The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Damiano fingered his little knife as he jogged along. He sang wordlessly under his breath, both his own tunes and those he was picking up daily from MacFhiodhbhuidhe. Meanwhile, through his mind was running a different sort of melody: a tune which, like the music of Raphael, could find no expression in the hands or voice of man. Just now he was not trying to express the music in his mind; it was expressing him.

  Never grow weary. Nor sick. He felt like a scrap of paper in the draft of a chimney, flaming and floating, weightless.

  But Gaspare was wheezing like a wind-broken horse. The boy had started at a disadvantage, under a debility of sorrow. Now, as they watched a lone man in white—a baker—trudge toward his work with lantern in hand, Gaspare was near spent.

  He pulled down on his friend’s arm. He sat in the street, miring his mantle further, and without words he shook his head.

  Damiano put one hand on the boy’s head, which was sweaty. He did not attempt persuasion. Instead he said, “You’ll cool down fast. Take my overshirt.”

  Gaspare peered up incredulously as Damiano yanked the red-and-gold tunic over his head. “You didn’t like it when I took your shirt before,” he panted. “And why should I have both overshirt and mantle and leave you in your linen?” Yet he took the tunic from Damiano, who paced in circles, toying with the sliver of silver and crystal in his hand.

  “Because you are going to be cold and I am not,” the witch replied. “Not tonight.” Damiano whined—again like a hound. “I keep thinking about that no-good. I feel we are close.”

  “Don’t call my sister a no-good,” growled Gaspare sullenly. He was not offended enough to get up.

  Damiano smiled with all his teeth. “Why not? You call her much worse. But I was not referring to little Evienne, of course, but to Jan Karl. It is as though I can hear him talking in my mind. Or snoring, maybe.”

  Gaspare peered around him. “Well, my dear old sheep—uh, Damiano, I don’t know what you see or hear, and I myself can hardly see my hand before my face, but I have a funny feeling we’re back where we started, having covered Avignon with a layer of shoe leather.”

  Damiano glanced at the open mouth of the Pope’s Door without surprise. “That’s exactly what we have done, though to be sure we haven’t covered but half the city. We’ve been by this spot four times, and do you know it is always here that I begin to simmer inside about the Dutchman. I think we’ll find him on the other side of that wall.”

  Gaspare glowered from Damiano to the gate and back again. Exhaustion gave birth to scorn. “Maybe Jan’s been elected Pope, eh?”

  Damiano was too intent to rise to the bait. “He started out as a cleric, Gaspare, right here in Avignon. Do not forget that. Though he may be a thief and a procurer in other lands, behind those walls he will be remembered as student and lector of the church.” Damiano sighed. “I’ve wasted time. We should have started looking in the Papal Palace.”

  The boy scooted around on his behind until he also was peering through the darkness toward the looming white hill of the Pope. “Great,” he grunted. “We’ll just walk up to the pikeman there and announce that we must enter in order to search for a prostitute and a pimp.” Then he turned on Damiano a glare that was hard with disappointment. “Shall I go first or would you like that honor?”

  Damiano was chewing on his lip. “That method might have had a chance while the big blond was at the gate, although even then… Now, I think, we shall have to resort to skill.”

  “Over the wall?” suggested Gaspare with a glimmer of professional interest.

  Damiano chuckled in his throat, and there was behind that laugh a feral arrogance that Gaspare did not associate with the lutenist. “No, Gaspare. A different sort of skill.”

  He crouched down next to the boy. “Don’t you remember the ducks’ eggs and the peasant’s house south of Lyons? How Saara took us in and out unnoticed?”

  “Saara isn’t here,” said Gaspare unnecessarily.

  Damiano pulled him to his feet. “We don’t need the lady. Invisibility used to be a specialty of my own, remember, and I don’t feel that I’ve lost any of my ability. Watch.”

  And Damiano sorted himself out for the effort. Within his head, behind closed eyes, he allowed the world of stone and night air to penetrate, so that his body would be no obstruction: not to air, sound or moonlight. It was a pleasant discipline while in process, and only tended to weary him afterward.

  Out of habit he reached for something—for his staff, which was a focus for his power and his intent. His hands touched only Gaspare.

  He jerked back. God knows what would happen, either to the boy or to the spell, if he tried to use a human being like the wooden length of a staff. He had no staff and would simply have to do without.

  The spell was familiar, and he certainly hadn’t lost any of his ability. He felt the scattered moonlight, heavy as mist, penetrate the borders of his body. Shape fell away. And thought.

  Very pleasant.

  There was commotion and someone flailing about in the street.

  Gaspare was shouting his name in a whisper. “Damiano! Damiano! Where have you gone?”

  The boy crashed right into him and took him by the shoulders. “You stupid sheep-face! Where by the sufferings of hell have you been for a quarter-hour?”

  Damiano cleared his throat. He could not rouse an anger to match Gaspare’s. “Ho. Nowhere, I guess.” He scratched his head with both hands.

  “You know, Gaspare, not to be—I mean, to be not, you know, is not bad at all. I don’t mean not to be born, of course, but rather… Never mind.” Damiano shook his head forcefully to clear out the moonlight, and returned to the work at hand.

  “Well. I’ll have to make some changes in the way I do things, I see. I need a tool. If I can’t use a staff, like a respectable magician, I’ll do like Saara.”

  Gaspare frowned dubiously. “Are you going to make up bad verse now?”

  Damiano turned his head and struck a belligerent attitude toward the gleaming hill of the Pope. “I am,” he declared.

  “We pass beneath the arched gate,

  Unperceived. No blade will strike…”

  They were right under the door, with the black iron portcullis raised above their heads. Damiano stopped to stare and his concentration faltered. (Strike. What rhymes with strike? Dike, like, pike…)

  “And leaning is the sentry’s pike

  Against the wall The hour is late.”

  If they were challenged, thought Gaspare, they would simply plead innocence. For there they were parading openly through an open gate, with guards at either hand. It was not like being caught climbing a wall. If they were challenged…

  They were not challenged.

  “So quiet are the cobbled streets

  Where the Holy Father sleeps, Or his prayer vigil keeps

  That…”

  Streets. What rhymes with streets? Sheets (terrible). Sweets. (Worse. Oh, God!) Beats?

  “That one can hear his slow heartbeats.”

  The doorway loomed deep in shadow. Damiano plunged in, dragging Gaspare behind him. Once concealed, he began to blow like a winded horse. “That,” he wheezed, “was awful. Hideous.”

  Gaspare’s hand made an equivocal gesture, unseen even by the witch in the dark of the overhang. “Oh, I don’t know. I think it was much better than Saara’s. The ABBA rhyme has more subtlety than…”

  Damiano snorted. “I’m not working in a foreign language. But it was terrible, nonetheless. I thought I would be found standing there under the portcullis, mouth open, knees knocking, and all for lack of a rhyme. There’s got to be another way to work it.”

  This was what people meant all over Europe, when they spoke the word “Avignon.” It was a single building and an entire city as well: the Holy Father’s city. Damiano and Gaspare passed sedately down its passages, expecting to be impressed.

  First glance was a little disappointing, for the nearest hall was a rather musty library of no great size.


  “I’ve seen better,” murmured Gaspare. Being illiterate, he wasted no time staring at the books.

  “Oh? Where?” replied his friend absently. “In San Gabriele?” But even his interest faded when he discovered that the library specialized in canonical law.

  The chambers beyond were plain but serviceable. Damiano fingered his little knife as he went. Jan Karl was not too near.

  “I don’t think, after all, that we entered by the main gate,” he remarked to Gaspare after a minute. “For these seem to be little-used offices. Perhaps it was we who missed the rendezvous.”

  “Nope. I ran circles around the building,” grunted Gaspare. “She wasn’t anywhere.”

  Turning a corner, they came upon a region where the passages were broader and admitted more moonlight. “How straight the walls are,” murmured Damiano. “Look at them. It is hard to believe this whole enclosure is only one enormous building.”

  “That doesn’t give me any trouble,” replied Gaspare, whose ignorance of engineering principles made him blase. “But what gets me is that there’s no smell of shit anywhere.”

  “I’ve read that there are tubes in the rooms and one can piss into them and it travels all the way down to the Rhone,” commented the lutenist “Very civilized.”

  “Oh, I dunno. Must make the river stink. Is that any better?”

  Damiano could not answer this question. He did not try, actually, for he had found a door with light behind it, and very carefully he was opening it.

  Here was a courtyard, larger than many large. houses, and soon the pair of intruders stood beside a massive pile of stone carved with bulge-headed dolphins, spouting thin streams of water into the velvet night. Damiano’s hand rested on his little knife and his lips moved soundlessly.

  Gaspare put his hand on his friend’s arm, for the moon was setting and the dolphins’ faces bore a monstrous cast. “What is it Damiano?”

  “I… I am annoyed. Really annoyed,” was the reply. “Though I can’t think why. And therefore I think Jan Karl is near.” He pointed toward a high, brass-doored entryway on the far side of the court. “Through there, in fact.”

  Gaspare followed the dim finger. He trembled appreciably. “There? That is where the Holy Father lives, I am told.”

  “Ah?” Damiano lifted his eyes to the bulk of the building. The palace appeared heavy, squat, ungainly from within. He felt the presence of humanity beating against his face like the heat of a hearth. Which of these sleeping souls was the Holy Father himself? No way to tell. “Well, it could very well be,” he assented. “Good for Heer Karl. I always knew he had it in him. Of course it may be he is merely robbing the rooms of his superiors. Let’s go find him.”

  Closing his eyes, he prepared the beginning of his song.

  “Through the palace now we tread…”

  And then he stopped. “No,” announced Damiano to the darkened dolphin court. “No more of that.”

  He began to improvise a lullaby: wordless, full of ornament and with a tune that wandered. He sang high in his nose, almost at a whisper, like a mother with a baby who was already asleep. Gaspare strained his ears to hear.

  Damiano took Gaspare by the hand. He touched the brass door and found it unlocked. Together they entered.

  Here the windows were shuttered against the night air. Into unbroken blackness Damiano introduced fire: a tame blaze which he held in his hands and stroked. The walls danced and then revealed themselves to the intruders’ eyes.

  Perhaps this was the Holy Father’s wing of the palace, but evidently he didn’t reside on the ground floor, for there were no hangings or rugs, though the hall was of marble. Thoughtfully Damiano latched the door behind them. “No use inviting thieves,” he whispered, and then gestured up the large staircase which stood before them. “He’s up there.”

  “You are so sure?” hissed Gaspare, clinging very closely to the taller man.

  “I am,” replied Damiano lightly, and led him up the steps.

  The palace made no sense to Gaspare, but then he was at a disadvantage, being largely in the dark and quite terrified besides. He followed Damiano from one cold length of passage to the next, his normally quick feet made clumsy by the hour. He watched the tiny tendrils of flame wrap themselves around his friend’s fingers; Damiano’s face was lit satanically from below.

  But it did not look satanic. That was Gaspare’s sole comfort. His good friend looked both cheerful and interested, and darted from passage to passage with the confidence of a man who has finished a long strange journey and reached neighborhoods he knows very well.

  And Damiano sang as they went: sang, hummed and even whistled a snatch of his tune which bounced from wall to wall of the huge, frescoed chamber they were passing through. Gaspare yawned, though whether it was Damiano’s lullaby or his own long sad day making him sleepy he could not tell.

  “I would like very much to see the Pope,” said the musician to Gaspare, standing beneath a dome of blue and gold. He extended his arms, allowing the flame to crawl up both to the elbow, the better to examine the architecture. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Not under these c-c-circumstances,” replied Gaspare, whose teeth chattered despite the wool and velvet. “Can’t we hurry, please?”

  Lowering his eyes from the painted grandeur, Damiano obediently strode on.

  The black wood doors were plain along this wall: like what one imagined of the rooms of vowed religious. But still by their spacing the doors said that these were not poor quarters inside, and the wall itself was inset with parquetry. Damiano stopped and leaned against the stone, sighing.

  “We’re lost?” quavered Gaspare, drawing his cloak around him.

  “No,” whispered the witch. “We’re not lost. He’s found. Jan Karl. He’s within.”

  His was an unfortunate head for a tonsure, being pointed slightly off-center. That head and the drawn, ascetic face below it were all that was visible of Karl, poking out of a roll of soft blankets on a bed with sheets.

  “Nice situation,” mouthed Gaspare to Damiano, who was singing and therefore could not reply. The witch fed his pet flame to a candle, then shook his hand out. He knelt tenderly down beside the sleeper.

  Oddly enough, it was when Damiano stopped his singing that Jan Karl awoke, to see figures standing over him by the light of his own devotional candle. Before he could open his mouth Damiano had clamped a hand on it.

  “Early for matins, I know,” he whispered cheerily into the man’s ear. “But after all, it is Holy Week.”

  Jan gurgled, and when Damiano brought the candle close to his own dark face (the flame touched the skin) and to Gaspare’s (he was more careful) the Dutchman seemed in no way reassured. His deep-set blue eyes shifted warily and his swaddled form thrashed about.

  “No fear, Jan,” crooned Damiano. He removed his hand. “It was only that I did not want you to wake your saintly neighbors in your surprise at seeing us.”

  Gaspare was standing behind Damiano. He pushed forward. “Where’s my sister?” he demanded. “Why weren’t you at the Pope’s Door, like you said you would be?”

  Karl sat up, dragging his blankets with him against the night chill of the stone walls. “Gaspare,” he began in his wretched Italian. “And Delstrego, of course. I did not forget our appointment. No, not at all. But there is a story behind that…”

  “Evienne!” spat the boy. “Tell me now. Is she alive or dead?”

  Karl raised his hands to his head in a gesture of horror which turned into an admonition for Gaspare to be quiet. “She is alive, of course, and may Christ preserve her in health.”

  “Where? Where is she?” pressed the boy with unabated volume.

  Jan Karl turned to Damiano as the more sensible member of the pair. “We cannot talk here,” he said. “Let us meet someplace later.”

  Damiano smiled beatifically. “I’m afraid later may lead to another story, Jan. Let us go someplace else and talk now.”

  The blond head (bald in the middle) shook f
rom side to side. “No. Impossible. I’d never get out of this building unnoticed.”

  The dark musician rolled a little ball of blue fire between his hands. He squatted convivially next to Karl and showed the trick to him. “Oh, yes, you will,” he whispered. “You’ll be surprised at how easy it is.”

  And again he began to sing.

  They sat like three rooks on the stone step of the dolphin fountain, under cover of the plash of water. Jan Karl was in the middle, with Gaspare and Damiano crowding him close on each side. Both Gaspare and Karl, wrapped in wool, shivered in the predawn chill. Damiano, who shone like a ghost in his white linen undershirt, felt not the cold at all.

  “You have to understand,” repeated the Dutchman for the third time, “it has been a year. Things change in a year.”

  “Things change in a day—in a minute,” replied Damiano. “Gaspare cannot forget it has been a year since you left with his sister.”

  “Where is she?” One of Gaspare’s bony hands flexed painfully on Karl’s thigh, causing the cleric to wince. “In a single word, you can say it.”

  Karl stared peevishly at the boy. “At Cardinal Rocault’s great house. There. I’ve given you five words. Are you any the wiser?”

  “Explain,” suggested Damiano, and he dealt Karl a comradely blow upon the shoulder, using a hand from which fire only lightly flickered.

  Jan turned on him between fear and anger. “Delstrego, you have it in you to be a real bully, do you know that?”

  Damiano only smiled.

  “This child’s poor sinful sister has had the spiritual elevation of finding a place in the household of a very important man, in the cardinal. I rejoice in her good fortune.”

  Though Jan was speaking Italian, not French, it took Gaspare a few seconds to translate. “In the household of a cardinal? What is she doing for this cardinal—scrubbing pots?”

  The Dutchman tried vainly to hide his smile. “I think her position is more delicate than that.” He smirked.

  Damiano blinked at Karl as earnestly as a dog. “Cardinals are all very old men, are they not, Jan?”