The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  What did it matter? Damiano bent down and shook Marco by his greasy ears. “Wake up Marco,” he whispered. “Talk or I will turn you into a pig and you will talk no more! Wake up now.”

  Marco came awake grasping at the air. He gasped, “What? Who is it?”

  “It is Delstrego, old man.” Let Marco figure out which one himself. “Where have the citizens gone? Speak or be sausage.”

  Marco clutched at the wrists of invisible hands that in turn were clutching his lapels, slamming his head against the stones of the well. Feeling their solidity did not reassure him.

  “Guillermo? Do me no hurt, old friend. They are in the vetch field, where the sheep are summered. Pardo said he will offer them no violence, except, of course, for Denezzi, and I knew he was your enemy, so I told the general he had gold—more gold than he has, you know…”

  Marco giggled ingratiatingly. In horror, Damiano stood, letting him drop back against the well. He turned on his heel and darted off. Behind him came a snap and a yowl of pain, then he heard Macchiata panting at his side. “I always wanted to do that,” she growled contentedly. Damiano only hushed her.

  The tall, scarred soldier still stood beneath the arch of the Delstrego staircase. Peering upward, Damiano could see the door was open. He stopped and pulled off his boots. His breath was beginning to steam; he hoped it was not obvious. Barefoot he climbed the stairs, with Macchiata behind him. Her nails clicked against the stones, and he glared back at her.

  In five minutes he was out again, still invisible, with an invisible sheepskin sack slung over one shoulder and the liuto over the other.

  In the sack he carried wine, cheese, money, and phlegm-cutting tonic. In his heart he carried purpose. He lifted his eyes to the northern hills, where the sheep pastures flanked the Alps.

  Damiano padded noiselessly past the guard and down the open stairs. Once at the bottom he turned and looked about him, missing Macchiata.

  Where was the bitch? Surely she knew better than to wander off ratting now, in the middle of their escape. And it was costing him energy to keep her invisible.

  He hesitated to call out for her, because invisible was not the same as inaudible. Painfully, Damiano squinted up the stairs into the darkness of the house.

  There came a scream, followed shortly by a curse, and then the guard at the door fell flat on the stucco landing, bellowing. Macchiata’s squat form scuttled down the stairs and past Damiano. He had to run to keep up.

  “I bit them both, Master!” she panted, exultant. “I bit both soldiers and old Marco, too! Three in one day.” Suddenly she came to a stop, turned, and threw herself, slobbering, upon her winded master.

  “Oh, Master, I have never been so happy! This war is wonderful.”

  Damiano could not spare breath to disagree.

  Chapter 3

  The moon rose just before sunset. It hung as invisible behind the slate clouds as Damiano had been to old Marco at the well. But Damiano knew where it was, out of a knowledge so accustomed he didn’t know whether it was his father’s blood in him or his father’s training. He always knew where the moon was; he could have pointed to it. The five planets came harder, but he had a feeling for them, also. Even with peripatetic Mercury he was usually right,

  Though Damiano’s eyes were faulty in daylight, he had a compensating ability to make use of moonlight, even moonlight behind clouds. For most of the month he could read without candlelight and could perceive things in the dark that most people could never see at all (nor did they want to). The full of the moon also tended to sharpen his other senses and put his feelings into a roil.

  Guillermo Delstrego had liked to say that male witches were like women, with their monthly cycles. It was a joke Damiano had found in the worst taste.

  Tonight the moon was at her third quarter, waning. Damiano felt as dull and heavy as a water-soaked log. For the past three nights he had tended the batch of tonic, sitting on a hard-backed chair so that he could not doze off for more than an hour at a time. The mixture had been ready this morning, and Damiano had bathed and gone immediately back to the workroom for his lesson with Raphael. He would not be able to walk the night through.

  Besides, to the vetch field it was two and a half days’ march. How did the citizens do it, with old women and babies, and Alfonso Berceuse with his one leg?

  The road into the hills was also the road to Aosta—good and wide, open almost all the year. Why hadn’t he heard? Why hadn’t someone told him? It was sad that they would all go off and not think of Damiano, alone without family or servants, sitting up and brewing medicine for their sakes.

  Damiano was swept with self-pity. He hated to be forgotten. And he couldn’t bear the thought they had left him behind on purpose. And now three toes on his right foot had no feeling at all.

  But Father Antonio would not have left him behind on purpose. Since Delstrego’s death Father Antonio had been very kind to Damiano and had spent long evening hours with him in the parlor of the rectory—the good father felt constrained to avoid the Delstrego tower, though he knew Damiano worked no impieties there—drinking spiced wine and talking about sanctity and Holy Mother Church. It was a subject about which Father Antonio seemed to know much more than anyone else Damiano had met. More than did Raphael, for instance. Father Antonio was the sort who never forgot anyone— not the least of his parishioners, in their good fortune or bad. If he had left without Damiano, it was because he had believed Damiano to be gone already.

  And why not? Damiano hadn’t set foot outside for three days, nor let a candle shine, nor lit any fire save that under the caldron. There was no need for him to feel neglected.

  Still, forgotten or no, he had to sleep. Damiano lifted his eyes to the rounded hills on either side of the road. Immaculate, white, they seemed to give off their own faint light. Damiano knew this landscape with a child’s minute memory. He remembered that the hill with a lump on the side of it, three back from the road, concealed a long, skinny cave, dry for most its length. He remembered also that from the top of that hill one could see Partestrada down in the cup of the valley, where the Evançon ran under this road. He had stood there in summer twilight and watched the lamps twinkle through the soft air.

  Plunging into the snow-sprinkled gorse at the side of the road, he looked at his footsteps behind him. There was no need to concern himself with covering them over. The wind was doing that. The tiny toe-dimples of Macchiata’s progress were half obscured already.

  A good thing, too. Damiano wasn’t sure he had the strength left to work a wind spell. “How are your feet, Macchiata?” he asked the dog, his words coming slurred through frozen lips. She replied that she couldn’t remember, which was probably meant as a joke, although with Macchiata one never knew for sure. He heard her behind him, bulling her way through the low shrubbery.

  At the top of the hill he stood and looked down, gripping his staff as tightly as his clumsy hands allowed. There was a light in the valley: one smoky firelight where there should have been dozens. The wind billowed his mantle out before him, and the ermine lining glimmered brighter than snow. There was no sound but the wind and the crackle of his breath, along with the heavier, warmer sound of the dog’s breathing.

  Already he felt removed from Partestrada, both in distance and in time. His removal had been surgically quick, but as he considered now, quite thorough. All the strings that bound him to his home had been cut: Carla was gone ahead, and both Macchiata and the lute were portable. Damiano felt an unwarranted lump in his throat— unwarranted because, after all, he was not leaving Partestrada forever, but just for so long as it took him to find his people, and to do something about this General Pardo. Perhaps two weeks, he estimated.

  He clambered down from the crest of the hill, poking amid the dry growth with the heel of his staff”, looking for the mouth of the cave he remembered.

  It was still there. Crouching down he crawled into it, his hands smarting against frozen earth.

  Inside there was no w
ind, and the rivulet that had created the cave was frozen on the floor of it like a broken silver chain. He inched over it. Macchiata slid behind.

  There, as he remembered it, was the hole in the wall: an egg-shaped chamber that had been the perfect size for a boy alone to play in. It was tighter for the grown Damiano and his lute, and tighter still when Macchiata squirmed in, curling between his nose and knees. The staff would not fit in at all, but he laid it along the lip of the chamber with its silver head hanging in. He touched this, mumbling three words in Hebrew, and it gave off enough light for him to arrange the furry mantle between his body and the stone.

  “This is not too bad,” he whispered to the red spot on Macchiata’s withers. She grunted in reply.

  He let the light go out. “Tell me, little lady, did you see anyone come near the house while I was tending the kettle? Did anybody perhaps stop and look for a light in the windows, and then pass by?”

  Macchiata squirmed sleepily. “I saw many people go by, and horses and carriages, too. All the dogs of the city, I think. They wanted me to come with them; they said it would be fun. —But of course I didn’t.

  “Also somebody knocked on the door one day. Not today. I don’t remember when.”

  “Ahh!” Damiano lifted his head. “Father Antonio?”

  Macchiata yawned. “No. That Carla with the blond hair.”

  Damiano’s skull struck the stone roof of the chamber, but that didn’t distract him from his joy. “Carla Denezzi, at my door? Why didn’t she come in?”

  “Because I didn’t let her in,” explained the dog. “You said you were not to be disturbed. I offered to take a message, like always, but she just stared and ran off. She’s timid as a cat, that one.”

  Damiano’s happiness was such that he had to hug someone. Macchiata gave a piglike grunt. “Timid? Ah, no, little lady, she had courage, or she would not have come at all. If that lout Denezzi knew she had come alone to the house of Delstrego, he would… well, I don’t exactly know what he would do, but he would be very angry. And she must have had endless matters to attend to: sorting and packing and settling with all the tradesmen. Oh, don’t say she is timid, Macchiata.”

  The dog stuffed her nose down among her folded paws in meaningful fashion and said nothing at all.

  When Damiano awoke, the cave walls were chalky with diffuse sunlight. He was warm, but very hungry. Macchiata was gone, but he heard her at the entrance to the cave, snuffling among the shrubbery. Rolling onto his back, he dug into his sheepskin bag and found the waxed wrappings of a cheese, which emitted a tiny crackling.

  Along the path of the rivulet he heard a frantic scrabble, and Macchiata slammed her broad head smartly against the end wall.

  “Mother of God, what is it?” demanded Damiano, blinking down the length of the tunnel.

  “Breakfast. Maybe?” she answered, wagging everything up to her shoulders.

  Damiano laughed. “Maybe,” he admitted.

  He divided the cheese expertly in half, as was his custom, knowing that although she was much smaller than he was, he had never had an enthusiasm for eating that could equal Macchiata’s. (It was for this reason that Damiano was thin while his dog was fat.)

  He washed down his bread and mozzarella with wine. Macchiata lapped snow. Gathering his gear and cradling the lute against his stomach, Damiano crawled out of the cave.

  It was a beautiful morning. The sun beat gloriously over snow a foot deep, and the occasional pine trees wore blankets and hats. Not a print marked the road, which ran smooth as a plaster wall upward toward the north. In the distance, beyond the foothills and even beyond the black band of forest, a jagged rim broke the horizon.

  The Alps, clean and sharp as puppy teeth. Even Damiano’s eyes could distinguish them.

  “By John the Baptist and by John the Evangelist and by John the Best Beloved!—if they are indeed three different Johns—this is magnificent!” He clambered down the slope, showering snow. “A good night’s sleep, a full stomach, and the road spreading before us like a Turkey carpet! Were it not for the plight of the citizens of Partestrada, I would have nothing else to desire.”

  Macchiata peered up at Damiano, her brown eyes puzzled, a lump of snow on her muzzle. “But you could have slept in the cave anytime, Master. You didn’t need to be thrown out of your house to do it.”

  Damiano grinned from ear to ear and sprang over the little valley where the stream ran down from the hill. “You’re right, little dear. And you know what? I think you are very wise.”

  Macchiata’s ears pricked up. It was not a compliment she had known before.

  “We live our lives bound by our little tasks and possessions and never know how free we could be unless God sees fit to pry us away from them. You know who knew true happiness? I’ll tell you—Giovanni di Bernardone, whom our Holy Father has sanctified under the name of Francis. He had nothing in the world, and the world had nothing in him, and he used to walk barefoot in the snow, singing.”

  Damiano himself began to sing, though he was not barefoot but instead wore soft leather boots with woolen linings. He found it difficult to sing and climb at the same time.

  “You have a lovely voice, Master,” said Macchiata, feeling that one good compliment deserved another.

  “Eh? Thank you, Macchiata, but it is nothing special.

  “Say, you know what I think I’ll do?—after finding Carla, of course. If the soldiers have robbed her, I’ll give her my money, and for those who catch the flux…

  “Anyway, I think I’ll cross over the Rhone to France, and maybe after that to Germany, for there is the heart and soul of alchemy, you know. Why not? I am young and strong.”

  And he did feel strong—strong enough to bend down a young bull by the horns, as the burly peasants did to show off during the harvest fair.

  “I have an intellect, too, and have studied hard.” Suddenly Damiano remembered that Carla Denezzi would not be in Germany but at home in Partestrada. “And then,” he concluded more soberly, “when I have a name and my words mean something to men of birth and education, I will use my power for Partestrada. I will return.”

  Macchiata had been listening with some concern. “What about me, Master?” she whimpered.

  Damiano glanced down in surprise. “Why you will be beside me, little dear. While we both live on this earth, we will not be parted!”

  After this promise they walked some while in silence. Macchiata’s robust little heart was filled with happiness and touched by the importance of her commitment to Damiano. He, at the same time, was busy with thoughts and plans. He would lead the people of Partestrada into the Valle d’Aosta, for Aosta was many times larger than Partestrada and also much closer to Chambéry and so to the Green Count of Savoy. There Pardo would not dare follow.

  Then Damiano would go on to France, where he would write a poem about the Piedmont and Partestrada. It would be called “The Sorrows of Exile,” and it would burn men’s souls. He could feel it within him now, stirring like a chick in the egg. It shouldn’t be a poem only, but a work of music, like the ballades sung by the old trouvères, and Damiano would play his lute as Raphael had taught him—France was far more musically liberal than Italy—till hearts bled for Partestrada as Dante had made them do for Florence, with its confusing lot of Guelphs and Ghibellines. Was not art, after all, the greatest weapon of man?

  Damiano considered, as his boot soles crunched down on snow. It was great, yes, but tardy, and Dante had never returned to Florence. Damiano sighed and shook his head, for the first energy of the morning was gone and so was the warmth of the wine. The snow was deepening as the road climbed; Macchiata cut into it with her breastbone as she trotted beside him, holding her head up like a nervous horse. The risen sun glinted in the corner of Damiano’s right eye.

  Perhaps Germany was a better goal. In Germany there was at least one emperor, and emperors can afford to be generous. But Damiano was not a fool; he knew what it meant to allow the ass’s nose within the tent or to ask
help of a foreigner in settling a local grievance. It would be no great sort of fame to be known as the man who invited the northern wolf over the Alps.

  In Nuremberg there were said to be many scrolls written by Mary the Jewess, and students of the great Hermes Trismegistus himself, and in Nuremberg now dwelt the sage Nicolas, who was called the prophet. Though Damiano did not know what help the art of alchemy had to offer defeated Partestrada, he would like very much to visit Nuremberg.

  “Master,” began Macchiata, as she leaned her shoulder against his calf.

  “Uh. What? Macchiata, little dear, am I going too fast for you?”

  “No,” she replied, with a dog’s inability to recognize weariness until it has throttled her. “But I was thinking… If I am your little dear, and we’ll never be parted until somebody dies, then why do you send me away all the time?”

  “I don’t!” cried Damiano, stung.

  “Yes you do. Every spring and every fall, for two weeks.”

  “Oh.” Damiano’s eyebrows lifted and his tangled black hair fell over his eyes. “That is necessary. It is not something I want to do, but you are a… female dog, and such have their times when they must be alone.”

  “But I don’t want to be alone. Ever,” she said simply. “Nothing is different then, except that I feel… friendly, and then I hate most to be in a pen.”

  Damiano stared stolidly up the road. The wind blew over his uncovered ears, which had gone very red. “It is the things you say,” he admitted. “During those times you are not yourself.”

  Beside him Macchiata gave a whuffle and a bound to keep up. “What do I say? I don’t remember a thing about it.”

  “I know. God be praised for that!” He marched on in a businesslike manner and would discuss the subject no further.

  Forest grew up around them. By midday they were in a dark hush of pines. Here the air was still and smelled somehow ecclesiastical. They had seen no one and passed no one.