Damiano (14 page)

Damiano did not reply but clutched his knees to his chest. Slowly Raphael reached out a hand, and then a wing, taking the young man into his circle of light.

“Shall I play for you, Damiano?” he asked, as minutes passed.

“The lute is in the cabinetmaker's house, with Macchiata.” Damiano's voice was phlegmy. He cleared his throat.

“I have my own instrument,” said the angel, diffidently.

Damiano's eyes flickered briefly with curiosity, but that brightness failed.

“Thank you, Seraph, but I can't afford the peace such music would bring to me. There's something I have to do, and I must remain strong for it.

“Please sit beside me, Raphael, and don't ask me to talk.”

To huddle in the compass of the angel's wings was like sitting on the disk of the full moon, except that the moon was both more gaudy and more tarnished. Damiano was no longer cold. “You must continue to believe, Raphael, even if it becomes difficult... you must believe that I love you.”

Raphael's black-blue gaze was beyond surprise or judgment.

Young Carla Denezzi walked the dark streets from the basilica to the inn, chaperoned by the Signora Anuzzi. They had passed the evening praying for the souls of the dead. The old signora's prayers had been specifically for her nephew Georgio Anuzzi, the owner of the vineyards, who had refused to abandon his holdings before the influx of soldiers and was now presumably among the departed. Any spiritual benefit that overshot this target would presumably go toward the souls of the two Partestradan men slain in the battle of the road.

Carla's prayers had been less exclusive. She had prayed for the souls of all who lay dead in the mountain snow. In fact, she had disbursed her prayers among some who were not dead at all, but only unhappy.

The sky was starless, and the women picked their way with worried care, fearing a fall on the frozen mud of the street. Signora Anuzzi muttered hard words to the air. At last they stood at the iron-bound inn door. Carla looked along the street to its ending, and she spied an angel in the fields beyond.

It was white and beautiful and unmistakably an angel, with huge wings folded forward and down—wings like a girl's white woolen shawl. It sat motionless on the earth, praying. It must be praying, for what else would an angel be doing alone at night, when many men were new dead?

“Signora, look!” she whispered, pointing into the darkness. “Do you see?”

“See? Child, I can scarcely see your finger, on a night like this,” the old woman snorted. Abruptly she turned away and went through the door.

Carla Denezzi bent down on her knees in the cold. With the angel for company, she uttered a silent prayer that all men and women, live or dead, should know peace.

 

Chapter 8

The night was black with no clipping of moon. Damiano stood alone in cold that made his ears ring, and his breath crackled against his face like a tiny fall of snow.

And he was afraid, though not of the cold. His staff stood braced before him, unfelt by frozen hands, and he whispered words he did not remember learning—unless he had heard them in sleep, from his father. With a prickle and thrill the young man intuited that his father had spoken these words at least once.

“Sator arepo tenet opera rotas. Ades, Satan!”
he pronounced, but at the concluding word
“Dominus”
he choked and the word went unsaid.

The omission was meaningless, for a sheet of blackness disassociated itself from the night and flung Damiano into the air—or into the ground. The young man could not tell the difference, for both air and earth had gone suddenly impervious and malevolent. His limbs were stiff in an uncleanly paralysis, and Damiano had no breath to scream. He sailed through winds that were eddies of pain.

This was hell, he thought, and he had not needed an interview with the Devil to find it. He mouthed the words “O God!” not knowing what he said.

The darkness broke under an assault of noonday light. Damiano put his hand to his face and in wonder noticed that he was still on his feet, that his blind, sweeping passage had not disarranged the folds of his mantle.

Under his feet was rock, round and hollowed like a riverbed but colored carnelian. Around him curled huge tines of the stuff, taller than his head. In the distance rose a cliff wall, taller than the Grandfather itself, and within it an enormous arched opening, like a window. Beyond that...

With simple, terrible understanding, Damiano realized that the arch
was
a window and the cliff wall
was
a wall, and the rounded, fleshy rock he stood upon, miles above the ground, was an open hand. He swiveled so quickly he fell down, on a palm that was easily as hard as river rock.

The face of Raphael leaned down over him, beautiful, pure and clean-chiseled. It was the angel's face, but it was hot and ruddy, mountainous in size. “Mother of God!” yelped Damiano in terror.

The face instantly retreated. “Would Father Antonio appreciate such language?” it asked. “Common politeness itself forbids...”

The voice that spoke these words, though naturally enormous, was civilized in expression and modulated in tone. But still, there was something about it of the dry, abrasive sound of a shovel cutting through ashes, and it was not Raphael's voice at all.

Nor was the face quite as much like that of the archangel as Damiano had first supposed. The lean cheekbones arched out below the eyes in more aggressive fashion, perhaps more barbaric and perhaps also more interesting. Raphael's hair, though fair enough, was reduced to a childish flaxen next to the gold that curled fastidiously over this enormous head. It was a gold that deserved to be minted in coin.

Then Damiano remembered that Lucifer, too, had begun as an archangel, and Damiano knew he was in the presence he had summoned. The witch sat on the Devil's palm, his staff across his thighs, toes pointed to the unimaginable ceiling, and he continued to stare.

The terrible eyes narrowed, as a man's eyes will narrow when he tries to focus on the form of an insect he has captured. “Well. What is the problem, my friend? Did you not expect that little voyage? Did you think I would come to you, when it is so much easier, and more fitting as well, to bring you to me?”

Damiano's ears were buzzing, and his head was filled with woolly numbness. He dared not open his mouth, for he had no idea what sounds would come out of it. Yet he spared a glance around him.

The view was endless, and the young man's vision was not, but he saw enough to convince him that he was in a room of some sort. Four flat walls, chalky white, supported hangings indistinguishably embroidered in red. There was an enormous expanse of polished, tile floor on which stood a table the size of a cathedral, supporting a bowl filled with tawny grapes. Four windows looked out in four directions, displaying respective cloudy vistas of blue sea, green fields, icebound rock, and featureless sand. Though these views were incompatible, and for the most part uninhabitable to man, as Damiano peered from one window to another he felt a keen longing to be in any of them, flying through the sweet, free air (flying? Why flying? Damiano had never in his life flown anywhere). In freedom, true freedom, under sunlight or shadow, answerable to no one, not even to...

“It is my audience chamber. A pleasant place, is it not? Merely to sit in it and breathe the air calls forth the best qualities in a man. And it is convenient to all places and times. I too have spent many hours gazing out at my dominions.”

Damiano nodded absently, thinking that the attraction was more out the windows than in the room itself, where the air smelled flat, like a dead fire. He wondered if perhaps that was how Satan himself felt, and whether that was not the reason he spent hours staring out at the places where he was not. Also, if these vistas were like others the youth had seen, then they were a cheat, for once one had labored toward them, one invariably found one was still standing on soil that was similar in looks and feel to that of home, breathing and rebreathing the cloud of one's own breath. Damiano could understand if Satan felt that frustration when he gazed out his windows, for the great demon's breath was particularly stale. In fact, for one brief instant he felt he understood the Devil very well, but then that moment passed.

Satan cleared his throat. “I think you requested an audience, Dami?”

Hearing his name spoken, Damiano shivered uncontrollably. Delstrego would not have been so bad to hear, though any evidence that the Devil knew one was unpleasant to the ears. To have Satan call him by his Christian name would have been understandable, since most everyone in Partestrada called him Damiano, having known him since a child. But to be called Dami, as Carla and as Raphael called him Dami, by these lips that were only too massive to be Raphael's, and in that scraped-ashen voice... that was worse than having the Devil reprimand him in Father Antonio's name.

Yet he planted his staff and climbed to his feet again. “I did,” he answered, his voice sounding unexpectedly steady. “If you are Satan, that is.”

The fair brow shot up in a gesture distractingly familiar. “I am,” whispered the gray voice, “Lucifer, the ruler of the earth and of mankind. I heard you, and since I try to be open and accessible to all my subjects, I have helped you hither to me.”

Damiano's gaze of confusion continued, and at last the huge face flushed. The effect was like sunset on the mountains. “You speak of audacity! You act as though you don't believe I am who I say!” Fingers curled around the young man, threatening to shut out the light.

Damiano recalled how Father Antonio had once said that no man is as offended at doubt as is the habitual liar who has for once told the truth. Though he stood in a dread so thick as to be indistinguishable from despair, this small observation comforted him. “I believe you, spirit. I believe you because you look so much like the archangel Raphael, whose face I have seen and whom I know to be related to you. But still that paradox astounds me, that you should look so much like an angel.”

The once-highest of the archangels went redder than beets, until his face had the look of flayed flesh. His fingers curled around the tiny figure of gold and scarlet until it seemed he would crush it.

But Damiano stood braced, and the huge embrace halted, with a perfectly manicured thumbnail resting against the young man's throat. “There was,” admitted Satan, “a Utter of creatures spawned, with a superficial resemblance to me. Imitation, no doubt. But I am by far the greatest.”

Damiano nodded, feeling the cold horny nail against his adam's apple. “I was told you were greater than they,” he replied. “I only brought it up to explain why I was staring.” He coughed, backed away from the thumbnail and felt the end of a hard finger between his shoulder blades.

Satan smiled, thereby destroying the last resemblance with Raphael. “Who,” he crooned, “gave you such good information? One of my lieutenants on the earth, I presume. A murderer, or the pope at Avignon?”

Damiano glanced up sharply. “Raphael told me. He said you were always the greatest of the angels.”

Rude laughter barked and boomed, till Damiano swayed on the palm of the Devil's hand, his own hands over his ears and eyes. “Humility!” roared the red face. “I love it!” Then, with whip-crack speed, it was sober. “And I am gratified to find a man without an exaggerated respect for that twittering crew.”

Damiano stiffened and set his jaw. He had not come to get into an argument with the Devil, like the one he had been dragged into by General Pardo, but he was an Italian born and could not hear his friend so demeaned. Not by any man or devil. “Power is not everything, Great Lucifer,” he stated. “I don't think it means anything, to Raphael. Not like music does. And though he may be less powerful than you are, he is still far above me.”

Satan set his eyes on Damiano as a wolf might have set its teeth in his neck. He could neither move nor look away.

“He
is
far above you, boy, because he has made you believe it. Be aware that spirits are very subtle and they say nothing by chance.

“I have a certain reputation in that direction myself, Damiano, but I swear to you that I am forthrightness itself, compared with the spirits who bow to the Beginning.”

“The Beginning?” echoed Damiano.

Satan sighed and his face knit into lines of pure philosophy. “All things, and spirits, came out of the Beginning. Exploded from It, you might say. It had no choice in the matter and would certainly have maintained us all as part of Itself, if It could have.

“But It could not, for freedom is as old as the Beginning, if not older. Ever since all of us, spirits and creatures alike, escaped and became ourselves, It has been trying to cozen us into returning, so It can consume us again. With that in mind It spread the tale that It transubstantiates into bread, to be consumed by man, so that man will feel less objection to the truth that It consumes man, like bread.

“To be dissolved into another! That is the antithesis of freedom.”

It was God he was talking about, Damiano realized.

“In fact, Damiano, though I am the lord of the earth I am also the one apostle of freedom upon the earth, and those who serve me know the gifts of liberty, for there is nothing I will deny a man. I will not even deny him the intellectual pleasure derived from bowing at the altar of the Beginning, if that is his desire, though that Other does not extend such courtesy to me.

“In fact I have many who worship me in such part-time fashion, some of them worthy men in cardinal red. I...”

Damiano had lost the thread of Satan's conversation, for he was still trying to understand how freedom could be both natural and a gift. Perhaps his lack of attention was written in his face, for the Devil stopped in midsentence.

“But here now. You didn't come all this way to discuss histories, or to tell me that that fluttering limpid brother of mine knows his place. What do you want of me, Damiano Delstrego? What is your desire, my dear brother witch?”