The Damiano Series (92 page)

Three claps more above the knees and three in front at arm's length and three more in the lap and then in front of the face, one, two, and…

Perhaps Damiano gave a nudge, or perhaps Raphael, in the heat of the performance, wasn't thinking quite what he was doing, but the third clap came hard and symmetrically down on his injured nose.

He gasped and rose half to his feet. “I hit myself!” he cried aloud, and then, as greater understanding came to him, he added, “You MADE me to hit myself!”

The spectral form wavered, perhaps through shame. “But your nose: How is it now?”

Raphael gave a careful sniff. “I smell blood,” he said, with a hint of petulance. “But I think… I think…”

Again Damiano leaned close. “I don't hear anything.”

Raphael, too, listened. “No. Nothing. The whistle is gone.”

“And your nose is straight again. You'll be as handsome as ever.”

The blond's fine hands were locked protectively around the middle of his face, but his eyes turned to Damiano with sudden interest. “Am I handsome? I never thought about it.”

Sadly Damiano smiled. “You've never been a mortal before. Now you'll think about things like that: Are my teeth good? Is that a wrinkle or a spot forming by my eyebrow? Is that fellow a bigger, stronger, better man than I? It's the mortal condition; we don't seem to be able to help it.

“And another part of being mortal, Seraph. Hating. Do you hate your master yet?”

Raphael squatted down again. He lifted his eyes to the stars while the warm wind stirred his hair.

“My master? I feel bad that he hit me. He had never told me I was not supposed to mention that Djoura was a Berber in front of other Berbers. And how was I to know that Djoura's father had been sworn to Qa'id Hasiim years ago?

“And though I know Rashiid had reason to be angry—he felt compelled to give a great gift of money to the Berbers in the Alhambra, as well as losing what he'd paid for Djoura—still, I'd rather not have to see him anymore. Somehow I don't like looking at him or hearing his voice.”

“Understandable.”

“Is it?” Raphael's left eyebrow shot up in a movement familiar to his student. “I don't understand it. After all, Rashiid will be Rashiid whether in my sight and hearing or not.

“But that is nothing like hate, I know, for I have felt hate. One doesn't have to be a mortal… There is one I hate and have hated for a very long time.” Then Raphael took a deep breath through his newly repaired nostrils.

“And anyway, this blunder of mine led to Djoura being freed, and freedom was what she most wanted, so I'm glad of it.”

“Freedom is what we all most want,” murmured the thoughtful spirit, and for a moment he faded into moonlight. When he raised his face to his friend again, there was a hint of fire in his dark eyes.

“Raphael, you must remember who you are!”

The man looked only weary. He turned his head away. “I remember, my friend. My confusion is nearly gone.

“I remember every voice in the choir. And the song, in all its parts —how could I forget that? But my memories are only memories, and don't move me.”

The voice of a single frog hidden in the weeds of the pond silenced Raphael for a few moments. Then he said, “More real to me than heavenly music is the fact that my nose hurts, and is dripping blood, and that I know I must dig at the latrines tomorrow, as well as play the ud.”

Damiano nodded. He dipped one vague hand into the black pool water, passing it through several little perch in the process. Neither hand nor fish were the worse for it. “You don't talk about God— your Father—anymore.”

Raphael's eyes slipped down, from his friend's face to the undisturbed surface of the water. “You mean Allah. Here He is Allah, and the people of Granada use His name in every third sentence. And they all seem to know just what His will is on every issue. All but me, of course.

“Allah and I have not been introduced.”

“You are bitter,” whispered the ghost.

Raphael smiled and his battered face was transformed. “I'm not,

really.” He put his hand into the waistband of his trousers and pulled out a little pouch. “I have a pebble, Dami: the one you gave me. I take care of it.”

The moon had rolled away and only Jupiter and the Dog Star made light enough to outshine the approach of dawn. In that season and latitude Sirius never set.

Raphael was sleeping like a dog, however, curled against the cold with a protective hand on either side of his nose. Even as he slumbered, the little perch of the pond did not relax their honor guard, and the carp at the bottom hugged the bottom and sides of the tank as though to push their way through soil to the transformed angel.

Soon the dozen men in the barracks would be expected to wake up and be useful. They slept all the harder now in expectation.

But in the main house little Ama was awake; she had had to wake up to vomit, which was her recent custom. As always, concluding this task left her fresh and airy, ready for the day's experience. And now she tiptoed out the white doorway, sure of her path despite the lack of light.

Ama was wearing white. She came sans veil and her hair was undone. She looked more like Rashiid's little daughter than Rashiid's young wife. She found Raphael on the bench beside the fish pond. Finger-length perch darted in every direction.

“Ho, slugabed! Wake up. Wake up and do my hair.”

Raphael opened both eyes. He yawned, winced, and touched his upper Up. He chafed his unclad arms.

“Since because of you I don't have Djoura anymore, you must be my body servant,” Ama persisted. Then she giggled. “You're much nicer, after all, though you're the wrong color.”

She leaned over him and peered closely at his face. “Wrong colors, I should say. How shocking!” Ignoring his incoherent reply, Ama pushed his knees off the bench and sat herself down facing away from him, presenting her abundant hair.

“My husband is a brute; I have always known so. He would hit me, I'm sure, if my family were not so important. I'm glad they are. My uncle is a
nakib;
he has the fealty of two hundred men. But not so much money.

“Why do you sleep outside, Raphael? It gets cold in the morning. It's cold now.

“You know how Djoura used to sleep? Fully dressed, in all those dusty black gowns of hers. Looked like a hill of mud, she did, with her veil over her black face. But she was warm, I bet.

“What did you say?”

Raphael had been about to tell Ama why he slept on the bench by the fish pond: a story which involved his first and only night in the barracks (fully dressed, like Djoura), when because of his humming and his muted conversation with an unseen visitor he had earned eviction. But as he rose from his hard cot he thought of something else to say.

“I don't know how to do your hair, mistress,” the slave admitted. “I have never done a lady's hair before.”

Ama shrugged and set her small mouth. “You know how to make braids, don't you? Braid it.”

Raphael set to work. His hands were good, and he was, of course, an artist. He worked neatly but without great speed, and Ama wiggled. After a few minutes, she wiggled backward into his lap.

“Rashiid is angry with me too. Isn't that absurd? All because I'm the one who wanted the black. How was I to know she was of an important clan? It's Rashiid's own business to know those things; I'm just his wife, after all.”

She darted an avian glance back at the blond. “I wish I weren't his wife. I wish I was YOUR wife instead!” Then Ama giggled at her own conceit. “The wife of a eunuch! Wouldn't that be an easy job?”

Suddenly the girl spun about on Raphael's knees, pulling her black tresses from his fingers. Her face was inches from his. With her fingers she combed his yellow hair over his eyes and began to twist it about. “Your turn, Pinkie… I mean Raphael.

“You'd make such a pretty girl yourself, except that you're too big, of course, and too skinny. But I like your eyes, and your mouth is so sweet.” She kissed his not-quite-awake face.

Color had descended from the sky: the green of the pond, the blue in Raphael's eyes, the hidden russet in Ama's hair. “Shall I marry you, Raphael? Shall I forget about Rashiid and marry you? You can be my little wife!”

Ama forced her treble voice down to a masculine growl as she repeated again and again the phrase “my little wife.” She had quite a talent for imitating Rashiid, both in word and gesture; Raphael found himself being possessively pawed all over. It was rather pleasant.

“I have only seen one eunuch before,” whispered Ama, breaking out of her husbandly character for a moment. “He was the little boy of my uncle's household in Algiers, and he had two red scars in this shape.” She laid one finger crosswise over another. “He would cry if we tried to touch them.

“Here, Pinkie. While no one else is watching. Take your trousers off and show me.”

Raphael's fair forehead drew down and he prisoned Ama's exploratory hands in his own. “I'm not supposed to do that,” he said.

With a force of outrage she yanked free of his grasp. “Not supposed to… Who said you're not supposed to? I'm your mistress and I say…” Ama grabbed the waistband of Raphael's cotton trousers and pulled until the cord broke. The baggy garment slipped onto the bare wood of the bench.

Little Ama looked first surprised and then quite confused. She was speechless. Under the intensity of her stare Raphael grew nervous. He also felt quite warm, somehow, though the sun had not yet crested the wall. He attempted to gather the cloth again at his hips, but Ama forestalled him.

“Either a eunuch looks just like a man, once he grows up, or…” Her small round eyes rose to his. “Are you a whole man after all, Raphael?”

“Yes,” he replied. “But no one is supposed to know that.”

Ama rolled her eyes. She edged away from the slave along the bench and folded her hands on her lap. Her feet swung to and fro, not touching the ground. “By the light of Allah!” she whispered, and then, “Rashiid is going to be sooo angry!”

Raphael found he was more nervous than ever, though not nearly so warm. “I did not ever tell him I was a eunuch,” he ventured to say to the girl, but she only muttered and shook her head.

Then with her typical unpredictability, Ama squeezed Raphael teasingly in a place he did not expect. “I won't tell,” she promised, grinning sidelong. “Not if you're nice to me.” Then she turned and darted, perchlike, past the fish pond and away.

In the harbor of Adra, the big-bellied ships bobbed and wallowed in the swell. The longshoremen sang in Spanish and the wind tasted of salt.

Djoura hated it: both the Spanish and the water-laden air, which made her nose run. She despised the whining Northern Arabic of the mariners who warbled and yodeled to each other in the hold, securing their cargo of oranges. She had great contempt for the official Granadan bookkeeper, a sunburned Spaniard who sat on a small date keg by the gangplank, in case the owner of the boat should try to load anything in evasion of the export duties.

Djoura sat behind the gay-striped partitions in the stern of the ship which was to take her across the Mediterranean, and she thought furiously.

It had been a pleasant shock, in the beginning, when the tribesmen burst into the Spanish pig's hot kitchen, scaring his old wife into hysterics and pulling her out of the grease and soot. It had also been fulfilling to see Rashiid babbling apologies—not to her, of course, but to the Berbers he had so grievously offended.

Djoura had not expected these pale Berbers, strange to her, to take such an interest. It was only just—only Berber—that they should, of course, but still, Djoura had lived her life in the real world, and no one else in her five years of slavery looked past her skin color to see that she was of the free people, and that her captivity was an outrage.

And this, besides, was not the manner in which Djoura had planned to regain her freedom. Where did they think they were sending her, anyway? Not a soul had bothered to share with her that information. The black woman knew well she had no living male kin. She had seen her father's headless body, and her single brother— well, if he had lived, he would have found her by now.

Perhaps they would dump her with the first black Berbers to pass through Algiers. Then what would she be? Little more than a slave, again.

As a slave, she had known herself a Berber, and therefore not truly a slave. Now, kinless among her own race, she would be a free but homeless female, and therefore not free at all.

Djoura cursed the pride which had forced Hasiim to “rescue” her —a woman in whom he had no interest, and to whom he had never bothered to speak.

And always Djoura's circle of thought returned to her Pinkie, whom she had groomed for the role of her male “protector” in their escape from Rashiid's household, and who was the unwitting cause of all this upset. How had he suffered for his interference? Surely that greasy swine had not let his loose tongue go unpunished…

Poor Pinkie: How long would he be able to hide his secret among that household—without Djoura? He would be a real eunuch soon enough, and with stripes to boot.

Ah, but maybe that would be just as well. Pinkie was so naive: too childlike even to consider vengeance. And he wasn't much of a man, to look at: pale, beardless, baby-haired. He wouldn't mind as much as some. Assuredly he would not kill himself from the shame of castration, as many men would. Djoura sighed. The wind caused the hangings of her enclosure to flap and billow, reducing it to an unconcealing framework of ropes: a seclusion as ineffective as was this “rescue” from slavery.

Then, between one moment and the next, Djoura knew that she could not leave Pinkie to his fate.

For hadn't she named him her brother? And even as a brother must avenge his sister or die, so must she, Djoura, return for the poor pale singer she had adopted.