The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  Innocent grimaced and blinked, rubbing one age-stained hand over his eyes, but he did not pause.

  The angel watched him go. White wings drooped down to the carpet.

  “He couldn’t hear you?” whispered Damiano.

  “I don’t know if he heard me or not,” replied the angel.

  “. . . you forget the usuric taxes, Rocault. Your cardinal’s vestments were purchased out of Jewish…”

  Damiano felt easier at heart. Not that he was about to confuse the astute Innocent with Saint Francesco, but now he had a certain faith in the man as well as the office. The old Pope was not about to be ground under heel by Cardinal Rocault.

  Damiano was more and more certain that he did not like Rocault, who was making life more difficult for everybody, from the Holy Father to Gaspare.

  And therefore for Damiano.

  The food was cleared away. Was the music supposed to be cleared away as well? Damiano looked about for some sort of signal from one of the lackeys. Discovering none, he continued playing.

  Rocault had a plan which he insisted on describing to His Holiness. It involved the disestablishment of all lending institutions except those beneficiary associations belonging to the guilds and (of course) the church itself.

  Innocent listened with what appeared to be little attention, occasionally murmuring phrases on the order of “killing the goose which lays the golden eggs.”

  From strain and general weariness, Damiano had created a small headache. When the lackey who had handled the Pope’s chair returned with a bundle in his arms, his eyes could not at first make out what the thing was. When by its shape it proved to be a lute, he was filled with mixed feelings.

  Did the Holy Father want to play for him? Or with him? That could be interesting. Or dangerous for Damiano, since it was a direct insult to the cardinal, who plainly wanted to talk. It could also prove embarrassing, since the Pope was the successor to Saint Pietro, but music was still music, and about it Damiano could not he.

  He kept his head down toward his strings but out of the corner of his eye Damiano watched Innocent open a case of gilded leather and pull out an instrument.

  Mother of God, what an instrument. As Innocent carried it from the dining table over to Damiano’s corner, the lutenist could no longer pretend to be uninterested.

  The lute was larger than Damiano’s, but by the way the old man hefted it, very light. Its back was of many woods and its soundboard bleached white. The neck of it was black ebony, inlaid with gold wire, and the pierced cover of the soundhole was a parchment lace as fine as cheesecloth. The tuning head of the lute bent sharply back from the neck, the better for the musician to play in ensemble.

  Damiano was stricken with base jealousy: that a man who played “when he found the time” should have such an instrument, when Damiano, who ate and breathed the lute, was forced to carry a box poorly joined and false at the top of the neck…

  But he shoved himself roughly back into line. How could he object to the most important man on earth owning a pretty lute? Besides, it was probably made for show and possessed a voice like a crow’s.

  Innocent sat himself down between Damiano and the angel, who was also regarding the lute with interest. Perhaps the lutenist’s conflict of feeling had not passed entirely unnoticed, for the first thing the Pope said was “People give me things.” And he shrugged.

  “Lutes, among the rest.” With a touch of a quill to each string, the Holy Father checked his tuning. He seemed to know what he was doing. Then he took Damiano’s lute by the neck and made an exchange.

  “I want to hear that piece with the bass like a harp again. On this.”

  Damiano said nothing. When he touched the top course with his fingernail, the lute thrilled weightlessly on his lap. He played an aeolian scale, to get used to the spacing, and then a myxlodean. He found he was holding his breath.

  The instrument had a soul. Before five measures of the song had passed Damiano had forgiven it its excessive prettiness, and with the final sprinkle of notes he forgave it for not being his. He extended it to its owner.

  Innocent VI shook his head. “I like this one better,” he stated. “It is such a poor lute, and when I look at it I can remember to what heights you took an instrument which showed so little promise. When I consider my own soul, I would like to remember that. And besides, I, who am a halting musician, can play this instrument without feeling unworthy of it.”

  “But neither am I worthy of this,” blurted Damiano. And he believed it, without for a moment discounting his own abilities. For it seemed to him that the only sort of musician who ought to have such a lute was an old man who had played all his life, on the good instruments and the bad, and who had surmounted his obstacles and learned all that life was going to teach him.

  Damiano saw himself, on the other hand, as a beginner. A beginner who was already better at his art than most masters, but a beginner nonetheless. He tried to give the lute back.

  Innocent would not take it, and neither did the old man smile as he said, “That’s not for you to say, lad. But it wouldn’t matter anyway. An instrument like this—one cares for it for a while and then passes it on. As I do, to you. I was not its first owner, and perhaps you will not be its last. Something told me it was time to pass it on.” Innocent shrugged. “If you meet a man who is more worthy, or who has the greater need…”

  The old man fixed Damiano with a fierce hazel eye. “Is it a trade, musician?”

  “You… Your Holiness,” stuttered Damiano, and he tipped his chair over as he rose to bow.

  “Gabriele!” exploded Gaspare, as soon as they were out of the private quarters. “What a present! And from the Pope himself! You should have gotten him to sign it.”

  Damiano glanced up from the case of gilded leather. “Sign it? Don’t be an ass, Gaspare. Sign it where? The signature of God himself is on this lute; it is perfect.”

  He looked over his shoulder. “What do you think of it, Raphael? Isn’t it perfect?”

  Gaspare giggled at the sight of Damiano conversing with empty air.

  Raphael was smiling. He marched with wings straight out behind him, for the passageway was low and narrow. Because of this posture, he resembled a man fighting gale winds. “It’s a lovely lute, and as soon as you let me play it I’ll tell you more,” he answered. “But I doubt I’ll have much to criticize.

  “I’m glad he thought to give it to you,” added the angel, with more than a hint of complacency.

  They descended to the clean cobbled streets and the guard watched them walk away. Damiano sang in the rain all the way back to the inn.

  “Do I look so old to you that I can’t carry my clàrseach by myself?” bristled MacFhiodhbhuidhe, stooping to place one hand beneath the base of the soundbox, while the other hand rested on the serpent-curve of the string arm. Grunting, he hefted the weight of black wood.

  The harper’s instrument was garnished with a great deal of silver and crystal. It was splendid, certainly, but to Damiano’s Italian eye it lacked grace. It looked heavy—not like MacFhiodhbhuide’s music, which was almost frivolously light.

  “It’s lighter than you would think,” the harper said, almost as though he had read Damiano’s thoughts. “It’s carved out of willow. The box is hollowed from a single piece of wood: like an old log boat!” MacFhiodhbhuidhe chuckled.

  “But here, boy. You can carry my stool,” he added grandly, handing the item to Gaspare, who had not been the one to volunteer his help.

  The big Irishman, like Damiano himself, was in a glorious mood. “I haven’t enjoyed myself this much in years. And it has been years since I played like this, in public, for whoever wanted to stop and listen. For the most part, I have my patrons.”

  He stood at the door of the inn, peering out on to the wet pavement, scowling against the chance it might still be sprinkling. Finally he decided to chance it, and strode out to the street. Damiano and Gaspare tagged behind.

  “Your patrons, Monsieur Harper?
” piped Gaspare (when he should have kept his mouth shut). “Is the Holy Father one of your patrons? Have you played for the Pope, like Damiano?”

  Nothing in Damiano’s witchcraft had ever taught him how to drop through solid stone, or else he might have vanished from view then and there, out of sheer embarrassment. He gave the boy a shake and a barely suppressed hiss. But MacFhiodhbhuidhe only stopped in the middle of the road and peered down at Gaspare. A chase of cloud and moon flashed his image larger than life, and his long, carefully frizzed yellow hair bushed out like a halo. “Many times, child, have I played for His Holiness. Every good musician in Avignon has been heard by the Pope, whose interest in music is active.

  “Of course,” continued the harper, “not every good musician has been given an instrument by the Pope. Your friend has a right to be proud.”

  “I’m not proud,” mumbled Damiano, following MacFhiodhbhuidhe through the gate of his pretty little garden and into his pretty little house. “I’m only astounded. And besides, he said he did it because of a song that sounded like a harp.”

  The Irishman’s elderly serving woman came with a candle in each hand, and lit them in.

  In the middle of the harper’s front room stood a cabinet, lined with woolens, floored with absorbent sand. In this cabinet the clarseach lived. As MacFhiodhbhuidhe placed it upright in its stand, he sighed. “Everyone is attracted to novelty. But I’m sure His Holiness had more reason than that.

  “But the clàrseach, you know: it is different from all the other instruments.” The burly man gave a tolerant glance over his shoulder, knowing he would not be understood. “Looking at that great, weighty thing of wood and brass and silver, would you believe that there is nothing holding it together but its strings?

  “That is the case, however. A clàrseach is three pieces of wood, fitted with pegs and holes. The box is female, the bow male, and the arm, half and half.” His bushy black brows drew together in good humor.

  “We Irish are very fond of threes. We pretend to have invented the Trinity.”

  Damiano, though he enjoyed the occasional intellectual exposition, was more interested in the instrument than the philosophy behind it. He bent around the wider man, examining the harp’s joints. “Do you ever take it apart?”

  MacFhiodhbhuidhe sat back and allowed him to touch. “On the long trip from Galway to Quimper and through Brittany and the valley and south… there it traveled wrapped like a bundle of fagots. That was an odd trip, my friends, and a fortunate one for me, because I took it in the year of the Death.”

  Damiano flinched unnoticed.

  “Yes, I left Ireland before the plague struck, and entered Provence when its fury was spent here, consequently I never encountered the disease at all. Spared by grace, I have always said.

  “But to return to the clàrseach: it is better for an instrument, as it is better for a man, to remain taut—fit for work.” He thumped his round and sizable chest.

  “As long as I live, these three pieces will remain in one.”

  “Why did you want to hang around talking to him?” whined Gaspare, querulously dancing from one foot to the other.

  Damiano, who paced the shining streets with his thumbs in his belt, turned on him. “Why did I…? Why did you have to be so unforgivably rude? Asking him if he, who has been my greatest benefactor in Avignon, had ever had good fortune to equal mine…”

  Gaspare lowered his head like a spindly goat. “What does he matter, lutenist? His music is of the past, and so is he. You have a better ear and better hands than he; he is privileged to help you.”

  Damiano hunched his shoulders. “God preserve me from friends like you,” he growled. But within him was some part, not wholly submergible, which agreed with Gaspare’s analysis, and was buoyed up by the redhead’s cruel words. He recognized this in himself, and it made him more angry than ever.

  Gaspare hung back, silent for a moment, while both of them paced determinedly down the main north-south avenue toward the Rhone.

  Finally he spoke again, lugubriously. “What do you expect out of me, Damiano? I’m not your angel, you know. I am only a man, and I must say what I feel. Besides, it’s not three hours ago that some churl of Rocault’s assaulted me, merely because I asked him whether my sister was being kept within.

  “This business is wearing upon me. I can’t count when last I slept a night through, what with worrying about Evienne.”

  Damiano recognized the truth of this. Though it was not a complete truth, since Gaspare spent his nights very quietly, for a person who wasn’t sleeping. “Well, we’re doing something about that right now, aren’t we?”

  Gaspare trotted up beside Damiano. He nodded. “Yes, musician, we are. We are going to get ourselves killed, to be exact, and have our heads stuck on pikes over the cardinal’s wall.”

  Damiano grimaced. “Why do you talk like that, Gaspare? This was your idea, remember? And we are attempting nothing we did not do easily within the Papal Palace itself.”

  “Certainly. But bad-talking is good luck. It is an old thieves’ custom.”

  “I am not a thief,” insisted Damiano once again: obdurately, but with less conviction than he would have shown a few weeks previously.

  The night before last the moon had been full, but tonight’s fast-scudding clouds stole its brilliance. And it was late; soon the night orb would set, leaving darkness even Damiano would find thick.

  Yet he couldn’t ask Gaspare to wait longer, and he himself was eager to try his abilities on the task for which he had reclaimed them.

  “Quite a wind,” mumbled the boy, who in the interest of stealth had worn neither his richest nor warmest clothing.

  Damiano agreed, feeling his feet skid on muddy stones. “I hope the cardinal’s roof doesn’t leak,” he added. “A wet reunion would be a pity.”

  He glanced ahead, along the low riverfront road. His vision, imperfect in daylight, was sharp enough now to catch the pattern of light on the ruffled surface of the Rhone, and the movement of restless gulls that clustered under the house eaves. There was the outline of a bridge half spanning the river. Broken, or incomplete. Vaguely Damiano wondered who had built it, who had broken it and why it wasn’t repaired. “I see the house, I think. At least I see a building larger than all else by the wharves.”

  “That’s it,” replied Gaspare. “It has peach trees flattened against the west wall—they are in bloom—and vines covering the south.”

  “I see the espalier. It looks like it is shielding the house from the wind with a fence of flowers.”

  Avignon was no city of gardens, but with the immense thrift of Gallic peoples everywhere, foodstuffs were grown there wherever a square foot of soil stood undisturbed, against any white wall that caught the sun. The mansion of Cardinal Rocault rose high and proudly enough, but pots of kitchen herbs dangled out the first-story windows, and from the small enclosure came a sleepy quarrel of chickens. Damiano also smelled rabbits through the sweetness of the blooming trees.

  “It’s no Papal Palace,” pronounced Gaspare, with the easy criticism of the man who has nothing. “I can see why the good cardinal is envious of the Pope.”

  Damiano crept up to the wall which fronted the river road. Seven little peach trees, no taller than the second-story windows, had been pruned and trained into shapes as flat as heraldry. The sight and smell of them made him drunk; he rubbed his face against pink-white blossoms. “I myself,” he whispered, “have a certain envy of Cardinal Rocault, for I would sooner own this pretty house than inhabit the Pope’s warrens.”

  But a snort and sniff from within silenced him. Damiano held up a warning hand to Gaspare and began one of his oldest magics: one learned neither from Saara nor Guillermo Delstrego, but particular to Damiano himself. With images of hearthrugs and bowls of hot porridge he seduced the cardinal’s bandog. With a bodiless scratch in places no dog could reach, he turned the creature from its duty.

  Even Gaspare, who was watching his friend curiously, not understan
ding, heard the scrape of heavy dog claws at the other side of the wall. He hissed and bounced back into the road. “It’s the watchdog, Damiano.”

  Damiano had begun to sing. “Shut up, Gaspare,” he crooned melodiously, “or I’ll throw you to him.”

  The studded gate was locked by a mechanism more complex than any the intruders had seen before, but it opened itself at the witch’s cheery adjuration.

  They entered, and Damiano was almost knocked flat by a gigantic course-hound which dropped its front feet onto the witch’s shoulders and demanded the promised caress. Standing head to head with Damiano, the beast was only halfway upright.

  Gaspare cursed weakly as Damiano produced the tickles and scratches. “What is it?”

  “A war-dog,” caroled Damiano, catching his balance and placing the huge feet on the ground. “From the islands. Scotian or Caledonian. Described by Cambrensis. I have seen pictures of such as this.”

  Gaspare understood none of this, not knowing that Scotia was Ireland or Caledonia, Scotland. And never having read Giraldus Cambrensis, being unable to read. But he saw his old friend take liberty after liberty with the gray and shaggy pony-sized creature.

  “Not much of a warrior, for a war-dog, is it?” said the boy critically, as the dog bowed its forequarters till its muzzle touched earth, then set off in a lolloping gallop around them.

  “We won’t get into that,” replied Damiano, and he led Gaspare (and the affectionate dog) past the coops and the hutches, through the truck garden and into the back door. “He probably has another face to show to strangers.”

  Damiano was enjoying himself again. One of the unhappiest aspects of being a simple man had been his loss of special understanding with the animals around him, dogs especially. The memory of the sheepdog’s attack at the farm south of Petit Comtois rankled no end, for he had been used to believing that the beasts saw in him something wonderful: something the narrow eyes of men could not. That day he had to come to grips with the truth that it was no moral excellence that gentled the predatory canine, but mere witchly trickery.