Damiano's Lute (10 page)

“Guilty?” echoed the boy. “You feel guilty husking oats? By the Virgin and every saint, Damiano, do the little grains cry out as you break them?”

Damiano sighed and rested his chin on the boards for a moment. The muscles of his back hurt. He was also lightheaded from lack of nourishment, and his temper was on edge. He therefore collected himself before answering, “No, of course not, Gaspare. I meant I feel that Festilligambe is expecting us to give the stuff to him.”

Gaspare's florid face grew pinker and his mouth worked. But he bit off whatever he'd first intended to say, and said only, “The creature would be better off with wealthier owners.”

Damiano did not reply, though it was on his tongue to remind the boy that Festilligambe did not have owners but
an
owner.

Emboldened by this silence, Gaspare spoke the corollary to his statement, which was that the owners would be a lot wealthier if they sold the horse.

Damiano rested his face on the backs of his hands and resisted a temptation to escape from this unpleasantness into the familiar vacancies of his mind.

“Gaspare,” he began, “please try to understand. That horse likes “Likes you, maybe, but doesn't listen to you a pig's fart. And he doesn't like nobody else in this world. Especially me.”

Damiano glanced up, for he heard a tone of real hurt in his companion's voice. “Oh, he likes you all right, Gaspare. He likes you better than he likes anyone else except me.

“And in the beginning…” and Damiano's thoughts went back over a year in time, to the sheep pastures above Partestrada, where he had first seen the black gelding in the string of Carla Denezzi's brother. The horse had been flourishing then.

So had Damiano. He had worn soft boots, white linen and a full cloak of weasel skins.

Painful and distant came the memory to Damiano that he had once been respectable. He had sat at table with the parish priest. Once, he had spoken with Petrarch.

He had had a house. And a city.

Now that was over, and he was that pitiful creature—an Italian in exile. According to his bargain with the Devil, he must not return home. According to the Devil's bargain with him, he was now living the tag ends of his days.

For a moment's intense, ashen melancholy, brought on perhaps by starvation, Damiano was sorry the plague had spared him. But then that moment passed, and he remembered what he had.

He had an angel. An archangel, who had shared with him as much as mortal may share with spirit—which is to say, music. And he had a horse—a temperamental horse, but a fine one—and a still more temperamental distinguished colleague.

He watched a roadside row of plums pass by the wagon, just entering into their pale bloom. The tended landscape was sweeter than anything he had ever seen in Italy, and the soft air was gauzy. The sight and the smell and the warmth together sank Damiano into a diffuse and pleasurable stupor in which he could almost forget the stiffening lacerations that crisscrossed his back.

An angel and a horse and a friend (of sorts). And of course a lute, too. That was important, even though it wasn't much of a lute. Together, Gaspare, angel, horse and lute made a total for which it was worth losing a bit of respectability.

Especially while the weather remained so fine. Respectability was much less important in good weather.

Oddly enough, thought the sleepy musician, in some ways Raphael was the least respectable of his companions. It was talking to the angel, after all, that caused people to edge away from him.

Were it not for Raphael, Gaspare would have no cause to think Damiano a madman.

All these reflections took the time of one long sigh and a shift of weight from left elbow to right. Damiano continued his interrupted sentence. “And in the beginning, the horse liked me least of all men.

“But, Gaspare, I want you to listen to the strange thing that happened to me when I was being whipped in Petit Comtois.”

Gaspare's laugh was not kindly. “I can think of many possible strange things….”

The half-naked man ignored this interruption. “I sort of blacked out. But not really, for I found myself standing somewhere else. In Lombardy, I was, in a place I have been once before, though I never talked about it to you. A beautiful garden.”

The ironic light died behind the boy's eyes. “That happens,” he admitted. “When a man is in pain, or sick. When I was five and had the spots I had such a fever Evienne says I thought she was Saint Lucia, though why Saint Lucia, I have no idea….”

Damiano raised his chin again and frowned fiercely at Gaspare. “I spoke, not with Saint Lucia, but with a woman I know. A very beautiful woman….”

“A beautiful one? Sounds less and less real all the time.”

“And she was surprised to see me standing next to her. I was like a spirit, for my body was left in Petit Comtois. We both agreed I should not have come there, and she sent me back.”

One rusty eyebrow shot up. “She sent you back? Isn't that the way with beautiful women? But you should learn persistence, musician. Otherwise there will never be any little black-haired, sheep-eyed babies running around.”

Damiano pushed himself off the floor of the wagon. It seemed the heat of his own irritation was lifting him.

“This woman I speak of is a great lady, Gaspare. The most powerful witch in the Italies, if not in all of Europe. You must learn to think before you speak of people, or you will never grow
old
enough for there to be any little red-haired, pointy-nosed babies running around.

“And surely by now you know me enough to take seriously what Gaspare's small brow beetled enormously. The reins dropped from his hands and lay on the footboard of the seat. “Do you think I'm not old enough already, lute player? I'll have you know that I may only be fourteen, but some fourteen-year-olds are men already, while some twenty-three-year-olds…”

Damiano would not be sidetracked. Not even by this subject. Especially not by this subject. “. . . to take seriously what I say on the subject of powers unseen. I was trained from birth to feel and manipulate these powers, by a father who was no mean witch himself.

Gaspare's eyes dropped with queasy self-consciousness. He plucked up the reins.

“And on top of his training, and my natural predisposition to magic, I have added a thorough course of study in the works of the great Hermes Trismagistus, along with the additions and commentaries of Mary the Jewess. If I, out of all mankind, tell you I have visited Lombardy in immaterial form, then me you can believe!”

Gaspare set his long jaw. Rough-mannered as he was, he had always avoided this particular confrontation with Damiano. Now it seemed inevitable. He pulled on the reins with a long, exaggerated “Hoa.” Festilligambe stopped out of sheer surprise.

“Damiano. My dear, close friend,” he sighed. “You have no magical powers.”

Damiano blinked. “Of course not. Not since last year. I gave them all away.”

Gaspare's regard was steady and pitying. The horse shook his glistening, sweaty mane under the sun and opened his nostrils hugely.

“You gave them away.”

Damiano blundered stiffly onto the seat beside him. “Yes. But I still had them when I first met you in San Gabriele. Don't you remember? I disappeared in front of you and scared you half to death.”

Gaspare was affronted. “I don't remember being scared half to death by you. You had a trick or two, I grant. You could make it seem your bitch-dog talked. That was fine, and I'm really sorry you lost that dog. I like dogs. Much better than horses.”

Damiano pulled his hair in consternation, while he bit down on his large lower Up. “Gaspare! What are you saying? I'm always talking about how I was a witch, and how my staff worked, and about Raphael, whom I summoned—or rather requested audience of—and so learned to play the lute. I know you don't believe everything I say, but if you don't believe that I was a witch, then you must think I should be locked away in a cellar!”

Gaspare glanced up and away again. He brushed a stray fly from his colleague's back. “Not at all, Damiano. But I think that it is important to you to feel special.”

“Eh?” The dark, curly head jerked up, and the black eyes opened round.

“It is important to every man to feel special,” continued Gaspare moderately. “But what you don't realize is that you
are
special. You are singular. You are the finest lute player—oh, God's bollucks, the finest
musician
—we have seen in all our travels. I doubt there is another here or back in Italy as original and progressive as yourself. Being a magus or a wizard fades to nothing next to that. You need not wish to be a sorcerer. You need not ever think about it again.”

“I was not a magus, or wizard, or sorcerer. Just a witch.” And he stared and stared at Gaspare. “But what you are saying is simply that you do not believe me.”

“I do not believe you,” replied Gaspare quietly.

Damiano snorted. He folded his large hands together and his eyes wandered over the gentle Provençal horizon, where stood small cots and ricks, and ponds of water floating with ducks. Five seconds of silence grew into ten. Into twenty.

“I feel very strange right now,” Damiano announced.

Gaspare shot him one wary, concerned glance. “Perhaps that is how it feels to come to your senses,” he suggested, trying to say it as inoffensively as possible.

But Damiano spared only one distracted glance. He stood up on the footboard, and then climbed on the seat itself, holding to the wagon eave for support. Both Gaspare and Festilligambe looked up at him standing above them.

“No, Gaspare. I mean I feel magic. Even now. There is power in the air above us.” He waved hugely at the empty sky.

“Oh, Christ!” groaned Gaspare. “I have done it!” He hid his face in his hands. “He is beyond recovery.”

And now Damiano was pointing. “Look! Look, Gaspare. It is coming. Can't you see?”

The boy peeked. “I see a little bird,” he said in a flat voice. “A little bird bobbing and flapping, like little birds do.”

“She is
looking
for us,” the other insisted. “She is looking for me, I think.” Now he gesticulated with both hands, nearly overbalancing on the flimsy seat.

The horse snorted. Unobtrusively Gaspare sidled to the edge of the seat. The little bird (it was a dun-gray dove, with a ring around its neck) passed overhead, banked in the air and circled the wagon.

Gaspare glared from the dove to Damiano. The action was too perfect. He suspected this whole scene was a trick arranged especially for him, but for the life of him, he couldn't think how it had been done. As the bird circled again, Gaspare began to feel silly. He watched the dove descend to the dust of the road, where the horse sniffed it and uttered a very wise, deep nicker.

And then, while Damiano clambered down from the wagon seat, capering with what enthusiasm his striped back would permit, and as Gaspare's vision swam, the dun dove turned into a very beautiful— not lady, certainly, not with that blue felt dress which showed feet and ankles and more besides—a most exquisitely beautiful brown-braided, barefoot peasant maiden.

She put one hand upon the horse's shoulder, perhaps with the apprehension that her sudden appearance might have upset the beast. But Festilligambe might have been accustomed to transforming people since foalhood. His left ear twisted around but his right ear did not feel it was worth the effort. His head neither inclined nor flinched away. He inched away from her touch with only his usual diffidence.

She looked at the horse and the wagon and she looked at Gaspare (and at that moment the boy knew that this one
was
a great lady after all, even barefoot and in felt, so he swallowed firmly and bit down upon his unruly tongue) and then she looked through him and finally she allowed herself to look upon the young man standing in front of her.

“Where is this plague?” she said, speaking Italian with a strange, broad, bouncing accent. “Neither of you has such sickness in you.” Her small face showed concern, along with a certain shade of accusation, but as she frowned at Damiano, the tiny hairs that escaped her braids caught the sun. “Your only trouble is that you don't eat right.”

Damiano was looking at the gleaming bronze hairs instead of at the frown, while he himself was smiling so that he thought perhaps he would not be able to talk. “You—you came all the way from Lombardy, Saara. To see me? Because of my strange visit to you? Gaspare here was just telling me that you were a fever dream, like the time he had the spots and saw his sister as Saint Lucia.”

Then, before his bubbling triviality might have time to irritate Saara, he added, “Yes, my lady, there is plague behind us, and if we have escaped it I am only too glad. And the flogging I mentioned, which caused me to flee to you—that was real, too, though nowhere so terrible as the plague. But I did not think you would trouble yourself so….”

Saara the Fenwoman put her hand on Damiano's bare arm, intending to turn him around. As they touched she saw some shade of feeling in the movement of his eye and she said, “Don't worry, Dami.” Her frown dissolved. “Now that we are both present in body, it is no longer dangerous for me to touch you.”

Damiano's eyes opened wide. He scratched his own bare shoulder, and from his confusion he rescued some element of gallantry. “No longer dangerous? My sweet lady, it is because of our bodies that danger enters into it.” But as he spoke, pride turned his mangled back away from her.

“It is nothing worth looking at,” he declared. “No more than bramble scratches. Forget I ever spoke of it. I took off my shirt because the day was warm.”

Damiano met Saara's eyes slowly, for he was not a good liar, and he found in them a swirling, green-brown angry fire at this silliness of his.

As around Saara (and around the power of Saara) all things had unexpected color and focus, so even her anger took on brightness. Though once Damiano might have met, or at least understood this light of anger, now he could not even look at her. For she was the greatest and most assuredly the most beautiful witch in the Italies, while he had not even the fire with which he had been born.