The Damiano Series (32 page)

There was no flash of light, nor booming of thunder. The air did not smell burned. Yet Saara staggered as all that was her own came back to her, and more, and more. She shook her head against memories she had never known before: books unread, unfamiliar flowers and faces.

A girl's face, with yellow hair. The face of an air spirit, awesome and mild. The face of a dog.

Then she saw the face of Guillermo Delstrego through other eyes.

Daily lessons in the great stone workroom with the wood fire hissing. Daily dinners, crude but filling, cooked on the same enormous hearth. Whippings—both the deserved and the undeserved. A gift of apples. The gift of a staff.

And finally the screams from above, and, oh, pray for my father,

he is dead, my father is dead. Saara cried in anger but could not resist, violated to the depths by the pity she was compelled to feel for Guillermo Delstrego.

After minutes or hours she sighed, putting the images away.

The young man—the boy—stood unmoving, staring stupidly down at the piled stones and the shards of wood and silver. The heel of the staff dangled limply from his hands. His mouth was open. Finally he dropped the stick and rubbed his face in both hands. He cleared his throat.

“It's what he wanted, Saara. Ruggerio, I mean. He had a chance to kill me, but he chose instead to try to break the staff. Well, no one but I myself could do that, while I am alive.” He turned to her, squinting as though the light was too bright.

“My lady Saara, you are so beautiful! A beautiful witch and a beautiful woman. It's not just the witch power. When I came up the meadow, you were beautiful then, too, but you didn't give me a chance to mention it.”

Saara took a deep breath, sorting the chaos within her. “I don't want all this,” she said to him. “Only what was mine. Take back what is yours.”

He shrugged and dropped his eyes. “I can't. Besides, I don't want it anymore. Your song, my lady, was never meant to be bound in wood—it wasn't happy with me—and as for mine, well I give it freely, so it won't make any fuss. Please accept it; it's like a homeless dog. It can't survive alone.”

Saara stepped forward, letting the blanket slip from her shoulders. Her embroidered dress shone gaily under a sun that was growing warmer. Rags fell, leaving her feet pink and bare. She touched Damiano.

“This is too much to understand,” she said, and he nodded.

“I find it so myself. But, lady, I trust you with power more than I trust myself. I told you so once before.

“Besides—what is all power but fire? And I have had too much of fire, lately.” He stepped away, then glanced again at her, one hand scratching the side of his head.

“Please forgive me,” he said, “for all I've done to you. It was never the way I wanted it.” And he walked away.

“Wait,” Saara called. She opened her mouth to sing his feet still, but shame stopped her. Instead she ran after Damiano, her bare feet splashing over the wet ground. “Where are you going, like this?” she demanded. “You're helpless as a baby.” He turned to her in surprise.

“I'm going west,” he said. “I thought to Provence, or as far as I get. And, my lady, don't worry. I'm no more helpless than any other man.”

“Go home instead, if you can,” she countered. “Or if that general will not let you, then stay in Ludica.

“You'll learn what it is to be alone, now, Dami. Cold and
alone. Believe me: a witch without power…”

He scratched his tangled head again, and he grinned at her. “Don't worry, I said. I know what cold is like already. I've had a lot of practice.

“And alone? Saara,
pikku
Saara! Our closest friends are sometimes those we cannot see.”

He leaped one coil of the broad, choked stream that cut the meadow into islands. Landing, he slipped and fell on one knee, then stood again, laughing at himself. He met the Fenwoman's gaze, he squinting with the distance between them. “What a body this is; nothing seems to work right.” Then his grin softened. “Look at me, Saara. I'm happy. Haven't you eyes to see?”

Then he turned on his heel and darted across the meadow. Saara watched him until, slapping a low branch with his hand, he faded into the dark trees. When he had vanished, she lifted her head to the high, singing brilliance that went with Damiano, shining above the pine wood.

She had the eyes to see.

R.A. MacAvoy

 

Dedication

Epigraph

Prelude

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Coda

 

To my mother

 

Has he tempered the viol's wood

To enforce both the grave and the acute?

Has he curved us the bowl of the lute?

Ezra Pound
The Pisan Cantos

 

Prelude

Saara's song could make a garden out of a barren mountainside, or cover a hill of flowers with snow. When she sang, it was with a power that killed men as well as healed them. She could sing the winter and the summer, weeping and dancing and sleep. She could sing the clouds in their traces and the water in the bog.

She sang (this particular morning) a mighty song, replete with clouds and boglands, barren hills and lush, summer and winter, weeping, dancing and every other sort of earthly event. She sang from dim matins to high prime. At the end of this singing her voice was ragged; she was blue in the face and she saw spots before her eyes. But Saara's power of song had for once failed her, for she had not been able to sing one doe goat into a good mood.

And this was unfortunate, for Saara neither wanted to kill nor heal, and she desired neither carpets of snow nor flowers, but only the trust of this one ungainly creature, as companion in her loneliness.

Of all creatures (except perhaps for the cat) the goat is the hardest to sing-spell, having more than its fair share of natural witchery. Further, of all the changes one can work upon a goat, contentment is the most difficult state to obtain. To make things even more trying for Saara, this particular doe was encumbered by a dead winter coat she was too out of condition to shed, and was uncomfortably pregnant besides. Her gaunt sides resembled a hide-covered boat matted with brown algae. She wanted nothing to do with company, and had to be chased from the pineslope to the hill-dome crowned with birches before allowing herself to be befriended.

Yet this obdurate goat was all the company springtime had delivered to Saara amid the Alpine crocus and the purple hyacinth. Saara was not about to let the beast starve herself through obstinacy, not while Saara herself so needed some kind of voice in her ears besides her own.

But this was not strictly true—that she heard no other voice but hers. There was one other: the one that echoed in her head like her own thoughts, and yet was foreign to her, a voice soft and deep in slurred Italian. A voice which asked her questions.

“Where is he gone?” it asked her and, “Is it time to go home? Can I go home now?”

Never had Saara any answers for it.

This bodiless voice had been couched within her own head for over a year, serving only to make Saara feel as discontented as it was and more howlingly alone.

To distract her from these unanswerable questions she had tried work, until now her garden was blooming as never before and all her herb-pots were full. Then she had played with the weather, making the nearby villagers miserable. Following the visit of a brave delegate from Ludica, she curtailed experimentation and attempted to lose herself in her own woods, in bird shape. But that effort was least effective of all, for what reply has a wood dove to questions a Lappish witch cannot answer?

Now, as springtime took hold of the earth, Saara found nothing in all her wild refuge to interest her but this one strayed goat.

And the goat was disappointing. After spending all morning trying to entice her, Saara could approach just close enough to feed the doe a few willow withies and some fiddleheads of the new ferns. Most of these treats the animal spat out (as though to say she was no common nanny, to eat anything that happened to be green and given).

So Saara sang the goat a new song: a song of the first day in June, with a romping kid on the hilltop (instead of kicking in the belly), crisp sun in the sky and dry feet in the grass.

Saara sang in the strange tongue of the Lapps, which was her own. It made as much sense to the doe as any other tongue. The animal stared dourly at Saara with amber eyes the size of little apples, each eye with a mysterious black box in the center.

After receiving enough song-spelling to turn all the wolves in Lappland into milk puppies, the doe condescended to recline herself in the Utter of spring bloom.

Saara was already lying down, flat on her stomach, head propped on hands, mother-naked. She had braided her hair into tails when she had her morning bath. It subsequently dried that way, so now, when she freed it from its little pieces of yarn, it gave her a mass of rippling curls which shaded from red to black to gold in a cascade down her petal-pink back.

She might have been a tall peasant girl of sixteen. Her body was slim and salamander-smooth, her face was dimpled and her green eyes set slantwise. With one foot pointed casually into the pale blue sky, Saara looked as charming and ephemeral as a clear day in March.

She had looked that way for at least forty years.

“Goat,” she announced, aiming at the animal a green disk of yarrow, “you should eat more. For the baby.”

But the goat was still chewing a sliver of green bark she had deigned to take ten minutes before. She flopped her heavy ears and pretended she didn't understand Lappish.

“Haven't you ever been a mother before?” continued Saara. “I have. A mother has to be more careful than other people. A mother has to think ahead.”

The goat made the rudest of noises, and with one cloven hind hoof she scraped off a wad of musty belly hair, along with some skin. Then she bleated again and rolled over, exposing that unkempt abdomen to the sun.

“I could sing you a song that would make you eat every leaf off every tree in the garden—or at least as high as you could reach,” the woman murmured, yawning. “But then you'd explode, and that, too, would be bad for the baby.” Saara, like the goat, was made lazy by the sun. She turned over and watched her blue felt dress, freshly washed and dripping, swinging from the branch of a flowering hops tree. The wind played through the hair of her head, and through her private hair as well. She chewed a blade of grass and considered.

The goat bored her, though there was a certain satisfaction in helping the beast produce a sound kid. But Saara came from a herding people, and did not regard livestock with sentimentality.

No, it was not Saara, but the child-voiced presence within her that wanted to talk to the goat. She could isolate this presence from herself-proper and feel its warm edges. It was a bundle of visions, memories, instincts and… and fire. It was a shadow with dark eyes and skin: a guest in her soul. It was young, eager, a bit temperamental….

And undeniably full to bursting with sentiment. It liked to talk to goats.

Its name was Damiano Delstrego—or at least the presence belonged by rights to this Damiano, who had left it with her, like some foundling at a church door, and not part of his own being.

It was wearisome that he should do this, wearisome in the extreme. Sprawled flat on the sunny lawn, Saara let her song die away. Then, for an instant, she had the urge to rush at the sad, partial spirit she harbored, dispossessing it and recovering the unity of her own soul. But if she did that, she knew that Delstrego himself, wherever the fool had wandered (west, he had said), would be half dead, instead of only divided in two.