The Damiano Series (8 page)

“Master no more, dear one,” he sighed. “Say rather I'm little Dami, your foolish pet. Imagine what my father would have said, if he had seen me put my staff aside in a room full of strangers.” The grown witch had tried to make his son careful. In Damiano's mind came the vision of his father snatching the black wood from the dozing boy's hands and simultaneously giving him a cuff on the ear, while he laughed, laughed, laughed… The memory gave him the added warmth of shame, but it made his head ache more.

Macchiata snorted, piglike. “Of course you are my Master. Only you are too trusting for your own good.”

Damiano's brows drew together, which brought lancing pain along his scalp. The fire, however, was helping him.

“It was Pierre Paris's fear that caused him to strike me. Had he not known I was a witch, it would not have happened.”

“You are wrong, Master,” said Macchiata, quickly but diffidently, for she was not used to contradicting Damiano. “I'm sorry, but it's true. The one with the pale hair tried to stop that one. He said he'd be sorry for it. Then the one with no hair on his head asked what was the difference: a knife in the back at night or a wine bottle at dinner?”

“They were robbers? They meant to kill me in my sleep?” asked Damiano, incredulous. “What else did they say?”

Macchiata's skinny tail slapped his leg: once, twice, then rapidly. “They didn't have time to say much. I was asleep, but the sound woke me up.”

“The sound,” repeated Damiano. “The echo of the blow resounding in my braincase. That's what woke you up.”

She licked his hand. “But I cursed them for it, and I bit them. I bit the black one on the thick part of the leg, but on the blond my hold slipped, so I made a big rip in his shirt, and bloodied where he would sit.”

“So the one you missed altogether was the one who hit me with the wine bottle,” remarked Damiano, not meaning to denigrate her victory.

“Yes, because he tried to beat me off with your staff. It bit him.”

Damiano felt the blackwood beneath his fingers. “Signor Paris may never have use of that hand again,” he said.

“Both hands. But it was my curses that chased them out the door without their packs. I got the words from your father.” Macchiata wrapped her tongue around her muzzle, then smiled till her bristly muzzle resembled a cat's face.

Leaning on his staff, Damiano rose to his feet. “Packs?” he murmured, and shuffled off to see. “And curses? I only hope, Macchiata, that you didn't compromise your soul with evil wishes. They are very deadly.”

“Have I a soul, Master?” She asked in a tone of casual interest. “I never heard that before.”

There were two bundles under the table, besides his own sheepskin bag. A third huddled against the hearthstones. “Of course you have a soul, Macchiata,” he answered, and although he knew himself to be on shaky theological ground, still he believed that anyone who liked Raphael as much as the dog did, and who was so liked in return, had to have a soul. “And a great spirit, besides….

“Now let's see what the three scholars have left us.”

Within the packs was an assortment of trash, along with a few objects of peculiar meaning and value. The first sack dumped on the table offered a lady's hairpin in gold and pearls, along with three silver florins in a needlepoint pouch. The second bag held a double handful of walnuts, together with a bundle of faded letters written in a script that was not quite German. Out of the final bag dropped a squarish parcel wrapped in linen and tied with twine. Damiano undid the tiny knot with a tiny loosing spell.

“Domine Deus!”
he breathed, as a book in vellum, bound in both wood and leather, flapped onto the table. “So they weren't totally false!”

It was a volume of the poetry of Petrarch, copied in painful, schoolboy script. The premier letter of each verse was illuminated in the old manner, with awkward care and much gold paint.

These items were heavy, and he did not really want to be reminded of their former possessors. Yet books were like children; they could not be abandoned to the snow. And he did appreciate Petrarch.

In the end Damiano decided to take all but the clothing as spoils of war.

Their fire, too, was his by right. And their food. He felt almost well enough to care about that. His eyes scanned the table.

“What became of the sausage, little dear? Did our friend the German carry it with him out into the snow?”

Macchiata's tail and ears stood up. She dashed to the corner and nuzzled under Damiano's lute, backing out with something black and dirt-covered in her mouth.

“No, he dropped it,” she mumbled, placing an irregularly shaped piece of greasy meat in his hand. “I saved half for you.”

In the first light Damiano woke once more and spent a few minutes playing his lute. He had a headache and a spot of numbness on his scalp. Further, his eyes refused to focus on the strings. Raphael did not appear, but then the angel would scarcely have fit in the hut, and besides, Damiano had no time to spare. He took a swig of the wine in the basket-jug, and for luck, another of his father's tonic. Then he stepped into the cold.

After a half-mile's march the headache had grown to fill the world, and the light of the new sun on the snow pierced his eyes. Tears ran along his cheeks, and even the dog had nothing cheerful to say. Damiano was not too far from wishing he were dead, but the alternative of every person in the winter wilderness—curling up in the snow and sleeping—had no attraction.

“We shall be there today, and early,” he muttered. “Except for the weather, we might have reached the pastures by yesterday nightfall.” He watched for the cluster of huts that housed the shepherds of the mountains and a small number of hunters whose livelihoods kept them in the heights all winter. The nearest real village was Pont Saint Martin, on the North Road two miles from the spot where Damiano had turned, which was the reason this poor assembly was known as Sous Pont Saint Martin. Damiano had been there only once, in July, when his father had been called to treat the sheep for a bad flux.

The road had been swept by wind and the abrasive, frozen snow of the night before. In rare spots the wind had come again and shaved the earth bare, leaving only the strange, reversed prints of men and horses, made of pressed snow and glistening white against the black earth. Who knew how old these were?

The slopes dropped away on either side of the road, and the travelers came to a river: the Lys. It ran wide and violent, though ice crusted each bank like sheets of shattered glass. Across the river a stone bridge led. It was wide and smooth, with waist-high guardwalls on either side. It was the sort of craftsmanship the country people dismissed as Roman work, heavy, useful, built to last. There was no evidence it was old Roman, except in the fact that no Piedmontese was likely to take such trouble on a mountain bridge. Roman work was like the hills themselves: whether or not men could make such things today, they were there for free and so not to be admired too much.

As he crossed over the span the wind hit him and turned his head to the left, from whence the river flowed.

His left foot trod on his right, and then Damiano stopped stock still. “Mother of God! Can it be?” he cried and sank down on his knees in the wet snow.

There stood peaks ranked against the sky: an awesome white phalanx, blinding bright from the teeth of their summits to the green cloaks that wrapped their feet, which were banded with silver rock. They were so tall they crowded the sky, and they grew taller as they seemed to rush at the kneeling youth. In their silence were all the voices of an infinite, inhuman choir.

Two presences dominated. To the left sat the highest peak in the Valle d'Aosta: Mont Emilius, whom the peasants called Grandfather. Rugged and glistening, it had roots reaching almost to the road. To the right, far away and behind a palisade of mountains, out of a shimmer of light rose a single white fang, sharp as the tooth of a dog, and crooked at the tip, like a dog's tooth, but unearthly clean. Damiano did not know it was Mont Cervin: the peak called the Matterhorn.

As he stared, kneeling, he wept, knowing the beauty he saw must be like that of Raphael, if the archangel were to fling aside his little human cloak and appear as a flame of divine love. This the angel would never do, of course, out of a concern for the limits of man. The mountains, however, were less merciful. Damiano's ecstasy bid fair to do him damage.

“Master! Get up! Please, your knees are getting soaked. Master! Damiano. What is the pain?” Macchiata danced a circle around him, nuzzling his hands with her warm tongue and her cold nose.

“Little dear, I see a beauty fit to kill a man! Can't you see the… thrones of the ages?”

“Thrones of who?” She prodded him to his feet.

“Of the… the mountains. Mont Emilius and another. Doesn't their loveliness pierce you?”

She snorted. “I see nothing. The wall is too high. But if piercing is what loveliness does to you, I want no part of it!

“Come, Damiano. You can't stop here, in the wind, and now wet besides.”

Docile, made meek by so much splendor, he allowed her to lead him forward. In a few minutes the village of Sous Pont Saint Martin peeped out between two hills. Damiano passed between them into a natural rock shelter, where the wind swirled aimlessly, carrying snow spray in a high spiral into the air.

The west side of each square hut was braced with a flying buttress of white. The patch of ground blocked from the wind by each building was scattered with bootprints, along with the prints of shod hooves. Many riders had been here recently.

But were not here now. The village was desolate. Silence rumbled in Damiano's ears. Or was that Macchiata, growling?

Damiano glanced down at the dog in surprise. Her hackles were up, her squat legs braced. Nervously, her eyes met his. “Let's go back to the road,” she suggested.

“Why, Macchiata? Here is shelter, and my feet are frozen. What's wrong, little dear? Do you smell soldiers?”

“Yes. No. No soldiers now. Just blood. Frozen blood.”

Damiano took a wary step forward. Macchiata scrabbled in front of him and stood barring his way. “No, Master. You are too sensitive; looking at mountains hurts you. This will hurt you worse!

“Let's go back to the road. Our people aren't here.”

Damiano's easy color rose to his cheeks, and he gazed resentfully down at her. “Love of beauty is not the same thing as cowardice, Macchiata.

“Wasn't it I who found my father perishing in torment? And have I not grown up hearing Father Antonio remind us that all flesh is the food of worms—flesh of both dogs and men, little one? Dead men hold no terror for me.”

The dog dropped her head and Damiano swept by.

In the circle formed by the huts was a little meadow, which in the summer was browsed by chickens and the occasional hobbled goat. Now it was swept by wind and ice and snow, with the gray stubble of grass exposed where the wind had scraped most deep. In this field lay the broken bodies of three men and an old woman, frozen clean and uncorrupt. The edges of their many wounds were fresh and sharp: the color of good pork.

At Damiano's feet lay the severed head of one of the men: a young peasant with a reddish beard. The skin was blue and white and waxlike. The neck was chopped neat. With the hollow windpipe arched through it and the spine running through the back, the neck looked like a slice cut through a fish. Ice crystals had grown from the edges of the empty veins. The head wore an expression of slack bewilderment as it stared at the sky over Damiano's shoulder. One eye was open wider than the other.

Damiano thought he was doing very well until he tried to move. The horrid field reeled, and only his staff held him to his feet.

He shuffled from one body to another, mouthing an incoherent prayer for the dead that was also a plea for Christ to sustain him through this nausea. He dared not look at Macchiata.

The head was the most horrible, but the old woman was the saddest, for she had been trampled and her fusty black skirt torn off. Around each of the forms the snow was tinted a faded ruby, much like the color of the stone at the tip of Damiano's staff.

He raised his eyes to the sound of rhythmic lapping. A dog was licking at the bloody snow by the severed head. For a terrible moment he thought it was Macchiata.

It was not, of course. It was a shaggy herd dog, doubtless belonging to some man of the village. Perhaps the beast's master lay dead here before him. Whatever, it could do these poor figures no hurt.

Macchiata noticed the cur at the same moment. With a bull bellow she flung herself upon the stranger, who offered no fight, but tucked tail and fled.

“Come back, Macchiata,” called Damiano, as the red spot that was all he could see of her bobbed into the distance behind a row of huts. “There may be more of them. Come back!”

A human voice answered his with a cry shrill and weak. Damiano's hair prickled. He stared around him.

There was nothing to be seen: an ox wagon, its tongue buried in drifts; a stack of brushwood for burning; a pitchfork, wooden tines protruding from the snow like bird claws; the imperturbable gray stones of the huts. No more. But the cry came again, from across the expanse of wind. Damiano sprang toward it, plunging knee deep. He leaped over a dimple in the snow, not knowing it was the village well and twenty feet deep. The row of buildings greeted him with silence.

“Hello!” he cried. “Who's there?”

“In here!” came the answer from behind a door. He put his shoulder to it.

The door sagged in, hanging by one hinge.

The darkness within took his sight, and he gagged at the smell. “Speak!” Damiano commanded, swaying in the doorway. “If there is a Christian soul within…”

“Here,” she replied, and he saw her: the pale spot of a face in the corner by the door. She was covered in blankets and the skin of a cow. One hand held the wraps under her chin. That and her face was all he could see. He knelt beside her.