Damiano's Lute (11 page)

So he was silenced and his eyes slid away. And as Saara saw this, her anger faded into something like pity, or like hurt, and upon that emotion yet another sort of anger fed.

“You fool! What under all the winds have you been doing to yourself? Don't you know that plague is death, and not all the magic that is in the earth can overcome it? And this…”as she spun him about and pointed to the scabbing weals, “how did you let
this
happen? Do you forget who you are? You! You who were once strong enough to carry half of my soul away with you, and then wise enough to bring it back!

“I know you, witch, for I carry around a dark child you have abandoned, and all it does is whisper your name! You cannot lose your self-respect without bringing shame to me. And if you should die, witch—Damiano—if you should die of plague in a far country, then what am I to do with that little shadow?”

Self-possession returned to Damiano between one moment and the next. His head snapped up and he rested his own large hand upon hers. “When I die, Saara, then you must release anything of mine that you hold. A dead man should be dead.”

Saara blinked: catlike, green, but uncertain. “Not ‘when,' but ‘if,' Dami. You are not sick, remember, but only underfed.” And in a whisper she added, “And I am much older than you.”

In that instant their positions were reversed, for the young man stood with quiet assurance, while Saara stepped back a pace, slipping her hand from his.

“And I ask again…” She raised both her arms in a world-embracing gesture. “Damiano, in a land filled with food, why have you starved yourself?”

During the prior conversation, Gaspare had sat on the wagon seat as motionless as the whipstock, while magic and talk of magic turned his head around, and while talk of dark children turned his ideas of Damiano on their heads.

But at this last question Damiano himself turned from Saara to Gaspare, and what he saw in that pinched, ruddy face caused him to break out laughing.

The boy took this as a sort of permission, and his own strong need pulled him from the wagon seat to the presence of the terrible, angry, beautiful barefoot lady, where he knelt and clasped his hands about her knees.

“Oh, signorina bellissima! He will never admit it, being too stiff-necked and mad besides, but he is starving to death in truth, and I am also. And if you are as great a lady as your appearance declares you, you will have pity on us and give us a little something. If you have no silver, then bread will do. Enchanted bread is very good, I have heard. Or enchanted roast pork, or even enchanted boiled greens….”

Saara had been aware of Gaspare on the wagon seat, just as she had been aware of Festilligambe between the traces, but when the boy fell at her feet, and clasped her embroidered dress she gaped from his red face to Damiano's dark one.

“Who?” she asked.

Gaspare's gesture began at Damiano and ended theatrically, slapping his own breast. “I'm his dancer,” he announced. “And if he has lost a little of his looks, signora, do not exclude him from your graces. Some of his decay is age, of course, as he is all of three and twenty, but most of it is only hardship, curable with a little kindness.”

His gooseberry green eyes stared wildly into her green ones as he stage-whispered, “I beg you only to remember the dark child!” Then, seeing in the elven face no perceptible sign of softening (indeed, Saara's expression was frozen by complete incomprehension), Gaspare added, “But if after all these entreaties, it still seems the fellow is beyond saving, it is perhaps worth noting that I am only fourteen at present, so my best years are certainly before me.”

Saara shifted within Gaspare's unslackening knee-clasp. She looked up once more at Damiano, who was so trapped between anger at Gaspare, sympathy with the boy and a general desire to laugh at the picture he made, that his face had gone nearly as red as the redhead's.

“Why do you need a dancer?” Saara inquired of him.

He cleared his throat. “Gaspare. Let the lady go now,” he commanded.

Obediently Gaspare released. Then in a reaction toward dignity the boy stood upright, brushing himself off.

Damiano brushed one hand through his hair as he continued, “I need a dancer, Saara, because I am a musician. I play. He dances. People pay us—when they feel like it.

“That is also why we are starving.” He laughed at his own words, not because they were very funny, but because he found it easy to laugh around Saara.

“I don't mean because we're bad, so no one wants to hear or see us. I don't think we're bad, either of us.”

“We're certainly not,” interjected Gaspare with a great deal of confidence.

“But no one in Franche-Comté knows us yet, and we don't even know where and when the markets are, so… it is not easy.”

Saara continued to stare, and though Damiano believed, or wanted to believe, that he knew the woman well, he could not read her expression. From somewhere within him a spark of defiance rose. “So why should I apologize?” He shrugged. “Being hungry isn't a sin.

The woman started, in abrupt, birdlike fashion. “Ruggerio would talk like that; he would say, ‘If I want to sleep till midday, so what? It isn't a sin.' Or in the summer he would say, ‘When you walk around without your clothes like that, Saara, you are sin waiting to happen.'

“Someday I must learn what a sin is,” she concluded.

Gaspare's guffaw at the mention of walking around without clothes was rather overdone. But then he thought that line expected a guffaw, and was rather annoyed that Damiano had missed his cue.

Because he did not like to be reminded of the Roman he had killed, Damiano remained sober. “I myself am never certain, my lady. But I have found that harm done to another person is usually a sin, while harm done to myself usually is not.”

Saara took her left braid in her right hand, and her right braid in her left, and she yanked on them both. Thoughtfully she regarded the sweet hills of grass and trees.

Behind them rose a height of vines, their leaves just breaking, waxy green against the chalky soil. Down ahead the road looped around water, and the rough calls of ducks rose in the air. Set back from both pond and highway was a house: a rural mansion, limed white and possessing at least four rooms. To the right of the road spread pastureland, dotted with sheep. As though apprehending her notice, a sheepdog began to bark.

The witch stood motionless, her lips twitching slightly. Gaspare opened his mouth to speak, but Damiano elbowed him neatly, for he knew what Saara was doing. “There.” She pointed. “Three people are in that house. There is a whole new lamb hanging over a smokefire. Also a barrel half filled with sleeping roots: turnips, maybe. And in the oven, pot pies are baking now; I think even the simple nose could smell them.”

Gaspare emitted a strengthless whine and leaned against Damiano, who could scarcely support him. Saara, with the forced patience of a mother with very slow children, spoke slowly and distinctly.

“You go down there and clap at their door, and tell them that you are hungry and have nothing to eat.”

A dozen expressions chased themselves across Gaspare's features.

He whispered, “And you will enchant them into feeding us, O great and beautiful lady?”

Saara's smile was scornful. “Of course not. I will do nothing. They will give you food because it is what they ought to do, and they will be glad to do it.”

The boy deflated, and even Damiano looked a trifle wan. “I'm sorry, Saara,” he said. “But they will not. These are the civilized peasants of France, and they will give away nothing for free.”

She looked at him sidelong, but the honesty of his regard was convincing. “But how do they expect to live themselves, when their sleds are empty, if they do not feed the unfortunate now?”

“They rely on providence and their own management to prevent that from ever happening,” he replied, and Gaspare chimed in with, “They are hard, the people of France. Very hard!”

Saara sought advice from the black, disinterested eyes of the horse, and failing there, from her naked toes. She nibbled delicately at the end of one braid. Finally she raised her chin and nodded.

Her face was stern. “I believe what you tell me, Damiano, though I cannot see how a land can work so. Things are more just in the land of the Lapps….” Her words fell away, as though her memories had changed in midsentence. “Well, no mind. If they will not feed you, you must take what you need. It is only fair.”

Gaspare jumped up and down in place. “Hah. That's what I've been telling him since November last!”

Damiano did not respond to the boy. “Saara,” he said instead, “if we are caught stealing we could be hanged, or could have our hands chopped off. Without a hand I will not be able to play the lute.”

Saara sputtered, and her pink feet danced over the road. “Is that all it would matter to you? That you would not be able to play the lute? Well, Damiano, I will try to see you do not get caught. What more can I say?”

Pain added an extra glitter to Damiano's eyes, for he had donned his woolen shirt. The three thieves strolled casually along the dry and empty road, with Saara's witchsense keeping watch. Damiano walked stiffly, and the Fenwoman kept to his side, so that left Gaspare to lead the foraging party.

As was only appropriate.

Stepping her sun-browned feet in the dust next to Damiano, Saara was touched with meaning, with an importance of line, of color, of gesture that was almost deadly to him. It was nothing she did, for she did nothing but patter along childlike on his right side. It was not the beauty of her face or form, for though her skin was infant-fine, her green eyes were tilted like those of a fox, and were foxlike sly, and of her figure, though Damiano felt that he knew quite a lot about it, still all he had ever seen was the shapeless, felt dress.

But the sun became glory, when it burnished her hair. And the road of dirt became adventure, because reaching out Damiano could touch her. And this hot March afternoon marked the clear end of something, and the beginning of something else.

Yet under the heat of his face and behind the smiling mouth Damiano was not happy, for his feelings knew too much of yearning and not enough of rest. If this was love, it was not the same passion he would have said he felt for Carla Denezzi, now behind convent walls at Bard.

This was no blessed or consoling feeling. He thought perhaps he wanted to strike Saara, to hit her across her petal-pink lips and knock her down. But of course he would not be able to strike her; if he lifted his fist she would turn and look at him and he would be the one to fall.

Or perhaps he wanted only to shout at her, to tear her heavy dress off, to shock her in any way possible.

Why? Was it because he wanted her, and desire made him feel like a fool?

Then Saara turned her glance from the gray ducks of the pond to Damiano. In an instant he felt his mind had been read, and flinched with guilt, but what Saara said was, “Why ‘sheep-face,' Dami? Why did he call you sheep-face?”

Relief was exquisite, and the silly question settled his mind as little else could have done. “Because he thinks I look like a sheep,” he answered her, and then he yielded to the temptation of adding, “Can you see a resemblance?”

Saara's eye went dry and analytical. Damiano swallowed.

“I see what he means. It is the nose, mostly. It is broad down the middle and almost turns under. And the eyes, also.”

“I see,” said Damiano, as stoutly as he could.

“I myself have been told I look like a fox about the face,” she added, but Damiano interrupted with an angry hiss.

“Not at all!” he cried, with all the more heat because he had been thinking exactly that—that Saara looked like a fox. “There is no resemblance! Your face is as fine as ivory and roses, and you move like a bird in the air. Fox indeed!”

She skittered two feet away, amusement written all over her fox-face. “So. Is that the way I was supposed to answer you? ‘There is no resemblance!' Well, I can look like roses and a fox, too, I imagine, and you, Damiano Delstrego, are a vain young man, just like…”

“Don't say ‘like Ruggerio,' “ he pleaded. “I am not a duelist like him, and he was a Roman besides.”

“I was not going to say that,” she replied, subdued suddenly. “But never mind. I think you are a handsome boy, Damiano. Handsome and more besides. And you can be all that and still look a little like a sheep.” The part in her hair (straight, but slightly off-center) came just under Damiano's eye level. As he looked down upon it suddenly his roiled emotions clarified and he did what he wanted to do, which was to kiss that warm, bronze-brown head.

“I love you, Saara,” he whispered, regardless of Gaspare, trotting on ahead. “I know all men have to love you, so that is nothing special to you, and I know further that I am last of all who should speak to you of love, but I do love you.

“I hear you in my mind a thousand miles away, and your image floats to me through pain and darkness, like a golden lamp. I have nothing to give—not even time—but still I love you.”

Saara stepped back and her gaze was not soft but shrewd. “You don't love me, Damiano, though I might wish you did. You hear your other part; your broken self is calling to be whole.”

Damiano heard her. He answered nothing, though his mouth formed words. He shivered. By the pure Mother of God, he whispered to himself alone, she's right, or at least partly right.

Of course Saara was important, her every gesture imbued with meaning.
Her
every gesture was flavored by
his
every gesture, and her eyes gave back his own familiar fire. How could he not have seen? He had become simple indeed to stand next to his own spirit and not feel it.

He was ashamed.

He was ashamed, but he raised his head. “You know what I do not, Saara. Probably you know me better than I know myself, anymore. But still I love you.”