The Damiano Series (94 page)

He put her down on the pathway and turned, self-consciously, to the spot the music came from.

“Don't mind me,” came a ghostly whisper. “I doubt very much the child can see me.” Damiano struck up a saraband.

Ama was rubbing her mouth thoughtfully. “Raphael! Do you know you have a beard coming?”

Confused both by Damiano's and Ama's words, Raphael put his own hand to his face. “A… a beard?”

Ama bent him down with a hand behind his neck. She ran her fingernails backward over his cheek with female expertise. “Yes. You're growing a beard.” She snickered, came up on tiptoe and poked him under the jawbone. “Well, why not? We both know what you are—or aren't!

“My secret stallion!” Ama bubbled over with connivance as she added, “But how we'll hide THIS from Rashiid I don't know. Unless we pluck them all out, of course.”

“Sounds painful,” murmured Damiano from nowhere in particular.

The slave, too, made a tentative demur, but Ama was having none of it.

Raphael shot his friend a pleading glance as his mistress dragged him toward the house. The ghost, however, made no move to interfere.

By the light of one candle it was very difficult to find the fine yellowish hairs on Raphael's cheeks. Sitting on her subject's lap was also not the most convenient way to set about the task. But there was only one stool in the women's hidey-hole (now that Moorish visitations had become much rarer) and Ama was used to working in bad light. She was expert with the tiny brass tweezers.

“There's one,” she hissed, and the implement hovered closer. The tweezers struck with the speed of a hawk and Raphael flinched just perceptibly.

“Poor Pinkie,” Ama crooned, and left a kiss on the spot she had stung. The kiss took much longer than the plucking.

Raphael looked around at the candle-dancing clay walls.

“Perhaps I should simply tell Rashiid that I am not a eunuch at all,” he ventured to suggest. “It is the simple truth.”

Ama drew her breath in in a hiss. “Raphael! Then you would BE a eunuch for certain. Do you want that to happen?”

He squirmed in his seat, considering the question. “No,” he replied with some decision. “I don't know quite why, but that is a very repellent thought.”

“Or maybe he would merely kill you in his rage!” Ama's dark threat dissolved into a giggle. She plucked and kissed three times in succession. Then she kissed three times more. “My dear Pinkie. You're funny, with your ‘simple truth' and all!”

Ama was so small and warm and cuddly that Raphael found himself hugging her. Her hair was against his lips. He stroked it. She lifted her face to his.

The only other woman who had ever touched him had had hands less soft than these. Black hands, which had bathed him and combed his hair. Hands that smelled like sun and sand. Raphael heard Djoura's rich, brocaded songs in his ears as he held the little Arab girl.

His embrace grew tighter, with an urgency that seemed imposed upon him from outside, against his will. Ama pressed her round, fragile body against his. The last kiss did not end, but wandered from her mouth to her neck. Raphael's flesh was singing like the strings of a lute struck all together. So this was lust, he thought to himself.

This beautiful thing. Lust. A grin stretched tightly across his face.

“Why aren't you looking at me?” hissed Ama in his ear. “Why are you sitting there smiling into space like that? Don't you like to kiss me?”

Raphael had to swallow before talking and still his voice was thick. “I do,” he said, smiling shyly. “And I don't know why I was staring out; I just was.”

“Then kiss me again, and keep your eyes closed,” she insisted. Raphael obeyed his mistress, and she in turn took his hand in her smaller one and placed it where she thought best.

The stool Raphael had been sitting on had gotten lost somehow. They were sinking to the floor. And the floor was warm. It was as though the earth were turning soft and silky: like flesh.

But behind his closed eyes the flesh he stroked was not amber, like that of Ama, but ebony, and the mouth that touched his was heavier. And more proud.

“I want you to be my husband,” Ama crooned, burying her face against Raphael's breast. “You are so beautiful. So gentle!

“I don't love Rashiid; I hate him! He is a bear. A stupid pig! I want YOUR love.”

Raphael's blue-black eyes clouded over. He struggled up from the floor, pulling his mistress onto his lap once again. He nestled her sleek head beneath his chin.

“Poor Ama,” he whispered. “My poor, dear Ama.”

Ama struggled free. “What do you mean, ‘poor Ama'? You are supposed to say, ‘lovely Ama, beautiful, generous Ama'! Are you not my slave, after all? Is it not I who am conferring honor?”

She stood, and thus was slightly taller than he was, seated. Her taper threw a writhing shadow on the wall behind. Raphael saw a small candle flame in each of her shining brown eyes.

“I… I called you poor Ama because you said you were unhappy,” he said simply.

Ama settled her clothes, like feathers, into place. She leaned forward to him, hands on her knees, and kissed the tip of his nose. “Ah, but you can make me happy!” she whispered, and her ready grin was back.

“See this?” She let the brilliant shawl fall about her face. “Isn't it terrible? Spanish. I wore it for you!”

Raphael took the fabric in his hand. He didn't think it was terrible at all, even if Spanish. It suited Ama's olive coloring very well. He thought it would look good on Djoura too.

“How can I be your husband when you already have a husband?” he thought to ask.

“If Rashiid will be angry to learn I am a man, will he not be much angrier to find you want to…”

Ama cut him off with a grimace. “Rashiid is not to know, mooncalf!”

“This is Rashiid's house. You are Rashiid's wife, and I am Rashiid's slave.” Raphael folded his hands between his knees and let his head hang forward. For a while he watched the play of shadows on the tile floor. “I may be a simpleton, as everyone says, yet I know we cannot act THAT part for long here without the master discovering us.”

There was total silence from Ama, which lasted until Raphael lifted his eyes to see she was crying.

He opened his mouth in incoherent apology, but Ama spoke with trembling voice. “Don't you love me, my Pinkie, my Raphael? I have loved you since the first time I saw you. It was because of you I made Rashiid buy that nasty black Djoura, and…”

“Djoura isn't nasty,” he began, but seeing Ama's expression, immediately took a new tack.

“You are very dear to me, mistress. You are my closest friend in this place, and…”

“You have closer elsewhere?” Her dimpled chin jutted forward.

Raphael was not allowed to reply, for Ama found her own answer. “Djoura! That's why she wanted you sold together; she said you were her brother, but what she meant was quite different, I'll bet! I'll bet you lay together every night you could!”

“That isn't true,” he said, but as he spoke his mind filled with unbidden images, with the Berber's song all mixed with Ama's warm skin and the divine irresponsibility he had just learned to call lust. Therefore his words did not carry authenticity to his mistress's ear.

“I'm going to tell Rashiid you attempted to force yourself on me!” the girl declared.

“Please don't,” Raphael said weakly.

“Why not? Why shouldn't I?”

“Because it's not the truth.”

This plain response seemed to daunt Ama. “Well, I'll just tell him you're a whole man. That's the truth, and will be the same in the end.”

He reached out a hand to her, but hers hid behind her back. “But you said he would do me harm.”

Ama snorted and looked down the length of her nose at the fair face before her. “A moment ago you were the upright one: the one who wanted to tell him. And you a mere Christian—a giaour! Trying to make me feel low. Well, where's your courage now?”

The entreating hand dropped to Raphael's lap. “I never said I was courageous, Ama. In truth I am not very brave at all.”

He blinked confusedly and rubbed his face with both palms. “Nor very clever, I don't think.

“But I do know this; if I lie with you, mistress, it will lead to great unhappiness, maybe death, for us both.”

His blue eyes gazed so steadily that Ama turned her head to one side. “I'm not afraid.”

“I am,” whispered Raphael.

Ama ground her teeth. “Then be afraid of this, Pinkie. Unless you're a lot… nicer to me by tomorrow night, I have every intention of telling Rashiid what I know about you.”

Ama snatched the candle and stalked out of the room.

He sat with his forehead propped on his spread fingertips, his elbows on his knees. “How have I gotten myself into such a sticky web, when to my best understanding I did nothing wrong at all?”

It was the sort of question a man asks of the air, but in Raphael's case the air replied. “Know your own duty; that's all that's asked of you, and it's simple enough, isn't it?”

Raphael lifted his beautiful, offended face. By the velvety movement of a shadow it seemed his friend was standing just outside the window. “No, it is not! Simple? How can you say…”

Damiano's vague form wavered, shruglike. “That's word for word what you said to me once.”

“I did?” The slave hoisted himself out of the window again, and took a calmative breath of night air. “How dared I open my mouth about mortal concerns, having never been a mortal of any sort?”

There were the stars, up above his head in a Spanish sky untainted by clouds. There was the full moon. Unaccountably, Raphael thought of Djoura. “A mortal of any sort,” he repeated, lamely, to those stars.

“Yet your advice was always of the best,” Damiano chuckled, in a voice as soft as the wind. “You told me to dress myself to attract girls. You cut my hair becomingly. You even won over my sweetheart, who felt she had reason to hate you.

“In fact, Raphael, mortal or no, you have always known how to please the ladies.”

The blond turned to stare at Damiano, which was difficult, since he had no clear idea where he was. “You were listening!” he blurted aloud. “To Ama and me!”

There came a soft rustling, not like that of orange leaves but like that of a man shifting from foot to embarrassed foot. “Yes, I was listening. Shouldn't I have been?

“After all, I hadn't said I was going away, had I?” Then, in tones airy and droll, he added, “Perhaps I should write you a note to tell you when I'm nearby. I remember someone suggesting that policy to me once.”

The ghost's voice had taken Raphael to the garden wall. He slumped against it, feeling its coolness as a relief more than physical. “Don't make fun of me, Dami. If I was officious in the past, you can console yourself with the knowledge I'm wretched enough now.”

Damiano stood beside him in an instant, perfect from his rough hair to his large mountaineer's boots. His square hand (nails cut blunt on long musician's fingers) rested on his friend's shoulder. “I'm so sorry, Seraph,” he said. “I was only trying to make you laugh.

“Is it what your mistress said that disturbs you? Is it her displeasure, or do you fear your master will really do you harm? I have some advice on that point, if you'd care to listen.”

As Raphael opened his mouth to tell Damiano that he was quite definitely afraid of what Rashiid would do
_s
another answer came to his lips. “It's not any of that.”

The cicadas were droning like a headache, like sleep. Rashiid's unused mare moved restlessly in her confined quarters, kicking at a board.

“When Ama… embraced me, I really wanted to… to …”

“Of course you did,” said the ghost.

“No, you don't understand. I wanted to… replace her with someone else. And make love to her instead.”

This statement hung between them in the air for some moments before Raphael added to it. “I miss my friend Djoura.”

“Ah.” Damiano's voice held understanding, but he could not resist adding, in the next breath, “Wasn't she the one who used to kick you at night to make you stop singing?”

“She only did that once,” the slave replied with offended dignity. “And I understand now. Her whole plan was to keep everyone from finding out. That I am not a eunuch.”

A ripple of pigeon gray against the white of the wall showed that the spirit had ruffled his wings. “Well. That leads us back to the original problem. The fact that you are not a eunuch.”

Raphael, feeling very uncertain of himself, listened in his friend's voice for clues. “Is that what you think, Dami? That the problem is simply that I OUGHT to be a eunuch? Perhaps, then, I should allow my master to…”

There was an explosion of immaterial feathers. Damiano's twin sails snapped upward, hiding the moon and stars. “Seraph! Teacher! Raphael! What are you saying?

“You must not permit yourself to be so maimed! Nor, for that matter, should you continue as a slave. Nor languish without your lady friend.

“And THAT'S the advice of Damiano, the intrusive spirit. Take it or leave it,” he concluded, less passionately.

Raphael couldn't help casting a furtive eye over the dark garden, even though he knew Damiano's outburst had made no sound another could hear. “But Rashiid is my master,” he answered. “Under the laws of man. And Djoura—she is freed and gone from here.”

The ghost allowed his smoky wings to sink back again, until they obscured his outline, but a pair of quick Italian eyes darted from the wall to his friend's wan face. “Laws of man,” he echoed, rumbling in his deep, mumbling, Piedmontese accent. “Hah, for the laws of man!” A complex, obscure gesture accompanied the words.

“Raphael, you know me for a witch, don't you?”