Damiano (11 page)

She smelled man and stopped—curious, innocently wary.

When the first watcher beheld the spotted cow ambling down the hill toward them, he hissed a warning. All the townsmen froze. Those who had swords put their hands to the hilt. Belloc hefted his blunt hammer.

The cow stopped, her conviction failing as Damiano's did. Her ears revolved, and she peered over her shoulder at strange movement. One dainty foot was raised.

“Take her,” shouted someone, and a half-dozen swords caught the light. Belloc raised his hammer.

Damiano saw the blow descending. “No!” he cried, or tried to. “No! Let me...”

The cow fell to its knees, and Paolo Denezzi opened its brown and white spotted throat. It died in the snow without a sound and was butchered where it lay, steaming in the air like a kettle of soup.

Carlo Belloc plunged his bloody hands into the snow and turned away from the carcass. He was most surprised to see young Damiano face down in the snow; a splash of gold and scarlet. Denezzi was looking down at him.

The blacksmith hurried over. “What did you do to him?” he snapped at Denezzi.

“Do to him?” Denezzi shook his head. “I did nothing. I'd pick him up, but that bitch of his...”

Macchiata's bent legs straddled her limp master. Her mouth was a rictus of hate, dripping slaver. Belloc regarded her earnestly, from under beetling brows.

“You can talk, can't you dog? Tell us what's wrong with your master?”

She licked her lips, and her fury was extinguished. “I don't know. He fell down when you hit the cow.” Her nose burrowed through the hair at the back of Damiano's neck, to assure herself he was still alive. “He's very sensitive,” she added.

Denezzi bit off his laugh at Belloc's warning glower.

“Allow us to pick him up and carry him to the fire, puppy,” said Belloc. “If he has taken hurt, we will help him. We're his friends.”

The blacksmith lifted Damiano easily and set him over one huge shoulder. The staff lay where it had fallen until Macchiata, seeing her master laid gently before the fire, returned. Taking the brass foot in her mouth, she dragged the stick to Damiano's side.

The men she passed got out of her way.

Time was a trickle of chilling blood. Red went brown. Brown went black. Memory fell apart. Sense fell apart. He saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, and knew nothing except that he saw nothing, heard nothing, and felt nothing.

Hope fell apart.

Damiano's eyes were open, staring blindly at the fire. When Belloc spoke to him, he made no answer. He neither stirred nor spake the night through, nor did the smell of roasting beef rouse him. Macchiata lay by him, equally quiet. She, however, ate her fill.

At dawn the light of the rising sun stole his gaze from the fire. He propped himself on his elbows, and Macchiata uttered a whinny of glad relief. She smothered with kisses his dull and unprotesting face.

“Eh, boy? Are you with us again?” murmured Belloc, who had watched half through the night and finally pitched his blankets next to the tranced form.

Damiano slowly turned his face to Belloc. “How long?” he whispered.

“Have you lain there mazed? All yesterday evening and night. It's dawn already, Dami Delstrego. Where have you been?”

The answer was halting. “I have lain trapped in the body of a dead beast. Dead. Knowing myself dead.

“Was it only one night? I thought it was decades. I thought my time had passed. I thought there would be no escape until the last day, and judgment.” His eyes were still very wide, brown and soft like a cow's, and his face expressed nothing.

The blacksmith sighed. “If you were trapped within the cow yesterday, then you spent the night in a hundred stomachs. I think you're still not well, Damiano,” said Belloc. “Stay here for today, while a party rides to Aosta. There's plenty of firewood left, and I saved you some meat.”

Damiano had started to rise, but at Belloc's last words his stomach rebelled. He gagged but was empty as a dry bucket. “No,” he panted. “I'm riding with you. You will need me, should you find what you are looking for. And I—I am beginning to see what must be done. I'm riding with you.”

 

Chapter 6

The procession wound down and east, past the abandoned village, where the ruins of one hut were already softened with a cloak of blown snow, back over the river Lys, and toward the crossing of the roads. They were a somber line of men, and they pushed their horses, but they were not soldiers.

Damiano rode one of Paolo Denezzi's geldings, with a leather strap for a bridle and no saddle at all. It was a black horse; all of Denezzi's four horses were black. The witch reflected on what Denezzi had said the previous afternoon—how hard it would be on some poor man to lose his mount to the knife. And here was the rich man with one to ride, two for pack, and an extra. Damiano smiled grimly.

The horse was nervous bearing him. Well it might be, for Damiano's mind was filled with cold and weeping blood. The call that he had begun the day before could not be utterly silenced.

Bored with the slow pace, he turned his horse's head once more to the straggling tail of the company, where men rode on cart horses and hinnies. There was even one fellow, Aloisio by name, who sat astraddle an ass, his bootless feet dragging in the dust. He was a tanner by trade and carried neither sword nor spear. But he had a long hide-splitter, razor sharp, and a young wife in the train to Aosta.

“Aloisio, can't it move any faster?” asked Damiano, looming over the man from his seat on Denezzi's lean horse. He had intended his words to sound warmer.

The tanner raised his head, wary but unafraid. “No, Signor Delstrego, it cannot. Not unless I get behind and push.”

Damiano nodded in resignation and tried to smile. Dryly his lips slid back from his teeth. He fell in place beside Aloisio, at the tail of the line, where he could make sure no one became lost.

The tall peaks, crystalline now in the easterly sun, stood in the distance at the right of the road. Damiano squinted and wondered what he had seen in them, only the day before. They were unscalable stone, as they had always been, and they harbored neither food nor beauty.

Thinking about the peaks and his previous intoxication led him to think about Macchiata. He felt again her wet, impertinent nose against the palm of his hand and heard again her fluttering worry, like that of a hen as she prodded him from his knees in the slush. In the universe of ash in which he found himself, the little dog could spark a tiny flame of gladness.

She scrambled at the proud horse's feet, pottering into every mark and blister of the snow at the side of the road, panting very hard. A few days like this and she would not be so ridiculously fat.

Damiano placed his hand on the horse's knotty head and without words suggested that it trot back to the head of the line, to Denezzi's side. The animal started and plunged at the contact, almost costing Damiano his seat.

Very soon the crossroads came into view. Damiano led his mount to the snowbank where his own trail from the guardhouse broke onto the road. He gave the reins into the hands of his nearest neighbor and leaped down. His lean legs disappeared into the trail, stepping high and storklike. The procession slowed to a disorderly stop.

He emerged from the shelter bearing three soft bags. “Clothing,”

he said. “Not very good. Not clean. But for any man who needs it. And for any man who needs a hair pin.” He held up the jeweled ornament. Two dozen eyes stared uncomprehending, before he slipped the pin back into his belt pouch. As he climbed onto the horse's back Damiano rustled like dry leaves or paper, and a flat weight hung forward inside his woolen tunic.

The North Road was a steady climb, slick as wellstone. Some of the heavy steeds at the rear of the line, especially those without shoes, had trouble. Damiano noticed with dull amusement that Aloisio's ass was doing very well under the new conditions and was climbing toward the front of the company.

Damiano turned to Belloc, who had ridden silently on his gray gelding since breaking camp. “I learned to play the lute from an angel,” he said. “An archangel, to be exact. No one can see him but me—and Macchiata.” Belloc turned on him a slow, suspicious eye.

“Doesn't that sound silly, Signor Belloc? Until yesterday, it seemed quite natural to me. My lessons were, perhaps, the most important things in the world. As important as the quest of alchemy. Now...”

He turned his head in a circle, peering around with eyes that could not fathom distance or endure the sun. Belloc stared at him with a sort of stolid, masculine pity. “Now it seems very irrelevant. Both the angel and the lute. And alchemy as well.

“It was spending the night in the dead body of a cow. That puts a different perspective on things. It makes one see life as it really is, in all its misery. Or possibly it only makes one sick.”

“Sickness plays tricks on the mind,” rumbled Belloc in reply, not sure whether by sickness Damiano meant seeing angels or not caring to see them. “I told you you should have stayed back at the pasture.”

“Eh? Why? We're not going back there, you know. If we find no one on the road all the way to Aosta, there'll be nothing to do but stay in the city. Most of us, anyway. If we catch up with Pardo's soldiers, then either they will kill us, or we will kill them, or we will all kill each other. If it is we who survive, then we'd better keep going—for Pardo's men have many friends, and Partestrada has none. Unless the Green Count comes to avenge us. In the, spring, of course.”

Damiano's eyes shone dry like polished stone. His skin was white. Belloc shook his head. “When did you eat last, boy?”

Damiano shrugged without interest.

Paolo Denezzi, who was riding a few feet in front of the two, as though he were a commander and the others his lieutenants, peered back over his shoulder. After a weighty silence, he spoke. “We will go to Aosta,” he conceded. “Those with friends or family there may stay. Or those with money to buy. The rest I will lead to Donnaz, where we will prepare our own vengeance.”

Damiano felt a challenge rise up in him. When had these plans been adopted? When he had shown up at the camp no such idea had existed in the men's minds, and he'd heard no talk since....

But then for many hours he had not been listening. And could he provide any better destination? Denezzi at least had the good of the city in mind.

Besides, Damiano did not believe events would pass so smoothly. A troop of hardened cavalry did not disappear into the hills forever.

Belloc cleared his throat. “You have property in the town of Donnaz, Signor Denezzi?”

Denezzi nodded, distrustful. “What of it?”

“I was wondering where you would put our homeless neighbors.”

“They will pay me back,” stated Denezzi. His thin mouth was dour, and his moustache bristled.

Suddenly Damiano could stand it no more: the interminable, straggling march, the presence of Denezzi, even Belloc's taciturn kindness. He called Macchiata, ordering her to stay by the blacksmith until he returned, then he kicked his mount forward.

“Where are you going, Delstrego?” demanded Denezzi, rising in his saddle.

“Ahead,” answered the witch.

The dark man opened his mouth as though to forbid him. He remained that way for a moment, uncharacteristically indecisive. Finally he said, “If you break my horse's leg, boy, I will break your head.”

Damiano smiled thinly. “You're not even four years older than I am, Paolo. And as for breaking my head...” He swiveled front again, and the black horse sprang forward as though whipped.

Alone was much better. His head was clear, with that peculiar ringing lightness that comes with fasting. The horse climbed energetically, in a dumb effort to leave its rider behind. Damiano felt some pity for the beast, but not much. Pity was deserved all around and could be spread much too thin.

His tall staff passed under his belt and lay against the horse's flank like a sword. Damiano secured it with his right hand
,
so it would
not
slap with every iron-shod step.

In a short time he left the clatter and creak of the citizens behind. Up here the road wound the shoulders of a peak like epaulets and crossed two great chasms, one on a bridge of rough wood, and the other on a splendid stone arch twelve hundred years old.

The North Road was deceptive, folding back upon itself, taking whatever path or purchase it could, so that Damiano once found himself staring across a sheer drop no wider than a snowball's throw, at a length of snowy road he was not to touch for half-an-hour's climb.

Sound was deceptive too, for now he heard the speech of men again, together with the blow and whinny of horses. He looked below, but could see no sign of the ascending company. He turned a corner and looked ahead.

It was the troops of General Pardo, displayed against the smeared white cliffs like chessmen. They rode in order, two abreast. There were fifty of them, and behind them lumbered five ungainly wagons. Damiano stared wide-eyed at the wagons.

Four were heavy laden, covered in waxed linen, pulled by four oxen apiece. The last wagon was open, and packed with... women. Damiano blinked and clutched at his staff. He was sure they were women, wrapped in shawls and blankets, mostly black. But these were not all the women of Partestrada, by no means. There could not be more than twenty in that sad, paintless farm cart. What was this? Was Carla among these? He did not know whether to hope she was or to pray she was not.

Damiano heard a stentorian cry. As he watched, so he was being watched.

Though he sat in hailing distance of Pardo's cavalry, a large loop of road lay between them. A single soldier broke from the head of the line and drove his mount back against the direction of their march, between the third wide wagon and the empty edge of the road. The beast was frightened; its legs splayed stiffly against the slick road, and it backed against the wood of the wagon, its brown eyes rolling at the sheer drop.