The Damiano Series (84 page)

A hollow thump through the darkness indicated it had dropped its long chin on the ground. “Why should you? The world is full of illusion,” it agreed somberly.

Saara approached the creature, stepping from darkness into half-light. It lay extended on its side and held one paw—hand, really, with four spidery fingers and a thumb—in the other, flexing it gingerly. From a dull iron manacle on its wrist stretched the heavy chain.

“One would think,” it said to Saara waspishly, “that twenty years would teach me the limits of this thing.”

“One would think,” she agreed. The dragon massaged its wrist.

Saara, standing beside a circlet of iron as large as a hip bath, cleared her throat. “How do I know, dragon, that you won't turn around and eat me as soon as I release you?”

The gold eyes shone with more light than the reflected sun on the stone of the passage seemed to allow. They regarded her with a shade of amusement. “You don't, of course. Just as I have no security that you won't get it into your head to freeze me into a lump of ice. But if words carry any weight with your people (and I seem to remember they do), then it is enough that I say I will not. What is more, I tell you I have not eaten a human creature for approximately five hundred years.”

Saara found this statement very interesting, as possibly the dragon intended that she would. It implied that the beast was more than five hundred, of course. (Unless it was a way of saying it had never eaten a human, but then why not just say so?) It also implied some sort of monumental change in the dragon's habit. It positively invited questions.

But Saara refused to ask them. “But perhaps you haven't been this hungry for five hundred years.”

The great beast yawned. “I was hungrier ten years ago then I am now. But let's adopt a pleasanter subject, shall we?

“Such as yourself, madam: What necessity brings you to this dreadful, boring place, and how might I be of use to you?”

Saara sat on a chain link. “You be of use to me? I thought it was the other way around.”

The dragon's glorious face was turned to Saara, and between the light of his eyes and the heat of his breath, it was like sitting under a desert sun. “Nothing runs in one direction only except water, and that (I'm told) only in its lesser beds.

“I am the Black Dragon,” the creature announced, with a strange sort of dignity. “And though you see me at my disadvantage, I assure you that there is little bora of earth which is older, or which is my equal in strength.” And with that the dragon turned its head to the darkness and gave a short, hollow laugh.

Saara raised one eyebrow. “Well, dragon, I am fairly old and fairly strong and not tied up at all.” And then, with a sudden impulse of trust, she added, “And I'm on my way to the Liar's Hall of Four Windows, to find and rescue the Chief of Eagles, who has been imprisoned by the wicked one.”

The dragon started upright. Great writhing coils slammed against the roof of the passage. Its jaw hung open.

The creature hissed like a boiler giving way. “You are what?”

Saara repeated, condensing a long story as best she could. As she spoke the light of the dragon's eyes flickered, and amber rays moved like fish over the walls of stone. The beast itself did not move a muscle.

But when she was finished, it spoke. “This Chief of Eagles, then, is the same the Hebrews call Rafayl, and the Latins Raphael? He is a teacher?”

“Of music,” stipulated Saara.

The dragon yawned. “There is only one Teaching.

“I have heard of this person, Raphael.”

Then the dragon drummed his fingers against the stone floor, making thunder. He looked neither at Saara nor at anything else in the long gray tunnel, and the light of his eyes faded. At last he said, very calmly, “To hoard or conceal the Teaching is a great crime. Perhaps the greatest.”

“To keep a person's spirit imprisoned is greater,” she said boldly.

“One and the same.”

“Then you will let us go by?”

The long head drew very close to Saara's and the yellow eyes kindled again. “Free me.”

Saara felt the beast's will beating down on hers, but there was no magic in it, nor any compulsion she could not resist. Her desire to break the dragon's chain was her own, sprung of pity and nursed by her hatred for confinement of all sorts. She spared one moment's thought to Gaspare, helpless and unaware at the cavern's mouth, and then she put her hands to the cold iron.

But Saara had underestimated the Piedmontese. Gaspare was at that moment inching forward on his hands and knees through what was to him unbroken blackness, cursing as he went. He had heard voices, and he had heard hissing, and he had felt shocks in the earth itself.

He was coming after Saara.

“Too late,” muttered the youth as he went. “Too little and too late, may San Gabriele boot me in the behind, but I am coming. No man, woman, or devil may call Gaspare the Lutenist a coward.”

That no one save Gaspare the Lutenist had called Gaspare a coward did not occur to the redhead. He comforted himself with the knowledge that he had shown greater bravery than that of the horse, which had bolted at the first ominous crash from within. Carrying all belongings with it. All save the lute, of course, which Gaspare now bore slung under his belly. It banged his hipbone lightly with every jar.

No doubt it was the Devil himself ahead, ensconced amid the quenchless coals. No doubt Saara was long since reduced to a cinder. No doubt Gaspare's own defiance would last as long as it took for a moth to char itself in a candle.

Too little and too late.

Gaspare thought to himself of what it meant to live, and to die. Slowly he stood. He unwrapped his instrument. He walked forward, playing as he went. It was what Delstrego would have done.

From time to time he bounced off the passage walls.

The dragon froze at the sound. He (Saara had ascertained it was a he) lifted his ornamented head. “What IS that?” “That is Gaspare,” replied the witch calmly. “Playing the lute.”

He rumbled deep in his long throat. “I have never heard the like.” Saara sighed. “He is very progressive.”

Gaspare thought his eyes were acting up when the faint amber swirls started to play over the passage walls. But he put one hand out and what appeared to be the wall WAS the wall, so he blinked and walked on.

In the center of the yellow light was a shadow, a shadow that grew and came on, with a vague metallic rustling. The shadow grew to be that of the Lady Saara, surrounded by a halo of gold light.

Lute strings faded to silence. “My lady,” whispered Gaspare. “Are you in heaven or hell?”

At that moment the halo lifted above the woman, and Gaspare looked up into a shining, awful face.

“Christ!” he gasped, and then his tongue swelled to fill his mouth. His right hand slipped over his open strings with gentle dissonance.

Chapter 6

The street hawkers, heard faintly in the distance, called their wares in two languages, or three, if the patois of the Muwalladun was considered. All the flies of Granada droned, and the Sierra Nevada made a jagged rip in the horizon. Hakiim led his customer along a street baked hard as tiles by the sun.

The latter fellow was a man of imposing size and girth, dressed according to Moorish custom in white. Behind him came another, a small person, heavily veiled, who tended to bounce as she walked, after the manner of small dogs.

“Black?” asked the customer, not for the first time. “Black as ink?”

“Black as the abyss,” replied Hakiim, and he said no more. It was his custom to maintain dignified silence before such customers as he thought might thereby be impressed. And there was something not altogether orthodox about this potential customer: a shade of hazel about the eyes, perhaps, or a slight fault in speech. Perhaps a converted Christian, or a parvenu from Egypt come to Granada to hide his origin.

Whatever, Hakiim's instincts led him to adopt a haughty attitude and Hakiim's instincts were rarely wrong.

“I've heard that the blacker a girl is, the sounder she is, and the better nurse she makes,” remarked the man, as he followed Hakiim with a heavy, rolling step.

“It could well be true,” the Moor replied, still without great enthusiasm.

The small person who came behind tittered brightly.

“My little wife had a black nurse as a child. Now that she is… now that we are… we thought…”

Hakiim smiled to himself. Soon, if he kept his mouth shut, the fellow would reveal every fact and foible of his household. The Moor did not care, nor was he particularly disturbed by the idea of the ferocious Djoura as a baby's dry nurse.

The black's moods were various. Perhaps today she'd choose to exhibit cold pride instead of homicidal fury. Let the man look at her and decide; his family's safety was then his business.

They turned into a door in the blank white wall of a house: a fine, expensive house, rented by Hakiim for the express purpose of setting Djoura to the best advantage. They passed through to the garden courtyard, where among oranges and tiny cypress the black woman sat, wearing robes of white cotton, brand-new.

In the corner sat the idiot eunuch, who had been commanded to sit still, and who obeyed like a dog. The Spaniard was there, too, crouched unobtrusively in a corner where the welts on his face would not be visible. The welts had come from Djoura, as a result of the merchants' abortive efforts to feed the woman a sedative dose of kif.

But no such drug seemed necessary, for the black Berber gave the approaching party only the most demure of glances before lowering her shy head and lacing her hands together on her lap.

Hakiim approached. He tentatively extended one hand which was neither bit, clawed, nor spat at. He lifted the slave's chin for inspection. She smiled.

“This is Djoura,” he said. A shade of question crept into his voice.

He had expected SOME trouble. He had been prepared with discipline, explanations of previous ill-treatment, promises of amendment, offers of help in training… He had set up this entire situation—house, clothing, sale by private treaty—as an attempt to gloss over Djoura's maniacal temper.

What was in the girl's head, to go suddenly all meek and winsome? (And didn't she look handsome, with her face not twisted into a snarl?) Hakiim had the sudden wish he'd stated a higher price.

The customer stepped forward. He gazed down at the woman from over his white-cased paunch. “Girl,” he pronounced, “I am Rashiid ben Rashiid. I am looking for an attendant for my youngest wife and a dry nurse for the baby that is coming. Would you be a good one?”

Djoura batted her curly lashes and smiled at the ground. Then she smiled at the little veiled face that peeped around Rashiid ben Rashiid's bulk. She wiggled from one side of the seat to the other in an agony of shyness. “I think we would,” she mumbled into her lap.

Rashiid liked the girl's attitude. He also liked her looks. And it occurred to him that the Prophet had ordained that a man might have four wives, while Rashiid (comfortably situated as he was) had only two.

No need to think further about that now, however. Now there was the baby to consider: perhaps his first son. It was enough that this woman be strong and biddable. Later, when he was ready to brave his present bride's pique, and that of her family, of course…

But by what strange custom did the Nubian refer to her lowly self in the plural?

Rashiid ben Rashiid laughed tolerantly. “We, little one? Are you twins, perhaps?”

A giggle and a scuff of the ground with one sandaled foot. “No. My brother and I do not look alike.”

Hakiim felt his ears prick up. In fact, it seemed those organs were moving to the top of his head through amazement. He opened his mouth to contradict the girl—to assure Rashiid that there was no brother in the case—when Djoura crooked her finger and the blond eunuch trotted over.

Obedient, like a dog.

Rashiid stared at Raphael, who returned a blue gaze free from either shyness or challenge. Then the large man seemed to puff out larger. He gave out heavy brays of laughter.

“Merchant of women, what is this?” he gasped, when he could. “There was no talk of a… a brother!”

Hakiim shook his head blankly. “I have no idea. The yellow-head is of course no relation at all to her, and…”

A voice in the corner spoke. “They go well together,” said Perfecto. “In contrast. Two for the price of one.”

Hakiim shot a look of fury at his partner. It was not customary for Perfecto to speak in the marketplace; he was not a convincing salesman and his native accent was strong. In dealing with customers of quality it was the Spaniard's business to keep his mouth shut.

And this… this bizarre attempt to get rid of the idiot by making him part of a package with Hakiim's prize discovery…

But Djoura took Raphael by the hand, and seeming to gather together slow reserves of courage, smiled into Rashiid's glowering face.

“This is my brother Pinkie, master. He is not a man but—you know—a boy. He is a good worker and does everything I say.”

Rashiid found his annoyance melting in this girl's black velvet gaze. “I don't need a boy,” he stated, masking confusion with gruffness.

Djoura seemed to wilt, and she gave a long sigh. “Without my brother,” she said tremulously, “I must surely languish. Without Pinkie I think I will die.”

Hearing no response, she continued in louder tones. “Without Pinkie I will throw myself into the ocean, I guess. Without Pinkie I will throw…”

Hakiim cut her off, feeling her threats were about to extend from suicide to murder. “Don't be silly, Djoura. You've only just met the creature this week!”

Then he turned to Rashiid. “The eunuch, when we first got him, was sick, and Djoura nursed him back to health. I guess they developed some attachment, but it's surely nothing that cannot be forgotten in a few days…”