Damiano's Lute Read online

He took a stride forward and opened his mouth to call. The next instant saw him leap stiff-legged off the ground, swallowing his words, for two plump pink arms had embraced him from behind, while a thick voice in his ear wheedled, “Aww, Monsieur Trouvere! Give us a little song.”

  “Madam!” he croaked, or rather squeaked, swelling his shoulders to release himself and spinning in place.

  “Madam. I think, perhaps, with the troubles this town is suffering…”

  Here he paused to breathe, to gather his wits and to step away from the woman of many layers. “I think perhaps it is not the time for song.”

  She giggled and made a little moue. “Not if one has the plague, of course. But we are the ones the plague has passed over, and for us entertainment is very necessary.”

  She really was not bad to look at. Her eyes were bright blue, and tilted in a manner which reminded Damiano of someone or other. Her hair, escaping from the underside of her wimple, was barley-fair. And Damiano had nothing at all against plumpness.

  Yet he found this woman appalling. “Is it over, then?” he mumbled, looking around at the sunny square. “Is the plague at an end?” Under this blue heaven he could be easily convinced the plague was over, purified by spring weather alone.

  She shrugged, and the many layers of linen (the top layer was real lace) puffed with air before settling once more around her. It occurred to Damiano that these Provençal people did not shrug like Italians, forthrightly. They had sly shrugs. “It has killed most all those it is going to kill,” she replied, as the baby in the doorway gave a tiny, sleeping cough.

  He looked into her face, and then Damiano smelled olives. His long-nursed, familiar hunger awoke like a lion, nearly driving him to his knees, while at the same instant he felt he would much rather die than eat anything he found in Petit Comtois.

  “Must go,” he mumbled, and he took two smart strides down the main street. Then the woman had a grasp on his left leg, and was dragging him to his knees.

  “Music,” she cried out. “We must have music.”

  An instant later a half-dozen villagers, mostly female, had added their soft, unyielding pressure to hers. Damiano sat down on the street, cursing, holding his lute away from their curious, bejeweled fingers.

  Yet he was not entirely proof against this rough sort of flattery, and when someone dropped a great gold pendant with a red stone around his neck, he was not proof against that, either. With a broad, forthright and very Italian gesture, he yielded.

  It was too bad Gaspare wasn’t here. These mad souls would have loved Gaspare. (Like calls to like.) Yet he wouldn’t wish this place on the redhead, nor on anyone. He took the pendant off and stuffed it in his belt-pouch lest it scratch the finish of the instrument, and began to play.

  These people didn’t need a professional dancer after all. The way that fat woman was capering was an education to watch. And the butcher jigging on one foot next to her. For a moment Damiano thought the man in the bloodstained apron was the same he had seen in the church, lying still and awaiting promotion to the left-hand side. But no. The sentence of the plague was never commuted; the only similarity between the two men was in the leather apron.

  He gave them the rondel and the crude estampie, and when they were warmed up—indeed, hot was the more accurate word—he played that sarabande of Gaspare’s which he had so much reason to dislike. In his single year of playing for bread, Damiano had learned to judge an audience correctly, so he wasted none of the difficult polyphonics, and nothing Raphael had taught him at all.

  And if his fingers pinched the strings with a hint of contempt, and if he damped a bit harshly, well, that was all to the better, considering that Damiano’s natural touch was too delicate for everyday tastes.

  He lifted his eyes to see a huddle of drab brown at the edge of this graceless circle. Even the flagellants were drawn to the sound of festival, it seemed. In a moment they would be dancing.

  “Mother of God,” whispered Damiano to himself. “Is one fury interchangeable for another?”

  Then the sound of bone against flesh broke through the music. A year ago this would have caused the young man to stop, or at least to drop a beat. But now his fingers continued their course while he glanced up to see the man in the apron laid low by the biggest of the flagellants. With a noise of childish outrage the woman of layers bounded across the dust of the square and kicked the flagellant in the middle of his horsehair and ashes.

  This was not the first time Damiano had played for a dance which became a melee. His policy was to continue playing, while backing away from the ring of trouble. In this situation he found it most advisable to scrape along the row of ruined shops on the left of the main street. Following this course, he would eventually put the flagellants between him and the merry madmen (who were certain they were not going to get the plague) and seek Festilligambe in peace.

  He was fingering a spirited bransle (what else do you play when the audience is brawling?) when a round, soft, little noise behind him caused him to turn his head.

  This was the doorway of mother and baby, but mother was presently out in the sunshine, engaged in pulling someone’s hair. Baby lay alone in the darkened goldsmith’s shop, dressed in white christening robes, coated hands and feet with a precious, glittering dust, and coughing.

  “Mother of God,” groaned Damiano once again, and for a single instant he entertained the idea of taking the child with him. But in his twenty-three years Damiano had never so much as held an infant in his arms, and all he knew about their care was that he was fairly certain they could not eat grass.

  Avoiding the tiny mite, he set his instrument within the shop, in the safety of a dark corner, and then he went back out to find his horse.

  “Festilligambe,” he called, trying to be melodious as well as penetrating. There was no answer.

  His next cry was less modulated, but still he heard no reply, except from the brawl in the square. A silver tankard rolled, clanking, past his feet. He ignored it.

  All these houses marched down to the street, and of those which had stables below, all were open and empty. The packed earth would hold no imprint. “Festilligambe!” bellowed Damiano. There was a scuffle of feet behind him.

  It took Damiano a good two seconds to understand that the flagellants were chasing him. For one more second he stood his ground, belligerently resentful that they would try to get him involved in an argument between two breeds of lunatic. Then he sprinted.

  Had he been less outraged, or had he understood the situation a bit quicker, he might have escaped, for his opponents were weakened by their mutual abuse. But four pairs of hands gripped his tunic and his feet were kicked out from under him.

  “Damn the lot of you,” roared the furious musician, suspended by his shirt three feet off the ground. His fist connected twice, on what felt like hard pieces of anatomy. “I’ve had just enough idiocy!”

  Then his head was lifted from behind, by the hair. The expressionless features of the chief flagellant looked down upon him. “Corruption,” the man stated. “Human flesh is corruption, and the worm is its end. You are a sinner and partake of the nature of the beast. You must be freed from your corruption.” There was a tinkle as of tiny bells, as the tips of a cat jingled together.

  Then Damiano was no longer furious, but frightened.

  With sweat prickling all over, Gaspare backed away from the dead man he had come so close to touching. There was no doubt in his mind what had killed this fellow: those horrible round lumps like oak galls on the neck, the pus-y, discolored face and the general attitude of being left to he where it fell…

  He did not need the row of yawning doors and the desolation of the quarter to confirm his opinion. Gaspare had no trust in the world to delay his acceptance of sad reality. This was plague, just like that which had slain half the world a generation ago, and Gaspare was going back over the wall quickest.

  Sinking back into the ashes of the hut where he had earlier sat in unhurried thought, Gaspar
e shivered all over. What an ass he was, not to have guessed why they burned the place down! He minced out through the gaping door, shaking clean one foot, then the other.

  Distrustfully—hungrier than ever despite the crawling horror—he examined the road west. Rumor had it that plague, like mankind, followed the roads. And it hadn’t come from above, to the east in Franche-Comté or the Chamonix Pass. Perhaps Provence already suffered the worst. Perhaps Avignon was dead, as it had been only sixteen years before. Perhaps…

  Evienne.

  Gaspare’s heart banged his fragile chest wall like a prisoned enemy. He felt each mile that lay between his sister and himself as an unendurable deprivation: a personal insult against him and his.

  An affront to pride. He flared his pinched nostrils against it.

  It did not occur to him that being with Evienne would not prevent her (or him) from contracting plague. Avoiding the plague was not the issue for Gaspare. Getting through the plague to Evienne was.

  Why had he let her run off with that miserable, horse-faced Dutchman, anyway? Bad enough she should be a prostitute at home in San Gabriele (among family, as it were), let alone spreading her scandal into foreign countries.

  Leaving him nursemaid to a lute player who saw angels.

  Damiano! Gaspare’s head jerked up, and he moved away from the wall where he had been leaning. Where was that soft-eyed simpleton: lumbering the old cart back up toward the pass? Or would he have continued west? Gaspare cursed himself for not stopping to make sure. His feet led him over the cleared land which surrounded the wall of the town and into the head-high brush.

  Why would Damiano go back, after all? It was he who originally wanted to see Provence, whence came the music. The lutenist had only wanted to wait until May before attempting the Alpine passes.

  Well, they were over the passes. Easier to go on than back. And that meant Damiano would trot that spoiled, sullen-tempered horse straight into trouble.

  Gaspare could close his eyes and see it happening: a scene complete, with Damiano yawning, the horse snapping harness right and left, the rickety wagon trundling its oblivious way past rows of grinning corpses and burned shops. His soft-shod feet gathered speed.

  Looking up the road past the gate, Gaspare saw nothing. He breathed with relief. Then he noticed the familiar, derelict wagon squatting at the edge of the cleared land, its shafts angling out like the long curved tushes of a boar.

  Damnation and buggery. What could be done with the fellow? Gaspare washed his hands in the air. It was a gesture that relieved his feelings but did not change the fact that he’d have to go in and drag Damiano out.

  He went over the wall with the speed of practice, and padded nonchalantly down an empty street. Why should he skulk, when he’d broken no laws (so far) and besides, could outrun anyone he’d ever met?

  The first street was without interest. So was the second.

  Along the third, he heard a noise: a regular and workmanlike thumping, as of a hammer against wood. Exercising greater caution (because although he had broken no laws so far, there was no assurance he might not want to break some soon), he decreased the distance between himself and the source of the disturbance.

  It was coming from a half-door set into the first floor of a square stone building no different from any of its neighbors, except that it smelled a trifle more rank.

  Gaspare peeped obliquely in, to discover a horse, which was eating with its front end and kicking with its back end. It performed these actions in sequence, first chewing a bite of oats, then swallowing, then heaving up and delivering a massive blow to the oaken panels of the door. Gaspare found he could count to six during each iteration of the cycle.

  The horse was Festilligambe.

  Gaspare leaned negligently against the stones of the stable wall, considering what he saw.

  As a picture, he liked it. Damiano would, no doubt, be quite concerned that the horse would injure himself kicking the door. The owner of the stable might legitimately be concerned as well. Gaspare, however, liked both the animal’s rebelliousness and his realistic attitude. It wasn’t Gaspare’s door, after all. Nor his horse.

  But how had the horse gotten here? Damiano hadn’t a sou to pay for oats. And he wasn’t likely to have sold the brute. Christ, no! The lute player would sooner part with his bollucks. And why did Festilligambe have such a grudge against dry straw and good grain? He was a perverse horse, but not that perverse.

  Gaspare had a strong hunch something was wrong. He leaped lightly to the top of the door, timing his move for the moment the horse took a mouthful from the manger, and then landed lightly on the blond straw on the far side of the box from the gelding.

  “Hey! Festilligambe. Idiot-face,” hissed the dancer. The startled animal shrieked and spewed oats into the air.

  “Shut up,” rapped Gaspare, and he pointed in peremptory fashion. “So. You came into a fortune, eh, old friend? Well, one friend’s fortune is another friend’s.” And reaching into the black and bitten wood manger, he filled both his jerkin pockets (which were bigger than such pockets had any right to be) with golden grain. Then he filled his purse.

  With enough oats, one could make frumenty. Or flatbread. But it wasn’t with the clear idea of cookery that Gaspare loaded himself with the grain. It was only that it was there for the taking.

  When sufficiently laden, Gaspare took the gelding’s dangling halter rope and wound it securely around his wrist. Then he led the now-docile horse to the door. “We’re going out now, nag-butt,” he whispered up at the black ear, a foot above his head. “We’re going out to look for old sheep-face Damiano. Can you find Damiano for me, boy?”

  The horse blinked down at him mildly. Gaspare untied the leathern thong that held the door. He was nervous. If the truth be told, Gaspare was afraid of horses. A crack of light appeared as the oak door began to open.

  Festilhgambe hit it, chest on, roaring, and with a display of Barbish speed and temperament, flung himself along the empty street. They were halfway to the next corner before Gaspare’s pitiful scream hit the air.

  His arm was caught in the rope. His feet never hit the ground. There was nothing for the boy to do but grab a handful of mane with his left hand and hang on.

  Except for Delstrego Senior, no man had ever laid punishing hands on Damiano. Or, more accurately, no man had gotten away with it. Damiano was less prepared than most men for the touch of the whip, and the first lick of the tipped cat stiffened him from bucking and thrashing into mute astonishment. The second stroke knocked him to his elbows. On the third he cried out, or tried to.

  With the fourth multifingered assault upon his back, he gathered himself together and fled—fled in a manner he himself did not understand—through the ragged, empty socket in the middle of his mind.

  It was dark here, and green with the background of fir trees. The grass was dotted with crocus and snowdrops, and with gold brushes of flowering mustard. Over the flat meadow wound a stream which expressed neither decision nor ambition, weaving its course as random as a snailtrack.

  Over and through the branchlets of the stream splashed a doe goat, bleating unhappily, tied with a garland of grape hyacinth. It was a brown goat, cow-hocked and very gravid, still wearing great patches of its winter coat.

  The weaver of the garland was a more delicate creature. She rubbed one bare toe against the other leg, while she tickled the underside of her own nose with a yellow-brown braid.

  “Behave like a lady,” she said to the goat, speaking with firmness, and pointing to the fragile band of blue flowers. “If you tear that off, I’ll stuff it down your throat.”

  The goat stopped still, but not out of docility. It chewed an uneasy cud, and rolled its square-pupiled eyes at what it saw.

  Saara turned also, and her own green, tilted eyes widened. She dropped her braid.

  “You!” she whispered, half to herself. “Dark boy. Damiano!” One hand, small, pink and slender, made a circling gesture.

  And the lu
te player knew her as well: Saara of the Saami, barefoot girl who was the greatest witch in the Italies.

  Damiano knew Saara’s powers well, having both suffered them and then stolen them. And now all the strength was hers and he had none at all.

  Damiano felt himself step closer to the witch (though he himself did not know how he did it, not having a body with which to step). The placid water passed beneath his substanceless flesh without disturbance.

  “You cannot be dead! I would know it if you were dead,” she stated, yet by her voice Saara had her doubts. Her hand reached out toward him, as though to wipe haze from a glass, and quietly she began to sing.

  Once again Damiano was aware of having feet, and hands. They tingled. He brushed back the coarse hair from his face. “I don’t think I am dead,” he heard himself saying. “For though I can imagine nothing more like heaven than your garden, my lady, I have been led to expect there will be a matter of judgment to endure before I reach such a paradise. Assuming I am found worthy of it.”

  How odd his voice sounded in his own ears: a bit thin, perhaps, but quite composed and calm. And how confidently he stepped through air that had more substance than he did. Now Saara was almost close enough to touch. In three steps, she would touch. She chanted sunlight into the young man’s eyes. He blinked. His feet sank into marshy ground.

  Then Damiano remembered. “I’m not supposed to be here!” he announced, stepping back and into deeper water. “This is Lombardy, and I’m in Provence. I shouldn’t have come at all!”

  Saara paused, her feet resting on the tussocky grass. Her small face tilted like that of a wary bird. “But I knew you would come, at last, Dami. Part of your soul is waiting here. You have only come after it —there is nothing wrong in that.” She stepped into water, and Saara, greatest witch in the Italies, sank ankle-deep in the mud.

  Floundering backward, Damiano shook his head. “No, signora. I followed my lost powers, surely, but I did so in my effort to escape the lash, not to mention the plague. And in this I have done myself more harm than good.”