The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “Allah and I have not been introduced.”

  “You are bitter,” whispered the ghost.

  Raphael smiled and his battered face was transformed. “I’m not,

  really.” He put his hand into the waistband of his trousers and pulled out a little pouch. “I have a pebble, Dami: the one you gave me. I take care of it.”

  The moon had rolled away and only Jupiter and the Dog Star made light enough to outshine the approach of dawn. In that season and latitude Sirius never set.

  Raphael was sleeping like a dog, however, curled against the cold with a protective hand on either side of his nose. Even as he slumbered, the little perch of the pond did not relax their honor guard, and the carp at the bottom hugged the bottom and sides of the tank as though to push their way through soil to the transformed angel.

  Soon the dozen men in the barracks would be expected to wake up and be useful. They slept all the harder now in expectation.

  But in the main house little Ama was awake; she had had to wake up to vomit, which was her recent custom. As always, concluding this task left her fresh and airy, ready for the day’s experience. And now she tiptoed out the white doorway, sure of her path despite the lack of light.

  Ama was wearing white. She came sans veil and her hair was undone. She looked more like Rashiid’s little daughter than Rashiid’s young wife. She found Raphael on the bench beside the fish pond. Finger-length perch darted in every direction.

  “Ho, slugabed! Wake up. Wake up and do my hair.”

  Raphael opened both eyes. He yawned, winced, and touched his upper Up. He chafed his unclad arms.

  “Since because of you I don’t have Djoura anymore, you must be my body servant,” Ama persisted. Then she giggled. “You’re much nicer, after all, though you’re the wrong color.”

  She leaned over him and peered closely at his face. “Wrong colors, I should say. How shocking!” Ignoring his incoherent reply, Ama pushed his knees off the bench and sat herself down facing away from him, presenting her abundant hair.

  “My husband is a brute; I have always known so. He would hit me, I’m sure, if my family were not so important. I’m glad they are. My uncle is a nakib; he has the fealty of two hundred men. But not so much money.

  “Why do you sleep outside, Raphael? It gets cold in the morning. It’s cold now.

  “You know how Djoura used to sleep? Fully dressed, in all those dusty black gowns of hers. Looked like a hill of mud, she did, with her veil over her black face. But she was warm, I bet.

  “What did you say?”

  Raphael had been about to tell Ama why he slept on the bench by the fish pond: a story which involved his first and only night in the barracks (fully dressed, like Djoura), when because of his humming and his muted conversation with an unseen visitor he had earned eviction. But as he rose from his hard cot he thought of something else to say.

  “I don’t know how to do your hair, mistress,” the slave admitted. “I have never done a lady’s hair before.”

  Ama shrugged and set her small mouth. “You know how to make braids, don’t you? Braid it.”

  Raphael set to work. His hands were good, and he was, of course, an artist. He worked neatly but without great speed, and Ama wiggled. After a few minutes, she wiggled backward into his lap.

  “Rashiid is angry with me too. Isn’t that absurd? All because I’m the one who wanted the black. How was I to know she was of an important clan? It’s Rashiid’s own business to know those things; I’m just his wife, after all.”

  She darted an avian glance back at the blond. “I wish I weren’t his wife. I wish I was YOUR wife instead!” Then Ama giggled at her own conceit. “The wife of a eunuch! Wouldn’t that be an easy job?”

  Suddenly the girl spun about on Raphael’s knees, pulling her black tresses from his fingers. Her face was inches from his. With her fingers she combed his yellow hair over his eyes and began to twist it about. “Your turn, Pinkie… I mean Raphael.

  “You’d make such a pretty girl yourself, except that you’re too big, of course, and too skinny. But I like your eyes, and your mouth is so sweet.” She kissed his not-quite-awake face.

  Color had descended from the sky: the green of the pond, the blue in Raphael’s eyes, the hidden russet in Ama’s hair. “Shall I marry you, Raphael? Shall I forget about Rashiid and marry you? You can be my little wife!”

  Ama forced her treble voice down to a masculine growl as she repeated again and again the phrase “my little wife.” She had quite a talent for imitating Rashiid, both in word and gesture; Raphael found himself being possessively pawed all over. It was rather pleasant.

  “I have only seen one eunuch before,” whispered Ama, breaking out of her husbandly character for a moment. “He was the little boy of my uncle’s household in Algiers, and he had two red scars in this shape.” She laid one finger crosswise over another. “He would cry if we tried to touch them.

  “Here, Pinkie. While no one else is watching. Take your trousers off and show me.”

  Raphael’s fair forehead drew down and he prisoned Ama’s exploratory hands in his own. “I’m not supposed to do that,” he said.

  With a force of outrage she yanked free of his grasp. “Not supposed to… Who said you’re not supposed to? I’m your mistress and I say…” Ama grabbed the waistband of Raphael’s cotton trousers and pulled until the cord broke. The baggy garment slipped onto the bare wood of the bench.

  Little Ama looked first surprised and then quite confused. She was speechless. Under the intensity of her stare Raphael grew nervous. He also felt quite warm, somehow, though the sun had not yet crested the wall. He attempted to gather the cloth again at his hips, but Ama forestalled him.

  “Either a eunuch looks just like a man, once he grows up, or…” Her small round eyes rose to his. “Are you a whole man after all, Raphael?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “But no one is supposed to know that.”

  Ama rolled her eyes. She edged away from the slave along the bench and folded her hands on her lap. Her feet swung to and fro, not touching the ground. “By the light of Allah!” she whispered, and then, “Rashiid is going to be sooo angry!”

  Raphael found he was more nervous than ever, though not nearly so warm. “I did not ever tell him I was a eunuch,” he ventured to say to the girl, but she only muttered and shook her head.

  Then with her typical unpredictability, Ama squeezed Raphael teasingly in a place he did not expect. “I won’t tell,” she promised, grinning sidelong. “Not if you’re nice to me.” Then she turned and darted, perchlike, past the fish pond and away.

  In the harbor of Adra, the big-bellied ships bobbed and wallowed in the swell. The longshoremen sang in Spanish and the wind tasted of salt.

  Djoura hated it: both the Spanish and the water-laden air, which made her nose run. She despised the whining Northern Arabic of the mariners who warbled and yodeled to each other in the hold, securing their cargo of oranges. She had great contempt for the official Granadan bookkeeper, a sunburned Spaniard who sat on a small date keg by the gangplank, in case the owner of the boat should try to load anything in evasion of the export duties.

  Djoura sat behind the gay-striped partitions in the stern of the ship which was to take her across the Mediterranean, and she thought furiously.

  It had been a pleasant shock, in the beginning, when the tribesmen burst into the Spanish pig’s hot kitchen, scaring his old wife into hysterics and pulling her out of the grease and soot. It had also been fulfilling to see Rashiid babbling apologies—not to her, of course, but to the Berbers he had so grievously offended.

  Djoura had not expected these pale Berbers, strange to her, to take such an interest. It was only just—only Berber—that they should, of course, but still, Djoura had lived her life in the real world, and no one else in her five years of slavery looked past her skin color to see that she was of the free people, and that her captivity was an outrage.

  And this, besides, was not the manner in
which Djoura had planned to regain her freedom. Where did they think they were sending her, anyway? Not a soul had bothered to share with her that information. The black woman knew well she had no living male kin. She had seen her father’s headless body, and her single brother— well, if he had lived, he would have found her by now.

  Perhaps they would dump her with the first black Berbers to pass through Algiers. Then what would she be? Little more than a slave, again.

  As a slave, she had known herself a Berber, and therefore not truly a slave. Now, kinless among her own race, she would be a free but homeless female, and therefore not free at all.

  Djoura cursed the pride which had forced Hasiim to “rescue” her —a woman in whom he had no interest, and to whom he had never bothered to speak.

  And always Djoura’s circle of thought returned to her Pinkie, whom she had groomed for the role of her male “protector” in their escape from Rashiid’s household, and who was the unwitting cause of all this upset. How had he suffered for his interference? Surely that greasy swine had not let his loose tongue go unpunished…

  Poor Pinkie: How long would he be able to hide his secret among that household—without Djoura? He would be a real eunuch soon enough, and with stripes to boot.

  Ah, but maybe that would be just as well. Pinkie was so naive: too childlike even to consider vengeance. And he wasn’t much of a man, to look at: pale, beardless, baby-haired. He wouldn’t mind as much as some. Assuredly he would not kill himself from the shame of castration, as many men would. Djoura sighed. The wind caused the hangings of her enclosure to flap and billow, reducing it to an unconcealing framework of ropes: a seclusion as ineffective as was this “rescue” from slavery.

  Then, between one moment and the next, Djoura knew that she could not leave Pinkie to his fate.

  For hadn’t she named him her brother? And even as a brother must avenge his sister or die, so must she, Djoura, return for the poor pale singer she had adopted.

  Besides, she missed him.

  With dignity, the woman rose to her feet. Brass coins jingled sweetly around her ears. A pillar of black, she strode out of her enclosure, ducking under the supporting tent rope.

  The bookkeeper with his tally sat on a keg at the head of the gangplank. He looked up with surprise to see the woman standing before him. In faulty Arabic he told her to return to her place.

  In response Djoura mumbled something inaudible. She crooked her little finger and whispered again. Rising halfway to his feet, the embarrassed official presented his ear for some petty feminine revelation.

  Djoura put one large hand firmly over the man’s money pouch and the other firmly against his chest. She heaved.

  With a weak cry the bookkeeper fell backward from the keg into the green Mediterranean. Djoura paraded down the plank and into Adra.

  Chapter 10

  Though heat rises,” the deep, pipe-organ voice beneath them intoned, “the upper regions are colder. This is true over all the earth.”

  Gaspare was not satisfied. He shifted his grip on Saara’s waist. (He had shifted his grip so many times that she was developing the horse’s trick of swelling her middle whenever the girth tightened.)

  “I’m more inclined to believe you just haven’t gone high enough to find the layer of heat that surrounds the earth.”

  There was a short silence from the dragon. “I have never read that there is such a layer,” he replied at last.

  “Stands to reason,” attested the youth, kicking the metallic black neck absently.

  “I rather think a look at the simple geometry of the situation will explain the phenomenon, youngster.”

  “Geometry. Is that a foreign word?” Gaspare mumbled distrustfully.

  The dragon sighed at Gaspare’s ignorance. Saara sighed also, for she had a headache. She had carried it since waking on the mountain’s stony side with Gaspare shaking her. She wondered how the dragon (old as he was) could have recovered so quickly.

  When Saara as a child had a headache, her mother had used to roll an egg against her head, until the ache went into the egg. Then she would bury it beneath the snow of the yard: egg and ache together.

  She wished now she had an egg. She wished she were home.

  Home? Yes, and she didn’t mean Lombardy, but the far Fenlands, where her Lappish people dug their houses, pressed felt, and followed the herds of sturdy deer through white winter. For the first time in many, many years, Saara the Fenwoman thought of home without remembering Jekkinan and the faces of her dead babies, strewn across the floor of the hut.

  Her children were dead, and Jekkinan too. So, for that matter, was Ruggerio, and her old enemy Delstrego senior. All dead and folded away. (Like egg white in a cake. Like an egg itself buried in the snow.) Soon she, too, would be folded into history: that was the rule ever since the Spirit sang earth into being.

  Damiano was right; the summoning made the separation of the living and dead worse. Saara felt renewed pain, for she would have liked so much to have shown Lappland to Damiano. He would have liked it, for he liked anything pretty.

  If she lived through this, she told herself, she would return to the Fens and see it again—the red autumn, the white winter, the crying geese in the springtime—for the sake of Damiano Delstrego, and perhaps he would know the beauty through her eyes.

  Padding barefoot down an alley wet with offal, Djoura’s every movement was regal. The night air might as well have been thick with jasmine as with garlic and piss, for Djoura’s free soul was touching the high winds freighted with clouds.

  For over a week she had been alone among the rocks in the climbing desert which stretched between the ocean and high Granada. She had bought a mule and then sold it again, prefering her own feet for transport. The customsman’s gold had permitted her to eat well. Now she had reached Granada,

  For the first time in her grown life Djoura’s steps had not been ordained by another. These nights were the first in her life that someone else had not decided where she should sleep. She had slept in haystacks and under upturned wagons. She had slept under the moon.

  Tonight Djoura did not sleep at all, but paraded past mud brick and stucco, through the capillaries of a city she did not know, toward the liberation of another besides herself.

  The poor were curled dozing in doorways all around her. Good for them—it was certainly better to sleep in a doorway than in the rank holes within doors. Djoura stared down at the sleepers from a great height. Her veil was back and her hair gleamed with a constellation of coins. From within one house—a heavy, feverful pile of mud— came singing. It was bad singing, out of tune and with strictly private rhythm. But Djoura took it in and let it add to her own strength; she swelled with power as she walked.

  “I am so tall now,” she whispered to the air, “that there is no chain forged which could span my neck. And should some clever man forge such a shackle, he would find no ladder big enough that he could reach up to put it on.

  “And if he DID reach me, I would crush him in this hand, for his trouble,” Djoura continued. Her black hand moved invisibly through the heavy shadow. Eyes, teeth, and coins glimmered. “I grow larger at every moment.

  “Like the earth after rain,” she murmured on. “Taller and stronger, stronger and taller.” Her round nostrils flared like those of a high-blooded horse.

  “I am Djoura, the black one, the free. The breaker of chains. I am Djoura: my will is a sword!”

  And the walls on either hand fell away from her as though she had pushed them down. Djoura stood at a large crossroads, under moonlight. She raised her arms and made the moonlight hers. Her layered clothing cast a terrible shadow on the paving.

  Even Djoura herself blinked, surprised at the way the world was acceding to her new-won mastery. The moon touched her face like a rain of white feathers.

  Djoura cupped her hands to the moon. She danced (with African straightness, lest she spill the moon from her hands) and laughed, crying, “I am mad, mad with my own strength! M
oon keep me up, for if I stumble, I must knock a house down!”

  And though the woman was far from stumbling, she did spill moonlight as she spun. Cold light spattered from the coins on her head over every rough cobble, and her wide skirts made a shadow like a spinning black planet.

  There was one other sharing Djoura’s star-washed stage, though she hadn’t noticed him. This was a small man, long nosed, thin, dressed in Bedouin white muslin. He sat waiting on the dry fountainhead that marked the center of the square, and what he was waiting for is of no importance to us.

  His legs were neatly crossed. To Djoura (when she at last perceived him) he looked impossibly droll, sitting there so neatly and so still under the savage moonlight, so as she passed him she reached up one long African arm and clenched her hand. “I have caught the moon!” she whispered to him, making her eyes round. “I will hide it in my bosom now, and no one will know who took it but YOU!”

  Following her own words, she thrust her hand into her bodice, lifted it out, and shook her fingers in the small man’s face. “See! I have hidden it. I don’t have it anymore!” She floated away, then, laughing high in her nose.

  The man sat without moving. His mouth had gone faintly sour, and his eyes were fixed on the wall opposite him. But after Djoura had passed, fading into another dark alley, he raised his sight to heaven. “There is no God but Allah,” he intoned, “and Mohammad is his Prophet.”

  “Yes, a fish,” Raphael admitted. “A fish, or a small bird. This orange tree, too, whispers His name to me, but only after everyone has gone to bed.”

  “His name?” whispered the soft voice that came from the shadow.

  “The name of my Father, whom they call Allah: the name I can’t remember from moment to moment,” Raphael replied. Then he pushed a weight of pale yellow hair from his eyes. “But none of these speaks as clearly to me of Him as one look at your face, Dami.”