Raphael (10 page)

“No.” As the human's hand rubbed in expanding circles, the dog's left foot began a spastic, regular pawing of the air. Macchiata grunted like a pig. “No. No fleas in heaven. Only scratching.”

Saara settled back on her heels and looked about her. The moon was descending the western sky; the night was getting old. “Spirit, I haven't much time. Will you help me find your master? I called and he could not hear me.”

“He heard you,” said Macchiata, flipping onto her legs. She gave a great shake. “Everyone heard you. You called very loud. He just wouldn't come.”

Saara felt a cold needle of misery pierce through her. She was some time in answering. “He… wouldn't come?”

“No.” The dog's nostril's twitched, smelling the salt in Saara's tears. “Don't get upset! He stayed away so you wouldn't get upset. He wanted to come.”

Saara swallowed, beyond words for a moment. Finally she said, “I have to see him about Raphael. If I can't help Raphael, I will be very upset.”

Macchiata's sticklike tail thumped appreciatively. “I like Raphael. He has never been upset. Never.”

“That could change,” replied Saara ominously, “unless we help him.”

“I'll get Master,” announced the dog, and she faded like an afterimage on the eye.

Once Macchiata was gone, Saara wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her shirt and blew her nose into a handful of birch leaves. She had been shaken by every pull on her living memory, and the spirit that had refused to come had shaken her hardest. Had there been some malice in the little creature, to say so brutally “He wouldn't come”? Indeed, the summoning spell was the most dangerous of all spells, to soul and to body, for now that she had done it, she felt hardly the strength or the desire to go on living.

Her children: Could it be they were no more than infant spirits, grown neither in heart nor mind since the day they bled to death with their father on the floor of the hut? Something in Saara, instinct or sense of justice, rebelled at this idea. Was there illusion at the base of the summoning spell? Had Ruggerio not really kissed her fingertips?

Had Guillermo Delstrego not come after thirty years of her hate to say to her, “God go with you”? Something had happened nonetheless, and someone had come to her behind the darkness of her closed eyes. It remained to be seen whether her task had succeeded or failed.

She stared at the disk of the descending moon, and so deep in thought was she that she did not notice the silent approach of one behind her.

“Saara,” he whispered. “Pikku Saara.”

Saara turned slowly, effortfully, as though a great weight sat on her shoulders. She was suddenly afraid.

Behind her, illuminated by the moon, stood the shape of a man. It was dark, from its rough hair to its booted feet, and a cloud surrounded it like great, soft folded wings. As Saara looked up at the apparition's face the wings opened wide.

Smoky he was, and immaterial: not like the dog nor yet like the spirit who had kissed her fingers. For it was not her spell but his own wish that had brought him this very long way to a hill in Lombardy, in August, and he had little magic with which to clothe himself in flesh. Only the eyes of the ghost were clear to see, and full of tenderness.

“Damiano,” she began, and her voice left her as she uttered the name. “I'm sorry to call you. I don't want to cause you pain, when you have the right to peace.”

He knelt by her, and she sensed in her witch's soul a hand upon her face. “The only pain which can touch me,” he whispered, gently and from far away, “is to see this pain in YOUR eyes, Saara. And I will gladly endure it if I can help you. But I didn't think that I could.”

“You thought I called you out of loneliness,” she stated, and her words held a hint of accusation. “No. I have more love in me than that, Dami, and more sense too. I called you because of Raphael. He has fallen into the power of the Liar…

“And I… I was the bait used to draw him. It was my fault.”

Damiano sank down beside her and the round moon shone unobscured through his spreading wings. Slowly he grew more solid to look upon, as he gazed rapt into her green, tilted eyes. He put his weightless hands upon hers. “How could it be your fault, love, that Satan hates his brother?” He stroked her weathered hands gently. “If it is a matter of fault, then it is my fault that I wrapped my friend so tightly in the bonds of earth he could no longer stand against the Devil's malice.”

But the dark unghostly brown eyes reflected no sense of guilt. “There is no fault here at all, Saara, except that of Satan's jealousy. And even that may be borne.”

Saara gripped Damiano's large hands. They had become solid and warm. She brought them together and laid them against her cheek.

In another moment he was kissing her and curtains of wing shrouded them both.

“I love you,” whispered Damiano, with his head against her neck.

“Oh Lady, how I love you!” And then he sighed. “Forgive me, Saara; this does no good, I know!”

So it can be done, she thought to herself. The dead may touch the living in the very manner of life. Her heart raced, burning with the conviction that all vows would be well broken, and the future profitably traded—in exchange for this.

Saara hissed between her teeth and turned her head from him. “By the four winds! How wise I am—how wretchedly wise. Wise enough to put you aside, dark boy, even if you were fool enough to want to stay with me.”

When she looked back again her face had hardened. “You see what a woman can be made of, after seventy years of living? I am so strong even you cannot break me, my dear.

“And as for being hurt—what does it matter if I am hurt, Dami? Why should my friends want to hedge me from my greatest desire lest I be hurt? Is it not to be hurt, to have one's desire thwarted? Is it not to be hurt, to be left always behind?”

She turned on the ghost with a sudden, deep-felt anger. “You thought it were better to hide from me and die, rather than risk being saved at the expense of my life. How noble it was of you!

“But would it not have been greater to have given me the chance to prove myself as noble as you? Do you think my own love would have made it less than a joy to die in your place?”

He shook his head, and now the black curls moved with the fingers of the wind. The setting moon haloed his face: large-eyed, ram-nosed, smiling gently. “It would have been a great act, love. I was not capable of it.”

Saara was crying, but her voice came firmly. “And Raphael too… Walking into the Liar's snare, knowing it was a snare, and I the bait. I told him not to. I told him the truth: that I am old and my life is full-lived. There is nothing which now could please me more than a good death in battle…”

“Which you would not get from Satan,” replied the ghost simply, shrugging. “But rather pain, confusion, and the shame of weakness slowly overcoming you, like that of an old man who cannot hold his bladder. The Devil has no sympathy with anything quick and clean, and it isn't human death which pleases him, but human misery.” He searched her stern face for understanding.

“But in the end it did not matter, Saara, that you were ready to endure the Devil's torment. I believe you have the strength, beloved, if anyone born has ever had it. But Raphael also knew that if he left you in his brother's power, Satan would merely find another mortal tool, and then another, until Raphael could no longer resist him.”

Damiano's voice was slow and gentle, and he caressed her hair as he spoke, and when he was finished all she said was, “I love you, Dami Delstrego. We had only a few days together as man and woman, but when flesh is laid aside I will still love you, then and always.”

His sad smile widened, lighting all his face. “You are so beautiful, beloved. Like a great song… As for me, Saara of Saami, there is nothing left but love. That is why I feared to see you, lest it seem to you another abandonment, when the moon sets and I am there no longer.”

She whispered, “I have heard your father tonight. And I have heard the voice of my child. I have heard and seen a great deal in my life and I do not call up the dead to ease my heart, but for help.”

“Help?” he echoed, and his wings rose expectantly.

“Help in rescuing Raphael.”

Those shadowy wings beat the air in complex, unheeded rhythm, as a man may drum his fingers while thinking. “Of course,” he murmured at last. “Knowing you, how could I expect less? But I have no magic with which to help you,” he replied at last. “Nor force of arms. I am not a spirit of power.”

“You think not?” Saara looked away from his brown, human, dangerous eyes. “But, I don't seek power but knowledge. Once you summoned the Liar—Satan, as you call him.”

“Twice,” he replied gravely. “I was a fool.”

“But I am not,” she stated. “And I do not want to meet Satan again. But I must get to his hall, where he has bound Raphael.”

Damiano shook his head. “No, beloved. There is no need. Raphael has passed back onto the earth from there.”

Her head snapped up. “Where?”

Damiano was slow in replying. “I don't know.”

“Have you seen him?”

Once again the spirit smiled slowly, and then he turned his head as though to listen to the rising wind. At last he replied. “I have been to see him. He is in a dry, hot place. He is on a chain. It is a land to which I never traveled. More than that I can't tell you, for even as I look at you now, Saara, beautiful love, I am not here but far away, and there is little besides you yourself that is clear to my eyes…” And then it seemed he turned and peered down the hill again.

“For I am neither angel nor devil nor God Himself, to be prowling up and down the living world. Dead or alive, I am only Damiano, and my eyes have their limits.”

She snorted, bending to his humor unwillingly. “Then I shall have to steal into Satan's window, as I first thought.”

The smile died from his face as the belly of the round moon touched the hills behind him. “Don't try that, Saara.”

“I will. I must,” she replied. “Look at me, Damiano. Even simple eyes can see now that I am no more a child. This misadventure has aged me. But I am Saara of the Saami; I know what I must do, and I do it.

“Besides, I have sworn that I will find Raphael, so all choice in the matter is over.”

Damiano looked into her green Asiatic eyes and nodded his head in submission to the inevitable. “So you will find him. But not this way. Instead comb all the hot lands of the earth first, and all the places where men are kept on chains.”

She laughed a trifle scornfully. “No one can live so long! Most of the world is hot, to me, and most everywhere but among the Saami are men kept on chains! No, Damiano. You must tell me how to find Satan's Hall, where someone of greater information may be made to talk.”

“That would not be the act of a friend,” he said, staring away from her down the wooded hill.

There was a crashing among the trees below, like a deer leaping among the hazel, but Saara was too roused to attend to noises. She pointed a chiding finger at the ghost as she cried, “Was it the act of a friend to help a man die in his own way, when there was another who might have saved his life? Raphael said it was the act of a friend. Do you agree?”

Damiano's eyes were pulled to hers, and breathless spirit though he was, he sighed. “Will you throw me by my own words, Saara? Yes, that was the act of a friend.

“And it is your decision how you will live or die, and your vows are your own to keep. But the pure truth is that I no longer know the way to the Chamber of Four Windows, if I ever did.

“For Damiano is dead, you know.” The shadows of his hand touched his own breast. “This is only memory, lent shape by love.” As he spoke, his face was growing paler and less defined with the setting of the moon, but the look he gave Saara was an obvious mixture of sweetness and amusement. He raised his hand and pointed beyond her.

“But THERE is one I think might know the way to Satan's palace,” Damiano said.

Saara spun in place as the hulking black shadow barged among the birch trees. Above it was a thinner shadow that was cursing continually in a very familiar voice.

“Gaspare!” the witch cried out in recognition.

The horse shied at the sound and Gaspare came nearly off, hanging over the gelding's back by one crooked knee and a handful of black mane. He cursed fluently, sliding down to his feet.

The gangling youth strode closer, staggering and flailing his arms as though blind. He encountered a few birch boles before coming close enough to spy Saara, sitting solid as a point of stone at the crest of the hill.

“Lady Saara!” he began. “I have had the Devil's own trouble finding you. And it's dark here as the inside of a witch's…”

Gaspare had a pack on his back and the neck of the lute stuck out of it sideways like an insect's leg. His lank hair hung around his shoulders. Somewhere he had found another shirt.

Saara watched his approach in wonder and consternation. It had been scarcely a week since she had flapped home—a very weary dove —and in that time she had forgotten about the clownish Gaspare. She was not too happy to have him interrupting her ghostly tryst, painful though the meeting had to be. “As the inside of a witch's what, Gaspare?”

The only answer was a mumble and a clearing of the throat, as the youth realized what he had said. Saara turned her attention back to the waiting spirit, who glimmered like ice in the last rays of the moon.

Gaspare, too, noticed Damiano. The young man hissed, drawing himself back, and he made the peculiar Italian magical sign of protection which has been used from time immemorial by men who don't understand the least about magic.

“Again!” he cried in wrath made slightly hysterical by the touch of fear. He scooped a birch branch, complete with withering leaves, from the soil. “Again you try your tricks, Satan! Villainous wibbert, or wyvart… wyrven…” Giving up on the ungainly word heard only once, he lashed the branch at the apparition, which sat and watched him, wings pulsing slightly.