Damiano

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “Sweet Creator,” he began, in Latin as was proper for all prayers, “of this green world... I thank you for it, though it is not to be mine for very long. And though I am wicked in nature, I hope you will not take it amiss if I ask you to take care of certain people...”

  Damiano broke off suddenly, blinked, and stared at the road ahead of him. As he saw the delicate glory of white wings rising upward in twin interrogative curls his face stretched into a welcoming, gently relieved smile.

  But the expression was stillborn. With the sight of Raphael, Damiano’s plodding numbness broke in pieces, and he remembered. Shame froze his heart and heated his face, which went dusky. His hands twisted into the horse’s mane. His eyes slid down to the road. “Seraph,” he said thickly. “I didn’t mean to call you. It was only a prayer.”

  “I know.” The archangel Raphael did not try to smile. He gazed intently at Damiano on his horse, and the wind riffled his yellow hair.

  The angel raised one ivory hand, and Festilligambe loped forward, lipping the air and nickering. The heavy, swart head pressed against Raphael’s bosom.

  “I know, Damiano,” Raphael said again, scratching the beast forcefully behind the right ear. “But I wanted to see you.” And the angel’s gaze was simple and open, yet so searching that Damiano felt himself go red from head to foot.

  That’s why Satan looks red, he thought to himself. Bold as he is, his spiritual body is ashamed of itself. As I am ashamed. And now I understand why he hates his brother.

  Damiano’s jaw clenched. “You do see me, Raphael,” he snapped, more sharply than he had intended, and he stared over Raphael’s shoulder, where black trees gave way to fields of dead grass, crusted in snow. “And now that you have seen me, what is there to do but go away again?”

  The young man waited. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the easy slow drift of a wing, like the twitch of a cat’s tail. He dared not look at Raphael’s face, to see why the angel stood there, not speaking, for Damiano feared that either the beauty of that face or the compassion written upon it would knock him to the ground.

  “Go back to heaven, Raphael. My lute is smashed. My dog, too.”

  “I am sorry for you, Damiano.” It was said coolly, as a statement of fact. “But you must not grieve for Macchiata.”

  Damiano’s answer was fiat. “I have not been. I haven’t had the time. Or perhaps the feeling.

  “It’s my life that is smashed, Raphael. I have no more use for a teacher.” Then his need to know how the angel was reacting outweighed both fear and shame, and Damiano’s eyes turned to Raphael.

  Slowly the angel smiled. “I love you, Dami,” he said.

  Damiano’s head sank forward onto the gelding’s neck. His face hid in the long mane, rough and black as his own hair. He shuddered until the horse’s black back twitched beneath him. “Oh, no,” he cried softly. “Dominus Deus! No. Don’t say that. Not to me.”

  Raphael stepped to Damiano’s side. “Why, Damiano? What is this distance? Do you no longer love me? You said that you did, not a month ago, and you said I was not to doubt it. I will not doubt it.

  “—I can be very stubborn.”

  The witch flinched at the gentle touch on his knee. He screwed shut his eyes and ground his teeth together. “Of course I love you, Raphael. And that is turning me on a spit!

  “Go away now. Begone! Fly! You can do it fast enough when you want to.” And Damiano made blind, ineffectual bird-shooing gestures.

  The touch of the hand grew heavier for a moment. “I go,” said Raphael. “But we will meet again, Damiano. I am sure of it. At least once more. And then we will talk this over.”

  Suddenly the horse snorted and turned his head left and right. He stamped an iron-shod foot in disappointment, and his breath blew a cloud of steam. His whinny rang among the iron-gray trees. Damiano opened his eyes, knowing the angel was gone.

  Chapter 14

  The weather continued inclement, with the sky a dark nimbus and the earth cold and wet. Damiano made slow progress westward, waiting for a sign.

  He encountered a girl with a shoulder yoke and two baskets of hens. After one look at him she fled screaming, abandoning her squawking wares. Damiano righted the baskets and continued on his way, wondering what it was she had seen in him. When he placed one hand on each side of his nose, he felt the same face beneath them.

  That same day a man on horseback approached from a side road. His antipathy was as pronounced as the peasant girl’s had been, and what was worse, his champing horse seemed to share the terror.

  “This is good,” mumbled Damiano sullenly. “No one here to bend my ear with unwanted company and bad jokes. I can have some peace for a bit.” And he sighed.

  He had been riding for almost a week along the empty road when his witch sense felt the presence of people ahead, thick and hot like the smoke of a wood fire. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and listened with his mismatched ears.

  There were many men ahead—more men than women. Soldiers, in fact, if his powers were any judge. The part of him that had been Saara grew very wary, feeling this.

  But at least there was no sound of fighting. Damiano urged the gelding forward.

  Half the walls of San Gabriele had gone to make rubble for the barricades. Behind these makeshifts, the black leather and brass of the army of General Pardo filled the town. Because the men were Romans, mostly, they cursed the wind and the constant cold. Because they were soldiers, they glanced dourly over the barricades and the ploughed fields to another camp, where blue tents flapped in the wind and the flag of Savoy was pitched, and spoke of other things.

  Ogier, illegitimate son of Aymon of Savoy, sat in his quivering tent and also cursed the wind. He wanted to mop up this little pope’s man —this upstart—and go back to Chambéry.

  But Amadeus had given him only three hundred troops for the task, while Pardo had at least five. True, Ogier had been able to gather together a few score of the peasants uprooted by Pardo’s passage, men with a grudge who would fight for almost nothing, but these were not soldiers, merely angry queenless bees.

  He rose from his leather-seated campstool, stretched to his full six feet in height, and scratched the scalp beneath his yellow hair. As soon as he started to release the tent flap, the wind caught it and snapped it out of his hands.

  Spread before him was the three-day-old camp of his little regiment. The loose earth was dotted with man-sized shallow holes, which some of the men had dug as a protection from the wind. These made a depressing sight, resembling graves as they did. The air smelled of smoke, human feces (the men were not used to the water in this place), and burnt mutton. No one was doing much; till Ogier gave the order to attack, there was nothing to do.

  But his men were not fools or chattel. He could not send them blindly into a bloodbath, hoping in the process to somehow dispatch the Roman. They would not obey such an order. Nor would Ogier have given it, for he was a civilized man; he respected his soldiers, and he knew that giving orders that will not be obeyed only serves to break an officer’s authority.

  He wondered, not for the first time, whether his half-brother had assigned him this task in order to shame him. Certainly that would be unlike the Green Count, whose obsession with honor and chivalry had caused him to storm off under the banner of Jean le Bon, fighting Edward in Brittany merely because he had sworn to do so.

  The gesture had made Savoy appear weak in the eyes of jackals like Pardo, and sending a force of three hundred men after the Roman had merely reinforced that impression.

  Which was false. Savoy was not weak; it was merely led by a ruler whose moralities were passe. Ogier scratched the yellow stubble on his cheek.

  No, Amadeus had not sent him after the brigand to shame him. The count was not subtle enough for such maneuvering, and besides, Ogier had to admit that he himself was not strong enough to be a threat to Amadeus. Still, by plan or no, this encounter could shame him.

  He needed a stratagem to get past
the relative weakness of his regiment. But what was strategy without cities or rivers to work around, and when two small forces can see one another clearly? Twice he had sent mounted patrols into the surrounding hills, attempting to circle San Gabriele, and each time enemy trumpets sang out the Savoyard position. Men on hillsides could not hide very well.

  He fished for the rope closure of the tent flap, secured it again, and sat down heavily on the campstool. He absently fingered the tip of his long lace collar. It found its way into his mouth, where he bit down upon the already draggled fabric.

  He had been gone from his estates six weeks now. He wondered if his wife had yet taken a lover.

  At the hour of sunset, as Ogier took supper in his tent, alone and thinking, he heard a single scream, and then the hubbub of raised voices. He cursed himself for delaying too long, and he cursed Pardo for a treacherous Roman bastard. Snatching his sword from the tent floor, he leaped through the open tent flap and landed, rolling, on the stamped earth outside.

  There was no battle, he decided in one swift glimpse. The men sat by their cook fires, necks craned to the east road. Or they stood, their hands at their sides or their fingers pointing at a thing that approached through the fading light of day.

  Ogier, too, stood motionless and staring as the creature approached, riding a horse of white bones.

  The rider was black, save for a bone-white face, and it wore the shape of a man. Two eyes like spear wounds, black and ragged, peered over the blue-clad assemblage. Ogier froze with the sudden belief that those deadly eyes were looking at him.

  The worst of it was that the apparition was burning—burning like a doll of pitch, like a witch’s toy made for a curse. Its murky red-orange light lit the trees from underneath and shone through the gaping eye sockets of the horse’s skull. It advanced.

  “Let us shoot it, Commander,” urged Martin, his second. “Before it does us harm. Look, it steals men’s courage by its very presence!”

  The second’s teeth were actually chattering as he spoke. This observation broke Ogier’s paralysis. “Not... yet, Martin,” he replied. “It is hideous enough, surely, but it’s done us no damage. And what if our weapons can’t touch it? Then we will be sorry. Wait,” he concluded, adding, “and pray to Saint Michel the archangel, whose duty it is to rein in the hosts of Satan.” And Ogier strode forward into the apparition’s path.

  With one will, the men drew back from this encounter. The burning figure stopped before Ogier; its mount’s grisly head turned left and right.

  At close range it was the same, or worse. “At least there is no stink of burning flesh,” said Ogier aloud, in order to be saying something.

  The dead face peered down. “Mutton is what I smell,” it said in tones unexpectedly mild, and with a strong Italian accent to its French. Its voice gratified Ogier, who had always suspected the Devil was Italian.

  It slid down from its seat of bare ribs, and for a moment the Savoyard’s vision wavered, and he thought he saw an ordinary fellow (though rather small) standing next to an ordinary horse. But that glimpse was gone in a wink, and Ogier could not be sure he had ever seen it.

  “You are the commander of these men?” the apparition inquired casually.

  “Ogier de Savoy,” he found himself saying, and he executed a precise, ceremonious bow. Somewhere in the crowd of soldiers one man cried out and clapped his hands. Ogier smiled tightly to himself, thinking this interchange would do his reputation no harm, assuming he lived through it.

  When the apparition returned the bow, flames hissed like a flung torch. “Well met, Marquis. I know well the House of Savoy.”

  Ogier raised one eyebrow and tilted his head. He was not a marquis, but it did not seem necessary to correct the thing. “So? I hadn’t thought my family had lived so ill. But no matter, Monsieur Fiend, I stand here at your service. For what have you come so far?”

  The creature sighed and patted his skeletal horse. “I would like to talk to you in private, Marquis. It is to both our benefit.”

  Ogier’s other eyebrow joined the first. “The only private place in the camp is my tent,” he said. “And I greatly fear you’ll burn it down.”

  The cadaverous head jerked around. “Burn... ? Marquis, I promise wholeheartedly I will not burn your tent down. Why did you think... Am I glowing red in your eyes, or something like that?”

  A smile twitched over Ogier’s long face. “Something like that,” he admitted, and he led the apparition through the hushed camp to where his blue tent flapped and fluttered in the wind.

  “Leave the horse alone,” said the creature unnecessarily, but as it stepped away from the structure of bone, that monstrous steed wavered, and in its place stood a black gelding of good breeding, wearing no trappings of any kind. “Stay,” the apparition commanded, as though the horse were a dog.

  Ogier and the fiend disappeared into the tent of blue silk, which shone then like a lantern in the gathering dark.

  “You have men from Partestrada in your army, my lord Marquis,” Damiano noted. As there was only one seat in the tent (the folding leather campstool), he settled himself upon the dirt.

  Ogier also sat, his face expressionless, his eyes watchful. “I have men from all over the Piedmont in my retinue, good Devil, but only the ones I brought over Mont Cenis are soldiers.”

  The witch nodded appreciatively. To Ogier the effect was like that of paper shivering in the blast of a flame. The Savoyard sat bolt upright and suppressed a shudder.

  After a meditative pause, Damiano spoke again. “Am I correct in assuming you are pursuing the condottiere Pardo and have him cornered in San Gabriele?”

  Ogier sucked his cheek before answering. “Aside from the fact there are no corners left in the village you speak of, the situation is as you say. May I inquire, Monsieur Demon, how it is you involve yourself in this matter?”

  Ogier found himself confronted by two earnestly gaping eye sockets, filled with night. “I, too, am hunting General Pardo. I think you and I can save each other both time and bloodshed.

  “In fact, my lord Marquis, I was promised I would find a tool to my purpose, and I believe your army is the very thing.”

  Promised? Ogier’s mind raced, and the hair on the back of his fair neck stood on end. He repeated to himself “Jesus, Marie, et Joseph,” three times. “I regret, Monsieur, that I am not empowered by the count to make treaties, neither with man nor with man’s Enemy. I do not wish to offend a being of your evident grandeur, but...”

  Two arms rose, leprous white and burning, burning... Damiano slicked his hair back from his face. “I do not ask you to make a bargain with the Devil, Marquis. Nor with me, if there’s any difference there.

  “I am merely explaining to you that I need your men, or at least a goodly portion of them. I am going into the village tonight, and once I have captured the general, I will need troops to keep his own men from causing trouble.”

  Ogier started, snorted, and then thought better of it. “You are going to kill General Pardo, spirit? Tonight?” As if by chance, the blond shuffled his left foot forward until it almost touched the flickering figure: no heat.

  Damiano frowned. “If need be. I had hoped to deliver him to you, though that would be hypocrisy on my part, eh? Since you would, in turn, slay him.”

  There was a moment’s silence, broken by Ogier. “Why do you seek the Roman’s life? What could he have done...”

  “I was born in Partestrada, Marquis,” answered Damiano.

  Ogier leaned forward on the stool, his revulsion tempered by sudden interest. The lace of his limp collar hung in the air before his coat of sky blue. “So you were mortal once, Monsieur Demon?”

  Damiano blinked in surprise. Feeling a chill, he drew his soot-colored mantle closer. “Yes, Marquis. But it was a very short life and painful at the end.

  “Enough. It’s dark already, and there’s no reason to delay. Assemble your men now, and the battle will be done by midnight.” He rose to his feet, using his bla
ck staff for support.

  Ogier remained seated, staring at the ground. After some moments he shook his head. “I am sorry, Monseigneur Demon, but I may not do that. You see, although I am a soldier, I am still a Christian.”

  “Then I will,” said Damiano easily. “But they would be happier led by you, I think.” As he turned away, the witch heard the now familiar sound of a blade pulling free. He swiveled and pointed his staff.

  With a cry Ogier dropped the weapon and cradled one badly singed hand in the other.

  Damiano bent and stepped through the tent door.

  The night was windy but clear. None of the Savoyard soldiery seemed to have moved during their commander’s interview with the Devil. Some shadowed figures were standing, weapons in hand, while others squatted by the meager cooking fires. All faced toward the hellishly radiant tent, and when the burning corpse appeared again, they backed slowly away.

  Damiano felt the fear and hostility in the air he breathed. He glanced up at the uncaring stars, as if borrowing their indifference. He raised his staff just as an arrow shot out of the night toward him.

  Its bright yellow length splintered against the tarnished silver mid-band, and the goose-feathers sizzled and stank.

  “None of that,” said the witch quietly, staring past three fires into the crowd, directly at the archer who had loosed the arrow. “The next man who tries to harm me will flame like that arrow.

  “And he will die for nothing, because I cannot be hurt as easily as that.”

  Damiano glanced around him, and his nostrils flared. The skin of his face sorted the men around him. He strode forward at last, and men squirmed out of his path like the Red Sea parting.

  He stopped before a cluster of fires a little apart from the others. “Belloc,” he said. “Aloisio. I am glad to see you still alive and healthy.

  “Tell me, old friend and benefactor. Where is Paolo Denezzi? Is he not among you?”

  The square blacksmith gasped. “God’s wounds! It’s young Delstrego!” Then a form stepped between them.