Damiano waited for flames to take him, but after ten seconds passed uneventfully, he opened his eyes.
He lay under the rim of the pottery bowl, which was the color of dried blood. One of the heads brimming over the edge stared down at him. The slack features were those of the captain of cavalry whom he had seen brained by the butcher’s hammer not one day ago. That spotted thing behind it: was that a cow’s head? Damiano closed his eyes again. He became aware the Devil was speaking.
“You are a fool, and you have wasted my time, boy. But as you are a witch and a freethinker and so have some call on me, I will be very generous. I propose a bargain that will almost exactly suit your needs.
“I will arrange what you call peace for Partestrada. Not the entire Piedmont, mind you, and not for one hundred years, but just for the lives of the present inhabitants. You will be the mayor—simply because you are the only man who will be able to understand your perverse motivations in this matter. Partestrada will happen to he outside every path of conquest from Italy, France, and the north. Harvests will be adequate. Not ample, perhaps, but adequate. No plague will touch the city. Is that not a good approximation of peace?”
Damiano gazed up fixedly, as though engaged in colloquy with the head of the dead captain. “Possibly. What do you want for it, if my soul is of no value?”
Satan chewed his lower Up and peered out his southern window at endless sand. “I?” He spoke slowly, dreaming. “I, like you, am an altruist. I ask nothing for myself. But the situation imposes its own restraints.
“You are right, little witch, in supposing that the town of Partestrada contains the seeds of greatness. Its location on the Dora Baltea, three quarters of the way between Turin and Aosta… its salubrious climate, nurturing grapes yet in the shadows of the Alps…
“But I tell you that fifty years of unexceptional peace will kill Partestrada. She will fade and mummify, and her young men depart for Milan and Turin, violent cities of more promise.”
Damiano sat up. “That isn’t the way it has to be.”
The Devil raised one eyebrow in the familiar gesture of Raphael.
“Let me finish, please. Not only will Partestrada fade and be forgotten, Damiano, but you yourself. All you have done and dreamed. The alchemical discoveries you are destined to make, the music that even now your unfulfilled love is awakening in your bosom, all your wisdom, your easy gift of friendship, your very name and your family name and your house and the place where your house once stood and your face…
“All will be lost and forgotten. In a century you will be a man who might never have existed from a city with a forgotten name.”
Damiano put his head between his knees. “No!” he said, and repeated it stubbornly, his voice shaking in his throat. “No. That’s not the only way to get peace for my city.”
The Devil seemed to shrug. “It’s what I offer,” he replied. “I can see no other way. Greatness, in man or nation, is incompatible with that emptiness that you call peace.”
Damiano rose slowly to his feet, using the edge of the bowl of heads for support. “You can see no other way? Raphael can’t see into the future. He says no created being can…”
Harsh laughter boomed out, along with the odor of a wet fire. “Raphael? My little brother has a long history of confusing dare not with cannot!
“Believe me or doubt me, boy, but you came here to bargain. This is my offer, and if you were the… the saint you seem to be, you would snap it up. Even Raphael couldn’t fault such a bargain; it reeks of yielding resignation. And humility. What do you say, little witch? Will you take it?”
“No,” answered Damiano. “The more I talk to you the more I believe in Partestrada. Decay is not the only way to peace!”
The Devil snorted in jovial contempt. “Fine words! But you are a hypocrite, after all,” he said. He smiled as though he had just won a hand at cards. “Or a coward. Either way, you’re no better than I thought!”
Then the bitter wind took Damiano again and flung him at the wall.
Chapter 9
Damiano spent the next morning lying motionless on a pallet on the floor of the cabinetmaker’s house, Macchiata curled beside him. When he woke, his interview with the Devil might have been a dream, except that his knees were bruised from falling on that stony red hand and his nostrils were caked with ash.
At intervals during the morning, the dog left Damiano, only to return and find her master as dull as before. At last she inserted her damp nose between Damiano’s stubbly chin and his neck.
“Master,” she began, her voice muffled by the contact, “Master, are you sick?”
“No, little dear,” he answered slowly. “I just want to stop the sun for a while.” Then, remembering Macchiata’s literal mind, he amended his statement. “I needed time to think.”
The dog sat placidly beside him, her brown eyes a few inches from his. As he watched, a flea crawled out from behind her ear and disappeared among the white hairs of Macchiata’s muzzle. “And did you think?” she asked. “I mean, are you done thinking? What did you think?”
Wrestling with the heavy felt blanket, Damiano turned onto his back. “I think… there’s got to be another way. For both my city and myself.”
“I’m sure there is,” said Macchiata staunchly, “if you think so.” And she scratched the side of her face with the stubby nails of her back foot.
It didn’t bother Damiano that the dog should express her agreement with him without knowing the subject matter of that agreement; he was as used to Macchiata’s loyal ignorance as he was to Raphael’s smile.
“I need help,” he continued, thoughtfully glowering at the black beams of the ceiling. “I need advice.”
“Certainly.” She sat, ears pricked, and waited.
Damiano bent his head toward her, and a snort of laughter escaped him. “I meant—and I hope you will not be offended, Macchiata—from someone wiser than I.”
The dog grinned lazily, and her tongue slid out the side. “Not at all, Master. I know I am only four years old, whereas you are one and twenty. But where are you to find one greater than you are— that I don’t know.”
Damiano’s grin matched hers. The dog’s ludicrous flattery never failed to amuse him, because he knew it was sincere. He sat up, throwing the weight of covers aside. Beneath the blankets he was wearing his ermine mantle and nothing else at all. Limberly he twisted right and left over the floorboards, fishing for his tunic and trousers among the tangles of cloth.
“Unless it’s Raphael, Master. He must be very wise, because he never gets upset. Perhaps he is even wiser than you.”
“Perhaps,” Damiano agreed, and his grin grew rueful. “But I know his advice in any case; it is not of the world, as he is not, and unfortunately, our difficulty is very worldly. I can’t sit back and pray.
“Besides, if the archangel discovered what I did last night, likely he would never speak to me again.”
“Last night when I was asleep, Master? What did you do?”
“I had a chat with the Devil, little dear. And he threw me out.”
Macchiata thought. “Is the Devil wiser than you? Did you go to him for advice?”
Damiano pulled his trousers up, wondering how many of Macchiata’s fleas were hiding in them, and how many of his own. “I guess I did—go to him for advice. But that doesn’t mean I have to take it.”
He knelt to fold the blanket. His knees were very sore. “You know, little dear, it feels good to be thrown out by the Devil. Not as good, perhaps, as being welcomed in by the Father himself, but then, after the latter experience one is not usually walking the green earth. I think I know what I shall do next.”
“What we shall do next, you mean,” replied Macchiata, standing unconcernedly in the middle of the blanket her master was attempting to fold.
“What we shall do, then. We are going to take a trip. A very pleasant trip into a beautiful land. Just the two of us.”
Macchiata cocked her head to one side, and
the tip of her tail began to wag. Slowly the wag gained both speed and mass, until her body was still only from the shoulders forward.
“To Provence, Master, as you said last week?”
Damiano threw the blanket into the corner and stood. He thrust his head out the single small window the room possessed and took a chestful of clean air. “No. Last week I was dreaming childish dreams. I was dreaming of my own happiness. But still, where we are going is more beautiful than Provence. We are going to Lombardy, little dear. To find the witch my father said was the most powerful in all the Italics: Saara the Fenwoman, whose dominion…” and then his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, as he remembered where last he had heard the word “dominion.” “Whose power is over both snow and sunlight. She must help us.
“—For I don’t know anyone else to ask.”
The parting with Carla Denezzi was hard. It seemed to Damiano he had never known how he loved her until she was lost to him. If he had been more forward… but then he had not suspected there would be a limit to their time together, and feelings, like fruit, ripen slowly in the high air.
Damiano bought the black gelding from Paolo Denezzi, who was more than willing to help Damiano on his way. The last of his coin was spent on food and warmer bedding than even his closet at home had provided. Was General Pardo now storing his garb in the Delstrego wardrobe? It was quite possible, since the tower was nearly the best house in Partestrada, and certainly the most defendable.
Now that Damiano stopped to think about it, the general would be running quite a risk if he did plant himself in Damiano’s house. A man could come to harm, nosing about in the Delstrego tower, even though Damiano had quenched the fires in the workroom before leaving. There were still the chemicals, and the elementals… Damiano entertained the possibilities. A problem or two would be solved if Pardo exploded along with a sealed retort. But it was an idle notion: there was nothing the witch could do at this distance to encourage an explosion, and besides, he did not know for sure that Pardo was staying in his house.
Damiano rode back along the road south out of Aosta. He rode bareback because that was most easy for him. Guillermo Delstrego had never kept a horse; animals hadn’t liked him, and he had returned the feeling.
Or perhaps it had happened the other way around. In either case, Damiano had not learned to ride along with the other boys of family in Partestrada. He had not learned most things along with the other boys, but he had learned quite a few things by himself, and among them was bareback riding.
And the horse liked him much better, now that Damiano’s madness had burned itself out. The gelding stepped easily down the packed surface of the road, where a warm day had thawed the brown ice and hollowed it, making sheets brittle and thin like isinglass. Shod hooves ground the stuff into slush.
Macchiata pattered about, behind, before, and beneath, interfering in a hundred ways with the patient steed’s walking. Occasionally the horse put its head to the ground or thrust its lippy muzzle into a crack of the rock wall, in the forlorn hope of grass. Damiano did not correct it because he had no rein on the animal, and also because he had not the heart.
They passed the spot where Damiano had first been hailed by Pardo’s captain and then the bend in the road where Damiano had destroyed the soldiers with his memories of a butchered cow. Finally they passed beside the small crevasse where fifty-two men were buried beneath snow and branches. For Damiano this journey was another form of the stations of the cross. He said nothing, nor did Macchiata, though her nose had a long memory of its own.
The horse, who had memory but no words, rolled its eyes, and the hide over its withers twitched.
A mile south of this point, as Damiano stopped to take a pull of wine from the bag at his left side he heard a quick clatter of hooves. With his heel he prodded the horse to the side of the road and called Macchiata to stand beneath. Then he pulled his staff out from his bedroll and spoke the spell; it came easily, for he was both rested and in practice.
When the goatherd passed with his tiny flock, he did not notice the prints of shod hooves that led onto the smooth snow of the shoulder of the road and then stopped abruptly. The goats were more observant. They stared with their crazy yellow eyes, pupils rectangular as money boxes, and the witch didn’t know whether they could see him or whether they knew he was there by other means.
When almost all had passed, one weatherworn buck halted before the horse, examined them sagaciously and urinated into his own beard. Macchiata growled at the insult. The goat presented its horns.
“Don’t get involved,” hissed Damiano helplessly from above. At that moment the goatherd stalked over, and with his supple leather whip, sent his charge bawling up the road.
“Well,” said Damiano, when they were alone again. “It might have been soldiers.”
By midafternoon Damiano had passed the fork in the road where the stone hut stood abandoned and empty, passed by the shoulder hills that concealed the dead village of Sous Pont Saint Martin, and left behind the footpath where the bones and raw hide of a cow had been tossed to rot in the first thaw. Thus all the tragic histories of this past week were behind him.
The sky was streaked with fairy clouds of ice that scattered the sunlight. He felt warm under his furs, warm and sleepy. “Let’s start again, little dear,” he murmured to Macchiata. “No more of the Devil. I went wrong somewhere—I don’t know where, exactly, and I have no one to ask, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe Saara can tell me, eh? She’s been round awhile and must have seen much of life, traveling from the Fenland down to Italy.”
He waited for an answer, because Macchiata always replied to his questions, even the rhetorical ones. After a few seconds of silence, he looked around, then leaned over to peer under the horse’s belly.
“Macchiata?”
When was the last time he had heard from the dog? Sighing, Damiano slid to the ground.
To the left of the road rose hills, more rounded than the peaks visible from the crossroads, pocketed with green-black growths of pine. To his right the land hollowed out, and standing water had turned to sheets of ice. He squinted at the bright white road behind him.
A tiny speck of russet was hobbling in the distance. It became recognizable, and Damiano relaxed, leaning one arm over the black horse’s back. As Macchiata galloped she rolled like a small but heavy-laden ship, and her tongue lolled in desperate manner.
“Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t keep up?” asked Damiano. Macchiata looked up at him, pulled in her tongue, and then all four of her bandy legs gave at once. As she hit the packed snow of the road her jaws clashed resoundingly. Her inadequate little tail lay flat out behind.
She was hot as a bed warmer when Damiano scooped her up. “That’s terrible, Macchiata. Your pride might have gotten you lost! Now lie there a minute and don’t move.” As he spoke he deposited her across the withers of the horse, where she lay as limply as the goatskin of wine. Damiano leaped up next to her.
“This poor horse,” he began, as he clucked the gelding to a walk. “Two riders, two bags, a bedroll, a wineskin, my staff, and the lute besides. It’s lucky for him neither of us weighs too much!”
The dog only groaned.
“Do you wonder,” asked Damiano, when a few minutes had passed, “why I should care about Partestrada so much? To go running hither and thither, fighting battles in the snow?”
“No,” answered Macchiata, and she clambered precariously to her feet on the horse’s back, her blunt nails digging in for grip. Damiano had barely time to grab her middle before the twitch of the black hide sent her slipping. He sat her on her tail before him, one arm holding her around the middle. Her back legs lolled in the air.
“No, Master. Partestrada is our home.”
“But some might question whether she is worth it. After all, Partestrada isn’t the largest city in the area, and she hasn’t produced any great poets or philosophers—yet.”
“Partestrada is our home,” repeated the dog, as t
hough there was nothing more to be said.
But Damiano was not listening. “I think… it may be the fruit vendors that make it so special. The way they push their vans down the alleys bawling, ‘rubies, rubies, red rubies’ when all the world knows they have only apples for sale. Or it may be the way the sun seems to roll along the crest of the mountains at midwinter, and the dawn and twilight colors last half the day.
“Of course, it could be our wool, because the sheep get to stay cool both winter and summer and yet get enough to eat. We all get enough to eat, as a matter of fact, unlike cities like Florence, where bread might as well be wrapped in gold leaf, for what it costs, and I’m told a man may have a house of marble and yet eat bread laced with sawdust and bran.
“Or it may be the fact that we make our own wine, though frankly, Macchiata, it isn’t good wine—not made from the grapes they use in the south.” He slapped the gurgling sack smartly.
“And then again, little dear, though they make fun of us Piedmontese because we are so mixed up between France and the Italies, I think this mixedness makes us flexible. No one is as proud as an illiterate Tuscan peasant, though he has naught to be proud of except a field of sunbaked clay! A man with a Lombard father and a Rhenish mother-in-law must develop a sense of humor—to survive.
“But all in all, I think it is the vendors.”
“I’m mixed,” introjected Macchiata. “My mother is a ratter and my father… I don’t know, exactly.”
“Certainly! And see how fortunate you are in that? Strong, enduring, and, though you are not the largest dog in the Piedmont, fierce enough to put three highwaymen to flight.” He squeezed Macchiata till her breath squeaked out her nose.
Then Damiano’s dark eyes grew somber and earnest. “Though I know that the highest love asks nothing, still I would like… little dear, I would like Partestrada to know me before I die. To know how I have cared.”
The Damiano Series Page 12