“It was the Liar,” and she hid her eyes behind her hands once more.
“Ah!” Gaspare nodded sapiently. “That’s better. I had half a notion it might have been Satan himself. After me for my sins.”
Hazel eyes popped open again. “But it was. It was the one you call Satan, and he had come for you. For your sins.”
Gaspare collapsed again to the earth, and he stuck all eight of his fingers into his terrified mouth. He gave one high, thin wail.
Saara glowered at this lack of discipline. “Don’t worry. You’re safe. I went instead of you.”
“You did what?” He pulled himself toward the cot of branches, a look of dazed gratitude illuminating his ill-assorted features. “You took my sins upon yourself? You went to hell? Suffered for me?”
Saara flung herself to her feet and peered vaguely around for her dress. “I went to his hall, yes, and it was no joke. But if you want to know who is suffering, it is your teacher. Your Raphael.”
“The angel?” Gaspare squatted at Saara’s feet, growing numb from too many surprises. “Raphael is suffering for my sins?”
Finding nothing around except Gaspare’s shirt, she put that on. It did not quite reach her knees. “Sin I know nothing about,” she stated. “Just suffering.”
She ran her hands through her hair; they snarled among the blackened burned ends of her braids. She looked into the woods about her, as though marshaling unseen forces.
“Let me cut the damage out of your hair, Lady Saara,” offered Gaspare, in order to put the conversation on a more manageable level. And he added, half-regretfully, “And then we will try to find you more suitable clothing. After that we will be more in a position to talk about sin and suffering.”
She shot him a glance of such coldness he might have been Satan himself, with a voice of treacherous temptation. “I don’t have such time! I was asked by Dami to protect your Raphael, and I have failed! I must find what the Liar has done with him—for a spirit cannot be destroyed, you know. The Eagle is somewhere, in a dungeon. Or a jar, perhaps.”
“A jar?” echoed Gaspare, uncertainly.
She ignored him. “I will find him and I will bring him away, unless death comes first. This I vow, who have made no vows since leaving the Saami.” She raised both her arms into the air.
“Wait!” Gaspare made an expert dive and caught the woman about the waist. “Don’t turn into anything, Lady! Tell me where we’re going?”
She peered down at the redhead clinging to her, with irritation mixed with surprise. “I am going,” she corrected him. “Home, to Lombardy, first.
“And then to Satan’s Hall, or Hell, or whatever you call it.” Without further discussion, Saara grew feathers and flew.
After she had gone Gaspare sat back into his bed of branches and stared at the scurf of dead needles that coated the ground. Gaspare was thinking about his sins, which he knew to be many. He was thinking about his sins of commission rather than those of omission, and especially thinking about his sins of the body.
Gaspare’s sins of this nature had actually been few and exploratory in nature, but whenever he thought of sins, they were the ones to come immediately to mind.
And he was feeling very badly, for though it might be the act of a bravo to follow a giggling girl into the dark, as Gaspare had done more than once (but less than four times), it was the act of a worm to let a pure angel take the blame for it.
He was very fond of his lute teacher, with a hesitant and wary sort of affection which sprang from his knowledge that they were very different sorts of people, Raphael and himself. Without the fortuitous chance that Damiano had been the friend of both, they would have had no reason to meet.
And Gaspare felt, too, that Raphael in his sinlessness never had been able to recognize just how wicked Gaspare himself could be.
And now, unfortunately, Raphael had caught the brunt of that wickedness and was suffering. In a jar, of all things. Gaspare cringed queasily and tried to feel repentance.
What he felt, he found, was resentment. Gesu the Christ had been enough, he considered. What other load of guilt did a man have to bear? And even the Lady Saara… (Thinking of Saara as he had just seen her, his thoughts digressed immediately. It was a number of minutes before he could get them back on the subject of guilt.) Even Saara had tried to purloin his sins from him. Surely a woman who looked like that might have some of her own…
It seemed the earth was inhabited by posturing heros, with Gaspare of San Gabriele as the only poor dolt among them. Fit for nothing but to be saved from himself. It couldn’t be borne!
Well, he WOULDN’T bear it, he decided with a few redheaded curses. He rose to his full height (in three years he had grown prodigiously) and strode off toward the sunlight, seeking his wayward horse.
Lombardy in high summer was a green cathedral, with its constant murmur of clean waters and its odor of shadowy frankincense. On a round hill between spires of rock flourished the wild garden of Saara: a meadow of heavy grass, cut by interlacing streams, dotted with the early blue aster, and wound about with the sprawling late red rose. Not far from the lawn, in the shade of the pines below, she had a little house of sod, built after the manner of her northern people, to which she withdrew only to sleep.
Here also grew rosemary and comfrey, eyebright, and mullein, the vervain which makes the wild cats drunk in the springtime, and orris, for sweetening clothes and hair. Above the meadow, among the feathered birches which crested the dome of the hill, was a stand of hazel also: all plants with uses for the leech, witch, or wise woman.
Saara was all three of these, and on her garden no frost came,
though through the winter the high peaks on either side of her hill were painted white.
Under the last Ml moon of summer she sat, on the round dome of the hill, where the scattered birch striped the darkness with silver, and the fingers of the trees twisted moonlight into chains. She sat tailor fashion, wearing nothing but Gaspare’s linen shirt, her brown hair cropped halfway down her neck. Her face, splashed with light and shadow, was not that of a girl.
There is a spell almost all witches know, though some chant it and some read it from books and still others play it through the length of a staff, or scratch it out with the blood of a cock. It is not a complicated spell, only very dangerous, and for that reason it is often learned and rarely used.
Saara, in her long life, had never sung this spell before. When she had lost her lovers, she had refrained. When her children died, even then she had been wise, for she knew the gate of death had its purpose.
But now she, too, had her purpose—a purpose beyond loss or loneliness. Her purpose was rescue.
Through no other means had she been able to find Raphael. He was neither in the wind nor in the voice of the water, and he didn’t hear her call—or he could not answer. She hadn’t really expected to find him so easily, for she remembered that spinning disorientation in the air and the strange bare peak with a window. That was the place she must find again. For that she needed help.
So the greatest witch in the Italies sat with her hands folded in her lap and her legs bare to the wind as she sang up the dead.
It began with a wail and rose into a chant of four ascending notes, the last of which she held clear and unshaken until her breath failed her. She sang the line again. And again.
There was no expression to be seen on Saara’s face, had there been any to see on that dome of trembling birch. She had no feeling in her once the song had begun. And the moon put a severe light upon her features, emphasizing their odd Asiatic cast and draining all color. She appeared neither girl nor young woman under that stained white globe. In fact, there was nothing particularly feminine about the figure on the dry earth. Nothing particularly human. She might have been a peak of rock among those of the Alps nearby, eternally white, cloaked with loud, grieving winds.
The same four notes, building like stairs upon one another. Carving a black path into blackness. They droned
on while the soiled moon rolled from the slopes of the eastern hills to its zenith. Untiring, unchanging, they rang over the sparse dome of birch trees and down into the pine-woolly coverts below. At the foot of the hills, beyond the little lakes fed by the streams of Saara’s garden, people in the village of Ludica shut their doors and windows, shivering despite August’s heat.
And not least of all, Saara’s song echoed through the spaces of her own head, until she was mad with her own singing, and her mind and soul became the pure instruments of her purpose.
And when the moon balanced directly over the earth—directly over the round moonlike dome of the hill—Saara let the stair she had built open, and she spoke one name.
“Damiano,” she whispered. She closed her eyes and let the new silence hang in the air.
There was a whispering around Saara, and a rustle like the soft feathers of many birds. “Speak!” she commanded without opening her eyes.
The rustling grew nearer. It grew warm. “Saara,” came the sweet, caressing answer. “My beautiful one. My princess. My queen.”
Saara’s stern face slackened with sorrow, but only for a moment. “Ruggerio,” she whispered. “Forgive me. I did not mean to wake you.” Her eyes screwed themselves more firmly shut.
“I know, bellissima,” the thin, distant voice replied, chuckling, and ghostly lips kissed the very tips of her fingers. “And I do not mean to prove a distraction. May all the saints go with you.”
Then the air went thick with vague calls and whispers. Saara repeated the one name “Damiano” and sat as still and unyielding as a rock.
One sound rose among the others: that of a man’s laughter. But this was not Ruggerio, though it was a voice she recognized. “The greatest witch in the Italies,” it pronounced, and then laughed again. “For a while perhaps. Perhaps stronger than I. But my son was another matter, wasn’t he, Saara? My poor, half-blind, mozzarella boy! Who’d have thought it?”
Saara sat as rigid as wood, as stone, and chided her heart for pounding like a hammer. No response she gave to this spirit, and soon it sighed. “Ah. Well, no matter, Saara. God go with you.”
And it was gone. Surprise alone nearly made Saara’s eyes crack open, but she restrained herself. To think that thirty years of bitterness and fear toward Guillermo Delstrego could lead to this. “God go with you?”
Had the proud, predatory soul of Delstrego bent to that? She had grown to think the man almost the equivalent of the Liar himself in his wickedness.
Her strength trembled and came near to breaking at this touch to an ancient wound.
But now the hilltop was filled with a confusion of spirits and sounds and the witch’s guards came up by instinct.
Presences surrounded her like a roomful of smoke rings, half erased by the moving air. These were perhaps spirits who knew her or had touched somehow her long life, or were by some unknown sympathy attracted to the stern, unseeing woman in white linen, who held the gate open and yet spoke to no one.
For though the spell is called a summoning spell, its effect and its danger is that it brings the user very close to that world which is not a world (being placeless and infinite), wherein a living mortal has no business to wander.
And though there was no malice in the vague fingers that touched Saara, or in the soft whispers that questioned her, there was also not one of them without the power to do Saara great harm (should she let them), or to cause her great pain (whether she let them or not).
She took a deep, shuddering breath and her nostrils twitched, as though the air were too thick to breathe. “Damiano!” she called again, this time with a touch of urgency.
There was a moment’s silence, and then came a small voice, a sweet child’s piping voice, speaking the language of her northern people. “Mama?” it cried wonderingly. “Is it Mama?”
She gave a despairing gasp. “Go to sleep, baby,” she whispered into the blackness, while tears escaped the confines of her closed eyes. “Go back to bed. I will come to you soon.”
Now it was late and she had almost no strength left to hold the gate and fight the river of innocent, deadly voices. She had a sudden, desperate idea. “Little white dog,” she called out. “Little white dog of Damiano’s. Spot, or whatever your name was… come to me.”
“Macchiata,” was the matter-of-fact answer, which came from very close in front. Saara held to this spirit and let the rest go. She opened her eyes.
Sitting before her, legs splayed, was a very pretty plump girl with hair that shone silver in the moonlight. Her garb, also, was a simple white shift that gleamed without stain, with a red kerchief which tied about the neck and spread out across her back, sailor fashion. She had little wings like those of a pigeon.
She smiled at Saara with bright interest. Her eyes were brown.
“Some mistake,” murmured the witch. “I summoned only a dog. A little white dog which belonged to…”
“To Master—Damiano. Yes, that’s me.” She started to scratch her spectral left ear with her spectral left hand in short, choppy forward motions. She seemed to get great satisfaction out of doing this. “Damiano likes me in this form.”
“He does?” Saara exclaimed with somewhat affronted surprise. Then she remembered Damiano’s peculiar prejudice toward the human form above that of all animals, however splendid. “Well, I thought the dog looked perfectly fine.”
Macchiata was still for a moment, and then resumed scratching. She metamorphosed between one stroke and the next, going from girl to dog, and continued her scratch quite contentedly with her hind leg. “Like that?”
“Lovely,” stated Saara.
The deep brown eyes regarded Saara, asking no questions. The white dog smiled with all her formidable teeth exposed and her red tongue lolling to the right. Her fluffy pigeon wings scratched one another’s backs behind her.
Saara had not forgotten how last she had seen this animal, frozen like a starved deer in the snow, with her dark master above her, equally frozen with grief. She said, “You died by my hand, dog. But it was not by my intent.”
Macchiata pulled her tongue in. Under the spell she had attained an almost lifelike solidity, but still she glowed with milk-glass light. “I remember—I think. You were upset.”
“I was,” admitted the greatest witch of the Italies. “Upset and afraid, and I struck thinking only of defending myself. Do you forgive me, spirit?”
The dog, in reply, flopped over on her back. “Sure. Why not? Scratch under my left elbow; I can’t reach.”
Saara obeyed and was surprised to feel warm fur beneath her hand. “Have you fleas, then?”
“No.” As the human’s hand rubbed in expanding circles, the dog’s left foot began a spastic, regular pawing of the air. Macchiata grunted like a pig. “No. No fleas in heaven. Only scratching.”
Saara settled back on her heels and looked about her. The moon was descending the western sky; the night was getting old. “Spirit, I haven’t much time. Will you help me find your master? I called and he could not hear me.”
“He heard you,” said Macchiata, flipping onto her legs. She gave a great shake. “Everyone heard you. You called very loud. He just wouldn’t come.”
Saara felt a cold needle of misery pierce through her. She was some time in answering. “He… wouldn’t come?”
“No.” The dog’s nostril’s twitched, smelling the salt in Saara’s tears. “Don’t get upset! He stayed away so you wouldn’t get upset. He wanted to come.”
Saara swallowed, beyond words for a moment. Finally she said, “I have to see him about Raphael. If I can’t help Raphael, I will be very upset.”
Macchiata’s sticklike tail thumped appreciatively. “I like Raphael. He has never been upset. Never.”
“That could change,” replied Saara ominously, “unless we help him.”
“I’ll get Master,” announced the dog, and she faded like an afterimage on the eye.
Once Macchiata was gone, Saara wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her shirt an
d blew her nose into a handful of birch leaves. She had been shaken by every pull on her living memory, and the spirit that had refused to come had shaken her hardest. Had there been some malice in the little creature, to say so brutally “He wouldn’t come”? Indeed, the summoning spell was the most dangerous of all spells, to soul and to body, for now that she had done it, she felt hardly the strength or the desire to go on living.
Her children: Could it be they were no more than infant spirits, grown neither in heart nor mind since the day they bled to death with their father on the floor of the hut? Something in Saara, instinct or sense of justice, rebelled at this idea. Was there illusion at the base of the summoning spell? Had Ruggerio not really kissed her fingertips?
Had Guillermo Delstrego not come after thirty years of her hate to say to her, “God go with you”? Something had happened nonetheless, and someone had come to her behind the darkness of her closed eyes. It remained to be seen whether her task had succeeded or failed.
She stared at the disk of the descending moon, and so deep in thought was she that she did not notice the silent approach of one behind her.
“Saara,” he whispered. “Pikku Saara.”
Saara turned slowly, effortfully, as though a great weight sat on her shoulders. She was suddenly afraid.
Behind her, illuminated by the moon, stood the shape of a man. It was dark, from its rough hair to its booted feet, and a cloud surrounded it like great, soft folded wings. As Saara looked up at the apparition’s face the wings opened wide.
Smoky he was, and immaterial: not like the dog nor yet like the spirit who had kissed her fingers. For it was not her spell but his own wish that had brought him this very long way to a hill in Lombardy, in August, and he had little magic with which to clothe himself in flesh. Only the eyes of the ghost were clear to see, and full of tenderness.
“Damiano,” she began, and her voice left her as she uttered the name. “I’m sorry to call you. I don’t want to cause you pain, when you have the right to peace.”
He knelt by her, and she sensed in her witch’s soul a hand upon her face. “The only pain which can touch me,” he whispered, gently and from far away, “is to see this pain in YOUR eyes, Saara. And I will gladly endure it if I can help you. But I didn’t think that I could.”
The Damiano Series Page 59