaud threw a pitchfork at the first soldier to stick his head between the guard hills. They cut his head off and killed us all, and I don’t even know who they were or from where. It does not matter from where. I curse them. I curse the women who bore them and the man who sent them here. I curse the place they came from and the place they will go to.

  “I curse…” And she stopped for breath. Damiano could feel the curses hanging in the air, like thunder on a still day. They stole the mutilated woman’s strength, and she flickered before his eyes. As his father had flickered: a dying fire on the tiles of the workroom. The dog howled. Was it Macchiata?

  “No more, Signora,” he whispered, stroking her black hair back from her face. “Pray instead. For peace. For forgiveness.”

  The woman cried out in sudden pain and rocked back and forth on the straw bed. “Forgiveness? I have done nothing, not even to throw a pitchfork at the pig who tore me open! And I forgive no one. Least of all God, who let this happen.”

  Damiano knew something of healing, but he also knew that for death there was no remedy. He tasted in his mouth the salt of his own tears and could think of no way to help.

  Except for a little charm, not a witch’s charm but a child’s, to steal the pain of boils and bruised fingers. He took the dying woman’s right hand in his right hand and hugged the black staff with the left side of his body.

  “Charm, charm Cure the harm. Tell the pain Be gone again.”

  This he repeated over and over, with great concentration, till he felt himself no more than a black hollowness, like the length of a flute, through which the invisible passed. He played the charm like a tiny song along the length of his mind’s body, opening certain passages to the power and stopping others. With what small part of his mind was not involved in the spell casting he prayed that this little charm might grow into one large enough to shroud the pain of a deadly wound. Meanwhile, the moaning of the dog went on and on.

  Her hand softened its grip on his. Damiano opened his eyes.

  The woman gazed steadily up at him. Her breathing was easy. “The pain is gone,” she said, and sighed. “But you… have a palsy. Your hand shakes.”

  He shook his head. Exhaustion nearly toppled him onto the blood-soaked pallet. The woman patted his hand.

  “I see, you are a witch,” she said. “Like the man who came when the sheep were sickening. He shook like that and then slept an hour in my brother’s bed.”

  “My father…” began Damiano, but she wasn’t listening.

  “If I were a witch, I would not be lying here with my bowels torn. If I were a witch, I would have justice.”

  Struggling, she raised up on one elbow. “What right have you to live?” she asked him, her voice rising shrill again. Her image wavered like sun on water. “Give me justice.”

  Damiano caught her as she fell back. Her slight weight almost overbalanced him. He found himself shouting “Raphael! Raphael! I can’t help her. Help me, Seraph! Help me!”

  And white wings filled the squalid hut.

  Damiano took the archangel’s perfect fair hand and laid it upon the woman’s. Raphael glanced down, a distant pity in his eyes, then looked again at Damiano.

  The woman’s gaze had not moved. “Witch, give me justice, or have my curse too.” Her words came faintly through dying lips.

  “Raphael?” The angel merely shook his golden head. “Raphael, comfort her, give her peace. I cannot!”

  “Peace? I forgive no one, least of all God,” she stated. Her light flared and was gone.

  Damiano covered his face with one hand. He turned away from the angel and barged into the light.

  “I’m sorry, Damiano. She could not see me.”

  Raphael also wavered in Damiano’s sight, through a haze of tears. “Couldn’t you have spoken to her—told her something of God’s goodness—if not to stop the pain at least to sweeten her bitter heart? She has gone to judgment with a weight of curses on her back.”

  “… neither see me nor hear me. Dami! I could not touch her. And if I could have, what would I dare say?”

  Puzzled by the angel’s words, Damiano blinked his eyes clear. Vaguely he noticed that Raphael stood on the dimple in the snow that he had leaped over in his dash for the hut. The angel left no mark in the snow. Damiano walked around him.

  “Damiano, my dear friend. I am spirit and cannot die. Likewise I cannot understand death. What comfort do I have to give a mortal, who is in love with what seems to me a trial and a bondage? You are earth itself that has been given the nature of the Father: God in his most infinite humility.

  “I am… only a musician. Even less, I am only music. Your pain is so far beyond me…”

  I should have closed her eyes, Damiano thought.

  “I don’t understand what you are saying, Seraph. I’m too tired. I’ll think later on your words.”

  “But do not forgive me later, Damiano. I know I have failed you. Give me your hand.”

  Raphael shone like ice in the sun as he extended his hand. Dull from too much crying, Damiano squeezed it. Then he turned again to face the crazy-doored hut. “If there is failure here, it is mine, no doubt. I’m going to bury them now.”

  The bodies in the meadow were frozen stiff as wood. He dragged them over to the body of the young woman, not forgetting the grisly head of Renaud, who threw a pitchfork at a soldier and so destroyed six lives.

  Six? He had only four. There were two more to find. He raised his head and listened to the dog’s moaning. Was it Macchiata? He called her name.

  The howl cut off abruptly. “Master!” came the yip from the slope behind the village. “Here! It’s here.”

  He forced his feet to move.

  Macchiata lay curled at the foot of a dead man. The thin howling escaped her as though she had no will in the matter. “It won’t get warm. They threw it in the snow and it won’t get warm.”

  “He’s dead, Macchiata,” said Damiano, wondering at her. “Like all of them, killed by the soldiers.”

  “This one too?” The dog uncoiled and stepped back, exposing the stiff, blue body of an infant. “It isn’t bloody or anything, and it’s so little! Can’t it be alive?”

  Damiano stared and blinked. “No,” he answered, feeling nothing through weariness. “No it can’t.” He picked up the tiny corpse and dragged the man by one rag-wrapped foot.

  When all the bodies lay in the fetid darkness, Damiano braced his staff on the hard earth outside. Using his horror and the last of his strength as tools, he shivered the stone walls from top to bottom. The hut fell into rubble, burying the dead beyond the reach of weasels and starving dogs.

  Raphael was gone. Damiano had not seen him depart. He had more to say to the archangel, but it would have to wait. He turned back to the road.

  Chapter 5

  The road remained empty and the countryside bare, but this need not have been due to war or the passage of soldiers. Only fifteen years previously the pestilence had swept up from the south, and within the space of a year the population of these hills had been cut in half, and many towns and villages disappeared entirely.

  Partestrada had escaped the Death entirely, some said through the influence of Guillermo Delstrego, while others claimed it was because they had locked the gates of the town and posted archers to slay any who tried to get in.

 
; Damiano, who had been six years old, did not remember much about it except that it had been a hungry time. But he had grown up knowing that the world had been better, once, and that men died easily.

  Now he plodded through an empty landscape, and hummed a sad trouvère’s tune.

  At last he found footprints, on the path that snaked down from the West Road to the mountain meadows. Here, where time or some cataclysm had shattered a rock wall so that it looked like brickwork, was a small lap of ground protected from the wind. The snow lay only inches deep, old and crusted. Were these the prints of the refugees from Partestrada, or were these marks left by the pursuing soldiers? Certain of the imprints were soft edged, either weeks old and sun softened or left by the rag-wrapped feet of the peasantry.

  Damiano bent on one knee. Inches from the face of the wall was a soft print that seemed to overlie the clean print of a leather boot. That was a good sign; infantrymen did not wrap their feet in rags.

  “What does your nose tell you, little dear?” Damiano asked of the dog, who sat beside him, her thin-furred belly steaming in the noon sun.

  “It tells me that men have been by this way, and that the black man is near.” She spoke without dropping her muzzle to the ground.

  “The black man?” For a moment he wondered whether she meant the Devil himself. Absently, his fingers traced the metalwork on the staff, which had not left his hand since his waking that morning. It, too, spoke of a visitor, but not a supernatural one. His lips tingled, along with the fine hairs inside his nostrils. Damiano rose and strode forward along the path.

  Where the rock wall ended, a white glare filled the path. Damiano stopped still, for in the middle of the light stood a figure black as night and obscured by the brilliance. Something sparkled: a sword.

  “Who hides in the shadows?” spoke a voice Damiano recognized.

  “Denezzi? Paolo Denezzi? It’s I, Dami Delstrego. I’ve been looking for you for two days. Is Carla…” Damiano stepped into the sun, expecting Denezzi to give way for him, but the heavy figure stood like the rock wall behind.

  “Delstrego,” echoed Denezzi, in tones of contempt. “I should have known.” The sword slid into its sheath.

  Damiano had not expected such a greeting, but though his feelings were wounded, he was in no mood for an argument. Damiano stepped around Denezzi. “For two days I have followed after… Why didn’t you stop and tell me you were evacuating the city?”

  Paolo Denezzi was a bull-faced man with a full beard and as dark as his sister was fair. He snorted, looking more bull-like than ever. “I had thought it was fairly plain, to anyone who looked out his window in the last week.”

  Reluctantly he met Damiano’s look of reproach. “We didn’t leave you behind on purpose, Owl-Eyes. It seemed that you left before us.”

  Damiano flushed at the hated childhood nickname and at all implied by Denezzi’s words. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell Denezzi that Carla, at least, had known where he was, but discretion curbed him.

  “Where is… everybody, Paolo, and how did you evade the soldiers?” Only a narrow path marred the white: a path such as a single walker might make, breaking the thigh-deep snow. But greasy smoke hung in the sky ahead.

  “What soldiers?” Denezzi glared as Macchiata, huffing and panting, squeezed between his legs and trotted off”. “Pardo’s men? They don’t know where we are. I made sure of that.”

  “He does. They do. They left the day I did, but earlier.”

  Suspicion and confusion played a dangerous game on Denezzi’s face. “What do you know of this, witch?”

  “Pardo told me, and he told me he had sent a party of soldiers after the citizens. Not to slay, but to rob. He wants money to finance an attack on Milan.” Damiano saw Denezzi’s hand move and heard the terrible slick sound of steel. He stood motionless, holding his staff in both hands.

  “It was not I who betrayed you. I’ve come to help.”

  Silently he added, “Through cold and peril, you obdurate black donkey.”

  Denezzi drew his sword, but let its tip drop into the snow between them. “What were you doing, sharing words with the general himself, eh? And who betrayed us, if indeed we have been betrayed.”

  Damiano paused for only a moment. Marco’s deed could not be hidden, not after the gift of the vineyards. “It was old Marco who told. He has been given the Anuzzi property. I spoke to Pardo to discover his intention toward the city.”

  Denezzi’s small eyes were lost in wrinkles of doubt. Fur of black martin rustled as he shrugged his huge shoulders. “If I could believe you, Delstrego, I would be sure you are a fool. But as it is, no soldiers have bothered us.” He turned on his heel. “You had better go back the way you came.” As Denezzi walked he sliced with his sword into the snow on either side.

  Damiano took one step after the man, when he heard Macchiata lumbering back along the path toward them.

  “Master, I have found them,” she called. “All the men, Master.”

  In a fury of irritation, Denezzi raised his sword above the dog, who gaped upward in stunned surprise.

  “No, Paolo, you will not touch her!” The lean form sprang forward. Paolo Denezzi felt himself in the middle of a cloud like a promise of thunder, which stole the warmth from his heart and the air from his lungs. His hand slipped on the leather sword-hilt. His anger grew as his strength lessened.

  “What will you do, Owl-Eyes? Squinting in the sun, you can hardly see me.”

  Damiano was indeed almost blind. His brown eyes were sore from glare and from weeping, and at distance they had always failed him. Yet he knew where Denezzi stood and how the sword hung in the air, as though that figure were mapped within his brain, and he saw Macchiata inching backwards down the path, though a wall of snow lay between dog and master.

  “Whether I see you or not, Paolo, if you strike Macchiata you’re a dead man,” he stated. In pure fury, he was willing to commit the violence that Pardo’s threats could not force from him.

  Slowly the dark man lowered his sword, eyes fixed on Damiano. The dog was long since gone. “This is a silly quarrel,” he grunted, turning back along his footsteps. “But may God curse you if you’ve betrayed us, witch.”

  Damiano followed without speaking.

  It was a shelter thrown together out of brushwood and brambles and waxed cloth, piled between a cliff rise and an old, dry rock wall. Smoke runnelled upwards through the twigs and dead leaves, and the feet of men and horses had trampled the snow of the pasture.

  Macchiata nosed between Damiano’s legs, her belly to the ground like a cat’s. Her tail thumped hopefully, but she kept her nose on Paolo Denezzi.

  Damiano approached the rude shelter, aware he was the focus of dozens of eyes. Covertly, he kicked the dog away. “Now would be the time for me to fall flat on my face, you idiot,” he hissed. She whined an abject apology and leaned harder against his leg.

  The men of Partestrada huddled like rooks on a tower. Over a hundred men shared the ghost of warmth between the cliff face and the ancient wall. They had strewn the snow with pine boughs and dead bracken, which they now fed bit by bit to damp, unwilling fires. Even in the open air, the smell of hot wool was overpowering.

  Macchiata had been exactly right. They were all men. Every face that met his grew, or was capable of growing, a beard. The response to his greeting was a spiritless mumble, more wary than hostile.

  Belloc, the blacksmith, and two pot-bellied burghers edged aside for him, and Damiano sank down beside the most flourishing of the fires. His staff rested in the crook of his elbow, but the lute he wrapped in his mantle and set behind him. Heat beat against his face, potent as the grace of God.

  “You really shouldn’t keep the fires going in the daytime,” he remarked, watching the gray smoke sail out into the air, roiling, bending east. “You are visible from a distance.”

  Belloc raised one shaggy eyebrow. “Not all of us are as well clothed as you are, young Signor.” He stared pointedly at the ermine.
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br />   Damiano flushed. He had always liked the blacksmith, who once had sealed his father’s caldron so that the elder Delstrego had never known that Dami had allowed it to break. With guilty haste he pulled the instrument from its wrapping.

  “I don’t need it” Belloc half smiled, looking away from the offering. “But there’s some that might.”

  Damiano flung the mantle onto the piled branches. He didn’t look to see what hand plucked it up.

  “Besides,” continued the blacksmith, and he sighed, “no one is looking for us.”

  “According to him, there are soldiers on our trail,” said Denezzi, from behind a pile of embers that seemed to be his alone. All faces turned to the new arrival amid a sudden silence.

  “Where are the women?” demanded Damiano. “And the old men and children? Surely there is no cave, or concealment nearby, that…”

  “The women are in Aosta,” answered Belloc, with a dour satisfaction. “Along with the children, the lame, and those men born under a lucky star. Also in Aosta are the money, the carriages, most of the clothes and food…

  “We sent them straight on, while we came to this forsaken rock covered with frozen sheep dung and hungry sheep lice.”

  “Why?” Damiano looked from one uncomfortable face to another. “Why didn’t you follow them to Aosta?”

  Denezzi broke the silence. “If we abandon our homes, Owl-Eyes, we will return to find them occupied.” Other men grunted assent, but Belloc spoke again.

  ‘That was your reasoning, Signor Denezzi. But I left little I can’t do without. My tools and my anvil have gone up the hills in an oxcart. Still, it is important we hang together, if we’re ever to be a town again.” His sighs were deep, as befitted the size of his ribcage.

  Damiano was at first heartened by the news that the most delicate part of the city, at least, was safe. But then his mind began to turn over Belloc’s words.

  “Signor Belloc,” he began, sliding his hands absentmindedly in and out of the flame. “Your news troubles me.”

  The blacksmith stared fixedly as orange flames licked Damiano’s fingers. “I could use hands like that,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t need the tongs.”