The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  And as once before he had risked a rival’s blade for a chaste and unpracticed kiss in the witch’s garden, so now he stood calf-deep in the spring thaw of the mountains, and he reached out one doomed, immaterial hand.

  “Saara,” he whispered. “Pikku Saara. You should not be so beautiful!”

  Saara laughed, hearing the Fennish word in the Italian mouth. She looked into Damiano’s black eyes. Then her little nostrils twitched, and the laughter was cut off. She examined his amber visage with a cold, scientific thoroughness. She raised a hand, but did not touch.

  “You were right!” she stated. “You should not be here. It is very bad for you.”

  Then Saara clapped her hands, or she made as though to clap her hands. But Damiano heard no sound, for his whole world went out like a candle.

  Where the hell the beast was going Gaspare had no idea. The boy forced his eyes open, lest the spiteful horse scrape him off on a wall. If it tried that, Gaspare promised himself, then he would make his hands let go. Right now he could not quite manage the feat, for his fingers were welded into the black mane and the halter rope, which he should never, never have wound around his arm.

  Festilligambe swung around a corner and Gaspare’s heel plowed dust. Fear itself drove him to mount to the horse’s back.

  “I swear, you pig-head, you pig-heart, pig-collops, pig… pig of a pig! I swear I’ll wear your hide someday soon, and if you dump me it will be today, I swear by Saint Gabriele and by Maria, the Mother of Christ, I’ll eat your eyes and tongue roasted on a skewer and sell your bladder for a fool’s toy. I swear…”

  With a constant stream of such encouragements in his flattened ear, Festilligambe bolted past the basilica, where the odor of death was only a bit less terrifying than that of the burning houses on the street beyond. Each of his yellowing teeth was exposed to the wind. His nostrils were round as drainpipes, and gorged purple. His eyes were ringed, not with white, but red. He ran with his belly to the ground, carving the dry, packed road with his hooves. He went rough. He cornered viciously. He went from sun into darkness, leaping a flight of alley stairs and landing in sun again on the next street.

  He made straight for the square of Petit Comtois where the wooden gates stood solidly shut. Gaspare’s scream was soundless but heartfelt.

  There in the road lay a woman’s shirt of linen, and beyond it another of lace, stained olive green. Gaspare flashed by them too quickly for curiosity. Still farther toward the gate he passed a plump and fair-haired woman dragging along a monk by his long, untonsured hair. Both were bellowing; it all seemed perfectly natural to the panicked Gaspare.

  The wooden gate loomed, solid, oak-barred and five feet tall. The horse had no sense—he would brain himself against the palings, and Gaspare as well. It was time to let go.

  Gaspare told his fingers it was time to let go. He tried again. He shrieked at them, but from fingers they had become gnarled tree roots wound in the black earth of the gelding’s mane.

  A circle of brown-robed friars stood before the gate. Evidently Festilligambe intended to smash into them on his way to oblivion. Gaspare held to the selfish and forlorn hope they would cushion the impact.

  But neither the collision with the religious nor that with the maple palings happened, first because the brown robes scattered like so many dun doves of the wood, and second because Festilligambe ceased his mad pounding between one step and the next, and Gaspare’s convulsive grip dissolved. He went over the horse’s head and landed rolling. Twice he rolled free, escaping harm with the elasticity of youth and training, but on the third roll he came up against flesh. His warding hand slipped against skin slick with blood, on the lean, whip-scored back of a man whose head and arms were tied up in a shirt.

  All the bumps and knobs of that back were vaguely familiar, and in the leather belt that circled it was stuck a tiny, intricately-worked knife which was very familiar.

  “Pig’s head of an ass!” ejaculated Gaspare, as he plucked free the knife and cut the shirt apart.

  Damiano’s eyes were wide and staring. “Gaspare?” he asked, his usually rather deep voice cracking. “Gaspare—is this still Franche-Comté? Or… Lombardy, or…?”

  Fury warred with a strange ache in Gaspare’s heart. He took the shaggy black head (no, not shaggy any longer, but trimmed somehow) in the hands that had so lately been locked in the gelding’s mane, and he shook Damiano’s head roughly back and forth. “You damned, swiving sheep-faced lunatic,” he shrilled, and then he bent the unresisting head down and, still more roughly, kissed the top of it.

  Damiano, meanwhile, was staring nearsightedly through the four black pillars that arched above him, at a huddle of wary, pointing townsmen, both of the robed and the bejeweled variety. He squinted, but they were too far for him to make out the expressions on their faces. He brought his own, soiled left hand up to his face and flexed it, looking puzzled.

  Gaspare also looked at the whip-wielders, and his excellent vision gave him cause for alarm. “Get up, Damiano, before they regroup and come back to you. And once we’re five miles from this foul-stinking bed of misery you can explain to me just what…” and as he tried to rise Gaspare’s head hit something. He ducked once more, swiveled his head, and discovered why the townspeople were pointing.

  Gaspare collapsed once more on top of Damiano, the air whistling out of his throat. For above them stood a half-ton of rigid outrage, iron-legged, hissing, with a tail stiff as a terrier’s. The gelding’s head coiled left and right as though the beast were a dragon, and it dripped white froth onto Gaspare’s upturned face.

  “Call him off!” shrieked the sufferer. “Dear Jesu, call him off and I will sin no more!”

  Damiano, too, looked up, but either trust or poor vision saved him from Gaspare’s terror. “Festilligambe!” Awkwardly, like an old man, he climbed to his feet. Dirt grayed his hair and caked to the ooze on his naked back. He leaned one arm over the sweaty, trembling withers. “Hey. I went looking for you. But you found me instead!”

  The gelding nickered, but its defiance did not weaken. It stamped one hind foot. Gaspare moaned.

  The lute player peered down at Gaspare (squirming full length on the ground between the black hooves) as though he could not remember how the boy had gotten there. He reached down one hand and yanked him up. “Stand up. You shouldn’t play games with an animal this size,” he chided.

  Then he added, “We’ve got to get out of this town, Gaspare. They’re all mad here. You can never tell what they’re going to do next”

  “Mad?” Gaspare rolled his gooseberry eyes. “Oh, certainly, yes. I’ve noticed it myself. Well then, we should certainly get out of here, shouldn’t we, Damiano? In fact,” and the boy pointed surreptitiously to the wall by the gate, “why don’t we just run over there and slip over that wall? I’ll help you up and you pull me up behind, heh?”

  Damiano frowned hugely and touched his still-bleeding shoulder blades. “Don’t be silly, Gaspare. We can’t take a horse over the wall. Nor a lute.

  “I’ll go get my lute now,” he finished, and Damiano calmly stepped across the square toward the yawning black doorway of a shop. Gaspare watched him go, and he watched the tall shape, black as vengeance, stalk behind him, black tail slashing like a blade that would love to cut. The gelding’s muzzle hung just above Damiano’s shoulder, unnoticed. Damiano seemed to be quietly talking to himself.

  It was very lonely, standing in the middle of the square, without even a vicious horse for protection. Gaspare shifted from one foot to the other and raised his chin high into the air. No one came near, for all eyes followed the wounded musician and his strange protector as he vanished into the dark shop and reappeared, bearing his sheepskin-wrapped instrument.

  Damiano was frowning. “There was a baby in there before,” he said to Gaspare, “but it’s gone, now. I certainly hope it was its mother that came back for it. So much despair around, you know.” Then he raised his left eyebrow very high, and regarded Gaspare with more ratio
nality than he had yet shown, saying, “It is the plague that has hit here. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  Gaspare sighed hugely. “Yes, musician. I was aware of that, and that is another very good reason for… for hastening our departure, maybe?”

  Damiano swung onto the horse’s back. His mouth gaped with the pain of his flayed back. He leaned down and reached a hand toward Gaspare. “Get up in front,” he commanded the boy.

  Gaspare backed. “No, thank you. I have already ridden that horse once today.”

  “Get up,” said Damiano with some temper, and he snagged Gaspare’s unwilling hand. “I don’t want to lose you again, before I even have a chance to tell you about the strange thing that happened, or a chance to apologize, as I promised Raphael I would.”

  “Apologize?” Gaspare was so astounded he allowed himself to be pulled up in front of his friend on the steaming black back. “You, apologize, after I bit you?”

  Damiano was not listening. “I think if we just ride confidently up to the gate, that huge fellow in the robe—he’s not a real monk, you know—may just open up for us. Or at least not interfere with our opening it.

  “What is important,” he added, sententiously, “is always to appear to know what you are about, and most especially when others are uncertain. That is a fourth part of magic and the half of all medicine. It is most important of all in military matters, such as…” And Damiano gave a gentle kick (a nudge, really) to the gelding’s sides.

  The beast reared, turned on its haunches, and spurted along the street directly away from the gate. Then it spun again, nearly toppling both its riders, scrabbled its hindquarters under it, and flew directly for the wooden fence.

  A woman screamed. So did Gaspare. Damiano looked merely irritated as he clutched the mane, the lute, and a hysterical passenger. “He’s going to kill me after all!” wailed Gaspare. Once more the townspeople fled.

  But Festilligambe did not hit the gate. Instead, eight feet from the oak-bound, maple palings, he gathered himself under and leaped.

  The ground fell away. Weight fell away. Festilligambe nicked one black hoof against the top of the gate and he grunted an equine profanity. When his forefoot touched down, his rider was ready— ready enough to have Gaspare secured against falling, and to soften the thump of his own descent on the horse’s back with his knees. Together Damiano and Gaspare lurched against the gelding’s neck as it came up, pitching them back into position.

  The horse came down galloping, and galloping they disappeared along the Alpine highway.

  It was dark before they dared sneak back for the wagon.

  Chapter 3

  The countryside south and west of Petit Comtois was even gentler and more temperate than that which they had left behind them. What was more heartening, there were scattered almond orchards and fields of green lavender.

  But the almonds were in bloom, not fruit, and what use to a hungry man was lavender, sweet-smelling though it was?

  After Gaspare stole the clutch of some peasant’s goose, nearly having his finger broken and finding in the end the eggs were useless, being ready to hatch, well, it seemed the least said between them, soonest mended. Along the road they met no one, save the occasional meandering and always dry cow.

  It was unusually warm for the month of March, or at least it seemed so to Damiano. But then neither he nor Gaspare had ever experienced any but the Alpine spring. The present temperature was a saving grace to him, on this, the third day since his whipping in Petit Comtois, for he could bear no touch upon his scabbing back. He lay upon his stomach in the booming belly of the wagon, his woolen shirt folded under him and swaddled around his sides.

  He was husking oats, by hand, one by one. Boiled oats had been their diet ever since leaving the town. They had discovered that oats took a long time to boil. This little double handful was the last from Gaspare’s purse.

  Damiano’s face bore a look of pained concentration. Each ovoid seedlet went into the bowl of his lute for safekeeping, since no simple cup would maintain them through the roll and pitch of the wagon.

  The husks went all over. Many pale flakes had found their way into his hair and eyebrows.

  “I feel so guilty, doing this,” he mumbled, his voice coming strained because of the angle of his neck.

  Gaspare was driving, which is to say he sat in the driver’s seat, his hands clenched doggedly upon the tattered reins. But the lines hung from hand to surcingle, and from surcingle to bit in great, looping swags which swung left and right with the horse’s steps. Festilligambe was trotting decorously down the road solely because that was what he felt like doing.

  “Guilty?” echoed the boy. “You feel guilty husking oats? By the Virgin and every saint, Damiano, do the little grains cry out as you break them?”

  Damiano sighed and rested his chin on the boards for a moment. The muscles of his back hurt. He was also lightheaded from lack of nourishment, and his temper was on edge. He therefore collected himself before answering, “No, of course not, Gaspare. I meant I feel that Festilligambe is expecting us to give the stuff to him.”

  Gaspare’s florid face grew pinker and his mouth worked. But he bit off whatever he’d first intended to say, and said only, “The creature would be better off with wealthier owners.”

  Damiano did not reply, though it was on his tongue to remind the boy that Festilligambe did not have owners but an owner.

  Emboldened by this silence, Gaspare spoke the corollary to his statement, which was that the owners would be a lot wealthier if they sold the horse.

  Damiano rested his face on the backs of his hands and resisted a temptation to escape from this unpleasantness into the familiar vacancies of his mind.

  “Gaspare,” he began, “please try to understand. That horse likes “Likes you, maybe, but doesn’t listen to you a pig’s fart. And he doesn’t like nobody else in this world. Especially me.”

  Damiano glanced up, for he heard a tone of real hurt in his companion’s voice. “Oh, he likes you all right, Gaspare. He likes you better than he likes anyone else except me.

  “And in the beginning…” and Damiano’s thoughts went back over a year in time, to the sheep pastures above Partestrada, where he had first seen the black gelding in the string of Carla Denezzi’s brother. The horse had been flourishing then.

  So had Damiano. He had worn soft boots, white linen and a full cloak of weasel skins.

  Painful and distant came the memory to Damiano that he had once been respectable. He had sat at table with the parish priest. Once, he had spoken with Petrarch.

  He had had a house. And a city.

  Now that was over, and he was that pitiful creature—an Italian in exile. According to his bargain with the Devil, he must not return home. According to the Devil’s bargain with him, he was now living the tag ends of his days.

  For a moment’s intense, ashen melancholy, brought on perhaps by starvation, Damiano was sorry the plague had spared him. But then that moment passed, and he remembered what he had.

  He had an angel. An archangel, who had shared with him as much as mortal may share with spirit—which is to say, music. And he had a horse—a temperamental horse, but a fine one—and a still more temperamental distinguished colleague.

  He watched a roadside row of plums pass by the wagon, just entering into their pale bloom. The tended landscape was sweeter than anything he had ever seen in Italy, and the soft air was gauzy. The sight and the smell and the warmth together sank Damiano into a diffuse and pleasurable stupor in which he could almost forget the stiffening lacerations that crisscrossed his back.

  An angel and a horse and a friend (of sorts). And of course a lute, too. That was important, even though it wasn’t much of a lute. Together, Gaspare, angel, horse and lute made a total for which it was worth losing a bit of respectability.

  Especially while the weather remained so fine. Respectability was much less important in good weather.

  Oddly enough, thought the sleepy musician, in
some ways Raphael was the least respectable of his companions. It was talking to the angel, after all, that caused people to edge away from him.

  Were it not for Raphael, Gaspare would have no cause to think Damiano a madman.

  All these reflections took the time of one long sigh and a shift of weight from left elbow to right. Damiano continued his interrupted sentence. “And in the beginning, the horse liked me least of all men.

  “But, Gaspare, I want you to listen to the strange thing that happened to me when I was being whipped in Petit Comtois.”

  Gaspare’s laugh was not kindly. “I can think of many possible strange things….”

  The half-naked man ignored this interruption. “I sort of blacked out. But not really, for I found myself standing somewhere else. In Lombardy, I was, in a place I have been once before, though I never talked about it to you. A beautiful garden.”

  The ironic light died behind the boy’s eyes. “That happens,” he admitted. “When a man is in pain, or sick. When I was five and had the spots I had such a fever Evienne says I thought she was Saint Lucia, though why Saint Lucia, I have no idea….”

  Damiano raised his chin again and frowned fiercely at Gaspare. “I spoke, not with Saint Lucia, but with a woman I know. A very beautiful woman….”

  “A beautiful one? Sounds less and less real all the time.”

  “And she was surprised to see me standing next to her. I was like a spirit, for my body was left in Petit Comtois. We both agreed I should not have come there, and she sent me back.”

  One rusty eyebrow shot up. “She sent you back? Isn’t that the way with beautiful women? But you should learn persistence, musician. Otherwise there will never be any little black-haired, sheep-eyed babies running around.”

  Damiano pushed himself off the floor of the wagon. It seemed the heat of his own irritation was lifting him.