Saara stared. “I have been a cow before. I have been a lamb, for that matter, and yet I have no trouble.”
Damiano looked past her, and past the clearing off the road where the horse was tethered, to the light of the westering sun. “Ah, but were you ever a cow that someone butchered, my lady?”
She shook her head forcefully. “No, my dear, I was not.” And she scooped the shredded lamb on her fingers. “How about eggs, Damiano?” And then she giggled. “Unless you have been an egg that someone has cracked….”
Damiano’s heavy eyebrows rose. “You are sounding more and more like Gaspare, Saara. No. I can eat eggs, as long as they do not have slimy unborn ducklings inside.”
“Oh, no,” replied Saara. She held up an egg, pierced it with an experienced fingernail, and drained it raw. “These are fresh this morning.”
“Nobody can eat old eggs,” vouched Gaspare, rattling down from the spur of rock. “But even old sheep-face can eat fresh ones.” He took an egg, snipped it against the edge of one ragged tooth, and followed Saara’s example.
Glowing green eyes looked into his pale ones. “Don’t call him sheep-face too much,” she said to Gaspare.
Chapter 4
The sun was sinking and the travelers’ fire lit the hummocked rock walls of their tiny dell. As always, Festilligambe’s ardor for fire had to be restrained, lest the gelding burn off his mane and tail. Gaspare was almost as bad; having no warming fat upon his body, he huddled so close to the flames he would occasionally singe his nose and knees.
It had been surprisingly easy to fill up their bellies. Strange that a hunger built for months at a time should disappear within two meals. Damiano sat cross-legged, practicing left-hand changes upon his lute and wishing he could lean back against something. Satiation demanded rest, but he refused to he flat on his stomach like an infant with Saara watching.
At night it was bad enough—in the wagon with her gentle breathing on one side and Gaspare’s adenoidal rasp on the other. And Gaspare so pointedly turned his head away. (Gaspare had explained that his instinct was to withdraw into the wood and leave Damiano alone with the lady with whom he seemed to share such a disturbing past, but that there were not sufficient blankets to spare, and on cold ground he would never last till morning. And Damiano had replied, of course, that it didn’t matter at all where Gaspare slept.)
“Whose fief is this through which we’re driving?” he asked casually, just to be saying something.
Gaspare grunted. “Dunno. There’s nothing important between Lyons and Avignon. It may be the riots have swept the area already, and no one greater than a monsignore has a head on his shoulders….”
Damiano shook his head. “The riots were in the north, in France, and their year is ended, anyway. Gaspare, you are just trying to frighten the lady.”
“What is a riot?” asked Saara, sounding not at all frightened.
“It doesn’t matter. They are all in the north of France,” replied Damiano, a touch too sharply.
And he chastised himself for it. It was bad enough to move like an old man in winter, and to know one looked like a beggar (save for the hair), but now he was becoming surly as well.
“Is it like the plague?” she pressed them.
Gaspare, making some connection in his brain evident only to himself, gave a nasty laugh. “Not at all,” replied Damiano.
But the witch wasn’t ready to let the subject drop. “About the plague. You must be very careful, for if you should catch it, I cannot help you.”
Damiano glanced at her sidelong and sighed. “I know, my lady. My father read to me at least a dozen collected cures for the plague, and at the end of each one he said ‘That is very fine, except that it doesn’t work.’ I grew up knowing that there is no cure in grammerie for the pest.”
Saara reacted to this mention of Delstrego Senior by staring at the fire. “Yet a strong witch,” she qualified, “will not catch the plague.”
Heavy black eyebrows lifted. “That I didn’t know. So you, Saara, are in no danger?”
“Neither would you be,” she added casually, “if you were undivided.”
Damiano dropped his eyes to the lute.
Those green eyes rose a vanity in him, and more than vanity, a desire to impress. He switched from exercises to a newly learned piece in the sharp, Spanish mode, only to find his fingers unexpectedly clumsy.
Resting the instrument on his lap, he flexed both hands together. “I’m tight all over,” he mumbled to the world at large. “I need a lesson.”
Saara was lying flat on her back, at a four-foot remove from the fire. She needed far less heat than the two Italians, and in the wagon at night used no more than a corner of Damiano’s woolen blanket. As he spoke she was playing with a feather, a white down feather, which she was sailing right and left with puffs of air. Languorously she turned onto one hip.
“A lesson?”
“From his angel,” came a voice from the crackle of the fire, and Gaspare withdrew a red face beaded with sweat. “Damiano takes lute lessons from an angel whom one cannot see or hear.”
“One—meaning Gaspare of San Gabriele—cannot,” answered Damiano mildly. “And I will not inflict upon Gaspare Raphael’s invisible presence.” Scissoring his legs, he rose in place, and with the lute in one hand, walked to the edge of the circle.
“My lady Saara,” he began, suddenly formal. Suddenly uncertain. “If you have any desire to meet my teacher… he is a wonderful person. An archangel he is, with great spreading wings—but very easy company.”
Saara’s interest was quick. Amusement made her eyes slant further. She popped to her feet, stroking her chin with a bronze braid. She accompanied him out of the circle of light.
There was a lot of moon showing tonight. Perhaps it was full. Once, Damiano would have known the hour and minute of the moon’s fullness. Once, it would have affected him. Perhaps it still affected him, but he was no longer aware of it.
He was thinking he should not have invited Saara. Introducing Raphael had never been a great success, since other people could not see him. (Or since nobody else could see him except Macchiata, who had been a dog and therefore did not count. And now the horse, who counted even less, being without speech.) Saara was a fine witch, certainly, but Damiano wasn’t quite sure that being a witch was enough. And if she was able to see the angel, Damiano knew that he himself would wind up showing off in his lesson instead of working.
Here—on this bright dome of stone, with its glitter of glass in the granite rock. This would make a good setting for an angel, if the wind were not too high. Being in all things an artist, Damiano liked to set Raphael like a jewel against his surroundings.
He sat himself down, noting that moonlight hadn’t warmed the rocks. Saara folded herself a few feet away from him. He cleared his throat.
“Seraph?” he called into the shining night. He spoke as another student might call “Professor?” down rows of musty bookshelves. “If you have the time…”
This was meaningless, as he knew. Raphael always had the time, if he chose to come. In fact, he probably had an assortment of times to choose from. But Damiano had never been able to reconcile angelic dimensionality with human courtesy, and he was, after all, human. So he called, “If you have the time…”
And Raphael appeared above them, descending light as milkweed. Damiano felt him and looked away.
He gazed instead at Saara, who had no difficulty with the angel’s form. She stared at Raphael brightly and bird-wisely, but without reverence. Without, in fact, a great deal of courtesy. In an instant Damiano was regretting the introduction of two powers, neither of which he could control.
“Good evening,” he began politely, letting the angel’s radiance leak into his closed eyes.
“Yes, isn’t it?” replied Raphael, and his voice held such a rich and living equanimity that the mortal relaxed a bit. Surely the Archangel Raphael was too great to be offended at a certain lack of respect out of Saara. He had never
demanded respect out of Macchiata, and in some ways a pagan was much like a dog.
“Very good. Air and earth are singing together,” continued the angel. “And if you are quiet you can hear them.”
Saara was smiling with that secret, superior amusement of hers.
“I was rather hoping for a lute lesson,” he replied to Raphael, wishing he could see whether he was watching Saara.
“That needn’t break the peace,” was the answer, and then, unexpectedly, Raphael added, “God’s blessing on you, Saara Saami.”
She showed the composure of a small, grinning pagan idol as she replied, “So you are what these Italians call an angel, Chief of Eagles. How curious.”
The dark musician glanced wonderingly at Saara. “You know him already?”
“Every Lappish child knows the eagle-spirits of the high air. There are four of them.”
“Once there were five,” added the archangel.
Damiano, in his confusion, made the mistake of glancing at Raphael directly.
When the dizziness passed, Saara was speaking, an edge of sharpness in her voice. “So why don’t you take care of him, then?”
Raphael’s answer was slow in coming. “I don’t know how to do that, Saara. Do you?”
Damiano focused with effort on the witch’s face, which was a little too faraway for his eye’s comfort, especially when he was already woozy. What he saw gave no comfort, for Saara’s fox-face was to the fore. Not only was she lacking reverence, she did not appear even friendly toward Raphael. “I have a certain earthy wit,” she was saying. “Mother wit. I know, for instance, that he cannot continue in the way he is.”
“Mortals by their nature cannot continue in the way they are. What matters, I am told, is the direction in which they change.” Raphael’s words were slow and reflective; Damiano could barely hear them.
But they gained clarity as the angel added, “Be careful, Saara.”
To Damiano’s pained astonishment, the witch laughed outright. “That advice I will take,” she crowed. “I will be very careful.” She leaped to her feet, shook dust from her heavy dress and padded off the moonlit dome.
Damiano did not know what to say—whether he should apologize for Saara, explain her background or merely ask what had transpired while he had been hors de combat.
But Raphael spoke first, and he spoke very calmly. “On what did you want to work tonight, Damiano?”
The young man took a moment to collect himself. His fingers drummed on the thin wood belly of the lute. “I’m all tight again, Seraph.”
Raphael waited the perfect moment before he replied, “Yes. I can imagine.”
Gaspare was still haunting the fire. When he saw Saara approach alone he settled back and squinted at her cannily, as though there were a sly understanding between green-eyed people. “Is there an angel?” he inquired.
With a lift of her chin she repelled this familiarity. “Yes, there is an angel,” she replied. “A great spirit of the air. Did you think Damiano was lying to you?”
Gaspare shrugged. “No, lady. I just thought he was mad.” He snickered ruefully. “You have to admit, when a fellow talks about being a magician and then never does anything magical, it’s easy to doubt.”
Then Gaspare’s interest drifted in a different direction. He poked the fire with a stick. “This angel, Lady Saara. Does he play the lute like old sheep—like Damiano? I mean, is that where he got that style of his?”
Saara stood above the blossom of flame, and to Gaspare’s amazement, she thoughtfully began to braid the fire, as she would her brown hair. “I… don’t know, Gaspare. I didn’t stay to listen.”
When Damiano awoke, the wind was blowing against (and through) the wagon side. Already the sun was well risen. Saara sat at the open foot of the vehicle, combing her hair with her fingers. Her feet swung in the tree-dappled light.
Damiano’s back was taut and stiff, as it always was upon waking, and his neck muscles were sore from the lack of variety in his sleeping position, but he could tell he would feel much better today.
He was wearing his rough mountain trousers. He did not usually wear them to sleep, but with a woman so close… His first touch of the morning air caused him to reach for his shirt.
He blundered about, probing and peering, until he had covered most of the wagon. The lute protested hollowly as he banged it with one knee.
Saara observed him idly. Finally she scooted back into the depths of the wagon. “Gaspare has it,” she announced. “He was feeling very cold this morning. He has no blood.”
“Then what is it that makes his face so red?” mumbled Damiano, and he sat back on his haunches, wrapping the wretched blanket around him and over his head. His face he rubbed between his knees, grunting.
“He’s got my shirt? Well, what about me; is my flesh less sensitive, or am I any bloodier? And where is he, anyway?”
Saara regarded him with the superiority the quick riser feels for the poor brute who wakes up slowly. “He is out setting rabbit snares. He said he would rather do it while you were sleeping. And since the grass is so good here, we thought we’d rest the day. So you can stay in the blanket.”
“Deprived of all dignity,” muttered Damiano, and he slid to the ground and stalked away, robed and cowled like a monk, to perform his morning offices in privacy.
Breakfast was mashed turnips, and a cup of the goat’s milk that Saara had acquired without fuss or explanation. Damiano was not really in a bad mood, but he did not know how to behave around Saara, having grown up without mother or sisters.
One could not remain gallant and lyrical for three days unbroken.
“Speaking of dignity, my lady,” he began, and then reconsidered his angle of approach. “Or rather, I am curious to know why you did not… like… Raphael very much.”
Saara’s eyes grew almost round with surprise. “Not like him? But I do like him, Dami. As much as I have liked any spirit I don’t know very well. Why do you think I don’t like him?”
Damiano folded his large hands around his knees. “You did not seem trustful, Saara. And then you walked away from him.”
Her child-soft mouth tightened. “Should I stay to chat with him, like two women at a well? Him? It is the custom in the North that spirits keep to spirits and people keep to people. And as for trust: you, Damiano, are much too trustful.”
Damiano’s hands clenched over his knees. He made a rude noise. “If there is one sort of… of person, spirit or flesh, whom you can trust, it is an angel of God! And speaking of that, why did you call him Chief of Eagles? Raphael is his name.”
Very carefully, Saara crossed her feet on her lap. Her face showed no expression, yet the air in the old wagon was charged.
“I know his name as he knows mine. I call him Chief of Eagles because that is what we call him. After all, he is a white eagle in form, isn’t he?”
“No,” replied Damiano, nonplussed. “Of course not. I used to see him quite clearly, and he is a man—a beautiful man with wings.”
“An eagle,” she contradicted. “With human face and hands.”
Damiano recoiled from the idea. “Monstrous! Why would he look like that when the angel form is higher and more beautiful, and he himself is by nature high and beautiful?”
She snickered. “Evidently you think the body of a man is more beautiful than that of an eagle. There are two ways of thinking about that. And as for being higher, well, you cannot dispute that an eagle is much higher than a man. Most of the time.”
His forehead creased with puzzlement as Saara continued. “And I say again you trust too easy, Damiano. Even if this Chief—this Raphael—is all you say, as true as the Creator (and with the way you defend this spirit, young one, it is too bad you cannot marry him), still you place your trust in other strange places.”
“In Gaspare? It is not so much I trust him as…”
She shook her head till the braids flew. “No, Dami. In me. Why should you trust Saara, after all? I hate—hated your
father. You killed my lover. I killed your little dog. We have torn at each other worse than wolves. Yet you place your soul in my hands and go off, like leaving a baby at grandmother’s.”
Damiano hung his head. “But there is no more to it than that, Saara. Also, we know each other as well as any brother and sister, for I have walked in your mind, and you in mine. You know I never hated you, and… I would like to think you have forgiven me.
“When I broke my staff and gave you my power, I thought it would be a useful servant to you.”
“It is a charge,” she amended. “A burden.”
“It has not made you stronger? When I held your power I was terribly strong, I felt, and could do almost anything I could think of.”
Then Saara stared out the open back of the wagon, and her face was cold, distant and unreadable. “Oh, I am strong now, all right. Damiano—remember how your father told you I was the greatest witch in all the Italies? Well now, holding your fire with my own, I am without doubt the greatest witch in all of Europe.
“And if I wanted, I could go home.” She made a small noise in her throat. “I could go home to the North, where all are witches, and make a tribe around me. My power would stand as a wall of protection against winter and all the lesser enemies. I would be great, and the men of the fens would fight each other for my notice. They would pile skins at my feet: milk-colored skins of the reindeer, soft as butter. They would chant a new kalevala to me.”
Her glance shifted back to Damiano. “The thought makes me sick.”
Damiano was so sun-darkened that when pity drew his face darker, he seemed to fade into the shadows. “I understand. Last year, my own strength made me so sick I had to be rid of it.”
Saara drew closer. “But it is not last year now, Dami. It is this year. Will you take it back, your power? Your broken soul?”
“No.”
His answer was abrupt, almost involuntary. Saara snapped her head back, and bit down on one knuckle in frustration.
“Let me explain, Saara. It is partly the lute, you see.”
“The lute?”
The Damiano Series Page 34