Raphael (32 page)

Djoura, too, stood without moving for a terrible minute. Then with a thin cold wail she flung herself down at the very feet of the Devil and bent her head to the broken body.

But oddly enough, Lucifer, too, stood paralyzed, staring at the shape of flesh he had himself created. His lips drew back from his teeth in an expression that was not a smile. He lifted red eyes to the sky.

There was a crack of fire in the air above. All looked up to see the black dragon swimming back toward his enemy, flaming along his entire length. In the beast's yellow eyes gleamed no more intelligence, but only bestial fury. Where the dragon passed, the earth smoked beneath him.

Lucifer saw him coming and his hands clenched at his sides. His eyes searched distracted over the hills, almost as though in search of hiding. He took once more to wyvern shape and fled upward.

Ebony jaws closed around the wyvern's serpentine tail. The wyvern shape wavered and a flayed form dripping with pus flapped its wings against the dragon's rococco head. Slipping free in its own mucus, it fled, with the dragon giving chase.

Flame ate through the membrane of one loathsome wing. The dragon caught Satan again, and now it was a creature of many boneless legs which wound vinelike around the black dragon, and pressed a sucking, platterlike mouth against the scales of his neck. The dragon spun, and bit, and burned the lamprey-sucker to dry leather. Both beasts howled.

But the sky around the combatants changed suddenly, deepening and growing more clear. The furies in the air faded to shadows. Their cries were muted.

All the stars came out.

Saara lifted her head to witness the sun and moon shining at opposite ends of a sky grown glorious. Gaspare gazed at the heavens mutely, holding to his little lute as though to a lover. Miles away, a panicked horse slowed his flight, blowing clouds of bloody froth onto his lathered sides.

Only Djoura the black Berber missed the miracle, for she was alone in her world of grief, rocking and sobbing above the cast-off body of a slave.

In the middle of this indigo splendor, one star grew brighter than all others. It swelled to rival the moon. It flickered in shape like the shadow of a bird in flight.

Silver light entered the mad eyes of the dragon, and he let his enemy go.

The Archangel Raphael shone in the sky like truth revealed and in his hands was a sword. “Come, Satan,” he called, and his voice was sun striking a field of ice. “See what your malice has bought you.”

The wyvern took to wing again but the brilliant air rejected him. He sank to the earth and his stiff wings fell from him to lie like the wings that ants shed in their season and that one finds in the morning grass, covered with dew.

As Raphael descended, Satan rose once more as the red king— King of Earth—and he shouted, “You interfere! Again! It is unfair! It is not your right, Raphael, for the earth is MINE and all upon it!”

Still the angel descended. The burned hillside grew bright as crystal. “I do not interfere, Morning Star. I am sent against you.

“For not all upon the earth is yours, nor ever will be.”

The sword of light struck once and the Devil's gold crown went rolling over the turf.

Lucifer lifted his arms in defense. “I am given no weapon against you. It is not fair!”

But the angel made no reply. His blinding wings drew forward and round his brother and encompassed him. “Go!” cried Raphael, and once more, “Begone from this place, and torment these children no more!” and he touched Satan with his hand.

The Devil was not there.

The heavens lightened slowly and the glory went out of the sky. Gaspare drew a breath that rattled along his throat.

Saara looked about her at the daylit plain, and she saw Raphael as she had seen him many times before, a figure of alabaster and feathers, no larger than a man.

“Chief of Eagles,” she greeted him gravely.

But he did not reply, for he had not heard Saara at all, nor seen her. Raphael's eyes were on the keening Berber woman, and the body she had covered with her tattered clothing.

He stepped over to her and went down on one stainless knee beside her. “Djoura,” he whispered for her ear alone.

Through her grief, that was the single voice which had the power to reach her. She stiffened. Turned to him.

Her sloe eyes widened as she took in what he was. Who he was. “Djinn!” she gasped. “The great Djinn.”

And after a moment. “Raphael?”

He cupped his hands around her face. “Your Pinkie. Always.” He lifted her to her feet.

Djoura blinked around her. Her eyes were tear-blind. She seemed to wonder where the Devil had gone. Then she glanced at Raphael again and lowered her eyes.

She turned away.

“Isn't that like me,” she mumbled to herself. “One man I can stand, out of all the cursed world. One silly pink fellow is all, and he turns out… turns out to be…” She shook her head till the coins in her hair rattled. “Well, not for me, anyway.” She sought again the body of her friend, but it was not to be found, but only the black shawl with which she had covered it.

She kicked the crumpled fabric. She took a step. Another. Tears streaming down her face, Djoura strode away from the scene of battle as though she were beginning a journey which promised to be long.

But Raphael was beside her, and in his face was a loss which did not belong on the features of an angel. He trapped her hands in his and she was forced to raise her head. “What, then?” she said roughly. “Does the great Djinn want Djoura to wash pots for him?” And she laughed at the idea. Harshly. Like a crow.

Wings flashed back with a sound of cymbals. Raphael threw his arms around the woman and pressed his head to hers. The angel gave a short, sharp cry like that of a hawk and the wings plunged forward, crashed together.

Raphael was gone from under the sky.

So was Djoura.

After a few stunned moments Saara, Gaspare, and the dragon crept forward. There was nothing to be seen on the Pyrenean hill, neither angel, nor devil, nor black Berber woman.

There was nothing to see but burned dry grass. Nothing to hear but the call of a horse in the distance.

“Well,” commented Gaspare, fiddling nervous fingers over his tuning pegs. “It's not everyone's idea of courtship.”

“No,” replied Saara wearily. “Not everyone's. But as long as it suits…” She ran her hands through her heat-damaged hair.

The dragon cleared ten feet of throat. “Madam, I would like to suggest we catch our missing cattle and leave this place—before anything else untoward happens.”

“Nothing else will happen,” Saara replied, wearily but with great conviction. “And if it did, they wouldn't need OUR help!” She let Gaspare help her onto the broad black back of the dragon.

Epilogue

Two men walked up the hill toward San Gabriele. This village was surrounded by a bank of dirt and stones which might once have been a wall, but was now reduced to a mound that harbored grass and wild alpine pinks. Beside the road leading into the village rose a single oak tree, much the worse for wear.

The old man, dressed loudly in vestments of Tyrian purple, with sleeve bobbles picked out in silver, stopped to lean against the tree. It was an action appropriate to both his years and the difficulty of the climb, but his attitude, along with a certain hauteur in his lean face, gave the impression he had halted only to gaze out over the tilled valley below.

The younger man, perhaps twenty years of age and dressed demurely in black, felt a prick of guilt at having used his great-uncle too hard. His neat, smooth-shaven Provençal face darted a glance at the other's bitter features. But how to apologize, when old Gaspare would never admit he had felt tired?

Great-uncle made it difficult to feel sorry for him.

Now the old man's fierce green eyes rested on his companion. “Why do you call yourself Caspar, when you are supposed to be named after me?” he asked. His leathered mouth pulled sideways, as though he tasted something foul, and two white points appeared on the bridge of his nose.

The story was that Grandmama and Great-uncle Gaspare were the illegitimate children of some Savoyard nobleman. It had always seemed silly to Caspar—the sort of story any bastard might make up —but looking at old Gaspare, he found it more credible. From where else had the old man come by that hawk face and those obnoxious manners?

“Caspar is the same as Gaspare,
grand-oncle,
and comes easier to a Provençal tongue.”

The ancient green eyes narrowed. “I didn't want you to be called Gaspare at all.” Caspar scratched nervously under his skintight black jerkin and wished once more he hadn't come to visit, namesake or no. “I wanted you to be called Damiano.”

Caspar hit one hand with the other and snapped his fingers in the air. His gestures were Provençal, not Italian, and Great-uncle Gaspare regarded them with suspicion. “That's it! The name my grandmother keeps forgetting, of the lute teacher you had as a boy.”

Gaspare, through the years, had grown quite a set of unruly gray eyebrows. He raised them both. “He wasn't my teacher, boy, but my good friend. And your grandmother has no business to forget his name. Not with what he did for her.”

Caspar's eyes slid to the packed earth beneath the tree. Again that business. Caspar himself would rather have come from a family of no pretension, conceived between lawful sheets. “You mean that Grandmama Evienne and he… that he might be my…”

“NO!” spat Gaspare, glaring at his namesake's small, very French features. “Your grandfather was Cardinal Rocault, certainly. Almost certainly.”

The old man flung himself away from the tree and proceeded with great, gasping energy into the village. Caspar followed, drumming his fingers against his thigh uncomfortably. He heard his great-uncle mutter, “I could only wish…”

Since there was a hint of softening in that voice, Caspar humored the old man. “You told me about that one when I was a little boy, hein,
grand-oncle?
He was the one who talked to animals, yes, and God sent wounds of flame into his hands, and an angel comforter? He tamed a wolf that had ravaged the village.”

Gaspare's look of incredulity settled into scorn. “That was Saint Francis.”

“Ah. So it was,” Caspar replied equably. “I am mistaken. But I heard so many stories, you must understand, and as a child I believed them all.”

The old man's lips drew back from his imperfect teeth, and his angry hand made the swordsman's instinctive gesture toward the hilt of his sword. This surprised Caspar, as well as daunted him, for to the best of his knowledge, his great-uncle had never worn a sword in his life. “Delstrego was a man of our times—of MY times, at least There might have been much of the fantastic about him, but he was a REAL person, boy. Born a few days' ride west of here in the city of Partestrada.”

“I rode in from the west,” replied Caspar readily. “But… I can't recall a city of that name.” Then, realizing he had not spoken diplomatically, he added, “This is not to doubt you,
grand-oncle.
There are many ruins.”

Gaspare winced. “Yes, no doubt. Ruins.

“It never really WAS a city, of course. Except to Delstrego. A market town.

“Ah! It means nothing, boy. Forget it.” The look of defeat on Gaspare's ancient face might have melted the young man's amiable heart.

But he never saw it, for his great-uncle had turned his head away. “And forget the stories you heard as a child,” the old man growled. “About dragons and witches and angels and… whatever. It was just to entertain you: not to be believed. If you could remember only that the man was the greatest musician of his day…”

Gaspare gave a dry snort and smoothed his fashionable, threadbare, trailing purple sleeve. “Or perhaps even that is too much. Yes, I'm sure it is. It… it has been a very long time, boy, since I have seen an angel.” He turned at the stairs that led to his rooms, and, though he would have liked to rest before assaulting them, preceded his grand-nephew up.

The cynicism of this last reply heartened Caspar. He did not believe, whatever his family in Avignon told him, that Great-uncle Gaspare was mad or senile. He was just old and angry (as old men often were), and had his own kind of humor. Caspar sat down at the other side of the table and gazed at the old man's incredible lute while Gaspare poured him a mug of rough cider.

Such an instrument. Covered with inlays of shell and ivory, it was almost too pretty to be taken seriously. But Gaspare had plucked it for him, and he had perceived that it was of the highest quality, with a true tone clarified by age to bell-like sweetness. “That is the lute Pope Innocent gave you?” Caspar asked, a touch of awe in his voice. He smiled the smile that everyone in Avignon found so charming.

But Gaspare was staring out the window. “The Pope gave it to Delstrego. I inherited it only.” Cold green eyes wandered through the room, and though they touched Caspar's brown ones only for a moment, the younger man was abashed.

“It seems I was born too late,” Caspar said.

Old Gaspare's eyes widened, looking at the other's sleek exterior. Remembering the plague. Remembering hunger.

“Too late for Avignon,” Caspar qualified. “Since the papacy has been in dispute, most of the good patrons have removed to Rome. And so has the… the thrust of the music.”

He shrugged and touched both hands to his breast. “So. You see me on my way to Rome. Following my art.”

Caspar quailed as his great-uncle's face went red, then purple. It clashed terribly with his purple jacket. The old man's aristocratic hooked nose stood out white in relief. “What do you say, boy? You are going to Rome—after the music?”

“Yes,” came the answer. “Oh, I know it must sound absurd to you, as it does to my own father (since I am guaranteed a place in the guild at Avignon, and that is a thing a man may seek for a lifetime), but…”