“DON’T,” bellowed the general, “TELL ME—” He took a deep breath. A soldier clattered into the room, then seeing it was only the general exploding, he backed out.
“—about Hermes Trismegistus,” finished Pardo. Damiano stood pale and staring, like a man who has broken through ice into cold water.
“Why?” he asked in a small voice. “Why not Hermes?”
The general shifted in his seat. A smile spread across his features. “Because, boy, I have heard enough about Hermes Trismegistus and the quest of alchemy to last me three lifetimes. Florence is riddled with fusty old men who claim they can turn lead into gold. Venice is almost as bad.” He turned a gray-eyed hawk glance on Damiano. “Avignon... is beyond help.
“You are too young and healthy to be an alchemist, Signor Delstrego. Also too clean. Can you turn lead into gold?”
“Not... in any great quantity,” answered Damiano, embarrassed.
“Can you at all?” pursued the general.
Damiano sighed and fingered his staff. It was his burden that many of the goals of alchemy he found easier to accomplish using the tools of his father rather than those of the sainted Hermes.
“My methods are not pure”—he temporized—”and the amount of labor involved is...”
Pardo swung his legs down from the stool and glared at the youth in frustration. “What I want to know, boy, is HAVE YOU POWER?”
Pardo had an immense voice and was used to commanding large numbers of men on the battlefield. But Damiano was no longer used to being commanded. The bellowing raised in him an answering anger. His fingers tightened upon the black wood of his staff.
Without warning the air was filled with booming, as every door and shutter in the building slammed back upon its hinges. Sparks crackled in the folds of Damiano’s woolen robe. The light wooden door of the audience chamber trembled for half a minute. A cloud of plaster dust fell.
Pardo regarded it calmly. “I could feel that,” he remarked, “in my ears.”
Damiano kept his mouth shut, feeling he had done enough, and knowing that slamming doors would not protect him from a regiment of swordsmen. Besides, he was tired.
“That’s what I was trying to find out,” added the general conversationally, as he nudged the stool in Damiano’s direction. “Sit down, Signor Delstrego. I want to talk to you.”
“Thank you, General.” Damiano lowered himself gratefully onto the cushion. “I also, was wanting to speak with you.”
“Ahh?”
Uttered by a Piedmontese, that single, interrogatory syllable would have echoed in the back of the throat and in the nose, like the crooning of a mother cat. At the most a Piedmontese would have glanced at his companion as he spoke to show him it was to him the inquiry was addressed. But General Pardo was a Roman by birth. Both eyebrows shot up and his lips pulled back from his teeth. The intensity of interest revealed by the single syllable of “Ahhh?” seemed in Damiano’s eyes excessive: a thing too, too pointed, almost bloodthirsty. It was of a piece with the general’s appearance and his snapping temper.
These Italians, Damiano thought—not meaning to include the Piedmontese—they are too hot and too cold together. Passionate and unreliable.
“To speak with me? I expected as much,” concluded Pardo, with some satisfaction. “Well be my guest, Signor Dottore. I slept in a bed for the first time in a week, last night, and now am disposed to listen.”
Damiano spared only a moment to wonder whose bed the general had slept in, and whether the original owner of it now slept on a straw pile or in the hand of God. Then he put his mind to the task.
He leaned forward on his stool, his legs crossed at the ankles, each knee draped in gold cloth like the smooth peak of a furrowed mountain. His staff was set between his feet, and it pointed at the cracked roof and the heavens beyond. Against the ebony he leaned his cheek, and the wood was invisible next to unruly curls of the same color. His eyes, too, were black, and his mouth childishly soft. A painter or a poet, seeing that unlined face, might have envisioned it as springtime, a thing pretty enough in itself but more important in its promise of things to come.
General Pardo looked at Damiano, but he was not a painter or a poet. He noticed the huge hands, like the paws of a pup still growing, and he saw Damiano, like a pup still growing, as a bit of a clown.
“It is about this city,” Damiano began, and was immediately interrupted, as Pardo inquired what city he meant.
“Partestrada,” replied Damiano, wondering how the general could be so slow. “Partestrada has been under Savoy governance for many years.”
“If you can call it governance,” introjected Pardo.
Damiano paused to show he had heard the other, then continued. “In that time the city has grown from a town of four hundred families into the only place of any note between Turin and Aosta.”
“Of any note...” echoed Pardo doubtfully.
“Her people are healthy, her surrounding croplands flourish. She supports two silversmiths and a...” Damiano decided not to mention the vineyard at this time. “... and she is located on the Evançon, a river that is passable almost its entire length. She has grown like the child of the mountains that she is.”
“And you would like her to continue in the same fashion?” asked the general dryly. “Without interference.”
Damiano lifted his eyebrows in a gesture that, though he did not know it, was the mirror of that which he had distrusted in Pardo. “No, Signor General, that is not what I want for my city. All this she had accomplished on her own, unguided, like a peasant virgin, beautiful and barefoot. What would she be under the protection of a great man?”
Pardo leaned forward, uncomprehending. “I am not in the habit of protecting virgins, peasant or otherwise,” he said simply.
Damiano felt his face growing hot. He had picked the wrong metaphor to use with a soldier, certainly.
“What I mean is,” he began slowly. “We need the presence of a man of wealth and culture, in whose house the arts will flourish, and whose greatness of soul can inspire Partestrada with a similar greatness...”
“It’s the pope you want,” suggested Pardo with a white smile. “Go to him, Signor Delstrego, and tell him to move from Avignon to Partestrada, where the air is better.”
Wit is cheap, thought Damiano, yet reason cannot best it. He dropped his eyes, accepting the humiliation as he had accepted it from his father daily in his childhood. This general reminded him of his father in more ways than one.
For the sake of his city, he tried once more.
“General Pardo, it would not be bad for you to join yourself to Partestrada and to grow with her. By her placement and her people she is destined for greatness. You could be the tool of her greatness. She could be the tool of your own glory. Like Visconti and Milan.”
Pardo’s nostrils had flared, but he had let Damiano continue until he heard the name of Milan. “Milan!” he barked. “When I marry a city it will be one with a greater dowry than Partestrada! Why do you think I am up here, sweeping your little hill towns like a housewife with a broom, if not in preparation for Milan? I need money and power, and my army needs experience. I will get what I can from the crumbling House of Savoy, while Amadeus is busy with his new wife and the stupid wars of Jean le Bon. When that great one turns to bite the flea on his leg I will be gone.
“But I will come again. And again. And each time I will harvest this miserable, cold cloud-land, until I am rich enough and have men enough, and then I will move on Milan. If I cannot buy that city’s love, I will take it by force.”
Damiano’s face tightened painfully, but he spoke what was to him the obvious. “Milan has been in so many hands. You will not be remembered in history by taking Milan.”
“HISTORY IS SO MUCH DOG SHIT!” bellowed the general, pounding his fist against the wooden back of the pew. “Milan? That is something else. Passed through many hands? Well the whore is none the worse looking for it.
“Boy, have you SEEN
Milan?”
“Many times,” answered Damiano, meaning three times, once with his father and twice since, buying books. “It is a beautiful city, although very flat.”
Now it was Pardo’s turn to lean forward and stare. “I don’t want you to take this as an insult, Signor Delstrego, because I think I could like you. You have loyalty and enthusiasm. Also a very useful talent, if that business with the doors was any guide.
“But your provincial upbringing has colored your thoughts. You have read about Florence and Rome, and you think they are no different from your little town in the hills, where your family has a certain... reputation. It seems to you better to devote your time to making the little town bigger than to risk all by starting anew in a place where there are more possibilities, but you have no reputation at all.”
Damiano frowned perplexedly and shook his head, but Pardo continued. “My advice—and I am a man of some experience—is to risk it all and leap for what you want. Most men are less than they seem. It is nature; their fate is to feed the few who have vision and courage. Most cities exist to be plundered, and it is out of that plunder we create the glory of Rome, of Florence, and of Milan.”
Pardo smiled, with a too-knowing smile—with Guillermo Delstrego’s smile, in fact. And he was speaking in sly, comradely fashion, as Damiano had often heard his father speak to some low companion, the two sitting side by side in the empty stable, away from the light of the sun.
“Alchemists are all posers,” Pardo said. “And real magic—black magic—is very rare. But it exists! I am sure in myself that it exists!”
Damiano shook his head more violently. “Not for me,” he protested. “Never black magic.”
“Your father was not above cursing an enemy,” Pardo contradicted equably. “And I’m told he did it effectively.”
“Who told you? That’s hearsay. You mustn’t believe it!”
“An old man named Marco told me,” answered the general. “At the same time that he told me where the inhabitants of the city were hiding in the hills.”
Damiano rose from his chair, his face draining. “Marco? He betrayed the citizens?”
With one hand Pardo waved away Damiano’s shock. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to butcher them all. There’s no value in that. It is what they took with them that I want, and any villager who is willing to die over a purse or a ring of gold deserves what he gets.
“But it’s what Marco told me about your father and yourself that I found most interesting. He said your father was the most powerful witch—I mean, rather, wizard—in the Italies.”
“He was a witch,” said Damiano, dully, “and not the most powerful, by his own admission. He always said that Saara of Lombardy »»
“Good enough,” interrupted Pardo. “He also said you were almost your father’s equal in power, though too faddish and delicate-minded for your own good.”
“A mozzarella,” murmured Damiano, staring at the floor. Marco betraying the city. Soldiers with hairy knuckles ripping the gold from around Carla Denezzi’s neck. The gold and what else? He became aware that Pardo was still talking.
“—with me,” the general was saying. “I am not proposing a marriage, like that which you were so willing to arrange between this town and myself, but I am not a bad man. I am educated and a Christian. I kill no man for pleasure. Turn your skills to my service, and I promise you I will reward you well.”
Damiano stared through Pardo. “What did you give Marco, for his services?”
Pardo’s smile was crooked. “I have granted him the vineyard outside the gates,” he replied. “But Marco is an old sot and a traitor as well. I could be much more generous to a man of skill, whom I could trust.”
Damiano found his tongue. “You will have no need to be generous with me, Signor General.”
Pardo rose slowly from his bench. “You refuse me outright?” Like a cat, which begins its attack with a single step, the general advanced on Damiano. “Outright?” he repeated.
“It doesn’t even come to that,” answered the youth, standing his ground. “You see, I would be of no use to you. The abilities I possess —or even those of my father—do not make good weapons of war. If they had, I think he would have used them so.”
General Pardo stood facing Damiano. They were almost of a height. “Explain,” barked the general.
Damiano leaned forward upon his staff. He gazed at the red tile floor, thinking. At last he began.
“Works of magic are no different from ordinary labor. One starts with material and adds the strength of one’s own power, and in the end you have made something. When I threw open all the doors and windows of the building, I used the air as my tool and hammered it according to a design I had learned. In the end I was more tired than I would have been had I run from door to window and swung them open by hand.
“But the windows in rooms that were bolted you could not have touched at all without wizardry. Am I right?” The general sought in Damiano’s face some sign of subterfuge or evasion. Damiano met his glance.
“Ah, yes. But that is another element: the moral element, and that is a very real thing in magic, real and dangerous. If I open a door that you have locked against me, or cause it to open as you are walking by, with the intention of hitting you with it, then my deed is a wholly different thing than a mere opening of doors. Magic worked in malice will almost always spring back against the worker; that is why purity of heart is important in a witch.
“You may well laugh,” added Damiano, for Pardo was laughing, “but so it is. Being a channel of this power, I must be careful of my desires. If I grow angry with a tradesman and feel in my imagination my hands around his neck, then I will carry the seed of strangling around in my head and may well feel demon fingers at my own neck in the middle of the night.”
“Still,” introjected the Roman, “curses are pronounced, so someone must dare to pronounce them.”
Damiano shrugged. “A witch can be able without being wise. Notice how many with the power are poor and diseased, worse off than the unfortunates they have cursed. Some carry such hatred that they would rather do harm than remain well themselves. Some have learned the skill of putting off all their payment until some time in the future, trusting they will die before the bill falls due.”
Damiano sighed deeply. “But I don’t think by dying one can escape that particular sort of debt.” Again he found himself thinking about his father. “Still, even if I could murder and escape unscathed, it would be a sorry sort of killing, because in the time it would take me to strangle one man through witchcraft—one man, I say, for I don’t have the power to destroy a regiment—I could be run through ten times by a simple soldier with neither mind nor magic.”
Pardo’s gaze was eager and predatory. “This is interesting. Very. And convincing, since it is my intuition that nothing in this life is free. Yet, Signor Delstrego, you are not a military man, and therefore you don’t know what things can be valuable in war. You need not kill a regiment to destroy it; merely let them see their commander fall from his horse, gasping and turning purple. Let me tell you what things I have seen ruin an army: flux from bad water, the prophecy of a crazy old whore the night before a battle, three crows sitting on the corpse of a black heifer. Things as silly as this make the difference between loss and victory. And it will always be so, as long as armies are made of men. Think what it will mean to my men to have the wizard Delstrego riding with them into battle. Think what it will mean to the enemy!”
In General Pardo’s gray eyes sparked enthusiasm, and Damiano was not immune to it. Certainly no man before had ever expressed exhilaration at the thought of having him at his side in battle. The wizard Delstrego....
But even as he felt these things Damiano also felt his staff thrumming quietly in his hands, a private voice of warning. He reminded himself that he had come here to argue for his city, and that Pardo had refused him. And Pardo was a Roman, so obviously could not be trusted. Besides, he reminded Damiano of his father,
and what could be less inviting than that?
Suddenly he was aware of noises in the hall outside the audience chamber, and the room itself grew dimmer as bodies blocked the light from the door. Pardo was hedging his bet.
Damiano smiled vaguely at the general, and his fingers tightened over the second silver ring on his staff. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but instead he disappeared.
General Pardo blinked. His eyes darted right and left. “FIND HIM!” he bellowed at the men who poured into the small, square chamber.
For a moment the doorway was empty, and Damiano stepped through on tiptoe, holding the shoe of his staff off the tiles. He paced the hall, trading stealth for speed as he approached the arched door that gave onto the street.
Macchiata sat in the dust with an attitude of martyred patience. Her nose worked, sensing him near, and her head turned expectantly toward the entryway. The single sentry stood oblivious to Damiano, his helmeted head craned over his shoulder as he attended to the rising hubbub from the general’s quarters.
Damiano touched his dog on the back so lightly she did not feel him. He whispered two words. She yelped and started.
“Oh, there you are,” she gasped, and her inadequate little tail wagged stiffly. In answer Damiano put his hand to his mouth and gestured for her to follow.
“I am invisible,” he hissed, springing lightly along the bare street, where aimless flakes of snow had begun to fall.
“But I can see you, Master,” the dog replied following in more cumbrous fashion.
“You are invisible, too.” Damiano paused, staring.
Against the well sprawled old Marco, snoring, a powder of snow, like dandruff, across his felt jacket. He looked the same as ever: dirty, slack, disgruntled, even in sleep. Had he really betrayed the people of Partestrada to Pardo? If so, why was he still sitting out here in the snow, instead of throned in relative splendor at the house that until today had belonged to Cosimo Alusto? Pardo must have been lying. Yet what he had repeated concerning Delstrego and his son was every inch old Marco.
Damiano Page 3
