Damiano (23 page)

“But I have lived in Partestrada all my life, and she is in great trouble. It is for that reason I have disturbed your peace: because I am told you are the most powerful witch in the Italies.” He glanced up to see whether his words had offended Saara. She looked merely concerned.

“Who told you that I was the most powerful witch in the Italies, boy? No one in the Italies knows me.” But rather than waiting for his answer, she continued “Great trouble, Dami. That would mean —plague?”

Both his eyebrows shot up. “Mother of God! No! Not that! Not again. I meant war. And tyranny.”

“Ah.” The syllable expressed dying interest. She turned her head away from Damiano and toward the fluttering, yellow birch leaves. “War. Well, there's nothing I can do about that.”

“No?” For one moment he faced the possibility that his search had been useless, that there was no hope for Partestrada or for any small, industrious, unarmed peoples. Perhaps neither logic nor magic could hold the gates, for plague and Pardo were Fate and God's will. Just for a moment he stared at this possibility, and then he turned firmly away from it.

At a single word from Damiano, the tendrils of rosemary sprang away and hung as coils in the air around him. “I don't believe you. You say there's nothing you can do, but I read in your face that it's just not worth the bother.” He stood, and Saara stood. The air spat tiny sparks that smelled like hot metal. “Well it
is
worth one person's bother, and much more, and in the service of my city I have been beaten and frozen, gone hungry and sleepless and done deeds... that I shouldn't have done,” he concluded less forcefully. “In fact, I've done what no man should do. I've tried to strike a bargain with the Father of Lies, to deliver my city from bloodshed and poverty. Even he refused me. You are my last hope, Saara. I cannot believe the greatest witch in all Europe doesn't know of a way to free a town from the power of one Roman brigand.

“I'll do whatever need be done, lady. I'll fight Pardo's men alone on foot, if need be. I'll swell the Evançon to wash them from the streets. I'll go to any amount of work, and through any peril.

“I only need you to tell me how.” The faith in his eyes was as unreasonable as a child's, and his jaw clenched again and again.

Saara tried to break the link that locked her green, slightly tilted eyes to Damiano's. She failed, for the power that held her was as old as sorcery and far stronger. “I'm not the greatest witch in Europe, Dami-yano. In my home we are all witches, and there are some much stronger than I, and wilder. That is why...

“But, boy, you are free of that place, and of General Pardo. The world is yours—although not this hill, I must remind you. General Pardo cannot follow you everywhere.”

Damiano squinted painfully and shook his head. “He has my city, lady. My home. There is a great difference between a traveler and an exile. Ask Dante. Ask Petrarch.”

Saara cocked her head at the unfamiliar names, and then she laughed. “I need no one else's opinion. A city is a collection of stone walls. My people need no cities; they follow the reindeer and are free.”

“Reindeer?”

Saara grinned at his puzzlement. “Shaggy deer with great antlers and big feet that can stand on the snow. We ride them and milk them and also eat them, though not the same ones we ride.”

Looking at the impish set of Saara's smile, Damiano was not sure he was supposed to believe her. He decided, sighing deeply, that he should let the matter pass.

“We Piedmontese—all Italians—do need cities. We invest our hearts into them. A city is like a mother, lovely lady. She gives us our food and our friends and our amusements. She sets an indelible stamp upon us. Yet a city—she can't defend herself. Who will take care of her if not her children, eh?”

The Fenwoman's elfin face softened with something like pity, yet she shook her head. “That is a pretty thing to say, Dami. But a city is not a person. Nor has it life like a tree. It's a thing like the staff— it's your choice to put care into it or to be free. I would sooner help you be free.”

Hesitantly, Damiano stepped forward, trying to smile. When he was close enough to see her well, he was also close enough to touch. He put out his left hand and stroked her arm and shoulder. So roughened by the strings were his fingertips they scraped against the thin felt of her embroidered dress.

“Saara. My lady. If it is your wish that I don't live in my city anymore, so be it. I will live in a black forest. Or in a boat on the ocean—I don't care, so long as it is by your will. But first I must help Partestrada, don't you see?”

She watched his hand carefully but did not withdraw. He continued “I am told... by whom it doesn't matter, that a city can only prosper with blood and war, and that I could save Partestrada at the expense of her own future glory. I came to you to find another way.”

Damiano spoke in a whisper, and as he spoke his fingers traced a small wheedling circle on her shoulder. So intent was Saara on this motion that she seemed not to be listening. But she answered “I know nothing about glory, unless you mean the lights in the winter sky. I won't go to war with you, Dami-yano.”

“Then show me how to succeed without war,” he whispered, and as she raised an ironical eye to his insistence, he kissed her softly on the side of her mouth.

Saara caught her breath and closed her eyes and stepped back from him. “This is no good,” she said weakly. “Neither what you say nor what you do. Dami-yano, I have a man who would kill you for that.”

She rubbed her face with both hands. Damiano's smile, as he watched her, was slow and sad. “Maybe,” he admitted. “And maybe it was worth it, Saara.”

“No maybes about it,” she said sternly, then realizing what she had said, she added, “—about his killing you, I mean. He is just like you, too: lean and dark and unpredictable. His name is Ruggiero, and he comes from Rome.”

“From Rome!” cried Damiano, stung. “Then he can be nothing like me at all. I am Piedmontese.”

Her mutable eyes danced. “No difference that I can see—save that you are much younger and do not wear a sword.

“Take warning by that, Dami-yano and go back to Ludica. There is a world of charming girls out there. You need not a mother or a city or... a wicked old woman like me.” With those words Saara vanished, and a pale gray dove flashed upwards into the heavens.

Damiano followed the flight with his eyes, till the sun blinded him. He had never seen anyone turn into a bird before; such magic was impossible to one who worked through a staff.

There was a snuffle and grunt by his feet. He glanced down to see Macchiata, obscured by a dancing, round afterimage of the sun. The dog looked earnestly into his face.

“You licked her—kissed her, I mean,” said Macchiata.

“Yes,” responded her master. “I... like her.”

Still the dog stared. “I've never seen you kiss anyone before, Master. Not anyone but me.”

Damiano's lips twitched, but he controlled the smile. “That's true, little dear, but does that mean that I can't kiss anyone else?”

Macchiata thought about it. “You never kissed Carla Denezzi,” she commented sagely.

Damiano's reply was short. “No. But I should have.” He turned back to the rock, where the bees still droned and the moss lay like a cushion in petit point: green, gold, russet, black.

“I should have.” He picked up the lute by the neck and began to finger it, indecisively.

Macchiata heaved herself up beside him. “But she doesn't like you, Master. This one. She told you to go away.”

The treble trilled wanly. “That's because she doesn't want me to get in a fight with her... her Roman friend. One must like a person somewhat to want him not to get his head lopped off. Of course, there is really no danger of that. Saara underestimates me. She thinks I'm younger than I am.” He came down on the bass course so forcefully that the strings buzzed against the bridge.

“She will come around,” Damiano stated. “We'll camp on her hillside until she does.” Macchiata's ears flattened with doubt.

“But you said, Master... that we would soon be out of food. Remember?”

“We don't need to eat,” said Damiano, and he set his jaw. The dog stared for a long time without a word.

The camp he set up at the edge of the birch wood that evening was small, since he hadn't been able to carry much by foot from Ludica, and neat, since he felt in a way that the meadow was the lady Saara's parlor. And although he hadn't exactly been welcomed by that lady, he hoped to make himself a pleasant guest.

He and the dog ate bread and raisins while nightingales ornamented the wind in the leaves and a single late sparrow went “peep, peep, peep.” After dinner Macchiata lay before the fire and sighed.

Damiano was in a better mood. “You know, little dear, what is the best thing about Saara?” he asked as he peered down the neck of the
liuto,
checking it for wood warp. He didn't wait for an answer. “It's that she's wise as a great lady and yet free as a child.”

“Those are two things,” Macchiata commented, but her master was not listening.

“She was barefoot; did you notice, Macchiata? Her little white feet seemed scarce to bend the grass.”

The dog emitted a slow groan that ended in a grunt. “I noticed that she had a very heavy hand, when she pushed me down on the rock.”

Damiano shot her a glance in surprise. “Heavy? No, that was not heavy, Macchiata. Didn't I feel it myself? For a heavy hand, you must remember my father. Now
he
had a heavy hand.”

The lute was sound, but its finish had undeniably suffered in the climb. Hoping the bass course was true, Damiano tuned the rest of the strings by it. (Among his gifts was not that of absolute pitch, which Raphael said was more of an ordeal than a blessing to the musician possessing it.)

“Yet, Saara the Fenwoman is greater than my father was. I'm sure I could learn much from her, and the learning would be more pleasant.”

Macchiata raised her head. “But you don't want to be a witch, Master. You want to play the lute and go from place to place. You said so.”

Damiano cocked an eyebrow in irritation, and at that moment a mid string snapped. The small explosion echoed through the little gold wood and the birds all went quiet together.

He stared down dumbly for a moment, then began to pull off the remnants of the string. “Both ways of life,” he stated, “Have their advantages. And disadvantages.

“It may be I'm tuning too high,” he concluded, and started the tuning again.

“But Saara has the best of both worlds, for her music is her magic. And vice versa. Her way, I think, is more suited to a woman than a man, for we are by our nature more forceful and less gentle. If my feelings ruled my craft... well, we'd have a lot more storms in the sky, Macchiata.”

This time the tuning was completed without incident, though the empty space on the fingerboard was as bad as a missing tooth. “It must be that the lady's pure heart is her strength. That and her green eyes. Green and golden eyes. And smooth, dimpled skin...”

“Master,” broke in Macchiata. Her own eyes, earnest and brown, were concerned. “Master, do human men ever have to go to the stable?”

He peered across the fire at her, blinking, his chain of thought—if it was thought—broken. “What, Macchiata? Do human men ever what?”

“Ever have to stay in the stable. For two weeks. Alone.”

Damiano's glance slid away, and his complexion went many shades darker. He cleared his throat. “No, Macchiata,” he said with authority. “No, never.”

In the dark, in the rustling quiet of the birch trees, under the round white moon, Damiano began to play. His music was French, but it was not the new music at all. He played songs that were two hundred years old: the chansons of Bernart de Ventadour, whose love of his patron's lady was so unwavering that he was banished for it, and who then chose to love Eleanor of Aquitaine.

And Damiano sang to the lute in old Provençal, a language he could barely understand. The mode was Ionian, but the tune was very sad.

“Amors, e que'us es vejaire?
Trobatz mais fol mas can me?”
(Love, what is your opinion?
Can you ever find a greater fool than I?)

He heard in his own voice greater depth and feeling than he had imagined it to possess, for there is that about any foreign language: speaking it one becomes a different person, capable of new and astonishing things. His voice carried him away, till there were tears in his eyes with pity for the song and for himself.

“... Farai o,c c'aissi's cove;
Mas vos non estai ges be
Quern fassatz tostems mal traire.”

Little wings fluttered in the tree nearest the fire: neither the wings of the lark nor the sparrow. Damiano did not look up as Saara swooped to the earth beside Macchiata and sat there, feet folded under her blue felt skirt. But he sang the last part of the verse again, in Italian.

“I'll do what I must.
But it does not become you
To keep me suffering this woe.”

Saara whispered “Ah,” and Macchiata slunk away from the fire. The greatest witch in the Italies twisted her brown braid around and around one pink finger. “Very pretty, Dami-yano. Your music is like you: warm and dark and lonely. Only very young men are lonely in that way.”

There was silence while Damiano regarded her from across the campfire. Though her face was a blur at that distance, under the full moon he saw things with his witch's eyes and was abashed.

“I've come to tell you something, Dami—I'll call you that; it's easier. I've come to tell you why I won't help you fight a war.”

“I don't want...” he began, but she cut him off with a sharp gesture.

“In my home, which is Lappland in the far north, we were all sorcerers among the Haavala tribe: all Lapps are sorcerers—witches. We have power over the herds and the wild beasts and, most important of all, the weather. We keep the weather just bad enough to keep other peoples out.”