Damiano (3 page)

The bottle did not quite drop from Marco's hand. He stared at Damiano slack-jawed, all the stumps of his front teeth exposed. “You will go over to the monster?”

Damiano scowled. “The monster? That is what for forty years you called Aymon, and then his son Amadeus. He was no friend to Partestrada. He ignored our city, save at tax time—you yourself have told me that, and at great length.”

“The old tyrant grew softer once he'd filled his belly from us, and his son at least is mountain born,” snorted Marco.

“Perhaps Pardo will be different. Perhaps he is the one who will realize he can ride to greatness along with the city of Partestrada. If he has a mind, and eyes to see, I will explain it to him.” Damiano spoke words he had been rehearsing for the general's ears. Marco cleared his throat, spat, and turned his back on Damiano to shuffle toward the sun-warmed stones of the well.

“Wait, Marco!” called Damiano, hurrying after. He grabbed the greasy sleeves of Marco's jacket. “Tell me. Are they all gone? Father Antonio? Paolo Denezzi and his sister? Where is Carla? Have you seen her?”

Marco spun about, vermilion-faced. “Tell you? That would give you something else you could explain to General Pardo.” Without warning he swung the clay bottle at Damiano. The staff took the blow, and the bottle fell in purple-stained shards at his feet. Only a swallow had been left in it.

“Your father,” called Marco, stomping down the street in the direction from which Damiano had come, “was an honest witch. Though he burns in hell, he was an honest witch.”

Damiano stood staring at the drops of wine beading the dust, till Macchiata laid her triangular head against his leg. “He shouldn't have said that about your father,” she said.

Damiano cleared his throat. “He wasn't insulting my father. He was insulting me.

“But I can't believe Marco thinks I would betray my friends, let alone my city. He is just old and angry.”

Damiano shook his head, took a deep breath, and jerked his sleeves from his hands and his hair from his eyes.

“Come,” he said. “General Pardo is expecting me.”

Damiano hated being reminded about his father, whom he had last seen dissolving into a green ichor. Guillermo Delstrego had died in pain and had stained the workroom tiles on which he lay. Damiano had never known what spell or invocation his father had been about, for there were many things Delstrego would not let young Dami observe, and that particular invocation Damiano had never had any desire to know.

Guillermo Delstrego had not been a bad father, exactly. He had certainly provided for Damiano and had taught him at least a portion of his arts. He had not beaten Dami often, but then Damiano had not deserved beating often, and now it seemed to Damiano that his father would have liked him better if he had. A mozzarella was what Marco called him. Delstrego probably would have agreed, being himself a ball of the grainiest Parmesan. But after their eighteen years together, and despite Damiano's quick sensitivity to people, the young man could say that he'd scarcely known his father—certainly not as well as old Marco knew him.

Damiano was like his mother, whom Delstrego had found and married in Provence (it was said no woman in the Piedmont would have him), and who had died so long ago she was not even a memory to the boy. He had her slimness, small face, and large eyes. And though his nose was rather larger than hers had been, it was nothing like the strongly colored and very Roman appendage that Guillermo Delstrego had borne. Yet Delstrego had had to admit the child was his, because witchcraft did not run in his wife's family, and even as a baby Damiano had given off sparks like a cat.

Was Delstrego in hell? There was gossip that said a witch was damned from birth, but the Church had never yet said anything of that sort, and Damiano had never felt in the slightest bit damned. He attended the mass weekly, when work permitted, and enjoyed involved theological discussions with his friend Father Antonio of the First Order of San Francesco. Sometimes, in fact, he felt a little too sure of God's favor, as when Carla Denezzi let him sort her colored threads, but he was aware of this fault in himself and chided himself for an apostate whenever the feeling got out of hand. His father, though, who died invoking the Devil, alone knew what... Who could be sure about him? When he asked Raphael, he was told to trust in God and not to worry, which was advice that, although sound, did not answer the question. Damiano prayed both at matins and at vespers that his father was not in hell.

It was quite frosty, even though past noon. Cold enough to snow. The sky was heavy and opaque, like a pottery bowl tipped over the city, its rim resting on the surrounding hills and trapping all inside.

Except it had not trapped anyone, anyone but old Marco and himself. Where had the people gone? Where had Paolo Denezzi gone, taking his whole family? It was not that Damiano would miss Denezzi, with his black beard and blacker temper. His sister Carla, however...

The whole city was one thing. An undifferentiated mass of peasants and vendors and artisans called Partestrada; to Damiano it was all that Florence is to a Florentine, and more, for it was a small city and in need of tending. Damiano was on pleasant terms with everyone, but he usually ate alone.

Carla Denezzi was another matter altogether. She was blonde, and her blue eyes could go deep, like Raphael's. Damiano had given her a gilded set of the works of Thomas Aquinas, which he had gone all the way to Turin to purchase, and he thought she was the jewel around Partestrada's throat. Damiano was used to seeing Carla at the window of her brother's house or sitting on the loggia like a pretty pink cat, studying some volume of the desert fathers or doing petit point. Sometimes she would stop to chat with him, and sometimes, if a chaperon was near and her brother Paolo was not, she would permit Damiano to swing himself up by the slats of the balcony and disturb her sewing further.

In his own mind, Damiano called Carla his Beatrice, and if he was not being very original, it was at least better to liken her to Dante's example of purity rather than to Laura, as did other young men of the town, for Petrarch's Laura had been a married woman and had died of the plague, besides.

Now Damiano passed before the shuttered Denezzi house front and he felt her absence like cold wind against the face. “Where are you, my Beatrice?” he whispered. But the bare, white house front had no voice—not even for him.

The town hall had no stable under it, and it was only two stories high. It was not a grand building, being only white stucco: nowhere near as imposing a structure as the towers of Delstrego. It had not been in the interest of the council to enlarge it, or even to seal the infected-looking brown cracks that ran through the wall by the door. Except for the weekly gatherings of the town fathers, discussing such issues as the distance of the shambles from the well and passing judgment on sellers of short-weight bread loaves—such were commonly dragged on a transom three times around the market, the offending loaf hanging around their necks—the town hall had been occupied by one or another of Savoy's captains, with the half-dozen men necessary to keep Partestrada safe and in line.

Damiano knew what Savoy's soldiers had been like: brutishly cruel or crudely kind as the moment would have it, but always cowed before wealth and authority. No doubt these would be the same. It was only necessary for a man to feel his own power...

His confidence in his task grew as he approached the open door of the hall, which was guarded by a single sentry. His nod was a gesture carefully tailored to illustrate he was a man of means and family, and a philosopher besides. The soldier's response, equally well thought-out, was intended to illustrate that he had both a sword and a spear. Damiano stopped in front of him.

“I am told that General Pardo wants to see me,” he began, humbly enough.

“Who are you, that the general should want to see you,” was the cold reply.

A bit of his natural dignity returned to Damiano. “I am Delstrego.”

The sentry grunted and stepped aside. Damiano passed through, leaning a bit on his staff, allowing any casual observer to believe he was lame.

“Not with that,” spoke the soldier, and Damiano paused again. He could not lie barefacedly and tell the man he needed the stick to walk, but he was also not willing to be parted from it. He squinted nearsightedly at the guard, mustering arguments. But the guard pointed downward. “The general doesn't want to see your dog.”

Macchiata's hackles rose, and she growled in her throat. “It's all right,” Damiano said softly to her. “You can wait outside for me. And for your sake, do it quietly!” The dog lumbered out the door, watched by the amused guard, and Damiano proceeded into the hall.

General Pardo was the sort who looked good in black, being hard, neatly built, and of strong color. His height was impossible to judge as he sat slumped in the corner of an ornate bench-pew, his legs propped on a stool beside it. He was dusty, and his face sun-weathered. He regarded Damiano in a manner that was too matter-of-fact to be called arrogant. Damiano bowed from the waist.

“You are the wizard?” began Pardo. To Damiano's surprise, the general addressed him in a clear Latin.

The young man paused. He always corrected people who called him witch, though everyone called him witch. No man had ever before called him a wizard. The word was one Damiano had only read in books. It rang better than witch in the ears, but it also sounded pagan—especially in Latin. It did not seem right to begin his conversation with General Pardo thinking him a pagan, and yet it wasn't politic to begin matters by correcting the general. “I am Delstrego,” he replied finally, knowing that at least his Latin accent was above reproach.

“Not a wizard?” The question was sharp.

“I am... an alchemist.”

Pardo's response was unsettling. His mouth tightened. He turned his head away. It was as though something nauseated him.
“Deusi
An alchemist,” he muttered in southern-accented Italian. “Just what I need.”

Damiano leaned against his staff, puzzled. He also dropped into Italian: the Italian of the Alps, heavily flavored with French. “An alchemist seeks only to comprehend matter and spirit, and to raise each to the highest level, using the methods of Hermes Trismegistus »»

“DON'T,” bellowed the general, “TELL ME—” He took a deep breath. A soldier clattered into the room, then seeing it was only the general exploding, he backed out.

“—about Hermes Trismegistus,” finished Pardo. Damiano stood pale and staring, like a man who has broken through ice into cold water.

“Why?” he asked in a small voice. “Why not Hermes?”

The general shifted in his seat. A smile spread across his features. “Because, boy, I have heard enough about Hermes Trismegistus and the quest of alchemy to last me three lifetimes. Florence is riddled with fusty old men who claim they can turn lead into gold. Venice is almost as bad.” He turned a gray-eyed hawk glance on Damiano. “Avignon... is beyond help.

“You are too young and healthy to be an alchemist, Signor Delstrego. Also too clean. Can you turn lead into gold?”

“Not... in any great quantity,” answered Damiano, embarrassed.

“Can you at all?” pursued the general.

Damiano sighed and fingered his staff. It was his burden that many of the goals of alchemy he found easier to accomplish using the tools of his father rather than those of the sainted Hermes.

“My methods are not pure”—he temporized—”and the amount of labor involved is...”

Pardo swung his legs down from the stool and glared at the youth in frustration. “What I want to know, boy, is HAVE YOU POWER?”

Pardo had an immense voice and was used to commanding large numbers of men on the battlefield. But Damiano was no longer used to being commanded. The bellowing raised in him an answering anger. His fingers tightened upon the black wood of his staff.

Without warning the air was filled with booming, as every door and shutter in the building slammed back upon its hinges. Sparks crackled in the folds of Damiano's woolen robe. The light wooden door of the audience chamber trembled for half a minute. A cloud of plaster dust fell.

Pardo regarded it calmly. “I could feel that,” he remarked, “in my ears.”

Damiano kept his mouth shut, feeling he had done enough, and knowing that slamming doors would not protect him from a regiment of swordsmen. Besides, he was tired.

“That's what I was trying to find out,” added the general conversationally, as he nudged the stool in Damiano's direction. “Sit down, Signor Delstrego. I want to talk to you.”

“Thank you, General.” Damiano lowered himself gratefully onto the cushion. “I also, was wanting to speak with you.”

“Ahh?”

Uttered by a Piedmontese, that single, interrogatory syllable would have echoed in the back of the throat and in the nose, like the crooning of a mother cat. At the most a Piedmontese would have glanced at his companion as he spoke to show him it was to him the inquiry was addressed. But General Pardo was a Roman by birth. Both eyebrows shot up and his lips pulled back from his teeth. The intensity of interest revealed by the single syllable of “Ahhh?” seemed in Damiano's eyes excessive: a thing too, too pointed, almost bloodthirsty. It was of a piece with the general's appearance and his snapping temper.

These Italians, Damiano thought—not meaning to include the Piedmontese—they are too hot and too cold together. Passionate and unreliable.

“To speak with me? I expected as much,” concluded Pardo, with some satisfaction. “Well be my guest, Signor Dottore. I slept in a bed for the first time in a week, last night, and now am disposed to listen.”

Damiano spared only a moment to wonder whose bed the general had slept in, and whether the original owner of it now slept on a straw pile or in the hand of God. Then he put his mind to the task.