Raphael (29 page)

He met steel, and the blond flexed his blade in a tiny circle. To Hasiim's immense surprise he felt his weapon loosen in his grasp. The scimitar hit the earth. Hasiim flung himself back.

To take a breath. To consider. To demand another scimitar from his milling followers.

Raphael did not drop his eyes from Hasiim's. He saw the Arab blink, shift from foot to foot, breathe a prayer to Allah.

HIM AND ALL HE HAD DELUDED TO STAND WITH HIM. Satan himself had given back before four angels. What hope had a mortal warrior, however skilled? Raphael looked at Hasiim and knew he could destroy the man. He stepped out from the buttress, his scimitar drifting like a leaf in the breeze.

The Berber's eyes widened. Raphael met those eyes.

And Raphael was lost.

This man was not Satan nor had he been bought by him. He was a stubborn and prideful mortal—a man not to Raphael's taste. A dangerous man. But Raphael gazed at Hasiim and felt a peculiar painful pity.

This hesitation gave Hasiim—who felt no similar emotion while glaring at Raphael—time to strike another sweeping cross-hand blow. Raphael countered, but did not press the advantage.

With a strident ululation, another tribesman stood beside Hasiim, sword at the ready. In this man's face Raphael read plain fear, mastered by the desire to please his commander. This second warrior slashed fiercely at Djoura, who raised her blade against the attack. But the swordsman feinted away and licked in beneath the woman's awkward guard.

Raphael snapped the man's blade in two. Djoura opened his face.

Hasiim, losing patience, shoved his subordinate aside and rushed his opponent as though he himself were still on horseback, slashing in even diagonals as he came. Raphael flung himself down on one knee before Djoura and his scimitar flashed broadside, clashing against Hasiim's weapon. Then he spring up again and knocked the qa'id backward before he could disengage. Taking the swordsman's wrist in his own, he twisted the hilt of the weapon, trying to pull it from Hasiim's grasp.

They fell and struggled, breath hissing into one another's face. Next to Raphael's head a sword struck the ground and sparked. Hasiim's eyes shifted. He cried a few words in his Berber dialect and the attack was not repeated.

Only a few inches above Hasiim's face hung that of Raphael. It was pale under its sunburn, bearing no sign of anger or outrage, but rather the sad concentration of a tutor with a very slow pupil. And from Raphael's neck dangled, like some rough piece of jewelry, the iron slave collar. Hasiim grabbed it in one hand, while the other hand dropped his blade and fixed itself against Raphael's neck. With one hand he pulled, while the other pushed, crushing.

Arching back, the blond put his knee against Hasiim's chest, while he worked his two arms between his opponent's stranglehold. He made no effort to use his sword against Hasiim. His breath came in a choking hiss. His vision sparkled.

He broke the hold.

Raphael stood above the fallen Hasiim, who looked up with fanatic indifference, expecting death. He did nothing, but his sword twitched like a cat's tail, warning off the fursan who had witnessed this crude duel.

A voice was calling out to Raphael: He didn't understand at first. “Drop your sword, giaour. Look up and drop your sword.”

Raphael did look up. Around the frosting-white tiled wall, behind the Berber fursan, stood a semicircle of humanity. Raphael stared from face to face.

There shuffled a poor Spaniard with confused, rolling eyes, bearing baskets of fish and of peppers. Next to him stood a proud Moorish householder in silk and muslin, his hands upon the jeweled hilt of a scimitar which had probably never seen use. Here was a woman so veiled neither her age nor race could be guessed at, another woman with tawny hair, sans veil but with the ring around her neck. Two teenage eunuchs, well dressed, who stood carefully not touching anybody. A dark peasant ignoring the squirming horned kid in his arms to stare, stare, stare…

Each casual figure engraved itself into Raphael's stunned brain, as though within the astonishment, fear, or unholy excitement expressed in these faces he would find the clue to every mystery. But finally his eyes found (as they were meant to) the five soldiers who stood with their legs braced, their wicked small bows drawn and aimed at both Raphael and Djoura.

The woman did not move. Neither did she drop her weapon. The steel of her sword sent glints of silver over the white mosaic wall, joined by the spark of gold from the coins in her black hair. Her face not black now but suffused with a ruddy blush, and when she spoke to her companion her voice held a furious elation.

“When I cry out, Raphael, then we will go forward together. We will give them reason to fear us!”

His face filled with pain. “But they will kill you, Djoura!”

She snorted in her habitual arrogance. “What are these but dogs? They will kill us anyway. This way…

“… is freedom.” She took one step forward.

But Hasiim, who had risen cautiously to his feet, heard her fierce whisper. He replied not to Djoura, but to Raphael. “My men are not dogs. I say they will not kill you: neither of you, unless you make it necessary. The woman I have promised to return to her own people and I will do so.

“You…” He stared at the fair figure. Raphael's borrowed clothing had all fallen off and he stood now wearing nothing but his eunuch's trousers. The scars on his back were visible around his sides and shoulders like the tendrils of red clinging vines. “You we will return to your master, and what he may do to you for this scandal is none of our business.

“Though I say,” and here the Moor paused. “Though I say that if I thought I could buy your loyalty with your sword arm, I would trade ten good horses for you.”

Raphael said nothing in reply. Slowly he lowered his blade. Djoura turned upon him a look of infinite bitterness.

“It gets hotter and hotter,” observed Gaspare, shifting his sweaty seat from side to side. “If we have to go much farther south we'll all burst into flame!”

The black dragon smiled: an action which caused Saara's thighs and knees to tickle. “That is mostly my own personal heat. It is actually quite cool at these altitudes, even in the south.

“I could cool down by going slower, of course…”

“Don't listen to the boy,” snapped Saara, who felt she had been sharing this aerial perch with Gaspare for too long entirely. “I'd rather have the speed. I feel time is pressing.”

The dragon's sigh was more disturbing to the riders on his neck than his smile. “I won't ask you why,” he drawled. “It's probably some sorcery and I'd rather not know about it…”

Saara opened her mouth to say it was not sorcery at all, but just a feeling she had, but the dragon was not finished.

“Besides, if I'm not out of my reckoning, that white shimmer where the mountains slope down is Granada itself.”

Gaspare craned over Saara's shoulder. It seemed they had finally reached the bottom of the Sierra Nevada. Good. Mountains were nothing special to Gaspare. “Even if that is not Granada,” he called into the black dragon's ear, “I think that the horse has to do something.” “I know, I know,” came the lugubrious hiss.

They set down to discuss plans upon a rock rubble only a few miles north of the city. Since the dragon was quite capable of firing any house or dry field he touched while at flight heat, it required some thought how to rescue Raphael without setting all Granada ablaze. The horse was released to gather what nourishment he could find.

But instead of offering suggestions, Gaspare stretched himself out with his back against a stone while he played the lute. Saara only paced.

Both of them heard a terrific racket, as though boulders in the nearby landscape were being crumbled into powder. Gaspare started up. It was the dragon, giving himself a good scratch against the rocks.

Gaspare's rhythms were almost as hard to listen to. Saara could not rest. She could not even sit down.

“He can alight on a tile roof,” stated the witch. “That way, even if he does set the timbers ablaze, he can knock the house in and contain the fire.”

“Fine by me,” mumbled Gaspare. “Of course the inhabitants of the house might disagree…” He raised his eyes and seemed to see Saara for the first time.

“What's wrong with you, my lady? You act like you have ants. Can you feel Raphael's presence from way out here?”

“No,” Saara said shortly. “I don't know WHAT it is I feel.” She shot Gaspare a glance under lowered brows.

“I told you, didn't I, that I was going to go home after this?” Gaspare lifted a surprised face.

“What else should you do, lady: stay in Granada?”

Saara grimaced. “I mean home. To the Fenlands. If I live. Home to my people, the Lapps.”

Gaspare put both hands around the neck of his lute and corrugated his young brow massively. “By sweet San Gabriele, Saara, why do you want to do THAT?”

She took offense. “Don't speak of my home in that tone of voice, youngster! You've never been there to judge it.”

With a single gesture Gaspare discounted that fact. “I know it is not civilized,” he replied. “And so no place for the greatest witch in all the Italies. And Spain.”

Saara's ire dissolved in Gaspare's predictable flattery. She produced a nervous grin. “It is a peaceful place, Gaspare, where the greatest enemy is winter. And beautiful, too, for in the autumn…”

“… all the grasses and moss turn a scarlet red, which covers the steppe and shines against the blue sky or the gray clouds like sunset,” said the voice, the familiar soft, deep voice which was not that of the dragon. “And the snows in winter take the color of the curtains in the sky, so bright that the dark time grows light enough for one to walk about and marvel.”

“Dami!” cried Saara, and her voice caught in her throat.

“Here,” he replied, and there he was, clear and only slightly shimmery, sitting on the hard ground between the witch and Gaspare. His storm-cloud wings were scarcely visible behind the mortal image.

Saara put her hand out, but stopped before touching. “I…

wanted you to see that. I thought about you and the russet time…”

“I know,” he whispered and gave her a very comfortable little smile. Then he turned to Gaspare and let him share the wordless joke. Then he stood up, wings rising behind him.

“Listen to me, my friends. I am here to interfere in the affairs of the living, as doubtless I should not!”

Damiano's amused smile faded into seriousness. “If you wish to be of service to Raphael, you must go into the city now. Move quickly. South of the central square you will find a broad avenue lined with orange trees. On this street is a house with a carved gate of cedarwood in a white wall. Enter in.

“There are also within Granada right now some fine horsemen riding fine horses very slowly. These are a sample of my interference, and as such may be of interest to you. But finding the house with the gate is more important.

“Go now; you are needed.” The ghost did not fade; he was simply not there anymore.

Gaspare rose as though on a string. He filled his considerable lungs with air. “Dragon!” he bellowed. “Come quickly!”

“A ghost?” repeated the dragon.

“The ghost of Delstrego,” replied Gaspare importantly. “And he said to hurry.”

The black dragon took to the air lithely enough, springing off his coiled tail, but he refused to be hurried in speech. “I wish I might have seen that.”

Saara had to chuckle. “I thought you would disapprove terribly. Magic being delusion, and all that.”

The great beast considered. “There is that. But spirits have their place in the natural order. If I disapproved of spirits in general, why would I then be adding my small energies to the rescue of one?

“Besides, madam: if this specter had knowledge to communicate… real wisdom, perhaps… What is it he said again?”

Gaspare repeated Damiano's message, word for portentous word.

They came to the city and passed over the wall. The dragon swooped down in a stomach-twisting dive in order to inspect the place more closely. With its regular low rows of daubed buildings and crowded streets (smelling even up here in the air) it looked like —first, a hive of bees, and then like a hive of disturbed bees. “People can see you,” shouted Saara. “They're terrified!”

The dragon writhed contemplatively. He slowed his progress so as to examine the length of one avenue broader than its fellows. “So it seems,” he murmured silkily. He rose a few yards higher.

“That edifice just beyond the city,” he explained for his riders' sakes, “set like a pearl in the red sand. That is the Alhambra, military center of the State of Granada, as well as the residence of Muhammad V, lineal descendant of Muhammad ben Yusuf ben Ahmand ben Nasir, who founded the present dynasty. It is generally accepted to be one of the most beautiful constructions in the world, and into its stones have been set the words of Ibn al-Khatib, that most martial of Islamic poets…”

“Fly!” shrieked Saara, whose sense of urgency had become almost overpowering. “South!”

“I AM flying,” declared the dragon patiently. “And hysteria will make me fly no faster. Besides, if we went faster, I should have missed what I now see below—that small force of either Bedouin or Berber cavalry, whose horses plod with their little teacup muzzles scraping the dirt of the road. Did not the sage spirit speak of such?”

“But he said the house on the street of oranges first, the cavalry after!” Gaspare insisted. “I heard him distinctly.”

Still the dragon, hanging high above the street, vacillated. “Yet we HAVE the cavalry, while the house on the street of oranges is theoretical only. And the prompting of spirits is a very subtle thing. Perhaps we should first investigate…”

“I've had enough of this,” said Saara, and without further ado she turned into a dove. Gaspare, left without a handhold, squeaked and grabbed for the dragon's coronary spines. “Me, too! Take me with you, Saara,” he bawled.