Damiano's Lute (29 page)

“Heathen,” said Gaspare in the same dry, suppressed tone.

The lutenist, who had a temperament of his own, was straining to be away. Yet it would be a shame to leave Gaspare on that word. He stalked over to the boy and spun him around by the shoulder.

“What is this, Gaspare? Don't I deserve a rest, after all that has happened in the past month? You, too—you're always complaining how hard it is to live with a madman.

“That is, when you're not telling me I am not a man at all because I have no mistress. Well, now I have a mistress, and I'm on my way to meet her.”

The boy stood with his hands in his jerkin pockets, one hip cocked —an attitude that mimicked carelessness very unconvincingly.

“Go, if you're going already. We'll talk about it if you come back.”

“If?” cried Damiano. “If?” A curse issued from the far end of the room, where an early sleeper had had his first rest broken by the noise. With one accord Damiano and Gaspare stepped out of the room and down the corridor.

“If? Mother of God, Gaspare. Do you believe I'm running out on you?” The heavy bundle banged along the narrow hall.

Gaspare cleared his throat and spat. “I believe nothing. It's much safer that way.”

Once under starlight, Damiano desired urgently to bolt and run. His mind rebelled at the thought of one more depressing wrangle with the redhead. But he took a deep breath and began again.

“Two weeks at the most, I will be gone. The room is paid up and you have enough money for food till I get back—if you don't spend it on clothes.”

“This is not good for your career, you know, musician,” said the redhead distantly, peering into the darkness toward the city gate. “In two weeks Avignon can forget. You can't expect to find a job waiting vacant when you come back.” Then he looked straight at Damiano. “How can I reach you if I need you?”

Damiano stared back. “Why should you need me?”

Gaspare ignored this. “I am your manager. I must be able to reach you. If you turn into a dove and flap off to Lombardy with that woman…”

The dark man leaned back against the white wall, where his hair made a shadowed halo. “Ah. So that's it. I'm not turning into a dove, Gaspare. I feel little enough human sometimes as I am. And a long journey is not the purpose for which I am…”

Cursing the limitations of the simple man, who would not be able to locate a friend hidden in the countryside outside the city, who indeed couldn't even find his sister when she was hidden behind a plaster wall, Damiano stood and cogitated. An idea came: not a good idea, for it interfered with his plans a bit, but one that might pacify the boy.

“I will leave Festilligambe with you,” he said. “Since he is a horse and not a man, he will have some notion of where I am. If you have to find me, just get on him and give him his head.”

In the middle of Damiano's explanation, Gaspare had begun to shake his head. The movement gained both speed and power, until at the end it shook the boy's entire frame. “Oh, no, I won't. The last time I tried something similar…”

“He found me right away, as I remember.”

Gaspare snorted. “And almost killed us both. I wouldn't touch that beast with anything but a butcher's blade.”

That was enough. Damiano's patience snapped like a lute string, and he turned on his heel.

Already, as Damiano disappeared into the darkness, Gaspare was beginning to regret the violence of his words. He was reassured to notice that Damiano left the horse anyway.

Each rustle was a mystery, and more a mystery as the witch's ears put a name to it. That rhythmic pinging was this week's rain, still dripping in a pipe somewhere. It rang in his head like the music of the spheres. That tiny interrogative shriek was a bat, chasing insects by the light of a pedestrian's swinging lantern. The lantern itself hung by a cord from the man's wrist, and creaked of rust and leather. The man's breathing, too, creaked. He was ancient.

A second squeaking joined the first, but from below. This was not a bat, but a rat, making sad complaint about some rattish problem or other. While passing the next block Damiano heard a louder sound: a thumping, also rhythmic, from behind an upstairs wall, accompanied by a duet of heavy breathing. Though recognizable, like the call of a bat or rat, this sound seemed to Damiano the very essence of mystery. He stopped still, listening. His hand tightened on the rope of his bundle.

Finally he reached the North Gate of Avignon, where he had entered the city less than two weeks ago. As he passed under he gave a silent prayer of gratitude.

What a clear sky, and what good fortune that three days' rain should have cleared when it did. Even the mud underfoot had been half dried by today's ambitious sun. Damiano nearly tripped over the broad flat road, then, as he remembered that Saara was a weather witch. Could she have worked this change for his sake? Or her own? For both, really…. The thought made him blush. He looked about him.

Twenty years ago Avignon had been threatening to burst her gates. The fields beside the road were dotted with small stone huts and large stucco houses, some roofless or without doors, either unfinished or subsequently cannibalized for materials.

All were abandoned now, for who else but a barbarian would live outside of Avignon when there was plenty of room within? They shone like ghosts, rain-washed, moonlit, surrounded by the susurrating new grass.

Two miles from Avignon, Damiano left the road, high-stepping over the soft earth, to look into one of the most imposing of the skeletons. (After all, why hurry when you don't really know where you are going?) This dwelling was in better shape than most; because it was so far from the city gate, no one had yet stolen its roof of tile. It possessed three large rooms through which the wind blew at fancy.

He entered. The stucco walls still stood, though cracked and sea-blue with mildew. The roof did not appear to leak much. Damiano placed his bundle carefully in the driest available corner and leaned out a front window.

No fortress, this, but the house of an ambitious peasant. The windows were square—indefensible, perhaps, but more pleasant for viewing the road. The rooms were big enough that a large family would not bump elbows too often, and the largest of them—the stable—had a loft which still appeared serviceable. Damiano scrambled up and peered down. Then he dropped to the floor and peered up.

He liked this house. He wondered if it were still owned by a man who had plans for it one day, and that was why it had not been pillaged like so many others. It was not too far for a man to live in and work in Avignon—if he had a horse.

Owned or not, the building was still occupied—by a nest of black snakes, many of whom were spending the evening within, their whip-bodies lumpily satiated. Damiano went over to talk with them.

“Boy, boy, solitary boy.” The song approached without noise of footsteps. The hair on Damiano's neck rose. Three snakes lifted sleek heads and listened with their tongues.

“Your playmates are the beasts of the fields.”

Outside the window where Damiano had lately leaned stood a shining girl, her loose hair whipping back from her face. Her dress was sprinkled with stars, and her eyes bleached silver by the colorless light of the moon.

“Saara,” whispered Damiano, thickly. The snakes all slithered away.

He came to the window, and gently he caught her wild hair in his hand.

“In what way am I solitary, Pikku Saara? And how am I a boy?” He kissed her.

Saara stared vaguely at the rough beams of the ceiling above the loft. “The sun is beautiful today. It would be warmer out there than in here.”

Damiano lay beside her, his head comfortably wedged between Saara's neck and her pink shoulder, his knees clasped around hers. He felt perhaps he should be examining himself this morning, assaying both the state of his witchery and the state of his soul, to see what the loss of virginity had cost him. But that seemed such a dreary enterprise. Much more interesting to examine Saara's hair. “That one,” he observed, “is coppery-red, almost as red as Gaspare's. And it is straight. But the one next to it is dark, and it has more curl to it.”

She giggled, for his breath tickled her ear. “Probably it's your hair.”

He grunted. “So it is. But this other one is not—my hair is never so fine—and it, too, is dark. And all around and between you have lemon-pale hairs, and ones of rabbit brown….”

“Don't tell me about the gray ones,” Saara murmured, and she cuddled in closer, making her own investigation of his neck.

“Eh?” Damiano gave a scornful snort. “You have no gray hairs. Don't be silly.”

One wisp of hair fell across the woman's face. She regarded it cross-eyed. “Not yet, maybe. But it will come. We all grow old, Damiano.” She squirmed in his grasp until she could reach his own shaggy head. He bent to allow her fingers in his hair. “What are you looking for, fleas?”

“Whatever,” she murmured in reply. “You don't have any gray hairs, which does not surprise me. Nor fleas, either.”

“I tell them to go away.”

“But your hair, Dami! So thick. If it didn't go in circles, I would think it belonged to a horse.”

He smiled and kissed the base of her throat. His head slid lower. “I thought I was a sheep,” he said, his words muffled between her breasts.

“You are a thousand creatures,” whispered Saara, and then nothing else was said for a quarter of an hour.

“Did I tell you Gaspare's sister is going to have a baby?”

Half his words were lost within a yawn. Saara made him repeat them.

“I have never seen Gaspare's sister, Dami, but my good wishes to her nonetheless.”

“It is either the child of a cardinal or a thief,” added Damiano, grinning up at his mistress, who was slipping her nakedness into her blue embroidered dress.

(He would dress her in silk satin, and in cloth-of-gold, and buy green velvet ribbons to wind in her hair. She would be the crown of Avignon.

But would Avignon accept a crown that did not wear shoes? There would be no use in buying Saara shoes.)

Her glance held a child's slyness. “Which would be better? I don't know what a cardinal is, but a thief I understand.” Saara shrugged an Italian shrug. “If the child is strong and handsome, that is what matters.” With practiced hands she braided her hair.

Damiano had a wonderful thought—a thought that made him feel both young and old, which turned him both to stone and to jelly. “Saara. Perhaps we will have a baby?”

Her green eyes darted to Damiano and her mouth opened. “Why —are you worried about that, Damiano? You need not be.”

“I would love it,” he said, and he laid his head in her lap, mussing his hair back and forth against her belly. “Nothing could be better.”

The northern woman turned her head away in some confusion. “But I thought, Dami, you did not… believe… in your own future.”

He raised his head to hers and there was fire behind his black eyes. “I was a fool,” he stated. “But since then I have met the Devil and called him a liar to his face. I am free of his words, Saara.”

She said nothing, but continued with her braiding. After a moment his mood softened again and once more Damiano yawned. He let his feet dangle from the edge of the loft and swung them back and forth.

“What a fool I have been, Saara: wrongheaded and self-centered and backward, as well. Everything I did around you was always the wrong thing.”

Saara primmed her mouth in superior fashion, but then spoiled the effect by giggling. “It couldn't have been too much the wrong thing, Damiano, or we would not be here now, yes?”

“But Ruggerio…”

She put a slim hand on his lips. “Dami! I will bury my dead if you will bury yours.”

He kissed the hand and said no more.

“Besides,” she continued, “it would be a miserable sort of young man who did not act like a fool now and then.”

Saara slid from the high shelf with no more fear than a bird, and landed almost without noise. “Come out, Damiano, and show me what you know about magic.”

They lay down in meadow flowers, side by side. “Eh!” Damiano protested. “We are going to get wet if we stretch out on this hill.”

Saara laced her hands behind her neck. “So?”

Damiano went up on one elbow. From here he could see the red tile roof of the empty house be bad already begun to regard as his, and the reddish ribbon of the road beyond, which his dim eyes could see was busy with people. Easter pilgrimage, most certainly. “All my clothes are new.”

She played his rich overshirt between her fingers. “Take them off, then.”

“If you will.”

She gave him a canny glance and giggled.

They lay down naked in meadow flowers, side by side.

“Now, little witch-man,” began Saara, “make for me a cloud.”

Damiano only stared at her.

“Come now, Dami. You have all the earth and all the sky to work with. Make one little cloud.”

He shook his head. “Show me.”

The pretty girl yawned. Idly she knotted her braids together under her chin. “It's easy. First you sing your water out of the earth; there is a lot of it sitting there today.”

Saara began to sing, not in Italian (thank God) nor in langue d'oc, but in her own far northern language. “DAH dah DAH dah DAH dah DAH dah” went the rhythm of her verse. It did not seem to have a rhyme scheme, but the sounds of her speech were so limited, and so harsh in his Latin-tuned ears, that he could not really tell.

Damiano flipped over to watch her as he listened. In only a few moments he felt a chill against his damp back, while the hair on his head was gently pulled away from the scalp. He scratched his head.

All around the two witches the air wavered, like that above a boiling pot. The grass on the hillock was complaining in a slow hish and hush as it gave up its glut of moisture.