Damiano's Lute (15 page)

Gaspare squirmed uneasily, exposing one shrimp-pink foot and a portion of his rib cage to the air. “I… would like to get to Avignon as quickly as possible. There are only two weeks—I think— until Easter.”

The dark, drugged gaze didn't waver. “Three, by my count. We are very close to the Rhone, I think. In the village we can find out whether we are on the right road. And I thought you had objections to being hungry.”

Gaspare wanted to shout that Damiano's argument was a cheat, that they both knew full well that the musician wanted to play because he wanted to play, not because he was worried about his own hunger or Gaspare's. There was little Damiano did anymore besides play the lute, in a music which grew more fluid and yet more passionate every day. When he spoke, it was usually either to himself or to his angel; Gaspare rarely knew which for sure, and never asked.

All the strings of the battered lute were fraying.

“I'm up,” said the boy apologetically, as though it had been a case of his lateness instead of Damiano's inability to sleep. He slipped out into the rain to void his bladder.

Damiano did not like to see the daylight well up, for it intruded upon a world he had created for himself alone, and which he had filled with order. When he played the lute he was not a witch grown blind, deaf and witless. When he played the lute he was not a man who had thrown away life and love. When he played the lute he was all the musician he could be, and let the rest of the world burn. Now that the sun was rising, he would have to go back to being maimed. His fingers hit the lute neck harder and plucked with more force. The lute whined and a wild overtone sang out of the treble. As if in answer, the horse called out to him.

Indeed rioting peasants had not swept the local landholders (nor any other fief of Provence). The Comte de Plessis sat in his fortress as had three hundred years of his ancestors, bestowing law and breaking it. Requiring entertainment, one hoped.

Damiano did not know how Gaspare arranged for him to play before the comte. Damiano himself, were he a seneschal of some great nobleman, would find it difficult to take seriously a ragamuffin like Gaspare.

But Damiano did not appreciate how Gaspare changed when acting on Damiano's behalf: how the honor and responsibility of the position of artist's agent turned the disreputable boy into a man of character. Or in other words, how confident Gaspare was as a salesman that his goods were the best. Damiano only knew that Gaspare had a gift for getting jobs.

The ancient wagon creaked up through the village that the castle had spawned and into the nobleman's demesne. It was a few hours before sunset and the two companions held ready expectations of being offered a cooked dinner before playing their part in the comte's grander meal. And there was always the chance that Festilligambe might take some share in the oats of the fortress destriers.

Gaspare, who never had to be shown the way more than once, led Damiano through a field of adhesive mud, along a wall of pearl-gray buttresses and into the kitchen quarters, where the seneschal had his offices.

He was a sandy man of no great size, taut of skin and sharp-faced, as Gaspare himself might be in twenty years. He glanced at the boy with recognition but no great welcome, and when he saw Damiano his ragged eyebrows shot up.

“This is the lute player?” The man's voice was as tense as his appearance. “He can't go before people like that.”

Gaspare bristled. Damiano merely stared.

“He looks like a lout.”

Gaspare's right arm went up in an Italian gesture of devastating scorn which was quite wasted on the Provençal. “This is the finest musician you have ever had in your establishment, and the finest you will ever have!”

“Certainly the shabbiest,” added the seneschal in an undertone, but Damiano's opaque black eyes had locked on his own, and the tawny official fell silent.

Damiano took a step forward. His square, spatulate hand rested on the tabletop. When he spoke it was in good langue d'oc, and very quiet. “Shabby clothing makes an outfit with an empty purse. Employment can alter both together. We have traveled all the way from the borders of the Italian Alps in a bad season, and our appearance only reflects that. My friend Gaspare's purse has a few oats sticking to the lining, so he is less shabby than I, for my purse is completely…”

And he slapped the small leather bag on his belt, only to discover that his words were false; there was something in the bag after all. Something hard-edged and tiny.

Between two words, regardless of the others in the room, Damiano sat himself on the carved oak table. He pulled the pouch from his belt and upended it onto his open palm. A small twinkle of gold slipped out of the leather, dotted with bright blood.

“Ah, yes,” he murmured to himself. “I had forgotten this, which was given to me in Petit Comtois—to induce me to play.”

Gaspare, standing behind, could not see what Damiano was holding. But it was understood between them that their visit to that town of the pest was not to be mentioned in public, lest the reputation of the place had spread to discolor their own. So he cleared his throat, and when he saw the face of the seneschal fall open like a book of blank pages, he feared his lunatic charge had ruined their hopes.

Then “That… is a ruby?” asked the tawny man.

Damiano shrugged. “I believe it is. Once I could have told you with more certainty, for the ruby and the topaz are the stones my family is accustomed to wear on their person. But of late my… eyes are not what they were, and this could be some other stone of similar coloring but other virtue. For all stones have their virtue, you know, and the most precious is not always the most useful.”

The seneschal took this lecture meekly enough, his eyes resting in a kindly manner upon the jewel which dangled by its golden chain from Damiano's fingers. Then, gazing at the dark man with new appraisal, he cleared his throat.

“I think, monsieur,” he said at last, “that you are not too different in size from myself, and I may be able to find an outfit to suit.”

“You forgot?” whispered Gaspare once more, as Damiano slipped the shirt of black brocade over his linen. “You simply forgot you had been given a ruby?”

His colleague regarded him as if from a great distance. “It was a day crowded with events, Gaspare,” he replied, and Gaspare shivered at something in the sound of Damiano's words. The musician adjusted his somber velvet sash. Lace shone at his collar and cuffs, white as teeth against his sun-darkened skin. “Besides, I can't wear it or I'll scratch the top of the lute.”

“I wasn't thinking of your wearing…” began the boy, and then fell unaccustomedly silent.

He
was
afraid of Damiano, now. This was no more the gentle simpleton he had shepherded from San Gabriele to Provence, whose greatest fault had been absence of mind, (along with an unreasonable concern for the proprieties). This fellow had a face like Damiano's but it was a face carved in stone.

It occurred to Gaspare that he had traveled with this man for exactly a twelvemonth, and had never known him at all.

Damiano now was staring out the arrow-slit window, drumming finger-patterns on the stone: three beats with the left hand, five with the right. He carried the rich brocades as though he'd worn nothing else in his life. That was encouraging, but could this black presence be trusted to play tonight before important people? Gaspare bit his lip.

He might break out in tears—the old Damiano had been known to do that (always for reasons that made no sense to Gaspare, like seeing that kid with a worm in his eye in Chamonix, or finding in ruins a church he had read about once in a book).

But no, this Damiano was dry as sand. He wouldn't cry.

He might kill someone, however. Squinting critically at the lean figure (hard as an English mercenary, the phrase went), Gaspare imagined him with those big square hands around some pasty throat. He might easily kill someone and get them both hanged, the boy reflected, but this Damiano wouldn't cry.

It was all that witch's fault: the silly peasant girl with her dirty feet and her terrible, magical rhyme. Clearly she'd been infatuated with Damiano, and something she'd said or done had caused this alteration in the lute player. Strange—for she had seemed easy enough. Not the sort of woman to keep her lover on the other side of a door.

And Gaspare had thought that, for once, old sheep-face wouldn't refuse an honest offer. In fact, Gaspare would have laid florins on his chances of coming back that last sunny day to find them both under one blanket.

What had gone wrong, to make her depart in a puff of whatever?

Suddenly he found a new perspective on the problem. He asked a question.

Damiano raised his distracted head. “Physical problem? What kind of problem, Gaspare? I don't understand.”

This was going to be more difficult than Gaspare had thought. “A… lack of compatibility, perhaps? A difference in size, or in expectation?”

Damiano frowned tightly, and one of his hands ceased its drumming. “I don't know what you're talking about. Start again.”

Gaspare took a deep breath and leaned back into the leather chair so kindly provided by de Plessis. “You… seemed to be getting along very well with the pretty little witch, and then… and then you weren't.”

“She is the Lady Saara,” replied Damiano, with hooded eyes and obvious restraint, as though correcting a stranger. “And no. There was no physical problem.”

All this while Damiano's right hand had continued beating its rapid five-beat rhythm. Now his left hand rejoined it, tapping in threes, sharp as a fast horse running. “There is no problem,” he repeated. “Except that I have to practice now.”

“Practice what?” asked Gaspare, for the lute lay swaddled on a table in the corner.

“This,” came the laconic reply.

Gaspare listened, trying to imagine how one would dance to such a rhythm. “What is it?”

“I don't know,” said Damiano. “Yet.”

There were fourteen people sitting at the high table with the Comte de Plessis and thirty-five at the long table just below the dais. They began with a soup of dried mullet and onions, followed by various roast birds decked in feathers that had never been theirs in life. The sweetbread was saffron, and the wine was amaranth purple. A tall honey cake, studded with raisins, had been built into the exact image of the Fortress Plessis; the diners demolished it without superstitious scruple.

More souls than sat under torchlight broke their trenchers in the shadow, on crude slatted benches at the far end of the hall. These did not eat of saffron or amaranth, nor did they pick raisins out of their honey cake, for they had no cake. But they did eat.

Gaspare sat in the shelter of an arras, one leg propped before him and one leg folded. He was neither hiding nor was he precisely there to be seen. His eye was on Damiano, who tuned his lute on a stool behind the main table, and whose garment shone like black damask under the light of torches.

The musician spoke no word, and his face wore the expression of inviolability it always assumed when playing the lute.

Gaspare had given up expecting the player to make amusing patter. Damiano almost never spoke when playing, and when he did it was in a whisper that could not be heard five feet away. But it was better that he should be quiet than to speak at the wrong time.

Before this fearsome Comte de Plessis, for example. The landholder's right arm was the size of Gaspare's thigh, and his blue eyes were leaden. A puckered scar pierced the man's mouth, giving him a perpetual snarl, and he ate with great concentration. Better be discreet before a man of this kidney. Discreet and conservative.

The process of tuning took a bit longer than necessary, Gaspare thought. But then Damiano never would hurry his tuning or apologize for it, and the lute's rather brittle wooden tuning pegs were crotchety. Laughter was heard to rise at the high table, but it did not issue from the comte, whose mouth was full. A rather beefy-faced bald man in soiled white was gesturing at a dark woman in yellow. He pointed with a bird's leg, scaly foot still attached. He chewed with his mouth open.

The dark woman was young, demure, clean-faced, quick-eyed. She divided her attention between the coarse gentleman and the figure in black behind the dais.

The musician's fingers brushed the open strings with harplike effect, while his left hand twitched over the tuners. After a while the left hand hovered, not touching, while the right hand began to dance. Tuning became music imperceptibly.

Damiano did not use a plectrum on the lute, because in the beginning he had not known he was supposed to use one, and later because he did not see the use of the quill. He struck the strings with his nails, playing as many lines as he had fingers, all together. “Devil's music” had said old Marco of Partestrada, and in that opinion he had not been alone. But Damiano's teacher had been the Archangel Raphael.

Now the lutenist was playing in earnest, his left hand spread spiderlike over the wide black neck, his curled right seeming not to move at all over the strings. Gaspare recognized it, and was relieved. This was an ancient piece, just right for Provence, and if Gaspare could remember correctly, by Ventadorn. Damiano played a great deal of Ventadorn; it was popular.

But then the musician inclined forward, rounding over the instrument until his wiry black hair fell over the lute face. He rested his cheek against the wooden neck and swayed from side to side with the beat of the music.

This was not so good. Better not to call attention to oneself in that way. Gaspare watched, wondering if anyone besides himself thought Damiano was looking a trifle mad. The simple Provençal tune, too, was changing. It took on a strange new form under Damiano's fingers, salted with sweet, knotted ornamentation in Hibernian style. Out of nowhere was added a bass line from Moorish Spain.

Gaspare looked into Damiano's black eyes then, and he knew that this night would not be safe: not safe at all.