The Damiano Series (98 page)

And his sun-bright eyes noticed very soon that the little troop, which had been riding south, toward the Alhambra, held a prisoner —just one. A woman whose ebony skin gave off the same rich highlights as his own scales, and who wore a corona of gold tips (again like his) in her hair.

The dragon chortled with delight at this exotic find. He plucked her from among her captors with the care a collector will give to blown glass.

Simon the Surgeon stared from Rashiid to the cup in his hands. “It is the common practice,” he observed. “Without the draught many more
of them die.
Since he
is full grown
and unwilling as well there is a good chance that this one might.”

“Indeed he might,” said Rashiid, with rising inflection. “Indeed he might.” The rotund householder's eyes were shining; his hands were knotted fists at his sides.

Rashiid was angry. Being awakened to take delivery on a runaway slave that one had not yet noticed was missing—that made one angry. It also made one feel a little bit of a fool.

Stripping the boy for flogging only to discover that he was no boy at all but a man intact—that added to both the anger and the foolishness in no small way.

But sending for the local surgeon: saying to the functionary, “Come,” and having him come, and saying to the assembled household, “Stand,” and having them all stand—that was a thing to comfort one with one's own power. Rashiid's mottled hazel eyes were gleaming with that power, and the assembled household shifted from foot to foot, its many subservient eyes turned to the sky, the pond, the white garden wall… Anywhere but to Rashiid.

Anywhere but to the man tied to the hitching post.

Raphael, too, stared past his master, to the white clay wall of the house. But his eyes were not focused on the house. His head was turned slightly, as though he were listening—listening to something important, yet expecting interruption at any moment from a fellow who tended to interrupt. Who had a reputation for interrupting important communications.

Who was a bit of a fool.

“He very well might die,” Rashiid repeated again, for emphasis.

Simon shrugged and put the cup down on his workbench. He was neither overawed nor afraid of Rashiid, for Simon was a free man employed to do a job. Since the greatest part of his work was done at the market, where buyers of young beasts wanted them castrated before taking them home, this wealthy cityman was an unlikely source of business. His tempers could not do Simon harm. The surgeon considered telling him not to get in the way.

No—Rashiid was the employer, and there was no use borrowing trouble. Simon put the cup down.

He signaled his apprentice to step up the bellows pumping.

Some practitioners castrated with hooks and some used clamps and a few used a loop of shrinking leather, but Simon the surgeon had a curved knife with a handle of wood, and this served for almost any occasion from gelding to bloodletting; one could even shave with it. He thrust this blade into the coals so that its single stroke would both cut and cauterize.

The second wife of Rashiid had been standing with her older housemate: soundless, white-faced, one knuckle between her cupid's-bow lips. Her round eyes had grown more than round, watching Raphael bound to the post. Watching the coals laid and the fire draw up. Now a waft of hot, metal-scented air came to wrap around her where she stood. The fire spat back at the bellows and the blade itself made a noise as it heated.

Ama fainted into Fatima's arms.

Rashiid saw his wife crumple. He subdued an impulse to go to her. It was first pride that caused him to ignore the incident—the unwillingness to break this moment of power with softness of any kind— but then a horrible surmise entered his brain and Rashiid's face went hard as stone. Let Ama give thanks to Allah that she had been discovered to be pregnant BEFORE this boy who was not a boy arrived.

Raphael's blank eyes saw only the face of Djoura at the last moment he had seen her, before they had bound him and thrown him over a horse. Her scorn withered him still.

For Raphael had no great confidence in the choice he had made; perhaps the mortal-born woman had been right and they should have died together under the blue and white tiles of the wall. Now she would be taken back to Africa, where she did not want to go, and he…

Raphael heard the knife moan in the orange coals and he knew dread—dread of loss and further shame… Dread of a life compassed by drudgery and by whippings, played out to a dull rhythm of days. Dread of simple pain.

Surely Djoura had been right.

But though the song was of pain and fear, still Raphael's body was singing. That body had a will of its own, and he heard it telling him what it feared most was to die.

Raphael listened to the voice of his body with his head turned slightly to one side and on his face was a distant, concentrated expression. But when Ama slumped into Fatima's arms he saw and he opened his mouth, as though he were on the point of saying something.

HAD he spoken, it would have been to tell her that he knew she had not betrayed him to Rashiid. That he did not blame her for his fate. But Rashiid, Ama's husband, stood between them, so Raphael said nothing at all.

The knife came out of the fire, not red-hot but hot enough to twist the air around it, turning morning mist into steam. Simon approached Raphael and peered appraisingly into his eyes.

In shock already, the surgeon said to himself. Bad risk. Aloud he called, “Bend him back.”

The calloused hands of the head gardener came around Raphael's neck and shoulders and stretched him back over the hip-high wooden post. One hand covered his mouth. Another squatted behind him and held his knees.

He could see nothing but the hairs on the gardener's arm. He heard the man's heavy breathing. He felt his own body stiffen and he wondered at this, for he had not told it to do so.

Next came a fearful deep noise like wind and a great thudding and crashing. Raphael did not know what caused this, whether the gardener's shoulder against his ear, an accident with the surgeon's coals, or his own body's confusion. But the howling continued and suddenly he was released, reeling at the end of the chain which bound his hands to the post.

The household of Rashiid was scattering like so many birds and crying in a dozen voices. The surgeon's terrible knife lay abandoned on the ground. Rashiid himself was waving his arms wildly and his face was contorted.

In the middle of this uproar a horse plunged and reared: a black horse. Upon his back was a tall, gangling rider with red hair. He was shouting something inaudible, and so was Rashiid. A flutter of feathers sank down by Raphael's feet and rose up again as a woman.

She sang a word and his chains fell open to the ground.

The horse seemed to be moving all its legs independently, like a spider. It sailed over the threshold like a leaf in autumn.

Gaspare wondered if he were going to stay upright at all, for the vicious cold wind sucked him along willy-nilly. He spun over packed ground, narrowly missing the wave-lashed surface of a pond, with his hands full of horse's mane and rope. He lifted his eyes.

It was Raphael and yet it wasn't Raphael whom Gaspare saw:

naked, squinting with confusion, gape-mouthed, lost in the middle of all the screaming Saracens. There was the angel's hair, perfect face, slender figure—but all pinched out of mere human clay. Gaspare sat the capering horse with unconscious expertise, his eyes locked on Raphael's confusion. He saw his teacher fall to his knees. Rage filled Gaspare, mixed with nausea, that he should have to see Raphael reduced to this. With a choked scream he threw Festilligambe into the tumult.

Raphael blinked at the horseman almost half-wittedly. But then the naked man's eyes focused on the head of the lute projecting beyond Gaspare's right shoulder, and memory awakened. “Hoal” shouted Gaspare, and he pulled on the reins.

But the horse had his own memory. His black ears swiveled to the human beside his withers. He nickered uncertainly. Then Festilligambe lifted his fine dry head and bellowed like a stallion from joy.

Raphael, grinning at this salute, hoisted himself up behind Gaspare.

There was another hand on the bridle: the same calloused hand that had held Raphael only a minute since, the hand of the head gardener. Gaspare kicked at it and the horse attempted to rear. Rashiid, seeing this, ran from the doorway where Gaspare's first rush had pressed him and put his own white-knuckled hand on the headstall. Festilligambe threw his head futilely from side to side. His tragic large eyes rolled, showing white all around.

Gaspare dropped the reins and took instead two handfuls of the gardener's hair. Dragging the man half off the ground, the redhead bit him in the ear. His uneven teeth ground together until the gibbering fellow dropped his hold. But in the time it took to accomplish this action three more men had taken hold of some part of the horse's anatomy. One grabbed Raphael's bare leg and began to pull him to the ground.

Saara had not been idle. Though weary from her wind summons (but she HAD to show Gaspare) she had scrabbled over the turf among fleeing feet and horse's hooves. Now she came up with Simon's bitter-edged knife. Hands dropped away from Raphael. From the horse.

Rashiid, for whom the capture of the horse had meant victory won from defeat, turned at the disturbance and did not see the knife at all, but only a child-faced woman with brown hair in uneven braids and a dress which did not cover her legs. She reminded him a bit of Ama, and Rashiid was not pleased with Ama. With a cold sneer he released his right hand from the headstall to cuff her across the mouth. With no expression on her face Saara released his other hand from the reins by slicing it off at the wrist.

Rashiid sprang back, stiff-armed, pumping blood like a garden fountain into the air. The whole household went still.

Simon the Surgeon had taken no part in the melee, but had flattened himself against the house wall as soon as the horse blew in through the gate. He was paid to do a job, after all, not to get himself killed. But as Simon was a surgeon he knew what was necessary when a man had lost a member, so he took Rashiid, tripped him, dragged him to the overturned brazier and pressed his spouting arm against a coal. The householder's shrieks reached deafening proportions.

Faces appeared—cautiously—at the gate. They disappeared again. There came the sound of a horn from without. It echoed along the street and was answered by another.

Gaspare looked at Saara. So did Raphael. Saara glanced from one end of the suddenly motionless yard to the other. She shifted her knife nervously.

Then the smell of hot metal and the horrible smell of Rashiid's seared hand stump mixed with another smell of burning. A lacy, twisting shadow descended. The carefully watered grass withered and steamed as the dragon set himself down. Djoura squatted within one enormous claw, her hands firmly over her face.

Lantern eyes took in the yard, the pool, the cowering humans. They lighted on the horse, with its double burden. “So! It seems you didn't need me at all!” the dragon said brightly.

Like a caterpillar with fluffy spines the dragon rode through the air, the gyrations of his body pushing first Djoura, then Raphael (who held to her), and then Saara (who held to HIM) upmost. Saara was at the end of the line because she had the least to lose by falling. Gaspare rode on one of the monster's upturned palms, to be nearer his horse.

“He did well, didn't he, dragon?” asked the redhead, not for the first time. “He cut into that mass of Saracens like… like…”

“Like a black dragon,” prompted the black dragon.

Gaspare thought maybe the dragon was making fun of him. “I am serious. Festilligambe showed the real, heroic soul of a horse down there, regardless of fire, knives, screaming…”

“Horses…” the great creature rumbled meditatively, “have very different souls, one from another. So have men. Have they not, Venerable Sage? And dragons, too, of course.”

Venerable Sage let the wind toss the fair hair from his face. “I certainly cannot deny that.” Then Raphael added, “Could you speak in Arabic, please, so that Djoura can understand?”

“Certainly,” the dragon replied. In Arabic. “The language of Mecca, or of the south, perhaps?”

“The south.”

An enormous long throat was cleared. “The young man has just noted, Child of Beauty, and I have agreed, that horses, men, and dragons are quite various. Within each species, I mean—the other is obvious.”

Djoura shifted her three-finger grip at the handholds in the dragon's neck scales. “Men are very different from one another, of course. Some are pink.”

Then she lifted her head high and rested back in Raphael's arms. “But that difference is of no importance.”

It was a beautiful morning over the foothills of the Pyrenees, with scattered soapsuds clouds over the pelty meadows. The dragon writhed for the sheer feeling of it.

“Where exactly am I taking you all?” he asked, first in Arabic and then in Italian.

“Lapland,” answered Saara promptly. “If you are going that far.” Gaspare groaned from below.

“I think you're a fool, my lady. But Lombardy for me,
signore.
Where else?”

“The land of lights is not too far at all,” stated the dragon. “And Lombardy is on the way.” Again he shifted language.

“And you, Venerable Sage—where would the lady and yourself like to be ferried?”

Raphael was silent. He threw back his head and regarded the blue, uncommunicative sky. “I don't know. All the earth is beautiful, and I'm sure it is my fault that I cannot feel myself to belong to it. It is just that I never expected…”

He shook his golden head. “Never mind me. Take us any place we might find a welcome, Djoura and I.”

“Lapland,” said Saara, who caught the meaning of the exchange through the foreign words.

“Lombardy,” insisted Gaspare, who had done the same. “A very civilized place, as Raphael well knows. Besides, I need my lessons.”