Her eyes narrowed at his astonishment. “What is wrong, Dami? You called me, didn’t you? You are still calling me; I can hear it.”
As he straightened he dropped her wrist. “You are here. You are not in Lombardy.”
And as she said nothing in reply, he added, “Why?”
There was no expression in the witch’s face as she answered, “I don’t know if I could have gone far, Damiano. Not after… last week. My strength is half yours—more than half yours, I think—and it wars against me. But anyway I did not want to go, for I was afraid for you.”
“For me?” he echoed. “You feared I might do myself harm?”
She shrugged an Italian shrug. (Had she learned it from Ruggerio the Roman? From Damiano’s father?) “I have pain, young one. Like I was having a baby and the head would not come out. For you it cannot be any better.”
He said nothing.
“Why did you do it, Damiano?” she continued. “To throw me away like that. In my long life I have never been treated so.”
Damiano’s eyebrows disappeared underneath his hair. “I—why did I…? Saara, it was a dirty trick you played me, leading me to think you wanted…”He took a deep breath. “I don’t think I want to talk about it,” he said.
The Fenwoman had taken a step backward, and her stomach tightened with a miserable understanding. “You thought I wanted you only to be rid of the burden I am carrying? That is dreadful. It is not true. I will carry it until I die rather than have you believe that.”
“No,” answered Damiano in a voice that sounded foreign to himself. “No. I need it back now.” And as Saara stared, openmouthed, he added, “I need to be a witch again. Tonight.”
The moonlight (and only the moonlight) streaked Saara’s hair with gray. She stood in an oddly formal pose, her hands cupping her elbows and her bare feet gripping the cobbles.
“You do? Tonight?”
He nodded. “It is not my need but Gaspare’s. His sister is missing, and I need full sight to find her for him.”
One of the woman’s hands crawled toward a hanging braid. White fingers clawed into the hair, tangling it. Saara glanced from the foul street to the eaves of the crowding buildings. She did not look at Damiano. From far away, the bark of the bandog could still be heard. “It would be easier if I found the girl,” she suggested.
Damiano shook his head and, leaning against the ancient grapevine, he slid down till he sat on his heels. “I thought of that, Saara,” he admitted. “I also asked Raphael’s help, when I first knew there was going to be a problem. But he told me to look elsewhere before asking him to do what he should not do—and since then I have had to think about what I am asking of everyone.”
Saara squatted besides him, her toes splayed out before her like those of a frog. “More thinking, Dami? You think too much, I think.”
Though her words were friendly, he ignored them. “I need witchcraft, or at least ‘sight,’ to find Evienne before Gaspare throws himself in the Rhone, or sickens with grief. If I use your skills just because I don’t want the responsibility, then I have done the deed and yet tried to evade the price, don’t you see? And we both know that does not work, in witchcraft or in life.”
Still she did not meet his eyes.
“Saara. What is it? Don’t you want me to take back that… that illegitimate baby that confused Gaspare so much?”
This pulled a smile from her, and a quick green glance that made it hard for Damiano to swallow. “No,” she replied. “Now that the moment comes, I do not. A person gets used to being the way she is.”
Then she reached toward him, a flame of concentration on her face. “Here, Damiano. Take my hand. Quickly.”
He obeyed, but his black eyes darted up and down the cobblestones. “Here? In the middle of the street?”
Saara giggled. She seemed herself again. “All that is not necessary, Dami. Nice, but not necessary.” She squeezed his hand roughly and leaned forward, placing her other palm against the young man’s forehead. “Only remember,” she whispered.
Saara’s touch was warm; that itself was easily remembered. And with that warmth came other memories from beneath the blankets in the old wagon: the mouse in the woodwork, the mole beneath the grass, the planets circling (each with its name, each with its song), the lake of fire which somehow came not out of hell. The corona that lit each living thing from within, and arcing green flame of its extinction. The touch of human presence, like a feather against his face.
Hermes Trismegistus, Albertus Magnus, the broken black staff, taller than his body, banded with silver, crowned with red and gold, through which once (as though it were a great flute) he’d played the wind of his will.
Once, only two years ago, he’d played that music better than he played the lute.
Damiano remembered, completely and without violence to body or mind, all he was born to be.
His blood was singing like a chorus. He felt the hard, rounded stones beneath him, and recognized that they had been pulled from the Rhone. He heard the bandog, and a hundred other hounds crying, droning, quarreling or snoring through the city of Avignon. He heard that segment of the human population which was awake at this hour; they sounded much like the dogs.
As a man orients himself in time by glass or sundial, he felt (with his tongue against the roof of his mouth) for the hour by the position of the heavens.
And in the next street he heard the sorrow-clogged breathing of Gaspare, who had fallen asleep against the Holy Father’s wall.
Damiano opened his eyes and was forced to squint against the glare of the moonlight off white walls. Saara’s face, too, appeared bleached and colorless. The fingers of her left hand, which had held his, hung limply.
“You are weary,” he whispered, and he helped her to her feet.
“Of course I am. Not you?” Saara disengaged herself from his arms. She inspected Damiano minutely and impersonally: head, hands and booted feet. “You are not tired, nor sick?” With a proprietary shove she turned him completely around.
He submitted to these attentions with the docility of a child. “I feel,” he announced, “as though I will never be weary again. Nor sick.”
Saara smiled wanly. One of her braids was completely undone and hung in waves, like falling water. She looked pale and thin and, despite her height, frail. Damiano could see a pulse pounding in the hollow at the base of her neck. “Good. Then it has been worth all the mice and rats.”
“All the what?”
Saara seemed to feed off Damiano’s confusion. The sly smile returned to her mouth, and color to her cheeks. “Mice and rats. I had to eat something in Avignon, you know. Since, as you say, these people will not feed a stranger.”
Damiano felt obscurely guilty, as well as revolted. “Mice and rats? Surely, Saara, if you had let me know…”
Saara giggled then, lifted one leg cranelike, and (since her braid was pulled apart) nibbled on one twisted lock of hair. “It is not so bad, if you are an owl.”
“An owl? You are the bird that has been ruining my sleep since I have been in Avignon?” Her grin spread to Damiano’s face. He snatched Saara off her feet, knocking the breath out of her as he spun her around. “Not a fox and an owl, too? Saara. You should be nothing but my little dove!” Her bare heel knocked against the gnarled trunk of the vine. With an apology Damiano put her down.
Forcefully she pulled away. “It is good you feel so strong, fellow.
But you must be careful; you don’t know what you are doing, now. You are like a baby.”
“A baby?” Even moonlight could not steal the warmth from Damiano’s olive countenance. As Saara spoke he closed the gap she had made between them and embraced her again. He kissed her on the cheek, the chin, the side of her neck. Her skin tingled his lips and tasted like wine. “How a baby? I have been a witch all my life, minus only one year and a little bit, and the whole time has been spent in study. I studied,” he declared fervently, “until my brains began to curdle.”
; Then Saara sighed, and the irritation in that single sound chastened Damiano completely. He took a step backward and let her continue. “You were a witch whose magic was locked within a stick. You lost both magic and stick. Now you have had the magic back for two minutes, and already you have both bruised my foot and made me angry.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and through the glow of his exaltation remorse did seem to be working. “I was just a little drunk with… being able to see and hear. I will be a gentleman from now on.”
Saara muttered something he was not meant to hear. It might have been “Too bad.” Then she spoke aloud.
“You will be all right, Damiano. Come with me and I will teach you to sing-spell. You will be very good at it, I am sure, having made so much music of the simple kind.”
He broke out in surprised laughter. “Simple? My music—simple? Well, each to his own opinion, my lady.” But his antic mood softened again. “Saara, Saara, I will most willingly come under your tutelage. (There is at least one lesson between us still incomplete.) But till Good Friday my time belongs to Bernard Coutelan and the Bishop’s Inn. I must remain a baby that long.”
“Then until Friday I must eat mice and rats,” interjected the Fenwoman, and for a moment her eyes went round, bright, orange and moonlike. Damiano sputtered with laughter.
“No, my lady. Return to the Heather Inn with me and eat like a burgher, if not a queen.”
Saara made a prim little grimace. “That place? I have sat in their courtyard every night, watching men and women make their beds in straw a reindeer would not touch. The fleas, mice and bedbugs have an easier life than the people.”
Damiano shrugged. “That is an inn. I have been in much worse.”
Saara wound her fingers in Damiano’s coarse hair. She drew him to her for one more slow, thoughtful kiss. “I would rather eat rats than have them run over me.
“Friday,” she added. Then with an odd, almost angry look upon her face, Saara shrank into a white pillow of feathers, orange-eyed. This flew onto Damiano’s shoulder, where the outsized talons pricked his skin. Then she hooted maliciously into his ear and rose into the sky on soft, shrouded wings.
Chapter 8
When Gaspare was awakened, his first thought was that the deep, commanding voice belonged to the Holy Father’s pikeman, or some troublesome soldier whose job it was to keep poor souls from cluttering the streets of Avignon. But the hand that reached down to take his was lean, calloused and very familiar, and when Gaspare raised his head…
“By Saint Gabriele, Damiano,” the redhead hissed, “the moon in your eyes made me half frightened of you!” Then as the boy locked his knees in the upright position and freed his hand from the lutenist’s grip, he remembered why he had fallen asleep at the Pope’s Door.
“Oh, Christ, sheep-face. She never came. I will never see my whore of a sister again.”
Damiano let the nickname pass. His wide drunken eyes stared from Gaspare to the swarthy face of the night gate guard, and across the wide avenue to where hundreds of black holes in pale walls revealed the sounds and smells of human sleep. His left hand was twitching like a small animal. Once more he snagged Gaspare.
“If Evienne and Jan are in Avignon, we will find them tonight,” said Damiano with sweeping confidence. “Come, little dear,” he added. “Start walking.”
Gaspare’s offense at being addressed as “little dear” was drowned completely in his amazement at the rest of Damiano’s behavior. He found himself dragged along the wide street, his eyes still grainy from sleep, his long mantle flapping behind.
If the Damiano of the past year had been unaccountable… if the Damiano of the past few weeks had been enough to make Gaspare tread warily… this new Damiano was an Act of God. He strode through the empty streets like the conqueror Alexander, his black eyes flashing, his rather large nose turned arrogant by the force of authority in the shaggy head. Though the night was chill, and Gaspare suffered despite his velvet cloak, the hand that held his was warm—warm like beach sand in the sun.
At the first corner, an abrupt change of direction nearly popped the boy’s arm from its socket. “What are we doing?” he yelled in protest. Half a dozen dogs were set off by the noise. “How are we going to find her this way? I have been up and down these streets every day for a week; she’s not to be found.”
Damiano looked back over his shoulder. “If she’s not here, Gaspare, then we won’t find her. Otherwise we will.”
“How?” demanded the boy, pulling free with great effort.
Damiano smiled mildly enough, though his eyes were still dangerous. “I will feel her presence. I am a witch again, Gaspare. I will know.”
Gaspare felt a sinking in his heart, though he would have thought it impossible for him to get any lower. “Oh, no, Damiano. Not that again.”
The dark eyes flickered with irritation and Damiano raised his hand. For a moment Gaspare believed he was going to hit him, but then from Damiano’s outspread fingers five points of flame sprang up.
Gaspare staggered back.
“Not a Hand of Glory,” whispered Damiano. “But my own.” He laughed at the boy’s goggle eyes and general air of amazement, but as he did so the tame, domestic fire in his hand leaped upward like the flame of a torch dipped in oil. He shook it out.
“Needs practice,” he muttered, slightly shamefaced, and then cleared his throat. “So you see, Gaspare…”
“Don’t hurt me,” the redhead blurted, stepping still farther back.
As the flame had gone out from Damiano’s hand, so now it went out from his face. With almost a look of suffering, the witch replied, “Hurt you, Gaspare? No. All of this is particularly to avoid you hurt. And I am only the same fellow you befriended in the market of San Gabriele, who knew how to disappear, but not how to make a broken florin. But enough time for talk after we find Evienne.” Without putting his hand upon the plainly frightened boy, he turned again and strode off down a side street, his lips parted, his face to the wind like that of a hound.
The city of Avignon existed because of the Rhone. Both the secular city and the city which was the Papal Palace crowded the water’s edge, but while the stone and stucco of the ecclesiastical center sat on a prominence from which garbage was piped into a river that was not even seen, the burghers built their jumbled houses in intimate contact with the mud. Damiano saw parts of the city that night which he might never have seen otherwise: not though he had lived in Avignon for years. And had he been a simple man, he could not have seen what he saw at all.
The houses of Avignon were not jammed with residents, despite the way they crowded together on the occluded streets. Some of them had no more than a single sleeper breathing within. Yet it was not a city of the rich, to be sure. Poverty had its own odor, and it was stronger and less mistakable than any expensive perfume. Damiano smelled poverty and rotting fish on the mud flats of the city.
“There are three men sleeping under that boat,” he observed to Gaspare as they hurried by a small neighborhood wharf.
“Men?” repeated Gaspare. “Not Evienne.” He stopped to stare.
Damiano frowned. “Not Evienne. I just thought it worth mentioning. There are also people sleeping beneath the stilts of these waterside houses. What they do when the river runs high I don’t know.”
Damiano tilted his face to the sky and stood silent for a moment, as though he were reading something. Then he looked behind him, to where Gaspare still wandered on the dried mud by the boat dock. The boy had his arms out stiffly before him. “Gaspare,” he called quietly, “what are you doing?”
Gaspare was startled, hearing his guide so far away. “Hen! Damiano. I can’t find you. I can’t find anything.”
The witch covered the ground between them in three strides. “What’s the matter, Gaspare? The moon is full. Are you night-blind?”
The boy caught his arm and stared with goblin eyes. “Night-blind? I don’t know. What does it matter? Lately I have taken to sleeping at night, you
know.” The arm beneath his pulled him away from the river once more.
“Damiano, where are you taking us?”
“Everywhere.”
“It will be easier for me to find Jan Karl,” murmured Damiano, talking for Gaspare’s sake. “I have this little knife in my belt, with which I cut off two of his fingers. Did he ever tell you about that?”
“Yes” was the short reply. Gaspare was stumbling and out of patience. Then he remembered more.
“He told a weird story. He said you got him drunk and then cut his fingers off in some kind of magic rite.”
“They were infected,” replied Damiano with some reproach in his words. “Gangrenous. Did he not tell you that?”
“No.”
Damiano sighed. “He was grateful at the time. I would not have done it for fun, I assure you, and especially would not have sacrificed all my supply of wine to play an ugly trick on a Dutchman. Didn’t he ever mention his night in the snow?”
“Certainly. He was benighted in the Alps in November and nearly froze.”
Damiano smiled grimly. It was on his tongue to explain to Gaspare how Jan Karl’s two roving companions had tried to kill Damiano, and but for the fierce (and loquacious) bitch Macchiata would have succeeded. It was Damiano’s dog that had driven the thieves out into the Alpine winter and thereby frozen Jan’s fingers.
It was a wonder the Dutchman hadn’t found some way to turn that story on its head and present it to Gaspare as an example of Damiano’s perfidy and his own innocence. Damiano was liking him less and less as time went on.
And for that reason he did not speak. Why impress upon the distracted boy that his sister was off with a lout of such repulsive character, now that it was too late for Gaspare to do anything but worry?
They ran on together: Gaspare through empty streets, Damiano buffeted by the presence of thousands. Fifty thousand had Avignon before the great pest. At least half had died. Now the city had begun to swell toward its former size.
The Damiano Series Page 40