Damiano

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Damiano did not reply. Perhaps he did not even hear her. He heard the sound of fire in his ears, and he knew the flames were near, to be drawn through his staff like air through a flute. He tilted his head to hear what the fire was saying.

  Saara looked at his face and turned to flee.

  The white bird rose, but fire seared the sky like the lick of a whip. She dropped and dove, and a beast like a shaggy deer sprang away. It carried backswept antlers, and its hooves were wide like the pads of a camel.

  It was true, Damiano thought distantly. She was not lying; there is such a deer.

  A tongue of flame raced toward the pine wood; where it touched the snow, the air went white with steam. It reached the edge of the meadow before the leaping animal and flashed sideways, turning the reindeer, prisoning both it and its captor with a wall of deadly heat. Grass sizzled. The fire burned wood, earth, snow. It needed nothing but itself to burn.

  I have only begun, thought Damiano without emotion. Hell is vast; I could char all this hill. All of Lombardy.

  Saara turned at bay, and as she cast off her animal form, she was hidden by the thickening mists. It didn’t matter. Damiano could feel her presence on his closed eyelids. He advanced toward her.

  Suddenly the air dazzled and snapped with thunder. Above both witches the heavens convulsed, and a drenching rain smote down.

  The ring of flame guttered, and for a moment Damiano saw Saara plainly: a small and slender figure kneeling on the flattened grass, streams of rain running along her long braids and down her breast. Her hands were raised to the sky. She was singing.

  She was as fair as a dryad, as a child. Her beauty hurt him, and with his pain he built the fire higher. Saara screamed at the touch of boiling steam. Damiano felt nothing.

  The clouds lifted, but there was no woman on the grass, merely a flock of doves, watching him. He closed his eyes and stepped toward Saara.

  A white bear rose above his head, black mouthed, ten feet tall. It swung a paw at him that was thicker than Damiano’s waist. He dodged and thrust a staff of fire at the creature’s eyes. It turned and faded.

  Lightning smashed down upon him, and the mad staff drank it, singing as though with joy. He threw the bolt at the woman before him, and she fell.

  Damiano leaned over her. Water ran from the snakelike curls on his head to spatter in her face. He put his boot upon her stomach; the broken heel snagged and tore the red and yellow stars. The silver head of his staff he pressed against her throat “No more singing,” he said.

  Then he raised his head. The ring of fire, unattended, had flickered out, but Saara’s rain continued, cold, dull, and gray. Damiano ground his teeth and stared without seeing.

  In another moment he would kill her. Or walk away. He desired... what he wanted he did not know. He flexed his damaged knuckles on the staff.

  The staff knew what it desired. It told him, speaking the same language as the fire had used. It desired increase—power. It vibrated in his hand.

  Saara cried shrilly and gasped for air. Damiano glanced down in surprise, all hate forgotten between one moment and the next. He lifted his foot.

  And then he was struck by a blow of greater power than that of the lightning. It came through the wood of the staff itself and ascended his arm, striking into his heart and his head.

  It was cold rain and distance and falling. It was sunlight and unrecognized tunes and a wealth of meaningless words. Damiano floated in stunned silence. He would have flung the staff away, had he known how. But he was not now master. The staff had been created by Damiano’s father, and in this moment, it reverted to type. It was strong, and it was thirsty. It dragged the young man into its own magic.

  But it was the only weapon he had or knew how to use, so he fought the chaos with that length of black wood, until it was subdued to it.

  Time and time and time passed away.

  Saara was still screaming. Rain pelted him in the face. Damiano climbed swaying to his feet. He stopped the rain.

  She stared up at him in horrified wonder. “You have it all,” she whispered, and huddled in a ball on the mired grass. “What your father wanted.”

  He looked down at the woman’s full hair, gray at the temples, and her eyes, which were seamed by sun and hard weather. On the backs of her clenched hands the tendons stood out clearly, and veins made a faint, blue lacework. Her face was burned by steam.

  But nothing he saw was a surprise to him now, for he knew Saara very well—in her body, in her song, and in her power, which had become his.

  “You are still beautiful, pikku Saara,” he said, not knowing he spoke the far Northern language. “And you are not very old.”

  Saara turned her head to him, and what she saw hurt her eyes. She started to shiver.

  Damiano limped away from her. In the middle of the waste that had been a garden he stopped and tapped his staff upon the soil. Grass roots ripped, and stones. A black hole gaped before him. Within it he placed the corpse of a dog. He made again the small journey to the dead man’s side, and he picked up, not Ruggerio’s body, but the pieces of the broken lute, which went into the grave beside Macchiata. In another moment the earth shut its mouth.

  Leaving the grave unmarked, Damiano turned away from the meadow, where a winter wind blew across the sullied earth. He did not look back at Saara.

  Chapter 13

  When he was well into the privacy of the pines, Damiano sat down on a log. He stuck a bit of moss into his painful ear, to keep out the cold, and with this his dizziness grew less. With a bread knife he pried off the heel from his intact boot, making his steps level.

  His new powers whispered in his right ear, like a friend standing too near for comfort. That broken ear could hear nothing save the memory of chants sung long ago, in a language repetitive and strange, yet to Damiano understandable.

  Fly, the words repeated. Find the sky. Leave vestment and body behind. He clung doggedly to his clomping staff.

  “It isn’t what I wanted, lady,” Damiano said aloud, his voice echoing oddly through his left ear only. “I am not my father.”

  Suddenly it occurred to him that even he did not believe himself. He stopped in his tracks, chewing his lower Up. He began to review his actions, step by step, since leaving home, both through the eyes of his memory and through this strange new vision that had become his. He sat down.

  Before Damiano moved again, the endless evergreen twilight had deepened. An owl stretched its downy wings in the crotch of a split fir, and cold spread down from the high meadow into the wood.

  Only the silver on his staff was visible as Damiano hauled himself again to his feet, using a sapling for support. He cleared his throat and glanced about him, marking each mouse-stir and badger’s yawn: the living rustle of the forest.

  This time the invocation should be easier. He had merely to follow his own fire to its source, and he would locate the spirit he sought. Closing his eyes Damiano descended within himself until he touched, far down and glimmering, the trace of the fire.

  This he followed, through blackness and void, and it grew stronger and brighter as he approached its source. At the shore of a molten ocean he stopped, daunted not by heat but by terror.

  I was born for this, he thought, and with that understanding he might have wept, except that he had used up all his tears. He did not kneel, but stood with his knees locked, braced by his staff. “Satan!” he called. “I am here.”

  There was no response. Damiano opened his eyes.

  He was in the black forest, in full night. His journey had gone nowhere. Puzzlement knit his brow. “If those are the fires of hell,” he mumbled to himself, “then this Lombard hillside must be hell itself. And I’ve been many places worse.”

  Frowning, he dismissed the matter and began his conjurement in the traditional manner, with staff and palindrome. At the word Satanas, he again felt the pull that would wrench him from the damp pine needles to the Devil’s palm. Every weary bone in Damiano rebelled at the thought
of that wild flight.

  “No,” he stated, and rooted himself to the earth. The spell tightened like a rope around him, but it neither shook him nor did it tear. The jeweled head of his staff sparked, then glimmered like an oil lamp, and Damiano found himself staring at the fine ruddy features and elegant poise of Satan, who shook the dead needles from his shoes and bowed.

  The Devil was just his size.

  “So you are no longer the sympathetic little dove who had words with me a week ago,” he said to Damiano.

  The witch shrugged. “You don’t have wings,” he remarked, pointing. “I didn’t notice before, when you were so big. You don’t have wings anymore.”

  The red face twitched with scorn. “I am what size it pleases me to be. And as for wings, young mortal, I don’t need them to fly.”

  Damiano blinked and scratched his chin. “Perhaps, Signore, but I don’t need my eyebrows either, and yet I don’t pluck them out.”

  Scarlet deepened to crimson, but the Devil’s urbanity remained otherwise intact. “Did you bring me here to throw insults at me, Delstrego? If so, I warn you, you are not yet that powerful...”

  “No, Signore.” Damiano ran one hand through his hair in a businesslike manner. “I... asked you here because I want to take the bargain you offered me last week.”

  Satan’s smile was slow and grudging. Under the flickering staff-light it looked a bit... satanic. “But you were sure there was a better way, little witch.”

  Damiano nodded, lips pursed. “Yes. I’m still sure of it. But not for me. Everything I have done has led to blood.”

  Very quietly the Devil said, “You are one of mine.” Damiano stared down at his boots and nodded.

  “The bargain,” he repeated.

  Satan sank indolently down upon a chair that hadn’t been there before: a chair that looked very much like the one Damiano had seen burnt in the guard shack at the crossroads below Aosta. He fixed Damiano with a knowing eye.

  “Why that?” he began diffidently. “Now that you know the truth, I can give you freedom itself.”

  “The bargain. I will trade the future of my city, and my own, for peace.”

  “Renounce the shackles of the Beginning, and you can have whatever you want.”

  Damiano snorted and sat also, not on a magical chair, but on the ground. “Why would I renounce my Maker, Signore. He has done nothing ill.”

  Satan’s eyes widened in shock. “He has covered the earth with pain and despair, Damiano. His cruelties are so enormous that even his ministers curse him in private. You have seen his work well these past few weeks. Open your poor, nearsighted eyes.”

  Damiano took a deep breath, and still regarding Satan, he scratched his forehead on the wood of the staff. “I have seen cruel and angry men and men who are mistaken. I have seen my own misbegotten nature. And I have seen a lot of bad weather.

  “But the world He made, Signor Satan, does not despair. It is beautiful. No, I admit that I am wicked, and that my destiny is hell.

  But that does not mean I must love hell, or all that is wicked, and I do not.

  “I love the green earth, Signore, and the Creator who made it. I also love your gentle brother Raphael, and the city of Partestrada in the Piedmont. What of the bargain you offered?”

  The Devil’s eyes flickered. “Don’t be a fool, Dami. You can do better than that.”

  “That’s what I thought, once. The bargain.”

  Satan folded his florid and shapely hands in his lap. Damiano noticed beneath his chair a settled pall of smoke, and the tang of burning cut the incense of the pines.

  “The situation has changed,” announced Satan. “You yourself have changed it, youth, by your... adventures. It will have to be approached differently.”

  “Explain,” replied Damiano, drumming his fingers on his staff.

  “You have become larger, Damiano. Much larger. And you are a disturbing influence, with your ultramodern ideas and your quaint morality. Men such as yourself exist only to make trouble.” The Devil grinned tightly.

  “And you will make trouble—for your village, for the Piedmont, for the Green Count himself, in years to come—for you will inevitably come to disagree with Amadeus, whatever the man does.

  “If you want what you wanted last week for your village—pardon me, your city—peace and stagnation, you will have to pay a higher price.”

  Damiano’s black eyebrows came together in a V between his eyes. “You said the city would fade and be forgotten. And I myself. Have you found something worse to offer, Satanas?”

  Satan’s smile was pained. “I? Damiano, I’m trying to help you construct the future. You have created the possible choices, not I.

  “And this one... isn’t good. In order for Partestrada to squat in comfort for the next half-century (before decaying into the soil), it is necessary that you be out of the picture.”

  Damiano shrugged and watched the smoke crawl like so many snakes over the forest floor. “So I can’t go home?”

  The Devil sat immobile. “That’s not enough, as it was not enough to exile Dante from Florence. You must die,” Satan said calmly.

  Damiano’s eyes shot to the red, expressionless face. “Die?”

  “Yes. Die. And soon. So you see, Dami, it’s not much of a bargain after all, is it?”

  The young man’s mouth opened. His black eyes stared unseeing.

  “How soon?” he whispered, repeating Macchiata’s words once again. “How soon is soon?”

  A slow smile pulled at the perfect lips as Satan watched the mortal man shiver. “Soon. I can’t say, exactly. Perhaps a year or two. Perhaps tonight. It is certain, if you strike this fool’s bargain, that you will not live to become wise.” And he observed Damiano’s misery with trained appreciation.

  But his enjoyment was short. Damiano raised his head, met the Devil’s gaze, and nodded.

  “Done,” he said.

  Satan scowled, and his huge anger cracked through the carnelian mask. “What game do you think you’re playing? You can gain nothing by theatrics, boy! The Beginning has cast you off already, and mankind will never know!”

  Damiano placed both hands on top of his head and rubbed his face against his knees. “Eh? Yes, but I will know, Signor Satan, and that is something.”

  The Devil stood up and flung the spindly chair into nothingness. He spat on the forest floor in front of Damiano, leaving a spot of smoking ash. “You will know, boy? When you are in my hand you will know what I permit you to know, no more. You will remember only the idiocy of your actions, forever!”

  Damiano rose slowly. “Then I know it now, and that will have to be enough. Come, Signor Satan. It was your bargain to begin with; hold to it. Shall I sign in blood?”

  Ruddy nostrils twitched, and Satan glared at the man with barely disguised rage. “Unnecessary, Damiano. I will have blood enough at the end.

  “So be it, fool. I give you your bargain.” The Devil sighed, and his pale eyes narrowed. “Go back the way you came. What you see on the road will make your path obvious.

  “As for what you are to do, do what seems best to you. Employ what tools you are given.”

  Pulling on composure like a cloak, Satan bowed and was gone.

  The young man drew his hands into his mantle and leaned against the rough trunk of a tree. “I’m cold,” he said aloud, with no expression in his voice. “And very tired.”

  But the full moon and his unfamiliar and exotic powers pulled upon him. The staff in which they were caged was warm in his hand. He scrambled down the steep incline toward the lake.

  A patch of moonlight stopped Damiano. He focused on the knobbed head of his staff; something was different.

  Indeed. The silver had gone black—black as soot. And the jewels at the top were six small chips of jet. What was more, his clothing had turned an equally inky color; ermine shone like sable.

  “So he has put his stamp on me, for all to see,” whispered Damiano, speaking aloud because he was not used to being
alone. Horror chilled the blood in his fingers. His shoulders drew up to his ears.

  “Mother of God, keep me from hurting anyone else!”

  He reached Ludica in the gray-violet light of dawn. The streets were empty, and Damiano went directly to the stable. Festilligambe whickered at his smell.

  From a pile of hay and blankets came a phlegmy snoring. Damiano nudged it with his staff. “I have come for my horse,” he said.

  The stableboy crawled out of his nest and stood upright before the shadowed figure. Then, with a cry of terror, he fell to his knees, hiding his face, praying and babbling together.

  The witch stood puzzled, then his back slumped wearily as he turned toward the horses. “It seems he has most certainly put his mark on me,” he said.

  The ride west from Ludica was quiet, very quiet save for the tumult in Damiano’s injured ear, where foreign speech, foreign desire, and homeless memory mixed together in a murmurous yearning. But either the eardrum was healing rapidly or he was getting used to the voices, for they no longer bothered him.

  During Damiano’s few days in Lombardy, November had given way to December. Damiano reflected that his birthday had passed unnoticed. He was now twenty-two years old. Twice that age would be younger than he felt himself to be.

  But he would not live to be forty-four, he reminded himself. He would not live to be twenty-five. It was quite possible he would not live past the night. With consuming fire at the end of it all, it didn’t make a pleasant subject for thought.

  Snow was falling and had been all morning. Damiano was sincerely tired of it, as well as tired of the wind, the frozen ruts, and the bare trees. His only comfort was that he was also too tired to question both what he had done and what he was about to do.

  He huddled in his furs and began to sing a sad ballad of Walther von der Vogelweide. It sounded odd in his own head, as though the singer were actually someone standing near him on the left, but the familiar tune comforted him.

  Was he still able to pray? he wondered. Well why not? He’d said his little Paternoster by the swordsman’s body, and the only difference then had been that he had not known he was damned at the time.