Damiano's Lute (25 page)

Damiano stared. “I did not. We were all clean. Saara said so.”

“Saara? And who is that?”

“Someone you don't know,” was Damiano's growled answer.

Satan let this pass. “In your pocket.” Satan smiled sweetly. “You had it in your leather pocket all those miles.”

And then he was gone.

Raphael's wings slowly settled. He turned toward Damiano and his eyes were as mild as they had ever been. “Once,” he began, his voice distant, “there were four of us: Michael, Gabriel, Uriel and myself, who stood together against him and his followers. We were the instruments of his downfall, as he does not forget.”

The angel shuddered then, not out of fear, but as a bird will shudder its plumage into place. “Also the instruments of his own desire, since to be cast off from peace was what he most wanted.”

Damiano felt himself returning from that silent fury to his human nature again. It was like climbing out of a hole. He bent and touched the charred table which lay on its side in the road. Its flames went out. “Yet you called him ‘miserable sufferer,' Seraph. Why? Do you pity him?”

One angelic eyebrow shot up while the other pulled down. “Pity Lucifer? No—should I? Remember, Damiano, he is not locked into being what he is. It is a matter of his own choosing, always.”

The stool he treated like the table. The leather seat had burned clean through. Together the two pieces of furniture made a sorry little picture beside the fire-discolored wall. “His own choosing? Of course. Yet one can be locked into his own choosing. As a mortal man, I understand that. When I act my worst, I know I am sinning, and that thought makes me wickeder than ever. I can pity the Devil.”

The mortal blinked nearsightedly from the wreckage to the street beyond. Now, with Satan removed from the scene, he recognized it as one of the shabby streets which led down to the mud of the Rhone. “Though if I had the power I would smash him flatter than a cutlet.”

The Archangel Raphael gazed deeply at the unaware Damiano, then clapped the mortal from behind with an enthusiastic wing. “Dami, Dami! You have a power of philosophy beyond the merely angelic. Perhaps you have hit on the reason for man being what he is.”

Damiano was tired. He remembered he had to play for the Holy Father, and that he had not yet asked MacFhiodhbhuidhe to substitute for him. “Reason? I did not know we
had
a reason for being, Seraph. To understand the Devil?”

“To forgive him. It is more than I can do.”

Slowly the man found the ability to think again, and he thought about what had just happened. “What… what he said, Raphael. About me. Was any of that true, do you know?”

“About your dying? I do not know the future, Damiano, and I don't think he can know any more than I. At any rate, he certainly backed off…”

Damiano shook his head till the black curls flew. “No. With that concern I am through. Whether I live or die is no one's business— and least of all my own. I meant about the plague.”

“Why should that be straight, when all else he says is twisted?” Raphael put his hand once more on his friend's shoulder and drew him in.

“Well, you see, by coincidence I
did
carry something in my pocket from Petit Comtois to Avignon. It was a ruby pendant that some madwoman gave me.”

The angel reflected. “Is it rubies, then, that carry the pest through the world?”

Damiano shrugged. “Who knows? It comes without warning and leaves when it is ready to leave. But I saw, or thought I saw, Satan's face on a man in the plague town.”

“Ah! Then he would be expected to know that you had a pendant. Dami… he is a very clever fool, my brother Lucifer. He would make you believe your own nose was your enemy, if he could. Besides. Is there plague in Avignon?”

Damiano gazed up and down. There were people on the street: a good dozen. Masons, laborers, clerics, mothers, gentlefolk. Where had they been before? He sighed in confusion. “Not to my knowledge.”

Damiano brushed nonexistent dust from his clothes. “Raphael, I am supposed to play before the Holy Father tonight.”

“Good for you,” replied the angel. “Give him something he has not heard before.”

“I am suddenly terrified of it. Please come with me.”

Raphael laughed. “I will. I would be interested to see the man.”

 

Chapter 10

This was just more of the same, said Damiano to himself. Placed here in the corner in insufficient light, playing to a drone of conversation, he might as well be back at the Bishop's Inn. At least in that high gallery, he wasn't half hidden from his audience by an armoire.

Audience? He knew better than that, too. The Cardinal Rocault had not looked his way once, and as for Innocent himself, though he was facing the musician directly, and though he occasionally let his eyes rest upon Damiano's quick-moving hands, it was obvious that his attention was taken by his demanding dinner guest.

Yet Damiano did have listeners. The table servants flashed him quite human glances, and Gaspare (who was in no good mood, having spent all the previous day and part of this afternoon haunting the house of this same ambitious cardinal, hoping for a sight of his sister) was offering his support. The boy, who was wholly hidden from the view of the diners along a passage at the other side of the chamber, stared at him with an intensity designed (by sheer effort of will) to prevent Damiano from making a mistake.

And Raphael had come, too. The angel sat within touching distance of Damiano, curled sideways around a heavy-backed chair. He listened as though he had never heard his protege play before.

To Damiano's slight disappointment, it seemed the Holy Father was as oblivious of an angel's presence as was the great mass of humanity. Of course the Pope was not a witch, but surely some preternatural authority ought to have been vested with his office along with the spiritual. Enough, at least, to recognize an angel when one plumped himself down in your dining room.

At least the acoustics were better here than in the Bishop's Inn.

The voice of the lute neither echoed nor faded within the intimate, muraled chamber, for there were just enough hangings to keep the sound clean. It was as though the room had been built with his art in mind.

“Give him something he has not heard before,” Raphael had said, so that is what Damiano did. Scorning the ballades of Provence and the boring (to Damiano) folksongs of his native Alps, Damiano played what he had composed himself: music so new it was hardly born yet, wild in both time and harmony, colored slightly (almost against Damiano's will) with the ornate ornamentation he was picking up from MacFhiodhbhuidhe.

He had no intention of listening to the dialogue of the Pope and the cardinal, though Jan Karl had arranged his concert with that end in mind. He had no desire to get mixed in with politics he could not be expected to understand, and besides, if he were playing at his best, he would have no attention free.

But the conversation impinged upon his attention, because of its subject.

“They tell me three hundred, in Lyons. Mostly children, of course,” the cardinal was saying. He was a big man, black-eyed, brown-haired, who looked good in the color red. Damiano had a long stare at the back of his head.

“Of course,” echoed Innocent, who appeared much older, but not appreciably frail. The Pope's nose was raptorial, his eyes fine. “These days the plague prefers youth. I have it on good authority that is because those who were subject to it of my generation died in '50.

“But it comes back every year, or every other year, somewhere in Europe. Last year it was Spain and Poland. This year it is France. Next year Italy, perhaps.”

Damiano's fingers kept playing while his mind reeled. Plague again. He could not escape it. He had a fervent, irrational desire that people would shut up about plague in front of him, for he had been through too much lately.

“All very well to take the long view, Your Holiness,” interrupted Rocault smoothly. “But people expect you to do something about it.”

Innocent's elderly-eagle eyes flickered from the cardinal to the lute on the other side of the room. The old man seemed to have no problem seeing at a distance. “Ah? Well, I am, my son. I am praying daily, and offering the mass.

“Or did you—forgive me, did the people—have in mind something different? Something more like a bull?”

“That is what I had in mind,” replied Rocault dryly. He followed Innocent's eyes and regarded the musician with no very friendly stare. For a moment he said no more.

What was Damiano to do? He had been told to play for the Holy Father, and he would continue until that one told him to stop. Surely Cardinal Rocault was not distracted by the sound of a single lute in the corner.

Perhaps he merely did not appreciate the New Music.

“A bull, certainly, Your Holiness, would let the people of France know they are in your prayers. And the best sort would be a bull rescinding your predecessor's protection of the local Jews.”

Jews again. Jews and the plague. Damiano wished momentarily that he were back in the north of Italy, in Partestrada, sans plague and with only one Jew to speak of.

Innocent chuckled, and tapped his silver knife on his golden plate. “Hah, Rocault, my old friend. Here we have gotten half through our dinner without your mentioning this
bête noire
of yours: protection of the Jews. I had even begun to hope you had left it behind.

“You know I think it is silly; Clement's very reasonable exposition of why the Jews cannot have caused the plague did not prevent the burning of the ghettos, nor the murder or exile of thousands. If I should publish a statement turning Clement's logic on its head, would that make the behavior of the populace any different?”

Damiano snarled a finger and returned his attention perforce to his playing.

There was a sound of thunder above their heads; the good weather was at an end. Raphael leaned—no, slouched—against the chair back, one elbow propped on the finial of cherubs carved from oak. With his calm, interested visage and generally passive attitude, he might have been any intelligent listener at the Bishop's Inn, with a seed cake and a cup of violet wine on the table before him.

There was a piece Damiano had written only the previous week, which reminded him of Raphael. (It fell short, the lutenist thought, but then of course it would.) Though it was not part of his professional repertoire, he played it now for the angel.

“There is everyday truth, and then there is a metatruth, Your Holiness. And while in actual fact the plague may not be due to the Jews poisoning the water supplies, the higher truth is that all our misery upon the earth is due to the wickedness that murdered our Saviour…”

“I thought,” murmured Innocent, seemingly inattentive to the cardinal's words, “that our misery was due to the sin of Adam, expressed anew in every man, and that the sufferings of our Lord were our happy redemption.” The Pope cleared his throat, laid down his knife and gestured for his chair to be moved to the other side of the table, closer to the music.

“After all, Rocault, it
is
Eastertide, you know, and we generally try to adopt an attitude of thankfulness.”

When the old man finally spoke to him, Damiano had gone so far from attention to the conversation that a lackey had to nudge him on the shoulder.

“Lutenist.” Innocent stood immediately in front of him. Damiano rose hurriedly.

But the Pope sat, knowing a chair would appear to receive him, and he gestured the same for Damiano. “You sound like an entire consort of lutes, here in your corner. Along with a harp or two, and at least one tambour.”

Damiano mumbled his thanks, and then, to his astonishment, Innocent VI reached out, asking if he might see the lute.

The Holy Father played a few quiet scales. He smiled. Back by the dinner table, Cardinal Rocault was not smiling.

“It sounds very different when I try to play,” observed the old man.

“I did not know, Your Holiness,” began Damiano (and his voice humiliated him by cracking on the word “Holiness”), “that you played the lute.”

“A little. When I have time. I play enough to wonder why you, who get such a variety of sounds out of your instrument, don't play more at the far end of the neck.”

“The lute is not true up there,” replied Damiano.

Innocent chuckled to himself. “Not true. Nor metatrue?” And his glance at the young man sharpened and held a covert amusement. “Are you Jewish, young man? You could be, by the look of you. Sitting here and listening to all this talk, it would be very frightening for you if you were Jewish. You would not easily forget, nor keep secret what you heard, if you were Jewish.”

“I am not,” said Damiano in turn. “I am Piedmontese, and this nose I got from my Italian father. It is very frightening to hear anyway, but I don't understand enough to repeat it. Nor do I know many people in Avignon to whom I could repeat anything.”

The Pope smiled sweetly at him and smothered a yawn. “No matter, my son. I am not about to issue proclamations this season, and the whole world is permitted to know that.” His Holiness stood, and his chair was toted back to the table.

As the old man turned to follow it, Raphael rose from his place and stood beside him. His fair face was only inches from the Pope's ear. “Claude,” called Raphael softly. “Claude Rabier!” And then he whispered in the Pope's ear.

Innocent grimaced and blinked, rubbing one age-stained hand over his eyes, but he did not pause.

The angel watched him go. White wings drooped down to the carpet.

“He couldn't hear you?” whispered Damiano.

“I don't know if he heard me or not,” replied the angel.

“. . . you forget the usuric taxes, Rocault. Your cardinal's vestments were purchased out of Jewish…”

Damiano felt easier at heart. Not that he was about to confuse the astute Innocent with Saint Francesco, but now he had a certain faith in the man as well as the office. The old Pope was not about to be ground under heel by Cardinal Rocault.