The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Her Pinkie looked, too, of course. Raphael gazed about himself with friendly curiosity, unbroken even when an infant of four years scuttled up and threw a wad of dried cow dung into his lap. The blond closed his eyes and listened to the chatter as though it were music.

  Once again life erased its miseries for Raphael and he was free to think about his condition.

  It had been terrible, and now was only bothersome. The difference between the two conditions seemed to be connected with what he had eaten and drunk, and when. The time of day mattered too. Cold and dark were unpleasant.

  But so was hot sun. And hard stone. And flies that bit. And being kicked or glared at.

  It seemed to him he was suspended between a thousand little-understood needs of the flesh and another thousand outside sources of pain. These established his course, as the course of a pebble was established once it was dislodged from the top of a hill.

  But that reminded him of his own pebble. Raphael’s hand felt sweet relief as he opened his fist and looked at Damiano’s gift.

  It was such a pretty pebble, all brown and rough with faint white stripes, and it looked as much like a piece of a corkscrew as anything.

  Damiano had been a man—he had been bora a man. Yet HE had not seemed to let himself be knocked back and forth between pain and desire, like Raphael was. Damiano had called, “If you have the time, Seraph…” very considerately, and had smiled to greet him. Had he been in such misery, then, hiding it all from his friend? Surely Raphael would have seen.

  No, it must have been that living as a man was an art which might be mastered. And Damiano, who had done so, was still with Raphael —somewhere, somehow. In a pebble. Flexing his cramped fingers, Raphael stuffed the pebble into the corner of his mouth, beside his back molar.

  “I am Raphael,” he said aloud, in Damiano’s language. “I am not just kicks and heat and hunger. I was before these things, and will be after. I am my Father’s musician.” He raised his eyes to the southern distance, where sand and dust fell away toward the sea he could not see, the sea they were leaving further behind each day.

  Djoura heard these foreign words in Pinkie’s voice. Surreptitiously she glanced over, and the blond’s face startled her.

  He looks as stern as a king, she thought. Praise be to Allah, could it be my sieve-head’s mind is coming back to him?

  But if it were so, why didn’t he talk sense? She gouged his hip with her muscular toe.

  “Hiss, Pinkie! Who are you talking to?”

  He shifted the pebble in his mouth before answering. “I am talking to my Father,” he replied.

  She giggled. “I see. Did he answer you?”

  “No,” Raphael answered simply. “He doesn’t anymore.”

  Perfecto was thinking, I will accompany him out of the city this time; he will not suspect anything in that. And with all the money I will buy a hundred Masses for protection.

  It was an act of grace to kill a paynim. It was holy.

  “My uncle will take me in easily, and with this last profit I can buy a small date-palm planting and a couple of boys to keep it. I will not say a word to him, just get on my ship and disappear.”

  Hakiim’s mule swiveled its ears, seeming to reproach him for the plan. “A promise to the infidel is no promise at all,” he whispered to the beast.

  Djoura observed Raphael narrowly. No longer did he move like a lout, nor roll his eyes like a simpleton. Too much longer and the swine on muleback would realize what they had here, and her new-budded plans would go for nothing. The woman sidled up to Raphael and did her best to trip him.

  “The birds in the air,” Raphael sang silently, despite his sore feet and scourged back. “The fish in the water, washing their backs in light.”

  Joy came from somewhere to him: a gift as solid as stone.

  Chapter 5

  The bees were already awake, but then the bees had retired earlier than Saara. She stepped from her hut into the light to find Gaspare stretched on the ground, waiting for her. His orange hair and red face shone like two clashing flames against the green of the bee balm. The young man leaped to his feet.

  “I can do it for you, my lady,” he stated, biting off his words with force. “Give me two silver florins and seven days and I can do it.” His frosty green eyes bore into hers, while his long mouth fairly trembled with intensity.

  Saara, who had not slept well, was beset with a desire to turn around and go back indoors, pulling the door behind her. Instead she yawned, combed her hair with her fingers, and replied, “Do what, Gaspare?”

  “Go to the Devil,” he replied.

  Saara lowered herself onto the gray rock which stood beside her door. This rock had a shape rather like that of some quadripedal animal with very round sides and stubby legs. She called this rock her housedog, although the rock had come first, with the house being built behind it.

  She considered the possibility that Gaspare was joking with her. He did not appear to be joking, and certainly the boy had had enough stupid ideas in the past, but one could have stupid ideas and still make jokes. Finally Saara said, “I have known men to go to the Devil before without needing two silver florins.”

  His lips pulled away from his teeth as he answered, “Ah, but without money it takes longer.”

  Now Saara was certain he was joking. Almost certain. She sighed, wondering once again why Italians had to be like that. “The problem is, young one, that we want to find the Liar, not be found by him.”

  Gaspare smiled and sat himself down at her feet. His face pulled into a taut smile as he looked across at her.

  Not up at her, but across. And there was something in his thoughtful expression that prefigured the man that was to be, once all of Gaspare’s tempers and gangling limbs had come to terms at last.

  Saara felt something like a blow over the heart as she remembered the starved boy Gaspare in ragged clothes who grabbed her about the knees, spouting gallant rubbish, on the road to Avignon, and the same fourteen-year-old who stood white-faced and silent beside the body of his friend.

  So she had seen one more boy grow out of childhood, and once again she hadn’t noticed it happening.

  This cannot go on forever, she said to herself. Everyone growing and growing old and dying except Saara. I do not want it to go on forever.

  Gaspare was watching her face attentively. “Don’t despair, my lady,” he comforted her. “If Delstrego believes I can find old Scratch for you, then it must be that I can.”

  She shook her head. “It is too great a risk for you, Gaspare. Not only a risk of the body, but…”

  He flushed to deep burgundy. “What? That again? By San Gabriele, woman, haven’t you learned by now that I am Gaspare the lutenist, not some postulant of a cloistered order, to be saved from the contagion of the world!

  “Why, Delstrego himself told you you needed my help. Would you throw away the word of the greatest musician of all Italy and Provence—and a blessed spirit besides?” His narrow form swelled with passion and he waved fingers all through the air.

  “Delstrego himself,” repeated Saara silently. Had Dami become history already, or a legend? What kind of legend died of the plague at the age of twenty-three?

  A legend with one believer.

  Or two.

  But she understood the anger behind Gaspare’s words. “No, Gaspare. You are right, and I of all people know better than to protect a person against his own will. If you want to help me find the way to Satan’s Hall, I will accept your help thankfully.”

  Gaspare, who had been building up his emotions in case tantrums were necessary, felt his fury leak away. “Hah? Good, then, my lady.”

  But his voice still held an edge as he added, “You must remember that Raphael is my teacher. And my friend.”

  Saara stared at him coolly. “He makes a lot of friends, that one,” she stated, and began braiding her damaged hair.

  At the crown of the hill stood Gaspare, turning left and right in place. The sun of early m
orning sent shadows of birch over the ground like tangled lace, while the looming shadow of the larger sister peak to the northeast lapped up through the pines. The morning was impossibly sweet and beautiful, predicting a scorching day.

  “Once,” the young man pronounced, drawing his brow and scowling fiercely, “when Delstrego wanted to locate a man he didn’t particularly like, he walked back and forth through a city, noting when he felt most bothered and irritated. In that manner he drew nearer and nearer, until he could feel the fellow’s presence directly.”

  “It sounds like a good method,” replied Saara, who sat with her back against the bole of the tree, chewing a stem of sourgrass. “Of course, HE was a witch.”

  Gaspare’s overlarge pale eyes pulled away from the horizon to focus on Saara’s small face. “Could it be that I am too, my lady, and never have known it? Perhaps that was what he meant when…”

  “No,” Saara cut in evenly. “But I wouldn’t let that worry you. Being a witch has its drawbacks.

  “Do you feel more bothered and irritated—or perhaps more proud, since it was supposed to be your pride which connected you to Satan—in one direction more than another?”

  Once again Gaspare revolved, this time with his eyes closed and hands out, while his cheeks brightened to a cheery red. “I just feel immensely ridiculous,” he replied.

  The northerner nibbled her tattered leaf thoughtfully. She stared at her bare toes. “Is there any direction in which you feel more ridiculous than another?” she asked reasonably.

  “Yes. To the north, where I can feel you watching me spin like a top.”

  Saara shot Gaspare a quick glance. “But I’m not. Not until now. I haven’t looked at you once.” Very quietly she rose and stepped past him.

  The redhead dropped his hands to his hips, but his eyes remained sealed. “Well, how am I to know if you are or not?” He had a habit of forgetting to call Saara “my lady” when the least bit excited. Saara never noticed.

  “I still feel ridiculous when I am facing you.”

  “Facing me or facing north?” came her voice from behind him. Gaspare jumped and swiveled. He blinked at her confusedly.

  “Facing… north.” His words were almost a whisper.

  Saara’s smile was slow and drawn. It aged her face. “Good, then. Tell me, Gaspare, if you had to guess, and Damiano had never said a word about pride calling to pride, in which direction would you expect to find the Li—the Devil?”

  Gaspare folded himself on the turf beside her, mindful of his skintight hose. “As a child, of course, I believed the Devil lived under the Alps, in the heart of winter. All the babies in San Gabriele are taught that.

  “Now, being a man of some experience,” (he did not see or chose to ignore the flicker behind his companion’s eyes) “I know he is more to be found in the cities of the south, doing his work among men.”

  Saara lifted her eyes to the green-black southern slopes, out of which the third sister peak rose like a rock from the sea. In the distance the haze was golden.

  Then she turned her head (and like an owl, Saara could turn it very far) to inspect the looming, purple north.

  “I think we should not be in too much hurry to grow up,” she commented.

  “What would we do with him?” Saara exclaimed, for the third time. “He is no goat, to bounce over the raw rock…”

  Gaspare clutched his handful of black horse mane obstinately. “This is the very animal that Delstrego rode through the mountains in the month of November, from Partestrada to San Gabriele and beyond.”

  Saara ground her teeth together and thought that she would shortly have heard enough about “Delstrego.” “That was on a road, I think. If I am right, we will have little enough to do with roads on this journey. And when we reach the Devil’s window in the rock (if we ever do), then what is the horse to do: grow wings and fly in?”

  Gaspare glared from the restive gelding to Saara. “Then he will walk home alone. It is no new thing for Festilligambe. He’s more than half savage as it is.”

  Saara, too, peered into the animal’s aristocratic face. “Why don’t we let him decide. If he is to take the risk…”

  Gaspare snorted sullenly. His rapprochement with the black gelding was too hard-won for him to want to walk when he could ride. And he wasn’t sure he trusted the witch, who could pretend to ask and then tell him the horse had said whatever she wished it to say.

  But the justice of her proposal could not be denied. “Ask then.”

  Saara put one little hand beneath the horse’s round chin, where spiky guard hairs grew untouched by knife or razor. “Festigi—Festilli—Festie—oh, horse! Tell me, do you want to accompany us north into the Alps, toward that presence we saw together by the wineshop door in San Gabriele? And will you help us to fight him?”

  The gelding’s head snapped up into the air. He did an oversized double take, and then, rearing, he spun around and vanished down the hillside.

  “Don’t feel bad,” said Saara gently to Gaspare. “Horses are not meant to be brave.”

  But Gaspare did feel bad. He felt utterly desolate, and unworthy besides, for he remembered this same cowardly gelding standing foursquare over his injured master, holding off eight men and four whips. In three years he—Gaspare of San Gabriele—had not won the animal’s heart. Doubtless he never would.

  “It’s nothing,” he told Saara, looking away. “He always knew I preferred dogs.” And he paced heavily down the hill among the birch trees.

  Gaspare’s few possessions were tied in a square of linen, two ends of which went around his waist and two ends of which went around his shoulders. The lute in its sheepskin case he carried. Saara carried nothing.

  The day was fulfilling its high-summer promise, but in the aromatic pine woods of the hill’s lower slopes, it was still cool.

  “There is a broad road not far north of Ludica,” Gaspare was calling to the woman behind him. “It runs all the way from Franche-Comté. In the east it leads to… to the faraway east, I think. Once we strike that, we will have easy going, and our choice of trails going into the Alps themselves…

  “Then we will have to take our bearings again, and I must search my heart for presence of the Devil, as Delstrego said. In fact, I ought to do so constantly, lest we lose our path and valuable time…”

  Though she knew more about the roads of Lombardy than Gaspare could hope to, Saara let him prattle on. She was used to Italians by now, and besides, she wanted to keep an eye on the shadow in the woods—bulky, black, wary—that was following them.

  As Gaspare detailed his plans for self-examination (they involved certain mental imageries of food, drink, cards, dice, and other appealing objects to which he alluded elliptically), this shadow rose onto the path behind, stepping silently on the carpet of needles. Saara faded off the path and let it pass.

  For twenty steps the black horse paced behind Gaspare without making his presence known. Then he nudged with his nose.

  The gangling youth skittered forward, flailing for balance. Then he turned in outrage and confronted Festilligambe, who stood motionless behind him with muzzle touching the ground and ears flat out to the sides.

  Gaspare also stood frozen, though he blinked repeatedly. At last he put his hand on the gelding’s bony withers and he sighed.

  Since Delstrego had been known to play his lute while riding, nothing could stop Gaspare from doing the same. He did not do so happily, however, for he was never completely relaxed on horseback, and his knees gripped Festilligambe’s sides like iron tongs.

  But the horse picked its way along the rough ground with egg-cherishing care, for the dove which perched on its pointed head had told him just what would happen if he spilled the lutenist. Slowly the gelding climbed into the fresh air of the mountains, wondering all the while why anyone would want to go to a place with so little grass.

  Saara’s bird body was breathing heavily. She had shrunk to dove size so as to keep up with the horse without burdening him f
urther, but by the give-and-take of magic, it cost her just as much effort to ride thus as it would have to climb at the gelding’s side.

  Listening to Gaspare’s lute playing was another payment of sorts, for Saara. That the boy had control of his instrument was obvious. His sense of time was good, and his rhythms were highly original. But Saara had been born into a culture where chant was the most respected form of music, and Gaspare’s carefully cultivated dissonances upset both her nerves and her digestion.

  Yet she said nothing, for among the Lapps (who were all song wizards), to tell a person to stop his music was to tell him to stop his being. She merely wondered if the twigs of the alpine willow would be effective against headache.

  Gaspare, who had been raised (or who had raised himself) in the shadow of the mountains, drank deep lungfuls of air scented with evergreens, and he turned his eaglet’s face to the stony north. He felt sparks of energy within him like the sparks the horse’s feet made hitting stone. Gaspare had only the vaguest idea where they were going, but he had confidence.

  Saara did not, for she had no faith in their present course.

  It was not that she doubted the words of the spirit, but she knew that there is no translation as difficult as that between the living and the dead, and what Damiano had meant by saying Gaspare knew the way to the Liar’s hall might be something completely different from having the boy lead her there.

  In fact, would Damiano—who had died rather than let her risk herself—have sanctioned bringing this clumsy young fellow into danger of body and of spirit? If he HAD meant for Gaspare to fling himself against Satan, then the dead were indeed a different order than the living. And though Damiano’s suggestion was little more than Saara had protested that same night on her own behalf—that one must not keep a soul from its proper risks—still she found it difficult to extend that liberty to others whom she felt were not fit to meet the challenge. Gaspare, for instance. What could he do against pure wickedness, and how could he survive?