The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Gaspare repeated his question more moderately.

  “I don’t know what kind of wings you’re talking about. These weren’t like regular demon wings. Not leathery. They had feathers like birds’. Whitish.”

  “Raphael!” cried Gaspare, and when Kadjebeen threatened to withdraw once more, he shook him.

  “Yes, yes! Raphael was his name. Nice guy, he seemed. Well put together. Looked a lot like the Master.”

  Seeing Gaspare’s exultant face, he asked, “You interested in wings too?”

  “I am… interested in Raphael’s wings,” warbled Gaspare, dancing another little dance of excitement. “Raphael is my friend. My teacher. We have come from San Gabriele in the Piedmont, looking for him.

  “Through cold and wind,” Gaspare chanted. “Past dragons and enchanted boulders we have come, and not all the Devil’s wiles could stop us!”

  Kadjebeen sighed again. “Then he must not have been trying very hard.”

  Gaspare was stung. “I’m sure he was! If he had any sense he was, because we are justice itself on his trail.”

  The skin at the back of his neck twitched, as Gaspare remembered where he was and to whom he was speaking. “You… LIKE him? Your wicked master? In spite of what he did to you? You’ll tell Satan I was here, and everything I said?”

  Kadjebeen’s eyes made independent circuits of the room. “Like… the Master?” Then in a rush he replied, “Of course I don’t. Who could like him? But I’m sure I will tell on you. He’ll torture me till I do.”

  The round demon sighed. He walked over to his toy and fiddled with it in proprietary fashion. “And then he’ll torture me some more, I guess.”

  Gaspare’s courage, working as it did by law of opposition, rose as the demon quailed. “It doesn’t matter if you do tell, you miserable insect. We’ve come for the angel and won’t leave without him!” He pirouetted around the table, slicing most gracefully with an invisible sword.

  “Well, I’m very sorry, then,” mumbled Kadjebeen.

  Between one florid step and the next, Gaspare stopped dancing. “Sorry for what?”

  Kadjebeen was sitting on the table. He had both hands laced around his middle. Now his color was returning, and he looked more like a raspberry and less like a bag. “Because the Master gave him away.”

  “Gave him away?” echoed Gaspare. He struck his bony fist on the tabletop. The greasy grapes bounced. “He gave away an angel of God?”

  “Watch out for the image,” mumbled the demon reflexively. “It’s a perfect correspondence, you see, and one has to be careful.” Then the demon realized that Gaspare’s attention could not be diverted from his goal.

  “Yes. He melted off his wings and gave him to one of his toadies— uh, servants. Perfecto the Spaniard, the man’s name is. I imagine your Raphael is in Granada now.”

  Observing the dusky flush of Gaspare’s face, Kadjebeen added, to console him, “The wings were gone by then, anyhow.”

  Gaspare’s impersonal glare sharpened. “You must take us to him!”

  The demon squeaked, and drew in both hands and feet, so that nothing but his trembling eyes disturbed his rotundity. “Oh, I couldn’t! The Master would never let me! He’d be so angry if he even knew you’d asked!”

  Gaspare, whose own fear had somewhere been left behind, strode to the window, where the dazed horse stood placidly, seeing nothing. All sounds of battle had faded, but in his heart was growing a conviction that the battle was already won: a conviction which had nothing to do with Saara’s magic, or the length of the dragon’s teeth.

  “Your master, little insect, is nothing but scum!”

  “Oh dear, don’t,” quailed Kadjebeen, as his ears and eyes rotated nervously. “He is the Prince of the Earth and very sensitive about it.”

  “He is the Prince of Cowardice,” Gaspare declared. “And all his victories are cheats.”

  He spun theatrically and smacked his chest. “I myself tell you this, you poor deluded slave. And I should know, because I AM A VERY BAD MAN!”

  Kadjebeen stared at Gaspare with an increase of respect.

  “Or I WAS a very bad man. But with the grace of God and the help of His angel Raphael, I am trying. It is hard,” added the youth, staring with wide green eyes at the round body on the table, “when you are bora with low instincts and have habits both worldly and violent, but it is possible to throw off Satan entirely. Even you could do it.”

  His gaze on the demon lost certainty. “… I think.”

  “This Raphael person,” Kadjebeen thought to mention, “didn’t last very long against my Master.”

  Gaspare frowned, remembering Kadjebeen’s part in that deed. “Raphael sacrificed himself,” he said with dignity. “For MY sins, I am told.

  “And I… I will release him from bondage. I have the greatest witch in all Europe at my side. We cannot lose.”

  Kadjebeen’s stalked gaze shifted to Festilligambe. “The greatest witch in all Europe is a horse?”

  “Uh, no. This is Festilligambe. He is probably the fastest horse in all Europe. He is certainly the most troublesome.” A glance at the slack-jawed, lop-eared face forced him to add, “He is, however, not feeling his best.

  “My companion, the Lady Saara, is at this moment chasing your foolish master’s legions from the skies, while I have the responsibility to locate and rescue Raphael.”

  “He’s in Granada,” repeated Kadjebeen helpfully.

  “So.” Gaspare cracked his knuckles, one by one. “Take us to Granada.”

  “I couldn’t…” began the raspberry demon, but he changed his mind in midsentence. “I would like to, but I don’t see how…”

  “And you call yourself an artist!” Gaspare’s voice, not naturally resonant, rang strangely loud in that stale, tiled chamber.

  “An artisan,” Kadjebeen corrected him. “I build things. Images. As a matter of fact, I am the greatest maker of images that—”

  “Artist, artisan… Bah!” Gaspare brushed the distinction aside. “Don’t you know that all the arts are blessed, and Satan is their enemy? Raphael is the greatest musician ever created, as well as the most beautiful; it is out of jealousy that Satan has done him hurt. I myself—”

  “I myself am tone-deaf,” interjected the raspberry demon. “As well as ugly. But go ahead—you were about to tell me what YOU were greatest at.”

  “I was not,” grunted Gaspare, instantly deflated.

  “I’m not the best at anything, although my old friend and partner… Oh, never mind.” For to Gaspare’s mind came the words the ghost had said at the top of the hill in Lombardy. “Don’t strive to be the best, or you will wake up one day and know yourself no good at all.”

  There was no sound to be heard, except the droning sighs of Festilligambe, who seemed to be waking up. Suddenly Gaspare wanted to be out of this square room with windows that made no sense and air like doused ashes. Even if its owner never returned, it was no good place to be.

  “Granada, you say?” He spared a last glance at the demon. “Then to Granada we will go, on the back of the greatest dragon that…” Gaspare swallowed.

  “On the back of a dragon.” He leaped lightly onto the sill.

  Festilligambe nickered sleepily. Gaspare dragged him along by the mane. “Come on, ass-face. We have what we came for…”

  It was black outside, and all noise of combat had ceased. A dust of stars whitened the sky. Gaspare lifted his head, and cold wind caught his russet hair.

  Where were Saara and the dragon? Gaspare felt pregnant with news and wanted to communicate it. Surely they had not chased that stranger dragon so far they could not get back to him? All pretty white and gold, it hadn’t looked like a beast with much fight in it.

  As he stood in the mountain darkness, huddled against a black horse for warmth, Gaspare heard an awkward scuffing behind him.

  A squarish black shape was following his trail on spindly pink-purple legs. It looked like a bedding box with the hindquarters of a chicken. For
a moment Gaspare’s hair stood on end, not out of fear but disbelief, until he recognized the object as Kadjebeen’s toy palace, propelled by Kadjebeen himself.

  “I’m coming,” panted the demon, unnecessarily.

  “With that?”

  Kadjebeen hugged his masterwork with arms too short for the purpose. His eyes drooped protectively over the top. “It’s mine,” he mumbled. “I made it. Best thing I ever made. It’s an image of the whole palace. Even His Magnificence has never appreciated how perfect a job it is.”

  Gaspare only sighed. Together he, Kadjebeen, and the horse stepped out of the shelter of the rocks.

  There, on the gray-lit slope of the peak itself, lay a long body like a length of rope cast off by some giant. Moonlight glistened on it, for it was coated with some sort of slime, and small, scuttling things went in and out of the great, scimitar-lined mouth, which leaked steam. Yellow eyes shone faintly, staring at nothing.

  Caged in one iron paw, undamaged but motionless, was a small shape in a scorched blue dress.

  Gaspare stopped dead, causing Kadjebeen to bump into him. The horse reared in panic.

  Then Gaspare ran wildly over the rubble and stone, up the slick and gripless slope of rock, toward the fallen dragon with its phosphorescent infection. He reached the black-clawed hand. He squeezed between the bars.

  With both hands Gaspare wiped the ooze from Saara’s eyes. He wept and cursed together as more came out of her nose and lips. Her flesh looked and felt like wax.

  The creeping disease touched Gaspare.

  Kadjebeen stood alone on the road, leaning on his work. He was feeling very low.

  The fellow had seemed so certain of himself, with his greatest this and his fastest that. It had been a long time since Kadjebeen had met anyone except the master himself who was so self-assured. He tried to remember when and where he HAD met another like Gaspare. His memories were sadly jumbled.

  But the raspberry demon was sure of one thing. He really didn’t want to hang from the ceiling anymore.

  Amid the cries and weeping, as Kadjebeen leaned disconsolately on his image, he heard a familiar sound. From somewhere nearby, his master Lucifer was laughing. Kadjebeen listened, and in his present discouragement he had the idea Lucifer was laughing at him.

  Long white wings: light, intricate, craftworthy. Melted like ice.

  “No!” He shouted petulantly. Then louder. “No. I’m tired of it. Always the best work is broken and the worst exalted. Always the back of the hand! Well, I won’t anymore. I won’t!”

  And Kadjebeen, in excess of rage, sprang up in the air on his bandy legs and came down right on the cupola of his masterwork— the image of Lucifer’s Hall.

  He let out an “oof” and an “ouch,” for the little object was pointed. But it was also fragile, and it splintered beneath his jelly-shuddering weight.

  From the mountain beneath came the thud like that of a slamming door, magnified many times. Kadjebeen stamped. Something shifted in the rock itself. The air popped.

  But Kadjebeen hopped again and again, smacking his buboed surface against paper-thin walls. The image gave way.

  The fortress of Lucifer gave way. Rock shuddered, deep in the earth. The thin air was loud with broken deceits and the cries of demons with their leashes snapped. The yellow light shining around the corner went out.

  A fungoid silvery growth appeared on the black coils of the dragon, as Lucifer dragged himself frantically from the flesh of his victims. His shape solidified, grew hair, was dressed in white velvet.

  He hurled himself through the air toward the gate of his palace, at the small figure standing by the shards of delicate stone.

  It was not bulbous, not colored like a raspberry. It was a man, or the shade of a man: short, wiry, but not uncomely, with very strong arms and hands. His face was bearded and his eyes round and blue.

  “No more, my Master,” said the shade, and the voice came to Lucifer from far away. The spirit pointed to its eyes, its body, and to its mouth. “No one is made so badly as you would have them believe,” it whispered, and the bearded mouth smiled. Slowly the large, sail-white wings spread behind it and tested the air.

  Smiling, the shade raised its strong arms and square, workman’s hands. It rose and faded into a sky awash with the stars.

  Flaming with curses, Lucifer fled away to recapture his scattered devils.

  As a half-moon rose from behind the rock-tooth, the yellow eyes of the dragon answered its light. The bladed tail twitched.

  And Gaspare, in the pergola of the dragon’s upturned hand, held Saara until she was warm again, and her eyes opened.

  Chapter 9

  Though the glassy night was the most comfortable time in late-summer Granada, the servants in their barracks were too tired to stay awake for it and Rashiid and his wives were too well-fed. Only Raphael sat up, crouched half-naked beside the fish pond, and the fish circled at his feet. He was talking with Damiano.

  “You look much better, I think,” the spirit was saying. “Except for your nose.”

  “My nose,” repeated Raphael. He touched that member for identification and winced at the result. “It hurts. And it whistles when I breathe through it.”

  Moonlight had bleached the gold from his hair and reduced the glorious color of his black eye to mere shadows. He glimmered as insubstantially as his friend the ghost.

  Damiano’s cloudy suggestion of a face drew closer and darkened in sympathy. He said, “I can hear it. A very musical sound, as befits a teacher of music. But I know a cure for the problem.”

  “Tell me!” Though weeks of humanity had taught Raphael some sophistication, his face still reflected his every feeling, and now his perfect blue eyes (one of them rimmed in purple and green) pleaded with Damiano.

  “It takes bravery.”

  Raphael nodded soberly.

  The spirit’s umbrous wings folded back. He added, “It is not a magical but a musical cure.”

  This did not seem to surprise Raphael at all.

  “Take your hands,” began Damiano, “and clap them in your lap.” The blond did so, but quietly, so as not to wake the slaves in the barracks.

  “Now keep the rhythm and follow me, clapping whenever I clap.” The ghost went clap, clap, clap in his lap, making hardly a sound, and then raised his arms above his head and struck his ectoplasmic hands together. Raphael accompanied him in (of course) perfect time.

  Three claps more above the knees and three in front at arm’s length and three more in the lap and then in front of the face, one, two, and…

  Perhaps Damiano gave a nudge, or perhaps Raphael, in the heat of the performance, wasn’t thinking quite what he was doing, but the third clap came hard and symmetrically down on his injured nose.

  He gasped and rose half to his feet. “I hit myself!” he cried aloud, and then, as greater understanding came to him, he added, “You MADE me to hit myself!”

  The spectral form wavered, perhaps through shame. “But your nose: How is it now?”

  Raphael gave a careful sniff. “I smell blood,” he said, with a hint of petulance. “But I think… I think…”

  Again Damiano leaned close. “I don’t hear anything.”

  Raphael, too, listened. “No. Nothing. The whistle is gone.”

  “And your nose is straight again. You’ll be as handsome as ever.”

  The blond’s fine hands were locked protectively around the middle of his face, but his eyes turned to Damiano with sudden interest. “Am I handsome? I never thought about it.”

  Sadly Damiano smiled. “You’ve never been a mortal before. Now you’ll think about things like that: Are my teeth good? Is that a wrinkle or a spot forming by my eyebrow? Is that fellow a bigger, stronger, better man than I? It’s the mortal condition; we don’t seem to be able to help it.

  “And another part of being mortal, Seraph. Hating. Do you hate your master yet?”

  Raphael squatted down again. He lifted his eyes to the stars while the warm wind stirre
d his hair.

  “My master? I feel bad that he hit me. He had never told me I was not supposed to mention that Djoura was a Berber in front of other Berbers. And how was I to know that Djoura’s father had been sworn to Qa’id Hasiim years ago?

  “And though I know Rashiid had reason to be angry—he felt compelled to give a great gift of money to the Berbers in the Alhambra, as well as losing what he’d paid for Djoura—still, I’d rather not have to see him anymore. Somehow I don’t like looking at him or hearing his voice.”

  “Understandable.”

  “Is it?” Raphael’s left eyebrow shot up in a movement familiar to his student. “I don’t understand it. After all, Rashiid will be Rashiid whether in my sight and hearing or not.

  “But that is nothing like hate, I know, for I have felt hate. One doesn’t have to be a mortal… There is one I hate and have hated for a very long time.” Then Raphael took a deep breath through his newly repaired nostrils.

  “And anyway, this blunder of mine led to Djoura being freed, and freedom was what she most wanted, so I’m glad of it.”

  “Freedom is what we all most want,” murmured the thoughtful spirit, and for a moment he faded into moonlight. When he raised his face to his friend again, there was a hint of fire in his dark eyes.

  “Raphael, you must remember who you are!”

  The man looked only weary. He turned his head away. “I remember, my friend. My confusion is nearly gone.

  “I remember every voice in the choir. And the song, in all its parts —how could I forget that? But my memories are only memories, and don’t move me.”

  The voice of a single frog hidden in the weeds of the pond silenced Raphael for a few moments. Then he said, “More real to me than heavenly music is the fact that my nose hurts, and is dripping blood, and that I know I must dig at the latrines tomorrow, as well as play the ud.”

  Damiano nodded. He dipped one vague hand into the black pool water, passing it through several little perch in the process. Neither hand nor fish were the worse for it. “You don’t talk about God— your Father—anymore.”

  Raphael’s eyes slipped down, from his friend’s face to the undisturbed surface of the water. “You mean Allah. Here He is Allah, and the people of Granada use His name in every third sentence. And they all seem to know just what His will is on every issue. All but me, of course.