The Damiano Series (37 page)

Beside her, not touching, removed as if by time and distance, sat the undisciplined bass, singing
“gaudeamus”
as he juggled olives in his oily hands. He was not smiling, this reveler, nor was the well- (or at least much-) dressed woman. Nor was anyone on the street or in the square beyond. The dry smell of wine warred with that of olives, while above both rose a reek of excrement.

And this whole assemblage of unsmiling maniacs gazed directly at Damiano. Festilligambe froze, shaking all over.

And though he had no longer any witch's staff to warn him, and would not have been able to use it if he had, Damiano sensed wrongness before him as strongly as a blind man may sense the noonday sun. He thought to back out the way he came, but the white-eyed horse stood rooted, while behind him rose the terrifying soft prayers and sharp strokes of the flagellants.

The bass voice was climbing to his feet. He approached Damiano. Indeed, the whole somber riot of them was drawing near, staring with puzzled intensity at one dark-skinned, thinnish traveler with a horse.

The singer bowed from the waist. “Welcome. Welcome to Petit Comtois, my brave one. Forgive our deshabille: we were not expecting visitors. And yet we are delighted to see you.” At the end of this announcement, the fellow forgot to close his mouth.

Damiano dropped his bag of clothes and pots. His head was swimming unpleasantly, and he didn't know whether the scene before him was as bizarre as it appeared, or whether it only seemed so to eyes which had just endured the sight of the Devil. He cleared his throat. Once, twice, three times he tried to answer. The fat woman hove up beside the first villager. She stared at the horse, and then at Damiano. She touched the mane of each.

“Hasn't he nice hair,” she observed to the world in general. Her mouth was a rosebud and her eyes were glazed like candy. Damiano stuttered harder as her fingers played through his new-trimmed locks.

At last he was able to say, “My name is Delstrego, good villagers. I am a musician, and I have come seeking after a friend.”

The bass singer nodded sagely. “Good Monsieur Delstrego, welcome again. No one could please us more than a musician seeking after a friend. In Pe'Comtois you will find many friends. In Pe'Comtois we are all friends. Friends unto death.” And he smiled a wise, lunatic smile.

Damiano backed away, and the horse backed with him, trampling the bag of pots. He felt a stiff, foolish smile stamp itself upon his face. He could not tear it off. Then the silver bell of the flagellants tinkled once more and Festilligambe bolted forward, dragging his master beside him. But the heavy villager grabbed the gelding's cheekstraps, and the beast went rigid with terror.

Behind them, wooden gates swung shut. The horse moaned helplessly.

At this Damiano's courage awoke. “I'll take the horse,” he snapped. “He doesn't like strangers.” And he pulled the villager's fingers, one by one, from the rope halter. Then he turned foursquare and confronted the town.

“What is wrong, here?” he challenged. “I can't tell whether you are all in mourning or on holiday. You are all dressed up and yet it looks like the village has been looted. Is there war? Sickness?”

He pointed over the first row of houses to where black smoke still increased. “What is burning?”

The fat woman turned to the odd-dozen villagers behind her. “He asks whether there is war,” she announced. “He asks whether there is sickness. He asks what is burning in Pe'Comtois.” She giggled. “He has such a sweet Italian accent.”

Damiano, being only human, reacted to this with a certain amount of cold hauteur. But the male villager put up a restraining hand. “Peace, Monsieur Italian. I will show you what you want to know. I will show you what is burning. I will show you the very soul of Pe'Comtois. Follow me.”

Damiano followed, between two dry stone buildings and across another desolate street. The bizarre audience faded behind, lacking either energy or interest. At the next narrow intersection Festilhgambe balked, and rather than suffer the villager's unsettling aid, Damiano left the lead rope hanging over a post, knowing no one could walk off with the animal. The truth about Festilligambe was that although he would not always obey Damiano, he would never, under any circumstances, obey anyone else.

Here the smell of dung was stronger, but it was overwhelmed by burning wood. It was houses that were burning, the white stone walls containing flame like cupped hands, while fire-tongues licked through the windows. Around the perimeter of the blazing area stood men with pails and pokers, watching the flames with proprietary interest.

“It is… on purpose?” asked Damiano, shifting his lute from hand to hand. “You are burning your houses on purpose?”

“In Pe'Comtois,” stated the villager, “we are very rich. When we are tired of a house, then—
pfft!
Up she goes. There are always plenty to go around.

“Enough houses, gowns, linens, foodstuffs, wines—no, not enough wines, forgive me. But enough of everything else.” He led the other across a court, where stood an enormous church, high-spired, windowed with glass. It was a church far too big for the village that contained it. It was a Provençal church. Together they passed in.

“And how are you so lucky, in Petit Comtois?” mumbled Damiano, his words echoing in dim stone.

With every step he grew more distrustful. Sacred ground or no, this place stank. And his ears told him it was not empty. The nave door swung open.

There, under high tiered windows of scarlet and gold, upon carved pews of oak, were strewn bodies: the dead and dying, piled neatly head to toe.

“Because there is no one left to eat, to wear clothes, to live in houses…” announced the singing villager, sweeping the chamber with a gesture.

“We are all dead, you see. Plague.”

 

Chapter 2

From the right came sounds: the weak rebellion of the dying, and their terrible, whistling breath. From the left came only the echoes of the sounds, for all who reclined on the pews on that side of the church were already dead. Even as Damiano's eyes adjusted to the dim jeweled light from the stained windows, two cowled men lifted one of the passive shapes and promoted it to the left side of the aisle. No word was spoken.

“This cannot be,” Damiano whispered tentatively. Then hearing his own words in his ears, he fell silent.

Festilligambe stood in the beneficent spring sun, shifting from one pair of legs to the other. It seemed to him that if he wasn't going, he ought to be eating. Or at least rolling. He tested the length of his rope. Not quite long enough. Too bad. Of course he could always pull the rope away; it was not attached to the thin wooden post in any way. But that he was not supposed to do.

For a few minutes he amused himself scratching against the painted stone wall, leaving mats of black winter coat caught on every roughness. Then he scraped his halter methodically against the windowsill. He bit off a chunk of painted plaster, and then spat it out with disgust. Festilligambe didn't know he was elegantly lean, but he knew he was hungry.

Someone was coming. The gelding pricked his fox-tiny ears and snorted. He wasn't very fond of people, except of course for Damiano. Not that anyone had ever done him any real hurt, but he was a Barb, and there it was.

It was a horse approaching. A big horse. The gelding's ears went back, because he really wasn't very fond of other horses, either. He especially disliked bigger horses, who might tend to think too much of themselves.

As it turned out, this horse wasn't really too big. He was shorter then Festilligambe although far heavier built. He had a human with him. That was good; it meant there would probably be no fight, and fights were not amusing unless the other horse was much smaller. One look in the gray stallion's placid ram-face and Festilligambe knew this horse would offer no difficulty. He crested his black neck and hissed at the draft horse, for though Festilligambe was a gelding, he knew what pride was.

Now the human was lifting his halter rope from the post where Damiano had left it. Wouldn't he be surprised to find that Festilligambe could not move from the place he had been told to stay?

He never had moved, not since he had made that agreement with Damiano in San Gabriele over a year ago, when Damiano had promised never to spellbind him if the horse would stay where put. He never had moved, and he never would. Never, never, never. The elegant black set his every muscle for the balk.

The human, however, did not try to pull. Instead he tied the halter rope into the gray horse's harness straps. Holding the gray's cheekstrap loosely in one hand, he clucked to the massive animal.

The rope tightened. Festilligambe dug in with his hooves. In two seconds he found himself flipped in the air and landing on his left shoulder and hindquarters, his legs still straight out before him. As he was dragged gently along the dry road, his face was a mask of equine bewilderment.

Plague. There must be some mistake. The plague had vanished sixteen years ago, after destroying almost half of Europe. Surely it was like Noah's flood, and God would not send it again. This must be some other pestilence; typhus or cholera. Something that would do its little damage (great enough to the people who died of it, and to the families of those who died of it) and fade away. Man was heir to so many diseases.

Slowly Damiano began to pace along the great central aisle, cradling his lute high against his chest, his breath half choked by the stench. He peered only down the rows to his right.

This man was a farrier; Damiano could tell because he still wore his divided leather skirt. Touching his head were the bare feet of a tall woman in black lace. Her handsome face, not young, had gone green. (At first he thought it was the window light, but no, there was no green glass in any window. She was green.) Her breath whistled two notes at once. She stared stupidly at Damiano's lute, and her lips moved.

What could he do but shrug his shoulders, apologizing for his healthy presence: a lute-carrying mountebank at death's grim door? In reply she spoke one word, which he could not hear.

There was a man at Damiano's elbow. One of the religious who had ported the body from the right side to the left. A brother of Saint Francis, the musician noted.

“It was kind of you, my son, but I doubt many of them would notice.”

It took Damiano a little time to understand. Then he shifted the lute from hand to hand. “Oh. Forgive me, Brother. I don't mean to disturb.”

He found himself repeating his words from the village gates. “I am a musician, and have come off the road seeking after a friend.”

The Franciscan nodded. He lowered his eyes and replied, “Look, then. But for your own sake, do not touch.”

This misunderstanding shocked Damiano. But as he opened his mouth to tell the friar that Gaspare could not possibly he here among the dying, having preceded Damiano down the road by only an hour, it occurred to him there was no use in it. Gaspare (if he had entered Petit Comtois at all) was subject to real danger.

And so was Damiano. Between one moment and the next he remembered Satan's words.
“Soon. Perhaps a year or two. Perhaps tonight. “
And once more he touched the black bedrock of his existence, which was the fact that Satan had told him he was going to die.

His hand trembled on the neck of the lute and he chided himself, asking himself why he should be frightened now at the sight and thought of death, when he had spent the last year and more preparing himself for that inevitability. After all, was that not the reason he had avoided involvement with women? And was it not at least part of the reason he had fallen into sleeping so much, sleep being death's close kin?

But no preparation could suffice; he was not at all ready to die. There were matters unsettled—matters such as Gaspare, who was angry with him. Such as that vision of green eyes and brown braids, and the singsong voice in his head which he could not quite understand.

Saara. He wished he had said more to her.

It came to Damiano all at once that his life was not a rounded whole; it had no progression or shape. As an artist, he couldn't call complete a work which possessed neither structure nor moral—or, at least, no structure or moral evident to human eyes.

And he felt a great dissatisfaction with this method of death, perishing in hopeless and frightful stink. A man wanted to die heroically, with someone standing by to take down his final words. To sicken and die of plague, in company of a hundred others, nameless and forgotten…

“In a century you will be a man who might never have existed from a city with a forgotten name.”

But it was Satan who had said that. The Father of Lies, and his one purpose had been to hurt. “I'd be careful whom I believed,” Raphael had said. Damiano did not believe this prophecy because Satan had given it, but rather because he himself had accepted it. As a bargain. Yet at the same time he did not believe it at all because the archangel had also advised Damiano that no created being—including Raphael's brother Lucifer—knew the future of men. At any rate, believing or not believing, Damiano was not ready today to die.

Ail this passed behind his black eyes in a moment. He found himself speaking to the Franciscan. “It is the plague, Brother? Not typhus, or…”

The friar lifted his eyebrows so forcefully his scalp wrinkled above his tonsure. “Didn't you know? My poor, innocent traveler. You have come along a very bad road.”

“God be with you along this road.”
Cursed angel. He could cut hair. He could fix harness, but he couldn't say one little word about the plague lying ahead.

Immediately Damiano reprimanded himself. He could not blame the archangel for keeping to the limits assigned him. Especially since he had broken those limits once already for Damiano, saving him from the hangman in the village of San Gabriele. Raphael was definitely not supposed to involve himself that way.