Raphael (2 page)

“Not that Delstrego had any importance in himself, mind you. No more than any of that… that mortal tillage of mine. But such as he was, he was Raphael's weakness.”

Lucifer straightened in his chair and dropped his fist to the table. His face was a sculpture of cold hate, at which the demon stared in a terror of admiration. “Raphael's weakness,” repeated Lucifer, gaining fury as he spoke.

“Oh, my sickly sweet, sainted brother!”

The Devil flung himself to his feet. The table was jarred and the intricate, careful palace model skidded over its smooth surface. The raspberry demon flailed and caught it just before it went over.

“Don't do that, please, Your Magnificence!”

“Raphael! Raphael!” hissed Lucifer. His face went from coral to blotched snow and rubies. “After Michael, I hate you more than any created being! And since you've never had the Sword-Angel's hard-headed good sense, you have let events carry you to ME.

“And you did it all by yourself.” And at some sudden memory, Lucifer snickered, as his anger was cut with ugly hope. He stopped before a heavy metallic tapestry which hung between north and east, and he fingered it, following its embroidered story with his eyes.

“Once you were no more than a mirror for Him, like that other sheep, Uriel: beautiful, blank, and… and quite safe from influence.

“Now you've become nearly as much a slave to the earth as some sylph of earth's air, brother. You bob right and left as the winds take you, and there is no one down there—absolutely no one, you will find—who can protect you.”

And with these words, and the more complex thoughts which went behind them, Lucifer's mood flipped over, from immediate disappointment to eventual success and he looked inward upon a balmy future steeped in revenge.

“You see, Kadjebeen, my playing at dice for the soul of the little witch man wasn't a loss, after all. No—for every time he escaped me, it was by some great expense of Raphael's, until now, after only a little time at the gambling wheels of earth, my brother is near bankrupt.”

Lucifer giggled then, and in a moment he had himself convinced that he had never been interested in Damiano Delstrego's soul at all.

“My only mistake,” concluded Lucifer, raising his eyes and pointing at the raspberry demon, Kadjebeen, who still sat on the table, clutching his cunning image between his curly feet, “was in trying to use the man as the final bait to my trap now that he is dead and therefore untouch—or rather, I mean, without importance to me. Though as a gesture it would have had such artistic merit…”

Kadjebeen folded his hands and stared at his model, lest he be accused of acquiescence in the idea that Lucifer had made any mistake at all. And that he was wise to do so was proven in the next moment, for Lucifer smote his palm with a fist and cried, “Why, by my own powers! Of course. There was no error! He CAN be the bait of my trap, even now.”

And then Lucifer strode over to the window of the south, where lay expanses both of desert and plenty. “Woe, my dear Raphael,” he whispered, as his blue eyes wandered, making plans. “You have loved well, but not at all wisely.”

The baked white earth threw the heat against the baked white wall, which threw it back again. Hidden cicadas produced a tranced droning which was the perfect aural equivalent of the heat shimmer: a sound which a person might ignore for hours at a time before his consciousness came up against it, and which then would become unbearable.

Above San Gabriele the dark hills gathered, looming over the village like large friends who stood too close for one's comfort. Their blackish evergreen slopes promised a relief from the August heat to anyone who had the energy to walk so far.

For the most part, the San Gabrieleans preferred the blackish relief to be found within the wineshop. There, stretched out on the bosom of Mother Earth (the shop boasted no other floor), a handful of men with nothing to do let the sun fry the world outside.

Not that they were all drinking wine. Signor Tedesco, proprietor of the little store, would have been very happy had that been the case. But in all the village of San Gabriele there was not a man who had the money to spend his weekdays in a haze of vinous glory.

One man had a bottle which had been passed around a bit, and another had a half-bottle, which had not. The same fellow possessed a loaf of bread longer than his arm, which he guarded, waiting for the cool of the afternoon to give him the energy with which to eat. Another refugee from the sun had brought his lute, a very fine instrument, bright, sonorous, covered with a paper-thin inlay of mother-of-pearl, upon which he was trading songs with a chitarre player. A second lute, also belonging to the chitarrist, lay on the table unused because it would not stay in tune with the other instruments.

Signor Tedesco regarded his patrons with a jaundiced eye. He had had no intention of creating an atmosphere conducive to the promulgation of the arts. He hadn't even intended for the wine that he sold to be consumed in the confines of his shop.

He knew what an inn was: enough to know his wineshop didn't qualify. He wouldn't mind being an innkeeper, mind you, for he rather thought a man of that occupation might be a little wealthier than a villager who bought twenty casks of cheap red per season and filled bottles with the stuff. But if he were an innkeeper, Signor Tedesco would have tried to keep riffraff like this off his floor.

Especially the redhead in the corner making strange noises on the lute. He was the kind of musician Tedesco liked to refer to as having his ears on upside down. No more than seventeen years old, surely, the young pup bounced his hands up and down the neck of his pretty instrument with great concentration and produced a variety of sounds that Tedesco found quite unpleasant.

(But then, to be fair to the redheaded lutenist, Signor Tedesco had about twenty songs he liked, having known them from childhood, and he liked them played only in certain ways and on certain instruments, and thought the rest of the musical world might just as well go hang.)

The gangling youth pinched a smart octave on the sixth of the scale, then added to it a tenth above, then an eleventh and even a twelfth. Instead of resolving the progression, the musician then damped out the final sound on the beat and called the song complete.

Tedesco didn't know what an eleventh interval was, but he knew how to shudder.

“That's… very original,” murmured the chitarrist, for although his ears, too, were a bit shocked, he was willing to try to understand. “Why does it end like that? Bomp!”

The redhead had an aggressive chin and eyes of a peculiar pale sage green, in a face which had not yet settled into its adult proportions (if indeed it had any intention of settling). His Adam's apple rehearsed his answer before he opened his mouth.

“That's so you don't fall asleep.” Then he shrugged enormously and cast the question behind him. “What can I say? What do you expect me to say? That's how the song came to me.”

“Came to you?” echoed the chitarrist, who was a round-faced fellow with a bristling mustache and three fat little babies at home. “You made it up?”

Gaspare drummed his fingers on the soundboard a trifle self-consciously and let his oversized eyes wander out the door as he replied. “Of course I made it up. Everything I play is my own.

“To play another man's music,” he added righteously, “is akin to theft.”

One who knew Gaspare well—one like his sister Evienne, for example—might have fallen face first upon the dirt, hearing this statement uttered in this tone by Gaspare of San Gabriele. But Evienne was not in San Gabriele but in Avignon, tending her own fat babies, and the villagers Gaspare had left behind some years ago found it easy to forget the scrawny, light-fingered street dancer when looking at this insolent youth with his foreign manners and his exquisite lute.

The chitarrist took this opportunity to run a fingernail down his strings. Signor Tedesco, behind his counter, perked up. But Gaspare had so cowed the round-faced man that he dared not go simply from the root to the fifth and then back again, as he had intended, so his endeavor led to nothing. The chitarrist stared glumly at his fingernails.

“But what about the master musician of whom you are always speaking, whom you followed from Lombardy to France? I was under the impression it was his tunes with which you educate the village.”

Gaspare's eyes did not exactly mist over, for he had not the sort of eye for that, but they expressed a certain feeling. He slumped back, letting his lute he in his lap like an empty bowl.

“Ah, yes. Delstrego. You know—while I was with him I never touched the lute. Never dared, I guess. And then afterward, though I have had my training at the hands of his own teacher, and it was my idea to sound as much like him as possible…”

The redhead sighed. “It didn't work that way.

“And now I see that it could not, and I no longer desire to imitate him, for Delstrego was in a way a soft man. Whereas I…”

The bristling mustache stood out like a hedgehog's quills, as the chitarrist reflected on Gaspare's lack of softness. Gaspare himself ignored the smile.

“And when I tried to play Delstrego's songs with my own hands and my own spirit, then they sounded like little birds that had been put in a cage of iron.” His long nose twitched and he sat up again.

“So I let them go.” The redhead gestured theatrically toward the rough stone doorway.

“Still, if Damiano Delstrego himself were to come stepping in that door out of the summer heat, with his little lute under his arm—then you would hear some music,” vouched Gaspare, whose self-importance, though considerable, had never been permitted to come between himself and his admiration for his first friend. “You would hear music more original than mine, and yet music even Signor Tedesco could appreciate.”

The proprietor raised his head, frowning, uncertain whether he had just been praised or insulted.

Gaspare, still with his hand raised, stared out the pale shimmer of the open door. Cold water seemed to trickle up and down his spine, unpleasant despite the heat, and he wondered if perhaps he had said something he should not have said.

Behind the wineshop, and behind every other shop and dwelling in their nudging row along this street in San Gabriele, was a straight and narrow alley, which (since the battle of the same name as the town, four years before) led to nothing but a pile of rubble. Without a steady stream of feet to keep the clay packed, this alley had been conquered by grass, which had in turn suffered from a lack of sun. Summer had killed this unfortunate growth and dipped it in bronze, but still it held some value for a gelding who had discovered it in the process of avoiding the sun.

This animal was black and lean. Its long neck was sinuous. Its long legs were… well, very long. One of its ears rested malevolently back against its head, but the horse gave the impression that its ill-temper was a chronic condition, not about to manifest itself into action on this stifling afternoon. The horse's other ear made circles of uneasiness. He chewed half a jawful of yellow grass and let the remainder drop.

Under the thatch of the wineshop roof sat a brown wood dove, colored such a pale and desiccated brown that she might have been molded of clay and left to dry in the sun. She was keeping a sort of uncommunicative company with the gelding. She was also listening to the music within.

Doves are for the most part very conservative singers, and do not appreciate any music but their own. This dove, however, was only a dove part-time. She was a witch, and what is more, a singing witch. She listened to Gaspare's lute playing with a quick and educated mind.

It tended to give her a headache.

Bird eyes regarded the stripe of uncompromising blue sky which was visible under the ragged thatch. She didn't know what it was about the heavens which seemed so false, or at least dubious, today. She rather suspected that Gaspare was about to do something he shouldn't. The boy was much wiser than he used to be—the Eagle Chief's influence, if not her own—but still he had a long trail to sled before he could be safely left to his own devices.

Saara could easily imagine Gaspare accepting a challenge to a duel: he who had never held a sword in his life. She could even imagine him challenging some other to a duel. Over some picayune point of music, of course.

Some hot-tempered village maiden could run him through with a pitchfork. Or her father could. At least, being simple (not a witch born), Gaspare could not lose himself in the myriad dangers and seductions that came to a youngster with Sight.

Saara felt a certain responsibility for Gaspare, born out of both friends and adventure shared. She shifted from foot to foot. Because she was a dove, this looked much like a round pot rolling from side to side on the table. She heard the chitarrist in the wineshop make his tentative dribble of sound and, like Signor Tedesco himself, she had hopes. But it seemed fated the man would not continue his plain, confident melody.

The day would not permit.

Festilligambe, the horse standing below, felt the same unease, for he wiggled an ear in the direction of Saara (whom he knew quite well, both as bird and as human) and he stepped out into the unfriendly sun.

That white disk of light bleached the color of the soul, and it stole the will away. Even Gaspare (bright of hue and mightily determined) ceased playing. The two beasts heard the murmur of his voice seeping through the metallic-hot air. Then that sound, too, dried away.

Someone was coming up the hill of San Gabriele, striding long-legged past the ruin of the village wall. The rhythm of his steps, and the regular thumping of his wooden stick, broke the cicada's drone.

He was dressed in black, and his hair was black, and as he lifted his eyes toward the yawning door of the wineshop, they, too, were black. His face was comely, though the nose was a trifle broad, and in those quick black eyes shone intelligence. From his staff flashed red and yellow, which shimmered, along with the entire figure, in the glare of the sun.