The Damiano Series

by R. A. MacAvoy

  “You thought I called you out of loneliness,” she stated, and her words held a hint of accusation. “No. I have more love in me than that, Dami, and more sense too. I called you because of Raphael. He has fallen into the power of the Liar…

  “And I… I was the bait used to draw him. It was my fault.”

  Damiano sank down beside her and the round moon shone unobscured through his spreading wings. Slowly he grew more solid to look upon, as he gazed rapt into her green, tilted eyes. He put his weightless hands upon hers. “How could it be your fault, love, that Satan hates his brother?” He stroked her weathered hands gently. “If it is a matter of fault, then it is my fault that I wrapped my friend so tightly in the bonds of earth he could no longer stand against the Devil’s malice.”

  But the dark unghostly brown eyes reflected no sense of guilt. “There is no fault here at all, Saara, except that of Satan’s jealousy. And even that may be borne.”

  Saara gripped Damiano’s large hands. They had become solid and warm. She brought them together and laid them against her cheek.

  In another moment he was kissing her and curtains of wing shrouded them both.

  “I love you,” whispered Damiano, with his head against her neck.

  “Oh Lady, how I love you!” And then he sighed. “Forgive me, Saara; this does no good, I know!”

  So it can be done, she thought to herself. The dead may touch the living in the very manner of life. Her heart raced, burning with the conviction that all vows would be well broken, and the future profitably traded—in exchange for this.

  Saara hissed between her teeth and turned her head from him. “By the four winds! How wise I am—how wretchedly wise. Wise enough to put you aside, dark boy, even if you were fool enough to want to stay with me.”

  When she looked back again her face had hardened. “You see what a woman can be made of, after seventy years of living? I am so strong even you cannot break me, my dear.

  “And as for being hurt—what does it matter if I am hurt, Dami? Why should my friends want to hedge me from my greatest desire lest I be hurt? Is it not to be hurt, to have one’s desire thwarted? Is it not to be hurt, to be left always behind?”

  She turned on the ghost with a sudden, deep-felt anger. “You thought it were better to hide from me and die, rather than risk being saved at the expense of my life. How noble it was of you!

  “But would it not have been greater to have given me the chance to prove myself as noble as you? Do you think my own love would have made it less than a joy to die in your place?”

  He shook his head, and now the black curls moved with the fingers of the wind. The setting moon haloed his face: large-eyed, ram-nosed, smiling gently. “It would have been a great act, love. I was not capable of it.”

  Saara was crying, but her voice came firmly. “And Raphael too… Walking into the Liar’s snare, knowing it was a snare, and I the bait. I told him not to. I told him the truth: that I am old and my life is full-lived. There is nothing which now could please me more than a good death in battle…”

  “Which you would not get from Satan,” replied the ghost simply, shrugging. “But rather pain, confusion, and the shame of weakness slowly overcoming you, like that of an old man who cannot hold his bladder. The Devil has no sympathy with anything quick and clean, and it isn’t human death which pleases him, but human misery.” He searched her stern face for understanding.

  “But in the end it did not matter, Saara, that you were ready to endure the Devil’s torment. I believe you have the strength, beloved, if anyone born has ever had it. But Raphael also knew that if he left you in his brother’s power, Satan would merely find another mortal tool, and then another, until Raphael could no longer resist him.”

  Damiano’s voice was slow and gentle, and he caressed her hair as he spoke, and when he was finished all she said was, “I love you, Dami Delstrego. We had only a few days together as man and woman, but when flesh is laid aside I will still love you, then and always.”

  His sad smile widened, lighting all his face. “You are so beautiful, beloved. Like a great song… As for me, Saara of Saami, there is nothing left but love. That is why I feared to see you, lest it seem to you another abandonment, when the moon sets and I am there no longer.”

  She whispered, “I have heard your father tonight. And I have heard the voice of my child. I have heard and seen a great deal in my life and I do not call up the dead to ease my heart, but for help.”

  “Help?” he echoed, and his wings rose expectantly.

  “Help in rescuing Raphael.”

  Those shadowy wings beat the air in complex, unheeded rhythm, as a man may drum his fingers while thinking. “Of course,” he murmured at last. “Knowing you, how could I expect less? But I have no magic with which to help you,” he replied at last. “Nor force of arms. I am not a spirit of power.”

  “You think not?” Saara looked away from his brown, human, dangerous eyes. “But, I don’t seek power but knowledge. Once you summoned the Liar—Satan, as you call him.”

  “Twice,” he replied gravely. “I was a fool.”

  “But I am not,” she stated. “And I do not want to meet Satan again. But I must get to his hall, where he has bound Raphael.”

  Damiano shook his head. “No, beloved. There is no need. Raphael has passed back onto the earth from there.”

  Her head snapped up. “Where?”

  Damiano was slow in replying. “I don’t know.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  Once again the spirit smiled slowly, and then he turned his head as though to listen to the rising wind. At last he replied. “I have been to see him. He is in a dry, hot place. He is on a chain. It is a land to which I never traveled. More than that I can’t tell you, for even as I look at you now, Saara, beautiful love, I am not here but far away, and there is little besides you yourself that is clear to my eyes…” And then it seemed he turned and peered down the hill again.

  “For I am neither angel nor devil nor God Himself, to be prowling up and down the living world. Dead or alive, I am only Damiano, and my eyes have their limits.”

  She snorted, bending to his humor unwillingly. “Then I shall have to steal into Satan’s window, as I first thought.”

  The smile died from his face as the belly of the round moon touched the hills behind him. “Don’t try that, Saara.”

  “I will. I must,” she replied. “Look at me, Damiano. Even simple eyes can see now that I am no more a child. This misadventure has aged me. But I am Saara of the Saami; I know what I must do, and I do it.

  “Besides, I have sworn that I will find Raphael, so all choice in the matter is over.”

  Damiano looked into her green Asiatic eyes and nodded his head in submission to the inevitable. “So you will find him. But not this way. Instead comb all the hot lands of the earth first, and all the places where men are kept on chains.”

  She laughed a trifle scornfully. “No one can live so long! Most of the world is hot, to me, and most everywhere but among the Saami are men kept on chains! No, Damiano. You must tell me how to find Satan’s Hall, where someone of greater information may be made to talk.”

  “That would not be the act of a friend,” he said, staring away from her down the wooded hill.

  There was a crashing among the trees below, like a deer leaping among the hazel, but Saara was too roused to attend to noises. She pointed a chiding finger at the ghost as she cried, “Was it the act of a friend to help a man die in his own way, when there was another who might have saved his life? Raphael said it was the act of a friend. Do you agree?”

  Damiano’s eyes were pulled to hers, and breathless spirit though he was, he sighed. “Will you throw me by my own words, Saara? Yes, that was the act of a friend.

  “And it is your decision how you will live or die, and your vows are your own to keep. But the pure truth is that I no longer know the way to the Chamber of Four Windows, if I ever did.

  “For Damiano is dead, you k
now.” The shadows of his hand touched his own breast. “This is only memory, lent shape by love.” As he spoke, his face was growing paler and less defined with the setting of the moon, but the look he gave Saara was an obvious mixture of sweetness and amusement. He raised his hand and pointed beyond her.

  “But THERE is one I think might know the way to Satan’s palace,” Damiano said.

  Saara spun in place as the hulking black shadow barged among the birch trees. Above it was a thinner shadow that was cursing continually in a very familiar voice.

  “Gaspare!” the witch cried out in recognition.

  The horse shied at the sound and Gaspare came nearly off, hanging over the gelding’s back by one crooked knee and a handful of black mane. He cursed fluently, sliding down to his feet.

  The gangling youth strode closer, staggering and flailing his arms as though blind. He encountered a few birch boles before coming close enough to spy Saara, sitting solid as a point of stone at the crest of the hill.

  “Lady Saara!” he began. “I have had the Devil’s own trouble finding you. And it’s dark here as the inside of a witch’s…”

  Gaspare had a pack on his back and the neck of the lute stuck out of it sideways like an insect’s leg. His lank hair hung around his shoulders. Somewhere he had found another shirt.

  Saara watched his approach in wonder and consternation. It had been scarcely a week since she had flapped home—a very weary dove —and in that time she had forgotten about the clownish Gaspare. She was not too happy to have him interrupting her ghostly tryst, painful though the meeting had to be. “As the inside of a witch’s what, Gaspare?”

  The only answer was a mumble and a clearing of the throat, as the youth realized what he had said. Saara turned her attention back to the waiting spirit, who glimmered like ice in the last rays of the moon.

  Gaspare, too, noticed Damiano. The young man hissed, drawing himself back, and he made the peculiar Italian magical sign of protection which has been used from time immemorial by men who don’t understand the least about magic.

  “Again!” he cried in wrath made slightly hysterical by the touch of fear. He scooped a birch branch, complete with withering leaves, from the soil. “Again you try your tricks, Satan! Villainous wibbert, or wyvart… wyrven…” Giving up on the ungainly word heard only once, he lashed the branch at the apparition, which sat and watched him, wings pulsing slightly.

  “Worm!” bellowed Gaspare, slashing his weapon left and right through the translucent form. The colors of Damiano trickled over the thrashing branches like dappled sunlight, while the ghost himself sat placidly waiting.

  As soon as Gaspare stopped, panting, to survey his destruction, Damiano spoke again. “Hello, old friend, and God keep you.”

  Gaspare, leaning on his branch, stared uncertainly. After a few moments, he whined.

  “I see you have that pretty lute on your back,” continued the spirit, grinning at Gaspare’s discomfiture. “I remember it somewhat, though I owned it less than a week. I have heard you play with great enjoyment, Gaspare.”

  “You? Have heard me play? With…” The redhead struggled with the idea that the Devil might like his music. It was almost as difficult for him to believe the alternate explanation. At last he let his leafy weapon fall. “Could it be you are really Delstrego?”

  “Damiano Delstrego. Or I was. And I have no one anymore to call me ‘sheep-face,’ Gaspare. What a shame.”

  Gaspare blinked away a sudden brightness in his eyes. He turned to Saara, to find that the witch, like the ghost, was grinning. “Lady Saara,” he said decisively, “I think you have made a mistake. I don’t think this is Satan at all. I think this is really Damiano.”

  “Of course it is Damiano,” stated Saara.

  Gaspare sank to his knees. He yanked the pack from his back and began to pull it apart, until the pearl inlay of the lute belly shone under the moon like the spirit’s wings.

  “Play for me,” he demanded, thrusting the beautiful instrument at the ghost. “Play for me this minute, before you turn to moonlight or I wake up and it will be too late. For my worst fear, old partner, is that I will forget what you sounded like, who were—who are—the finest musician in…”

  Damiano shook his head, and the gray wings gathered closer. “There is no time left for that, Gaspare. I AM moonlight; I came with the moon and will fade with it. Besides—the lute and the playing of it is yours. But I will tell you one very important thing—old partner…”

  Gaspare leaned close to the dimly shining spirit, trying to quiet his ragged breath. Damiano’s serious face grew clear, and more intent, even as the rest of him darkened.

  “Gaspare. In music, as in everything else, ‘best’ is an empty Word. Don’t strive to be best, or you will wake up one day and know yourself no good at all.”

  Saara’s voice rapped out. “Enough! The moon is almost gone!

  What did you mean, Dami? That he might know the way to Satan’s Hall?”

  The ghost’s smile returned again, ruefully. A ghostly hand laid itself very lightly on Gaspare’s bosom. “There.” The words came faintly. “He knows it there, for pride calls to pride.” Gaspare gasped and shrank away, but the spirit consoled him,

  “I am not saying you are wicked, Gaspare, nor that you belong to the Devil’s own. Don’t be a fool like I was, to let him make you believe that! But you… like me… may have an understanding of Satan. Raphael wonders if that is what men are for, did you know? To understand the misery of wickedness, as angels cannot. To feel pity for it.”

  The hand, almost invisible now, rose to touch Gaspare’s still unbristly chin. “I’ll help you as I can, old friend. I haven’t forgotten that you were a very good manager to me.”

  Gaspare swallowed hard. He wanted to believe he felt the touch of that hand. “And I, sheep-… Damiano. I pray for your peace each night—when I think to pray, of course.”

  “I know,” whispered Damiano, and then Gaspare’s eyes could no longer see anything.

  Saara rose to her feet, her trembling hand raised before her. “Farewell, love,” she called to the air.

  “Love,” came back the reply, or else an echo.

  The moon was gone.

  “What did he mean?” demanded Gaspare, as the whites of his eyes glinted at Saara.

  The Lapp woman subjected Gaspare to an uncomfortable scrutiny. “He meant,” she said at last, “that you can tell me how to find and enter Satan’s stronghold.”

  “He meant that?” Both Gaspare’s hands clapped to the sides of his head. “I know Satan’s stronghold?” His stiff fingers stood up like antlers. “If he knows I know that, then he knows a lot more about me than I do about myself!”

  Saara yawned, glancing up at the starlit sky. “That is the first wise thing I have ever heard from your mouth, Gaspare.” She walked over to him, somewhat stiff from her hours on the chill earth. She laid her hand on his rather pointed red head and rumpled his hair. “Come now: It’s time to sleep. In the morning we can worry at the spirit-puzzles.”

  Chapter 4

  The night was more confusing than the daytime. During some hours Raphael slept, forgetting pain, abandonment, and the unpleasant feeling of being cold. But these interludes were interrupted by wakefulness, which, like a prodding finger, reminded him he was lost. And toward morning he was visited by an experience as miserable as wakefulness but different: his first nightmare.

  It was the sparrow again, gripping a bare twig with claws more brittle than the wood, its dusty feathers rutched against a light fall of snow.

  It had no song. This vision brought with it a sense of desolation unalloyed by hope.

  There was something here he was supposed to understand—he knew that much, at least—and with undemanding patience Raphael was prepared to let the dream unfold until he did understand. But with the first light the slave women began to stir in their chains, and very soon Perfecto (who had also spent a very bad night) was awake and kicking everybody else except Hakiim into r
ising. His kick to Raphael was perfunctory, for, truth to tell, Perfecto felt an inexplicable distrust of this gift almost amounting to terror.

  The new slave did not respond to the urging, because he was not yet finished with his dream. But with the increasing noise and bustle of the camp, the dream finished with him; it flew off, offended.

  Still Raphael did not move. He had an idea that if he kept his eyes closed long enough—if he denied the activity around him long enough—they would all pack up and go away. And that seemed very desirable this morning.

  He listened to the chatter of the women and the bray of the mules. His throat tightened with unconscious imitation of the noises both made. Stop it, he told himself. Rest again. Make it go away.

  Perfecto came back, and the kick he delivered was harder. “Get up, idiot!” the Spaniard snarled. “We’re traveling today if we have to drag you by a mule’s tail.”

  The blow hurt, but it certainly didn’t induce Raphael to obey. Instead he screwed his eyes tighter.

  Make it go away.

  And Perfecto did go away.

  Raphael was immensely heartened. He curled into a more comfortable ball and waited for sleep to take him again. Hakiim, the Moor, was whispering to someone close by. It was easy to ignore the sound.

  The pointy little foot caught him between the ribs and its big toe jabbed and wiggled. “Get up, Pinkie! You get up right now or I’ll stuff dirt up your nose!”

  It was not the threat but Djoura’s tone of voice that smote him. Guilt and remorse splashed through Raphael, all the worse for the fact that he’d no experience with either feeling. He clambered up, tripped in his voluminous gown, rose again, and stood tottering beside her, looking down at the top of her jingling headdress.

  The Berber possessed no veil to her headdress. Her excellent teeth shone whiter against a skin as opaque as lampblack as she gave Raphael a wolfish smile. “I knew you just needed encouragement,” she said.