Raphael

by R. A. MacAvoy

  In front of them came a small fellow, mounted bareback on a horse he was having difficulty managing. Djoura recognized him at the same moment he recognized her, and she saw him pointing and heard him say, “That is her. The black infidel who worshipped the moon before my eyes!”

  But Hasiim the Berber did not need such identification. He spurred his mare forward.

  Raphael was watching the man come, followed by a mass of pounding hooves which could smash human flesh into the clay of the road. Had Djoura not snatched him by the hand, he might have stood there until overtaken, for he had no experience in running away from things.

  Nor was running a very useful endeavor, for the horses were faster than any barefoot man, let alone a woman wrapped in heavy skirts. But Djoura slipped around a corner of the street and pulled him into a doorless entryway.

  “Fly-caked pigshit!” she hissed violently. “Infidel, am I? Well, this infidel is going to spit him like a fish!”

  Raphael heard horses racketing toward the narrow corner. One came through. Another tripped—slammed the sun-baked wall. A man screamed and the beast went down.

  Toward them danced an hysterical Arab horse, with its light bit clenched firmly in its teeth. It tossed its head while the small citizen of Granada bounced unhappily up and down on the animal’s withers. His right hand held a cavalry scimitar out in the air, where it wobbled dangerously. His left was caught in the horse’s mane. He did not look at the fugitives at all.

  Without hesitation Djoura struck, pulling man from mount and the sword from the hapless fellow’s grasp. The freed horse bolted forward along the alley, leaving the shouts and screams of the inhabitants in its wake. The disarmed warrior crumbled into a ball before Djoura, also screaming. She lifted the scimitar above her head, then stopped still, an expression of disgust on her face. Finally she kicked the fellow out of the way.

  Raphael stood next to Djoura, watching the struggling mass of fallen horses and riders which blocked the alley entrance. One animal urinated in its panic: the air grew sour.

  In the sunlit street a small white mare whirled. The black robes of her rider billowed as she was spurred toward the congested corner. Then lifting into the air like a deer she leaped the whole mass and came down perfectly balanced in the alleyway only fifteen feet from Djoura.

  Hasiim reined his mare expertly and her hind feet pulled under her. Dropping the reins along the mare’s neck, he lifted his sword in a practiced hand.

  Djoura hefted hers like a club.

  The white mare sprang forward. At that same moment Raphael stepped out into the alley between Hasiim and Djoura. He raised his empty hand toward the beast. “Dami!” he cried. “Old friend, help us! Help us if you are near. If you can. Remember the horses in the pass of Aosta!”

  There was nothing to see. No shadow more nor less haunted the alley. Raphael’s hope shrank and he chided himself for expecting too much of a friend who had, after all, passed beyond earth’s turmoils.

  But the horse—Hasiim’s war mare—stopped dead in her tracks. Hasiim was slammed hard against her neck. She lowered her head. Nickered softly.

  In the moment of the Berber’s amazement, Raphael was up behind him. He took Hasiim’s sword arm in both of his and struck it against the alley wall.

  Hasiim cursed his mare’s infidelity. He cursed enchantments. He dropped the sword.

  Raphael took it in both hands and was off.

  Outside the alleyway and in the wider street beyond, the desert horses stood locked in a pleasant dream. Neither spur nor quirt led to more than a fly switch of the tail. The horses who had fallen now climbed to their feet and stood together, completely blocking the entryway.

  The townspeople of Granada remained where the onslaught of the fursan had driven them, watching from windows or huddled in black doorways, and what emotions this humiliation of the Berber cavalry raised in their several Muslim or Christian breasts were theirs to cherish.

  Raphael passed the sword from one hand to the other, until suddenly its weight settled in his grip and he knew what to do with it.

  THERE WERE FOUR OF US: MICHAEL, GABRIEL, URIEL, AND MYSELF. WE DROVE HIM OUT—HIM AND ALL HE HAD DELUDED TO STAND WITH HIM.

  Raphael darted back to Djoura, and their two swords faced the light.

  “What was that?” hissed the woman. “What happened to his horse?”

  Raphael opened his mouth, but hardly knew what to say. “A… deed is redeemed: a deed done years ago, in the high mountains of the north. It is my friend who has helped us—he of whom I told you. The pebble.”

  “The pebble?” Djoura’s startled eyes shifted from the danger ahead to the strange fellow beside her.

  “Off your horses!” Hasiim spoke in the hill Arabic of Morocco. (Down the darkened alley Djoura heard him and cursed in the same tongue.) “Off your horses and after me!”

  A more slender shape appeared among the equine silhouettes blocking the corner. One man squeezed through. Another.

  With no other coign but a bolted doorway from which to fight and over a dozen swordsmen slipping toward them, the fair man and the black woman turned together and fled down the alley.

  It was dank: the cobbles both slippery and odorous. Djoura ran with a focused, arrowlike urgency, like a person who knows refuge is just ahead. Raphael followed her in similar fashion, not because he believed there was such a refuge (no, he knew it was only Djoura’s unquenchable confidence which led them) but because he did not want to lose her. The woman’s dusty black skirts were hiked, and her scimitar bobbed in her hand. This weapon scattered once more the mothers, children, and men without employment who frequented the alley. Again shrieks and bellows.

  The fugitives passed the small man’s horse, the runaway, as it was being led by eager dirty hands through a doorway of clay daub toward some illicit fate. The sound of foot pursuit echoed behind them, giving wings to their own steps.

  Then they were out in the morning sun again: first Djoura, whose clothes drank the brilliance and gave nothing back, but whose head flashed with coins, then Raphael, wound—no, tangled—in shawls over his striped household trousers, his fair hair flying like a horse’s mane. Their eyes watered in the light and before them rose a wall: the north wall of the city of Granada.

  It was impossibly high, and here and there the poor had built mud-wasp huts of clay against it, narrowing the street to a mere donkey track. Djoura turned to the left and as she bolted forward she shrieked, “The gate! We must find the gate!”

  Raphael’s breath rasped in his throat. He felt his nose bleeding again. He pressed behind Djoura through a blockade of dirty children, while a dog with pointed ears and a curling tail barked sharply at the confusion.

  Was that a gate ahead, round arched and trimmed with tile? It was: the north gate of the city, as high as a house, and the wall around it was ornamented with lapis cut into the words of the Koran. Djoura sprang toward it and stopped, for in its shadow were framed five swordsmen, with the Qa’id Hasiim in the front.

  Raphael crashed into Djoura from behind. He put one arm around her shoulder and glanced about them.

  On their right the city wall, far too high to climb. On their left, a potter’s shed. The street was Uttered with clay pots and with broken fragments of clay.

  What had this wild flight gained them, besides burned lungs and a head full of panic? No matter. Djoura was not about to flee again. She backed against the white wall, where a buttress stood out a few feet. There she was as obvious as a fly on sugar, but there was no longer hope of hiding. Shouts from left and right told her she was surrounded by her enemy.

  But then was there anyone on earth who was not Djoura’s enemy? Not the people of her home, anymore, nor the Spanish giaour who stared at her now from buzzing clumps in the street. Only Pinkie— Raphael—with his weak skin and strange eyes as blue as a blind man’s, who stood by her now, back to back, with his scimitar fluttering in his hands lightly as a bird. She pressed against him.

  Hasiim’s men e
rupted into the sun and when they spied their quarry at bay they gave out a noise like hounds. They came with the fury and undiscipline of men who are not used to fighting on foot.

  And they slid to a confused halt, for there was no flaw or opening in the defense of the blond European who stood with back against the chiseled wall. And the black woman beside him, with her weapon held up rigidly like a headsman’s sword… All knew she was mad, and in league with spirits besides, but who knew what strange arts she possessed to do harm?

  Hasiim then came forward, for he was a pure Muslim and without superstition, and he had a wealth of injured pride to avenge. He glanced from Raphael (with only professional interest) to the black Berber. He was armed once more.

  Raphael shifted his balance so that he faced Hasiim and stood silently to the front of Djoura. He caught the warrior’s eyes with his own and held them. Djoura, seeing that her Pinkie knew more of this business than she did, took one step back. Then Hasiim struck: a feint toward the black woman which ended as a stroke at Raphael’s wrists.

  He met steel, and the blond flexed his blade in a tiny circle. To Hasiim’s immense surprise he felt his weapon loosen in his grasp. The scimitar hit the earth. Hasiim flung himself back.

  To take a breath. To consider. To demand another scimitar from his milling followers.

  Raphael did not drop his eyes from Hasiim’s. He saw the Arab blink, shift from foot to foot, breathe a prayer to Allah.

  HIM AND ALL HE HAD DELUDED TO STAND WITH HIM. Satan himself had given back before four angels. What hope had a mortal warrior, however skilled? Raphael looked at Hasiim and knew he could destroy the man. He stepped out from the buttress, his scimitar drifting like a leaf in the breeze.

  The Berber’s eyes widened. Raphael met those eyes.

  And Raphael was lost.

  This man was not Satan nor had he been bought by him. He was a stubborn and prideful mortal—a man not to Raphael’s taste. A dangerous man. But Raphael gazed at Hasiim and felt a peculiar painful pity.

  This hesitation gave Hasiim—who felt no similar emotion while glaring at Raphael—time to strike another sweeping cross-hand blow. Raphael countered, but did not press the advantage.

  With a strident ululation, another tribesman stood beside Hasiim, sword at the ready. In this man’s face Raphael read plain fear, mastered by the desire to please his commander. This second warrior slashed fiercely at Djoura, who raised her blade against the attack. But the swordsman feinted away and licked in beneath the woman’s awkward guard.

  Raphael snapped the man’s blade in two. Djoura opened his face.

  Hasiim, losing patience, shoved his subordinate aside and rushed his opponent as though he himself were still on horseback, slashing in even diagonals as he came. Raphael flung himself down on one knee before Djoura and his scimitar flashed broadside, clashing against Hasiim’s weapon. Then he spring up again and knocked the qa’id backward before he could disengage. Taking the swordsman’s wrist in his own, he twisted the hilt of the weapon, trying to pull it from Hasiim’s grasp.

  They fell and struggled, breath hissing into one another’s face. Next to Raphael’s head a sword struck the ground and sparked. Hasiim’s eyes shifted. He cried a few words in his Berber dialect and the attack was not repeated.

  Only a few inches above Hasiim’s face hung that of Raphael. It was pale under its sunburn, bearing no sign of anger or outrage, but rather the sad concentration of a tutor with a very slow pupil. And from Raphael’s neck dangled, like some rough piece of jewelry, the iron slave collar. Hasiim grabbed it in one hand, while the other hand dropped his blade and fixed itself against Raphael’s neck. With one hand he pulled, while the other pushed, crushing.

  Arching back, the blond put his knee against Hasiim’s chest, while he worked his two arms between his opponent’s stranglehold. He made no effort to use his sword against Hasiim. His breath came in a choking hiss. His vision sparkled.

  He broke the hold.

  Raphael stood above the fallen Hasiim, who looked up with fanatic indifference, expecting death. He did nothing, but his sword twitched like a cat’s tail, warning off the fursan who had witnessed this crude duel.

  A voice was calling out to Raphael: He didn’t understand at first. “Drop your sword, giaour. Look up and drop your sword.”

  Raphael did look up. Around the frosting-white tiled wall, behind the Berber fursan, stood a semicircle of humanity. Raphael stared from face to face.

  There shuffled a poor Spaniard with confused, rolling eyes, bearing baskets of fish and of peppers. Next to him stood a proud Moorish householder in silk and muslin, his hands upon the jeweled hilt of a scimitar which had probably never seen use. Here was a woman so veiled neither her age nor race could be guessed at, another woman with tawny hair, sans veil but with the ring around her neck. Two teenage eunuchs, well dressed, who stood carefully not touching anybody. A dark peasant ignoring the squirming horned kid in his arms to stare, stare, stare…

  Each casual figure engraved itself into Raphael’s stunned brain, as though within the astonishment, fear, or unholy excitement expressed in these faces he would find the clue to every mystery. But finally his eyes found (as they were meant to) the five soldiers who stood with their legs braced, their wicked small bows drawn and aimed at both Raphael and Djoura.

  The woman did not move. Neither did she drop her weapon. The steel of her sword sent glints of silver over the white mosaic wall, joined by the spark of gold from the coins in her black hair. Her face not black now but suffused with a ruddy blush, and when she spoke to her companion her voice held a furious elation.

  “When I cry out, Raphael, then we will go forward together. We will give them reason to fear us!”

  His face filled with pain. “But they will kill you, Djoura!”

  She snorted in her habitual arrogance. “What are these but dogs? They will kill us anyway. This way…

  “… is freedom.” She took one step forward.

  But Hasiim, who had risen cautiously to his feet, heard her fierce whisper. He replied not to Djoura, but to Raphael. “My men are not dogs. I say they will not kill you: neither of you, unless you make it necessary. The woman I have promised to return to her own people and I will do so.

  “You…” He stared at the fair figure. Raphael’s borrowed clothing had all fallen off and he stood now wearing nothing but his eunuch’s trousers. The scars on his back were visible around his sides and shoulders like the tendrils of red clinging vines. “You we will return to your master, and what he may do to you for this scandal is none of our business.

  “Though I say,” and here the Moor paused. “Though I say that if I thought I could buy your loyalty with your sword arm, I would trade ten good horses for you.”

  Raphael said nothing in reply. Slowly he lowered his blade. Djoura turned upon him a look of infinite bitterness.

  “It gets hotter and hotter,” observed Gaspare, shifting his sweaty seat from side to side. “If we have to go much farther south we’ll all burst into flame!”

  The black dragon smiled: an action which caused Saara’s thighs and knees to tickle. “That is mostly my own personal heat. It is actually quite cool at these altitudes, even in the south.

  “I could cool down by going slower, of course…”

  “Don’t listen to the boy,” snapped Saara, who felt she had been sharing this aerial perch with Gaspare for too long entirely. “I’d rather have the speed. I feel time is pressing.”

  The dragon’s sigh was more disturbing to the riders on his neck than his smile. “I won’t ask you why,” he drawled. “It’s probably some sorcery and I’d rather not know about it…”

  Saara opened her mouth to say it was not sorcery at all, but just a feeling she had, but the dragon was not finished.

  “Besides, if I’m not out of my reckoning, that white shimmer where the mountains slope down is Granada itself.”

  Gaspare craned over Saara’s shoulder. It seemed they had finally reached the botto
m of the Sierra Nevada. Good. Mountains were nothing special to Gaspare. “Even if that is not Granada,” he called into the black dragon’s ear, “I think that the horse has to do something.” “I know, I know,” came the lugubrious hiss.

  They set down to discuss plans upon a rock rubble only a few miles north of the city. Since the dragon was quite capable of firing any house or dry field he touched while at flight heat, it required some thought how to rescue Raphael without setting all Granada ablaze. The horse was released to gather what nourishment he could find.

  But instead of offering suggestions, Gaspare stretched himself out with his back against a stone while he played the lute. Saara only paced.

  Both of them heard a terrific racket, as though boulders in the nearby landscape were being crumbled into powder. Gaspare started up. It was the dragon, giving himself a good scratch against the rocks.

  Gaspare’s rhythms were almost as hard to listen to. Saara could not rest. She could not even sit down.

  “He can alight on a tile roof,” stated the witch. “That way, even if he does set the timbers ablaze, he can knock the house in and contain the fire.”

  “Fine by me,” mumbled Gaspare. “Of course the inhabitants of the house might disagree…” He raised his eyes and seemed to see Saara for the first time.

  “What’s wrong with you, my lady? You act like you have ants. Can you feel Raphael’s presence from way out here?”

  “No,” Saara said shortly. “I don’t know WHAT it is I feel.” She shot Gaspare a glance under lowered brows.

  “I told you, didn’t I, that I was going to go home after this?” Gaspare lifted a surprised face.

  “What else should you do, lady: stay in Granada?”

  Saara grimaced. “I mean home. To the Fenlands. If I live. Home to my people, the Lapps.”

  Gaspare put both hands around the neck of his lute and corrugated his young brow massively. “By sweet San Gabriele, Saara, why do you want to do THAT?”

  She took offense. “Don’t speak of my home in that tone of voice, youngster! You’ve never been there to judge it.”