The Damiano Series (66 page)

Damiano was different. He looked down upon Evienne and saw the rosy cheeks of pregnancy mottled with a grayish green, and her smooth throat swollen out of shape. “Oh, dear God,” he whispered to the air.

Gaspare may not have been able to understand by looking but he could not escape the meaning of his friend's words. His hand slipped to the floor at Evienne's feet. He shook his head fiercely at Damiano. “No,” he said. “No.”

Once more he touched Evienne's hand and then turned again to the motionless Damiano. “You. If she's sick you have to
do
something!” he cried.

Damiano flinched. “Wh—what? What can I do, Gaspare? Saara and I—we've both told you already that there is nothing…”

Evienne stuffed her whitened knuckles in her mouth and bit down upon them. Then she sniffed. “Are you trying to tell me,” she began with a certain rude energy, “that Herbert—that I—have got…” and then this spirit failed her. “Is it the plague?” Her frightened breath wheezed in and out, and then she squeezed her eyes shut. “Oh, no, I don't feel
that
bad—just kind of muzzy. And I ache, and it's so hot in here….” Her words trailed off. “I'm going to die?”

Gaspare screamed, “No! No, no, Evienne, you're not going to die, no, never!” And in a single motion he flung himself at Damiano and wrapped himself around the witch's knees, in terrible parody of his actions only a few weeks earlier when he had pleaded with Saara for Damiano. “Don't let her die,” he cried shrilly. “Please, please, Damiano, don't let her die!”

It was as though he were praying to God.

With clumsy gestures Damiano freed himself and stepped over to this girl who had been so pretty. His large hands were shaking. “Signorina, I don't… I don't have any power over this thing. I'm only a man.” Awkwardly he touched her hair.

Evienne's eyes were still beautiful, even through fear and disease. Shyly she took hold of Damiano's shirt and whispered, “I am not ready to die. Please understand. I know I must die but not now, for I am young, and this finds me in the middle of my sin. Who will absolve me, if I die here? Herbert? By Mary and all the saints, he's not the one to forgive sins he made happen himself, and he's in no shape to do it anyway. And then… and then I have a baby in me. How can I die now?”

“You see?” seconded Gaspare, as though Evienne's words had proven something. Then he hit his sister a weak blow upon the thigh. “Slutty bitch. What have you done to us now?”

In the distance the ursine roarings continued, along with the panicked cries of men. Damiano sank down upon the carpet and hid his face behind his hands.

Why did they both believe this impossible thing—that he could cure the plague? Why did it hurt so badly within him that they should believe this? Saara, who knew so much about healing, knew there was no hope.

His course was clear to him. There was no sense in suffering the witnessing of this evil he could not help. Saara had discovered as much a generation ago. It would only drag down the healthy with it, to madness or suicide. The only recourse was flight.

Within a week he could be in Lombardy, upon the clean high hill where springtime reigned all the seasons, alone among the small high-meadow flowers with an elegant, barefoot mistress. Within a week, between Saara's magic and his own.

But Damiano did not move. Wonderingly he watched himself not moving. His resolution was formed, but he seemed to lack the power to carry it through.

Was it because Gaspare's red-fingered grip on his wrist could not be broken? Was it because Evienne was kissing his hand?

“I am not God!” Damiano shouted suddenly. “I… am not even one of his saints!”

“Not a saint, no, but almost,” wheedled Gaspare. “You are such a good sort of person, Damiano. And you have an angel, and that means something. Send for your angel, Damiano, and tell him…” And the boy's eyes changed as he spoke, from his characteristic hysteria to something unfamiliar to Damiano: something calm and lucid and cold. “And tell him to send Evienne's plague into me.

“Yes, into me,” Gaspare repeated. “Why not? I'm not anything worth saving. Not even much of a dancer, really. The only thing I do well is to judge other people's music, and no one will pay me to do that.

“But it's all the same to the plague, isn't it? Whether it takes a critic or the cardinal's mistress? And it must be possible to trade one to the other, too, for Jesus sent a man's devils into the pigs. Call your angel, Damiano, my good friend. Remind him of that gospel, if he does not remember. Please, Damiano. Do it.”

Damiano called Raphael then, and the angel came.

It may have been only Damiano's imagination that said the sick chamber did not smell so bad with Raphael standing in it, stainless and glimmering. It was certain, though, that with the first sight of the angel, the witch's misery became lighter, even though he knew how Raphael would answer his question.

He asked it anyway. “Seraph. Can you cure the plague?”

“Oh, no,” moaned Gaspare, who blinked about owlishly, as though he might discover the tiny form of an angel in some corner of the room. “Ask more gently, Damiano, or he will never agree to help.”

Raphael gazed beyond Damiano to the figure of the terrified girl, who rocked back and forth with her brother's arms wrapped around her and who did not seem to be listening. Then Raphael regarded the motionless form on the featherbed. “Damiano,” he said quietly. “If I had power over the plague, no man would have ever died so.”

“I thought as much,” snapped the witch, and sorrow and frustration made him add, “For a spirit of great reputation, you can't do much.”

Blue-black eyes returned their gaze to him. “I'm sorry, Dami. I didn't make my own reputation.”

Gaspare only heard one side of this conversation, but it told him enough. “Don't accept any excuses, musician. We have managed so many hard things already—over the mountains at the end of winter, and through Provence starving to death—how can we let my pretty little sister just lie down and die? There must be another way!”

“There must be another way.” Oh, Christ! the very words Damiano had used with the Devil, and with Saara herself. And the Devil had nearly had him for his arrogance, and how badly he had hurt Saara, who had done him no wrong, searching for that “other way.”

It had been his father's obstinacy in him: that bullish Italian obstinacy which had led him along the odd paths of his life. Stealing witchcraft by force and giving it away in a single grand gesture that did no one any good at all. Making war with the flames of hell as a weapon, and using that weapon against Lucifer himself. Now he was a witch without a staff, singing his spells like a Lapplander—like an infant Lapplander, to be exact.

And no help to his friends at all.

Damiano's lips pulled back painfully from his teeth and he looked away from Gaspare. Had he his staff, he thought bleakly, he would at least try. With his staff he had not been a child in the making of spells. He had known that length of black wood better than his lute, at one time. Though he might fail, with his staff he would at least know how to try.

And then, between one moment and the next, he knew not only how to try, but how to succeed in helping Evienne. He remembered how, on the streets of Avignon, not far from the Papal Door, he had grabbed at Gaspare himself, as though to use the boy as a living focus for his magic, and then, sensing the danger involved, had drawn back. And he remembered how he had entered the earth and gathered the water from it, leaving only a song to mark his way home.

But he could not claim he didn't know what happened when power went from one person into another. Out of all the witches on the earth, he (and his lady) knew that best.

A witch did not die of the plague, or so said Saara. Not unless he used himself too hard. When he had been simple, he had been in peril of the plague. Now he was not.

Clear and accurate. But that statement was a knife that could cut both ways. And dear God, how it could cut! “What is he saying now?” whispered Gaspare excitedly, for in truth Damiano's attitude was that of one who was very thoughtfully listening to something. Instead of answering, the dark witch glanced over at his friend, heavy-browed.

Then he sank down on one knee beside Evienne. “Go away, Gaspare,” he said. “Don't touch us.”

Gaspare pulled back with alacrity. “Save her, Damiano. Please save her,” he begged, his voice cracking with tears.

But the face which looked back at Gaspare's was frozen, and oddly pale beneath its strong coloring. “Be quiet,” whispered the witch.

He put his right arm around Evienne's waist and she lifted her suffering head. But there was neither comfort nor gentleness in Damiano's eyes as his left hand wrapped her hair and pulled the girl backward, only a great concentration. “Look at me,” he grunted at her. “Don't talk.”

The stool overbalanced and Evienne lay back in a tangle of skirts, supported only by Damiano, whose hands clenched and clenched, whose arms were trembling. In the girl's eyes despair had been diluted with a strange admixture of terror and hope.

When Damiano had stolen power from Saara, the staff had shown him how. It had felt very good, like wine and sunshine and victory, all together. When he broke the staff, releasing to her half his own soul—what then? What had it felt like, then?

It was not a good memory; it made his head spin, and his stomach tied itself in a knot. Damiano did not want to be simple again, and he did not want to stand in Evienne's position of helpless fear.

Once he had been reconciled to that life of many blindnesses. Once he had been prepared to die. Now he was not reconciled to any loss or limitation on a life grown rich as the orchards of Provence.

And Evienne was such an inconsequential person. Without either morals or aspirations, possessing only a little quick-fading beauty, she mattered to him less than his dog had mattered. Much less.

But being inconsequential did not make it easier to die. And how much he cared for Evienne, or even for her anguished brother, had nothing to do with it. Damiano sought the memory of his defeat, and when he had it, he used it to make a song: a song of fire and of loss. Silently it rang in his head. His lips pulled back from his teeth.

Evienne screamed, buffeted by a flaming wind. She arched her body and threw back her head. She cried for her brother to save her. Then she swooned.

And the girl was drowned in fire—Damiano's fire, a flame of brilliant, consuming color that covered her sweet body over until she looked like a soul in the pains of hell. Gaspare gasped and dived toward her, to free her from the witch's awful embrace. Slack-jawed, gray-faced, Damiano slapped him across the room.

He sang his fire into Evienne, feeling his strength enter all the wounded provinces of her body. He heard the dumb, smooth, insistent beat of her heart and he felt the ugliness of the damage plague had done to the veins of her body and in her lungs. Without thought his fire fed itself upon that evil. The wild bright flame grew hotter. It went white, then blue and sang with a pure and unwavering note.

But Evienne was not a staff or a cup or a cloud. Not a vessel of any kind which could be filled with magic, containing it. She was a living being and simple besides. Damiano's strength flowed into her and out again, running away over the carpet like a fire of oil on water. Again and again he filled her, forcing magic into flesh and soul not created to take it, until, by the time the flame ran quiet within a body revivified, Damiano was empty. He lay half across Gaspare's sister, voiceless, panting like a dog.

Far away along the long corridor, a bearlike bellow sharpened into a wail, as Saara the Fenwoman sensed her lover's magic flow out and be lost into the air.

Damiano did not hear her crying, for his attention was turned within, to where his new emptiness had found already a thing to fill it, to where within his trembling shell something unwelcome was finding a home. It was a thing like a groping hand, but fine as mist It was mindless and determined and terribly hungry.

Damiano knew its name, and he had been expecting it.

For a moment he thought he would not be able to rise, and his hands scrabbled on the slates of the floor. But from nearby came a helping hand. “The devils into the swine,” mumbled Damiano to Gaspare. “Strangely, I have never before thought of myself as a pig.” He stood swaying for a moment and shook his head.

But it was not Gaspare who had helped him to his feet. Gaspare sat hunched over his sister, who slept now peacefully, with only a slight flush of the skin to mark her short visit in the Inferno. It was the fair hand of Raphael who steadied Damiano, and a white wing wrapped around him like a mantle.

He put an arm about the angel's waist, just below where the huge wings sprouted. “One more favor I have to ask you, Seraph,” he whispered hoarsely, staring at the floor. “And I promise I will then request nothing else.”

Raphael asked for no promises. He listened to Damiano, folded his wings around him, and led him away.

Jan Karl burst into the room, bleeding from the shoulder, with his black cassock torn. “Evienne, you idiot, get off the floor. I have come to release you!”

Evienne woke up confused. These days she always woke up confused, and usually a little sick to her stomach as well. But this time her stomach felt fine, at least. Indeed, she felt fine all over, and quite ready to endure a little confusion if it meant Jan had come to get her. She flung herself to her feet, only noticing Gaspare as she bowled him over.

“Gaspare! How long have you…” Some part of her memory returned to her then. She turned to the bed where Herbert Cardinal Rocault lay unmoving. A brief glance told her he would never move again, and she jerked her hand back, shuddering. “Take me away now, Jan. Death frightens me so.”

But at that moment Saara the Fenwoman entered the door, not with the form of a bear but in natural shape. “We have only a minute,” she announced. “One minute before they are after us.” Her eyes swept the room, resting only lightly on the girl before her, with her red hair and generous beauty.