The Damiano Series (95 page)

The blond's eyes (not quick; not Italian) deepened in memory. “I know what you were in life, my dear friend.”

Damiano lifted one eyebrow and one wing, in unconscious imitation of his teacher. “Well, Seraph, alive or dead, I'm about to work a great magic for you. To help alleviate this problem.”

Raphael managed a smile. He let his back slide down the smooth wall until he was sitting on the turf. “Which problem, Dami? That of my freedom, or of my…”

“They are linked,” the ghost replied shortly. With a face so full of gravity it wore a scowl, he floated back from Raphael.

Great dusky wings stood out sideways, as stiff as heraldry. Two rather large hands were lifted in front of Damiano's breast. He raised his flashing eyes to the heavens. “Habera Corpus!” he intoned. “Ades, Barbara, Ades!”

His shadowy hand was lit suddenly and only for a moment. The air smelled of lightning.

“Witness,” cried Damiano, pointing inexplicably at the top of the garden wall. “Witness my power.”

Raphael looked, saw nothing, and gazed confusedly once more at the spirit.

Who completed the ruination of the effect by winking.

But at a sound Raphael's head turned again to the wall, just in time to see Djoura, bareheaded but draped in her numerous garb, put one foot and then the other over the top and drop to the dry garden earth beside him.

Raphael's welcoming embrace was oddly hesitant and awkward, for the juxtaposition of what he had imagined with what he had never dared made him shy. But the black woman was too full of her own mission to notice.

“Don't ask questions,” Djoura hissed into his ear. “I have walked all the way across Andalusia to rescue you, so you just follow me.”

With a glance back toward the spot where he had last seen Damiano and another at the figure of the boy who lay snoring at the bolted garden gate, Raphael did follow Djoura, up and over the garden wall.

Now I am a renegade, he thought, crouching in the obscurity of the roadside, looking back at the pale height of clay he had just scaled. Just like Lucifer: a renegade.

Not quite like Lucifer, he qualified, as a firm dark handhold pulled him on. Lucifer would never let anyone lead him by the hand. The snores of Ali the doorkeeper faded in his ears.

For five minutes he scuttled after his liberator, along alleyways he did not recognize, passing squares where even now in the second hour of morning they encountered people who had risen already for the next day as well as people who had not yet been to bed.

He was prodded to walk upright. He was made to stroll. Djoura, stepping meekly behind him, twisted her bony knuckle into the small of his back to induce him to behave. “You are free, Pinkie! Walk like a free man!”

Raphael was walking the only way he knew to walk. On impulse he turned on his heel and came round beside the woman. He laid one arm over her shoulders.

“If I am free, then this is how I please to walk,” he replied reasonably. “And if I were wholly free, I would not walk at all, because I need so much to speak with you, my dear Djoura.”

The Berber wiggled out of touch. “None of that! What are you thinking, man? You'll have us both pilloried, holding on to me in public.”

Raphael smiled ruefully, feeling not very free at all. But he trotted along, talking over his shoulder, while Djoura drove him from behind.

“Did the magic pull you from your Moroccan home, Djoura? Or were you still on the sea when the call came?”

Djoura puzzled at his phrasing. “I escaped from the ship before it sailed the harbor. I tossed a customs man into the water, took his wallet, and walked down the gangway an hour before sailing.

“Pah!” She spat dry and catlike upon the street. “That ship was like a prison, and I've had enough of chains. And I have no family left in the south.

“Besides.” Her voice dropped in timbre and her eyes snared moonlight. “I had to come back for my pink Berber.”

A grin spread over Raphael's face: a shy grin as tight as a shrunken suit of clothes. All he could say was, “I missed you, too, Djoura.” But that smile and the warmth which accompanied it dissolved as he thought further.

“But if I am running away from my master and you are running away from your home, then where are we going TO?”

The black woman snickered. “How about your home, Pinkie? Don't you have one, somewhere, with a mother who would be glad to see her little boy again?

“Along with his charming friend?”

Raphael stopped dead in the exact middle of the street. He made no answer, nor did he glance at Djoura, but stood with his hands clenched at his sides and his head bowed. He bit his Up. Djoura was standing before him, a concerned look in her coffee-colored eyes. “I know already that you are not a Berber,” she said diffidently. “It was the music you play that confused me. But I have heard you play the music of many places, since, and that doesn't matter.”

“It doesn't? You came back for me anyway?” They were quite alone on the street. Raphael touched her face. The look she gave him back was haughty, as though to say the reasons she did the things she did were hers to know.

“Djoura, I don't know how to find my home anymore. My memory has been… damaged. But I know the earth is filled with pleasant places to live. Come with me and we will find one we like.”

“That is for me to say,” replied the woman, shooting him a glance over a lopsided smile. “I am the one with the wallet,” she added, letting coins tinkle softly beneath her clothes.

But she let him kiss her in the darkness that came after the moon's setting.

Chapter 11

The great military entity that was the Alhambra was not about to bestir itself in the cause of the wounded pride of the Qa'id Hasiim Alfard: not though he had a thousand horsemen under his command. But Hasiim had also within his regiment a few dozen men tied to him by blood: tribesmen and sons of men and sons of subordinate tribes. These had allegiance of another order.

Days before Djoura arrived back in Granada, Hasiim was aware of her escape. When the fursan courier relayed this message to the qa'id, he did nothing but shrug. But Hasiim's many eyes and ears were opened.

Djoura led her blond companion through a tangle of sleeping streets. There was no indecision in her step, for what is the use of indecision when one does not know where one is going? Raphael, too, followed without hesitation, for it was all one to him. The light (hardly more than symbolic) iron ring about his neck had been hidden beneath swaths of fabric.

Black fabric.

“In the north,” murmured Djoura over her shoulder, “it will be necessary for me to pretend to be giaour—a Christian. You will show me how.”

Raphael considered this silently, while he gazed down at the uneven street in front of his bare feet. “I'm not sure,” he said at last, “that I can do that convincingly.”

“Because I am black?” Djoura countered, with rising belligerence. “Or because I am too much of Islam?”

Raphael shook his head. “Because I myself don't know how.

There are so many dogmas AND sacraments, and one need only do or say one word wrong to get into a great deal of trouble. I have not ever studied…”

The Berber woman snorted. “Yet you yourself are a Christian, and have managed.”

“I am not a Christian,” he stated, and for easier conversation, Raphael fell back beside the woman. “That much I DO know. There is a ritual called baptism which one must undergo to be a Christian, sometimes by immersion and sometimes by sprinkling. I have never been baptized.”

“That you remember…” chided the black good-naturedly. “But you don't remember much.”

She took his hand. “Ho! You are so cold, Pinkie. Is it because of your weak skin?”

At her touch (And it was not cold at all. No, underneath all her tentlike layers, Djoura was very warm.) Raphael had begun to tremble slightly. He turned his hand beneath hers, and moved his sensitive fingertips over the surface of her palm, her thumb, her wrist…

And he said nothing at all.

Dawn was near, but the darkness now was almost complete. Djoura stopped in her tracks, suddenly indecisive. “We'll give you another shawl, Pinkie. That will keep you warmer.”

He allowed her to drape another musty garment over his shoulders. “Djoura,” he whispered, when all was arranged to her maternal liking. “Could you call me Raphael?”

She stiffened and barked a laugh. “That again?” When he neither moved nor responded she continued more seriously. “That is a very important name in the desert, Pinkie. A fearful name. Raphael is one of the great djinn, which a good Berber—a good Muslim—must never bow to worship.”

Then it was Raphael's turn to laugh. “I don't ask you to worship me, dear one, but only to call me by my name.” And when Djoura didn't reply he took the opportunity to kiss her softly upon the lips.

Djoura stood still for a moment, then made a very small noise in her throat and turned her head away. Stepping back, she protested, “I don't want to be pawed around by a simpleminded man!”

“I am not simpleminded, Djoura,” he replied with no hint of offense. “Only new here.

“And I love you. When you left the household…”

“That was YOUR fault, with your big mouth…”

“When you left I missed you terribly, and then when Damiano brought you back…”

“When WHO brought me back?” the woman almost wailed. “You ARE an idiot, Pinkie.” Djoura caught her tongue, then, and with unexpected consideration corrected herself, “Raphael. I came back by myself, with no help from anyone!” She turned on her heel and paraded forward again, going nowhere in particular with great determination. Raphael took hold of her skirts so that he would not lose her in the dark. “I'm glad,” he began again. “Either way. That you came back for me.”

She sniffed. “You are my responsibility.”

The man's steps slowed. “That's all? Your responsibility?” His fingers slipped their hold. Raphael came to a disappointed stop in the middle of an empty street.

Djoura, feeling his absence as quickly as she had his uncomfortable presence, turned around again.

“Curse it all, Pinkie! You only think you love me because I wiped your ass for you when you were sick and pushed food in your mouth.”

Raphael had one hand resting on each of the woman's shoulders. “What is the difference,” he whispered softly, “between thinking you love someone and loving them? I love you because you are kind and hate to be known as kind. Because you are brave…”

“Brave, huh? Because I kicked you?” Her voice held a shade of embarrassment.

“Ah, but you won't kick me again, will you?” His grip slid down to the woman's elbows. He took her hands.

Djoura was suddenly aware that Raphael was taller than she was. And the awkward, gangling Pinkie of her memory had to crumble before the presence before her, that held her hands in a grip no longer cold.

“And because you sing, Djoura,” he continued, as though he had not been interrupted. “When I was newly a… a slave and I tried to refuse this life, I heard you singing.”

In a small voice, very unlike herself, Djoura said, “I only did that to bother the woman sellers.”

“You did it beautifully,” Raphael insisted. “It was the voice of… of Allah, to me. It still is.”

Once more Djoura snorted, but she allowed Raphael to slip his arms around her. “I have grown very bad at hearing HIS voice, Djoura, except through others.

“But what does all that matter? In the end I don't need a reason to love you, except that you are Djoura and I am… myself. Whatever you call me.”

The Berber woman allowed her head to rest against his collarbone. She rested her hand on his shoulder. Although she was no less uncomfortable, she felt no desire to move. “Ah, Pink—Raphael. I know you are no simpleton. In some ways you are as wise as a scholar. And my singing is like a bird's peep next to yours.

“If only you weren't…”

“Yes?” His voice was tender but worried. “Weren't what?”

“Weren't such a funny color!” Djoura burst out, and then she giggled. They both giggled together. It was a laughter that grew almost rowdy and then was cut off knife-sharp.

They stared at one another, mouths still open, silent.

Raphael pulled her closer. “You can't see my color in the dark,” he murmured close into the woman's ear.

The arms Raphael and Djoura wound around one another were hard through labor. It grew very warm on that tenebrous windy street.

“I think it is getting hotter, even up here,” stated Gaspare. Saara had one hand gripping the dragon's pierced scale while the other held the young man's hands together in front of her waist.

He leaned out over the dragon's side and the updrafts of the great beast's movement caught his red hair. Nothing but Saara's grip held him on. “This is a long mountain range, dragon,” Gaspare observed idly. “What comes after this?”

“Granada,” replied the black dragon.

The first light was miraculous but frightening, for although it enabled their feet to move with careless speed, it exposed them to the cruel, awakening world.

How white was Granada, where the sun had bleached even the urine-stained walls to fairness. And how large, for they had been shuffling through half the night and had never reached the north city wall. It was as though Djoura's stern leadership had taken them in circles.

The odor of lamp oil and that of candle wax floated out of the bare little windows along the street. Soon sandaled feet and bare feet trod the cobbles and the clay beside theirs. Raphael was once more pushed out in front. Djoura's eyes sank to the earth, doelike, submissive. She prodded her leader with one concealed knuckle.

“I don't know where I'm going, Djoura,” he said amicably. “The street keeps curving to the left.”

“It can't do that forever,” the Berber woman hissed. “Tell me what you see.”