The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Now, once more he could forget that humbling verity, and others of like nature.

  Never be weary or sick…

  Inside the back door a fat man was sleeping, for all the world like another watchdog. Damiano had to croon with great concentration to wedge the door open without awakening the sleeper. The witch and his two companions then crept by, the great hound wagging furiously at finding himself in the house.

  “Watch his tail,” whispered Damiano, too late, for Gaspare winced and grabbed at his stinging thigh. They found themselves in a looming, sooty kitchen, lit by the orange embers of a fire so large that no single night of inattention could kill it. It smelled still of the evening’s roast veal.

  Gaspare grimaced, still rubbing his smarting leg. The hound’s tail had the lash of a bullwhip. It occurred to Gaspare as he hopped by the fireside, that between the Holy Father and Evienne, Damiano’s dinner (and his own) had been forgotten.

  Damiano, meanwhile, had scooted himself onto the great plank table which filled the center of the kitchen. There he sat, his hands laced around one knee, casually humming to himself. His eyes were closed.

  Gaspare prodded his musician with a gentle finger, but pulled back in alarm when the war hound put back its rough ears and growled.

  “Uh, Damiano. No time for daydreaming. Don’t fall asleep.”

  Black eyes flashed open, filled with firelight. The lullaby was cut off. “I am not likely to fall asleep in the middle of events, Gaspare. The Damiano who did that sort of thing is gone, and I don’t think he’ll return. But I am having difficulty finding Evienne.”

  “Oh, no! She is taken. She is dead.” The great dog lifted his head from an intensive search for scraps on the floor, and Damiano darted a glance out the hallway, where the round-bellied sculleryman slept.

  “No fear, Gaspare. It is only that there are many sleepers within here, and it has been a long time since I have seen your sister. I never knew her very well.”

  “You alone out of all the world,” grumbled Gaspare. Then he whispered, “She is taller than me, being five years older. She is bigger in the hips than in the bosom, though plenty big in both. She has a lot of temper, and of course, red hair like mine.”

  The witch’s face lit “Red hair! Now there is something real on which to focus. Gaspare, come here.”

  Gaspare approached, strangely unwilling. “Why? What is it you…”

  Damiano grabbed the boy’s carefully curled hairdo in both hands. Gaspare smothered a squeal of protest, and the bandog put its long head between them to see what was going on.

  “Aha.” Damiano chuckled. “No more difficulty.” Releasing Gaspare’s rumpled head, he swung his legs off the table. “Follow your general, troops.”

  Evienne of San Gabriele put her small nose to the linen sachet and whuffled. The trouble with all sachets and pomanders was that after a while you didn’t smell them anymore, and then you didn’t know whether the fragrance was gone, or whether your nose simply had grown used to it. Then you added some rose oil or orris root, and someone would come in—someone like Herbert, in a bad temper— and shout that the sweetness was making him gag.

  But that was his own fault, for if she were allowed a promenade every day, or even to do her own shopping, then she would be able to tell when the room smelled too sweet.

  Better than smelling like a pisspot, anyway.

  Evienne turned on her back (it was more comfortable for her to sleep on her back) and sighed. Herbert was so difficult: not letting her wear red, even if it matched her hair, and keeping her indoors nine days out of ten, without even a girl companion.

  What good were baubles and silk, if you didn’t have another girl to show them off to?

  And he made her the butt of jokes—funny dry jokes in private, when there was no one to laugh. Just because she was not educated, not a real lady. In that way he was like Jan, but of course with Jan you always knew where you were. Jan needed her. (Had needed her? No. Still.) The cardinal was a different matter.

  She wrapped her arms around her body, over her ample and growing abdomen. This might give her a certain hold on Herbert. Maybe.

  Of course men could be so cruel. And what if the baby had yellow hair? No one of the cardinal’s family (she had ascertained) had yellow hair.

  But because Evienne had a naturally sanguine temperament as well as blood-colored hair, this worry could not depress her for long. She still had three months during which the cardinal would surely not boot her out.

  But Jan—if she started thinking about Jan, then she’d be crying all night. For Jan had not come to see her in two months, and the last time was only to steal away certain of the jewelry she’d been given by Herbert. He was going to copy it in glass, in case Herbert wanted it back someday. He’d never even come back with the copies.

  Had he been torn apart by Couchicou, the dog? The hound had almost gotten him once before, he’d said. But surely she would have heard about that. Had he taken ill, then? There was no one she could ask.

  Or was that stinking tomcat already back in Italy, accompanied by another, younger, less pregnant woman?

  Evienne’s fists balled into the pillow. Her jagged nail caught a thread. Herbert was telling her all the time to stop biting her nails.

  She sobbed. Why was she doing this—caged in a chamber of goosedown and brocade, if not for Jan’s sake?

  Evienne thought she heard singing. Because the sound was more pleasant than her thoughts, she listened. It was a lullaby, soft and sweetly sung. Not a woman’s voice.

  Who in the cardinal’s house could be singing a lullaby in black night? The closer she listened, holding her breath, the more she thought she could recognize the voice. Now it was a trifle louder.

  Without warning, Evienne fell asleep.

  At the very top of the winding stair Damiano stopped. His lips were parted and he sniffed the air pensively, adding a staccato character to his melody. He turned right down a low-ceilinged narrow hall, dragging the night-blind Gaspare behind him. “Close,” he murmured.

  Suddenly the witch stiffened. His song died in his throat and he seemed to convulse under Gaspare’s grip. “My God, Damiano,” the boy whispered almost without sound. “What…?”

  “I… I…” Damiano said no more, but grabbed a double handful of his shirt and buried his face in it. Three times he sneezed,

  each time more convulsively than the last, until Gaspare felt the sweat break out on his friend’s forearm.

  Then Damiano lifted his head, taking a slow, deep breath. “Orris rood,” he pronounced phlegmily. “Terribly strog. It has cofused my sedses.”

  Gaspare himself sniffed, and then nodded. “Evienne. My sister all the way. Now you follow me.”

  The young thief led Damiano along the black and dismal hall, his less sensitive nose working stertorously. Damiano wiped his eyes (and nose) on the hem of his overshirt.

  The source of the floral bouquet was a small wooden door with a simple lock on it. Damiano did not need his nose to encourage the mechanism to work itself.

  He shoved behind Gaspare into a room in which sweet smells had taken on a fetid aspect.

  It was small, hardly wider than the height of an average man, and scarcely longer than it was wide. Its single window was inadequate and firmly shuttered. A rug carpeted the floor, while other hangings of similar nature lined the walls till it was all as furry and as stiflingly close as a cocoon. Save for a closet of white oak huddled in one corner between folds of heavy wool, the place was occupied solely by bed: a soft and formless bag of white linen stuffed with feathers (Damiano’s nose was tingling again) lying on the floor like a very fat dog.

  And on that bed, half unblanketed, with her left shoulder and left breast wholly exposed to the night air, lay Evienne of San Gabriele, Gaspare’s sister.

  Gaspare had not moved. After a moment Damiano remembered that his friend was simple and could not see in the night. The witch lit a dim blue fire-pet in his right hand and stroked it with his left.


  “Evienne!” hissed Gaspare, and he stalked closer. The boy’s first action, motivated either by shame or by a strange sort of fraternal caring, was to adjust Evienne’s blanket under her chin.

  Damiano stepped backward and sideways as far as he was able, which is to say, two steps. He felt woolly fibers against the back of his neck and had to stifle a sneeze, crushing his domestic flame in the process. He lit another and watched the scene before him.

  He had forgotten how pretty a girl Evienne was, with her heavy auburn hair, pink cheeks and infant-round limbs. Had she always possessed such a delicate complexion, and such amplitude? Damiano regarded Evienne intently while Gaspare did the same at close range.

  The young woman had stirred after the moment of Damiano’s sneeze, but as he began his song again (this time almost without sound, like a man who hums while adding a column of figures) her slumbers grew quiet once more.

  “Shall I let her wake, Gaspare?”

  The boy nodded. “Her, but not everybody else in the house, hey?”

  “You ask a lot,” replied the witch tunefully, but stepping over to the bed he placed his nonfiery hand upon Evienne’s.

  Gaspare had his hand ready to muffle his sister if she should wake up screaming, but it was not necessary. Evienne was not the sort of girl to react in that way to the presence of a man in her bedchamber.

  “Herb…?” she moaned, then opened her eyes and looked Wearily at Damiano, who seemed to be cupping a votive candle in his hands, and so possessed the only spot of light in the room. “Who?”

  Damiano simply pointed at Gaspare.

  Recognition came slowly, but the subsequent embrace was bone-cracking. The boy escaped his sister’s arms long enough to deliver a savage tweak to her pretty pink cheek.

  “Hah!” he growled, with what seemed perfectly unmixed fury. “Here you are, wrapped in perfume thick as a cloud of summer dust, lolling on goosedown, speckled—positively speckled—with priceless gems, with no thought of your poor brother walking every street in Avignon, thinking you were dead.”

  Evienne opened her eyes very wide and sat up straighter, thoughtless of the effect this action had upon her modesty. “That isn’t fair, Gaspare! For one thing, I’m not wearing a single gem, and for another…”

  Her angrily suppressed voice trailed off then, and Evienne’s green eyes wandered from Gaspare to the linen sachet on the pillow by her head. She inhaled in a great, unladylike snort. “Does it really smell strong in here?”

  “Nearly choked him,” attested Gaspare, pointing with his thumb in the direction of Damiano.

  Evienne saw a dark young man, looking impossibly tall and slim in the light of the strange bright candle in his hands. His hair cast black river-shadows against the ceiling. Damiano looked back at the half-naked woman, hoping his expression displayed a suitable insouciance.

  Evienne thought he looked a bit cruel. “Who… who is he?” she mumbled to her brother.

  Gaspare glanced from one to the other in surprise. “That’s Damiano, my lutenist, Evienne. You remember him.” Once more he tended her blanket.

  It was hopeless, for Evienne sat completely forward, peering closely at Damiano. “Oh, yes. I do remember. Funny you two should still be together. Jan always said he didn’t see why.”

  Damiano had tried hard to keep his eyes on Evienne’s face, but with her last comment he relaxed the effort.

  She was a very pretty girl, only a trifle big in the belly. Just a trifle.

  “There are a lot of things,” he whispered, still keeping the tune of his lullaby, “that Dutchman cannot see, I think.”

  Her loyalty to Jan Karl did not extend to the point of defending him against slights of so vague a character. Especially now, when she was feeling his absence as a slight against her.

  At the sound of Damiano’s voice she lifted her head and remembered. “The singing I heard tonight. That was you!”

  He nodded. “Damiano’s a witch,” said Gaspare, as though that explained something.

  The girl paid no attention. “And… and you still look like that,” she added, decisively. “Who’d have thought it?”

  Damiano could think of nothing to say in reply to this. He wanted to believe it had been a compliment but was not at all sure.

  Gaspare shook his sister by her peach-blossom shoulder. “Enough of what he looks like. I want to know why you missed our rendezvous.”

  Evienne gave him a disparaging glance. “Because there is a lock on the door, of course. I can’t go anywhere anymore. Herbert gets so jealous.” She was momentarily startled as a monstrous gray head thrust itself under her hand. “Couchicou. You’re not supposed to be in the house at night.”

  “He followed us in,” explained Damiano.

  “Not much of a watchdog,” grunted Gaspare, as he watched the animal fawn over Evienne.

  Who giggled weakly. “Couchicou almost tore Jan to pieces that last time he came to visit. Didn’t Jan warn you about Couchicou when he met you?”

  At this mention of Evienne’s lover, Damiano reacted automatically. He reached out and gave the bandog a hearty, approving slap. “Jan did not show up at the Pope’s Door either, Evienne.”

  She caught her breath in unfeigned alarm. “He is dead, then. It is as I feared.”

  The witch shook his head. “How you are like your brother! No,

  the Dutchman is not dead; he only decided that it was not politic to fulfill his promise to us.”

  Evienne’s concern hardened into resentment. She snatched a gorgeous emerald robe from its lodging under the covers at the foot of her bed. It was very wrinkled. She thrust her arms through the holes and struggled out of the bed with a certain lack of grace. “Politics, again. Jan never shuts up about politics. What does ‘politics’ have to do with him and you—or with him and me, for that matter?”

  “Wasn’t it politics that got you this, nice little cubby “with the cardinal?” asked her brother. Gaspare was not disillusioned on the subject of Jan Karl; like all cynical people, he trusted implicitly anyone who acted even more cynically. He turned from a hands-on examination of the contents of her dresser table to finger the padded Oriental silks of her garment.

  Evienne gazed around her at the crowded little chamber. For a moment it appeared she was going to cry, but instead she raised her arms a few inches and flapped them at her sides, penguinlike. Then she raised her eyes to Damiano, who had withdrawn to the corner of the room and sat sprawled on the rolled bottom of a tapestry which was much too long for the wall on which it hung. His black curly head was bent forward as he examined the bright thing in his hands. Softly, sweetly, he was singing to himself.

  Evienne shuffled forward till her hair shone like sunset. “What…? What have you got there? Is it a candle? You’ll burn yourself if you’re not careful.”

  “No, he won’t,” replied her brother in a voice of authority. “I told you Damiano’s a witch now. He’s got the rest of the house sleeping with that song of his, and that’s why no one’s come banging on the door to see what the noise is.” As Evienne continued to stare at Damiano’s hands (warmly translucent, lit from within), Gaspare took the opportunity to drop into his jerkin pocket one green glass flacon, stained with dried perfume, and a pair of silver earrings.

  The girl knelt rather cumbersomely beside Damiano and attempted to pry his hands apart.

  He shook his head and pulled away from her. “No, Evienne. It will burn. Just sit still and watch.” And he opened his hands together, palms up.

  It was a little blue hedgehog with flickering, yellow-tipped spines. It ran from his hand heel to his fingertips and then back again, before dissolving.

  He shook his head. “It’s too difficult to do two magics at once,” he sang aloud. “If I’m putting the house to sleep, that’s about all I can handle.”

  Evienne’s green eyes were wide as an eight-week kitten’s. “How pretty!” she giggled, without any hint of fear.

  “Come with us,” Damiano said on impulse
. “Rocault is no lord, that he can keep you prisoned this way. Neither are you bound to this house like a peasant to his patch of ground.”

  Evienne sat back heavily and hugged herself. “Come with you? Where?”

  Gaspare had turned and was staring at Damiano with as much confusion as Evienne.

  “To the Bishop’s Inn, for now. Later—when the baby is closer— then we can find you a little house somewhere. We’re not so poor as we once were.”

  Gaspare mouthed the word “baby.” Then he exploded. “Baby! Baby. By Saint Gabriele, woman, don’t tell me you are pregnant!” The boy gave such a perfect imitation of a brother whose honor is outraged that both Damiano and his sister sat silent for the next few moments.

  “Hush,” hissed the witch, pointing meaningfully toward the door. “There are limits, Gaspare, to what a spell can do for you.”

  “Yes,” answered Evienne sullenly. “I am pregnant, Gaspare. Is that any of your business, I’d like to know?”

  “How’d it happen?” demanded Gaspare, in unreflecting rage.

  Damiano beheld his friend’s behavior with rising irritation. The only creature more volatile and irrational than Gaspare of San Gabriele was Gaspare when in the presence of his sister.

  “Are you going to challenge the Cardinal Rocault to a duel, perhaps?” The question slid away from song and ended in a tone of disgust.

  Evienne decided to ignore her brother. “It is because of the baby I must stay. If it’s Herbert’s, you see—well, I know him enough to say that he’ll take care of it very well. And take care of me also.”

  “And if it’s not?” growled Gaspare, as his limber fingers snaked a choker of blue beads into his pocket, to he beside the earrings.

  She shrugged. “Then it’s Jan’s.”

  Gaspare mock-spat into the corner. “Tell me how you were such a fool as to get pregnant. You never did before.”

  “I didn’t have any girlfriends in Avignon,” she said simply. “What was I to do? Besides, Gaspare, I want this baby. If it is the cardinal’s, then it will be my fortune. If it is Jan’s…” Her face softened, till Evienne appeared about five years old. “I really love Jan. Even when he does awful things, like not coming to see me for seven weeks together. I feel sorry for him, I think. He can be so bad.”