Damiano

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Hesitantly, Damiano stepped forward, trying to smile. When he was close enough to see her well, he was also close enough to touch. He put out his left hand and stroked her arm and shoulder. So roughened by the strings were his fingertips they scraped against the thin felt of her embroidered dress.

  “Saara. My lady. If it is your wish that I don’t live in my city anymore, so be it. I will live in a black forest. Or in a boat on the ocean—I don’t care, so long as it is by your will. But first I must help Partestrada, don’t you see?”

  She watched his hand carefully but did not withdraw. He continued “I am told... by whom it doesn’t matter, that a city can only prosper with blood and war, and that I could save Partestrada at the expense of her own future glory. I came to you to find another way.”

  Damiano spoke in a whisper, and as he spoke his fingers traced a small wheedling circle on her shoulder. So intent was Saara on this motion that she seemed not to be listening. But she answered “I know nothing about glory, unless you mean the lights in the winter sky. I won’t go to war with you, Dami-yano.”

  “Then show me how to succeed without war,” he whispered, and as she raised an ironical eye to his insistence, he kissed her softly on the side of her mouth.

  Saara caught her breath and closed her eyes and stepped back from him. “This is no good,” she said weakly. “Neither what you say nor what you do. Dami-yano, I have a man who would kill you for that.”

  She rubbed her face with both hands. Damiano’s smile, as he watched her, was slow and sad. “Maybe,” he admitted. “And maybe it was worth it, Saara.”

  “No maybes about it,” she said sternly, then realizing what she had said, she added, “—about his killing you, I mean. He is just like you, too: lean and dark and unpredictable. His name is Ruggiero, and he comes from Rome.”

  “From Rome!” cried Damiano, stung. “Then he can be nothing like me at all. I am Piedmontese.”

  Her mutable eyes danced. “No difference that I can see—save that you are much younger and do not wear a sword.

  “Take warning by that, Dami-yano and go back to Ludica. There is a world of charming girls out there. You need not a mother or a city or... a wicked old woman like me.” With those words Saara vanished, and a pale gray dove flashed upwards into the heavens.

  Damiano followed the flight with his eyes, till the sun blinded him. He had never seen anyone turn into a bird before; such magic was impossible to one who worked through a staff.

  There was a snuffle and grunt by his feet. He glanced down to see Macchiata, obscured by a dancing, round afterimage of the sun. The dog looked earnestly into his face.

  “You licked her—kissed her, I mean,” said Macchiata.

  “Yes,” responded her master. “I... like her.”

  Still the dog stared. “I’ve never seen you kiss anyone before, Master. Not anyone but me.”

  Damiano’s lips twitched, but he controlled the smile. “That’s true, little dear, but does that mean that I can’t kiss anyone else?”

  Macchiata thought about it. “You never kissed Carla Denezzi,” she commented sagely.

  Damiano’s reply was short. “No. But I should have.” He turned back to the rock, where the bees still droned and the moss lay like a cushion in petit point: green, gold, russet, black.

  “I should have.” He picked up the lute by the neck and began to finger it, indecisively.

  Macchiata heaved herself up beside him. “But she doesn’t like you, Master. This one. She told you to go away.”

  The treble trilled wanly. “That’s because she doesn’t want me to get in a fight with her... her Roman friend. One must like a person somewhat to want him not to get his head lopped off. Of course, there is really no danger of that. Saara underestimates me. She thinks I’m younger than I am.” He came down on the bass course so forcefully that the strings buzzed against the bridge.

  “She will come around,” Damiano stated. “We’ll camp on her hillside until she does.” Macchiata’s ears flattened with doubt.

  “But you said, Master... that we would soon be out of food. Remember?”

  “We don’t need to eat,” said Damiano, and he set his jaw. The dog stared for a long time without a word.

  The camp he set up at the edge of the birch wood that evening was small, since he hadn’t been able to carry much by foot from Ludica, and neat, since he felt in a way that the meadow was the lady Saara’s parlor. And although he hadn’t exactly been welcomed by that lady, he hoped to make himself a pleasant guest.

  He and the dog ate bread and raisins while nightingales ornamented the wind in the leaves and a single late sparrow went “peep, peep, peep.” After dinner Macchiata lay before the fire and sighed.

  Damiano was in a better mood. “You know, little dear, what is the best thing about Saara?” he asked as he peered down the neck of the liuto, checking it for wood warp. He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s that she’s wise as a great lady and yet free as a child.”

  “Those are two things,” Macchiata commented, but her master was not listening.

  “She was barefoot; did you notice, Macchiata? Her little white feet seemed scarce to bend the grass.”

  The dog emitted a slow groan that ended in a grunt. “I noticed that she had a very heavy hand, when she pushed me down on the rock.”

  Damiano shot her a glance in surprise. “Heavy? No, that was not heavy, Macchiata. Didn’t I feel it myself? For a heavy hand, you must remember my father. Now he had a heavy hand.”

  The lute was sound, but its finish had undeniably suffered in the climb. Hoping the bass course was true, Damiano tuned the rest of the strings by it. (Among his gifts was not that of absolute pitch, which Raphael said was more of an ordeal than a blessing to the musician possessing it.)

  “Yet, Saara the Fenwoman is greater than my father was. I’m sure I could learn much from her, and the learning would be more pleasant.”

  Macchiata raised her head. “But you don’t want to be a witch, Master. You want to play the lute and go from place to place. You said so.”

  Damiano cocked an eyebrow in irritation, and at that moment a mid string snapped. The small explosion echoed through the little gold wood and the birds all went quiet together.

  He stared down dumbly for a moment, then began to pull off the remnants of the string. “Both ways of life,” he stated, “Have their advantages. And disadvantages.

  “It may be I’m tuning too high,” he concluded, and started the tuning again.

  “But Saara has the best of both worlds, for her music is her magic. And vice versa. Her way, I think, is more suited to a woman than a man, for we are by our nature more forceful and less gentle. If my feelings ruled my craft... well, we’d have a lot more storms in the sky, Macchiata.”

  This time the tuning was completed without incident, though the empty space on the fingerboard was as bad as a missing tooth. “It must be that the lady’s pure heart is her strength. That and her green eyes. Green and golden eyes. And smooth, dimpled skin...”

  “Master,” broke in Macchiata. Her own eyes, earnest and brown, were concerned. “Master, do human men ever have to go to the stable?”

  He peered across the fire at her, blinking, his chain of thought—if it was thought—broken. “What, Macchiata? Do human men ever what?”

  “Ever have to stay in the stable. For two weeks. Alone.”

  Damiano’s glance slid away, and his complexion went many shades darker. He cleared his throat. “No, Macchiata,” he said with authority. “No, never.”

  In the dark, in the rustling quiet of the birch trees, under the round white moon, Damiano began to play. His music was French, but it was not the new music at all. He played songs that were two hundred years old: the chansons of Bernart de Ventadour, whose love of his patron’s lady was so unwavering that he was banished for it, and who then chose to love Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  And Damiano sang to the lute in old Provençal, a language he could barely understand. The mo
de was Ionian, but the tune was very sad.

  “Amors, e que’us es vejaire?

  Trobatz mais fol mas can me?” (Love, what is your opinion?

  Can you ever find a greater fool than I?)

  He heard in his own voice greater depth and feeling than he had imagined it to possess, for there is that about any foreign language: speaking it one becomes a different person, capable of new and astonishing things. His voice carried him away, till there were tears in his eyes with pity for the song and for himself.

  “... Farai o,c c’aissi’s cove;

  Mas vos non estai ges be Quern fassatz tostems mal traire.”

  Little wings fluttered in the tree nearest the fire: neither the wings of the lark nor the sparrow. Damiano did not look up as Saara swooped to the earth beside Macchiata and sat there, feet folded under her blue felt skirt. But he sang the last part of the verse again, in Italian.

  “I’ll do what I must.

  But it does not become you To keep me suffering this woe.”

  Saara whispered “Ah,” and Macchiata slunk away from the fire. The greatest witch in the Italies twisted her brown braid around and around one pink finger. “Very pretty, Dami-yano. Your music is like you: warm and dark and lonely. Only very young men are lonely in that way.”

  There was silence while Damiano regarded her from across the campfire. Though her face was a blur at that distance, under the full moon he saw things with his witch’s eyes and was abashed.

  “I’ve come to tell you something, Dami—I’ll call you that; it’s easier. I’ve come to tell you why I won’t help you fight a war.”

  “I don’t want...” he began, but she cut him off with a sharp gesture.

  “In my home, which is Lappland in the far north, we were all sorcerers among the Haavala tribe: all Lapps are sorcerers—witches. We have power over the herds and the wild beasts and, most important of all, the weather. We keep the weather just bad enough to keep other peoples out.”

  “Weather? You mean raising the wind and calling clouds or dispersing them? I can do that a little.”

  She smiled. “I mean making a downpour in a drought, or a garden without winter.”

  Damiano shrugged humbly and shook his head. “I cannot even imagine that much strength.”

  Saara chuckled. “To control the elements, Dami, you must be willing to become one with them. That you refuse to do.

  “But I want to tell you about me, and why I’m here.

  “I was young, Dami. As young as you. I had a husband—Jekkinan—and two little girls with black hair, like their father’s.

  “Jekkinan was the head of our tribe. He was a strong man, and could cage a wolf with a song of three words. He was also proud and haughty, though he tempered his words with me.

  “In the autumn was the gathering of the herds, when the men go out alone. There was a fight over the division, and a man was killed. I am told Jekkinan killed him, though I cannot believe...

  “Whether or no, he came home and said nothing to me about a fight, but the next day I went out alone, and when I came home, Jekkinan was dead, and the—and the chil—children. Dead on the floor, pierced by spears. The open wounds were mouths that spoke the killer’s name.”

  An involuntary cry escaped Damiano. “Ah! Lady, I’m so sorry.” He leaned forward till his face was almost in the fire.

  Saara glanced upward with dry, locked eyes. “That isn’t why I won’t help you, Dami-yano. The same night that I found my children dead I came to the house of the man who killed them.

  “And I killed him with a song—him and his wife. His children were grown, or I might have killed them too. Then the tribe came together and decided—for shame—not to be a tribe anymore, and the herd was divided and they went apart, taking the names and the manners and the stitchwork of other tribes. I am the only one left wearing the two stars of the Haavala.

  “That is why I won’t help you, Dami. I have done what hate made me to do. For all my life.”

  Damiano stepped through the fire and sat beside her. “We are more alike than you know, Saara,” he whispered. His sun-darkened hand rested on her own.

  “Oh, I do know, Dami-yano,” she replied, her hand motionless but unyielding beneath his. “When I felt you in the breezes of the meadow, I knew you, both by your delight in my garden and by the pain that brought you to it. You drew me to you like a lodestone draws a nail, and even now I cannot help but...”

  With these words she edged away from him and turned her face to the dark. Damiano did not release her hand.

  “If you know me, lady, you know that I don’t want vengeance, but peace for my people.”

  Saara’s rose pink lips tightened. “Let them find other towns to live in, as my people found other tribes.”

  He sighed. “It’s not the same, lady. A man without property— with only a wife and hungry children—he’s not especially welcome anywhere. Exiles are so many beggars.

  “A city is like a garden. Everything grows together, and the roses shade the violets. A man belongs in his own city. Can’t you help me, Saara? If you have the power to cage a wolf, can’t you cage a brigand, or at least scare him away?”

  “Can’t you?” she replied. “Men who have no power are easily cowed by it.”

  Damiano smiled ruefully and scratched his head. His hand disappeared amid the tangle of black curls. “I can’t think how,” he admitted. “The only ways I know to frighten an army are ways Pardo suggested to me himself, and so I doubt they’d work on him.

  “But with rain and lightning, lady! I’ll speak the spell myself, so if it is risky or demands heavy payment, it will come back on me...”

  Saara shook her head emphatically. “You can’t, black eyes. Not bound to this staff as you are, and even if you let it go, you would have to learn again like a child.

  “I would have to do this thing for you, and I won’t.” Her face was set. “In the morning you go back to Ludica.”

  Damiano flinched. He squeezed her hand placatingly. “Please. I’d like to stay here a few days, in case you change your mind.”

  Saara glared at Damiano. She pulled on one of her braids in frustration. “I told you you can’t, boy. Ruggerio will go into a rage, once he knows you’re here.”

  Damiano picked up a pebble and threw it into the fire. His own quick fire was wakened. “Well then, he must be very easily enraged, Saara. For if the truth be known, I myself am as much a virgin as a day-old chick. If I tried to do you violence, lady, you would probably have to show me how!” And with his admission he turned away from her, rested one hand on his knee and his head on his other fist and stared unseeing across the meadow.

  Saara smothered her laughter with both hands. “Oh, my dear, my sweet boy. I know. I knew that from the beginning. But Ruggerio— will either not believe or not care. He is proud and quick to anger. Like Jekkinan, I guess. And it’s his boast that he keeps men out of the garden.”

  “Proud and angry and not even a witch. What do you want with him, Saara?” growled Damiano, still with his back to the fire.

  He missed the lift of her shoulders and her dimpled smile. “He’s very faithful,” Saara offered.

  “So’s Macchiata—my dog,” he grunted in turn. He turned again to see the lady scratching her bare toes thoughtfully.

  “Understand, Dami. When I came to this country I was very unhappy. Filled with grief and regret. When the southerners discovered who I was—a foreigner and a—a witch—they would not speak to me. The children ran away.

  “A man came to me, then: a southman, but a man of our kind—

  the first witch I ever saw who bound himself to a stick. (How that puzzled me!) He told me he had felt my presence in the wind of his own chimney, far off, and could not stay away.

  “He was young, like you, and dark. I thought I loved him. I did love him; he was like Jekkinan, with both his power and his storms. One night he... he did something very bad; he crept into my mind. He moved to steal my strength from me, and so I disco
vered that he had never loved me at all but had desired my power.

  “It was horrible to find I had been so wrong—to find I had lived as wife with a man and it had all been planned as a trick! He had the skill of lying with the heart itself—never had I heard of such a thing.

  “But he had exposed himself too soon. I fought back, and I was the stronger. He went fleeing down the hill, and I’ve never seen or heard of him again.

  “But I remember; I remember how I saw through a man, or thought I did, and was a fool. And I will not trust another like him! So I allow no one on the hill and rarely step out of my garden. And that was why I was surprised to find that people in the far Piedmont know my name.

  “Ruggerio has no power,” she continued, in calmer tones. “And his temper is a trouble to me, Dami. But he loves me, and because he is only simple I know he is not hiding...” She stopped in mid-sentence, staring at Damiano’s face, where anguish and shame and a dread certainty were growing. “What is it, boy? What have I said?”

  He swallowed and croaked, “The witch who betrayed you. His name. What was it?”

  Her brow drew forward painfully. “I... don’t repeat it. What does it matter to you, Dami-yano?”

  His hands clenched each other as Damiano, uncomfortably glanced everywhere but at Saara. “It... it couldn’t have been Delstrego, could it? Guillermo Delstrego? Because if it is, I really am sorry.”

  Saara’s breath hissed out. She took Damiano’s head between her hands and looked into his eyes, reading the truth she had missed before.

  “I am sorry,” he said, thick voiced. “I wouldn’t...”

  “No!” she cried out. “I’ve done it again! Again! Great Winds, will I never be free?” And Saara vanished upward into the trees.

  Damiano huddled against a blast of frozen air. “Dear Jesu,” he whispered, as the fire guttered out. A few minutes later he added, “Papa, you have so much to answer for.” Macchiata crawled out of the night and sat beside him.