The Damiano Series (51 page)

“Enough,” growled the guard. “No fighting around the Papal Palace. Haven't you any respect for the Holy Father?”

The guildsman evidently did have respect, either for the Holy Father or for the instruments of war, for he backed off, cringing and snarling together, like a dog.

“Hah!” grunted the guard, once he and Damiano were alone. “That was one of the few amusing moments of my day.” His weathered blue eyes twinkled down at Damiano, who had sunk strengthless back onto his stool. “That and your pretty playing, of course. Don't mind that fellow. I know him: he's usually here, with a hurdy-gurdy out of tune, playing the same five songs. He's got at least a dozen children, and his wife leaves them with him while she takes in laundry. Quite a racket, they make.”

Damiano smiled his gratitude, as he reflected to himself—they protect me. The strangest people protect me: guardsmen, Irishmen, horses. Dogs. Why? And then he thought, The Devil. He is in Avignon. What does that portend?

Gaspare returned in late afternoon, looking worse than ever. Damiano put down the lute. “Where did you go?” he asked, offering the boy some of the bread and dates he had paid a child to buy for him.

Gaspare wanted nothing. “Around. To every other gate into the enclosure. And then to each of the outer gates.”

“All around the city?”

The boy threw himself upon the ground against the stucco wall,

regardless of his exquisite new mantle. “I thought… I thought perhaps we had the place wrong. I wanted to see if they were waiting elsewhere. They weren't.”

Damiano said nothing, for there was nothing he could say, except that he had seen Satan on the streets of Avignon. And that was not something Gaspare would want to hear right now. So he spent another hour improvising quietly on the treble strings, and when it could no longer be avoided, he said, “I'll have to go now. I have to work.”

Gaspare glanced up at the setting sun and flinched as though he had just received a blow. His arms, nothing but skin, bones and twisted tendon, were wrapped around his knees and he buried his head between them.

Damiano bit down on his lip. Poor child: his sleeves did not come within three inches of his wrists, so fast he had grown in the past winter. Damiano for a moment had the feelings of a father. He put the lute behind his stool and considered what he might say or do to help.

But Gaspare was beyond easy consolation. He rocked stiffly back and forth, his dusty boots soiling the velvet of the cloak. “Perhaps she never reached Avignon,” he said in a strangled voice. “Perhaps she has been dead the greater part of a year!”

Damiano grunted. “We have no reason to…”

“She is dead! I feel it. I have felt it for a long time!” Now Gaspare raised his head, and, yes, as Damiano suspected, the boy was weeping, reddening his protuberant gooseberry eyes. His nose was as pinched as an old man's, and indeed, Gaspare looked very aged right now, aged and in despair. “She was all I had. All I had. No father, no mother, no name of our own, and she was only a dirty slut, but she was all I had! And now she is dead and I have nothing!”

It was on the tip of Damiano's tongue to say that Gaspare still had him, but that seemed such a conceited thing to say.

Evidently the guard had some Italian, for bending at the waist and pushing his steel helmet back from his forehead, he whispered in Damiano's ear, “What a shame. How did she die?”

“We don't know that she
did
die,” hissed the lutenist back. “She simply did not show up for an appointment.”

Raphael knew where Evienne was. Damiano was tempted to tell Gaspare as much, to allay his fears. But how could he reveal that, without being therefore obliged to ask the angel for more specific information, which the musician did not want to do. Besides—was Raphael's knowledge a comforting thought after all? The fact that Raphael knew where the girl was did not mean necessarily that she was alive. For all Damiano knew, angels were on close terms with the dead. He remembered the little ghost of Macchiata, half hidden by Raphael's robe, and he decided not to mention Raphael's words to Gaspare.

Damiano crouched down in front of the boy and with both hands forced Gaspare to look at him. “You are being very unreasonable, Gaspare. Think whom we are dealing with. Evienne has no more sense than a kitten—I doubt she even knows how to read a calendar, and Jan… well, Jan Karl would not get out of bed to save his mother's life. Not if the bed were comfortable.

“Evienne is not dead; we have merely been stood up.”

Sadly Gaspare shook his head, but there were no more hysterics. Damiano left him to keep faith during the last daylight, under the small blue eyes of the interested guard. He ran the whole way back to the Bishop's Inn.

Damiano knew that Coutelan, the innkeeper, did not know what he was saying when he said Damiano had a genius; probably the man didn't know the difference between a genius of the lute and a genie in a lamp. Coutelan only repeated and magnified anything the Irishman said. Mac Whatever, who lived next door and had invested a certain amount of money in the operation of the inn, was his authority.

Which was why Damiano had gotten this job in the first place. It was because he had been seen by the innkeeper exiting the harper's garden in that unorthodox manner. And because he had an accent.

But though Damiano repeated these things to himself, he was still human, and praise could make him drunk. Especially after a long winter and hungry spring. And tonight he had gotten a good dose of it, for MacFhiodhbhuidhe had walked in leading a good ten other men, all musicians, and he had called Damiano his “glorious exception to the rules.” The young man had also been bought three glasses of violet wine, which was the harper's favorite but not Damiano's and consequently he now had a fire in his middle and a bad taste in his mouth.

In spite of this, as he wrapped the lute in its baby blanket and strode out into the street toward his poor accommodations, Damiano was singing to himself.

That owl on the wall there, making noise every night. Bothersome as a tomcat: it was a wonder somebody didn't kill the creature with a brick. And what did it find to eat in the stone and stucco city of Avignon?

Damiano, who was not the man to flip a brick at any animal, snapped his fingers and clucked to the bird as he went by. It followed his motion with a head that turned ridiculously far around. Its eyes were two orange full moons, mirroring the one in the sky. He went through the quiet, leather-hinged door.

And then Damiano remembered Gaspare and the sister who hadn't shown up. Queasy pity hit him, making his stomach worse. At least, he hoped, the boy had been able to sleep. Reaching the Heather Inn, he tiptoed down the hall and into the room they shared with four other men. One of them was snoring.

On Gaspare's pallet the clean straw glistened under the spear of moonlight admitted by the street-facing window. His blankets were lumped beside. There was no Gaspare.

Damiano cursed under his breath. By his own pallet he left the lute, still swaddled, and his lean legs took him out of the room and out of the inn in five strides.

Guilt that has been stored gathers interest, and Damiano was feeling very guilty at leaving Gaspare to wait. He loped the moonwashed, empty streets, stepping silently through long training—his father's training. He imagined Gaspare squatting there by the Papal Palace all evening, as the sun went down and the friendly guard was relieved by another, and the shops closed and the hawkers shut up and slowly all the avenue became still.

While Damiano, who did not really care if Evienne missed the appointment, save for Gaspare's sake, and who did not care for Jan Karl at all, had been playing to a room full of gentlemen, receiving heady praise and sweet wine. Shades of hell, that was a sorry thing, and most especially since Damiano's genius had always been Gaspare's faith, much more than Damiano's, and so the confirmation and the praise rightly belonged to Gaspare.

Above his head Damiano saw the silver white body of the owl float by on noiseless wings. He watched it swoop down upon a roof. Just before it struck it emitted a sharp, predatory cry. It did not reappear.

But then Damiano thought of another explanation for Gaspare's tardiness. Perhaps Evienne
had
come after all, and taken the boy with her to wherever she lived (preferably apart from the Dutchman). That made sense. And of course they would come back for Damiano, sooner or later, after the first flush of reunion was past.

With this conviction, Damiano's feet slowed to a more comfortable pace. He sighed deeply, feeling some great crisis had been only just averted. He strolled as far as the Pope's Door, to see whether they'd left any message.

There was the high, Gothic-arched gate, with a glistening sentry at either side, behind an avenue that the full moon made look decently clean. And there, like a bundle of rags beside the right-hand pikeman, was the huddled shape Damiano had decided would not be there. And because he had decided this halfway between the inn and the Pope's Door, Damiano was not prepared for the sight.

“Mother of God!” he whispered to the moonlight. “He
is
there. What on earth am I to do about this?” And he came to a stop, still a hundred feet away from the pathetic thing in the green velvet mantle. “What on earth
can
I do?”

And worldly fame turned to ashes in Damiano's soul. He turned on his heel and ran away, down the first, random crooked street he came to, fleeing because he could not meet the boy he had no way to help.

But had he no way? Raphael had said he knew where Evienne was, and would tell him at need. But he had also said there were other ways he could find out. There were, of course. If he were a witch he could find the girl, just as a hound could find her, given time enough.

If he were a witch.

Well, for God's sake, why not?

Because of his music? Hell and damn. What did it matter if he was the smoothest and most intellectual lutenist in all Provence and Italy? Was it important that ten men with reputations came to judge him as though he were a prize cow, while they ate pastries and talked musical philosophy? (While inside he nursed a slight contempt, knowing he was better than they.) Someday, then, he could be five and forty years old, and sit judging the young whose reputation is still to be made, secretly afraid that they might be better than he. Afraid they might be nursing a slight contempt.

Damiano then remembered the little tunes Raphael delighted to play: children's pieces without ornament or heterophony, and how the angel's head bent over Damiano's instrument, lost in simple melody, far beyond self.

Tears stung his eyes, and his stomach hurt like sin.

For what reason, besides devotion to the lute, had he refused his powers, when pressed by Saara? He had told her he was afraid his magic would hurt people.

It
had
hurt people. He'd killed at least fifty men with a force of terror one winter's day in the Alps. Perhaps he also saved that many, or five times that many, by circumventing a battle between Savoy and the
condottiere
General Pardo. But one was never sure about saving men, while killing them was incontrovertible.

And Gaspare was hurting already: hurting in a way that only magic could help. And of all the people in the world, Gaspare had most claim on him.

So all his reasons, musical and magical, were empty. In fact, what did it matter whether it was wise or foolish, saintly or sinful, for him to deny his witchhood?

What did Damiano matter at all? He had mattered too much to himself in the past year. Gaspare—loyal and uneducated, without philosophy, lost in the sea of his own sorrow—mattered. He had to be helped.

His feet raced on for another half-block, almost of their own accord. He passed a man who was casually pissing out of a groundfloor window. The white owl circled overhead, silent as any of the planets. When he finally stopped he realized that this decision carried him no closer toward a solution to Gaspare's problem.

For Saara held Damiano's witch-soul within her own, and Saara had said goodbye to him. Not
arrivederci,
or
au revoir,
or any other of the thousand ways to say she would see him later. She had been angry and had said goodbye. By now she was in Lombardy.

She could not be expected to come to him again.

The weariness of the long day descended on Damiano then, and he leaned upon the nearest wall for support. It was a dirty wall, stucco and timber like all the rest in Avignon. There was a bestial roar and a thud. The wall itself trembled and Damiano snatched back his hand.

Bandog. Mastiff. He backed away and for the first time looked about him at the sagging, dilapidated rowhouses, and the cobbles mired with human filth. He had not previously seen this side of life in the Papal city. He found himself standing in the exact middle of the street, scanning the shadows for movement. He feared thieves.

What a difference in fortune a week can make, he thought. I might have been lurking in the shadows myself. Slowly he turned on his heel and departed the way he had come, accompanied by the barking of the mastiff and the silent white owl.

He must try. Though Saara might refuse him, though she would certainly laugh at the way he was denying all his carefully thought-out reasons for remaining simple, still he must make the effort.

If he could remember how.

There—that silver strip against the hill with the river beyond— that was the wall of the enclosure. There stood the pikemen. There sat Gaspare, beneath his weight of fear. It was try now or never.

Damiano came to an ancient grapevine trained into an espalier. The wood was heavy, the burgeoning leaves few. The dirt of the city had half killed it and age was completing the rest of the task, but it was yet alive, and its leaves rustled as he laid his face against its trellised surface. He took comfort from the strength of wood as he tried to remember.

It was difficult—difficult and painful as well, for he no longer trusted the torn vacancies of his mind where he had slept away a year. He clung in fear to the smell of furry grape leaves, to the rough brush of bark, to the sound of the hooting owl. He could not let go.