Damiano's Lute by R. A. MacAvoy Page A

once that his life was not a rounded whole; it had no progression or shape. As an artist, he couldn’t call complete a work which possessed neither structure nor moral—or, at least, no structure or moral evident to human eyes.
    And he felt a great dissatisfaction with this method of death, perishing in hopeless and frightful stink. A man wanted to die heroically, with someone standing by to take down his final words. To sicken and die of plague, in company of a hundred others, nameless and forgotten…
    â€œIn a century you will be a man who might never have existed from a city with a forgotten name.”
    But it was Satan who had said that. The Father of Lies, and his one purpose had been to hurt. “I’d be careful whom I believed,” Raphael had said. Damiano did not believe this prophecy because Satan had given it, but rather because he himself had accepted it. As a bargain. Yet at the same time he did not believe it at all because the archangel had also advised Damiano that no created being—including Raphael’s brother Lucifer—knew the future of men. At any rate, believing or not believing, Damiano was not ready today to die.
    Ail this passed behind his black eyes in a moment. He found himself speaking to the Franciscan. “It is the plague, Brother? Not typhus, or…”
    The friar lifted his eyebrows so forcefully his scalp wrinkled above his tonsure. “Didn’t you know? My poor, innocent traveler. You have come along a very bad road.”
    â€œGod be with you along this road.” Cursed angel. He could cut hair. He could fix harness, but he couldn’t say one little word about the plague lying ahead.
    Immediately Damiano reprimanded himself. He could not blame the archangel for keeping to the limits assigned him. Especially since he had broken those limits once already for Damiano, saving him from the hangman in the village of San Gabriele. Raphael was definitely not supposed to involve himself that way.
    (Yet the angel still called himself sinless. Not perfect but sinless.)
    Turning to go from that deadly church, Damiano thought of one more question. “Brother. Those monks I saw at the village gates. The flagellants. Are they Franciscan also?”
    The friar’s frown was lit crimson, blue and gold. It was formidable. “They are not monks of any sort. They are not true Christians. Pay them no attention, my brother. Fear and despair may drive men mad, and Satan enjoys our misery.”
    â€œSatan?” echoed Damiano, and he wished he knew a way to tell the friar what he had seen in the face of the flagellant at the gate. But no, the Franciscan would only think him mad. He turned to the white light of day that came through the entrance door. But he heard a call. “Lute player. Lute player.”
    It was the green woman in the black lace. “Play,” she said. “Play for me.”
    The Franciscan was not around.
    Damiano did not want to play, nor to remain in that house of plague for any reason, but he lowered himself gingerly onto the arm of the pew, by the feet of the unconscious farrier. Quickly he tuned.
    â€œWhat do you want to hear?” he whispered to her in conspiratorial fashion.
    â€œPlay sweetly,” the sick woman replied. “Quietly. I don’t want to dance just now.”
    He played a sad Palistinelied by Walther, and then one of his own, written in midwinter, that he had called “The Horse’s Lullaby.”
    When he was done, she said no more, and only by her rough and bubbling breath did he know she was not dead.
    As Damiano paced toward the vestibule a man passed him: elderly, upright, dressed like a burgher. This composed old fellow proceeded slowly up the aisle, peering down every right-hand pew. Looking for someone, Damiano decided. But then the old man paused, discovering the opening left by the body recently carried off, and he sat down, crossed himself, and lay back.
    Damiano flung