The Damiano Series (99 page)

“There is always Cathay,” added the dragon with studied casualness. “In Cathay they know how to respect sages. And spirits.”

The blond smiled. “And am I either?” Then his expression softened.

“What can we possibly do for you—uh, Venerable Dragon? I and all my friends owe their lives to you. Perhaps many times over.”

The black dragon chuckled steam. “No matter, Venerable Sage. I have a great respect for teachers.”

“Do you want me to teach you, then?”

The creature gave a tiny shiver then, which every passenger felt but none understood. “Can you teach me truth?”

“No,” replied Raphael gravely. “Just music—the lute, primarily. But in the study of the lute you may find more than you expect.”

“Music?” The dragon emitted a long, serpentine sigh. “Truth through tuned strings, instead of through privation, paradox, or long silence? I've never heard of THAT approach.”

It was Raphael's turn to chuckle and he gave Djoura a little squeeze. “That is not to say it won't work, however.”

The dragon held up one five-fingered, obsidian clawed hand. It was the one that held Gaspare. “It would have to be a rather large lute.”

“Very well. You can learn to sing instead,” said Raphael equably. “Every type and every individual created has its own music.”

Once again the dragon cleared his throat and bobbed diffidently through the sky. “To sing? The thought makes me very awkward »»

Raphael chuckled. “The thought makes everyone awkward. But that tension can be overcome. You will find…”

“What's that I see?” called Saara from behind them all. “Straight ahead. Coming fast?”

They all looked, but only the dragon's eyes saw, and with an organ-pipe whistling he humped and turned in the air.

Saara clung to Raphael who held to Djoura tightly. The Berber locked her fingers in their grips.

In a few moments they could all see.

It came in the form of a white dragon. It came in the form of a writhing, legless wyvern. It came in the form of a phosphorescent, myriad plague.

It was destruction, dread, the death of hope, and it was coming fast.

“What is it? WHAT IS IT!” cried Djoura, craning her neck around. But she did not need the stricken faces of her fellows to tell her it was terrible. “Why is it chasing us?”

For a moment no one had the heart to tell her, then at last Raphael spoke. “It is Satan—Iblis—whom Saara calls the Liar. It is my brother.”

Then Lucifer swept over them. He came between them and the sun, huger than a cloud. His shape was that of a king in rich robes, with a visage of blood.

The black dragon sank crazily toward the earth.

Saara felt the shadow touch her, with paralysis and despair in its wake. She laughed—laughed at the naivete of her plans for the future. She had no future. But with that single laugh the paralysis passed Saara over, and her despair turned into unbreakable resolve. She let go of the man she had tracked across Europe and took to the air.

“No!” shouted Raphael, as he felt her go. “Saara of Saami! This is not your battle anymore!”

And indeed, as she flung herself at the breast of the hideous king, it vanished in front of her, leaving nothing but cloudless sky. The dove fluttered wildly before an iron hand struck her and sent her falling.

Gaspare screamed.

The dragon vomited fire at the apparition. He grabbed the falling woman with one hind claw. Flicking his snake's tail he flung himself toward the broken hills.

The sound of cruel laughter was all around them. It turned the air poisonous to their lungs. All eyes dimmed.

But the black dragon touched the earth again, searing the autumn grasses at his feet. Gently he shook off his living cargo.

Lucifer alighted before them, and his towering size reduced the Basque hills to clods of dirt. His colors were bright and monstrous. He wore a crown of gold and the face of Raphael.

“Haven't we done as much mischief as we possibly could?” he inquired jovially, looking carefully from Saara to the dragon to Gaspare. “Haven't we?”

The dragon coiled around his tiny dependents as dragons coil around their hoards. His corona of gold and scarlet stood out stiffly from his head. His eyes gleamed as white as an August sun. “Delusion!” he hissed. “Puffed, empty delusion!”

Lucifer regarded him thoughtfully. “It is no delusion that you are going to die, snake,” he said, grinning horribly.

But a small black hand gripped one of the dragon's coronal spikes. Djoura's face appeared next to it. She had a stone in her hand. She stepped out.

“No, child!” The creature moved to guard her. “You don't know what it is you are facing.”

She opened her lips, which were whitened with fear. “I know,” she said. “I have faced slavery,” Djoura whispered almost without sound. “I have faced swords. I have faced YOU, great dragon.

“AND,” Djoura found her voice at last. “I have stolen the moon. The moon! Did you know that, Iblis?” And with a mad laugh, the Berber woman flung her stone at the Devil.

It soared its futile course. It might have hit the apparition's knee. But instead the small missile hung in the air and grew, until it became the image of a black man in blood-caked robes. His body was hewed and his head struck off before them. The open eyes of the head wore an expression of idiocy.

Djoura shrieked her incoherent rage, and she would have flung herself at Lucifer, armed with nothing except her black robes and her fingernails. But Raphael, wordless and set-faced, came up behind the woman and restrained her with his arms.

Again Satan laughed. He reached a long arm out. The black dragon swelled dangerously, like an adder in the grass, as the hand of Satan came near.

“How is our little woods dove, then?” A gout of acid flame passed through his arm harmlessly. “I know her from before, I think. I have a weakness, you know, for the small songsters.”

Saara lay white-faced where the dragon had put her down, her head against Gaspare's narrow breast. She watched death approaching and she said, “You never touched me, Liar. You never will.”

Gaspare, too, watched the hand descend. Because he was seventeen years old and Italian besides, he rose to meet it. Because he was Gaspare, he unslung his lute and began to play. He shouted, “Here is a small song, then, from a small songster.”

The hand hovered, seemingly more from amusement than fear. “Gaspare of San Gabriele,” said Lucifer. “You are miserably out of tune. As always.”

“Out of tune, certainly,” replied the redhead. “But in time, you must admit. I am told that is more important. And besides, Satan, if you do not like my lute playing, then I will be forced to sing for you, instead, and many find my voice even harder to take.”

Then Lucifer tired of the game. His hand swept down…

And found itself between the lance-toothed jaws of the black dragon. Fire spouted from its nostrils and between its buried teeth. Both the dragon and the red king hissed.

Lucifer fit the fingers of his other hand around the dragon's throat. The tiny human atoms fled away—all but one that stood motionless as a tree on the bare hillside.

Toad-flat, baleful, the dragon's head steamed. He ground his teeth into Lucifer's hand. Ninety feet of black iron struck the ground like a whip. Lucifer lifted the creature, still locked in his hand, and struck again, this time at the speck that was Djoura.

A writhing whip, however, is not an accurate weapon, and he missed. Frustration flushed the perfect face purple. He exposed a swollen mottled tongue as he lifted the dragon again.

“Stop!”

It was Raphael who had stood still on the smoking hillside, regardless of the titanic war around him. “All of you. Satan—leave him. Your business is with me.”

Lucifer turned his mountainous head. The gold of his crown shone in the sun.

“You?” he said. “You, little ball of clay: half-witted animal?” His mouth split into a sly snarl.

“You are the only one among these in whom I have no more interest. What more could I do to you, after all?”

But as Lucifer spoke so, he flung the dragon away from him. Like a thread in the wind, the dark length swirled.

Djoura was stalking toward Raphael, her eyes locked on the mountain of dread before him. Saara came up slowly on his other side.

But Raphael stepped forward, putting them both behind him. In his sculpted face was neither confusion nor doubt. “It is not what you could do to me which is at issue. It is what I can do to you. I know you fear me.”

“WHAT?” The air around the robed shape wavered. It burst into flame. “Fear YOU? What you can do to ME, you bag of offal? You are helpless!”

Raphael, weaponless and half-naked, stepped toward the mountainous form. “You have no idea what I can do, Satan. You have never known, and that is WHY you fear me. But I will tell you what I can do.

“As you took my hand, Satan, so I can take yours.”

Lucifer watched his brother approach, one arm stretched out before him. “Maggot! We both know you have no power to…” But the red king seemed to shrink into himself as he spoke, growing smaller, or perhaps farther away.

As he walked Raphael was whispering, though neither his brother nor the friends who stood silently on the hillside behind knew what he said.

He came to the brooding apparition on the hill.

With a hand pierced and bloodied, Lucifer made to push Raphael away. They touched. And at that touch the red king collapsed like a sheet full of wind, and Lucifer and Raphael stood face-to-face: of equal height, two images of the same creation.

“You do not know me, brother,” Raphael said quietly. He reached forward. “But now you will.”

His fair hand lifted toward Lucifer's face.

Lucifer recoiled. “No!” he cried, and he flinched away. Raphael smiled patiently. He reached out again.

“No! I won't have your tricks! You insipid, cunning toady, it's not you but HIM in you! I won't stand it!”

Lucifer backed off, his voice cracking, but still Raphael walked toward him. The Devil reached out fending hands which became claws. Raphael slipped past them. Satan had turned to flee when he felt Raphael's touch on his shoulder. In blind panic Satan took the man by the neck with both hands and he shook him. Then convulsively he threw him off, smashing Raphael against the ground.

So quickly the fight was over, for Raphael's human body lay motionless at his brother's feet, its mouth bloodied, its neck at an ugly angle.

There was stillness on the rolling hills, and the only sound was that of the smoldering grass.

Saara stared transfixed at the defeat of her last crusade. Gaspare, beside her, held the neck of his lute in both hands and his lips were pulled back from his teeth. He opened his mouth to ask a question of someone, but no sound came out.

Djoura, too, stood without moving for a terrible minute. Then with a thin cold wail she flung herself down at the very feet of the Devil and bent her head to the broken body.

But oddly enough, Lucifer, too, stood paralyzed, staring at the shape of flesh he had himself created. His lips drew back from his teeth in an expression that was not a smile. He lifted red eyes to the sky.

There was a crack of fire in the air above. All looked up to see the black dragon swimming back toward his enemy, flaming along his entire length. In the beast's yellow eyes gleamed no more intelligence, but only bestial fury. Where the dragon passed, the earth smoked beneath him.

Lucifer saw him coming and his hands clenched at his sides. His eyes searched distracted over the hills, almost as though in search of hiding. He took once more to wyvern shape and fled upward.

Ebony jaws closed around the wyvern's serpentine tail. The wyvern shape wavered and a flayed form dripping with pus flapped its wings against the dragon's rococco head. Slipping free in its own mucus, it fled, with the dragon giving chase.

Flame ate through the membrane of one loathsome wing. The dragon caught Satan again, and now it was a creature of many boneless legs which wound vinelike around the black dragon, and pressed a sucking, platterlike mouth against the scales of his neck. The dragon spun, and bit, and burned the lamprey-sucker to dry leather. Both beasts howled.

But the sky around the combatants changed suddenly, deepening and growing more clear. The furies in the air faded to shadows. Their cries were muted.

All the stars came out.

Saara lifted her head to witness the sun and moon shining at opposite ends of a sky grown glorious. Gaspare gazed at the heavens mutely, holding to his little lute as though to a lover. Miles away, a panicked horse slowed his flight, blowing clouds of bloody froth onto his lathered sides.

Only Djoura the black Berber missed the miracle, for she was alone in her world of grief, rocking and sobbing above the cast-off body of a slave.

In the middle of this indigo splendor, one star grew brighter than all others. It swelled to rival the moon. It flickered in shape like the shadow of a bird in flight.

Silver light entered the mad eyes of the dragon, and he let his enemy go.

The Archangel Raphael shone in the sky like truth revealed and in his hands was a sword. “Come, Satan,” he called, and his voice was sun striking a field of ice. “See what your malice has bought you.”

The wyvern took to wing again but the brilliant air rejected him. He sank to the earth and his stiff wings fell from him to lie like the wings that ants shed in their season and that one finds in the morning grass, covered with dew.

As Raphael descended, Satan rose once more as the red king— King of Earth—and he shouted, “You interfere! Again! It is unfair! It is not your right, Raphael, for the earth is MINE and all upon it!”

Still the angel descended. The burned hillside grew bright as crystal. “I do not interfere, Morning Star. I am sent against you.

“For not all upon the earth is yours, nor ever will be.”