“Dami!” cried Saara, and her voice caught in her throat.
“Here,” he replied, and there he was, clear and only slightly shimmery, sitting on the hard ground between the witch and Gaspare. His storm-cloud wings were scarcely visible behind the mortal image.
Saara put her hand out, but stopped before touching. “I…
wanted you to see that. I thought about you and the russet time…”
“I know,” he whispered and gave her a very comfortable little smile. Then he turned to Gaspare and let him share the wordless joke. Then he stood up, wings rising behind him.
“Listen to me, my friends. I am here to interfere in the affairs of the living, as doubtless I should not!”
Damiano’s amused smile faded into seriousness. “If you wish to be of service to Raphael, you must go into the city now. Move quickly. South of the central square you will find a broad avenue lined with orange trees. On this street is a house with a carved gate of cedarwood in a white wall. Enter in.
“There are also within Granada right now some fine horsemen riding fine horses very slowly. These are a sample of my interference, and as such may be of interest to you. But finding the house with the gate is more important.
“Go now; you are needed.” The ghost did not fade; he was simply not there anymore.
Gaspare rose as though on a string. He filled his considerable lungs with air. “Dragon!” he bellowed. “Come quickly!”
“A ghost?” repeated the dragon.
“The ghost of Delstrego,” replied Gaspare importantly. “And he said to hurry.”
The black dragon took to the air lithely enough, springing off his coiled tail, but he refused to be hurried in speech. “I wish I might have seen that.”
Saara had to chuckle. “I thought you would disapprove terribly. Magic being delusion, and all that.”
The great beast considered. “There is that. But spirits have their place in the natural order. If I disapproved of spirits in general, why would I then be adding my small energies to the rescue of one?
“Besides, madam: if this specter had knowledge to communicate… real wisdom, perhaps… What is it he said again?”
Gaspare repeated Damiano’s message, word for portentous word.
They came to the city and passed over the wall. The dragon swooped down in a stomach-twisting dive in order to inspect the place more closely. With its regular low rows of daubed buildings and crowded streets (smelling even up here in the air) it looked like —first, a hive of bees, and then like a hive of disturbed bees. “People can see you,” shouted Saara. “They’re terrified!”
The dragon writhed contemplatively. He slowed his progress so as to examine the length of one avenue broader than its fellows. “So it seems,” he murmured silkily. He rose a few yards higher.
“That edifice just beyond the city,” he explained for his riders’ sakes, “set like a pearl in the red sand. That is the Alhambra, military center of the State of Granada, as well as the residence of Muhammad V, lineal descendant of Muhammad ben Yusuf ben Ahmand ben Nasir, who founded the present dynasty. It is generally accepted to be one of the most beautiful constructions in the world, and into its stones have been set the words of Ibn al-Khatib, that most martial of Islamic poets…”
“Fly!” shrieked Saara, whose sense of urgency had become almost overpowering. “South!”
“I AM flying,” declared the dragon patiently. “And hysteria will make me fly no faster. Besides, if we went faster, I should have missed what I now see below—that small force of either Bedouin or Berber cavalry, whose horses plod with their little teacup muzzles scraping the dirt of the road. Did not the sage spirit speak of such?”
“But he said the house on the street of oranges first, the cavalry after!” Gaspare insisted. “I heard him distinctly.”
Still the dragon, hanging high above the street, vacillated. “Yet we HAVE the cavalry, while the house on the street of oranges is theoretical only. And the prompting of spirits is a very subtle thing. Perhaps we should first investigate…”
“I’ve had enough of this,” said Saara, and without further ado she turned into a dove. Gaspare, left without a handhold, squeaked and grabbed for the dragon’s coronary spines. “Me, too! Take me with you, Saara,” he bawled.
Unruffled the dragon said, “Youngster, I am more than willing to set you down.”
Chapter 12
The dove scouted, dipped, and led the horse on. Gaspare clung like a monkey to the lean black back, with nothing to restrain Festilligambe but a tattered rope bridle. But the young man’s cross-continental ride on a dragon had burned away all the nervousness he had once felt around horses.
They passed the central square—a little plot of green, cleverly irrigated and tended with immense labor—and found the avenue that was edged in fragrant orange trees without trouble. This way was wide and fairly empty. The few people they did pass were dressed well in Saracen style. They failed to notice (or pretended to fail to notice) the sight of a horse chasing a little brown bird along the avenue. Gaspare, not knowing which of these strollers might have had a hand in Raphael’s imprisonment, cursed the overfed lot of them equally.
He sought the house with the white wall and carved wooden gate. Odd. ALL the houses had white walls and all the white walls had wooden gates. They were almost all carved, too, with inscriptions in Arabic, meaningless to a young man not even literate in his own language. The words of the dragon flashed into his mind. “The promptings of spirits are subtle.” Damiano, too? Gaspare had clean forgotten that the ghost had specified cedarwood as the material of the gate they were seeking. But then, neither would he have been able to recognize cedarwood if he had remembered.
Saara, however, fluttered straight toward a gateway of mottled yellow and orange, which was set into a featureless wall surmounted by red tile.
She stood beside Gaspare. “It’s bolted. There’s something going on inside: I hear voices and the sound of a bellows. Can he jump it?”
Gaspare turned Festilligambe and trotted across the street. Then he stared at the looming wall of wood and daub. “Sweet San Gabriele,” he whispered. “Never.”
In his frustration he turned on Saara. “He’s only a horse, you know: not a Cathaysian dragon.” Then an idea occurred to him.
“Delstrego—Delstrego could have made a flame to burn this door away from in front of me!”
Saara, who had been about to return to bird form and dart over the wall, found herself stung by Damiano’s name. “Oh, he could, could he? Well, Gaspare, you stand right there and you will see what I, whom yourself have named the greatest witch in all the Italies OR Spain, can do!”
Gaspare waited nervously.
The desert horses were aware of a presence in the air before their riders. Their dreams of honeyed grass dissolved into the terror of rabbits beneath a hawk.
The black dragon’s interest in the beasts, however, was only aesthetic, for he had recently consumed both a large fat mule and several wild Andalusian cattle (scrawny, but serviceable), and dragons do not eat as frequently as men. And neither did the Berber riders interest him greatly, for he did not see among them any select individual whom a spirit might have thought worth noticing.
There was the little fellow who, once thrown from his horse, waved a spindly sword into the air… But the dragon was hoping for something more flamboyant.
And his sun-bright eyes noticed very soon that the little troop, which had been riding south, toward the Alhambra, held a prisoner —just one. A woman whose ebony skin gave off the same rich highlights as his own scales, and who wore a corona of gold tips (again like his) in her hair.
The dragon chortled with delight at this exotic find. He plucked her from among her captors with the care a collector will give to blown glass.
Simon the Surgeon stared from Rashiid to the cup in his hands. “It is the common practice,” he observed. “Without the draught many more of them die. Since he is full grown and unwilling as well ther
e is a good chance that this one might.”
“Indeed he might,” said Rashiid, with rising inflection. “Indeed he might.” The rotund householder’s eyes were shining; his hands were knotted fists at his sides.
Rashiid was angry. Being awakened to take delivery on a runaway slave that one had not yet noticed was missing—that made one angry. It also made one feel a little bit of a fool.
Stripping the boy for flogging only to discover that he was no boy at all but a man intact—that added to both the anger and the foolishness in no small way.
But sending for the local surgeon: saying to the functionary, “Come,” and having him come, and saying to the assembled household, “Stand,” and having them all stand—that was a thing to comfort one with one’s own power. Rashiid’s mottled hazel eyes were gleaming with that power, and the assembled household shifted from foot to foot, its many subservient eyes turned to the sky, the pond, the white garden wall… Anywhere but to Rashiid.
Anywhere but to the man tied to the hitching post.
Raphael, too, stared past his master, to the white clay wall of the house. But his eyes were not focused on the house. His head was turned slightly, as though he were listening—listening to something important, yet expecting interruption at any moment from a fellow who tended to interrupt. Who had a reputation for interrupting important communications.
Who was a bit of a fool.
“He very well might die,” Rashiid repeated again, for emphasis.
Simon shrugged and put the cup down on his workbench. He was neither overawed nor afraid of Rashiid, for Simon was a free man employed to do a job. Since the greatest part of his work was done at the market, where buyers of young beasts wanted them castrated before taking them home, this wealthy cityman was an unlikely source of business. His tempers could not do Simon harm. The surgeon considered telling him not to get in the way.
No—Rashiid was the employer, and there was no use borrowing trouble. Simon put the cup down.
He signaled his apprentice to step up the bellows pumping.
Some practitioners castrated with hooks and some used clamps and a few used a loop of shrinking leather, but Simon the surgeon had a curved knife with a handle of wood, and this served for almost any occasion from gelding to bloodletting; one could even shave with it. He thrust this blade into the coals so that its single stroke would both cut and cauterize.
The second wife of Rashiid had been standing with her older housemate: soundless, white-faced, one knuckle between her cupid’s-bow lips. Her round eyes had grown more than round, watching Raphael bound to the post. Watching the coals laid and the fire draw up. Now a waft of hot, metal-scented air came to wrap around her where she stood. The fire spat back at the bellows and the blade itself made a noise as it heated.
Ama fainted into Fatima’s arms.
Rashiid saw his wife crumple. He subdued an impulse to go to her. It was first pride that caused him to ignore the incident—the unwillingness to break this moment of power with softness of any kind— but then a horrible surmise entered his brain and Rashiid’s face went hard as stone. Let Ama give thanks to Allah that she had been discovered to be pregnant BEFORE this boy who was not a boy arrived.
Raphael’s blank eyes saw only the face of Djoura at the last moment he had seen her, before they had bound him and thrown him over a horse. Her scorn withered him still.
For Raphael had no great confidence in the choice he had made; perhaps the mortal-born woman had been right and they should have died together under the blue and white tiles of the wall. Now she would be taken back to Africa, where she did not want to go, and he…
Raphael heard the knife moan in the orange coals and he knew dread—dread of loss and further shame… Dread of a life compassed by drudgery and by whippings, played out to a dull rhythm of days. Dread of simple pain.
Surely Djoura had been right.
But though the song was of pain and fear, still Raphael’s body was singing. That body had a will of its own, and he heard it telling him what it feared most was to die.
Raphael listened to the voice of his body with his head turned slightly to one side and on his face was a distant, concentrated expression. But when Ama slumped into Fatima’s arms he saw and he opened his mouth, as though he were on the point of saying something.
HAD he spoken, it would have been to tell her that he knew she had not betrayed him to Rashiid. That he did not blame her for his fate. But Rashiid, Ama’s husband, stood between them, so Raphael said nothing at all.
The knife came out of the fire, not red-hot but hot enough to twist the air around it, turning morning mist into steam. Simon approached Raphael and peered appraisingly into his eyes.
In shock already, the surgeon said to himself. Bad risk. Aloud he called, “Bend him back.”
The calloused hands of the head gardener came around Raphael’s neck and shoulders and stretched him back over the hip-high wooden post. One hand covered his mouth. Another squatted behind him and held his knees.
He could see nothing but the hairs on the gardener’s arm. He heard the man’s heavy breathing. He felt his own body stiffen and he wondered at this, for he had not told it to do so.
Next came a fearful deep noise like wind and a great thudding and crashing. Raphael did not know what caused this, whether the gardener’s shoulder against his ear, an accident with the surgeon’s coals, or his own body’s confusion. But the howling continued and suddenly he was released, reeling at the end of the chain which bound his hands to the post.
The household of Rashiid was scattering like so many birds and crying in a dozen voices. The surgeon’s terrible knife lay abandoned on the ground. Rashiid himself was waving his arms wildly and his face was contorted.
In the middle of this uproar a horse plunged and reared: a black horse. Upon his back was a tall, gangling rider with red hair. He was shouting something inaudible, and so was Rashiid. A flutter of feathers sank down by Raphael’s feet and rose up again as a woman.
She sang a word and his chains fell open to the ground.
The horse seemed to be moving all its legs independently, like a spider. It sailed over the threshold like a leaf in autumn.
Gaspare wondered if he were going to stay upright at all, for the vicious cold wind sucked him along willy-nilly. He spun over packed ground, narrowly missing the wave-lashed surface of a pond, with his hands full of horse’s mane and rope. He lifted his eyes.
It was Raphael and yet it wasn’t Raphael whom Gaspare saw:
naked, squinting with confusion, gape-mouthed, lost in the middle of all the screaming Saracens. There was the angel’s hair, perfect face, slender figure—but all pinched out of mere human clay. Gaspare sat the capering horse with unconscious expertise, his eyes locked on Raphael’s confusion. He saw his teacher fall to his knees. Rage filled Gaspare, mixed with nausea, that he should have to see Raphael reduced to this. With a choked scream he threw Festilligambe into the tumult.
Raphael blinked at the horseman almost half-wittedly. But then the naked man’s eyes focused on the head of the lute projecting beyond Gaspare’s right shoulder, and memory awakened. “Hoal” shouted Gaspare, and he pulled on the reins.
But the horse had his own memory. His black ears swiveled to the human beside his withers. He nickered uncertainly. Then Festilligambe lifted his fine dry head and bellowed like a stallion from joy.
Raphael, grinning at this salute, hoisted himself up behind Gaspare.
There was another hand on the bridle: the same calloused hand that had held Raphael only a minute since, the hand of the head gardener. Gaspare kicked at it and the horse attempted to rear. Rashiid, seeing this, ran from the doorway where Gaspare’s first rush had pressed him and put his own white-knuckled hand on the headstall. Festilligambe threw his head futilely from side to side. His tragic large eyes rolled, showing white all around.
Gaspare dropped the reins and took instead two handfuls of the gardener’s hair. Dragging the man half off the ground, t
he redhead bit him in the ear. His uneven teeth ground together until the gibbering fellow dropped his hold. But in the time it took to accomplish this action three more men had taken hold of some part of the horse’s anatomy. One grabbed Raphael’s bare leg and began to pull him to the ground.
Saara had not been idle. Though weary from her wind summons (but she HAD to show Gaspare) she had scrabbled over the turf among fleeing feet and horse’s hooves. Now she came up with Simon’s bitter-edged knife. Hands dropped away from Raphael. From the horse.
Rashiid, for whom the capture of the horse had meant victory won from defeat, turned at the disturbance and did not see the knife at all, but only a child-faced woman with brown hair in uneven braids and a dress which did not cover her legs. She reminded him a bit of Ama, and Rashiid was not pleased with Ama. With a cold sneer he released his right hand from the headstall to cuff her across the mouth. With no expression on her face Saara released his other hand from the reins by slicing it off at the wrist.
Rashiid sprang back, stiff-armed, pumping blood like a garden fountain into the air. The whole household went still.
Simon the Surgeon had taken no part in the melee, but had flattened himself against the house wall as soon as the horse blew in through the gate. He was paid to do a job, after all, not to get himself killed. But as Simon was a surgeon he knew what was necessary when a man had lost a member, so he took Rashiid, tripped him, dragged him to the overturned brazier and pressed his spouting arm against a coal. The householder’s shrieks reached deafening proportions.
Faces appeared—cautiously—at the gate. They disappeared again. There came the sound of a horn from without. It echoed along the street and was answered by another.
Gaspare looked at Saara. So did Raphael. Saara glanced from one end of the suddenly motionless yard to the other. She shifted her knife nervously.
Then the smell of hot metal and the horrible smell of Rashiid’s seared hand stump mixed with another smell of burning. A lacy, twisting shadow descended. The carefully watered grass withered and steamed as the dragon set himself down. Djoura squatted within one enormous claw, her hands firmly over her face.
The Damiano Series Page 75