Part 23 (1/2)
”I know,” he whispered and gave her a very comfortable little smile. Then he turned to Gaspare and let him share the wordless joke. Then he stood up, wings rising behind him.
”Listen to me, my friends. I am here to interfere in the affairs of the living, as doubtless I should not!”Damiano's amused smile faded into seriousness. ”If you wish to be of service to Raphael, you must go into the city now. Move quickly. South of the central square you will find a broad avenue lined with orange trees. On this street is a house with a carved gate of cedarwood in a white wall. Enter in.
”There are also within Granada right now some fine hors.e.m.e.n riding fine horses very slowly. These are a sample of my interference, and as such may be of interest to you. But finding the house with the gate is more important.
”Go now; you are needed.” The ghost did not fade; he was simply not there anymore.
Gaspare rose as though on a string. He filled his considerable lungs with air. ”Dragon!” he bellowed.
”Come quickly!”
”A ghost?” repeated the dragon.
”The ghost of Delstrego,” replied Gaspare importantly. ”And he said to hurry.”
The black dragon took to the air lithely enough, springing off his coiled tail, but he refused to be hurried in speech. ”I wish I might have seen that.”
Saara had to chuckle. ”I thought you would disapprove terribly. Magic being delusion, and all that.”
The great beast considered. ”There is that. But spirits have their place in the natural order. If I disapproved of spirits in general, why would I then be adding my small energies to the rescue of one?
”Besides, madam: if this specter had knowledge to communicate... real wisdom, perhaps... What is it he said again?”
Gaspare repeated Damiano's message, word for portentous word.
They came to the city and pa.s.sed over the wall. The dragon swooped down in a stomach-twisting dive in order to inspect the place more closely. With its regular low rows of daubed buildings and crowded streets (smelling even up here in the air) it looked like-first, a hive of bees, and then like a hive of disturbed bees. ”People can see you,” shouted Saara. ”They're terrified!”
The dragon writhed contemplatively. He slowed his progress so as to examine the length of one avenue broader than its fellows. ”So it seems,” he murmured silkily. He rose a few yards higher.
”That edifice just beyond the city,” he explained for his riders' sakes, ”set like a pearl in the red sand.
That is the Alhambra, military center of the State of Granada, as well as the residence of Muhammad V, lineal descendant of Muhammad ben Yusuf ben Ahmand ben Nasir, who founded the present dynasty. It is generally accepted to be one of the most beautiful constructions in the world, and into its stones have been set the words of Ibn al-Khatib, that most martial of Islamic poets...”
”Fly!” shrieked Saara, whose sense of urgency had become almost overpowering. ”South!”
”I AM flying,” declared the dragon patiently. ”And hysteria will make me fly no faster. Besides, if we went faster, I should have missed what I now see below-that small force of either Bedouin or Berber cavalry, whose horses plod with their little teacup muzzles sc.r.a.ping the dirt of the road. Did not the sage spirit speak of such?”
”But he said the house on the street of oranges first, the cavalry after!” Gaspare insisted. ”I heard him distinctly.”
Still the dragon, hanging high above the street, vacillated. ”Yet we HAVE the cavalry, while the house on the street of oranges is theoretical only. And the prompting of spirits is a very subtle thing. Perhaps we should first investigate...”
”I've had enough of this,” said Saara, and without further ado she turned into a dove. Gaspare, left without a handhold, squeaked and grabbed for the dragon's coronary spines. ”Me, too! Take me with you, Saara,” he bawled.
Unruffled the dragon said, ”Youngster, I am more than willing to set you down.”12 The dove scouted, dipped, and led the horse on. Gaspare clung like a monkey to the lean black back, with nothing to restrain Festilligambe but a tattered rope bridle. But the young man's cross-continental ride on a dragon had burned away all the nervousness he had once felt around horses.
They pa.s.sed the central square-a little plot of green, cleverly irrigated and tended with immense labor-and found the avenue that was edged in fragrant orange trees without trouble. This way was wide and fairly empty. The few people they did pa.s.s were dressed well in Saracen style. They failed to notice (or pretended to fail to notice) the sight of a horse chasing a little brown bird along the avenue. Gaspare, not knowing which of these strollers might have had a hand in Raphael's imprisonment, cursed the overfed lot of them equally.
He sought the house with the white wall and carved wooden gate. Odd. ALL the houses had white walls and all the white walls had wooden gates. They were almost all carved, too, with inscriptions in Arabic, meaningless to a young man not even literate in his own language. The words of the dragon flashed into his mind. ”The promptings of spirits are subtle.” Damiano, too? Gaspare had clean forgotten that the ghost had specified cedarwood as the material of the gate they were seeking. But then, neither would he have been able to recognize cedarwood if he had remembered.
Saara, however, fluttered straight toward a gateway of mottled yellow and orange, which was set into a featureless wall surmounted by red tile.
She stood beside Gaspare. ”It's bolted. There's something going on inside: I hear voices and the sound of a bellows. Can he jump it?”
Gaspare turned Festilligambe and trotted across the street. Then he stared at the looming wall of wood and daub. ”Sweet San Gabriele,” he whispered. ”Never.”
In his frustration he turned on Saara. ”He's only a horse, you know: not a Cathaysian dragon.” Then an idea occurred to him.
”Delstrego-Delstrego could have made a flame to burn this door away from in front of me!”
Saara, who had been about to return to bird form and dart over the wall, found herself stung by Damiano's name. ”Oh, he could, could he? Well, Gaspare, you stand right there and you will see what I, whom yourself have named the greatest witch in all the Italics OR Spain, can do!”
Gaspare waited nervously.
The desert horses were aware of a presence in the air before their riders. Their dreams of honeyed gra.s.s dissolved into the terror of rabbits beneath a hawk.
The black dragon's interest in the beasts, however, was only aesthetic, for he had recently consumed both a large fat mule and several wild Andalusian cattle (scrawny, but serviceable), and dragons do not eat as frequently as men. And neither did the Berber riders interest him greatly, for he did not see among them any select individual whom a spirit might have thought worth noticing.
There was the little fellow who, once thrown from his horse, waved a spindly sword into the air... But the dragon was hoping for something more flamboyant.
And his sun-bright eyes noticed very soon that the little troop, which had been riding south, toward the Alhambra, held a prisoner-just one. A woman whose ebony skin gave off the same rich highlights as his own scales, and who wore a corona of gold tips (again like his) in her hair.
The dragon chortled with delight at this exotic find. He plucked her from among her captors with the care a collector will give to blown gla.s.s.
Simon the Surgeon stared from Ras.h.i.+d to the cup in his hands. ”It is the common practice,” he observed. ”Without the draught many more of them die. Since he is full grown and unwilling as well, thereis a good chance that this one might.”
”Indeed he might,” said Ras.h.i.+d, with rising inflection. ”Indeed he might.” The rotund householder's eyes were s.h.i.+ning; his hands were knotted fists at his sides.
Ras.h.i.+d was angry. Being awakened to take delivery on a runaway slave that one had not yet noticed was missing- that made one angry.
It also made one feel a little bit of a fool.
Stripping the boy for flogging only to discover that he was no boy at all but a man intact-that added to both the anger and the foolishness in no small way.
But sending for the local surgeon: saying to the functionary, ”Come,” and having him come, and saying to the a.s.sembled household, ”Stand,” and having them all stand- that was a thing to comfort one with one's own power. Ras.h.i.+d's mottled hazel eyes were gleaming with that power, and the a.s.sembled household s.h.i.+fted from foot to foot, its many subservient eyes turned to the sky, the pond, the white garden wall... Anywhere but to Ras.h.i.+d.
Anywhere but to the man tied to the hitching post.
Raphael, too, stared past his master, to the white clay wall of the house. But his eyes were not focused on the house. His head was turned slightly, as though he were listening-listening to something important, yet expecting interruption at any moment from a fellow who tended to interrupt. Who had a reputation for interrupting important communications.
Who was a bit of a fool.
”He very well might die,” Ras.h.i.+d repeated again, for emphasis.
Simon shrugged and put the cup down on his workbench. He was neither overawed nor afraid of Ras.h.i.+d, for Simon was a free man employed to do a job. Since the greatest part of his work was done at the market, where buyers of young beasts wanted them castrated before taking them home, this wealthy cityman was an unlikely source of business. His tempers could not do Simon harm. The surgeon considered telling him not to get in the way.
No-Ras.h.i.+d was the employer, and there was no use borrowing trouble. Simon put the cup down.
He signaled his apprentice to step up the bellows pumping.