The Damiano Series (49 page)

Without warning Damiano's melancholy became unendurable. He rose from the upended box he was sitting on, as though he would fling himself out the door, down the stairs and into the crowded street below. His heart pounded. Mastering himself, he sat down again to think.

Perhaps he should visit the horse—make sure he had food and water. But the groom would think he was crazy, for he had seen the buckets filled already this morning. Neither would Festilligambe understand such a visit, for although he liked his master he was not a sentimental horse.

Where was Gaspare anyway? Out looking for his sister, certainly, though he had not said as much to Damiano. Gaspare's need to find Evienne had grown into a pitiful thing, and Damiano was a little afraid of what would happen if she failed to show up at their long-planned appointment.

This last worry was too much. The musician needed someone to talk to. Someone reliable.

He put the scuffed bottom end of his lute down upon the tops of his boots and laced his fingers together around the neck. With his eyes closed and his forehead resting against the tuning box he cleared his throat and spoke to the empty air.

“Raphael… Seraph. If you have the time…”

By the sound and by a faint flutter of shadows behind his eyelids Damiano could have sworn that Raphael had come in through the far window. It was an illusion that made the man chuckle, for he had the sophistication to know that heaven was not in the sky above Avignon, or any other worldly place.

“Good morning, Dami,” said Raphael, in a voice like the sweet after-ring of a bell. “How do you like Avignon?”

“So far it has been very generous with me,” answered Damiano, in an effort to be just. “But still, I am not in a very good mood today.”

“You are lonely,” replied Raphael without pause.

Damiano squirmed, trying to keep his eyes fixed on the stripes along the back of the lute. It was unsettling and a bit demeaning to be read so easily. “How did you know?”

There was a shrug of wings: a noise like heavy-falling snow. “Because there is no one here. And you have just come to a city that is strange to you. From what I have learned about men…”

An idea came to Damiano. “Do you know Avignon well, Seraph?”

“No.”

The man had not expected this answer. He lifted his eyes from the lute. “You do not? But it is the Papal city.”

Raphael's wings were bowed forward in the confines of the room. The first pinions touched together on the floor almost at Damiano's feet. “I don't know the Pope, either. I have never been to Avignon before,” the angel said.

“Not even with messages?”

Again that feathery shrug. “I am not a messenger by calling.”

Still, Damiano's idea must be spoken. “I… had wondered if perhaps you knew where Gaspare's sister, Evienne, was staying. We are supposed to meet her, you see, and the boy is very nervous.”

Raphael's pale hair was heavy as the mane of a horse, and like a horse's mane it fell where it would. His midnight eyes gazed out from a frame of light. “I know where Evienne is,” he admitted.

Damiano straightened with the news. “You do? Well, where is she?”

It was the angel who dropped his eyes. “I would rather you didn't ask me, Dami. I think there are other ways you could find out.”

The mortal sat again. “Of course, Raphael. Of course. I am embarrassed. I… asked without thought, forgetting that you are not supposed to involve yourself…”

And then this small understanding was lost within a larger. “Raphael!” cried Damiano. “Raphael, Seraph, Teacher! I am seeing you—really seeing you. And I am not sick!”

The angel's grand, opalescent wings rose up like flowers opening, till their tips lodged in the corners of the room. His look of joy was as full as Damiano's. But it was mixed with something less definable.

“I am glad, Damiano,” he said. “It was never my desire to make you sick.”

Placing the instrument hurriedly down to one side (for he treated the lute with the care necessary to something upon which his living depended, and not the care deserved by a tool one loves), Damiano crouched down at Raphael's feet. He squeezed one alabaster hand. He slapped a samite knee. He fished a bright wingtip from the air and held it between his hands, as though to restrain Raphael from flying untimely away. “Hah! Raphael, my dear master…”

“Not master,” said the angel, and Damiano nearly lost the wing.

“Teacher, then. You are a vision to rest my eyes. And it has been so long…. I thought my sight would not be so rewarded on this side of death's door.” Behind his grin Damiano's quick mind raced.

“You know, Raphael, I think I know how it is I can see you again. It is because of Saara, and the trick she played on me.”

“Ah? So it seems to you that it's you who have changed?” asked Raphael, and there was a shade of diffidence in his question.

“What else?” Damiano pushed closer to the angel, until he was almost sitting in Raphael's lap. I am clumsy as a dog, next to him, he thought. Like Macchiata, I wag my tail so hard I knock things over. But I don't care.

Aloud he said, “Of course the change is in me. You are an immortal spirit—how can you alter?”

The fair, chiseled face grew serious for a moment. “Not alter? Dami, even if that were true for me, standing out of time and place, once I had set foot upon the earth of Provence or the Piedmont, and spoken with you, who alter so dramatically every moment of your life, and touched you, too… how can I not change?”

Now Damiano let the great pinion slide through his fingers. “I don't want you to change, Raphael. And for me—me to be changing you? That doesn't sound good.” Again he cleared his throat and scooted a few inches across the stone floor, away from the simple, gleaming robe. “I don't want to be a bad influence on you, Seraph.”

Raphael laughed. His laughter was never like bells, or sunshine, or running water. Raphael laughed like anyone else. “Don't worry about it, Dami.” His lapis eye glanced down at the lute in the corner.

“Did you want to play something for me?”

Without taking his eyes from the angel, Damiano scooped up his instrument. “I have a dozen things I could play for you.” His voice took on a note of warning as he added, “They are not like your pieces….”

“I wouldn't want to listen if they were,” answered Raphael dryly.

Of course, contact with the stone flagging had put the crotchety lute out of tune again. As he worked it back, Damiano had a sudden idea, brought on by the splendor of the moment. “Hey, Raphael. Do you think we could… I mean, would you be willing to play with me? I mean, not as a lesson, but for fun?

“It has been a long time that I've wanted to do that,” he added plaintively. “And I think my playing has improved lately.”

Raphael's left eyebrow rose. His right wing twitched like the tail of a thoughtful cat. “I did not bring my instrument,” he demurred, but his fingers drummed his knee as though hungry for work.

“Your lute? Or harp, viella, viol, recorder? My dear teacher, what is it you play when you are not giving lute lessons?” demanded Damiano, and in asking that question (which had bothered him the better part of two years), the young man felt he had crossed a sort of Rubicon.

Raphael opened his mouth to answer, but then his flaxen brow drew down and he turned his head, listening. There were trotting steps in the passage. Raphael extended his hand and shook Damiano gently by the shoulder. “Later,” he whispered. “We have all the time in the world to play. Right now the boy is unhappy.”

White wings and white gown flashed upward, fading into the rising light of day.

Gaspare burst the crude door open. His face was red and white in blotches. “She isn't anywhere,” he growled. He kicked his bedroll and cursed. “Not in the taverns and not in the churches. She's not washing, nor praying nor eating nor drinking nor whoring. Not anywhere.”

An Italian musician, the innkeeper had said. How ironic that seemed to Damiano, whose journey to Provence was largely a pilgrimage for the sake of its music. After a bit of questioning, Damiano became certain that it was not any essential Italianate quality that the man desired in an entertainer, but only that he be an exotic, like the Irishman. Damiano was confident he could give the fellow something he hadn't heard before.

This was no poor establishment, the inn across the street from Monsieur MacFhiodhbhuidhe's house. Had it possessed sleeping rooms, Damiano and Gaspare would never have been able to afford the use of them. But it was only called an inn for lack of any better word to call it, being a place where wine was served by the glass and little tarts on salvers of pewter. Originally, before the Papacy moved from Rome, it had been the house of the Bishop of Avignon, and still, of an evening, functionaries of the court of Innocent VI filtered through the guarded gates of the Papal Palace and lounged about in the great top-floor assembly room, eating, drinking, gossiping and ignoring the music. The Bishop's Inn maintained a pastry kitchen and offered a large selection of wines, both local and imported. In fact, it was almost a cafe, in a country in which coffee had not yet been discovered.

Damiano considered this perhaps the most civilized establishment he had ever seen, and he was glad to be employed in it. He was also nervous. He was—barring the pink-cheeked serving girls—the youngest person in the music room, too. That made him even more nervous.

He sat in the shadow of the pillared colonnade at one side of the room. Above his head a small window let in the twilight and the rooftop breezes of the city. Vine tendrils sharpened one another not far from his ear. He toyed with a spice bun he had been allowed to buy for half-price.

These old men, and churchmen, too. If ever there was an audience before which he ought to play conservatively, this was it. Could he? Touching the top of his lute (damned instrument: poorly made, badly fretted. No hope for it), he knew he could not.

For he was the tool of his music. As once his will had passed like braided winds through the length of his black staff, so now the music which sounded on his lute seemed to come through him from another source. If he tried to play for prudence—if he tried to play as he had played a year and a half ago, he would only play badly.

Gaspare sidled in. Now Damiano was not the youngest man in the room. “Almost ready, the fat man says,” hissed the redhead. His drooping finger curls were oiled glossily. He wore a bright green velvet mantle which pulled his shoulders back and pressed against his neck. Having just bought the garment today, Gaspare was immensely vain about it and would not take it off, even though torchlight and the heat of many bodies had made the chamber stuffy.

“Don't call Monsieur Coutelan that to his face,” chided Damiano, and he fished in his pocket for the piece of soft leather which would keep the bowl of the lute from slipping on his lap.

Gaspare ignored him. “You know, Delstrego, there is a guild in Avignon. A guild of musicians.”

The dark man grunted, lost in tuning. “A guild is a good thing. We should join it.”

Gaspare danced a nervous step. “I told Coutelan you were a member already.”

“Then we will certainly have to join,” said Damiano, and he walked toward the torchlight.

He did what he could, in the beginning. He played the dances of home, which bored him, and he emphasized the treble at the expense of the bass. He played no piece that the average man of Provence might be expected to feel he had desecrated. He did not sing.

Yet, for all that, it was not anyone's usual music, not even in Avignon, where the New Music had been born, for Damiano's polyphony went from two lines to three to four, and sometimes dissolved into a splash of tone in which no separate lines could be discerned at all. He pulled his strings with his left hand till they whined like the viol. And he brushed his strings with his right hand till they rang like a harp.

And after ten minutes, when he realized that none of this plump, balding, oily-eyed crowd was listening, he gave up trying to please them. Instead he did as he had done very often in the past year, when the audience was drunk, argumentative or merely absent. He played for Gaspare.

In a way, this was fortunate. In a way, this made him happy, for with Gaspare there was nothing he could not do without being understood; the boy knew his idiom as no one else could, and could not be satisfied by anything other than the best Damiano could do. Damiano played for Gaspare as one old friend might converse with another: fluently and without theatrics. In his self-satisfaction he began to sing a nonsense descant above the melody, adding sweeping arpeggios to the accompaniment.

“Let the lute be the lute”? Why, this
was
the lute, and anything it did well belonged to it by right. Damiano smiled to himself. He liked what he was doing and how he was doing it. It didn't matter if the audience was not listening.

But it had grown very quiet out there. Perhaps they
were
listening, now. Even the comte had started to listen, after Damiano had quite given up on him. Damiano glanced up without breaking rhythm.

He could see five ornate little tables, each with a small group of men—only men, of course—seated around it. Beyond that distance his eyes couldn't focus.

And these small groups were silent, and their attention fixed not on Damiano, but on a half-dozen well-dressed fellows who stood between the musician and the audience, leaning on brutal-looking wooden clubs.

Damiano blinked at six faces set like stone into bad intention. It took him another few seconds to realize that their hostility was focused on him. Then he was aware that Gaspare was standing behind him.

All his confused brain could do was to repeat to itself, “At least it was never much of a lute. At least it is no great loss.” He was just finishing the refrain of a Hobokentanz. He began it again, and he spoke to the men who he knew were about to attack him.