The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “Don’t do that,” muttered Damiano, jabbing the beast with a thumbnail.

  And then he said “Hush!” and raised his head.

  Festilligambe, who had been making no noise at all, pricked his ears also.

  They heard music, not loud but close enough to ring clear: a flow as complex as water broken on rocks. It shimmered from many strings together, like an entire concert of lutes—if lutes had been strung in metal.

  For half a minute longer Damiano listened, motionless with the rigidity of a pointing dog. Finally, with a word to the gelding to stay, he leaped upward and boosted himself onto the wall.

  It was a small garden, planted with tubs of rosemary and fennel. Three anemic olive trees fluttered their silver, sword-shaped leaves, while the cool smell of thyme warred with Avignon’s odor of almonds and human feces.

  In the far corner of the garden, under a vine-woven trellis, sat a man playing on a harp strung with brass. It was from him the broad splashing music had come. But even as Damiano spied him, the player paused to examine his left hand, which was clawed like the talon of a bird. With a fragment of pumice stone he buffed his middle finger, muttering.

  “Hello,” called Damiano, letting himself slide onto a walkway of stones. The harper glanced up and his handsome fair face expressed his disturbance at finding a stranger where no stranger should be.

  Damiano noticed, and he grimaced an apology. But though Damiano had manners better than the average, certain things were more important to him than manners. “I’m sorry, monsieur, but I had to come right over. It is because of your bass line.”

  “Because of my what?” The harper was about fifty years old. His flaxen hair had been made frizzy by lime, and a line of stubble made clear that his high forehead had known the assistance of a razor. His eyebrows were black (whether by nature or art) and his eyes blue. He was impeccably groomed and clean shaven, and dressed in a house robe of full Provençal cut. But his gentlemanly appearance made his talonlike nails even more noticeable.

  “Forgive my langue d’oc. It is awkward, I know,” said Damiano with no sincerity. “I said because of your bass line, monsieur. That which you do with your right hand, at the bottom of the instrument. I could not help but notice that you pull your hand off smoothly, so that the notes come off almost together. They sound together, in fact.”

  The older man listened without apparent comprehension. Damiano tried again. “Perhaps you think of it as ornament—what you are doing. But I hear it as polyphony. A polyphony of many lines.”

  Still the harper’s heavy-browed, snub-nosed face remained blank. What am I doing here? Why do I care? thought Damiano, and answered himself: There is something to be learned here.

  He added, “And polyphony is what I am doing on the lute, you see. It is a technique I have had to invent myself, for I have never heard anyone (save for my teacher) try to put so many lines on one instrument.”

  The harper took a deliberate breath. “And this is why you climbed the wall into my garden, breaking the law, and getting yourself covered with chalk?” He regarded his visitor with less wariness and more humor. “Because of my right hand?

  “Well, lad,” the older man said didactically, “that is neither called polyphony nor ornamentation. It is merely the style of the clàrseach: ascending and descending strikes of the right hand, using fourths and fifths. It has always been the style of the clàrseach. It is not the style of the lute.”

  Damiano shrugged. “Never yet,” he said. “But my teacher…”

  “Why not let the lute be the lute, and if you want to sound like a harp, play one?” The sharp talons curved, and the harper flurried up and down his strings.

  Damiano smiled, crouching down before the harper with his chin resting on his knee. He had not come hundreds of miles through snow and sun to hear somebody tell him “it’s done that way because it’s always been done that way.” Nor was he impressed by pyrotechnics: he possessed a number of impressive effects himself. But the sound was pleasant and the man made a striking picture. When it was quiet again Damiano sought to say something appreciative. “You make me understand why it is common to paint angels with a harp.”

  But the fellow was either tired of this particular compliment or didn’t take it as a compliment at all. “’Tisn’t angels who play the clàrseach, young man. It’s Irishmen.”

  “Oh?” Damiano lifted his head. “You are an Irishman?”

  The man had mobile nostrils and a wide mouth. The first flared, while the second tightened.

  He curled his barbed hands before him and squared his broad shoulders. With a round gesture he pointed from the heavy harp with its ranks of gleaming strings to himself.

  “What—do I look or sound Provençal to you?”

  Damiano showed his teeth politely. “I cannot say, since I myself have just arrived in Provence. And never have I met…”

  Unwillingly he let himself be interrupted by a grunt and a scuffle from the other side of the wall. He sprang up. “Forgive me, monsieur. I have left both my horse and my lute.”

  He attacked the wall once more, growing twice as chalky as before. There below him was Festilligambe, as Damiano knew he would be, still bearing his lumpy pack of belongings, the neck of the lute protruding behind. The horse wore also a crude rope halter, however: wore it with very poor grace, and against the fat man pulling and the fatter man with the switch behind, he had set his obstinate will.

  Since the ground seemed fully occupied, Damiano slid down onto the horse’s withers, first giving the beast a warning whistle. Both fat men gaped.

  “This is my horse, messieurs,” announced Damiano, and since the two were both too loud and too clumsy to be thieves, he smiled at them. “Is it that he is where he should not be?”

  The fat man in front (he was wearing a dirty apron) had difficulty with this sentence; perhaps Damiano’s langue d’oc did have its faults. Finally he replied, “But the animal wears no restraint, monsieur. It was our idea he had run away.”

  Damiano slipped to the cobbled road. He removed the contrivance from Festilligambe’s head. “No, not at all. It is only that he does not like ropes, so I don’t use any.”

  The man in the back had hitherto stood silent, brushing the ground with his weed-switch as though it were a broom. Now he said, “Monsieur. You were visiting the Master MacFhiodhbhuidhe?”

  Damiano tried to fit this collection of sounds into his mouth. “MacFhiod… the harper. Yes, I guess I was.”

  The fellow (this one was dressed in serge d’Nîmes. He did not wear an apron) pointed with his switch at the head of the lute. “You are perhaps also a musician by trade? An Italian musician, if my ears do not deceive me?”

  Damiano began to brush himself off. It was a fruitless effort, which was just as well, for a coating of chalk concealed much of his clothing’s decay. “I am a musician, certainly, monsieur. And that I am Italian cannot be concealed. Why do you ask? Have you need of an Italian musician?” he asked, and he laughed at this conceit.

  “Yes, I have,” replied the fatter fat man, astounding Damiano completely.

  “I thought I would never find you,” stormed Gaspare, throwing himself on to the far end of the bench where Damiano sat. The musician had a green glass cup of wine sitting before him and he wore a tunic of wine-red, chased with gold. He was in the best humor he had been in for weeks. He brushed white bread crumbs from his front.

  “Find me, Gaspare? I am not a hundred feet from where you left me, running off as you did, like some goat in the mountains. Indeed, it was you who were lost, and I feared Avignon had eaten you.”

  The boy stared from Damiano’s face to the street before the very pleasant inn-yard where they sat. He did not seem to know or care where he was.

  “You did not find her,” stated his friend.

  “No.” Gaspare was hot—flushed. Possibly he had been crying.

  Damiano’s shrug communicated a certain sympathy. “Did you really expect to? This is a city of many thous
ands of people, and our appointment is not yet for a week or more. According to the innkeeper here, my account is correct and next Sunday in Palm Sunday.”

  Then Gaspare’s green eyes drew out like the stalked eyes of snails. “Innkeeper? Damiano! What are you wearing? And eating? What is all this?”

  On impulse Damiano reached out and ruffled Gaspare’s carefully managed hair. “This, my dear manager, is human comfort. I have been to see a jeweler—also a harper, but that is a less relevant story. The jeweler and I had an interesting conversation about the hybrid nature of electrum, as well as a mild disagreement as to whether amethyst or adamantine is the stone more pure. He gave me thieves’ prices for the ruby, I think, but where could I have gotten better?”

  Gaspare blinked about him, then, and Damiano placed the green glass cup in the boy’s unresisting hand. Gaspare downed it and stared again at his friend. There was something pinched, thwarted and ancient in the boy’s face that stung Damiano’s own eyes and tightened his middle.

  “You shouldn’t have shopped without me,” Gaspare declared, growing a bit belligerent from confusion. “I would have advised you to buy black. You look more impressive in black.”

  Damiano pulled a lopsided smile and reached across the table to deposit the last heel of the loaf in Gaspare’s lap. “I’m black enough in other ways, my friend,” he murmured. “But whether the name be for fame or shame, I am still Delstrego—the only Delstrego left— and our colors are crimson and gold.”

  Gaspare felt his role as manager slipping away from him. He bolted the bread and more wine. “But you should not have spent this kind of money before even trying to find work.”

  “I have found work,” answered Damiano gently.

  Two years ago Damiano might have scorned an inn room like this one: slate-floored, poorly lit, smelling of piss. His father, with whom Damiano first went to Torino and Milano, would not have stayed a minute, and it would have been bad for the innkeeper who had shown him such quarters.

  But two years can make a difference. In two years a baby can talk. In two years a dead man can turn to earth.

  Damiano sat by one of the long slit windows, tuning the lute.

  The sun was up, slapping long bars of yellow light against the ground between buildings. The air was changing so fast it was hardly worth the bother to tune, but then Damiano was hardly aware he was doing it.

  The other six inhabitants of the room had vacated for the day, including Gaspare. Certainly there was no reason to lie huddled on straw upon stone and within walls of the same: not when it was actually warmer out-of-doors. But Damiano had slept poorly and was without ambition for the moment.

  It had been an owl. Somewhere in Avignon an owl had hunted, calling half the night, and for some reason Damiano could not hear an owl without remembering all he had lost. And this morning it was still there for him: a distant knowledge that the heavens were circling in their complex rhythms without his consent or understanding. That wolves conversed and ghosts walked, but not for him.

  And locked into this grief—to his greater misery—was a memory of his lips against skin in the cold of night, and the smell of clean flesh under blankets.

  Out the window he could see a vertical slice of the city, where the white stucco housefronts stood identical, shoulder to shoulder. On the ground floor of this inn—Heather Inn, it was called—Festilligambe had been stabled, in a large, square box with two goats and a Sicilian donkey. Damiano hoped the horse was enjoying himself. Perhaps he was sleeping late.

  Without warning Damiano’s melancholy became unendurable. He rose from the upended box he was sitting on, as though he would fling himself out the door, down the stairs and into the crowded street below. His heart pounded. Mastering himself, he sat down again to think.

  Perhaps he should visit the horse—make sure he had food and water. But the groom would think he was crazy, for he had seen the buckets filled already this morning. Neither would Festilligambe understand such a visit, for although he liked his master he was not a sentimental horse.

  Where was Gaspare anyway? Out looking for his sister, certainly, though he had not said as much to Damiano. Gaspare’s need to find Evienne had grown into a pitiful thing, and Damiano was a little afraid of what would happen if she failed to show up at their long-planned appointment.

  This last worry was too much. The musician needed someone to talk to. Someone reliable.

  He put the scuffed bottom end of his lute down upon the tops of his boots and laced his fingers together around the neck. With his eyes closed and his forehead resting against the tuning box he cleared his throat and spoke to the empty air.

  “Raphael… Seraph. If you have the time…”

  By the sound and by a faint flutter of shadows behind his eyelids Damiano could have sworn that Raphael had come in through the far window. It was an illusion that made the man chuckle, for he had the sophistication to know that heaven was not in the sky above Avignon, or any other worldly place.

  “Good morning, Dami,” said Raphael, in a voice like the sweet after-ring of a bell. “How do you like Avignon?”

  “So far it has been very generous with me,” answered Damiano, in an effort to be just. “But still, I am not in a very good mood today.”

  “You are lonely,” replied Raphael without pause.

  Damiano squirmed, trying to keep his eyes fixed on the stripes along the back of the lute. It was unsettling and a bit demeaning to be read so easily. “How did you know?”

  There was a shrug of wings: a noise like heavy-falling snow. “Because there is no one here. And you have just come to a city that is strange to you. From what I have learned about men…”

  An idea came to Damiano. “Do you know Avignon well, Seraph?”

  “No.”

  The man had not expected this answer. He lifted his eyes from the lute. “You do not? But it is the Papal city.”

  Raphael’s wings were bowed forward in the confines of the room. The first pinions touched together on the floor almost at Damiano’s feet. “I don’t know the Pope, either. I have never been to Avignon before,” the angel said.

  “Not even with messages?”

  Again that feathery shrug. “I am not a messenger by calling.”

  Still, Damiano’s idea must be spoken. “I… had wondered if perhaps you knew where Gaspare’s sister, Evienne, was staying. We are supposed to meet her, you see, and the boy is very nervous.”

  Raphael’s pale hair was heavy as the mane of a horse, and like a horse’s mane it fell where it would. His midnight eyes gazed out from a frame of light. “I know where Evienne is,” he admitted.

  Damiano straightened with the news. “You do? Well, where is she?”

  It was the angel who dropped his eyes. “I would rather you didn’t ask me, Dami. I think there are other ways you could find out.”

  The mortal sat again. “Of course, Raphael. Of course. I am embarrassed. I… asked without thought, forgetting that you are not supposed to involve yourself…”

  And then this small understanding was lost within a larger. “Raphael!” cried Damiano. “Raphael, Seraph, Teacher! I am seeing you—really seeing you. And I am not sick!”

  The angel’s grand, opalescent wings rose up like flowers opening, till their tips lodged in the corners of the room. His look of joy was as full as Damiano’s. But it was mixed with something less definable.

  “I am glad, Damiano,” he said. “It was never my desire to make you sick.”

  Placing the instrument hurriedly down to one side (for he treated the lute with the care necessary to something upon which his living depended, and not the care deserved by a tool one loves), Damiano crouched down at Raphael’s feet. He squeezed one alabaster hand. He slapped a samite knee. He fished a bright wingtip from the air and held it between his hands, as though to restrain Raphael from flying untimely away. “Hah! Raphael, my dear master…”

  “Not master,” said the angel, and Damiano nearly lost the wing.

  “Te
acher, then. You are a vision to rest my eyes. And it has been so long…. I thought my sight would not be so rewarded on this side of death’s door.” Behind his grin Damiano’s quick mind raced.

  “You know, Raphael, I think I know how it is I can see you again. It is because of Saara, and the trick she played on me.”

  “Ah? So it seems to you that it’s you who have changed?” asked Raphael, and there was a shade of diffidence in his question.

  “What else?” Damiano pushed closer to the angel, until he was almost sitting in Raphael’s lap. I am clumsy as a dog, next to him, he thought. Like Macchiata, I wag my tail so hard I knock things over. But I don’t care.

  Aloud he said, “Of course the change is in me. You are an immortal spirit—how can you alter?”

  The fair, chiseled face grew serious for a moment. “Not alter? Dami, even if that were true for me, standing out of time and place, once I had set foot upon the earth of Provence or the Piedmont, and spoken with you, who alter so dramatically every moment of your life, and touched you, too… how can I not change?”

  Now Damiano let the great pinion slide through his fingers. “I don’t want you to change, Raphael. And for me—me to be changing you? That doesn’t sound good.” Again he cleared his throat and scooted a few inches across the stone floor, away from the simple, gleaming robe. “I don’t want to be a bad influence on you, Seraph.”

  Raphael laughed. His laughter was never like bells, or sunshine, or running water. Raphael laughed like anyone else. “Don’t worry about it, Dami.” His lapis eye glanced down at the lute in the corner.

  “Did you want to play something for me?”

  Without taking his eyes from the angel, Damiano scooped up his instrument. “I have a dozen things I could play for you.” His voice took on a note of warning as he added, “They are not like your pieces….”

  “I wouldn’t want to listen if they were,” answered Raphael dryly.

  Of course, contact with the stone flagging had put the crotchety lute out of tune again. As he worked it back, Damiano had a sudden idea, brought on by the splendor of the moment. “Hey, Raphael. Do you think we could… I mean, would you be willing to play with me? I mean, not as a lesson, but for fun?