The Damiano Series (40 page)

With the fourth multifingered assault upon his back, he gathered himself together and fled—fled in a manner he himself did not understand—through the ragged, empty socket in the middle of his mind.

It was dark here, and green with the background of fir trees. The grass was dotted with crocus and snowdrops, and with gold brushes of flowering mustard. Over the flat meadow wound a stream which expressed neither decision nor ambition, weaving its course as random as a snailtrack.

Over and through the branchlets of the stream splashed a doe goat, bleating unhappily, tied with a garland of grape hyacinth. It was a brown goat, cow-hocked and very gravid, still wearing great patches of its winter coat.

The weaver of the garland was a more delicate creature. She rubbed one bare toe against the other leg, while she tickled the underside of her own nose with a yellow-brown braid.

“Behave like a lady,” she said to the goat, speaking with firmness, and pointing to the fragile band of blue flowers. “If you tear that off, I'll stuff it down your throat.”

The goat stopped still, but not out of docility. It chewed an uneasy cud, and rolled its square-pupiled eyes at what it saw.

Saara turned also, and her own green, tilted eyes widened. She dropped her braid.

“You!” she whispered, half to herself. “Dark boy. Damiano!” One hand, small, pink and slender, made a circling gesture.

And the lute player knew her as well: Saara of the Saami, barefoot girl who was the greatest witch in the Italies.

Damiano knew Saara's powers well, having both suffered them and then stolen them. And now all the strength was hers and he had none at all.

Damiano felt himself step closer to the witch (though he himself did not know how he did it, not having a body with which to step). The placid water passed beneath his substanceless flesh without disturbance.

“You cannot be dead! I would know it if you were dead,” she stated, yet by her voice Saara had her doubts. Her hand reached out toward him, as though to wipe haze from a glass, and quietly she began to sing.

Once again Damiano was aware of having feet, and hands. They tingled. He brushed back the coarse hair from his face. “I don't think I am dead,” he heard himself saying. “For though I can imagine nothing more like heaven than your garden, my lady, I have been led to expect there will be a matter of judgment to endure before I reach such a paradise. Assuming I am found worthy of it.”

How odd his voice sounded in his own ears: a bit thin, perhaps, but quite composed and calm. And how confidently he stepped through air that had more substance than he did. Now Saara was almost close enough to touch. In three steps, she would touch. She chanted sunlight into the young man's eyes. He blinked. His feet sank into marshy ground.

Then Damiano remembered. “I'm not supposed to be here!” he announced, stepping back and into deeper water. “This is Lombardy, and I'm in Provence. I shouldn't have come at all!”

Saara paused, her feet resting on the tussocky grass. Her small face tilted like that of a wary bird. “But I knew you would come, at last, Dami. Part of your soul is waiting here. You have only come after it —there is nothing wrong in that.” She stepped into water, and Saara, greatest witch in the Italies, sank ankle-deep in the mud.

Floundering backward, Damiano shook his head. “No, signora. I followed my lost powers, surely, but I did so in my effort to escape the lash, not to mention the plague. And in this I have done myself more harm than good.”

Saara stopped in midcurrent. Her blue felt dress darkened as it absorbed water. Her chant first slowed, and then stopped. From behind her, the doe goat bleated loudly.

“Plague, Damiano?” she asked quietly. “The lash? Where are you? Where have you left your body?”

He stared down at hands like clear amber, glowing with their own light. His breath came out soundlessly, and he looked up at the witch again.

“Somewhere between Lyons and Avignon. In Provence, where the music is bora. And I must go back, before I… I forget how.”

He turned away from her, then, as though he were about to walk down the hill, and he stared confusedly around him.

“Saara, it's you that is holding me, isn't it? Let me go back.” His voice rose with a tinny, faraway urgency.

Her hand rested on the goat's ridged horn, while the scruffy, decorated beast nuzzled Saara's hip. “Don't worry, Dami. I won't hurt you. Don't I have half your soul in my care, and by
your
wish, not my own? But before I let you go you must tell me…”

“Won't hurt me! You will kill me, I think! Let me go before it is too late.” Damiano blundered forward into the same streamlet where Saara stood. Water plashed against his legs and hands, feeling more real by the moment.

And the slim shape in peasant embroidery, too, was very real. As Saara stood beside him, frowning doubtfully, disarmingly, Damiano felt that it was too late already, and that the cord which tied him to this body was frayed beyond repair. That Provence and life together were done with him and he would be nothing more than a captive elemental: a domestic spirit in the garden of the lady Saara.

And he was glad of it.

For life was cruel and Provence dying, while Saara was beautiful. And she, like him, had been bora a witch, with his own strange senses and stranger arts. Damiano knew suddenly that he loved Saara, and that he had loved her since their first meeting on this very hillside, amid the drone of bees and the sharp fragrance of rosemary.

And as once before he had risked a rival's blade for a chaste and unpracticed kiss in the witch's garden, so now he stood calf-deep in the spring thaw of the mountains, and he reached out one doomed, immaterial hand.

“Saara,” he whispered. “Pikku Saara. You should not be so beautiful!”

Saara laughed, hearing the Fennish word in the Italian mouth. She looked into Damiano's black eyes. Then her little nostrils twitched, and the laughter was cut off. She examined his amber visage with a cold, scientific thoroughness. She raised a hand, but did not touch.

“You were right!” she stated. “You should not be here. It is very bad for you.”

Then Saara clapped her hands, or she made as though to clap her hands. But Damiano heard no sound, for his whole world went out like a candle.

Where the hell the beast was going Gaspare had no idea. The boy forced his eyes open, lest the spiteful horse scrape him off on a wall. If it tried that, Gaspare promised himself, then he would make his hands let go. Right now he could not quite manage the feat, for his fingers were welded into the black mane and the halter rope, which he should never, never have wound around his arm.

Festilligambe swung around a corner and Gaspare's heel plowed dust. Fear itself drove him to mount to the horse's back.

“I swear, you pig-head, you pig-heart, pig-collops, pig… pig of a pig! I swear I'll wear your hide someday soon, and if you dump me it will be today, I swear by Saint Gabriele and by Maria, the Mother of Christ, I'll eat your eyes and tongue roasted on a skewer and sell your bladder for a fool's toy. I swear…”

With a constant stream of such encouragements in his flattened ear, Festilligambe bolted past the basilica, where the odor of death was only a bit less terrifying than that of the burning houses on the street beyond. Each of his yellowing teeth was exposed to the wind. His nostrils were round as drainpipes, and gorged purple. His eyes were ringed, not with white, but red. He ran with his belly to the ground, carving the dry, packed road with his hooves. He went rough. He cornered viciously. He went from sun into darkness, leaping a flight of alley stairs and landing in sun again on the next street.

He made straight for the square of Petit Comtois where the wooden gates stood solidly shut. Gaspare's scream was soundless but heartfelt.

There in the road lay a woman's shirt of linen, and beyond it another of lace, stained olive green. Gaspare flashed by them too quickly for curiosity. Still farther toward the gate he passed a plump and fair-haired woman dragging along a monk by his long, untonsured hair. Both were bellowing; it all seemed perfectly natural to the panicked Gaspare.

The wooden gate loomed, solid, oak-barred and five feet tall. The horse had no sense—he would brain himself against the palings, and Gaspare as well. It was time to let go.

Gaspare told his fingers it was time to let go. He tried again. He shrieked at them, but from fingers they had become gnarled tree roots wound in the black earth of the gelding's mane.

A circle of brown-robed friars stood before the gate. Evidently Festilligambe intended to smash into them on his way to oblivion. Gaspare held to the selfish and forlorn hope they would cushion the impact.

But neither the collision with the religious nor that with the maple palings happened, first because the brown robes scattered like so many dun doves of the wood, and second because Festilligambe ceased his mad pounding between one step and the next, and Gaspare's convulsive grip dissolved. He went over the horse's head and landed rolling. Twice he rolled free, escaping harm with the elasticity of youth and training, but on the third roll he came up against flesh. His warding hand slipped against skin slick with blood, on the lean, whip-scored back of a man whose head and arms were tied up in a shirt.

All the bumps and knobs of that back were vaguely familiar, and in the leather belt that circled it was stuck a tiny, intricately-worked knife which was very familiar.

“Pig's head of an ass!” ejaculated Gaspare, as he plucked free the knife and cut the shirt apart.

Damiano's eyes were wide and staring. “Gaspare?” he asked, his usually rather deep voice cracking. “Gaspare—is this still Franche-Comté? Or… Lombardy, or…?”

Fury warred with a strange ache in Gaspare's heart. He took the shaggy black head (no, not shaggy any longer, but trimmed somehow) in the hands that had so lately been locked in the gelding's mane, and he shook Damiano's head roughly back and forth. “You damned, swiving sheep-faced lunatic,” he shrilled, and then he bent the unresisting head down and, still more roughly, kissed the top of it.

Damiano, meanwhile, was staring nearsightedly through the four black pillars that arched above him, at a huddle of wary, pointing townsmen, both of the robed and the bejeweled variety. He squinted, but they were too far for him to make out the expressions on their faces. He brought his own, soiled left hand up to his face and flexed it, looking puzzled.

Gaspare also looked at the whip-wielders, and his excellent vision gave him cause for alarm. “Get up, Damiano, before they regroup and come back to you. And once we're five miles from this foul-stinking bed of misery you can explain to me just what…” and as he tried to rise Gaspare's head hit something. He ducked once more, swiveled his head, and discovered why the townspeople were pointing.

Gaspare collapsed once more on top of Damiano, the air whistling out of his throat. For above them stood a half-ton of rigid outrage, iron-legged, hissing, with a tail stiff as a terrier's. The gelding's head coiled left and right as though the beast were a dragon, and it dripped white froth onto Gaspare's upturned face.

“Call him off!” shrieked the sufferer. “Dear Jesu, call him off and I will sin no more!”

Damiano, too, looked up, but either trust or poor vision saved him from Gaspare's terror. “Festilligambe!” Awkwardly, like an old man, he climbed to his feet. Dirt grayed his hair and caked to the ooze on his naked back. He leaned one arm over the sweaty, trembling withers. “Hey. I went looking for you. But you found me instead!”

The gelding nickered, but its defiance did not weaken. It stamped one hind foot. Gaspare moaned.

The lute player peered down at Gaspare (squirming full length on the ground between the black hooves) as though he could not remember how the boy had gotten there. He reached down one hand and yanked him up. “Stand up. You shouldn't play games with an animal this size,” he chided.

Then he added, “We've got to get out of this town, Gaspare. They're all mad here. You can never tell what they're going to do next”

“Mad?” Gaspare rolled his gooseberry eyes. “Oh, certainly, yes. I've noticed it myself. Well then, we should certainly get out of here, shouldn't we, Damiano? In fact,” and the boy pointed surreptitiously to the wall by the gate, “why don't we just run over there and slip over that wall? I'll help you up and you pull me up behind, heh?”

Damiano frowned hugely and touched his still-bleeding shoulder blades. “Don't be silly, Gaspare. We can't take a horse over the wall. Nor a lute.

“I'll go get my lute now,” he finished, and Damiano calmly stepped across the square toward the yawning black doorway of a shop. Gaspare watched him go, and he watched the tall shape, black as vengeance, stalk behind him, black tail slashing like a blade that would love to cut. The gelding's muzzle hung just above Damiano's shoulder, unnoticed. Damiano seemed to be quietly talking to himself.

It was very lonely, standing in the middle of the square, without even a vicious horse for protection. Gaspare shifted from one foot to the other and raised his chin high into the air. No one came near, for all eyes followed the wounded musician and his strange protector as he vanished into the dark shop and reappeared, bearing his sheepskin-wrapped instrument.

Damiano was frowning. “There was a baby in there before,” he said to Gaspare, “but it's gone, now. I certainly hope it was its mother that came back for it. So much despair around, you know.” Then he raised his left eyebrow very high, and regarded Gaspare with more rationality than he had yet shown, saying, “It is the plague that has hit here. You knew that, didn't you?”

Gaspare sighed hugely. “Yes, musician. I was aware of that, and that is another very good reason for… for hastening our departure, maybe?”

Damiano swung onto the horse's back. His mouth gaped with the pain of his flayed back. He leaned down and reached a hand toward Gaspare. “Get up in front,” he commanded the boy.