Damiano (7 page)

The staff throbbed in his hand—a reminder from his instincts to himself to be careful. These were not three Poverelli of Francesco, to be sure, whatever their clerical bent. Since the Holy Father had moved to Avignon, it seemed all of Provence had adopted the styles of the Church, saints and sinners alike. And these fellows had been drinking.

But still, they were students, and what else was Damiano? The brotherhood of students was as close as that which existed in any cloister, and more entertaining besides. Damiano knocked his damaged knuckles against the wooden door, while Macchiata whined in her most placatory manner.

What had been boisterous conversation became silence. “Qui?” called a voice, and then in broken Italian, “Who there?”

“Naught but a traveling student,” answered Damiano in Latin. “And his dog.”

More silence followed, and then a scraping. The door opened, revealing the scene Damiano's craft had shown him before. Three men, a smoky hearth, and a tin lamp set on a table strewn with food. Damiano blinked against the beauty of the sight.

“Enter then and be welcome,” said the fellow who had opened the door. He was moonfaced, plump, and balding, despite his youth. The two others regarded Damiano from their places at table. One was dark and square, the other towheaded with a long face. This last mentioned student held a greasy spiced sausage in his lap in a manner most proprietary.

“My name is Damiano Delstrego,” Damiano said, bowing. “This lady is my dog Macchiata. We thank you for your courtesy on this icy evening.”

The dark youth rose, smiling slightly. The bow of the fellow at the door was a marvel involving three separate movements of the foot. “Signor Dottore Delstrego. Let me present our small company. This one standing, with the shoulders of Hercules—he is Paul Breton, and he is a poet. The blond without manners is called Till Eulenspiegel. We are golliards, the impossible children of Pierre Abelard himself.”

“Till Eulenspiegel!” Damiano burst out, involuntarily.

Slyly the blond looked up. “What's wrong with that?” He spoke an egregious Italian.

The first student stepped between them. “You see, Dottore, we believe that a name chosen oneself or by those who know one is more meaningful than the one chosen at birth. It is the custom of golliards to forego allegiance to country, town, and family for the highest fidelity to learning itself. Therefore Jan Karl is Till Eulenspiegel, and world watch out.

“I myself,” he concluded, “have the honor to carry the name of Pierre Paris, because that is the place I like best.”

A chair was sought for Damiano, to no avail. He who called himself Pierre Paris offered his own, but Damiano chose to sit on the table. From his pack he took the remainder of his bread and cheese, pulled off portions of both for Macchiata, and put the rest on the table. The dog wolfed what she was given and retired to the space beneath Eulenspiegel's chair, where she lay consuming the aroma of sausage.

“Delstrego,” drawled the Dutchman. “Doesn't that mean ‘of the witch'?”

“Yes it does,” admitted Damiano. He had become impatient waiting for someone to invite him to eat and so had begun unasked.

“Is it also”—the blond ran out of Italian and switched to French —”a title self-chosen?”

Damiano shook his head forcefully. “Definitely not. It was my father's name and his father's before him for I don't know how long.” He continued in Latin, for he was quite at home in it, having the advantage of being Italian. “If I took a name to myself it would be Damiano Alchemicus.”

“Not Damiano Musicus?” asked Pierre Paris, as with lightning speed he whipped the long sausage from Eulenspiegel's grasp and cut a section for their guest. The blade of his dagger he wiped on the hem of his black overshirt. “I was hoping we would hear that lute you have cradled so carefully in the corner.”

Damiano followed his glance to where the lute rested, wrapped in the white fur of his mantle. “Perhaps later, Signor Clericale, once it's warm. But I'm not very good.” Half the thick slice of sausage disappeared into a wet mouth waiting under the table. The other half Damiano held between his fingers, nibbling.

“Good students,” he said, “for such I see you are—though I had thought that war and pestilence had ended the golliard's jolly times —I am a student also, both of science and spirit. Why do you travel weaponless through a land devastated by war?”

Paris stared owlishly at Breton, who in turn looked toward Eulenspiegel, who kept his eyes fixed on Damiano. “Who would devastate the barren mountains, and how would one be able to tell they had been devastated?” inquired Paris, who in all matters seemed to be the spokesman of the three.

Damiano felt a variety of envy for them, whose lives had not yet been touched by the present troubles. He assumed that because his troubles were not theirs, they had no troubles. This supposition on his part was a human error, certainly, but it could have been dyed a much deeper hue had Damiano felt contempt and alienation from the three because of their fortune.

Instead he wanted to help keep them safe and carefree, and to that end he said, “Believe me, Signori Clericale: we are little more than a day's travel from what was a thriving city and is now abandoned to General Pardo's soldiery.”

“Pardo?” spoke up Eulenspiegel, who seemed to have a quick ear, though a slow tongue. “The condottiere in the service of the pope? He was at Avignon a few years ago.”

Damiano peered stricken at the blond at the other side of the table. He was just at the limit of Damiano's close sight, and Damiano could not be sure Eulenspiegel was joking. “You mean... It could not be that the Holy Father is sacking the towns of the Piedmont?”

Paris broke in smoothly. “It could be, but I think it isn't. The condottieri serve contracts, not men, and I remember hearing when I was at the papal court last that Pardo's time was lapsed, and either he or the Holy Father did not renew.

“And, my dear brothers, what is a condottiere without lands or employer, but a brigand?”

“They're all robbers, anyway,” sneered Eulenspiegel, glaring dourly into the distance. Damiano reconsidered his conception of this man; there was doubtless sorrow in his past.

“Nonetheless, I beg you to beware, Signori. Do not follow the road down from the hills or you may find you have walked into trouble. And if you hear the sounds of many horses on the road, then leave it quickly and hide where you may.”

“Would in any case,” growled Eulenspiegel, while the poet just sighed.

“Ah! I thank you, friend Delstrego,” said Paris, placing both the basket-covered wine jug and a husk of bread in front of Damiano. “I drink to your health, for you have cared for ours.” He picked up Damiano's green bottle and did as he had promised. “Now you must drink too, or the toast will be invalid.”

Smiling sheepishly, Damiano drank their wine. To his surprise, it was as good as his own. He complimented them upon it.

“Should be good,” said Eulenspiegel, showing his teeth.

Paris cleared his throat. “I appreciate your advice, Signor Dottore Delstrego, and believe we are all grateful. Yet our path was decided for us before we left France, and to veer from it would destroy the meaning of our journey.

“Let me tell you, friend in the wilderness, that we three are retracing the steps of the great Petrarch from Avignon to Milan, seeing every inch of the countryside about which he wrote.”

“Ah, the verse!” cried out Breton, the poet. “Immortal verses, wild as the god Pan!”

Damiano started. It was as though a dog had talked—another dog, not Macchiata.

“I saw him, in Milan,” ventured Damiano. “He was very gracious, and let me copy four of his poems into a book. I dared not ask for more, for I was sitting in his office where the window looked out onto il Duomo, and he sat across from me, asking which parts I liked. It was a great moment for me. Yet I don't believe Petrarch rode from Avignon in the beginning of winter, did he?”

The poet opened his brown eyes very round. “He has spoken with you? The laureate himself. You sat in his house?”

Damiano shrugged in self-deprecating manner. “Only for an hour. I doubt he would remember my name.”

“Delstrego would be hard to forget,” remarked the blond. “I've been looking at that,” he added, pointing at the staff, which rested like a baby in the crook of Damiano's left arm. “You use it just to walk?”

Under the combined stares of four pairs of eyes the black wood hummed. Damiano stroked it, embarrassed, as he was at any mention of his witchhood.

“No, although it is very useful and sturdy in that way. I use it as a focus for my concentration, because otherwise the—power—roams free in the body and clouds the mind.”

“You're a witch?” breathed Paris, and the room froze.

“A wizard,” contradicted Damiano, immediately wondering why on earth he had said that. The three students huddled like birds before the eyes of a snake, and Damiano blushed harder.

“Domine Deus,
my friends, there is no need to be afraid of me for that! I am a scholar and a Christian!” But still they sat, and they sat very still. In a moment Damiano was sure someone would say “but the devil can quote Scripture,” a proverb that always made him wince. He groaned deeply and rose from his chair, placing his staff by the wrapped lute in the far corner of the room from the fire.

“There, Signori Clericale. My power is there and I am here. I cannot hurt you now even if I would. Is that enough?”

Till Eulenspiegel relaxed, wiping the sweat from his pale forehead. The poet sighed once more, and Pierre Paris reached for the green wine bottle, a conciliatory smile on his round face.

The staff boomed a warning, alone and helpless in the corner, as Paris lifted the bottle and brought it down with force on Damiano's head.

 

Chapter 4

Damiano awoke to cold and pain and a feeling of being stifled. This last was due to Macchiata, who was lying on top of him, her nose anxiously denting his face. “Master, Master. Get up and move!” she crooned. “Or you'll die and freeze and leave me alone always!

“Please!” she cried, her voice like the neighing of a horse, in his ear. His arms moved to placate her, to ward her off.

“Can't breathe,” Damiano gasped, and the effort of this sent waves of nausea through his body. His eyes closed again.

“Master!”

Damiano turned, bringing his hands under him. He remembered the golliards and the bottle against his skull. His head rose and his poor eyes peered through the little hut, at the table, with its remains of bread and cheese, the hearth, where the fire still blazed (thanks be to God), the shape in the corner that must be his lute. That glint of silver along the floor meant his staff was intact; had any of them tried to touch it, woe unto them. His mantle lay upon him where Macchiata had dragged it, off-center and with the lining upwards.

“Where are they?” he asked the dog, his voice as shaky as that of an old man. He sat up and wrapped the mantle about him. Her response was a growl as preternaturally ominous as the sound of an avalanche in the distance. Damiano turned his head with difficulty and looked at Macchiata, who stood stiff as wood and spiney all over. All her teeth showed, as yellow as the tushes of a boar, and in her eyes was a rage he had never seen before. He began to shiver.

“They are far away, Master. So far I can't hear them or smell them. They will never hurt you again.”

Through his haze of misery he tried to understand. “Did you... kill them, Macchiata? All three?”

“They were not dead when they ran down the hill and down the road. But there was only one of them without a hole in him.” The ugly dog softened. She lifted one paw up to Damiano's shoulder and licked his eyes, one after the other.

“Go sit by the fire, Master. It will make you feel better.”

Pulling his garment tighter, Damiano obeyed her, but first he fished across the floor for the length of his staff. With this in hand, he sank gratefully down on the ashy stones of the hearth. In passing he noted that the firewood that the three “students” had been burning was composed of a splintered chair and a heavy oak footstool, as well as half a shutter. He sighed: their behavior was all of a piece. But why had he not noticed this last night? Macchiata clambered onto his lap.

“Master no more, dear one,” he sighed. “Say rather I'm little Dami, your foolish pet. Imagine what my father would have said, if he had seen me put my staff aside in a room full of strangers.” The grown witch had tried to make his son careful. In Damiano's mind came the vision of his father snatching the black wood from the dozing boy's hands and simultaneously giving him a cuff on the ear, while he laughed, laughed, laughed... The memory gave him the added warmth of shame, but it made his head ache more.

Macchiata snorted, piglike. “Of course you are my Master. Only you are too trusting for your own good.”

Damiano's brows drew together, which brought lancing pain along his scalp. The fire, however, was helping him.

“It was Pierre Paris's fear that caused him to strike me. Had he not known I was a witch, it would not have happened.”

“You are wrong, Master,” said Macchiata, quickly but diffidently, for she was not used to contradicting Damiano. “I'm sorry, but it's true. The one with the pale hair tried to stop that one. He said he'd be sorry for it. Then the one with no hair on his head asked what was the difference: a knife in the back at night or a wine bottle at dinner?”

“They were robbers? They meant to kill me in my sleep?” asked Damiano, incredulous. “What else did they say?”

Macchiata's skinny tail slapped his leg: once, twice, then rapidly. “They didn't have time to say much. I was asleep, but the sound woke me up.”

“The sound,” repeated Damiano. “The echo of the blow resounding in my braincase. That's what woke you up.”