Damiano's Lute Read online

  “Poor Festilligambe!” hiccoughed Gaspare. “Festilligambe? He alone among us…” Emotion choked the boy, and his face grew as red as his hair. “If I could live on the grass by the road, I’d have no more complaints.”

  Gaspare’s face was singular in its parts. His nose had an aquiline height of bridge and narrowness along its length which any man of birth might have been proud to call his own. His eyes were large and soulful and his complexion was milk and (more usually) roses. His mouth was mobile.

  Yet in all these features there was no harmony, but rather constant war, for the nose was too long and sharp for the shape of his face and the eyes were too big for anyone’s face, and his mouth—well, since it was never without a word, a twitch or a grimace, it was very hard to say anything about Gaspare’s mouth.

  He was just fourteen, and he hadn’t had a good dinner in far too long.

  “Nebuchadnezzar did,” replied the dark youth, referring to the possibility of living on grass. His voice was distant, his less ambitious but more proportionate features almost slack. “Or it is said that he did. But I don’t recall that he was happy eating grass.”

  Gaspare swelled. “I’m not happy, eating nothing!” Out of sulks he yanked a lock of hair that tumbled over his right ear. The spit curl went limp. His finger coiled it again, tighter. The boy’s head looked heavy, as will a round child-face that has grown too thin over its bones. Both his leanness and the dandified clothing he affected made Gaspare appear older than he was. Consequently his tempers seemed more scandalous.

  Damiano lifted one eyebrow. His form was also drawn out by fortune. In fact, he looked almost consumptive, with his face reduced to dark eyes he could hardly hold open and a red mouth that yawned. “Hein? My friend, I’m sorry. I would like to eat, too. But don’t begrudge the horse his horseness; if he had to eat bread we’d have been carrying our goods on our backs all the way from the Piedmont.”

  Gaspare could say nothing to this, and so was made even unhappier.

  Even in March, the warmth of noonday made wool itchy. Young Gaspare scraped his bottom against the seat, first right, then left. He was an unusually sensitive boy, both in spirit and in skin, and since he was also an unusually poor one, his sensitivities were an affliction to him.

  “Surely in such lovely countryside, we’ll find a town soon,” said Damiano, though the forced heartiness of his reply betrayed a lack of skill at lying. “Or perhaps an abbey, where we may be fed without having to put on a show.”

  “Or a rich penitent on pilgrimage,” Gaspare continued for him. “. . . strewing gold coins. Or a road leading up to heaven, white as milk, with angels beside it ranked like poplar trees—angels playing flageolets and cornemuse, but the angels will be made of cake, of course, and the pipes all of breadsticks, and at the top of the road will be a piazza paved with bricks of sweet cakes, and a gate of crystallized honey.

  “By the gate will stand Saint Pietro, dressed like a serving man, with a napkin over one arm and a wine cup in each hand, bowing and smiling. He will not stop us, but will thrust a cup lovingly into our hands. Then the sky will be all around us, floating with white-clothed banquet tables like so many clouds, and piled on each of them olives, puddings, pies, sweet and peppered frumenties…”

  “I despise frumenties,” murmured the driver, rousing a bit. The black gelding had maneuvered the wagon so far to the left of the road that his hooves scythed the bright and turgid grasses, and now he reached down for them in full rebellion. Damiano’s eyes stayed open long enough for him to pull the reins right.

  They were strange, those eyes of Damiano. They were dark and soft and heavily feathered, and in all ways what one desired and expected in a Latin eye. They were the sort of eye which is obviously created to house mysteries, and yet their only mystery was that they seemed to hide no mysteries at all, no more than the dark, soft eyes of a cow at graze. When Gaspare looked deeply into Damiano’s eyes (as happened most frequently when Gaspare was angry) he sometimes had the fantasy that he was looking straight through the man and at an empty sky behind. At those times the little hairs stood up on Gaspare’s arms.

  Gaspare’s own pale green eyes flashed. “Well, do not be alarmed, musician, for I don’t think you’re about to be offered frumenty. Nor olives, nor breads, nor roast pork, nor wine, nor…”

  “Do be quiet,” sighed the other, his loose shoulders slumping in exaggerated, Italian fashion. “This kind of talk doesn’t help. If you could think of something constructive to do about it…”

  Gaspare set his jaw, watching the last of the three ruined huts pass behind the wagon and be gone. “I have thought of something constructive. I told you, we should eat what God has put in our path.”

  The weary black eyes lit with amusement. “God sent that wether on to our road? Might He not also have sent the shepherd to follow? In which case our skins might have been stretched over a door alongside the sheepskin.”

  “We saw no shepherd,” spat Gaspare.

  Damiano nodded. “Ah, true. But then we killed no sheep!” He spoke with a certain finality, as though his words had proven a point, but there was something in his words which said also that he did not care.

  Gaspare’s expressive eyes rolled. (He, too, was Italian.) “I wasn’t even talking about the sheep, musician. Nothing to get us in trouble with the peasants. I meant hares and rabbits. Birds. The wild boar…” Damiano peered sidelong. “Have you ever seen a wild boar, Gaspare?”

  The redhead responded with an equivocal gesture. “Not… close up. You?”

  Damiano shook his head, sending his own black mane flying. His hair was so long and disordered it was almost too heavy to curl. “I don’t think so. Though I’m not sure how it would differ from a domestic boar.” With one hand he swept the hair back from his face, in a gesture that also had the purpose (vestigial, by this time) of throwing back the huge sleeves of a gown of fashion.

  “But, my friend, how have I ever stopped you from availing yourself of these foods? Have I hidden your knife, perhaps, or prevented you from setting a snare? Have I by word or deed attempted to discourage you…?”

  Gaspare broke in. “I can’t do it… when you won’t.” Nothing about his colleague bothered him half so much as Damiano’s educated vocabulary and poetical syntax. These mannerisms struck Gaspare like so many arrows, and he never doubted that Damiano used them that way to keep Gaspare (guttersnipe that he was) in his place. Gaspare would certainly have used such words in that fashion, if he’d known them. Yet at the same time the boy was as proud of Damiano’s learning as if it had been his own.

  Gaspare’s unspoken respect for his partner bordered on religious reverence, and he lived under a fear that someday Damiano would discover that. This thought was insupportable to the haughty urchin.

  Damiano, of course, had known Gaspare’s real feelings since the beginning of their partnership. But that knowledge didn’t make the boy any easier to take. The musician looked away, resting his gaze upon the purple horizon. He didn’t like quarrels. He didn’t have Gaspare’s energy to spend on them. “I don’t know how to set a snare, Gaspare,” he mumbled, and let the breezes of Provence wind through his vacant mind.

  The boy snorted. “But would you set one if I showed you how? Would you pluck a lark, or clean a rabbit, or even eat one if I cooked it for you?” He forestalled his friend’s slow headshake. “No, of course you wouldn’t. Well, that’s why I can’t, either—or I’ll be a bloodstained shambles-man in my own eyes. And so we’ll both starve to death.”

  Damiano gently corrected the horse. He yawned, partly because of the sun through a woolen shirt, and partly because discussions like this exhausted him. He wished there were some way he could communicate to Gaspare how like a blind man he felt, or perhaps like one who could not remember his own name. Not that Damiano was blind (only nearsighted), and not that he had forgotten anything. But he had been a witch and now was one no longer, and that was more than enough. Surely if the boy understood…

&nb
sp; But all he could bring himself to say was: “Please, Gaspare. I get so tired.”

  His lack of response brought the flush stronger into Gaspare’s face. “We will starve, and it will be all your fault!” he shouted, in an effort to be as unfair as possible.

  Damiano did not look at him.

  Gaspare’s color went from red to white with sheer rage. That he should have to follow this lifeless stick from place to place like a dog, dependent upon him for music (which was both Gaspare’s living and his life), for companionship, and even for language (for Gaspare spoke nothing but Italian)… it was crushing, insupportable. Tears leaked out of Gaspare’s eyes.

  But tears were not Gaspare’s most natural mode of expression. Convulsively he grabbed Damiano’s arm and drew it to him. With a canine growl he sank his teeth into it.

  Damiano stood up in the seat howling. Gaspare tasted blood but he did not let go, no more than any furious terrier, not until the wooden handle of the horsewhip came crashing down on his head and shoulders.

  Damiano then threw himself down from the seat of the moving wagon, clutching his bleeding arm and dancing over the shoulder of the road. The gelding pattered to a halt and turned its elegant, snake-like head.

  Above, on the high wooden seat, young Gaspare sat, red as a boiled crab, and puffing like a bellows.

  Damiano stared, slack-jawed, at him. “You bit me!” He repeated it twice, wonderingly. “Why?”

  Suddenly Gaspare was all composure, and he knew the answer to that question as he spoke it. “I wanted to see if you were still alive at all. You don’t act like it, you know, except when you play the lute. I thought maybe you died last winter, during the battle of San Gabriele, and had not yet noticed.

  “A man gets tired,” Gaspare concluded, “of talking with the dead.”

  Still gaping, Damiano pulled his woolen sleeve up. “Mother of God,” he whispered, staring at the neat oval of broken skin, where stripes of crimson were welling over the bronze. “You have bitten me like you were a dog! Worse, for no dog has ever bitten me.” His head went from side to side in shocked, old-womanish gestures, and his eyes on the wound were very large.

  Gaspare sat very tall on the wagon seat. The yellow and green of his dagged jerkin outlined the ribs over his emotion-puffed chest. “Best work I’ve done in weeks,” he stated. “Should have seen yourself hop.”

  Then he settled in the seat, like a bird shifting its weight from wings to perch. “You’ve been unbearable, lutenist. Absolutely unbearable for weeks. No man with a spirit could endure your company.”

  Receiving this additional shock, Damiano let his wounded arm drop. “Unbearable? Gaspare! I haven’t even raised my voice to you. You’re the one who has been howling and complaining since we hit the French side of the pass….”

  “Exactly!” The boy thrust out one knobbed finger. “Even though it is to meet my sister we are traveling across France and Provence in cold, dry Lent. It is me who complains, because I am a man. And you bear with me with a saintly, condescending patience which undermines my manhood.” Now Gaspare stood, declaiming from the footboard (which wobbled) of the high seat.

  “To err is human. Yes! I am a human man and proud of it! To forgive… and forgive, and forgive… that is diabolic.”

  Suddenly the older fellow’s dark face darkened, and he kicked a wheel as he muttered, “Did you have to say that—exactly that, Gaspare? Diabolic? A man can also get tired of being called a devil.”

  Gaspare snorted and wiped his nose on his long, tight sleeve. “No fear. You possess no such dignity. You are the unwitting—and I do mean unwitting—tool of wickedness, designed to lead me to damned temptation! By Saint Gabriele, Damiano, I believe you lost your head with that cursed Roman General Pardo in the town hall cellar, for you’ve been nothing but a ghost of a man since.”

  Damiano stared at Gaspare, and then stared through him. Five seconds later, for no perceivable reason, he flinched. His uninjured arm gestured about his head, dispersing unseen flies. Without a word he stepped to the side of the wagon and climbed into it through one of its large holes. A moment later he was out again, carrying a bundle with a strap and another bundle wrapped in flannel. The first he slid over his back (it made a tinkling noise) and the second he cradled with motherly care. Then he strode off and disappeared to Gaspare’s eyes, hidden by the bulk of the wagon.

  Gaspare heard the receding footsteps. He stood and hopped from one foot to the other. Failing to see Damiano appear around the wagon, he sprang gracefully to the dirt.

  It was true. The lutenist was leaving, plodding back up the road toward Lyons, Chamonix and the Alps. Without another word, he was leaving. By conscious effort, the boy turned his sensation of cold desolation into his more accustomed red anger. He caught up with Damiano in ten athletic bounds.

  “Hah!” he spat. “So you think to stick me with that unmanageable swine of a horse? Well, it won’t work. The crows can pick his ribs for all I care!” And he executed a perfect, single-point swivel, flung up his right arm in a graceful, dynamic and very obscene gesture, and marched back down the road west and south. His small, peaked face was flaming.

  Damiano, in his outrage, had forgotten Festilligambe, and he now felt a bit foolish. His less acrobatic steps slowed to a shuffling halt, while he heard Gaspare rummaging through the wagon. At last, when the noise had faded, Damiano came back.

  The horse, while still standing between the traces, stared curiously over his shoulder at Damiano. He had a marvelous flexibility in that neck, did Festilligambe. Damiano tossed his gear back into the wagon and carefully deposited the lute into the niche in one corner which he had built for it. (This corner had no holes.)

  Slowly and spiritlessly Damiano walked over to the horse. He examined the knotted, makeshift harness and the places where it had worn at the beast’s coat. Festilligambe lipped his master’s hair hopefully, tearing out those strands which became caught between his big box teeth. Damiano didn’t appear to notice.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this to you, fellow,” he whispered, stroking the black back free from dust. “You are no cart horse. It’s clean straw and grain for which you were born. And fast running, with victory wine from silver cups.” Thick horse lips smacked against the young man’s face, telling him what the gelding thought about silver cups. His near hind foot suggested they start moving again.

  Having no ideas of his own, Damiano was open to such suggestion. He boosted himself up to the driver’s seat and reached for the whip he had dropped after drubbing Gaspare. Carefully he pulled up his sleeve, bunching it above the elbow to allow the sun free access to the neatly punched bite on his forearm.

  The horse did not wait for a signal to start.

  What a misery that boy was. Squatting passively on the plank of wood, Damiano let Gaspare’s offenses parade by, one by one.

  There had been that housewife in Porto. She had had no business to call the boy such names, certainly, but you cannot drive through a town cracking strange women on the head and expect to get away with it. Not even when they are bigger than you. Especially not then. She had almost broken the lute over Damiano’s shoulders (though he was by rights not involved in the exchange of insults, only easier to catch than Gaspare).

  And in Aosta they had come near to fame, or at least a comfortable living, playing before the Marchioness d’Orvil, until Gaspare ruined things and nearly got them sent to prison with that sarabande he insisted on dancing. In front of the marquese, besides. Damiano blushed even now, wondering how he could have missed seeing all winter that the dance was obscene. Gaspare had no delicacy.

  But he was touchy as a condottiere, where slights to his small self were concerned. And jealous. Though he never let Damiano forget the young man’s inexperience with women, Gaspare’s attitude was as possessive as it was mocking, and his green eyes watched Damiano’s every move. Let the lute player offer one gallant word to a female of any description, whether it be a girl with the figure of a poker or a mother with a doz
en children, and Gaspare purely trembled with agitation.

  You’d think he was a girl himself.

  And hey! Gaspare was even jealous of the horse. That was what lay behind his silly resentment of the animal. He was jealous.

  Heat laid a dry hand against Damiano’s face. The clouds had dissolved in the sky. The black gelding trotted now easily, ears a-prick, long head bowing left and right to an invisible audience. It was as though this trip to Provence were Festilligambe’s idea, not Damiano’s. Or rather not Gaspare’s, Damiano corrected himself. Damiano had no pressing desire to meet Evienne and her thieving clerk of a lover in Avignon on Palm Sunday. It was Gaspare who had arranged the rendezvous and set the time. (And what a time! How they had gotten through the snows of the pass at that season was a story in itself, and not a pleasant one. It had almost done for the lute, not to mention the three living members of the party.)

  Gaspare babbled endlessly about his sister, calling her harlot, slut and whore with every breath and always in tones of great pride. He had badgered Damiano into crossing the Alps two months too early,

  just to keep faith with this sister with whom he was sure to squabble again in the first hour.

  There was nothing wrong with Evienne, really. She had a warm, ripe body dusted with freckles, a wealth of copper hair and a strong desire to please.

  But when Damiano compared her to another woman of his acquaintance—a lady whose tint was not so rare or figure quite so generous—all Evienne’s color and charm faded into insignificance.

  Next to Saara of the Saami, all of female humanity came out second best, Damiano reflected ruefully.

  And when Gaspare met Evienne again, along with her lover and pimp, Jan Karl, the boy was sure to learn more pickpocket’s tricks. He was certain to wind up hanged as a thief, if he didn’t die brawling.

  Damiano shut off this silent arraignment of his musical partner, without even touching on Gaspare’s salient vices of gluttony and greed. It was an arraignment too easy to draw up, and rather more pathetic than damning. The upset of spirits it was causing in the lutenist was making his arm throb harder.