The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Shyly the youth pulled back. “It will burn me too,” he admitted, “if I leave them there.”

  “The Devil takes care of his own.”

  Damiano swiveled at Denezzi’s remark, but the black beard was cut by a toothy smile. “I am not serious, Delstrego. All the world knows you’re the first in line at the communion rail.”

  “Listen to me, Belloc, Denezzi, all of you. I know there are soldiers after you, for your money. The whole town is to be squeezed dry. You especially, Paolo…”

  Denezzi scowled. “Why me?”

  “Because Marco told Pardo you were very wealthy.”

  The big man’s cry was pitiful. “Aaii! No! Why did he say that! It’s a lie!”

  Belloc chuckled.

  “Because he doesn’t like you, Paolo. I can’t think why not.” The laughter that greeted Damiano’s sally raised the effective temperature inside the shelter.

  Damiano continued. “If you haven’t seen them by now, it means they either passed along the West Road unnoticed…”

  “We’ve kept a sentry at the road,” interjected Belloc.

  “That’s how I found you,” added Denezzi.

  “Worse and worse.” Damiano rubbed his face with palms hot from the flames. “Then Pardo’s men must have turned back and headed north, either by mistake or intent, and come upon the carriages of the women.”

  The shelter erupted in noise and movement. Half the men cursed, while the other half rose to their feet, knocking snow-damped wood into the fires.

  “Impossible,” roared Denezzi, then added in calmer tones, “When would they have passed the fork in the road?”

  “On horseback? Two days, perhaps. I know they stopped at Sous Pont Saint Martin.”

  Cries, sobs, and gasps followed one another down the huddled line, as Damiano’s news was relayed.

  “God… help us. They may have caught them,” whispered Belloc, and Denezzi stared dumbly into the fire. “Perhaps they will only take the money.”

  “Will they resist?”

  The blacksmith did not understand.

  “Signor Belloc, this very morning I buried those who dwelt at Sous Pont Saint Martin. A peasant threw a pitchfork at a soldier, you see…”

  Muscles tautened in the blacksmith’s massive jaws. “Jesu! Boy, do you come to kill our hope?”

  “I’ve come to help, if I can,” said Damiano.

  Denezzi stood, and all eyes looked to him. Damiano felt a hot pang of envy toward this man, whose strength and brute temper had won him more respect among his fellows than had Damiano’s selfless dedication. “We’ll have to take the chance he’s right I will lead a party of horsemen back to the North Road.

  “But tomorrow. There’s little light left today.” He glanced down at Damiano. “For men’s eyes, anyway.

  “In the meantime, if you want to help us, then find us food. Else we will have to draw lots to see whose horse is butchered.”

  Damiano glanced sharply at him. “What do you expect of me: loaves and fishes? I have a jug of tonic in my bag; it’s the reason I missed the evacuation, you know. I was minding the pot.”

  Despite the worry in his face, Belloc grinned. “Ah, yes, that pot.”

  “What did you expect to eat,” continued Damiano. “Coming out here with little more than the clothes on your backs.”

  Denezzi growled, throwing tinder into the flames. “We expected to go home!—when Pardo had passed through: perhaps a week’s time. And I expected the shepherds to drive the flocks home as soon as they heard of the advancing army.

  “But they never showed, though I held up the march a day and a half to wait. Probably they are long since in Turin, and have sold the sheep as their own.”

  “Give them the benefit of the doubt,” grunted Belloc. “They may have been overrun, and all our mutton sitting in the bellies of the southerners.” Denezzi was not comforted.

  “You gave the order to march?” mused Damiano, idly fingering the slack strings of his lute. “Yourself, not the mayor, or the council?”

  Denezzi gestured as though to brush away flies. “I’m on the city council. My opinions are heard. Besides, most of the councilmen are not of military age; the mayor himself went to Aosta with the women.”

  Damiano peered through the lacework of the ivory rose that ornamented the lute’s soundhole. Was there dampness within? “I have neither meat nor bread, Paolo. Nor can witchcraft create them. You’ll have to kill a horse, I’m afraid.”

  “That will be a sore burden on some poor fellow,” replied Denezzi. “And unnecessary. I think you can help us, Damiano.”

  “How?”

  “You can call us meat from out of the hills.”

  The young witch’s head snapped up in startlement, but Denezzi continued “I have seen you do it, when we were both boys, calling rabbits from the fields and dogs from their master’s kennels. And my horse: I remember how he threw me and ran to you, pushing his black nose into your hand. Oh, yes, I won’t forget that.”

  “I didn’t ask him to throw you, Paolo. That was his own idea.” Damiano had his own memories of the episode, foremost of which was the bloody lip Denezzi had given him in consequence of the fall. This had occurred when Damiano had been nine and Denezzi thirteen.

  The young witch furrowed his brow, trying to explain a thing that was not easily put in words. “You see, Paolo, I can… tempt the beasts to come to me, for bread or a pat on the nose. But I can’t force them. And if I call them saying, ‘Come to me and be slaughtered,’ well I think I’ll be calling a long time.”

  “Just say come,” suggested Denezzi. “I know how little you like the sight of blood, Owl-Eyes, so you just pat the goat or whatever on the head, and we’ll do the rest.”

  Damiano dropped his head again. “That’s betrayal.” He heard a man snicker on the other side of the fire.

  The witch ground his teeth together. “It’s very hard to he, Paolo, without using words.”

  Denezzi rustled beneath his black pelts. “It’s very hard to go hungry. It’s either a wild beast or a horse, Owl-Eyes. You can at least try.”

  He could have pleaded weariness as an excuse; in truth he was swimming with fatigue. But he felt eyes on him, and he had offered to help. What was more, Damiano knew most every horse in Partestrada by its simple, unspoken name. He rose from the fire.

  He passed through a gap in the brush pile, and a chill hit him. “I’ll need my mantle back,” he mumbled sullenly. There was no response until he turned his black eyes into the crowd. Then the fur-lined wrap was handed out.

  “If I bring in a goat,” he said to Denezzi, “you must give me time to get out of it.” The big man turned his face away.

  Damiano trudged through crackling slush to the middle of the pasture. Shadows were growing, striping the field with blue. Tucking his mantle under him, he sat down on a hummocky stone. The shoe of his staff was braced between his boots; he leaned his face against the staff’s lowest silver band.

  For half a minute his mind floated free. Then he spoke a silent “Come,” and unbidden to his mind sprang the image of a sword. He heard it snick free of the scabbard. By willpower he burst the image, only to see it reform in the shape of a pitchfork, tines protruding through the snow.

  He was very tired. He tried again, and his call carried the odor of an abattoir, of a hut filled with dying. Mother of God! He didn’t want to do this. He wanted to sleep, here in the sun, if no better place offered.

  In the emptiness of his mind he saw how lovely it would be to rest. He remembered the honey-colored rock where he had eaten and talked with Raphael—only yesterday. He felt the heat of the hearth, where a chair was burning. How wasteful, but how warm.

  His mind was flooded with the memory of this very pasture in the green of summer, when his father would treat the sheep with tar poultices and incantation. Grass up to his half-grown knees, except where the flocks had cropped it. It had been cool then, in the mountains, but pleasant. Sheep’s milk. Napping at midday, surroun
ded by curious, odorous, half-grown lambs.

  All the while Damiano dreamed, his call continued, rising into the air, growing, following the wind like smoke.

  He remembered waking up with nothing to do all day, a condition he had experienced as recently as a week ago. He remembered the warm flood of sound Raphael pulled out of the lute. He remembered Carla, sewing as he read to her from the gilt-edged volume of Aquinas. (Her little brass needle caught the sun. She made only the gentlest fun of Damiano’s squint as he read the fine script.) He remembered how quickly and quietly the days had passed before this war.

  A shadow fell across the sunlight, and his drowsy eyes opened. A face stared down at him: Sfengia, the cheesemaker. The man’s eyes were wet with longing. He was not alone, for Damiano sat at the center of a circle of silent figures that was even now increasing. They came for the sunshine, for the summer, for the memories of August and the dusty roads that caked a boy’s bare feet and legs. They came at Damiano’s call.

  He felt their minds around him, open to his. There was Sfengia, afraid for his three daughters, and Belloc, heavy and mild. Behind them all, drawn but unwilling, Damiano sensed the brittle presence of Denezzi.

  The witch smiled wistfully. He had never compelled such rapt attention. It was very pleasant to sway men’s minds. Let Paolo equal this.

  Suddenly Damiano knew how to fulfill his task. It was all very easy. He imagined himself an animal, a hoofed beast: a sheep or a cow or maybe a goat. He allowed his dreams to shift in consonance with his animal being, though the call continued.

  Green grass. That was good. Tall dry grass, with grain spilling out of the head. Free water running. Sun.

  No halter. No wire twitch against the tender Up. Damiano touched the mind he had been seeking, the warm, wordless brute mind. It was tame to him and unafraid. It answered from very near. Unsuspicious, it opened to him and let him in. His meadow visions it made its own, improving them in the process. Salt. A warm back to rest one’s head upon. Sage in the wind.

  The old stable, out of the wind, and the smell of mash in the pail.

  Once more the sun stroked Damiano’s face; this pastoral rhapsody was losing him his human audience. But he scarcely noticed, for he was sharing the eyes of the cow that passed down into the dell along the lee of a cliff face, seeking summer just ahead. It was no wild beast, but lonely, lost. Its udder was shrunken, and its dappled sides gaunt. It stopped and looked around. Damiano saw the meadow and himself in the middle of it, motionless on the rock like a dark tree stump.

  Summer was calling. His mind shouted it. Grass, crackling hay. The cow trotted forward.

  She smelled man and stopped—curious, innocently wary.

  When the first watcher beheld the spotted cow ambling down the hill toward them, he hissed a warning. All the townsmen froze. Those who had swords put their hands to the hilt. Belloc hefted his blunt hammer.

  The cow stopped, her conviction failing as Damiano’s did. Her ears revolved, and she peered over her shoulder at strange movement. One dainty foot was raised.

  “Take her,” shouted someone, and a half-dozen swords caught the light. Belloc raised his hammer.

  Damiano saw the blow descending. “No!” he cried, or tried to. “No! Let me…”

  The cow fell to its knees, and Paolo Denezzi opened its brown and white spotted throat. It died in the snow without a sound and was butchered where it lay, steaming in the air like a kettle of soup.

  Carlo Belloc plunged his bloody hands into the snow and turned away from the carcass. He was most surprised to see young Damiano face down in the snow; a splash of gold and scarlet. Denezzi was looking down at him.

  The blacksmith hurried over. “What did you do to him?” he snapped at Denezzi.

  “Do to him?” Denezzi shook his head. “I did nothing. I’d pick him up, but that bitch of his…”

  Macchiata’s bent legs straddled her limp master. Her mouth was a rictus of hate, dripping slaver. Belloc regarded her earnestly, from under beetling brows.

  “You can talk, can’t you dog? Tell us what’s wrong with your master?”

  She licked her lips, and her fury was extinguished. “I don’t know. He fell down when you hit the cow.” Her nose burrowed through the hair at the back of Damiano’s neck, to assure herself he was still alive. “He’s very sensitive,” she added.

  Denezzi bit off his laugh at Belloc’s warning glower.

  “Allow us to pick him up and carry him to the fire, puppy,” said Belloc. “If he has taken hurt, we will help him. We’re his friends.”

  The blacksmith lifted Damiano easily and set him over one huge shoulder. The staff lay where it had fallen until Macchiata, seeing her master laid gently before the fire, returned. Taking the brass foot in her mouth, she dragged the stick to Damiano’s side.

  The men she passed got out of her way.

  Time was a trickle of chilling blood. Red went brown. Brown went black. Memory fell apart. Sense fell apart. He saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, and knew nothing except that he saw nothing, heard nothing, and felt nothing.

  Hope fell apart.

  Damiano’s eyes were open, staring blindly at the fire. When Belloc spoke to him, he made no answer. He neither stirred nor spake the night through, nor did the smell of roasting beef rouse him. Macchiata lay by him, equally quiet. She, however, ate her fill.

  At dawn the light of the rising sun stole his gaze from the fire. He propped himself on his elbows, and Macchiata uttered a whinny of glad relief. She smothered with kisses his dull and unprotesting face.

  “Eh, boy? Are you with us again?” murmured Belloc, who had watched half through the night and finally pitched his blankets next to the tranced form.

  Damiano slowly turned his face to Belloc. “How long?” he whispered.

  “Have you lain there mazed? All yesterday evening and night. It’s dawn already, Dami Delstrego. Where have you been?”

  The answer was halting. “I have lain trapped in the body of a dead beast. Dead. Knowing myself dead.

  “Was it only one night? I thought it was decades. I thought my time had passed. I thought there would be no escape until the last day, and judgment.” His eyes were still very wide, brown and soft like a cow’s, and his face expressed nothing.

  The blacksmith sighed. “If you were trapped within the cow yesterday, then you spent the night in a hundred stomachs. I think you’re still not well, Damiano,” said Belloc. “Stay here for today, while a party rides to Aosta. There’s plenty of firewood left, and I saved you some meat.”

  Damiano had started to rise, but at Belloc’s last words his stomach rebelled. He gagged but was empty as a dry bucket. “No,” he panted. “I’m riding with you. You will need me, should you find what you are looking for. And I—I am beginning to see what must be done. I’m riding with you.”

  Chapter 6

  The procession wound down and east, past the abandoned village, where the ruins of one hut were already softened with a cloak of blown snow, back over the river Lys, and toward the crossing of the roads. They were a somber line of men, and they pushed their horses, but they were not soldiers.

  Damiano rode one of Paolo Denezzi’s geldings, with a leather strap for a bridle and no saddle at all. It was a black horse; all of Denezzi’s four horses were black. The witch reflected on what Denezzi had said the previous afternoon—how hard it would be on some poor man to lose his mount to the knife. And here was the rich man with one to ride, two for pack, and an extra. Damiano smiled grimly.

  The horse was nervous bearing him. Well it might be, for Damiano’s mind was filled with cold and weeping blood. The call that he had begun the day before could not be utterly silenced.

  Bored with the slow pace, he turned his horse’s head once more to the straggling tail of the company, where men rode on cart horses and hinnies. There was even one fellow, Aloisio by name, who sat astraddle an ass, his bootless feet dragging in the dust. He was a tanner by trade and carried neither sword nor spear. But h
e had a long hide-splitter, razor sharp, and a young wife in the train to Aosta.

  “Aloisio, can’t it move any faster?” asked Damiano, looming over the man from his seat on Denezzi’s lean horse. He had intended his words to sound warmer.

  The tanner raised his head, wary but unafraid. “No, Signor Delstrego, it cannot. Not unless I get behind and push.”

  Damiano nodded in resignation and tried to smile. Dryly his lips slid back from his teeth. He fell in place beside Aloisio, at the tail of the line, where he could make sure no one became lost.

  The tall peaks, crystalline now in the easterly sun, stood in the distance at the right of the road. Damiano squinted and wondered what he had seen in them, only the day before. They were unscalable stone, as they had always been, and they harbored neither food nor beauty.

  Thinking about the peaks and his previous intoxication led him to think about Macchiata. He felt again her wet, impertinent nose against the palm of his hand and heard again her fluttering worry, like that of a hen as she prodded him from his knees in the slush. In the universe of ash in which he found himself, the little dog could spark a tiny flame of gladness.

  She scrambled at the proud horse’s feet, pottering into every mark and blister of the snow at the side of the road, panting very hard. A few days like this and she would not be so ridiculously fat.

  Damiano placed his hand on the horse’s knotty head and without words suggested that it trot back to the head of the line, to Denezzi’s side. The animal started and plunged at the contact, almost costing Damiano his seat.

  Very soon the crossroads came into view. Damiano led his mount to the snowbank where his own trail from the guardhouse broke onto the road. He gave the reins into the hands of his nearest neighbor and leaped down. His lean legs disappeared into the trail, stepping high and storklike. The procession slowed to a disorderly stop.

  He emerged from the shelter bearing three soft bags. “Clothing,”

  he said. “Not very good. Not clean. But for any man who needs it. And for any man who needs a hair pin.” He held up the jeweled ornament. Two dozen eyes stared uncomprehending, before he slipped the pin back into his belt pouch. As he climbed onto the horse’s back Damiano rustled like dry leaves or paper, and a flat weight hung forward inside his woolen tunic.